[ANN] How to model torcs cars with Free Software

Hello folks, this post is not related to Emacs... I want to advertise a little book that I wrote in the last months: it's called How to model TORCS cars with Free Software and you can find it on lulu.com.
It's a tutorial about modeling cars for TORCS (The Open Racing Car Simulator). The car design and modeling process is realized with Inkscape + The Gimp + Blender.

I hope you will support this project buying a copy of the book :) This will help my research project to go on in the future!

Artwork

Hello guys, I did an Emacs wallpaper. You can find it on EmacsWiki

Lisplog lives again

Hello folks... Today I took lisplog sources to make a new version... I would like to fix bugs and add more functionalities... I already started and you'll see soon a new version...

At the moment lisplog uses this css, if you want to create a new one, you're welcome! ;)

Editing root owned files

Just a few lines to introduce one of the billions Emacs features that I love: tramp!
Tramp allows to edit files on remote hosts but not only... It's really confortable to open root owned files from within my Emacs session... Even in this case tramp it's useful! I use tramp to open those files simply typing:

C-x C-f

And then

/su::/etc/fstab

A gimp plugin

Hello there!
Maybe someone still remembers my post about gimp-scripting with script-fu... Well, a guy, Elia Weiss, sent me his nice plugin for The Gimp.
Its description is:

"creates a shadow (transparent) version of the image

i use this script for colorizing an img with CSS/HTML
i.e. I display the shadow img and change the bg color with CSS

if u use the original colors from the picture u should get almost the same picture
u can play with the black-point/white-point values for less/more gray...
though it doesn't change much...

it meant to be use with uni-color img, but works with any img.

tested on png, jpg, GIMP 2.6.6
it gives an error message: Error: illegal function
I dont know why (didn't had the energy to debug it) but it works fine for me any way
so I simply ignore it

see GIMP on-line help for installation instruction of script-fu

usage: open an image and run the script
Note: i test it only on a flat image,
with multiple layer it should operate on the current active layer

after running the script:
* delete invisible layer (optional)
* merge visible layer (optional)
* save with a different name (as png for keeping the transparent charecteristic of the image)"

I thought it's nice and useful, so if you want to try it, well it's here

Thanks Elia for your contribution! I appreciated it! ;)

A self-made function for emms

Very often, while I'm listening to my /home/val/music folder, I think "Mmm.. I would like to add this song to that playlist..", so I wrote this little function to add the currently selected track in the emms-playlist buffer in a playlist file. I didn't find a similar function, but if it exists, please warn me! :P

(defun emms-add-to-playlist ()
  "Insert the currently selected track in emms playlist in a playlist file"
  (interactive)
  (setq song (emms-score-track-at-filename))
  (setq playlist (read-file-name "Playlist file: "))
  (find-file-other-frame playlist)
  (insert (concat song "\n"))
  (save-buffer)
)

Hope you'll find it useful.

LOL!

M-x animate-birthday-present

Ahahahahahahahahahha! Amazing and unuseful! :P