Installing Kind

These days I’m on nixos so I went with a simple nix-shell -p kind -p kubectl to setup the tool.

Example config for 4 workers

kind: Cluster
apiVersion: kind.x-k8s.io/v1alpha4
nodes:
- role: control-plane
- role: worker
- role: worker
- role: worker
- role: worker

❯ kind create cluster -n test --config 4-worker-cluster.yaml
Creating cluster "test" ...
 ✓ Ensuring node image (kindest/node:v1.34.0) 🖼
 ✓ Preparing nodes 📦 📦 📦 📦 📦
 ✓ Writing configuration 📜
 ✓ Starting control-plane 🕹️
 ✓ Installing CNI 🔌
 ✓ Installing StorageClass 💾
 ✓ Joining worker nodes 🚜
Set kubectl context to "kind-test"
You can now use your cluster with:

kubectl cluster-info --context kind-test

Thanks for using kind! 😊

We verify what this has done to our config

❯ kubectl config get-contexts
CURRENT   NAME                     CLUSTER                                                                  AUTHINFO                                                                 NAMESPACE
(my existing configuratino)
...
*         kind-test                kind-test                                                                kind-test

❯ kubectl cluster-info --context kind-test
Kubernetes control plane is running at https://127.0.0.1:39157
CoreDNS is running at https://127.0.0.1:39157/api/v1/namespaces/kube-system/services/kube-dns:dns/proxy

To further debug and diagnose cluster problems, use 'kubectl cluster-info dump'.

❯ docker ps
CONTAINER ID   IMAGE                                COMMAND                  CREATED              STATUS                PORTS                                                   NAMES
6ec5f2806ac4   kindest/node:v1.34.0                 "/usr/local/bin/entr…"   About a minute ago   Up About a minute     127.0.0.1:39157->6443/tcp                               test-control-plane
758a9749959b   kindest/node:v1.34.0                 "/usr/local/bin/entr…"   About a minute ago   Up About a minute                                                             test-worker
894b1de24498   kindest/node:v1.34.0                 "/usr/local/bin/entr…"   About a minute ago   Up About a minute                                                             test-worker4
c143d5c8c64c   kindest/node:v1.34.0                 "/usr/local/bin/entr…"   About a minute ago   Up About a minute                                                             test-worker3
e726f48d9c21   kindest/node:v1.34.0                 "/usr/local/bin/entr…"   About a minute ago   Up About a minute                                                             test-worker2

Launching pods

Images can be provided by a local registry but also can be “loaded” into the cluster, ideal for development and CI flows:

> kind load docker-image my-local-image:my-tag

# example to load a docker hub missage
> docker pull busybox:1.37.0-musl
> kind load docker-image busybox:1.37.0-musl --name test
Image: "busybox:1.37.0-musl" with ID "sha256:0188a8de47ca89b720586f01da7d7f870bdcf5f770b19f740291d716235d3107" not yet present on node "test-control-plane", loading...
Image: "busybox:1.37.0-musl" with ID "sha256:0188a8de47ca89b720586f01da7d7f870bdcf5f770b19f740291d716235d3107" not yet present on node "test-worker", loading...
Image: "busybox:1.37.0-musl" with ID "sha256:0188a8de47ca89b720586f01da7d7f870bdcf5f770b19f740291d716235d3107" not yet present on node "test-worker4", loading...
... (loads to all nodes)

Some Bottlerocket concepts:

• Minimalist, container-centric
• There is no ssh or even a login shell by default
• It provides ‘host containers’ that are not orchestrated (not part of kubernetes)
  • Control container - this is the one that allows us to connect via SSM
  • Admin container - this is the one that allow us to interact with the host container as root
    • The root file system is stored in /.bottlerocket/rootfs and there you can find /dev etc
• You can launch bootstrap containers if you need to run tasks, instead of using user-data scripts

Typically you don’t connect to these instances, but if you need to you can enable the control and admin containers in the user-data settings, connect to the control container and then type enter-admin-container. To connect to the control container use SSM (easiest is to do this via the EC2 web console, but also with aws ssm start-session --target <instanceid>))

You can learn more on bottlerocket’s github, their concept overview and the FAQ (https://bottlerocket.dev/en/faq/)

Bottlerocket is configured by providing settings via user data in TOML format and what you provide will be merged with the defaults.

Configuring Bottlerocket in node groups

module "my-nodegroup" {
  source  = "terraform-aws-modules/eks/aws//modules/eks-managed-node-group"
  ...
  ami_type = "BOTTLEROCKET_ARM_64"
  platform = "bottlerocket"
  bootstrap_extra_args = <<-EOT
    [settings.host-containers.admin]
    enabled = true
    [settings.host-containers.control]
    enabled = true
    [settings.xxx.xxx]
    setting1 = "value"
    setting2 = "value"
    setting3 = true
  EOT
}

Configuring Bottlerocket in Karpenter

See the default values that Karpenter sets.

In Karpenter these days for AWS you define an EC2NodeClass that basically describes the image to be used and where it will be placed, and a NodePool that defines the hardware it will run in.

apiVersion: karpenter.k8s.aws/v1beta1
kind: EC2NodeClass
metadata:
  name: myproject
spec:
  amiFamily: Bottlerocket
  userData: |
    [settings.host-containers.admin]
    enabled = true
    [settings.host-containers.control]
    enabled = true
    [settings.xxx.xxx]
    setting1 = "value"
    setting2 = "value"
    setting3 = true
  subnetSelectorTerms:
    - tags:
        Name: "us-east-1a"
    - tags:
        Name: "us-east-1b"
  securityGroupSelectorTerms:
    - tags:
        karpenter.sh/discovery: "my-cluster"
  instanceProfile: eksctl-KarpenterNodeInstanceProfile-my-cluster

---

apiVersion: karpenter.sh/v1beta1
kind: NodePool
metadata:
  name: myproject
spec:
  limits:
    # limit how many instances this can actually create, we limit by cpu only
    cpu: 100
  template:
    spec:
      nodeClassRef:
        apiVersion: karpenter.k8s.aws/v1beta1
        kind: EC2NodeClass
        name: myproject
      requirements:
        - key: "karpenter.sh/capacity-type"
          operator: In
          values: ["spot"]
        - key: "kubernetes.io/arch"
          operator: In
          values: ["arm64"]
        - key: "karpenter.k8s.aws/instance-cpu"
          operator: In
          values: ["4", "8"]
        - key: "karpenter.k8s.aws/instance-generation"
          operator: Gt
          values: ["6"]
        - key: "karpenter.k8s.aws/instance-category"
          operator: In
          values: ["c", "m", "r"]
        # alternatively
        #- key: "node.kubernetes.io/instance-type"
        #  operator: In
        #  values:
        #  - "c6g.xlarge"
        #  - "m7g.xlarge"

This article discusses some options for pre-caching images that we won’t do, but illustrates the architecture of Bottlerocket OS and how it can be combined with Karpenter.

Storage in Bottlerocket (permanent, ephemeral and local)

Bottlerocket operates with two default storage volumes: root and data. The root is read only and the data is used as persistent storage (EBS that will survive reboots) for non-Kubernetes containers that run inside the instance. The data container is 20 GB EBS drive and the root device is around 4 GB.

Check the Karpenter default volume configuration

Now the whole point of this post is to show how you can use the local SSD disks that machines often have but that Amazon makes particularly cumbersome to use. Many instances have local SSD storage that will show up inside the host as an extra unmounted device (eg /dev/nvme2n1). How do you make this available to Kubernetes in an automated way?

Kubernetes Storage local static provisioner

Learn more on the storage-local-static-provisioner github page and the getting started guide.

The way we expose local disks to kubernetes as resource is via a persistent storage class called ‘fast-disks’. The local provisioner will allow creating of these resources of that type by finding local storage

• It expects the host to have a folder called /mnt/fast-disks (configurable)
• It expects there to be links to the actual device files of drives we want exposed
• It is installed by generating a configuration file using helm and applying it with kubectl

Before going further we need to define a storage class that will be used to flag the new type of storage.

• Download the storage class file

It looks like this and effectively does nothing (see the no-provisioner):

apiVersion: storage.k8s.io/v1
kind: StorageClass
metadata:
  name: fast-disks
provisioner: kubernetes.io/no-provisioner
volumeBindingMode: WaitForFirstConsumer
# Supported policies: Delete, Retain
reclaimPolicy: Delete

kubectl apply -f ./default_example_storageclass.yaml

Then setup the local provisioner daemonset that will handle it

# Generate the configuration file
helm repo add sig-storage-local-static-provisioner https://kubernetes-sigs.github.io/sig-storage-local-static-provisioner
helm template --debug sig-storage-local-static-provisioner/local-static-provisioner --version 2.0.0 --namespace myproject > local-volume-provisioner.generated.yaml

# edit local-volume-provisioner.generated.yaml if necessary
# optional: kubectl diff -f local-volume-provisioner.generated.yaml
kubectl apply -f local-volume-provisioner.generated.yaml

See more about the installation procedure

This creates a daemonset that runs in all instances.

These are some excerpts of what it creates:

The storage class - note that by default it will use shred.sh to initialize the disk, which is rather slow. You can change it to other methods. This will be done only on first boot.

# Source: local-static-provisioner/templates/configmap.yaml
apiVersion: v1
kind: ConfigMap
metadata:
  name: release-name-local-static-provisioner-config
  namespace: myproject
  labels:
    helm.sh/chart: local-static-provisioner-2.0.0
    app.kubernetes.io/name: local-static-provisioner
    app.kubernetes.io/managed-by: Helm
    app.kubernetes.io/instance: release-name
data:
  storageClassMap: |
    fast-disks:
      hostDir: /mnt/fast-disks
      mountDir: /mnt/fast-disks
      blockCleanerCommand:
        - "/scripts/shred.sh"
        - "2"
      volumeMode: Filesystem
      fsType: ext4
      namePattern: "*"

Joining local static provisioner, AWS instance store and Bottlerocket

Bootstrap containers have root access and boot with the root file system mounted.

You can create one like this, and publish to your own repository:

FROM alpine:latest
RUN apk add --no-cache util-linux
FROM alpine:latest
RUN echo '#!/bin/sh' > /script.sh \
    && echo 'mkdir -p /.bottlerocket/rootfs/mnt/fast-disks' >> /script.sh \
    && echo 'cd /.bottlerocket/rootfs/mnt/fast-disks' >> /script.sh \
    && echo 'for device in $(ls /.bottlerocket/rootfs/dev/nvme*n1); do' >> /script.sh \
    && echo '  base_device=$(basename $device)' >> /script.sh \
    && echo '  if ! mount | grep -q "$base_device"; then' >> /script.sh \
    && echo '    [ ! -e "./$base_device" ] && ln -s "../../dev/$base_device" "./$base_device"' >> /script.sh \
    && echo '  fi' >> /script.sh \
    && echo 'done' >> /script.sh \
    && echo 'ls -l /.bottlerocket/rootfs/mnt/fast-disks' >> /script.sh \
    && chmod +x /script.sh
CMD ["/script.sh"]

Add this to the Bottlerocket settings

[settings.bootstrap-containers.diskmounter]
essential = true
mode = "always"
source = "YOURACCOUNT.ecr.public.ecr.aws/YOURREPO:latest"

Caveat: node cleanup

By default, when you set this up if an instance dies (which in AWS can happen any minute) the persistent volume claim will remain.

