Handy Tips To Be More Productive Using GIMP

GIMP - also known as the GNU Image Manipulation Program - is well known as an excellent graphics editor. Many people even consider it as useful as Adobe Photoshop for creating images for the web. I have been using GIMP for a long time now and have used it for such tasks as screen capturing, optimizing images, retouching photos, scaling images, special effects and so on. GIMP is available for multiple platforms including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. Why, GIMP is even available as a portable application  which allows you to run it directly from a USB pen drive.

The following are a few handy tips which will help you be more productive in GIMP.
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iPhone user experience: is it ready for a color-blind person?

I own an iPhone since a couple of months and I must admit that, as far as it concerns my user experience as a color-blind person, it is the best mobile device I worked with in a long time. It isn't perfect, though.

If you're wondering what color-blindness is, you can start reading this Wikipedia article. I seldom notice the effect of such an impairment and when I do, I'm usually interacting with a computer.

There exist many forms of color blindness and mine is called protanopia. Protanopia differs from other forms, such as deuteranopia, because we experience an abnormal dimming of light at some wavelength with the result that, for example, red is easily confused with black.

In the case of the iPhone, I must admit that I'm experiencing just one problem: missed calls. There's a fancy icon down there indicating the number of unchecked missed call. When you open the corresponding window, guess what? Missed calls are "highlighted" using the good ol' red fonts while received or dialed calls are black. The background? White, just to make it worse. I tried looking for some other color scheme but there's none. Just the good ol' "iPhone experience" that Apple is providing us.

This rare impairment affects almost 1% of the male population. Not much, indeed. But for us, there are no red characters to catch our attention. They just fade to black, hiding between the others. If you're working with a color-blind person, please follow good sense: don't rely on colors and please, do not use red to catch their eyes. Just rely on the tools your word processor is offering you, such as that yellow marker whose existence you probably wondered about sometimes.

Damn Small Linux - DSL

Damn Small Linux - also known as DSL - is a fully functional Desktop oriented Linux distribution which fits in a business card sized (50 MB) CD.
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50 Time Saving Tips For Ubuntu Users

If you are an avid Ubuntu Linux user and wish to be more productive in using Ubuntu, these 50 time saving tips are for you. These 50 tips range right from doing mundane tasks to doing something spectacular all the while helping you save on time.
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Googlle?

As I'm a customary animal, everyday I open my browser and go along the same Internet path. As I'm a faithful Google user, one of the pages I often open is iGoogle. Today I thought my eyes were failing when I realized I was seeing the simplest and oddest Google doodle I've ever seen. Who can I ask about it? Google, of course. The first thing I did was saving that doodle to the disk and its very name gave the answer:
11th_birthday.gif.

Happy birthday Google!

Pushing gmail to your iPhone (without GPush)

As I told you some posts ago I bought GPush and struggled to make it work. At the end I started to be notified about incoming mail, although with some glitches from time to time. Now, very shortly after GPush was released, you don't need it anymore: Google Sync is now pushing mail to your iPhone.

This is really good news because now you can sync your mail, your calendar and your contacts with your iPhone. As I was already using Google Sync for contacts and calendars, setting up GMail push was really easy: just the flip of a switch!

If you haven't set up your Google Sync account on your iPhone, just follow the instructions on the Google Sync web site.

As far as I can tell, mail is pushed to the iPhone almost instantaneously. Nonetheless, there's a thing I'm not really happy about. I miss is a notification popup: no one is ever shown and the counter on the mail icon is the only information you're given when a mail is pushed:

I would expect a mail to be managed just like an SMS or even a phone call: checking periodically sort of defies the purpose of a push notification...

Clipboard Managers in Linux

A clipboard manager is a computer program that adds additional functionality to basic clipboard usage. The main tasks of a clipboard manager are as follows :

1. To store data copied to the clipboard so that it can be pasted after closing the host application of the data copied.
2. To store and retrieve multiple clips from the clip history available – any number of times.

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