So, as I mentioned in the previous post, flickr’s CC license image search tool is totally awesome, and that’s where I found today’s image. In the spirit of the license, I’m attributing flickr user Daniel Montesinos as the original photographer. Thank you Daniel. I will also make my finished product available with the same license provisions on my flickr page.

On with the show!

1. Open your photograph in the GIMP and duplicate the background layer. Name the new layer B&W or something descriptive like that.



2. Click on Layer>Color>Desaturate. This will make the layer appear black and white even though it’s still in RGB. That’s not terribly important for this tutorial, but it can be if you’re wanting to do some more advanced blending. But that’s a topic for another day.
3. Right click your B&W layer and click Add layer mask


Now you are all set to begin colorizing an area. What you’re going to do is paint black over the masked area to reveal the color layer beneath. I use a Wacom tablet for this which I find infinitely more usable than a mouse since I can use the pressure sensitivity to do neat things like change the diameter or hardness of the brush dynamically, but it’s not that hard with a mouse either. Onward!

4. With a soft brush selected and set to black, start painting inside the area you want to reveal. In our case, the flower petals and leaves and stem of the center flower. Zoom way in (Shift++) to get the tiny little hairs. Notice the layer mask will have a black and white thumbnail of the areas you’re painting.



5. Once you’ve got the area you want colorized revealed, you may want to play with the color a little. I increased the saturation of the color layer in order to make it stand out a little more. Here’s the final revision:

Thank you for following along today. Stick around for more photo retouching and editing. I’ll try to pick something a little more in depth for the next topic.

Everybody knows, that DRM is bad. Also everybody knows, that Open Source is just a compromise and a stage in transition to a close-to-ideal system, which Free Software is. The free culture advocates have written dozens of books, heaps of articles and hundreds and thousands of blog entries showing the sense of standing against the law, organizations and corporations who bound (or try to put boundaries) on our freedom. Also stacks and heaps of text has been produced showing why should we boycott “bad” products designed by the aforementioned villains, the products being designed to achieve one obvious goal : to maximize profit, regardless of the consumer’s good.

The effects of these publications can easily be recognized : more and more people are now Open Source aware (mixing terms with Free Software though), there are more and more users of free/open systems, the closed formats are being pushed out, rejected by conscious users (just to mention the Ogg and FLAC’s success or even ODF’s victory over OOXML), and the new portals like do.org.pl or osnews.pl are in bloom, attracting more and more web community.

Step by step, led by the leaders like the creator of the Linux kernel - Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Creative Commons license - Lawrence Lessig or the creator of Free Software philosophy - Richard Matthew Stallman, we go on convincing more and more people and changing our reality.

However let’s try to look at the other side of the coin : with all these activities, trying to “free” the virtual world, including the user, aren’t we sometimes, however rarely, effectively restricting the freedom of those, who we want to be free ?

DRM
The F(L)OSS community opposition to DRM is widespread and firm. This comes from the fact, that the digital rights management technology is actually used to digitally manage restrictions. That’s why this post to LKML by Linus Torvalds started quite a storm : (http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/110368)

I want to make it clear that DRM is perfectly ok with Linux!
(…)
And like the software patent issue, I also don’t necessarily like DRM myself, but I still ended up feeling the same: I’m an “Oppenheimer”, and I refuse to play politics with Linux, and I think you can use Linux for whatever you want to - which very much includes things I don’t necessarily personally approve of.

Following the thread, Linus posted (http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.kernel/110400) also the following:

The technology itself is pretty neutral, and I’m personally pretty optimistic that _especially_ in an open-source environment we will find that most of the actual effort is going to be going into making security be a _pro_consumer_ thing. Security for the user, not to screw the user.
Put another way: I’d rather embrace it for the positive things it can do for us, than have _others_ embrace it for the things it can do for them.

An important question follows then : what is positive that DRM can do for us ? I decided to ask Google (the original question in polish). The first page of results only lists one text, being a news entry informing about trying to create the human face to DRM, by Valve (Steamworks); and another one, where its authors, nota bene the Internet shop software creators, trying to familiarize it to users. With our knowledge of the technology, I guess nobody is actually convinced reading an article written by people making money using the solution widely regarded as disruptive; All other results on the Google were actually contra-DRM : a text listing 10 cases against DRM :10 argumentów przeciw DRM, a not too acceptive tone text on Vagla.pl, a blog entry with a suggestive name Bye bye DRM, and so forth. Then I tried English Google, which yielded more sane cases, but their argumentation has been already long ago neutralized with - just to mention - Stallman’s article Opposing DRM.

