BSD & Gaming

Last xmas my family was generous and got me the little 10″ Zt-180 tablet I wanted. It’s been a lot of fun to use especially since this little “hu flung dung” epad has more features than many pricier alternatives, and does everything I want with a price tag that was well under 200 bucks. Gotta love it!!

It originally came with Android 2.1 1030 but the good news is I finally got around to upgrading the firmware to Android 2.2 0603! It’s fast and has flash support. I haven’t messed with it much to check on the actual performance but it seems pretty good so far. When I make the time I’ll put together detailed info on the upgrade and how I made it work for me.

Photoshop is a really powerful application, and the recent versions have some pretty amazing capabilities. The downside for somebody like me is the cost of it. While many software applications give discounts to students, that doesn’t help me because my student days are long since over. Even if I had a student discount it still requires an investment which I need for other things given the state of the economy. If I was a professional in a position where the expense was necessary it’d be worth it. However I’ve been using a free open source alternative that does everything I’ve needed so far.. The Gimp.

The Gimp has been around a really long time, I’ve been using it off and on for ages now. While I love the fact that there is a version available for FreeBSD, PCBSD, or the various linux flavors, there are even downloads compatible with Windows making it available to a huge audience. It is a quite powerful image manipulation program in it’s own right with plenty of free plugins, filters, and brushes to suit your needs.

The Gimp’s layout can throw people off balance if they are used to photoshop. Even though many of the features and tools are the same in function, they may have a different name or place to find them that can be confusing for photoshop users. There is a version available that tries to ease that learning curve with a more familiar layout called GimpShop. Since I am not a photoshop user I’ve never tried GIMPshop, but for someone interested in trying an alternative or wanting to transition over to free software it might be worth looking into.

The Gimp definitely has a slot in my “must have software” list and I think if you give it a shot I believe you’ll like it as well.

The Gimp – [LINK]

GimpShop – [LINK]