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This page contains downloadable resources and links to useful resources. I would appreciate hearing from you if you find these useful.
The Dept of Linux presents…
And for some of the "why" behind choosing Mint and Manjaro, here are
Password for this, password for that - and they should all be different. People get lazy and re-use weak passwords. All it takes is one site or service to get broken into, and all your digital life may be at risk. For example, you signed up for a shop's discount loyalty and their system gets hacked. Now your name, phone number, address, email and account password are in the hands of hackers, being sold and circulated. They will try that password against your online accounts, one by one!
So you should use different passwords and silo information companies have from you, or avoid it. $2 here or there, I don't care - my data is mine and remains more secure not being in the shop's system at all.
Now for all those passwords, you can use something like »KeepassX[1]. Avoid those 'handy' online cloud-based password 'wallets' - they have been attacked before, and obviously remain a very juicy target! KeepassX can help you to generate good passwords, but they tend to be cryptic: "#MZR9&gYUEK^~" which may be fine, but is not very memorable.
So how about something semi-pronounceable? I wrote something that builds
up fake words of a given length based on the system dictionary, usually
/usr/share/dict/words on most Linux
distros. As a small resource here is a file, pw-kit.zip[5.3kb],
that contains 38 lines each of fake words, like 'dwomps'
and 'eitdor' of length 6, 7 and 8 letters. The idea
here is to pick two or three 'words' you like and mix them up for a password.
Let's say you select "linwamby" and "neikes". Join them with a hyphen or underscore, change some letters to uppercase or numbers… and the final remix could be: "linW4mby_neik3s" which is a fairly good password that you might memorize without relying on KeepassX being open. Another person could pick the same two inputs and land up at "n31ke$-y-L1nw@mbY".
[1] If you are on Linux, the website and links are nice, but you know you can look in synaptic, pacman, apt or yast, etc and find KeepassX right in your distros repositories. Install it from there (but I'm preaching to the choir).
With mounting or framing prints, most commercial matted frames are simply set
dead center. This is done to cut costs in mass production and ensures that the
consumer can use the frame in either portrait or landscape orientation. A
more professional approach might place the image at the Visual Center
of the mat and frame. One can just make an artistic guess and add a little
"weight" at the bottom, but there is an exact formula for this which was
more widely known decades ago thanks to the massive ringbound photo finishers
encyclopedia, the "Photo Lab Index", published from the 1930s to the 1980s. Here
I make this almost forgotten "Secret Sauce" from the photographers of yesteryear
available as an online visual calculator:
Visual Center
(opens in a new tab) (v1.0.7)
If you find this useful, please be so kind as to contact me and let me know!
To illustrate below are a standard 4×6" (10×15cm) print in an
8×10" (20×25cm) frame, and an 8×10" (20×25cm) print
in an 11×14" (28×35.5cm), in both portrait and landscape examples.
The scale here is 100 pixels to 1 inch, with a standard 1/3" gold frame added.
Click on the thumbnails to see more detail.
The image size is usually already decided, but if you are making custom size frames, you can adjust the frame dimensions and fine tune the mat borders to great effect. The Golden Ratio of 1:1.618 and it's inverse 1:0.618 can be useful, as can other ratios like 1:√2. If you're stuck on how to apply such magic numbers to your project, or just need some advice, contact me.
Back in 2017 I made a set of textures that you can blend into your photos, something the UK photo magazines like to feature and promote regularly. Just click on the image below to download the 14.4MB zip file.
I worked on icons for Linux Mint, the Linux "Tux" mascot and Manjaro Linux. The Mint one is regularised to fit in a square, Tux was given some much needed eye surgery, and the Manjaro logo was rounded. Just click once on the images to download the SVG files.
Over at »timeanddate.com they have an interesting Word Clock. Just for some exercise I sat down and made my own version (English only, theirs is multi-lingual!), from scratch. 100% self-contained, no outside resources or frameworks. Crunched but readable code is about 7kb, the downloadable ZIP file is only 1.8kb.