So in the name of freedom (why shouldn’t somebody implement DRM on Linux ? We might not like it, but it’s a free country^Wsociety!) we seem to have created a loophole that could be used to win the market, that opposed DRM from its very beginnings and seemed to be closed tight for it.

But then, again. If Linux was relicensed to GPLv3, the user would have some rights removed, that were granted earlier on. Everything would boil down to resemble the closed source market : buy/take it, but you’re not allowed to do with (my) code something that I don’t like. Least of what I like is DRM, so don’t even try that!

The question, if when defending against bad technology, we can accept some restrictions, is is hard to answer by single statement. On one side, this seems to be good way to fight the danger to the community, on the other, it is a restriction on the freedoms we advocate most. The decision needs to be taken by the software developers (do they regard DRM as so bad, that they really have to restrict its creation/usage by other users at work?), but I’d also advocate to name this technology mainly as user-unfriendly.

My point is, we should not embrace a “bad” technology only because somebody “might” use it the “good” way, given that nobody ever tried to do it yet. And it’s not to be compared do P2P networks (which we defend), that might be used to share illegal copies of copyrighted works, because lots of us use them to share works (see Jamendo or GNU/Linux distros) - the P2P networks have bright areas, DRM doesn’t.

Quoting Torvalds, he treats this issue the “Oppenheimer” way. However, the latter when confronted with the catastrophic outcome of the atomic bomb explosion, which his research actually made possible, cited from Bhagavad-Gita : I became the Death, the Destroyer of Worlds. The FLOSS community, could become Torvald’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Means, us. I hope it never happens.

Stallman’s leadership
Not so long ago, there was a discussion, later turned into a flame war, between RMS and Open BSD developers (Real men don’t attack straw men and Play Nice - Real men don’t attack straw men (Theo)), where Stallman tried to make a point on why he can’t recommend this distribution, because it contains non-free, “bad”, software. According to RMS argumentation, it is enough to have the non-free software available to install, to disqualify the system freedom-wise, and it is the one and only condition that he takes into account recommending an OS.

Due to this reason, e.g. the Open BSD is a non-starter, forget its totally free default configuration. One can agree or not - this topic is so wide, that deserves a separate article, but the words that Stallman typed way into the discussion are worth noticing :

The Adobe flash plug-in is non-free software, and people should not
install it, or suggest installing it, or even tell people it exists.
That Firefox offers to install it is a very bad thing.

sourced from: Re: Real men don’t attack straw men

There we actually are told, that no user shall ever know about the non-free existence if he is not totally convinced not to use it, otherwise he might be tempted to install it.

This suggests what ? This suggests us to free people per-force. Looks like communist practices, where people were ‘protected’ from ‘damaging’ content by hiding it, so the population wouldn’t choose ‘bad’. Disinformation was a bread and butter, and RMS is now suggesting us to do it.
OK, this is not totally true, nobody hints us to say untrue, it is only about not telling the whole picture, omitting one solution. Hold on a sec, it is a form of lying! Additionally this way we take peoples right to subdue themselves, away from them, the right being one of the basic freedoms.

Trapped into freedom
The right to be free is a freedom of choice. Everybody can, and at least they should, decide themselves if the solution he wants, including all the restrictions, is appropriate. Given the above, an informational action (already in place, as I mentioned earlier) is much better than what RMS suggests - letting people know what they decide on choosing non-free software.

What Stallman pitches for, is quite accurately depicted by what the wider public knows about the freedom-promoting community. A few years ago, a few people actually knew about Richard’s vision of total freedom (GPL, BSD and similar licenses). Close to nobody also used the free operating systems, and when somebody got to mention it in the wide, he did it rather to discourage the users (ref the Progr@m aired not so long ago in polish commercial TV information channel TVN24). As one can now realize, so our community starts to look from the outside : we are beginning to go to the lengths of restricting people’s rights in the name of freedom.

Finishing this article, I’d like to summarize, giving the example of Linus Torvalds again, this one being, in my (author’s) opinion, a good cause to think, whether we have the right to enforce our perception of “freedom” on others. In my opinion, the soft forms of promotion, that is informational and convincing actions are better than sending “thunders” onto sinners, evangelizing and calls to convert (using Mesianism 2.0 like tone) with addition of tainting the “heretics”. According to Linus then, he might be wrong. That he doesn’t approve on something, doesn’t mean it is bone-deep “bad”, and there should be actually a path left for somebody to try to create user-friendly solution here. So, we might approve of this idea or not, but it is clear to see, that it is much more flexible and leaves the community more space to manoeuvrer than the Stallman’s model.

