This list was originally compiled for Art & Design Explorer Post 407. Name Platform URL Image Type Uses Notes License Blender Linux, Windows, Mac http://blender.org 3D Animation Renderer, Animations, and Game Creation GPL Gimp Linux, Windows, Mac http://gimp.org Bitmap Drawing, Photomanipulation, Graphic Design Photoshop workalike GPLv3 Inkscape Linux, Windows, Mac http://inkscape.org Vector Drawing, Graphic Design …
Category Archive: tools
Oct 02
Looking Inside a JVM: -XX:+PrintFlagsFinal
Java’s twenty years old now — next year Duke can have Irish Coffee! Seriously, though, in that time there’s been a lot of changes to the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). What once was true may no longer be the case. In digging into an issue I discovered a nice feature of the JVM which enables …
Sep 18
OBS for Videos
I recently discovered a really interesting tool for producing videos of screen captures, optionally with webcam inserts. It’s called Open Broadcaster Software and it works on Linux, Windows, and there is a beta version for Apple OSX. It seems that it was originally intended for streaming to websites, but it has a lot more features …
Sep 07
PDF-XChange Editor Review
I was in training last week — rather than a printed text, we were provided with a PDF of the slides. PDF files are not the easiest thing to annotate without special software and, well, Adobe Acrobat isn’t precisely cheap. I was very pleased to find Tracker Software’s PDF-XChange Editor. There is both a free …
Apr 09
Abusing Awk
Almost ashamed to admit I did this, yet it’s still kinda cool. I use awk for a lot of commandline parsing; I learned it back in 1989…. before perl was much of a thing. For some problems, awk “just works”. So I was wanting to count the number of instances of ‘A’ in a collection …
Mar 17
Mounting Images on Linux
This is mostly for reference, but may be of use to others. In order to mount an image (in order to be able to edit it), you can execute the following code:
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dev=`sudo kpartx -a -v $FILE |tail -1|awk '{print $3}'` sudo mount /dev/mapper/$dev /mnt |
This is useful for editing one or more files in an image without needing to copy it to a device or card.
Mar 11
Pi Metrix
I really like that go can produce static executables which do not require any dynamic libraries; this is especially useful for sysadmin tools. Metrix is one such tool — it is a single executable which is able to gather a variety of metrics and send them to different aggregators (by default it is sent to …
Feb 25
Grabbing Titles & URLs with a Bookmarklet
The following is fixing the wrong problem, but often technology is easier than people problems. $WORK removed the ability to use plugins with Chrome without having to go through a bureaucratic process lasting weeks. One tool I’ve found useful is the ability to copy the title and link of a page to the clipboard and …
Aug 01
Cloudy Update
I’ve been working with Docker a good bit and have updated my list of tools. Here’s a quick dump of where I am in the design of the infrastructure. collectd will be used to monitor cgroup statistics. This necessitates compiling all or part of collectd — the current packages do not contain the cgroup plugin. …
Feb 05
Web Based Portable mysql tool suite
Are you limited in what software you can use at work? This article details how to have a web based tool suite for mysql. It currently has the following tools: AjaxMyTop — a php implementation of mytop (think top for mysql) which runs in a browser. rbdb — a phpmyadmin work-alike in progress. It’s the …