Basically the life cycle is a bit like:

• Pod is created that has a persistent storage claim of a fast-disk
• This is allocated in one of the instances
• Once it is assigned, the pod will be assigned to that instance
• If the instance dies, the pod is still assigned to that specific instance and deleting it won’t fix it

This will manifest as an error about the pod not being able to find nodeinfo for the now defunct node.

This cleaning process is achieved by the node-cleanup-controller

To set it up:

• Download the deployment file
• Download the permissions file
• Edit it to change the storage class (default is called nvme-ssd-block)

apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
...
    spec:
...
      containers:
      - name: local-volume-node-cleanup-controller
        image: gcr.io/k8s-staging-sig-storage/local-volume-node-cleanup:canary
        args:
          - "--storageclass-names=fast-disks"
          - "--pvc-deletion-delay=60s"
          - "--stale-pv-discovery-interval=10s"
        ports:
          - name: metrics
            containerPort: 8080

Now apply both deployment and permissions

kubectl apply -f ./deployment.yaml
kubectl apply -f ./permissions.yaml

You will end up with

• A new Storage class called ‘fast-disks’
• The CleanupController looks for Local Persistent Volumes that have a NodeAffinity to a deleted Node. When it finds such a PV, it starts a timer to wait and see if the deleted Node comes back up again. If at the end of the timer, the Node is not back up, the PVC bound to that PV is deleted. The PV is deleted in the next step.
• The Deleter looks for Local PVs with a NodeAffinity to deleted Nodes. When it finds such a PV it deletes the PV if (and only if) the PV’s status is Available or if its status is Released and it has a Delete reclaim policy.

$ microk8s kubectl create token default
(...token output...)

This process lead me to a few questions:

• What is that token?
• Where does it come from?
• Where is it stored?
• Does it expire?

Essentially, “wait how does the whole token authentication thing work?”

Token types

So far we have dealt with two token types:

1. We have static tokens, like the one we added in the kube config file. This token is equivalent to a user:password pair. If exposed it could be used forever to act as that user.
   • These are either stored as secrets or via some other mechanism
   • In microk8s there are some credentials created during installation, including the admin user we have been using. This can be found in /var/snap/microk8s/current under credentials/known_tokens.csv. Changing the token can be done by editing the file.
2. Then we have temporary tokens, like the one we used for the dashboard access

Now, let’s think about those… what is a temporary token? where are they stored? how do they expire? Those are the kind of questions I like to dig in to learn about the internals, and I end up finding a lot of this is implemented in a perfectly reasonable and standards-based way.

Inspecting a temporary token

As usual:

• Kubernetes authentication docs to the rescue

There we see:

• The created token is a signed JSON Web Token (JWT)
• The signed JWT can be used as a bearer token to authenticate as thegiven service account

Now, let’s take our token and inspect it - pasting it into jwt.io to see its content (this is safe as long as you don’t expose your cluster anywhere):

{
  "alg": "RS256",
  "kid": "_h3i-pvtWSsSXXVyXxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx"
}

{
  "aud": [
    "https://kubernetes.default.svc"
  ],
  "exp": 1664705605,
  "iat": 1664702005,
  "iss": "https://kubernetes.default.svc",
  "kubernetes.io": {
    "namespace": "default",
    "serviceaccount": {
      "name": "default",
      "uid": "755e1766-e817-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx"
    }
  },
  "nbf": 1664702005,
  "sub": "system:serviceaccount:default:default"
}

• The aud parameter indicates the audience, in this case kubernetes
• The sub indicates the ‘subject’ (user, service account, etc). When we created the token we didn’t specify a service account, which means it used the ‘default’ service account (not great practice but hey we are starting)
  • This means the authentication request is coming from system:serviceaccount:default:default
  • You can take a look at this account with kubectl get sa default -o yaml
• The date parameters define the validity period: "nbf": 1664702005 (not before), "iat": 1664702005 (issued at) and "exp": 1664705605 (expiry) which you can quickly convert to a date with:

$ date -d@"1664702005"
Sun  2 Oct 10:13:25 BST 2022
$ date -d@"1664705605"
Sun  2 Oct 11:13:25 BST 2022

How can I use this token?

Any client application we give the token to will be sending an HTTPS request to the API server with a header set to Authentication: Bearer <token>. That’s all is needed. Any requests will then be approved/rejected based on the permissions of that account.

If you want to test a particular call, you can use the token with for example:

kubectl --token="xxxxxxxxxxxxxx" get pods --all-namespaces

And finally, where is it stored?

• The token is not stored as a secret and it’s not directly linked from the service account object
• In fact, the token is not stored anywhere in kubernetes, it’s validated from the signature
• Secrets don’t expire but these tokens do (an hour as seen above in the JWT token itself)

As usual, you will be able to dig into the Dashboard project itself, for instance here you have alternative access methods

A final note on temporary tokens: they do provide advantages in limiting the scope of attack as they will expire but you will still need to associate them to limited users or service accounts with limited restrictions, something I haven’t gone into yet and we have been using the default service account. For example, if the temporary account is captured it can be used to create permanent accounts/secrets.

Whatever you think about Kubernetes, it is here to stay. At work it’s replaced all our custom orchestration and ECS usage. It solves infrastructure problems in a common way that most Cloud providers have agreed to, which is no small feat.

So why would you want to install it locally anyway? For work your company will most likely provide you access to a cluster and give you a set of credentials that somewhat limit what you can do. Depending on your interests that won’t be enough to properly learn about what is going on under the hood. Getting familiar with how Kubernetes stores containers, container logs, how networking is handled, DNS resolution, load balancing etc will help remove a huge barrier.

The best thing I can say about Kubernetes is that when you dig into it, everything makes sense and turns out to be relatively simple. You will see that most tasks are actually performed by a container, one that has parameters, logs and a github repo somewhere you can check. Your DNS resolution is not working? Well then take a look at “kubectl -n kube-system logs coredns-d489fb88-n7q9p”, check the configuration in “-n kube-system get deployments coredns -o yaml”, proxy or port-forward to it, check the metrics…

In my particular case I also always have a bunch of code I need to run, scripts to aggregate and publish things, renew my Letsencrypt certificates, update podcast and RSS services, installed tools like Grocy and others. Over the years I’ve tried various solutions to handle all of this. Currently I have a bunch of scripts running on my main machine (Linux) that I usually have always running, some of those spawning containers (to ease dependency management, sometimes it’s not completely under my control) and other tasks are done by my Synology DS.

For me, having kubernetes seems like a logical step even if it’s just to see if this solution will age better over time. I like the declarative nature of the YAML configuration and the relative isolation of having Dockerfiles with their own minimal needs defined.

But let’s be clear, for most non developers this is a pretty silly thing to do!

Let’s reuse some hardware

There are multiple ways to have a local kubernetes cluster. One of the most popular is minikube but this time we are going to try the Microk8s offer from Canonical (Ubuntu) running in a spare Linux box (rather than a VM).

Microk8s is a developer-orientated kubernetes distribution. You should most certainly not use it as your day to day driver but it’s a good option to play with Kubernetes without getting too lost in the actual setup

Do you have a spare computer somewhere? I have an old Mac Mini I was using as my main OS X (for iOS builds) and as a secondary backup system. Now it has been superseded by a much better Intel Mac Mini I kind friend gave me, leaving me with a machine that is too nice to just shelve but too cumbersome to maintain as another Mac OS X machine (it won’t be plugged in to a monitor most of the time).

• I installed a minimal Ubuntu 22.04.1 LTS on it (Server edition)
• Cpu according to /proc/cpuinfo is i5-4278U CPU @ 2.60GHz
• RAM according to /proc/raminfo is 16GB of RAM
• And according to hdparm -I I have two SSDs since some time ago I replaced the old HDD with a spare SDD: Samsung SSD 860 EVO 500GB and the original APPLE SSD SM0128F
  • I decided to mount the smaller Apple SSD as ext4 in / and the bigger 500GB one as zfs in a separate mountpoint called /main. Mostly because I have tendency to reinstall the whole OS but like to keep the ZFS partition between installs.

Setting up microk8s

Once the Mac Mini linux installation was setup (nothing extra needed to do there), I enabled SSH and the remaining setup was done from inside SSH sessions.

Installation didn’t start very promising as it failed the first time, but re-running did finish, following the official installation guide:

$ sudo snap install microk8s --classic
microk8s (1.25/stable) v1.25.2 from Canonical✓ installed

For ease of use I’ve given my own user access to it with:

sudo usermod -a -G microk8s osuka
sudo chown -f -R osuka ~/.kube
# exiting the ssh session and logging in again is needed at this point

That you have the correct permissions can be checked by running microk8s status --wait-ready As per the guide, enable some services:

$ microk8s status
high-availability: no
  datastore master nodes: 127.0.0.1:19001
  datastore standby nodes: none
addons:
  enabled:
    ha-cluster           # (core) Configure high availability on the current node
    helm                 # (core) Helm - the package manager for Kubernetes
    helm3                # (core) Helm 3 - the package manager for Kubernetes
    metrics-server       # (core) K8s Metrics Server for API access to service metrics
  disabled:
    cert-manager         # (core) Cloud native certificate management
    community            # (core) The community addons repository
    dashboard            # (core) The Kubernetes dashboard
    ...

We activate the following services, by running microk8s enable XXXX for each one:

• dashboard: Provides us with a web UI to check the status of the luster. See more on github
• dns: installs coredns which will allow us to have cluster-local DNS resolution
• registry: installs a private container registry where we can push our images

We enable also the “community” services with microk8s enable community which gives us additional services we can enable. From the community, we install

• istio: this creates a service mesh which provides load balancing, service-to-service authentication and monitoring on top of existing services, see their docs

Make microk8s kubectl the default command to run:

• add alias mkctl="microk8s kubectl"
• this is just the standard kubectl, just provided via microk8s so we on’t need to install it separately - we can still use kubectl from other machines

Let’s use it remotely

Access the cluster itself with kubectl

The last thing I want is to have yet another computer I have to keep connecting to a display so this installation will be used remotely. Also I don’t really want to be ssh’ing inside of it just to run kubectl commands.

From inside the ssh session, check stuff is running:

$ mkctl get pods --all-namespaces
NAMESPACE            NAME                                         READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
kube-system          kubernetes-dashboard-74b66d7f9c-6ngts        1/1     Running   0          18m
kube-system          dashboard-metrics-scraper-64bcc67c9c-pth8h   1/1     Running   0          18m
kube-system          metrics-server-6b6844c455-5t85g              1/1     Running   0          19m
...