Well we don’t have to choose between two extremely different standards here. The history of mankind is full of stories of looking for a golden proportion, so, we, the IT crowd, following Horace’s advice, should try to define these for our freedom. It should be somewhere in between the given examples - giving the user the right to exercise his freedom in full, freedom to choose, at the same time, not being allowed to restrict the freedoms of other people. The answer is there somewhere, only time will tell, exactly where.

Good luck to you and me while searching.

Translated-by : el es

Editor’s note: the following article has been originally written in Polish by darcnet 25 April 2009. I had to submit it with some usual haste, and with lack of any taste :), so please forgive my mistake I just mentioned the author here, not in the header. I will try to fix it shortly guys.

Coming back to the point - Amarok 2.0 release was somewhat like a KDE 4.0 release - more of a framework release, basic building blocks in place, but just about. I terribly missed queuing support, and promptly stopped using Amarok (and on a different note, switched to Gnome - Rhythmbox is sweet!). Amarok 2.1 brings in a lot of improvements - and the most obvious one is the improvements to the playlist and main play window area. With Amarok 2.0 - the playlist area was a bit of a hit and a miss the lyrics, Wikipedia info was there but wasn’t obvious, you had to “Add the plasma” and once you added multiple plasma(”applets”) you had no idea how many were there without “zooming out” and overlooking it. And with the zoom effect not at its slickest best it was a big chore. Amarok 2.1 fixes this by adding buttons which bring up the respective applets making it easy to remove the exisitng applets, add new ones or simply re-arrange them.

Another nice feature introduced is “bookmarking” - any track with a length greater than 10minutes and Amarok will save the last listened position, so when you return to playing the track, it resumes from the last bookmarked place. You can also manually bookmark any track btw.

There are other improvements too - only I couldn’t figure it because the damned player wouldn’t play anything
I’ve put my query in Ubuntu forums over here - my problem is that Amarok just refuses to play any local files. If any of my readers can help me figure this out, it’ll be great, just drop a comment.

As for installing Amarok, its pretty straightforward, Goto System -> Administration -> Software Sources. Click on third party sources, click on Add, enter the below line.

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/backports/ubuntu jaunty main

Save, update. Launch Synaptic, search for amarok and mark for install.

That’s it, Amarok 2.1 is ready to rock. Were you able to get Amarok successful run on your system ? Do drop a comment.

Originally posted at author’s blog

Filmaster is a new social network for film buffs that features personalized content and recommendations. What makes it special is that it is an open service: both code and content is free as in freedom.

Bias warning: Author of this article is one of the founders of Filmaster. At the same time he’s the founder of PolishLinux.org.

Filmaster — Main page

Why create yet another movie site?

That’s a valid question. And the answer to it can be summed up in the following points:

• Film rankings are useless!
  Have you ever checked out the movie ratings at IMDB or RottenTomatoes and wondered “how on Earth could this crappy movie have such a high score?”. Wonder no more as Filmaster suggests you the movies that you will enjoy. It personalizes rankings using a custom recommendation algorithm, so that the Top 100 is prepared for each user individually based on their weird tastes.
• Movie websites are not social enough!
  On Filmaster you can blog about movies (and you’re getting a cool URL for your blog like michuk.filmaster.com), discuss movies on forums, make friends and follow their activity, check your and their ratings and compare your movie tastes using the taste comparison indicator, share your movie libraries or wishlists and much more…
• All movie sites are proprietary
  You don’t own your data at IMDB or Flixter. The companies behind those websites do. And they can disconnect you from your data at any given time. It’s all in the convoluted terms of use. Filmaster is free as in freedom. You own your data. You control your data. And you can do whatever you want with it. What is more, you can also use the code that runs the service as it’s fully free as well, being a mixture of BSD licensed stuff (mainly borrowed from the Pinax project guys) and Affero GPLv3 (all the original Filmaster code including the recommendations engine). What can you do with it? Well… sky is the limit.

Planet Filmaster aggregates all user activities

Filmaster as an open service

Implemented in Django (a Python framework) and using a PostgreSQL database engine, Filmaster was made possible by using strictly free software. The decision to open source the code of the service itself came a few months after the development started. It became clear to the project founders, Borys Musielak and Adam Zielinski, that making Filmaster fully free software will enable the project to grow much faster and gain a wider range of features compared to proprietary websites offering similar recommendations functionality like Jinni.com, Criticker.com or ClerkDogs, not to mention a popular movie social network Flixter.com.

But the code is only one part of a fully open service. According to the Open Service Software Definition, an open software service is one:

• Whose data is open as defined by the open knowledge definition with the exception that where the data is personal in nature the data need only be made available to the user
• Whose source code is:
  • Free/Open Source Software (that is available under a license in the OSI or FSF approved list).
  • Made available to the users of the service.

