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  • Why The Breeze Cursor Theme is The Best

    Themes

    So basically, there are themes.

    Themes can do a lot to change the look and feel of your computing experience. If you’re a Linux user, there’s a good chance you like things customized. Just have a Google for “linux themes” and you’ll see what I mean. You can take this to whatever level you want. You can change the look and feel of literally everything, or you can do a subtle cursor change like me.

    Breeze Theme

    Lately I’ve been a fan of the Breeze cursor theme. To get that theme and a selection of other themes to choose from later, open a terminal and install the unity tweak tool and a few theme libraries:

    $ sudo apt install breeze-cursor-theme oxygen-cursor-theme oxygen-cursor-theme-extra unity-tweek-tool

    Once you install the themes and the unity tweak tool, you can open the tweak tool and head over to Appearance > Cursors. Click through the list until you find one you like. Make note of the name. Once you’ve got one, open your terminal again and type:

    $ sudo update-alternatives --config x-cursor-theme

    This will bring up a list of all the themes you’ve installed on your system. Look through the list and find the theme you liked. Type in the number of your selected theme to confirm your changes. To make sure your changes remain changed, simply run:

    $ compiz --replace

    and you can either reboot or log out and log back in to make your changes. That’s it! Enjoy your new look!

    matt

    April 16, 2019
    Lifestyle, Linux, Ubuntu
    breeze, computing, cursor, linux, pc, theme, ubuntu, windows

  • What Is The Golem Network?

    What Is The Golem Network?

    Simple explanation: Golem is a bunch of connected computers that team up to become a giant rendering Megazord!

    This is a really cool project. Recently I have found myself lacking computational power in a professional environment. The client loves this Blender animation, but I’ve got 1/13th of the power I need to render what they want by the time they need it. Traditional render farms are out of the question because on demand render pricing would be enough to just buy a render farm outright. Possible solution? Golem network.

    Disclaimer: I have not used Golem in a professional setting. However, that doesn’t mean I’m not very interested in the project. The idea being: you can download a simple client for accessing the network, set up a few ports for your router to forward, and essentially “go online”. There were anywhere between 250-350 computers or “nodes” on the network at any given time (at the time of this writing). You can check this number now at stats.golem.network. It even gives you the collective number of CPU cores, RAM, and disk space available at any given time. Pretty cool!

    There are two sides to Golem. First is the side where you can essentially put your computing resources ‘up for rent’. This allows others on the Golem network to use your computer to render projects. The other side is renting computing resources from the network. Got a huge project to render? You can pay to rent resources to finish your project way faster. A huge advantage is that this is much less expensive than using a traditional render farm. Here’s a promotional video that explains it quite well:

    My Experience

    I ran spent about 2 weeks on the Golem network just renting my unused compute power. Wasn’t sure what to expect. The Golem network is built on the Etherium blockchain and providers are paid in GNT or Golem Network Tokens. If you are buying compute power, you’ll be paying in ETH and also covering any transaction fees. As of now estimating how much you’ll need to render your job is kinda complex. You need to define a specific ‘timeout’ time for your job. So if a weaker node gets your job and takes longer than your ‘timeout’ time, you basically lose your money. In my experience, I rented out my AMD FX 8350 Black Edition and earned about $0.07 worth of GNT. I think it’s because the network is still so new. Even the client to connect to the netowork is still in beta. It could also be that not a lot of people are using the network just because it’s just so new.

    Regardless, the Golem Network is an incredibly cool project to keep an eye on. Who knows, it could potentially be the only way we render our complex projects! It is also worth mentioning that Golem is compatable with Blender projects. I have yet to test out the capabilities of the network and discover what is and isn’t possible when rendering Blender projects with certain versions of Blender, different addons, plugins, etc. Will keep you posted! Thanks for reading.

    matt

    April 2, 2019
    3D Animation, Blender, General Computing, Linux
    b3d, Blender, computing, decentralization, networking, open source, render, render farm, rendering

  • What is HTML?

    What is HTML? Hypertext Markup Language is the standard way to format text for use on web pages. So if you ever find yourself needing to edit a webpage or create one from scratch, this is the most basic way to display anything on a page.

