I’ve used Corel Draw since the ‘90’s with version 5.  Corel Draw is a vector drawing program.  This means that everything you create is stored as a mathematical description.  All those lines, curves, boxes, ellipses, fills, whatever you draw is kept in the computer as an object or description.  The advantage of this is you won’t get the jaggies or blockiness when you zoom in.  This makes it ideal for things from greeting cards to poster art and anything in-between, That’s because you can easily scale your artwork from small to huge with no introduction of jaggies.  Any changes you make to your artwork is easily reversed or altered unless you convert an element from vector to raster(bitmap).

You'd be surprised how fast you can create things in vector format

The downside is the all your artwork that you want to scale needs to be created.  If you introduce a photo into the artwork, it will suffer when scaled especially compared to the line art you’ve created.

The big question is which vector illustration tool is the best.  Obviously I’m stumping for Corel Draw, but most people will steer you towards Adobe Illustrator.  Illustrator is admittedly the industry standard.  If you’re submitting artwork to a printer, they’re going to want an “.ai” file; most won’t take a “.cdr” (Corel Draw) file.  But that’s OK, Draw can export to the “.ai” format as well as a dozen others including “.pdf”.  If I owned a graphics company, I’d probably swallow and buy Adobe Illustrator.

But, for small home/office use let’s cost this out.  On Amazon, Corel Draw X4 currently clocks in at $282($179 upgrade), Adobe illustrator is a heart stopping $583($196 upgrade).  Let’s look a little deeper: Corel Draw is actually a suite of programs including PhotoPaint(an excellent multi-layer photo editor,  which also doesn’t get it’s due, although admittedly also not the industry standard), Corel Trace ( for converting bitmaps to vector art), and Corel Capture (screen capture tool).  And usually, on any given version there will be different additional software, for awhile it was a 3D modeling  program, then a flash editor, the next version (X5) will apparently have a different flash editor).

Adobe’s DRM/licensing scheme is notoriously draconian in its implementation putting it on par with video games to limit their software to one machine/one user; if you want to use an Adobe product on your home computer and your laptop, better plan on buying to two copies.  Corel’s license is the same, but the DRM is not there.  I’m currently using X4 and have had no problems using it and previous versions on different machines.  (Please don’t interpret this as an excuse to throw this on a thousand machines).  The secret that nobody seems to talk about is that the upgrade version of Draw will install just fine on a fresh computer without looking for a previous version with no problems.

Corel Draw is insanely popular on two different fronts: vinyl cutting (sign making) and pattern design.  If you go to youtube and search on these you’ll find hundreds of videos.

What have I done with Corel Draw?  I’ve made maps,flow charts, logos, layouts for security presentations, nicely formatted resumes, flyers, business cards, and just general art.

Is illustrator better? Maybe, but I’d argue that Corel Draw has about 70 to 80 percent of the abilities of Illustrator for half the price.  You really got to need that extra 20 percent to pay the premium.  I have access to Illustrator CS4, but I always go to Corel Draw, because I can bang something fast and decent without frustration.

If you can’t even afford Corel Draw, an alternative is Inkscape, a free open source vector drawing program.  I hate to dismiss it, but It’s slow to load, and bogs down after a fair amount of elements are introduced.  I’d recommend getting a used copy of Draw (version 9 or better) from EBay and be on your way.

Kaspersky Rescue CD (Linux Bootable)

The first thing you have to make sure is that you’re scanning the right partition, one time it indicated a recovery partition as the “C:” drive, but you can check that with a simple built-in file manager by clicking on the start button in the lower left.

Another note is before you start scanning, go to the “scan settings” and change the prompt option to “prompt on completion”, otherwise the scan will stop every time it encounters something and will wait for you to respond.

Select "Prompt On Completion"

The only other problem I had was that one time I had a gigabyte motherboard that would go into suspend every 20 minutes or so until the mouse was moved, and that would also suspend the scan, I couldn’t find the bios setting that would apply for that. The scan itself typically takes about 5 hours, so I do it overnight.

This isn’t to be confused with the rescue disk that can be made with the Kaspersky antivirus product. That’s a Bart/PE or UBCD4WIN type disk that is made with a windows XP disk and is created with up-to-date definitions for use as a boot disk. For that, you actually have to own the Kaspersky product.  (This strikes me as a cool product for your bench computer to produce up-to-date boot disks for an on-site trip.)

Kaspersky also offers the “Kaspersky virus removal tool”, which is a stand alone program (run once) you can download and =is= updated daily, but needs to be run under windows

PART 1

PART 2

Part 3

Blender is a free open-source 3d modeling program available from blender.org.

There’s no shortage of tutorials regarding modeling, texturing, animation and other subjects for blender, but basic info on the user interface is tough to come by. Surprising, considering that 90 percent of understanding blender comes from wrapping your head around the interface. Once you get past that, it’s a whole new world and a what was once a dense program suddenly makes a lot of sense.  Some fine tutorials can be found by searching youtube; some more cool tutorials can be found at gryllus.net

The cool thing about the UI is I started to wonder about it being applied to other programs like a word processor. What if you could just slide open a new window in Word, and then make that window another view port in a long document for easy cut and pasting, then make that window into some type of sub-menu system, drawing area, wysiwyg output. or html preview, withouth having to hunt for them in menus. Really cool stuff.

Most  cameras come with a free photostitcher, but I use a commercial one called PTGui.  Originally built around “panorama tools” (a free suite of programs and libraries), but has since relied on it’s own engines.  It can stitch photo’s  taken in a typical horizontal fashion, but also in a matrix (both horizontal and vertical).  It will automatically match and blend them.  A demo can be downloaded, but the actual price will be $119 for the personal version and $225 for the pro version (which includes batch processing and support for 64 bit windows and HDR images).  I haven’t been able to justify the $110 difference (yet.)  You get updates for 1 year after that the update (rather pricey, I thought) is $38 for standard PTGui and $68 for the pro version.  Price aside, if you take a lot of photos of landscapes and such, take a look.  I use it and recommend it.  In fact, if you look for the tag panorama on by blog, you’ll see a fair amount of pictures using PTgui