There’s quite a bit of documentation on how to do most common tasks, check the how to section of the Microk8s site. To configure access:

• Expose configuration

$ microk8s config
apiVersion: v1
clusters:
- cluster:
    certificate-authority-data: LS0tLS1CRUdJTiBDRV... # (certificate)
    server: https://192.168.x.x:16443   # (ip in local network)
  name: microk8s-cluster
contexts:
- context:
    cluster: microk8s-cluster
    user: admin
  name: microk8s
current-context: microk8s
kind: Config
preferences: {}
users:
- name: admin
  user:
    token: WDBySG1.......  # direct token authentication

At some point we will create users but for initial development tasks all we need is to concatenate the contents of this configuration into our ~/.kube/config file (or create it if it’s the first time using kubectl).

After doing this, all kubectl commands will work as usual. I’ve renamed my context to ‘minion’:

❯ kubectl config use-context minion
❯ kubectl get pods --all-namespaces

More details for this specific step in the official howto.

Access the dashboard

Since we haven’t enabled any other mechanism, to access the dashboard you will need a token. At this point you could use the same token you have in .kube/config, but the recommended way is to create a temporary token instead:

$ kubectl create token default
... a token is printed
$ kubectl port-forward -n kube-system service/kubernetes-dashboard 10443:443

Then connect to https://localhost:10443 and paste the output from the first command. See the next post for an explanation of the token used there.

Over the years of trying lots of different tools, still seems to me that what I would call ‘hand drawn’ diagrams are best - but I don’t mean actually hand drawn, I’m quite bad at whiteboard drawing but give me a tool like Omnigraffle and I’ll make the nicest diagrams. I’ll throw in some pastel colors even.

The issue is that integrating that with documentation when most of the documentation is in markdown is getting very annoying: you have to export the diagram as an image, save it somewhere and then insert a reference to it inside the markdown document.

It’s pretty much impossible to do a decent version control on those, other than replacing a binary blow by another binary blob.

WARNING: If you read this post in an RSS reader it’s not going to look pretty - diagrams are rendered client-side, you’ll need to go to the website.

Mermaid

Many times all I want is to draw a small simple figure to help the narrative or to more effectively highlight some point, something that belongs to the document. Enter mermaidjs, that lets you embed diagrams by writing a description of them. Here is a simple example diagram, you will have to enclose it in three backticks and the word mermaid (I can’t seem to be able to escape that in a way that works in jekyll):

sequenceDiagram
    Mobile Device->>Server: Request
    Server->>Cache: get [x-something]
    Cache-->>Server: null || contents

Renders:

The great thing about this is that now I can edit the source file for this post and open a preview in Visual Studio Code (by installing the extension Markdown Preview Mermaid Support) that shows me what it would look like.

Here are some more examples, there is a ton of diagram types:

I can see myself writing a quick gantt diagram that I can store as part of my project’s code, and then export as PDF when needed with the “Markdown PDF: Export (pdf)” command of the Markdown PDF plugin.

You can do pretty interesting things in the gantt charts, multiple dependencies etc

You can have class diagrams

classDiagram
      Animal <|-- Duck
      Animal <|-- Fish
      Animal <|-- Zebra
      class Duck{
          +String beakColor
          +swim()
          +quack()
      }
      ...

You can have nice state diagrams

stateDiagram
    [*] --> State1
    State3 --> State4
    State1 --> State2
    State3 --> [*]
    State2 --> State4
    State2 --> State3: Conked

or with the newer plugin:

stateDiagram-v2
    [*] --> State1
    state fork_state <<fork>>
        [*] --> fork_state
        fork_state --> State1
        fork_state --> State3
    ...

Entity relationship diagrams:

Caveats

One thing to note is the different diagram plugins are almost independent applications and have subtle syntax differences: for instance you must use quotes in pie charts, but not in gantt.

The “Markdown: Open preview to the side” command on visual studio code right now works but has a very annoying refresh effect on the document you are typing in making it mostly unusable. You will be better of just opening previews that refresh only when you focus them using the “Markdown: Open Preview” command.

Integration with Jekyll

There’s no real integration with Jekyll, you just add the library to your layout and then embed a <div> which automatically gets expanded client-side by the library:

<div class="mermaid">
sequenceDiagram
    Mobile Device->>Server: Request
    Server->>Cache: get [x-something]
    Cache-->>Server: null || contents
</div>

To add the library (quite a hefty library at 800K for the minified version, but for a site like this it’s acceptable):

mkdir lib
cd lib
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mermaid-js/mermaid/develop/dist/mermaid.min.js

To add it to your layout, edit for instance _layouts/default.html:

...
<body>
...
<script src="{{ site.baseurl }}/lib/mermaid.min.js"></script>
</body>

Customization

One of the greatest things about mermaid is that you can tweak most of it using just CSS and you can add event listeners to make the diagrams more interactive. Check the excellent documentation

I started using a Wacom tablet for drawing but found it an excellent replacement for a mouse and moved to exclusive use when I started having symptons of RSI. The change from having the wrist on top of a mouse to having it gripping a pen made a big difference and my problems went away.

When I started using macbooks this became almost a non issue since the trackpad (on OS X) removes a lot of the stress points, in particular if you enable tap to click, tap with two fingers to right click and three finger drag.

Now I find myself on desktop PCs running Linux most of the time so I went back to using it as my main device, tweaking it to my liking. I have compiled my tweaks and hacks here, currently all is tested on a relatively old Wacom Intuos pen & touch small tablet (CTH-480).

Oh and kudos to Jason Gerecke the maintainer of the linuxwacom driver, such an essential but slightly thankless job (and Wacom for supporting him).

The basics

Luckily most distros these days detect Wacom tablets without any hassle and provide even a tool that will help you do some simple mappings.

First of all you’ll need to find the ID of the device you want to modify, and you’ll need to have xsetwacom installed (part of xserver-xorg-input-wacom, normally installed by default).

In my case:

xsetwacom --list devices

 Wacom Intuos PT S Finger touch    id: 13  type: TOUCH
 Wacom Intuos PT S Pad pad         id: 14  type: PAD
 Wacom Intuos PT S Pen eraser      id: 17  type: ERASER
 Wacom Intuos PT S Pen stylus      id: 16  type: STYLUS

The following commands can use the name of the device or the id number, I’ll use the name to make it easier to read.

Absolute positioning

This is a must, trying to use the pen as if it was a trackpad just doesn’t function in an usable way. What you want is to map a point on the tablet to a point on the screen. This allows you to fly from one corner of the screen to the other faster than a trackpad could do.

For almost all distros you can switch this on via a UI, but if you don’t have it, you can do it manually, for my case:

xsetwacom --set "Wacom Intuos PT S Pen stylus" Mode Absolute
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Intuos PT S Pen eraser" Mode Absolute

Aspect ratio

There is one subtle but very big problem I have noticed as the aspect ratio of my monitors have diverged from the aspect ratio of the tablet over time.

If your tablet proportions don’t match the proportions of the screen it will be impossible to draw properly, this is painfully evident on an Ultrawide screen: you’ll draw a circle but it will show as an oval. The brain is able to more or less adjust to that and you may be able to manage it but it’s a very frustrating experience.

For my case I have written a small script that will calculate the aspect ratio of the screen and map the tablet to it.

# if you have more than one monitor you can specify which one to use by
# adding a --display option to the xrandr call
s_w=`xrandr | grep -w connected  | awk -F'[ \+]' '{print $4}' | sed 's/x/ /' | awk '{print $1}'`
s_h=`xrandr | grep -w connected  | awk -F'[ \+]' '{print $4}' | sed 's/x/ /' | awk '{print $2}'`

ratio=`echo "${s_h}/${s_w}" | bc -l`

echo "Screen detected: ${s_w}x${s_h}"
for device in 'Wacom Intuos PT S Pen stylus' 'Wacom Intuos PT S Pen eraser' ; do
  echo ""
  echo "${device}:"
  xsetwacom set "$device" ResetArea
  area=`xsetwacom get "$device" area | awk '{print $3,$4}'`
  w=`echo ${area} | awk '{print $1}'`
  h=`echo ${area} | awk '{print $2}'`
  hn=`echo "${w}*${ratio}" | bc -l`
  hn=`printf %.0f "${hn}"`
  echo "  Area ${w}x${h} ==> ${w}x${hn}"
  xsetwacom set "$device" area 0 0 ${w} ${hn}
done

Fix the jitter

My hand is not particularly steady and I find that if I try to keep it still I will get tiny movements (jitter). These two parameters make it less sensitive. You can play with the values. This seems to work for my Intuos S.

xsetwacom --set "Wacom Intuos PT S Pen stylus" Suppress 10
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Intuos PT S Pen stylus" RawSample 9
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Intuos PT S Pen eraser" RawSample 9
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Intuos PT S Pen eraser" Suppress 10

Mapping of the tablet buttons

There are some buttons on the tablet. I find the most useful thing to do is to map them to mouse buttons so that I can click more precisely. I find hovering over a selection and using the other hand to press the buttons makes me more precise. You can also map them to any key or combination of keys.

# the pad of my tablet has 4 buttons
# the mapping is a bit weird because Xinput reserves some buttons
# https://github.com/linuxwacom/xf86-input-wacom/wiki/Tablet-Configuration-1%3A-xsetwacom-and-xorg.conf
#
#  [ button 3 ]               [ button 9 ]
#  [ button 1 ]               [ button 8 ]
#
xsetwacom set "Wacom Intuos PT S Pad pad" Button 9 "key +ctrl z -ctrl"  # undo
xsetwacom set "Wacom Intuos PT S Pad pad" Button 8 2  # middle button
xsetwacom set "Wacom Intuos PT S Pad pad" button 1 1  # mouse click
xsetwacom set "Wacom Intuos PT S Pad pad" button 3 2  # middle button

You can use trial and error to find which buttons correspond to which numbers. Note the mapping for the ‘undo’ functionality, it’s equivalent to saying “press control, while holding it press z, then release control”

Mapping of pen buttons

You can map the buttons on the pen itself to various functions.

For years one feature I missed was the ability to scroll just using the pen. The way this works is I press on the button on the side of the pen (which is very ergonomic) and then press with the pen on the tablet and move up and down. Works like a charm as a relaxed way of scrolling. This is called “pan scroll”, I have seen it called “drag to scroll” too and has worked in Linux for a couple of years now and it’s implemented as a button mapping.

# pan scroll (press lower button + click and drag to scroll)
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Intuos PT S Pen stylus" button 2 "pan"
xsetwacom --set "Wacom Intuos PT S Pen stylus" "PanScrollThreshold" 200

I leave the other buttons as they are, which is the tip of the button acts as a ’left click’ and the second button on the side acts as a right click. This particular pen can also be used as an eraser - so you can change the eraser mapping too. Defaults work fine for me.