This is why all the content created by the users at Filmaster.com is automatically licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 3.0, and that is why the team is working hard to provide an API that will make it possible to trivially access all the essential data, like user ratings, reviews, personal recommendations, wishlists, collections and all the rest using simple JSON calls.

How can you help?

Easily. Check out Filmaster.org, the developer’s community wiki, get an account at the issue tracker, set up the environment (which shouldn’t take more that 15 minutes if you follow the set up instructions precisely) and get going!

There is a lot of cool stuff going on at the moment, mainly thanks to our great contributors:

• Jakub is working an an enhanced version of the recommendations engine. Feel free to comment on his conception described on the wiki as New recommendation engine.
• Witold is planning to migrate the code base from Subversion to Git in order to make it easier to manage and provide a better tool for a distributed coding project like this.
• Turin is working on enhancing the search features, tagging and a single page to follow all the answers to your posts and reviews.
• And you may take one of other cool planned features like the integration with TV programme and local cinema schedules, adding a ClerkDogs-like “film DNA” feature, e-mail/SMS notifications about upcoming shows that are on user’s wishlists and many more, perhaps just the ones that you think that are missing from the roadmap.

But… I can’t code! Am I useless?

Quite the opposite! There are fortunately many things that you can do if you can’t help us programming:

• Translate Filmaster to your native tongue! We have two language versions at the moment: English (launched at May 24th) and Polish (running in beta since January 2009). You can create the one for your language and either work with us or set up your own instance of the service and work independantly. The power of open source, that is!
• Become a moderator of the English version of the website. There are thousands of things that need to be done manually, like tagging the movies, editing the official movie descriptions, correcting the current data and many more. You don’t need to do all :>, just a little help will do. With a strong community we can do amazing things, I assure you.
• File bugs if you find them, suggest new features and — what is most important — advertise the website to your friends, so that they can join and help us well!

OK, but… where is the catch?

Sorry to disappoint you, but there is none. We are simply film buffs ourselves and we think that the current websites are not good enough so we decided to change that by creating our own that will be more social, more personalized and completely free at the same time. With an open service like Filmaster this can happen and we very much hope you will like the idea and join us!

Even if you don’t feel like doing much work, just sign up sign up and use the website. Rate some 20+ movies and wait for the recommendations to arrive. They may surprise you as they are actually pretty good even at this early stage. And if you would like to share your opinion about the movies you love and hate either by leaving a short note or a longer review, we would be even more delighted to see that happening!

Contact us

The information provided here is not good enough? Just contact us and ask for more!

The best way to contact us is via Jabber. Just send a message to me (michuk@jakilinux.org) or Adam (adz@jakilinux.org) and we can talk about what we can do together. You can also leave us an e-mail — the addresses are the same. Everyone is invited to join and I hope we can quickly gather quite a numerous community of movie and software geeks and their friends to work together on this exciting project.

By the way, kudos to the founders of Identi.ca, Wikidot.com and Libre.fm for inspiration and great kudos to the Pinax project that made Filmaster possible to arrive as fast! Free software and free content is a great thing and keep doing your great work, please!

Aaron Seigo has published a list of changes and new features to Plasma, the desktop shell for KDE4, that will be included in KDE4.3. This list is quite long, so I will only try to show the most important changes.

Notifications

The system tray of KDE4.3 finally supports notifications fully. Also the configurability has changed there. Now we can select the group of icons that are to be shown at all times - e.g. the Hardware group, containing i.e. KMix - if not enabled, the KMix icon won’t be shown in tray. The notification icon is shown at all times, unlike the earlier KDE4 versions. The notifications can now be grouped together and also they can e.g. display the Kopete contact avatar. Also the possibility to choose whether the notifications are to be hidden after some time, or to be always visible, has been added - when the mouse pointer floats over the notifications icon, a Notifications and jobs tool-tip is shown.

Plasma::Dialogs

The dialogue windows of Plasma are now animated. These animations work if the KWin effects are on. So far, the animation is not too smooth yet.

libplasmaclock

Can now speak out the current time (using text to speech) and show the holiday days for a chosen country in the calendar.

Plasma desktop shell

Cashew is now smaller and its appearance can be changed. If not docked, it can show the given activity’s name in one of the corners of the screen. Also the keyboard shortcuts of Plasma options are now in Cashew menu. Also as I mentioned earlier in the article on KDE4.3, Plasma has now a separate dashboard to dock Plasmoids on. They appear when this table is turned on, not on the desktop as until now. Now the empty space on a panel can be added directly from its configuration tool. The empty space can be resized at will. The new “show windows underneath” option causes the windows to be visible in the background of the panel.