    Basic Structure

    HTML is broke up into several different elements, noted by tags. You can write anything you want on your web page, but these tags are at the core of HTML and are used to give your text its structure. Tags are noted with angle brackets <> and wrap around the text that it affects. It should be noted that the tags need to go in a specific order, like so:

    <!DOCTYPE html>
    <html>
         <head>
              <title>Page Title</title>
         </head>
         <body>
              <h1>Heading</h1>
              <p>Paragraph text.</p>
         </body>
    </html>

    Let’s break that down. The first tag is <!DOCTYPE html> and that’s just a one-time declaration to help the computer understand that it’s about to read an HTML document. That way, it knows what to expect. You don’t need to close this tag.

    Next, it’s the <html> tag. Everything, the whole page, is contained inside this tag.

    The <head> tag is where you keep file path references associated files, like CSS files for styling, Javascript files for functions, and other page metadata like titles. The <head> tag closes with a forward slash and closes out all the page metadata before the <body> tag begins.

    Finally, the <body> tag surrounds the main content of your page. Inside this tag, you’ll find lots of tags like <p> (paragraph text), <h1> (largest header text) through <h6> (smallest header text), <ul> (unordered list AKA bullet points), <ol> (ordered list AKA numbered), <a> (anchor tag, used for making clickable links) and <form> for forms. There are several more, but those are some of the most common tags you’ll find.

    Why Tags?

    These tags server two main purposes. The first and primary purpose is to tell your web browser how to interpret all the text coming from a web page. Is it a title? A paragraph? A list? Table? This provides the overall structure of the page. HTML is often referred to as the “skeleton” of the web page. It’s functional, but not necessarily the most beautiful thing out there.

    Additionally, tags provide a great element that CSS files can use to apply style. So instead of applying a style to ALL text in an HTML document, CSS can select just the headings (<h1> tags) and apply styles to just the text inside those element tags.

    That’s it for the basics! There are tons of free online courses and videos out on the web to help help get to grips with the basics of web design and development. In this day and age with so much of our lives existing on the internet, it definitely doesn’t hurt to know some of the basics of how the web works.

    matt

    March 5, 2019
    General Computing, Linux, Web Design, Web Development
    computing, internet, linux, portfolio, web design, web development, website, wordpress

  • Swap Memory: It’s Like Downloading More RAM

    How Do I Download More RAM?

    It’s kinda like changing the blinker fluid in your car. You can’t. You shouldn’t. I mean… stuff like that doesn’t exist. But, if you’re finding yourself in a situation where you are running shy on your current installed amount of RAM, is there anything you can do without hitting up Newegg for a few more RAM sticks? Luckily, you can! Read on to learn how to add swap memory in Ubuntu 18.04.

    Just recently, I tried rendering a complex Blender scene on my computer. Unfortunately it crashed before I ever saw the first tile start to render. Blender was all like, “ERROR: Out of Memory”. I tried rendering again, but this time I opened my system resources window and monitored the RAM usage. I have 16GB of RAM installed, and 2GB of swap. As the scene loaded, the RAM started climbing up to the top of the usage graph, hit the top, then the swap started filling up. They both hit the top, and Blender crashed again.

    Fortunately, there’s a somewhat hacky thing called swap memory. So instead of purchasing extra RAM for your machine and going through all the trouble of installing it, you can add “virtual RAM” with just a few lines of code. This swap memory is designed as a sort of fail-safe should your machine demand more RAM memory than is physically installed. My problem was I was exceeding both my physical and my swap memory limitations. By default, Ubuntu was giving me 2GB of swap memory, and I had 16GB of RAM installed, but the Blender scene I was trying to render required more than my physical plus swap total of 18GB.