Touch and multi-touch (fusuma)

Without doing anything you get functional trackpad functionality on Wacom touch models. For mine you get standard movement, tap to click, tap with two fingers to right click and what I can best describe as “tap + release + tap again and move” to select or drag, plus scrolling by using two fingers up and down the tablet. Some distributions enable also going forwards and backwards in browsers by sliding both fingers left or right, while the most common case seems to enable scrolling left and right.

There’s a few multi touch frameworks you can use to extend what’s possible. I’m currently using fusuma, I simply followed the instructions to set it up and then launch it as part of my window manager startup. It can do a lot more than what I need so my configuration is very simple:

$ cat ~/.config/fusuma/config.yml
swipe:
  3:
    left:
      sendkey: "LEFTALT+RIGHT" # History forward
    right:
      sendkey: "LEFTALT+LEFT" # History back
    up:
      sendkey: "LEFTMETA" # Activity
  4:
    left:
      sendkey: "LEFTALT+LEFTMETA+LEFT"
    right:
      sendkey: "LEFTALT+LEFTMETA+RIGHT"
pinch:
  in:
    command: "xdotool keydown ctrl click 4 keyup ctrl" # Zoom in
  out:
    command: "xdotool keydown ctrl click 5 keyup ctrl" # Zoom out

Basically I use four fingers to move between workspaces (I have mapped those keys in my window manager to switch workspaces) and three fingers to go back/forwards in browsers. I have pinch configured but it’s not very practical to be honest.

Here you can really play with whatever fits best with your preferences and window manager. Note that you can issue extended complicated commands via xdotool in a similar way to what linuxwacom can already do by itself.

That’s it. This is what works for me so far, feel free to ping me if you get stuck setting up something.

• Wayland supports tablet and other pointing devices as separate inputs

Previously we have been able to simply have the pencil move the main cursor whenever it gets close to the tablet. This worked fine but the Wayland way is actually better and allows for other functionality, unfortunately it means applications needed to be updated to be multiple cursor aware.

Until recently, xwayland (the component that translates Wayland events to X events for older applications) wasn’t able to transform tablet events at all, since the Wayland tablet specification wasn’t finished.

Things have improved a lot and now a default installation of Gnome Shell (in this case in Ubuntu) mostly works, but in my case at least it still needed a simple tweak that is not particularly easy to guess. Documenting it here for posterity:

• The cursor is invisible. You can see your mouse cursor (if you have an additional mouse or trackpad), but the Wacom cursor is not visible. Clicking on things does indicate it is actually working but simply not rendering.

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.cursor active false

Explanation: There is a running plugin in Gnome Shell sessions called “the cursor plugin” that apparently tries to help by hiding inactive cursors. Whatever it does, it breaks the Wacom cursor, but since it’s not an essential component we can just disable it (set it to false) which is what the above command does. Set it to true to revert.

From others I already knew one of the biggest issues is having a work flow involving an iPad, as it’s a very closed system that is fighting you a lot of the way. Thinks have improved now that Apple introduced the concept of “Files” into the operating system, believe it or not that wasn’t a thing until recently. Now you can have your various clouds providers appear as a file system and things are slightly easier. It is still a pain to work with.

I decided I wanted to try as many tools as I could get my hands on. Along the way I was posting to twitter as a kind of public commitment to continue. You can see all my posts following this link

Tools I examined

• Procreate: Poisonous, Chicken, Weak, Exhausted, Chop, Prickly, Stretch, Thunder, Double, Gift, Jolt, Slice

• Pixelmator: Whale

• MediBang Paint: Flowing, Precious

• Inkscape (PC): Drooling

• Autodesk Sketchbook: Roasted, Spell, Cruel, Star, Clock, Guarded, Swollen, Scorched, Drain

• Vectornator: Angular, Bottle, Breakable, Muddy

• Adobe Illustrator Draw: Tranquil Expensive

• Affinity Designer, Inspire Pro and Pixelmator: Only tried after the Inktober challenge.

Veredict

My goal with this whole Inktober thing was to get a bit again into drawing, as I left it for too long. It was just an excuse as any other.

I did find that as of today, an iPad Pro with a Pencil is great for sketching, great for painting but not so great for doing the whole process up until publishing. Some things like handling a lot of images and group them in collections is a sub par experience.

Handling of a lot of files is a horrible experience, most dialogs to choose images seem to show a preview of the file and truncate names (really bad when you have similar versions of a drawing and you need to tell one from the other), they tend to forget were you where and you find yourself using the cumbersome folder selection dialog to find where your image is.

I also found that drafting on paper is still much easier for me than drafting on the iPad directly. The surface of an iPad is glass and the feel is nowhere near paper. That said, sketching something on a piece of paper, taking a high quality picture with an iPad and then working over it is a very nice work flow that works better than scanning and importing on a more traditional setup.

Oh, if you are doubting whether to get an iPad Pro or a Microsoft Surface: iPad Pro all the time. I’ve had a Surface SP4 and that has the worst of both worlds. Also, the debate between 12.9 and 10.5 inches: get the 12.9. It is not as big as it seems.

Raster drawings

For my particular style (I’m not that great at drawing), I found Procreate to be one of the best application overall. You can clearly see this was thought for the iPad Pro rather than being an app retrofitted for it. It’s the most intuitive and easy to use of them all.

You can certainly do great drawings with all of them but as you can see by the results, the nicest images for me seemed to correlate with when I was using Procreate.

Vector drawings

That said, I’m a big fan of vector graphics for comics, I like to be able to stretch my drawings and transform them and just play with segments of a drawing. For comic strips it’s also very handy if you have to repeat the same character in similar positions. You can do a similar thing with raster layers but for me it’s never been easy. I tried Adobe Draw, Vectornator and after Inktober finished I’ve been also trying Affinity Designer.

• Adobe Draw is a poor man’s Illustrator, completely tied to the Adobe Creative Cloud, which needs an expensive subscription. For people like me that do this as a hobby and/or that have a mostly hate-hate relationship with Adobe (horrible customer service), that is simply not an option.
• Vectornator has an amazingly easy to use interface and it’s a great program on its own.
• Affinity Designer: in terms of work flow I found it worked the best, offering me more options to save and share. I have chosen this for Vector drawing going forward.

Issues

Font management is a gigantic mess on an iPad Pro. Either your tool has its own font management or you can import fonts individually (which is really annoying) using some applications. Affinity Designer seems to have a nice font manager though.

Moving from one application to the other is terribly inefficient, most of the time I found myself having to save as a PNG to Dropbox and then importing on the other app.

SVGs generated by the vector tools work pretty well in Inkscape with a big problem: text management. Basically there is no standard in SVG for flowing text. Inkscape implemented a version of what was going to be the standard but that later changed and currently everybody seems to do their own thing. This has been a big pain point for me since my little comics all use Inkscape’s text flowing and don’t render correctly. Moving to handwritten text seems to be the easiest option but I publish both in Spanish and in English and that’s a lot of lettering.

I found that really interesting as I had found the plugin restrictions in Github very limiting - I want to be able to run preprocesses on my files so I don’t have to type or copy and paste so much.

This post explores how I migrated one of my sites there.

Outline of the process

1. Import old project (PRs, issues etc)
2. Create a .gitlab-ci.yml file (build pipeline) and build
3. Check that page is live under gitlab.io domain
4. Add a custom domain and SSL support using Let’s Encrypt (certbot)
5. …
6. PROFIT

Optionally: run your own runner to do the build (future post).

Import old project

Option 1: Import using Gitlab’s wizard. Very easy but you give access to all projects you have access to. Some client companies may not be fine with it. At the very least remember to disable access on Github settings when you’re done with the import.

Option 2: If you just need the git history.

• create a new empty repo in gitlab,
• add that repo as a new remote on your current github repo local copy,
• push to the remote,
• remove your local repo copy, clone the gitlab one and you should have everything there.

Create a pipeline job definition

We will be creating a file called .gitlab-ci.yml on the root folder.

Very brief introduction to gitlab’s pipelines

• They are based on a YAML file describing the steps and scripts to run
• They run inside ‘runners’ that create containers to run the pipeline jobs
• There are shared runners owned by Gitlab but you can also have local runners
• Jobs can generate artifacts that pass from one step to the other or are end results

Brief introduction to Gitlab’s Pages

• If there is a job called pages that generates an artifact that contains a folder called public, everything under that folder will be served as static contents
• By default, this will be served under https://GITLABUSERNAME.gitlab.io/PROJECTNAME

Example file for a jekyll project using ruby 2.4.4

image: ruby:2.4.4

variables:
  JEKYLL_ENV: production

before_script:
  - bundle install

pages:
  stage: deploy
  script:
  - bundle exec jekyll build -d public
  artifacts:
    paths:
    - public
  only:
  - master

and here’s the Gemfile I was used for jekyll already:

source "https://rubygems.org"
ruby "2.4.4"

gem 'jekyll','3.6.2'
gem 'jekyll-paginate'

You should never lose the ability to build locally, so keep the pipeline script ultra simple.

It’s important to match the ruby versions between Gemfile and pipeline, otherwise the runner would be launched with a different version.

Check your page under gitlab.io domain

Just by pushing the CI file it will create the pipeline and it will build every time there is a push to master.

After a first build passes you will be able to access the site. If you don’t, check where you went wrong as all the rest is meaningless until you get to this stage.

Now you can rest, keep playing with your site and check that everything looks ok. Depending on how you implemented it, it may not be able to find CSS and images, but don’t panic - just use view source to check the URLs will be ok when it’s in its own domain (or fix your jekyll config so that it is)

Add a custom domain and SSL support

A nice github feature is that you, simply by checking a box, get a valid SSL certificate (they do internally all the let’s encrypt domain validation). On Gitlab pages this is a manual process. You’ll find lots of guides for this, but here’s what I did (word of advice: the best approach is probably to do first adding a domain without SSL and then adding SSL support, but I did all at the same time)

Install certbot:

apt install certbot

You can use yum, brew or whatever your poison is.

Decide of a home to store your certificates. I decided this certificate is pretty much irrelevant so put it inside the container itself:

export CERTDIR=~/onlydognews.com/certs

Generate a certificate request and send it to letsencrypt:

certbot certonly -d onlydognews.com --work-dir ${CERTDIR}/work/ --logs-dir ${CERTDIR}/logs/ --config-dir ${CERTDIR}/config/ --manual

Output:

...
Obtaining a new certificate
Performing the following challenges:
http-01 challenge for onlydognews.com
...
Are you OK with your IP being logged?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(Y)es/(N)o: y

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Create a file containing just this data:

dasjlkdjasiojXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX.dasdjskljxp-21rwefQQEWr8

And make it available on your web server at this URL:

http://onlydognews.com/.well-known/acme-challenge/jdaslkdjsaXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXjklxjklxj

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Press Enter to Continue

This turned out to be a bit tricky since my domain was still pointing to the old Github project. So I cloned that repo and added a commit to publish that file, in order to verify my domain.