New Plasmoids

• Bubble Monitor - system monitor
• Media player - audio/video player
• RememberTheMilk - integration with this site
• Unit converter
• Weather

New wallpaper plug-ins

• Virus - burn-out the screen pixels
• Weather - the wallpaper adjusts to current weather
• Mandelbrot
• Marble - the Earth on your desktop

These are the most visible changes from the user perspective. Obviously there were many changes under the bonnet too.

The full list of Plasma changes can be found here

This article was posted originally as Wybrana lista zmian w Plaźmie dla KDE4.3 / Selective list of Plasma changes for KDE4.3 on the Authors’ blog.
Translated-by : el es

First Impressions and Installation

After popping the live CD into the drive, rebooting my laptop and waiting for a couple of minuets for the system to load I was welcomed to new, shiny KDE 4.2.2 desktop. The default theme is aya with a light blue background and Mandriva logo on it, even though I’m not an aya lover I have to admit, things were looking very good indeed.

Mandriva developers spend a lot of time and pay a lot of attention to visual aspects of the system, and this immediately shows-what you get is well thought out and balanced desktop. Leaving visual aspect aside I went to the central control panel to check the hardware detection; Mandriva lived up to its reputation and all but the webcam was correctly detected. The Ricoh webcams installed in some of HP and Sony laptops including mine are a constant nuisance to Linux users, and none of the distros I’ve tried so far managed to recognised it. I’m not going to pick on Mandriva in that respect. My wireless card was correctly detected and so I proceed with establishing the connection to my home network, a task that took me about 30 second and was painless and straightforward; another point scored for Mandriva here.

As responsiveness of the live CD was becoming an issue and my first impressions were excellent, I decided not to wait any longer and install the system on my hard drive. After clicking the appropriate icon on the desktop, the installation wizard has started offering partitioning options including resizing of the Windows partition if you have one, the option I decided to test. Wizard proceeded to do the necessary work while I was still able to use the Internet to check my email and the latest news on BBC website. The whole instillation process took just under 18 minutes and I have to say I was very impressed by it.

This is a bold claim but to me the newest Mandriva installation wizard is probably the best I’ve ever used. It is simple, intuitive and very fast and I can’t see a single reason why anyone with no previous Linux experience and limited computer skills would run into a problem using it, well done Mandriva team. After rebooting all the settings and changes from live CD session, including my network password were remembered, something that is still lacking in some other live CD distros and adds another points to so far nearly excellent record. Overall in terms of installation and hardware detection Mandriva scores the highest mark with a small minus for the webcam recognition.

Software and Multimedia handling

Mandriva One comes with a decent selection of software; all the usual utilities found in other leading distros are available here as well. For any additional software just fire up rmpdrake, using Install & Remove Software tab in kick off menu and vast Mandriva repositories will provide you with almost any software you might need. Installing and removing software is very straightforward, if you know what you are after, just find and select the require packages, approve the selection and wait for the system to do the rest for you. If you new to Linux and don’t know much about what’s on offer or if you just browsing to see what’s available, tabs grouping available software in thematic categories can come very handy, just click on a chosen category tab and in right-hand pane you’ll see the selection of available packages. Software management tool is very intuitive and works smooth and fast, over the curse of last few weeks of testing and a large number of different packages I installed or removed I didn’t experience a single problem with it, my overall experience was very pleasant, and I have to say this is probably one of the best software management tools I’ve used recently.Whether you’re an advanced user or a just discovering the Linux grounds you should quickly find you’re way round it and just enjoy using it.

When it comes to multimedia Mandriva One does very well, it will play common formats out of the box which is a nice feature , especially for less seasoned users. If you attempt to play a multimedia that require a proprietary codecs not available by default, system will launch codeina web shop offering you an option of purchasing an appropriate solution. Obviously you can opt out and stick to free packages available for the Linux platform which in most common case scenarios will do good enough, if however you are prepared to dig out few pennies it might make sense to upgrade to powerpack edition which will include all the proprietary codecs out of the box along with other commercial software you might find useful (list here) and on-line support should you require it. It this place I’d like to highlight that Mandriva is a powerful system available free of charge and you don’t have to spend a penny to get the full functionality. However unlike some other major distribution Mandriva is a commercial venture and as such will offer you several additional paid for options, like support and commercial software and this is not a bad thing at all, some users might require it. At the end of the day it all comes to personal requirements, for those on a tight budget or those just not willing to dish out money on software most of the functionality offered in Power Pack can be archived with free solution and a little creativity just like in any other major distribution. If on the other hand you are looking for ready made solutions and technical support, Power Pack might be a right option for you. My advice is get the free version first and see if you like it then carefully evaluate your needs before clicking the purchase button, it is simple and best method to avoid latter disappointment. To sum up - Mandriva does an excellent job in terms of software management and multimedia handling, new users will appreciate intuitive interfaces and ease of use, and more advance users will appreciate the wealth of configuration options and fast and solid performance.

