Web design & FOSS

I'm trying to get to grips with the Free publishing software Scribus, as I want to update the artwork for the OpenDisc DVD. But I have hit what appears to be a brick wall, although I'm sure it's just a learning curve.

The problem I have is being able to apply line-spacing (or leading) to one individual paragraph, not all the paragraphs in a text box (see the illustration for an illustration. This is something you can do in any word processor, so I'm sure I'm just doing something wrong.

Along the path of discovery, what has been cockle-warming and encouraging was the response I had within minutes on the Scribus IRC channel. There is also a Scribus mailing list that you can post to as a guest. I've been set back by the Seasonal Summer Cold and the excruciating necessity to earn a crust in The Smoke, so I'll be revisiting this issue to find a fix.

As previously detailed, I've had problems synching my Sony Ericsson K770i with Ubuntu. In fact, I gave up and did it via a temporary Windows install.

It's niggling now, that when I want to add a quick address I simply can't synch the Thunderbird email client with the phone.

My first plan was to simply export the new contact from Thunderbird in the vCard format and Bluetooth it over. But Thunderbird doesn't export as vCard :(

Enter the not-so-catchily-named MoreFunctionsForAddressBook extension, which adds a slew of features to the Thunderbird Address Book, including export as a vCard. Just right-click and Save link as to your desktop, go into Thunderbird -> Tools -> Add-ons -> Install. Once restarted, select your contact in the Address Book and Tools -> Actions for contacts -> Export as vCard. Locate the vCard and Bluetooth it to the phone.

Easy.

?!

I'm a huge fanboi of GNOME Do, a keyboard shortcut application launcher. It's great, gets rid of the need for an application menu.

I installed the Firefox web browser at the youth centre, and was amazed at the number of new add-ons over at Firefox Add-ons. One that caught my eye was SiteLauncher. It's the same idea as GNOME Do; a keyboard shortcut brings up your most favoured sites and then you're only a keyboard character away from visiting one of your faves.

The only fly-in-the-face-cream is that I already use ctrl + k to enter the Firefox search box, and then use the arrow key to scroll my search engines. But it's handy for news sites nonetheless :)

I gave a presentation to the Faversham Community Cafe about Free Open Source Software and the OpenDisc project last night. It went well, just letting people know that there are free alternatives, and asking them to spread the word and distribute the DVDs.

The OpenDisc project has just released it's latest collection of Open Source software for Windows. No animal names, only 09.05. The software that appeared to attract the most interest was OpenOffice.org 3, Firefox, Scribus, ClamWin anti-virus and GIMP. As I emphasised last night, "these are worth the price of admission alone".

I did have a bit of a problem trying to print the artwork for the OpenDisc DVD; the artwork was out of date and also the Scribus DTP files didn't want to open :(

I thought I would help out and reset them in Scribus. However, new software trip-up-the-learning-curve syndrome: I don't know how to a) apply leading to one paragraph rather than the whole text box or b) apply paragraph spacing without creating new styles. When I get there, I'll pass the artwork on to the project!

Thanks to oiio for pointing me in the direction of this handy external add-on for Pure Data (an Open Source environment for creating real-time audio and visual applications). It's called readanysf and it plays "both kinds of music". Which, as we all know, is "country AND western".

It also reads (m)any sound formats. In the green and pleasant land of Pure Data, this is a "holy-grail-cow".