Not only are they popular in the United States but they are also becoming more and more popular around the globe. They are currently providing translations to the following.

France http://www.shopwiki.fr/

Germany http://www.shopwiki.de/

Netherlands http://www.shopwiki.nl/

and other english speaking countries like:

UK http://www.shopwiki.co.uk/

Australia http://www.shopwiki.com.au/

Not only is ShopWiki providing the research shopper with reviews, but they are also providing a directory to give those gift givers out there a hand finding ideas for gifts. They have listings for “Gifts by Occasion” which include just about every major life occasion; Christmas, Graduation, and Housewarming. They don’t stop there though, they even provide listings for “Gifts by Recipient”; Brothers, babies, and even Nerds have their own category. Their directory can be found here http://www.shopwiki.com/wiki/Directory, and I suggest you look it over if you are in need of a gift for someone.

Well let me wrap this up if you are shopping for something and need to compare items or if you are looking for ideas for the perfect gift gives these guys a visit cause they gotcha covered I promise!

FreshBooks is an online invoicing and time tracking service that saves you time and makes you look professional – Fortune 500 professional. FreshBooks is easy to use and is recommended by Webternals, LLC.

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Each menu option will allow you to open an SSH session in a new terminal window. You can organize the connections into groups of hosts using separator bars or sub-menus. You can even open all the connections on a submenu (in separate windows or tabs) with one click.

Here’s a killer feature found in SSHMenu , imagine you just connected to a production server and the terminal window had a red-tinted background, to remind you to tread carefully, well using terminal profiles, SSHMenu allows you to specify colours, fonts, transparency and a variety of other settings on a per-connection basis. You can even set window size and position, talk about convenient.

The latest source distribution can be downloaded from here, but you’ll probably want to get a pre-built package for your platform if possible.

If you’re running Debian, Ubuntu, etc … you can install the packages directly from the repository locate here. Downloading from these repositories will ensure that the Ruby and GTK dependencies are resolved automatically.

There are manual installation instructions that describe all the files in the distribution and where you need to put them on your system to make them work. This information is really targeted at people who wish to build packages for other OS distributions.

For more information setting up SSHMenu you can visit this page http://sshmenu.sourceforge.net/setup/

Enjoy and Have a Good’n!

The DigiPro T-6000U USB Graphics Tablet provides an easy way to draw, sketch, hand write an email, annotate documents, edit digital photos and make an electronic presentation! This DigiPro T-6000U features a 6 x 4.5-inch working area, 12 macro keys, USB 1.1 interface and comes with a stylus pen that features 512 levels of pressure sensitivity. In addition, a 3-button cordless mouse is included for smooth, accurate tracking! The DigiPro T-6000U comes with Power Presenter RE, Office Ink & Free Notes software to make handwriting, drawing and presentations quick and simple!

OK, OK, I’ll do the rest of the technical stuff later most of you are just wanting to know does it compare to a Wacom, and the answer is yes. I have used both Wacom tablets and this DigiPro tablet is comparable to the Wacom tablets at least when used with Ubuntu. When I first bought this thing I hooked it up to my main box that I use for development work, I keep a fresh install of the latest Ubuntu on this box by the way, after the long road of trying to get the drivers installed (my only grip by the way but it is not tablets fault because once I got the right drivers it worked flawlessly, I would like to see these drivers included on the cd or at the least tell us this tablet uses Aiptek chipset), I opened up GIMP and began sketching away and was surprised. For those who have used Wacom tablets you are used to the heavy price included with using them, but I am here to tell you if you are like me and are on a budget the DigiPro is the way to go, no regrets at all from me. I took a chance on this tablet because of its price and at the time I bought it I paid $35.99 for the tablet, shipping and tax. You can’t beat that price and still get a quality tablet.

Now the negative stuff. For me anyway, I don’t use the macro keys and think they are a waste of space and I also think they could get in the way (accidentally getting triggered when using GIMP or other software especially when trying to close a window ), I would leave them disabled in Ubuntu and disable them on Windows, but I know somebody out there will or can find a use for them. So after having lots of success using this tablet on my Ubuntu system, I decided to install this guys on a windows installation and I wish I had just stuck to the Ubuntu install and never ventured over to windows with it. On the Windows installation I noticed significant lag and was almost sick at my stomach. I thought to my self and then I said wait maybe something is configured incorrect so I tried to fix the settings but to no avail. It did not take long to realize that this tablet is no going to have the same success on my Windows box that it had on my Linux box and what a disappointment that is, Windows fails again.

In short if you are going to use this on Linux then go ahead and purchase the guy right now, if you are going to be using Windows then be careful, you may not like the lag you are possibly going to encounter (It is a Windows problem not a hardware issue).

Enjoy and Have a Good’n!

grep -i name /proc/bus/input/devices
lshal | grep Aiptek

The following information is for installing aiptek-based USB tablets for Linux and X11, not to be confused with the older serial-based hyper pen module. This tablet is also known as a Dolphin, Medion (Aldi tablet), Nisis and a few other generic brands.