Conclusion

The newest Mandriva is no doubt an excellent system, easy to configure and use, appealing visually and offering a very powerful system under the hood. I really like the look and feel of it, but somehow I doubt it will dominate the Linux word or challenge the dominant position of Microsoft Windows. In comparison to Ubuntu the most popular Linux distro at the moment, Mandriva has nothing to be ashamed of, if anything many things are going to be easier for new users and I bet if you take 10 Linux novices and let them play for half an hour with both OS, the majority will point to Mandriva as more friendly. This however doesn’t matter much as if asked I will still recommend Ubuntu to any new user, and there are few reasons for that. The first one is the community, whatever problem you might have with Ubuntu, there are countless forums and websites dedicated to Ubuntu and the chances are you’ll find a solution to your problem sooner rather than latter. In case of Madriva community support in comparison to other major distribution is very poor; the result of ill thought Mandriva approach to community in last few years. Mandriva club available only to paying subscribers proved to be a big failure and recently Mandriva opened it up to everyone, still though it is a bit of a ghost town. If you walk into your local bookshop you’ll find at least few books on Ubuntu, one or two on Red Hat / Fedora and openSuse and absolutely nothing about Mandriva. Searching Amazon for any kind of introduction to the OS returns nothing. Uncertainty about which direction is going to be adapted by the company in the future remains an issue, probably the last thing you want is to get involved into a community project that is going to be fully commercialised sometime along the way or the other way round - to pay for software that will fail to gain a significant market share and disappear into oblivion. Judging from the recent announcements, people in Mandriva headquarters finally realised that without strong and vibrant community achieving success in the Linux word is nearly impossible. I genuinely hope that the recent attempts at rebuilding community spirit will work out as the OS is definitely worth it, but no doubt this will take time and lot of effort. To give justice to the company though they managed to develop one of the best Linux distributions around, it is available for free, and if any of the above doesn’t pose a problem for you, it is a distro worth a try.

The first thing we need to do, is have a Calender system in Mozilla Thunderbird. There are couple of addons for this, but IMO the Lightning project is probably the best of the lot. Lightning project also allows you to accept Outlook meeting invites, but we’ll get to that in a while.

Head over to Lightning project homepage, and download the addon as per your platform. Next, install the addon by clicking on Tools  -> Addons -> Install and then point it to the location where you have downloaded the addon. Restart Thunderbird and you will get a Calender and tasks pane on the lower left corner, and an events sidebar.

Now that our calender system is ready, lets do the next step - Integration with Google calender. This requires another addon, Provider for Google Calender which basically allows  Lightning to access and write back to Google calender. Follow the same steps as mentioned above to install the addon.

Next, lets configure Thunderbird to use Google calender. Click on File -> New -> Calender -> On the nextwork radiobox. Now click on the Next button.Click on Google Calender radio box. In the location, enter the location of your Google Calender shared URL. You can obtain this URL by logging on to Google Calender and then clicking on the Settings link from the left sidebar. In the lower corner, you will see an “Calender address” section, right click on the XML button and copy the link address. Now enter this address in the Location textbox mentioned above.

Click next, you will be prompted for your Google  accounts username and password. Login you’re done! Next time you receive a meeting invite, it will be available under Invitations link!

As a bonus, if you use Google contacts to keep your contacts in Sync, use the Zindus addon to Sync your Mozilla Thunderbird Addon with Google Contacts!

This article has been originally posted at the author’s blog

Now years have passed, technology has evolved and new possibilities have appeared, but I still look back to those golden years, when computing was most fun, and gaming was most addictive.

If you have similar feelings, I’ve got some good news for you! You don’t need to employ Wine or another (non-)emulator to bring back time anymore.
There is an open source alternative, that can easily replace the King with dignity. The project I am talking about is called Hedgewars, and though it’s been here for some time (first released in 2004), it seems to have gone unnoticed by many and it’s definitely worth checking out.

Before we begin, you deserve a few words explanation on what the Worms game actually is.

