Art by Fuzzy

Pottery, Photography, Design - Brandon "Fuzzy" Schwartz

I Love Free Stuff

The previous two posts were created using Open Source software almost exclusively.  I have always loved the idea of Open Source, not only because most of it is free as in “no cost” but free as in “anyone can contribute or make changes”.  There are plenty of websites that can give a better description of Open Source so go see for yourself.

There are even entire Open Source operating systems.  A while ago I installed OpenSuse 10.3 (a version of Linux) on an old computer so I could see what it was all about.  I’ve been pretty impressed.  I have slowly found and installed all kinds of useful free software including GIMP (a pretty advanced image editor), and Open Office 3.0 (an entire office suite comparable to Microsoft Office.)  I edited the images in the two previous posts with GIMP and typed most of the Nov. 6th post in Open Office Writer and then brought it all to school on my flash drive.  I’m still experimenting but I have found many great programs and all of them have fit my “budget” just fine…  And there are plenty of Open Source programs for Windows and Mac users as well.  Find some Open Source software at SourceForge.

My Gift to the Online World

It’s that special time of year again.  We get to celebrate the birth of a very special person…  My wife!!!

Flash Gallery ScreenshotBut more importantly, I have made a small addition to my growing website.  The first gallery is up!  The clay dinnerware set that I created in college is featured on the Clay page of artbyfuzzy.com.  (Of course you should check out the actual gallery but just in case it doesn’t work there is a screenshot to the left.)  I still have some tweaking to do but I’m happy with the basic design.  Some day I’d like to get information for each piece added and maybe change a few small details.  Let me know what you think.  And of course I’ll be working all of Christmas vacation to get the rest of the galleries up….

I also had to manually fix the links to the News page (you are here) because I somehow screwed that up again.  But now everything seems to be working okay.  The other good news is that I got an FTP program to work from my flash drive so I didn’t have to manually upload the files to the server.  I used WS FTP LE which was created by Ipswitch.  I think they have a newer version out now… Since we’re talking about software I should mention that the web gallery was created using Jalbum and the Fotoplayer2 skin.  Both a great holiday bargain at $0.

 Well, I’m on Christmas break so this could be my last post of the year.  Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, and check back next year for some more spectacular updates.  I’ve got big plans for 2007…