I added this to _config.yml, the Jekyll configuration file:

include: [.well-known]

I created a new file under the path instructed by cerbot and pushed both changes upstream, which made the file available online. Then continued the certbot process.

Waiting for verification...
Cleaning up challenges
Non-standard path(s), might not work with crontab installed by your operating system package manager

IMPORTANT NOTES:
 - Congratulations! Your certificate and chain have been saved at:
   .../_certs/config/live/onlydognews.com/fullchain.pem
   Your key file has been saved at:
   .../_certs/config/live/onlydognews.com/privkey.pem
   Your cert will expire on 2018-09-02. To obtain a new or tweaked
   version of this certificate in the future, simply run certbot
   again. To non-interactively renew *all* of your certificates, run
   "certbot renew"

There’s an important bit there, we will have to remember to renew the certificate in three months. Certbot can automatically update some servers but not Gitlab as far as I’m aware.

The result of all this setup process is

‘Live’ folder

• DOMAIN/privkey.pem: the private key for your certificate
• DOMAIN/fullchain.pem: the certificate file used in most server software.
• DOMAIN/chain.pem: we don’t need it
• DOMAIN/cert.pem: we don’t need it

‘Renewal’ folder:

• DOMAIN.conf: File that certbot will use for renewal

‘Archive’ folder: History of all the certificates generated. This will contain just the one just created.

‘Renewal-hooks’ folder: Empty folders for deploy, pre and post hooks.

‘Keys’ folder: Certificate private keys used. I have a few because I tried this process a few times.

‘CSR’ folder: Certificate requests used. Again, one for every try.

‘Accounts’ folder: Output of the registration process

• meta.json: creation date, host name that issued the request
• private_key.json: private key used during registration
• regr.json: data used during registration, contact details, terms and conditions

Installation into Gitlab

Go to your project/pages/domains/new

Check the enforce SSL option and add your domain name

In Certificate(PEM) add the fullchain.pem text contents

In Key(PEM) add the privkey.pem text contents

It will show:

This domain is not verified. You will need to verify ownership before access is enabled.

To do so, from your DNS provider create a new DNS record:

• Type: TXT
• Name: _gitlab-pages-verification-code
• Value: gitlab-pages-verification-code=XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

Important: the gitlab page displays the full Name (including the domain, as in _gitlab-pages-verification-code.YOURDOMAIN.com), but on the DNS settings you just add the host part

Now we can finally move our domain to the new one. In the settings page Gitlab will show a CNAME entry that you should use. This is fine if your site is on a subdomain (for example www), but if it’s the root (as in gatillos.com), you can’t create a CNAME of it. This is a DNS restriction that some people are not aware of: the root domain is called APEX domain and is used by a number of things. If you create a CNAME of it you can lose control of MX and similar registers.

To find out the IP address you need, simply lookup the domain showed on the settings page:

dig +short YOURCNAME.gitlab.io
52.167.214.135

Which means we need to add an A record on your DNS, something like:

a   @   52.167.214.135   1 hour   

Final result:

The best option was the AirPort Time Capsule but Apple discontinued it last month. Nowadays there are quite a few networked hard drives that advertise support for Time Machine but if you have a Raspberry Pi or a computer that is mostly on all the time you can just build your own. Plus, you get to launch other things on that server, including other systems for non-time machine compatible devices.

In this post I’ll just talk about how to setup a Time Machine server using a docker container.

After trying various containers, I’ve settled on this one. It hasn’t changed in a while but still works fine.

First, clone the repo, or the fork of it I have under my account and build it, by running this inside your server machine:

git clone https://github.com/arve0/docker-timemachine
docker build docker-time-machine/ -t local/docker-timemachine

You will need docker community edition for that, but I won’t go into that here as it depends on what device you are actually using, it should be as easy as going to their site and finding a version.

On a side note, be aware that docker (the company) is in dire need of a business model and will try to trick you into trying their bloated products. You just need the community edition runtime engine.

Now, decide where you will be storing the backups. If it is an external drive make sure that it is plugged in before starting the container. Say you want to store in /media/time-machine.

Then, create a new docker container that will hold your server and the parameters it needs.

1. Replace the password below with one that will be used to allow access to the server (the backups themselves can be encrypted with a different one). The user name will be TimeMachine.

2. Replace /media/time-machine with the location for your backups

docker create --name timemachine --restart=always -e "PASSWORD=CHOOSE_ONE" -v /media/time-machine:/backup -p 548:548 --net=host local/docker-timemachine

The container above has --net=host which indicates a privileged container and may be dangerous if it gets hacked although in a normal/personal setup you won’t be making it accessible to the Internet so the risk is minimal. Enabling it makes the Time Machine server discoverable (ie it shows in Finder). If you want, you can remove it and just use afp://nameofyourhost to connect, also if for some reason your server doesn’t show in Finder, just go open Finder, then /Go/Connect To Server and type in that to make it show.

Finally, from you Apple device, launch Time Machine preferences, Click Select Disk and then select your server. Input user name TimeMachine and your password and don’t forget to select [x] Encrypt backups on the Mac OS X Time Machine dialog to add another layer of protection.

UPDATE: Recovery

I finally had to use the time machine backup after a bug in Disk Utility destroyed my partition table (a whole story in itself), and one thing I noticed is that a full recovery from a Time Machine backup is very slow, and anecdotal evidence from twitter peers said this is a problem with Time Machine itself (that affects even Airport based devices etc). My backup was taking about 700GB, including all the history and it was encrypted, I believe TC has to walk through a lot of that data to find the latest versions so it took forever (about 13h), but the worse part is that it kept failing. My recommended solution: don’t use time machine to do a full recovery. Simply install a clean system, then launch migration assistant a few times to recover everything, first settings, then your user, then apps. This worked flawlessly.

Since that is a bit annoying, I decided to try using a plugin in Sublime Text, and this article explores how to do just that (spoiler: it’s all python).

Jekyll templates have a relatively simple structure, based on a mix of YAML metadata and Markdown contents. For example:

---
layout: post
title: "Let's Encrypt support in Dreamhost"
categories: [blog]
tags: [main]
date: 2016-01-31 18:48:32 +0200
---
First paragraphs that will be shown on list views where you want only an
excerpt of the text.

<!--more-->

Rest of the article goes here

One can add any number of tags to the front matter, and then use them in templates to add particular behaviours. I use those in comics, for instance, to indicate the main image of the comic, or if it’s a simple reference to a news article then I include a target-url to the source site.

The file name should include the date of the post, but they are actually sorted based on the date indicated inside the YAML front matter.

So, long story short, this is how to create a sublime text plugin:

1. Go to Tools/Developer/New Plugin (creates a template file in the right location)
2. Replace contents with something similar to the code below
3. Any method ending in Command becomes available (eg “NewBlogEntryCommand” becomes new_blog_entry).
4. Save file in the location indicated, name is irrelevant.
5. Associate the command to a new shortcut: Preferences/Key Bindings and add an entry like:

  {"keys": ["ctrl+shift+b"], "command": "new_blog_entry" }

Here’s the actual code I’m using, yours can be simpler or more complex. I’m asking for two parameters from the user: a title and a ’target url’. I will add thumbnailing capabilities to it soon (similar to what Twitter etc do).

import sublime
import sublime_plugin
import datetime
import re

class NewBlogEntryCommand(sublime_plugin.TextCommand):

    def run(self, edit):

        self.url = ""

        def on_done_url(input_string):
            self.url = input_string
            self.thumbnail = ""  # todo: fetch
            now = datetime.datetime.utcnow()
            targetview.run_command("insert_snippet", { "contents":
              """---
layout: post
title: "%s"
categories: [blog]
tags: [main]
date: %s
target-url: %s
thumbnail: %s
---
Text
<!--more-->
Text
"""
            % (self.title,
               now.strftime("%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S+00:00"),
               self.url,
               self.thumbnail)
            })
            filename = re.sub(r'[^0-9a-z\-_ ]', '', self.title.lower())
            filename = filename.replace(' ', '-')
            targetview.set_name("%s-%s.markdown" % (now.strftime("%Y-%m-%d"),
              filename[:80]))


        def on_done(input_string):
            self.title = input_string
            targetwindow.show_input_panel("Main Url:", "", on_done_url, None, None)

        window = self.view.window()
        targetview = window.new_file()
        targetwindow = targetview.window()
        targetwindow.show_input_panel("Blog post title:", "", on_done, None, None)

A couple of notes:

1. Receiving input from the user is asynchronous, so you register a callback
2. You can add any python code you want, which is quite powerful if you are doing repetitive tasks.

Thankfully some big companies have joined in an initiative called Let’s Encrypt, which does just that: provide you with a free, automatically generated security certificate that is acccepted by all major browsers.

It’s worth mentioning that Amazon is doing exactly the same thing if you host sites there, although you’ll need to be using either an Elastic Load Balancer or Cloudfront CDN, both of which incur costs (see more at Amazon’s Certificate Manager).

Even with all these, the process of setting it up is a bit cumbersome, so I was very happy to find that Dreamhost, the hosting server I use for this site, just enabled one click setup. It’s literally one click:

That’s all there is to it. Just a note: you’ll have to wait a few minutes for it to take effect. If you try it immediately, it shows as using a self-signed certificate which obviously is no good. Be patient.

I did have to fix some references to non-ssl links that I had in the site (for instance, including images with an http:// prefix). For most use cases you can replace references to http:// with just // and it will work both in http and https modes. Or just use https everywhere.

Here’s the thing, I’m not that good a designer but I don’t have enough going on to justify hiring a proper one. Good news is, if you’re in a similar situation there’s hope for you.

Hey I don’t have time to read this thing!

If you scroll below, that will seem like a lot of work.

But think about it this way:

1. This is reusable. You’ll only have to do it once.
2. You can modify effects, colors, font types and see the results immediately thanks to clones
3. Crucially, you can change the text and have a new image in seconds

Not convinced? download this Inkscape SVG file and start playing with it right away. Change the font, the text, export, enjoy!

Illustrating the problem

Unity 3D does not support bitmap fonts (not easily at least), so you will be using normal TrueType fonts.

In this example I’m using kenvector_future.ttf, part of this bundle and made by Kenney (and on the public domain). It’s a nice font, but on a game, using only one colour it feels quite dull.

Take a look:

Ugly, isn’t it?

Creating a bitmap font label with Inkscape

What we will do is replace the text with a nice image with colors and effects. We will be doing it the clever way too, using clones so that everything is derived from a single original object that can be modified afterwards.

On Inkscape, create a text box at the top level part of the screen. Set a nice font for it, in my experience bold fonts look better (like Stencil Std and Bauhaus).

Now, open the Fill and Stroke settings dialog and mark both “Fill” and “Stroke paint” as unset (select the option marked as ‘?’).