    Step One: Check If You Have Swap Enabled

    I’m using Ubuntu 18.04, so I can check my swap status by running this in the terminal:

    sudo swapon --show

    If there’s no output after running that command, you don’t have any swap memory enabled. If you do have swap enabled, you should get something like this:

    NAME      TYPE      SIZE USED PRIO
    /dev/sda2 partition 1.9G   0B   -2

    The swap information in Ubuntu (size and settings and all that) can be found in /swapfile. To enable the swap file, you’d run:

    sudo swapon /swapfile

    To learn more about the ‘swapon’ and ‘swapoff’ command, you can check out:

    man swapon

    Step Two: Disable Your Swapfile

    Before you edit your swapfile, you need to disable it, otherwise you’ll get an error that’s something like “ERROR: file in use”. To do this, disable your swap file by running:

    sudo swapoff /swapfile

    Step Three: Edit Your Swapfile

    You can edit your current swapfile (or add a new swapfile if you don’t have one) using the fallocate command. You can learn more by running “man fallocate”. To increase your swap memory, run the following command (and change the number of GB to your preference):

    sudo fallocate -l 50GB /swapfile

    Step Four: Re-Enable Your Swapfile

    The -l flag stands for ‘length’ which essentially adjusts how much swap you’ve got. Next, you’ll need to reactivate your swap file by running

    sudo swapon /swapfile

    Step Five: Confirm Changes Were Applied

    That should give your as many GB of swap as you need! You can double check your swap memory by running the Ubuntu System monitor by running:

    gnome-system-monitor

    and click the Resources tab at the top. You should see your swap memory reflect (not exactly, but pretty close) the amount of swap that you set using the fallocate command.

    Swap = 46.6 GB

    Now you should be able to render huge scenes in Blender without buying more RAM! Woot!

    Just a disclaimer: This is more of a note for myself so I can go back and visit this later. If you spot anything wrong or catch some mistakes, feel free to let me know! Thanks.

    matt

    February 19, 2019
    3D Animation, General Computing, Linux, Ubuntu
    animation, Blender, blender 3d, computing, general computing, hack, memory, RAM

  • How to Clean Your Computer Without Compressed Air

    So, my computer is starting to show its age a little bit after being built a few years ago. Now it’s time to clean out all the dust bunnies. The only problem is… I don’t have a can of compressed air lying around. Who wants to make a trip to the store just for that? So what are my options? Luckily, there are a few.

    Let’s do this

    First, you’ll want to clean out your filters and fans. Fans typically get gross faster than anything else. Good news: they’re also the easiest to clean. This all depends on the make/model of your computer case and how it’s built, but most filters can be popped out or slid out for easy cleaning. I usually just run my filters through some water in the sink. I’ve done this for years and it’s never hurt anything. Just be sure that your air filters are completely dry before you stick them back into your computer case.

    Photo courtesy of Nick Ares on Flickr

    Now is when it starts getting tricky. If you don’t clean your fans and filters often, or at all… you may have dust that makes its way deep into your machine and starts to cover all your components. You know… the ones you can’t clean with water. There are a few approaches you can take.

    Method 1

    First, if you have some plastic drinking straws lying around, you can grab one of them and just blow through it to clean out the particularly dirty parts of your machine. This is a totally viable option, and can work, but it does take a considerable amount of time, and you have to be careful not to breathe in all the dust you stir up into the air.

    If you don’t have any straws at your disposal, you could do this just by blowing with your mouth. It’s not as effective as a straw, and you may find it difficult to reach tighter areas inside the case.

    Method 2

    Another method, arguably more effective than both the mouth and the straw methods, would be to use a bicycle tire pump, or a sports ball pump. Most of these pumps come with a general purpose plastic tip that can be used to blow concentrated streams of air into tight places. One, technical note, this does require exact positioning of your pump and your computer case. With one foot to keep the pump on the floor and one hand to push the plunger, that only leaves you one hand to direct the air stream.

    Photo courtesy of Your Best Digs on Flickr

    Once you blow out all your components, your machine should be running much cooler. That’s all the computer cleaning methods I have at the moment; if I missed anything, or if you found this post helpful, drop a comment below!

    matt

    November 1, 2018
    General Computing, Lifestyle
    cleaning, computing, lifestyle, maintainence

  • Free Software That Could Replace Your Adobe Subscription

    If you’re like me, you’ve probably second-guessed how much you’ve shelled out to companies like Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, and others. It costs a great deal to be on the cutting edge of technology, and some software can set you back literally thousands of dollars. Seriously. Have you tried licensing a copy of Maya lately? Let’s check out some free software that could make you money.

