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Showing posts from December, 2009

Seven Segment Display in Inkscape

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Today I got a little sidetracked while working on my key-train (keyboard training) project.  I thought I might spruce it up a little by using a seven segment display for the digits (say for the words per minutes), similar to what kTouch has.  I found an open source font, but it appears to be difficult to just use a ttf font in GTK. So I figured, it's only 10 images, I'll just make them in svg. I vaguely remembered a heathenx inkscape podcast  describing how to make an LCD display and decided to use that at my base. Unfortunately, they didn't provide any source files in the show-notes (as far as I could see) so I had to watch and redo the drawings myself! By naming each of the seven segments I could create the 10 digits simply by deleting a few elements in one template svg file .  I can create the template as beautiful as I like and quickly create the 10 derived images with these programs . Unfortunately, both ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick don't handle

Choo choo, get on the Key-Train

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Well I've done it again, started another open source project . Renata and I want Victor to learn how to touch type, but these days, it's hard to find a school that teaches just that. So I looked at what available in open source and found KTouch .  It's pretty good however I found some issues with it: The lecture files aren't very obvious. It's not clear, for example, that it has already loaded the default lecture file. The keyboard is rather plain looking. The scrolling text area you type in is nifty, but gets in the way for advanced users.  My typing speed is limited to how fast it can scroll back.  Also, as you get near the end of the line it's becomes difficult to see what characters are coming up, slowing you down and creating additional errors. Like many other typing tutor programs, it shows only one line of text at a time, it's not obvious how many lines you have left to do. The first time I ran it I thought it was going to go on forever. It doe

Keyboard Monitor is being used

I saw this week that Meet the Gimp is using my keyboard monitor program and gave me nice plug as well. It was thrill, but bittersweet, since key-mon still doesn't support the Wacom table (and I don't know how to fix it ). I also feel it could look a little better (at least that I can fix).

Feeling a little homesick

Street view has some great shot's of Lennoxville. Bishop's University View Larger Map Lion's Pub View Larger Map Also of the the house I grew up in in Montreal. Exibir mapa ampliado No street view for Kingston yet. But there's this areal view of where I used to go windsurfing. Exibir mapa ampliado