Now, create a background box with a color similar to what they will have as background in your game. Then create three clones of the original text.

Now, for the fun part. We are going to modify these clones with different effects, then stack them one over the other.

1. Clone 1: Choose a color and set it to both fill and stroke. Set a big width, for instance 6. We will use this image as a background, it doesn’t have to be readable.

2. Clone 2: Choose a related color and set it to both fill and stroke. Same width as Clone 1. Set transparency (also known as Opacity) to 60% and blur to 4.0. You can play with these values later.

3. Clone 3: This will be the one actually going on top of the others so it should be readable. Just choose an appropriate color.

Now, bear with me, clone all the clones!. This will make it easier to change colors later.

Select the three “clones of clones” and align them horizontally and verticall against the box, so that they are all in the same position, stacked over each other.

This is already more acceptable than the original text and looks more “game-like”.

Adding some effects

To make it a little prettier, we will add a couple of simple tricks to create a glow effect.

First, create an ellipse of the same size as the box. Then select the three stacked clones and duplicate them. Join the duplicated result in a group (this whole process can be done by just pressing Control + D then Control + G). Finally, select the group, then while pressing shift select the ellipse and select Object/Clip/Set.

Now you can play with this clipped result, applying effects to it, changing its color to white and so on.

Exporting

Obviously you’ll want to export your labels as images. The best way to do this is to temporarily remove or hide the background box (otherwise it would show on the image). In my case I put that box in a separate layer just to be able to do that quickly. After that, select the text and click on File / Export Bitmap.

• Choose the right size in pixels for your game
• You may want to export multiple versions with different sizes, for instance a 2x version for retina displays

Final result

Here’s an example. The code would look like

In this case, shuffleTexture is a public Texture2D property of the script and can be set via Unity.

(As usual, a reminder that you can like the facebook page to get updates, and if you are into this kind of stuff you could also follow me on twitter)

(As usual, a reminder that you can like the facebook page to get updates, and if you are into this kind of stuff you could also follow me on twitter)

(As usual, a reminder that you can like the facebook page to get updates, and if you are into this kind of stuff you could also follow me on twitter)

(As usual, a reminder that you can like the facebook page to get updates, and if you are into this kind of stuff you could also follow me on twitter)

(As usual, a reminder that you can like the facebook page to get updates, and if you are into this kind of stuff you could also follow me on twitter)

(As usual, a reminder that you can like the facebook page to get updates)

(As usual, a reminder that you can like the facebook page to get updates)

(As usual, a reminder that you can like the facebook page to get updates)

If you don’t know, that whole thing originates in a severely wrong and uninformed EU Regulation on cookies, without understanding that there is no way to differentiate between ‘good cookies’ and ‘bad cookies’ and that either you accept the modern web needs them to work or you re-engineer the whole thing from scratch.

Of course, the final joke is that the ONLY way for a website to remember that you accepted OR rejected the policy is to set a cookie. So if anything, the new legislation made every site create a new cookie in your computer.

But I digress…

(As usual, a reminder that you can like the facebook page to get updates)

(As usual, a reminder that you can like the facebook page to get updates)

What I think is actually more interesting is the kind of climate that office had for something like this to happen and have nobody go to the guy and tell him “Dude, press STOP DESKTOP SHARING”, instead letting him do that for the longest time.

By the way, have you tried to come up with a domain name for a dating site that is not already registered? It’s insane. I was trying to put something that wasn’t an actual web site and it took me quite a while… and I’ve seen THINGS in the process.

(As usual, a reminder that you can like the facebook page to get updates)

Everything else you manage to screw up in 2013 you will be able to fix in 2014.

I’m thinking the emo architect is, inside, a loving and well-meaning character. That loves Satan.

Note: The christmas tree in this comic is a modified version of the one by Mathew Callaghan that you can find in openclipart.org.

(As usual, a reminder that you can like the facebook page to get updates)

(As usual, a reminder that you can like the facebook page to get updates)

(As usual, a reminder that you can like the facebook page to get updates)

(As usual, a reminder that you can like the facebook page to get updates)

That’s the only reason they are not allowed in most offices.

(As usual, a reminder that you can like the facebook page to get updates)

(Oh, yes, remember that you can like the facebook page to get updates)

(Oh, yes, remember that you can like the facebook page to get updates)

But really, if your boss refers to him or herself as ‘boss’, you know things are not right. That ‘I HEART BOSS’ mug he bought himself isn’t a good indicator either.

Anyway, remember that you can like the facebook page to get updates.

Anyhow, there you have it. Every now and then I see this: good programmers, good coders, designers, testers, they are all too busy to sit down and define ‘guidelines’. They do manage to transmit them to each other so the structure kind of works.

But that leaves out the most useless people in each of those teams. They need to justify their jobs so what better way than to ‘help’ the others by defining some guidelines and common styles? Nothing wrong with that, is it?

That parser is what creates thumbnails for links shared in Facebook. It reads the contents of a page and allows you to choose an image. The problem is that more often than not, it can’t find the images. It’s got a lot of limitations: image size, image position in the document and it also has a tendency to just randomly stop working.

It’s particularly bad when you start adding images as CSS backgrounds since those are completely ignored, even if you have fallbacks for crawlers like google etc. So today I once again found myself with this problem, Facebook refusing to use my images anymore. So any link to a comic would not show the actual thumbnail of the comic, which I find extremely annoying.

That meant I finally needed to cave in and use their extensions: I created a thumbnail for each post and added a few tags at the top of the page so that Facebook can find the right image.

To fix it, Create a thumbnail for your images and add the following to your HTML document (head section):

<meta property="og:image" content="http://address.of/your.image_thumb.png">
<meta property="og:title" content="Optional text">

That’s it. Want to check if it works? Use the Facebook URL debug page. It will tell you whether the tags were interpreted or not.

Note: for creating a thumbnail you can use Imagemagick, for instance using “convert -crop 300x300+0+0 image.png image_thumb.png”.

Also, all I know about art school life comes from Daniel Clowes comics.

But the most interesting bit is that I added hi-res comics in the Paul series and the header logos. This means that if you have a retina display (iPad or iPhone 4), you will see much crisper and detailed comics. All of that thanks to me using Inkscape from the start, which uses vector graphics.

Being a bit geeky as I am I created a small script to do this for all comics at once, using Inkscape and Gimp. If you are interested the code is in this github gist.

So you are asking, what’s the difference, well here’s an example. I captured screenshots before and after enabling this, on an iPhone 4. The pixelation that the iPhone had done on the first one is obvious.

So what’s next… well I have a huge pending thing in the form of translation. To Spanish, mostly. I’ve promised to translate these comics a few times, and have some actually translated already so I guess at some point I’ll have to put them online. Another biggie is making the website react to the device you are using, so to make it easier to navigate from a mobile.

Oh, and you know, maybe write some comics :).

Yes, I could do that.

Final note: I discovered there’s a limitation in the actual size an image can have on an iPad’s browser. That doesn’t bode well for the super long images I used in LIFE/interior. For the time being I sliced the large pages into smaller ones but haven’t yet added hi-res versions as they are still too big. More info in the official documentation, found here.

Then someone added some stuff and called the thing Agile. It was still good, but you could see something was changing.

Then people started specializing in ‘Agile’. And people that never actually programmed anything started giving talks. And then managers wanted something similar because programmers had started to be able to work without them, and they called it Scrum. And Scrum was not bad in itself, but people with too much time on their hands started theorizing about what development was. Developers ignored it for a while (big mistake) and then someday they found out that what they had been doing before was now Scrum and Agile and some other names. And suddenly they had the less useful member of the team be branded Scrum Master and get a pay raise. Then people started signing emails as “Scrum Project Manager”, and defining written methodologies for the monkeys to follow.

Anyway… I digress.

I’d like to point out that any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental (as usual).

That said, one wonders what planet you have to be raised in for you to consider burping as a valid form of expression.

In an office.

I should mention that what you see on the comic is not exactly Apple’s iCloud icon, which caused quite a revolution among designers. I drew my own version, just in case the evil Apple likes to crush cartoonists.

If you want to see the original icon and probably actually understand what I’m talking about, take a look at this.

Most of the script for this strip comes from my beloved Javier Gala, check his site at http://javiergala.com/

I see this in Telco more than anywhere else. Telco’s need to evolve and become more ‘internet’, more ‘Google’, but more often than not there’s a lack of staff that can actually check that a candidate is indeed anything more than a doughnut eating talking head. But hey, if you want a good doughnut, you’ve come to the right place.

Anyway, you have to agree it’s actually pretty funny.

I liked the idea of that man-ape not going much past that. Yes, we get it, you know how to use a bone, now can we just eat?

Problem is, I overestimated the popularity of 2001 A Space Odyssey. Apparently most people know about it, but it’s not that many that have actually watched the thing. Plus, this would be the second 2001 reference in this comic, maybe I need to renew my repertoire.

Please let me know anything that is odd or any links that are not working. Hate mail is welcome too.

There are a few known issues:

1. The feed in Google Reader will reset and display all posts and comics as new entries… sorry about that, you’ll have to ‘mark all as read’. To be honest, I’m not sure it works at all…
2. Comment counts on index page always display 0. Working on it!
3. I need to add links to
4. LIFE/interior archive
5. Paul the innovator archive
6. Other stuff archive

The design is an evolution of a design that my friend Sergi made about two years ago as a draft thing I could start with. I’d say that taking two years to implement a design doesn’t qualify me as the greatest web developer in the world… but I get there, don’t I?

The site uses a nice thing called Jekyll and the code is in github for you all to peruse. I’ll probably post some other entries with small details about that, to help people that might be trying to do the same thing. The comments have been migrated to Disqus, but you shouldn’t see much difference.

At least for a while :).

But I won’t… that would be mean.

Anyway, this is to say that Paul’s escape will soon reach a conclusion and we’ll be back to more normal strips.

PS: I had to re-use the little monkey that tap-taps Paul on the back, I just had. I like it too much.

PPS: In hindsight, a monkey that touches himself with unusual frequency was not such a good idea for a character :).

PS: No, I don’t know who the m-monkey is supposed to be :).

Note: Please don’t judge me by my ability (or lack of) to come up with onomatopoeia in English.

The corporate merge freed thousands of middle management brainless Zombies that are now desperate for brains, projects and heads… or headcount… ANYTHING.

Unfortunately the office ethics code prohibits recording in office parties. Otherwise I would have proof.

But, trust me on this ;).

Luckily the only consequence was a very surprised corporate lawyer. I repeat, this is a fictional depiction, an hypothetical situation, no baby monkey was harm or sold.

By the way, introducing Xavier The UX Designer. ;)

Update: made it a bit bigger (bigger is better, isn’t it? I just hate that the Cradle of Filth T-Shirt is not that easy to spot!).

I’m not so sure this is actually a good idea, given that the process of creation for a comic seems to be intrinsically linked to drawing. It would seem more appropriate to do sketches and scripting at the same time, which is more or less what I’ve been doing so far. I do have an idea and some draft scripting, but it’s usually not that much and when I’m actually drawing things change a lot.