    It took me a bit of testing out different software, but I think I’ve compiled a pretty decent list that, I’m personally convinced, with enough skill and creativity could completely replace Adobe Creative Cloud.

    Operating System

    First up, I’m going to start with the most basic. The operating system. Most people think computers fall into 2 categories: Mac vs PC. Well, PC just means ‘personal computer’ so… every consumer computer falls into this category, but- I digress. A great open source alternative to Mac and/or Windows is Ubuntu Linux. There’s TONs of documentation out there and a mega community who supports it.

    Update January 2020: I’ve been using Manjaro on both my work and home machines, and I find it much easier to set up out-of-the-box, and there’s much more support for my video editing applications. I write more about that here.

    Photoshop

    Photoshop is no doubt the industry standard when it comes to image retouching and manipulation. But few people know of a great open source alternative to Photoshop called GIMP. GIMP is an acronym that stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Kind of an unusual name, but a stellar piece of software available for free. An excellent choice for users who only need to do minor editing and retouching every now and again.

    Premiere Pro

    This one is a tough one, I’m not going to lie. Depending on how much video you need to edit, how big the project is, and how often you need reliable editing tools, there may not be much of a choice here. Just to be fair, this comment is coming from someone who makes his living and supports his family editing video. If that’s not you, Kdenlive is an excellent choice to edit just about any video you might need.

    Another piece of software on this list is Shotcut. It’s a little more scaled back as far as the technical capabilities, but it’s still able to do some basic edits. I haven’t logged more than a few hours in Shotcut, but it can handle basic edits for small applications like vlogs and home movies. If you need more technical control, I’d check out Davinci Resolve, or Kdenlive.

    Also, this one’s kind of an honorable mention, but just to be clear, this is NOT open source software, but it is excellent (the Hollywood gold standard) software in color correction, and more recently, video editing. It’s now available as free software that can be used with Mac, Windows, and Linux. That of course, is DaVinci Resovle. Definitely worth checking out.

    After Effects

    Again, another toughie, because of the way that this program operates. After Effects is a layer-based compositor, which is the only compositor that I am aware of that operates in this fashion. It makes sense when you view it as a part of Adobe CC as a whole, because Illustrator, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Lightroom, and others are all layer-based. However, there are a few node-based compositors that are open source that I can suggest. The first, and definitely the most battle-tested is Blender. Easily the most powerful software I’ve ever come across. Another option would be Natron. Natron is more up-and-coming than Blender, but still something to keep an eye on.

    If you’re already checking out Davinci Resolve, then you’ll already have Blackmagic Fusion which comes bundled with Resolve. Admittedly, I have limited experience in Fusion, but from what I gather from coworkers and others who have used it, it’s more than capable for graphics and VFX. It’s a node-based platform much like Blender, Natron, and Nuke, so if you’re coming from a node-based platform, you should feel comfortable pretty quickly!

    Illustrator

    Illustrator is a great platform for creating vector art for use in large-format work like billboard design or design works that require your images to be flexible, such as a web environment. It’s is included in Adobe CC, but there’s also a great open source alternative called Inkscape. An amazing tool for creating vector art and logos, and available for Mac, Windows, and Linux.

    Audition

    Again, if you’re checking out Davinci Resolve, you’ll get another built-in program called Fairlight. My experience at the time of this writing is zero with Fairlight, but from my brief glances at the interface, it looks absolutely capable.

    Another powerful option is Ardour. Conveniently enough, Ardour is available to download and install via the Ubuntu Software Center.

    Missed Something?

    Drop a comment below, or shoot me a message, and I’ll add to this list!

    matt

    October 7, 2018
    3D Animation, 3D Modeling, Compositing, General Computing, Motion Graphics, Photo Editing, Video Editing
    3d animation, 3d modeling, compositing, computing, motion graphics, photo editing, video editing

Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. 1 Thess 5:21