Chisel Tip Fat Marker in Gimp is Easy and Fun

Gimp doesn't have an angled brush, so you set the angle of the flat brush tool to negative 45 degrees.

 

 Fat Marker Short Vid

This short video shows the settings I use and the fun drawing with extreme bold.  I also am not using the mouse, but a tablet with a pen.  Tablet is connected to Mint via USB.

It works well, no extra drivers required.

Background music is a new original jam using some old gear from years ago.  Blender used for the editing and audio track sync.

If you watch the video, I could use some subscribers and likes, thanks.

The tablet is a Bamboo made by Wacom.  The pen was included with it.  I'll be looking for a later model, this one is probably not manufactured any more.  So the search is on again.

I'll post again later with more details on this setup.

...and it smells a lot better than actual fat markers.

UPS Battery Replacement in CyberPower 1350AVR

This got in the way of part 2 of prior post.  It had to be done.  For a few days, I was able to still continue using the UPS even tho the battery capacity was not showing on the front panel.

I guess it's a feature to not allow power to go through to the devices plugged in on the power strip that is for battery backup when there is no battery capacity.  I was able to continue like that for a few days until the replacements arrived.

This unit has no easy access door.  The front panel has to be removed but it is only one screw to remove.  The panel is connected by a plug that they do suggest be removed, but I didn't.

The unit with the batteries is 23lbs.  It takes a battery pack of 2 that are secured with a spacer and taped around it to hold it all together.

The tape on the pack I received was not stuck very well on one side so I pulled that part off, pushed the pack together and put the tape back on tight so it would all fit inside the case.

It's been plugged in all day and the display shows full battery capacity.

I haven't tested it yet by running it on battery only, I need to find if there is an alarm disable option.

Here's the YouTube video: UPS Battery Replacement

Optical Media for Backup and Archiving Part 1 - The discs

I still use optical disks for backup and archiving.  Other choices are flash memory like usb flash, SD, micro SD, and HDD/SDD drives.  Hard drives and solid state drives and flash are RW, read-write.  They will work but are larger and more expensive for a single unit or device.

The discs are always under a US dollar so it's easy to shred the old backups.  I always burn two copies for archiving and sometimes 3 if it's important data.

I know, you are saying, "Why not just use the cloud?"  I do for some redundancy, but I need some less amorphous, more tangible form for my own peace of mind. 

The Disks

CD data disks were great at the time.  700mb on one was so good, of course now I am managing files that are over 2,000mb.

DVD data disks were great for years.  4.7gb was fine until recently when I started using larger video files.

BR data disks I use now are 25gb.  25,000mb is a good size for me.  The dual-layer is 50gb, but they are more expensive and I really don't accumulate that much data yet, I hope I don't for a long time.

The Drives

My first CD drive was $330 a long time ago, then they came down to about $20.  Drives sold now for DVD are $16.  Blu-ray is about $50.

There was always a little compatibility problem with disc manufacturers and specific drives.  I've been lucky with that and did a little research before buying and all my discs worked with my drives.   I've been thru about 20 drives, they don't last a long time, so now I don't even install them in the PC case, I just go with external interface, that's for next post.

Linux Mint 17.3 Rosa 64-bit Running On Same Hardware in 2017

I looked back on my blog here and I started using this machine in 2012.  That's around 5 years on this hardware configuration.  In the past, that was never possible.  Upgrading Linux has worked well on this system.  Of course, all my Windows machines have had to change with those upgrades, or get stuck on a prior OS if they aren't able to keep up.


For nearly the same price, these days as my 6, an 8-core AMD CPU is available.  RAM was $50 at the time I put this together and it's 8gb.  Now for only around $20 more, you can get 16gb.  It's great to see the system statistics for the amount of ram in use, as well as cpu usage.

I didn't think I was going to be needing this much power, now I do.  I am running virtual guests and rendering using Blender.  These use up a lot of this horsepower and I'm really glad I have it now.

Here it is running 2 guests with nice amount of ram for each and the cpu is not working hard, and the fan isn't loud so no heat generated yet.  Booting the guests, however does take more effort, but still not as much as I would expect.

Blender rendering does peg the cpu.  I uploaded test videos to YouTube just to see how it works and I'm using Blender for the editing, it's cool but has a learning curve.

Happy New Year 2017!