So this is what’s happening… I’m writing a script, a short one. I’ve explored a couple of ideas so far but none seem to what I’d like to do next.

On the journey to scripting aside from, well, a notepad, what seems to be working very nicely for me is Celtx. It’s very fast and simple. It’s supposed to be able to work with sketches and things like that, but I’m using it as a task-oriented word processor. Typing is fast, you just press tab to iterate between the typical structures in the script of a comic, and that’s about it. It does generate nice looking PDFs too, which makes you look more professional.

PS: I try character drawing from time to time, but they all look more or less the same –I’m going to take that as meaning I’ve found ‘my style’.

and another PS: Oh, I started also translating LIFE/interior to Spanish, just because.

Btw I decided to make the page a bit bigger. I was keeping it under 768 pixels for some weird reason but maybe it’s time I get into the new century.

It’s a kind of Pavlov conditioning.

• "How am I managing you?"
• "Well you could change the way you apply the <SHOCK>ouch!"
• "I repeat, how am I doing?"
• And after a while, you'll get an "You are doing excellent, sir!"

Note: To my dismay I discovered that iPads reduce quality of big images, so had to split this comic in… ten pages. That means a new one will show up in RSS readers…

Note: To my dismay I discovered that iPads reduce quality of big images, so had to split this comic in… ten pages. That means a new one will show up in RSS readers…

Note: To my dismay I discovered that iPads reduce quality of big images, so had to split this comic in… ten pages. That means a new one will show up in RSS readers…

Note: To my dismay I discovered that iPads reduce quality of big images, so had to split this comic in… ten pages. That means a new one will show up in RSS readers…

Note: To my dismay I discovered that iPads reduce quality of big images, so had to split this comic in… ten pages. That means a new one will show up in RSS readers…

Note: To my dismay I discovered that iPads reduce quality of big images, so had to split this comic in… ten pages. That means a new one will show up in RSS readers…

Note: To my dismay I discovered that iPads reduce quality of big images, so had to split this comic in… ten pages. That means a new one will show up in RSS readers…

Note: To my dismay I discovered that iPads reduce quality of big images, so had to split this comic in… ten pages. That means a new one will show up in RSS readers…

Note: To my dismay I discovered that iPads reduce quality of big images, so had to split this comic in… ten pages. That means a new one will show up in RSS readers…

This page was a long time in the making, I think it’s roughly six or seven standard pages. That’s one of the things I’ve learned: I don’t like the concept of ‘page’, it doesn’t really work well for comics (cough graphic novel cough) like mine.

I’m thinking of writing a blog post about my experiences but I want to thank everybody that supported me on this. Without you I would never have finished it.

Even when my drawings were crappy I always got support, sometimes in the form of harsh and cruel critiques ;) but support nonetheless –in all truth, all was always well deserved :).

It’s been an amazing journey, from knowing zero about drawing and publishing a webcomic, and with that scary feeling you get when writing in a foreign (to me!) language, to a decent ability and a good overall feeling. Style has changed a lot in this comic, and it’s not too coherent so I don’t expect many people to ever read it. As they say, the goal is the journey itself.

Now that I know myself better and I have learned a bit about the medium, the plan is simple: keep working, keep growing. Make something, someday, that someone likes.

So here I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know what you think about the whole thing, you know I die for feedback.

Technicalities: Almost everything drawn by hand, shaded by hand using just a pencil and then scanned and tinted. The epilogue uses images from the beginning of the comic, which were drawn in vector mode using Inkscape, directly on screen. Oh, and the seashells were colored using watercolors. This page is a huge JPG file that might have some trouble rendering, if so please let me know and I’ll see about splitting it up in pages.

Note: To my dismay I discovered that iPads reduce quality of big images, so had to split this comic in… ten pages. That means a new one will show up in RSS readers…

Technicalities: Painted using a graphite pencil, then inked on top of it, then added some shading using the same pencil. Finally, added some tint using Inkscape and the lettering. Oh, and there’s an effect in the ‘Stop Villain!’ text but it’s too silly to even mention ;).

Note: To my dismay I discovered that iPads reduce quality of big images, so had to split this comic in two. That means a new one will show up in RSS readers…

Technicalities: For the last months I tried to keep myself under 2048 pixels of height. Not for really a good reason, just because bigger seemed to mess with quite a few things like the Facebook poster and some thumbnail generators. But I really feel some bits of the story need to be together and I could have published to pages simultaneously but decided for a big one. Also, this is a bit of a return to past techniques, but with the addition of some graphite shading. All drawings are scanned here, and only minor shading added.

Note: To my dismay I discovered that iPads reduce quality of big images, so had to split this comic in two. That means a new one will show up in RSS readers…

I’m having a bit of a conundrum here, well I would if I knew what the word conundrum actually means. Thing is, I’ve tried color with some very nice results but most of the time it doesn’t feel right. I feel I really need to set on a small palette, maybe grays or shades of blue or something. For the time being I decided I’m going a bit back and using shades applied in Inkscape and pencil shading.

I’ll continue practicing with watercolors to see where I can apply them safely.

Take a look at this:

Here, I had a lot of fun drawing it with the graphite pencil. Then I applied some ink as usual. After that I would normally just remove all pencil, either erasing or on the computer, but I figured I could try to take advantage of it and keep some shades of gray which give it a very nice look. Considering it’s supposed to be part of a kind-of-gloomy scene, it feels right.

Above you can see the original pencil&ink work, quite draft. I scanned it and then removed pencil via Levels (2nd image), then added a kind of sepia background and some shading for the final image. It still needs a bit more work, a bit more shading but you get the idea.

Finally, above you can see yet another twist on the style. It’s a pencil image, which as I’ve mentioned I enjoy drawing, to which I added a bit of ink (just a bit), and then scanned. On top of it I layered the basic sepia/brown colors you can see. It’s simple and very fast, which is a bonus to lazy people like me.

Anyway, I’m going to update the last comic page I posted in LIFE/interior because I didn’t like the color. I’ll just remove some color. It might show up in your Feed reader, sorry about that. The next page is coming shortly after that.

Oh, the meaningful conclusion is this: I want to do what I enjoy the most, and that seems to be more about pencil and real paper than computers and watercolor, so far. Both using the computer and watercolor have a big drawback: they need a ‘setup’, kind of a chair space, sitting in a specific place, etc., while drawing panels with a pencil can be done almost anywhere.

Honest.

Technicalities: Mostly scanned, except for the two portraits I made just using the calligraphy tool in Inkscape. Colored using watercolor pencils, different types of paper, but none of them actually watercolor paper.

Technicalities: I did strange things with this one. First panel is mostly just pen-brush going crazy, with some added watercolor just for the sake of it. Last one is mostly watercolor but I added some shade using pen in still damp paper, which gives an interesting effect.

I enjoy painting with watercolors. It takes me back to childhood memories. I think that it somehow looks better, notwithstanding the fact that I’m not particularly good at picking colors.

And yes, we are getting closer to an ending. Oh!

Technicalities: This time all the drawings were drawn by hand, with the exception of that little Ana at the bottom, which is actually copy&pasted and slightly retouched from another page. The scanned images had almost no modification, but an Auto levels adjustment in GIMP is a must. Some I adjusted manually, but basically if I don’t do the levels everything looks faded. In particular, the ink seems to not like being watered. Also, the final size of the image was roughly 2 MB which is quite a lot, so I had to compress it a bit and make a jpg.

The pen is a Cretacolor Monolith, which is particularly interesting because it’s essentially all graphite, no wood, but still feels like a normal pencil.

I’ve been doing some other sketches but maybe it’s a bit too early to upload them, I’m thinking of a new character for the 3-panel strips (or similar) format.

Technicalities: There’s three panels where I played again with the watercolours, guess which ones they are :). Maybe I should also mention that these past pages I have done them without an external monitor, meaning trusting the crappy screen of my old macbook for the colors. I need to check how these look in a nicer screen.

Technicalities: there’s a few panels in which I tried coloring a bit by hand, with watercolours. I had to enhance the color levels a bit because after scanning they tend to look quite dime.

Oh, guess who bought a set of watercolors :).

Technicalities: not much new here, all drawings are hand made but with different paper. Some of these panels are actually huge A4 size drawings, because I was trying what happens when you do that. Essentially it’s ok but if you don’t do it consistently (i.e. if you do it like me :)) the line weight looks too different between one panel and the other. The image is a big uncompressed png, maybe it’ll take a while to load.

Here’s a cat for you.

Technicalities: This is an interesting one. I discovered one thing I was doing wrong: Inkscape’s calligraphy tool is better used with no stroke set, just the fill color. I don’t know why I didn’t notice this before! Otherwise the lines are too thick and lack the natural brush-like endings. The first and last drawings are obviously hand drawn, the middle ones are all drawn directly on the screen. I used the Gouache texture filter on some panels. Oh, it’s also a PNG, not sure if that makes any difference.

Technicalities: Not much, all scanned images, some with the no-bleed paper, some with the regular one.

It’s not that I do the whole sketch-with-models then draw thing, but I do try to outline the figure using stick figures, well actually stick 3D geometrical figures. Of course, whenever I’m in a hurry I bypass all of that and just convince myself it doesn’t look that bad. Still, drawing the same face and body in many different angles is a nightmare if it was not defined clearly. The only ones I can say were defined clearly are Ana’s and kid Mr Mann’s. You can tell those two are usually easier to identify than the others, no matter the angle you see them.

The gangster-like expressions in this page were reviewed and approved by linguists. Blame them.

Technicalities: The close up of the hand pressing the button and the metal shutters opening are all done freehand on the tablet, using Inkscape’s calligraphy tool. The rest were hand drawn on the “bleed proof” paper I got the other day. I’m drawing the graphics a big bigger than usual, and shrinking them after scanning.

Anyway, can you see the script is heading somewhere? I know you all doubted it :).

Technicalities: drawn using a different paper, one that says in big letters “bleed proof”. Somehow I’m actually missing the ink bleeding of the sketch book. We’ll see if I get back to that.

Technically: same old, same old. Some of the shading was done using the ‘splotchy’ pen in the calligraphy tool, which kind of mixes better with the rough ink. By the way, the ink looks rough because the paper I use is probably not the best for ink, I can see it spread through the pores in the paper when I draw. Of course, I’m too cheap to get another sketch book.

Update: fixed typo to appease the masses.

Most of the time, the humor is so narrow that only a few people actually understand what’s going on –and that doesn’t mean they will all find it funny, which narrows the audience even a bit more.

Most of the 3-panel comics I follow have very well established characters, usually just two or three. What I wanted to write about is something that puzzles me: invariably, in the comics I like, you can identify the main characters easily and get to know their persona without needing to have them introduced first. It’s as if they had always been there, always. Take Robby + Bobby as an example, he’s managed to create two great characters. You can just read a strip and immediately understand it, even if there is absolutely no context.