The xserver-xorg-input-aiptek package must be installed to use this tablet, this is where I ran into my biggest troubles. I keep trying to install wizardpen drivers because all my searches for Ubuntu and DigiPro were leading me to results that linked to wizardpen drivers instructions, hence why I am writing this. To install run the following command.

sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-input-aiptek

Support for the Aiptek tablet has improved a tremendous amount in a short time since Ubuntu 8.04. One of the more confusing things is setting the correct configuration setup for HAL. The settings for the tablet are now stored with HAL, and no longer requires one to have to edit the xorg.conf file. The following will fix you up; create a file named 10-aiptek.fdi, in the directory /etc/hal/fdi/policy with the following content (make note if your tablet has 1024 levels of pressure sensitivity use 1023 instead of 511):

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> 
<deviceinfo version="0.2">
  <device>
    <match key="info.product" contains="Aiptek">
      <merge key="input.x11_driver" type="string">aiptek</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.SendCoreEvents" type="string">true </merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.USB" type="string">On</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.Type" type="string">stylus</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.Mode" type="string">absolute</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.zMin" type="string">0</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.zMax" type="string">511</merge>
      <merge key="input.x11_options.KeepShape" type="string">On</merge>
    </match>
  </device>
</deviceinfo>

All you need to do now is to restart udev and xorg or for simplicity just reboot, for newbies I recommend rebooting just to be safe.

Now most people will be using their tablets to draw in GIMP but almost everyone will notice that if they try and use it now the 512/1024 pressure sensitive feature will not be working, not to worry this is a GIMP configuration problem. To configure GIMP to use the pressure sensitive feature navigate here in the menus Edit >> Preferences >> Input Devices >> Configure Extended Input Devices … Now you need set the mode to either window or screen I screen but the choice is yours. Save your settings and restart GIMP for good measure and off you go.

Some tablets (6000U, 12000U, 14000U) seems to use Wacom drivers, if you experience problems with button presses (Your mouse pointer freezes), but you can move the cursor try the updated packets for Wacom.

(I think I’ll write a review on this tablet too I like it a lot)

Enjoy and Have a Good’n!

You will need to create a new canvas for your cloud, here are the settings that I used.

Alright, now I guess we need a sky to put our cloud in so let’s grab our gradient tool and use the following colors #23B7FF and #8FE1f2 and create a gradient “sky” something like this.

To create the could we are actually going to be just selecting a region as the outline for the cloud. Create a new layer to put the cloud on and the use the circle/ellipse tool and, the following settings, just click around until you have a shape that you are happy with. Below is what I wound up with.

On this new layer we need to fill in the selected area, so get out your bucket fill tool and fill the selection up with a cloud color, I chose #FDFDFD.

Now that we have the base for our cloud lets give it some depth. What I do here is simple but effective. Create a new layer making sure you leave the cloud selected. Grab the spray brush tool and set the foreground color to #838383. Now using the below settings kinda spray a little gray on the bottoms of the clouds.

Next we drop a shadow using the drop shadow tool with the following settings.

I know this looks pretty convincing but lets not stop here lets finish this off. Select the layer with gray shadows because we need to do two things here. One, we need to smear the shadows so they look more realistic and two, we need to adjust the opacity so they blend well with the shadows. Use your best judgment here on what looks best but just don’t over do it. By the way the reason we do this now instead of before we drop the shadow is so we can get the proper blend with the shadow.

And there you have it the best looking cartoon clouds I ever made, even if I do say so myself.

Enjoy and Have a Good’n!

The President Pickle comic strip began in August 2009. The President Pickle concept may or may not resemble past, present, or future Presidents, white house staff or other politicians whom deal with the President or staff. We are in no way affiliated, associated, or receive funding with any party, campaign, or any other political organization. The views expressed in our comic strips are not meant to cause harm, slander, or any way violate any constitutional rights of any party, group, person, or organization. This comic is purely for entertainment value and should be read for entertainment only.

Thanks,
President Pickle

Enjoy and Have a Good’n!

Real quick I am going to make a few assumptions, one being that you can easliy cut the ship out of the left image , insert it, and then re-size it to come up with something that looks very similar to the next image. If you are having trouble getting the ship without th white background into the pool then you need to read up on basic GIMP usage before you continue. Anyway here is our starting point.

First thing you need to do is re-size the image and make it look like it is a model ship in a pool and not an out of proportion hideous looking ship. Something like this will work.

Adjusting the Color Balance is where I decided to start, just make sure you have the layer with the ship on it seledted and not the other layer. I did not have to adjust the colors much but I did have to adjust them to get the ship to look like it actually belonged in this picture. Here are the screens of the midtones, shadows, and highlights.

And this is what it looks like after

You now need to give the ship shadows and highlights to match the image. Now I know this can be a tutorial all in its own, and can be done several different ways, so you can can apply your own method here but here is what mine looked like after I finished it. (For those curious I just selected the area occupied by the ship made a new layer filled that area with black and dropped the layer to 75% opacity then took out my air brush  and added a few darker spots in areas to make it look better).

Almost done if you notide everything in this image has a reflection except the boat. So again there are multiple ways to do this but I usually just make a copy of the layer I wish to reflect flip it, change the perspective to match to other reflections, add a little blur if it is reflecting in water, and then drop the opacity down a bit, and finally erase any odd looking parts. And here is my finished product.

Well, if you follow these steps every time you wish to stitch two photos together it will work. There will be some special cases where you will need to adjust brightness, or maybe some of the other color adjustments but the principal is the same make it match the background.There will also be the occasion you will need to patch some photos to make the work but all in all the principal is the same, you are trying to change the foreground images properties to close match the background. Hope this helps somebody any.

Enjoy and Have a Good’n!