Worms is a turn based artillery game developed by Team17 and released in 1994. It resembles other games of the genre such as Scorched Earth. It’s much more developed though as it combines plenty of game types. It can be considered an artillery game, a logical one, arcade or strategic… and even as a platform game! It all depends on the situation on field. It’s really addictive mixture, so beware not to abuse. The original game is still under development, however I find the so called ‘third generation of Worms’ is pretty different game with different goals and different treatment, that actually killed whole playability in my opinion. Beginning with Worms 3D, Worms era ended - not that it’s so bad, it’s yet another overdo. You can find no PC versions available anymore (I mean the classic ones), and I feel like it went one step too far and left the fans behind. Enough of these personal thoughts, let’s get back to the game philosophy.

As a player, you control a team of worms, and have to ‘dispose’ your ammo to your enemies – other worms team controlled either by another human player or a computer. There’s some impressive equipment to help you with that, so don’t worry, you can do it! The more lead-resistant team wins the match which is divided into three separate rounds. Sounds interesting? Well, too bad that there’s no Linux alternative…I mean…there wasn’t because now we can play Hedgewars!

Take cover!

There is a Unix Worms-like game, called Hedgewars, developed by a Russian programmer Andrey Korotaev. It might be hard to believe, but hedges have been there since 2004, so don’t waste any time and proceed with the review. It’s free and open source project, GPL v.2 based, and more importantly - it’s available for Linux, Windows, and MacOS supporting both - 32, and 64 bit architecture.
For review purposes, I have used the latest release available, 0.9.10.
The first look after starting the game brings back the past memories. The artwork seems to be solid, fresh and appealing, and it also – as the game itself - it maintains the standards set by the original predecessor. As in Worms, you can either play against your computer, or choose
the more addictive, multiplayer option against your friend(s). More over, you can start the bloodshed over the Internet since Hedgewars offers this option too. This was not so common in the original Worms. Well, at least you had to apply a special game patch to make it playable over the net. Now you have this by default, which is very impressive and brings playability to a higher level.
At this point I have to mention, that there are some other, alternative solutions such as Wormux project, which is a great game for sure, but sadly I do not consider it as a worthy successor. Despite the name similarity it’s just a different game, with different goals and ideas behind it. It may find its place in Linux gaming area, but it definitely doesn’t meet my tastes as - discussed here - Hedgewars.

Let’s see…

The main menu is divided into several sections, which allows you to select desired play mode, set up your teams, and play around with some configuration options. All is clean and simple yet visually appealing and made with taste. I felt like I was running another Worms release, and I really enjoyed that!

The top menu choice is only limited to a few options, but there’s no need to have more at this particular stage. The menu allows you to pick a quick, single or multiplayer game which can be set up more deeply further on. You can also make some practice exercises by choosing the third option, a kind of a training course. Beside the above, you can of course set up the game itself in the config menu, and even watch previously saved game demos. That suprised me to be honest, since it’s a brand new possibility in the Worms world.

The quick play mode is really straightforward so I won’t focus on it that much, the multiplayer option offers much more however. In multiplayer mode you have to set up nearly every aspect of the game, from setting up your weaponary, teams and ground editing, to setting your teams eventually. Talking about the little squad of hedges… you can even provide them with nice looking head-coverings, varying for each little soldier. It looks pretty funny.
That’s also what worms didn’t like. Well, it’s their loss anyway. There is also a very limited possibility to change the default speech sets, the hedges can communicate with the environment. These are similar to the one we knew before, and there’s just a few schemes, but it would be changed surely in the next releases.
If you’d like to play against people from all over the world, feel free to do so using the multiplayer mode by selecting the Internet play mode. It is a very addictive way to spend your spare time, but
I’m afraid I wouldn’t write this article at all if I played for any longer, so let’s leave that part, say, because of security reasons :). Let me just mention that if you decide to play over the net, you can take part in many competitions and tournaments being held in hedgenet and described on the Hedgewars website. It’s definitely one of these “must have” features in games like these.
Of course you can find many more goodies and configuration options, which might be useful during the game. You can create or modify your team, select your weaponary, and even more.

The network options screen allows you to either join, create or modify your network game. You can even chat with other players before, or during the game. This is probably the most addictive part, which is also really hard to resist to.

If you eventually decide to eliminate some creatures, you can proceed and start the match. The rules haven’t changed at all for years.
Though you can find many new weapons in your inventory, find out several new features and maybe discover even more pretty artwork in some aspects, it’s still the same old Worms that we used to play with such passion but with many improvements in comparison to it’s predecessor. However you can still do the very same well known tricks, jumps, and spectacular evolutions. All to send dozens of enemies back to hell again. Generally, nothing has changed, and I took that fact with some kind of relief - it’s just the way it should go!

The one thing I miss is that the match itself isn’t divided into rounds, but it’s only a minor inconvenience in view of what you get in advance.

The Game Experience

In-game atmosphere brings back the magic feelings that was with you when you played original Worms. Hedgewars is visually tempting - all the same great, cartoon styled graphics are looking nice and appealing. I didn’t like some of the map designs though - they are too bright and too lacking in contrast, like the kitchen for example. On the other side, the underwater theme is well designed and original, but too colourful, and distracts player’s attention away in my opinion. There are also some rather poorly designed scenes, but since the game is in constant development, many things can change rapidly.
You are however, far from restricted to using one you don’t like. There are plenty of maps to choose from, so go ahead and pick the best.
Unlike in Worms, you can even pick some extra guns, which you won’t find in Team17’s production. It’s also very important in view of the fact, the developers didn’t try to force their ideas. These are really original and funny, and furthermore, it is smooth to use them, and you’ll love them eventually.
I also discovered many interesting features while playing or setting up the game. You can, for example, play a basketball match (sic!) using your hedges or rather, the opponents’. It is a really great, and original idea, which I remember I was trying to bring to the game before by editing the levels when things get boring over time.

There are also some other play modes, which are as follows:

• Pro mode

is a game type where players only have 15 seconds to move, and are limited to skill based weapons. There is a pro mode weapon set-basically bazooka, grenade and mortar only.
It puts the player under a lot of pressure to make an accurate shot very quickly. Turns are also very short so players get turns more often.

• Shoppa mode

is a mode usually played on a shoppa map (try ropes map), where players only have a rope as a weapon, and 30 seconds to move. However, a weapon crate drops at the start of every round, so in 30 seconds the player must use the rope to collect a crate and then launch an attack on an opponent. “Shopping” for weapons.

…and even more still to come.

As mentioned above, the game itself is very similar to what we played before. Although it has to be played within a single round, not three. It is definitely one of the options I miss. I hope that it will be implemented soon, as the game is moving forward all the time, and the process seems unstoppable.

During the rather fast paced game, you can do almost everything you could before. For example it is possible to dig through the terrain, swing on a rope or drop some presents from it. Digging up the land is even better-designed than in Worms, since it’s possible to change a dig angle smoothly when hedge digging. Just please be aware of mines placed randomly on the field. As I said, the game tends to be fast paced. On the other hand, you have the possibility to slow things down a bit and take some time to plan your strategy, think, and perform some more logical movements, which is often a key to survive when your situation on field is getting difficult.

In terms of arcade elements, it is very enjoyable too. As stated, there are plenty of similarities between both discussed titles. Still you can perform some rope acrobatics, jumps and nearly whatever you could imagine, whatever you could do in Worms, you can do in Hedgewars. ‘Backspace jumping’ is also here. It helps a lot when an item falls out of reach and you are out of your ropes.
There are several item types that you can get during the game. These are of course well-known crate drops performed by a defined period of turns (default is 5).
As well as a ‘regular’ crate that holds a random weapon, you can pick a tool crate, health crate, and some utlilities. These can help you to build the structures with girders, get some extra health points and even expand your abilities by collecting utilities. I was, however, a little disappointed by a lack of my favourite items and guns. There is no sheep weapon and no jetpack included. On the other side, you have some extra guns and items which Team17 developers do not include, and they are in Hedgewars. It gives some balance, doesn’t it?

Eagerly, I noted the game keeps the famous atmosphere and won’t let you turn off your boxes that easily. It has nice looking graphics, good sounds and music themes, different in each environment. The hedges are also very nice and have good animations. In particular, when they are hit. Well, it is one of the primary targets after all.

Talking about in-game animations, there are also some that spoil the overall impression. The water effect seems very modest, and that’s surely not enough to call it a water movement. Also, the blast effects need to be improved a bit, in my opinion. These are fair and well reflect what is happening on the screen, but these are far from what I would call ‘well designed’.

Depending on the surrounding conditions, there are also different background animations like snow, rain or falling leaves. All of these is make the game very interesting and a very attractive and coherent audio-visual frame, even in spite of aforementioned shortcomings.

Victory!

The game is very playable itself and may entertain you for many hours. If you liked Worms, you’ll certainly love Hedgewars and if you have never heard of them before, it is time indeed to get to know them.
The problems mentioned above are smoothly balanced by the game’s ‘freshness’. Those that remained, are the result of the hard work of the developers. If you are looking for the Worms successor, here it is, you’ve just found it. If you cannot forgive Worms developers for going commercial, to gain easy money, and set to 3D – Hedgewars is just for you and you’ll love it.
Hedgewars seems to be untouched by current trends and retains its own identity. It also brings a lot of fresh air into the genre, as it didn’t try to pretend just another Worms clone. Although it keeps all of it’s greatness. It’s definitely worth to play!