My latest attempt, Paul the innovator, is probably only going to be funny for me and a few coworkers, as usual.

Paul is a so-called innovator in a corporate world. Still, I'd like it to be easily identifiable and funny for other people too, but the only way I can think of doing that is by writing a few strips to fully define the character. Which means, I'm not doing it right :). ]]> https://gatillos.com/yay/2011/01/23/lifeinterior-in-custody-11/ 2011-01-23T22:34:56+01:00 Hope I’m giving you some clues of the puzzle with every page. I’m still having some trouble because of being scanner-less (yes, that’s totally a condition). Hopefully that will be fixed soon.

That should explain why this one doesn’t really have that many drawings :). Shush! Don’t tell anybody!

Update: Fixed a typo. Well, I actually invented the word “minuciously” and that was luckily pointed out by a nerdy reader. It looked like a word to me. It should be a word.

Any resemblance to real people is purely coincidental.

Technicalities: This was drawn directly on screen with Inkscape. I used the calligraphy tool for everything but the face on 3rd panel.

Technically not much to say this time, maybe only that mixing multiply and shading layers creates some very weird artifacts in Inkscape but I was too lazy to workaround them. Basically a rectangle around some areas goes bersherk and decides it wants to be a different shade. See if you can spot it.

For the technically inclined: Every panel was drawn by hand, scanned, had the saturation reduced to 0 and then levels applied to make a smooth white background. Then I put all the panels into a ‘multiply’ layer. I tend to draw individual panels on my sketch book, and do the composition with Inkscape. It’s really fun to see how many options one has to tell the same story. I usually have a few versions of each page, changing layout, balloons, panel sizes. I don’t think I could do comics in the classic style, i.e. drawing a whole page and scanning it.

Update: Fixed grammar typo, added a couple dialogue lines.

Technicalities: I discovered, thanks to some random stranger in the internets, that it’s better to forget about extracting ink via transparent images the way I was doing it, and using Multiply plus level calibration to remove the paper texture and the pencils instead. It’s worth mentioning that these days I don’t even erase the pencil before scanning, it goes away magically, for such is the miracle of computing. So you just take a scanned image, alter the color levels to make a smooth white background and put the resulting image into its own layer on top of all other layers, with a filter of Multiply. It works wonderfully.

Hope you appreciate it. Next year will see the Spanish translation of my main webcomic, too, hence the bilingual message :).

I’m improving the ink extraction process, or I think I am. Let me know if you see any difference.

Technicalities: All panels drawn by hand, scanned, ink extracted. I didn’t have too much time for shading, and I still think it looks a bit weird, but hey you are supposed to be reading, not focusing on the little details :P.

Technical: I’m in the process of replacing the font used everywhere, I couldn’t get a hold of a valid license for the previous one I was using. I’m also using upper case for text.

Some of the pages were too big and that poses quite a few logistics problems, so I’m reducing all pages, trying to make them smaller than 2048 pixels height and 768 width, but without removing content or reducing text size. For some of the pages, the only option is to split them into two or three. When I do that, the RSS feed gets updated and some feed readers like Google Reader get a bit confused and show new pages although they have an old date and should not be displayed. Just check them out if you want, but you can ignore them.

At some point the archive will be completely updated and I’ll post about it.

Other technicalities: The ‘Roughen’ script in Inkscape came up very helpful, and there’s a ‘Comics Cream’ filter applied to the background. Crosshatch was done manually though.

Update: Changed font size, reduced stroke size.

Update: Changed font.

Oh, and I solemnly promise to publish the next one in less than a week.

On the technical side of things, I think this is the first page where everything but the balloons and the shading was hand-drawn. It’s an interesting experience. I draw the panels individually and then play with different layouts in Inkscape.

Update: Changed font, stretched the page a bit.

Step one, scan an image: I’m doing it using Image Capture in Mac OS X just because it’s dead simple. I stay far far away from software provided by Canon, it’s simply not worth it for my needs. Here’s a capture of the process:

Step two, open image in GIMP and Color-Threshold it: It’s a bit of an unfortunate name for such great software, “Gimp”, ahem, but let’s put that aside for a minute. In my case I did first an Image –> Transform –> Rotate until I had it looking the right orientation. Then from the Colors menu I selected Threshold.

From the manual:

The Threshold tool transforms the current layer or the selection into a black and white image, where white pixels represent the pixels of the image whose Value is in the threshold range, and black pixels represent pixels with Value out of the threshold range.

Option 1: Use the ‘Auto’ setting. This seems to work most of the time. In my case it gives 178 - 255 as values. Option 2: Adjust manually, this can also be used to make it more restrictive and then apply filters to the resulting image to enhance the result.

The max threshold will most likely always be 255 (all white). I went for the Auto this time. Here is the resulting image, if you look at it in zoom you’ll see some detail was lost, but not too much.

Step Three make background transparent: This is very straightforward when you know where everything is, but a bit daunting at the beginning.

• Add a transparency layer, by selecting Layer --> Transparency --> Add Alpha Channel.
• Now choose the Select by Color tool from the palette

Once selected, just click somewhere in the background and it will select all the colors around the click pixel, within a range to accommodate slight differences (e.g. all shades of white). Since this is already a pure white background it’s not going to do much, but you would need it for regular images as in those the background will never be completely made of pure white. The range is defined by a Threshold in the Toolbox.

After clicking, the whole background is selected. The selection is indicated by a set of moving lines lines that look like this (you won’t see much in the thumbnail, click to see the selection):

Now you just press the Delete key or select Edit/Clear and the white background will be removed.

The above is the image as displayed in Gimp with a transparent background (Gimp uses a checkered gray background to indicate transparency). Now the final image looks like this:

Finally all you have to do now is take this image and insert it into a separate layer either in Photoshop/GIMP or Illustrator/Inkscape and add the rest of the elements and shading.

So, why all this trouble? what was the point? Well, color is much easily applied in a layer below the ink layer. If you try to apply color over an unmodified scan, well, it’s not going to be easy. In order to do that, you need a transparent ink layer.

But we will leave that for a future post.

Update: You can see the final image in the this comic post.

PS: Are my dialogues a bit cheesy, or is it just me…?

Update: Changed font.

Update: Changed font, stretched a bit the layout. ]]> https://gatillos.com/yay/2010/10/18/3-panel-comic-isa-the-intern-4/ 2010-10-18T21:28:17+02:00 And again, this is absolutely true. There is a certain boss that does this, and he makes his assistant aggregate the values by hand using a calculator just like that. REALLY.

She tried to convince him to use a simple sum on the Excel file and he thanked her but said she should first start to know the company and how they work, and then try to improve the processes, instead of changing everything so that only she would know how to do it.

Update: Changed font.

What do you think? Can you tell what is going on without too much effort?

Sometimes, particularly when the drawings are intentionally rough, intended to read fast or when the focus should be in the narrative, I feel they look better with very little shading. In fact, as little as almost nothing.

I tried shading this a couple of times, and it didn’t seem to feel as I’d like it to. So I’m leaving it as is, and see what people think of it. Also, yesterday’s page didn’t bring anything new narrative-wise, other than Mr Mann living with the cat, so this one might compensate for that.

Or not :).

Update: Changed font and line weight.

This starts a new episode, this is present day. I keep changing the face of Mr Mann so I tried to make it more obvious but… you tell me if I succeeded.

Note: the clever ones will notice that cats don’t live 30 years. It should actually be the same cat so I have a problem here… maybe I should just make it 20 years later… or maybe I’ll make it the son! or the grandson! We’ll see.

Update: Changed font.

Here are some scans:

This is hand-drawn, first drafted with a regular pencil, then more-or-less-inked using pens. As you can see I don’t really know what to do with the brush-like pen I bought so I tried using it to make some lines stronger but it didn’t work too well.

I didn’t erase the pencil, so you can actually see what I changed.

Then, I scanned this and put it on a layer in Inkscape (actually although the above is a scan, I used a photo because I didn’t have the scanner at hand). After that I used mostly the pen tool to draw the lines, and the calligraphy tool for most of the shading, all inside Inkscape.

In fact, the above is one of my favorite panels so far.

Then, the following was drawn directly using Calligraphy tool, as a sketch:

Finally, I took that same drawing directly and just added some shading and a bit of color here and there, and fixed some things (mostly when lines crossed each other).

I particularly prefer the second option, but just because the rest of the comic looks like that. I think I could do some story using just those pseudo-drafts, with minor tweaking for shading. This last one is also nice and has the advantage of being the fastest of all, as you work digitally during all the process.

As I’m trying different drawing styles, one thing that is very nice and quite easy to do by hand (albeit a bit tedious) is ‘crosshatching’ to display shades. That is, using lots and lots of lines to represent shades, forming a pattern. My first surprise was that there is no standard crosshatch pattern for filling, which seems odd (it has stripes, sand and other strange ones). There must be a reason but in any case that type of crosshatching is always perfect and that is not what I wanted.

First I created a few lines, with the calligraphy tool set to Dip pen, width 1, Stroke size 0.1, in a 300% zoom. These numbers will vary wildly depending of what you do. I created a pattern like this:

Then I selected it, pressed the Spray Tool (new to Inkscape 0.48) and just sprayed with it to do the shading:

You can also enable pressure use for the spray tool, play with the width and in seconds do shading. I didn't put any effort on the actual drawing here, it's just an example :).

If you put a little more effort on the actual pattern to be used by the Spray Tool and apply it more carefully than I did I’m pretty sure the results will be quite good. I’ll be trying it out soon!

Let me know if what happens in this comic is more or less understandable. I’m still struggling sometimes finding ways to transmit what is so clearly inside my head.

Update: Changed font.

On the other hand, the pencil tool generates just plain bezier lines that you can bend and modify afterwards. It follows your trace and kind of approximates what you are trying to do. After drawing a stroke, you can modify it quite easily, whilst the calligraphy tool generates strokes that contain so many nodes that it’s not worth trying to rearrange it, it’s just better to redraw that particular stroke.

Right now most things you see in my comics are drawn using the pencil tool. That’s why they have a clear-line look. I like how it looks, although it’s quite a lot of work. I sometimes scan hand-drawn drafts but now I’ve started doing those drafts on screen using the calligraphy tool and then creating the final version with the pencil tool. I should be brave and start using the calligraphy tool for the final result, but I somehow feel more comfortable with the pencil approach, right now. Incidentally, the calligraphy tool is very sensitive to zoom so if I zoom in the strokes become thinner. It’s a bit weird there might be some way to avoid it but right now I can’t seem to find it.

Here’s a sample draft with the calligraphy tool. It just takes a minute to draw something like this:

I like the simple appearance. On the other hand, here’s an image first drafted with calligraphy and then redrawn using the pencil tool:

The second drawing took a little longer to draw, but it’s still only a few minutes. The difference lies in doing further modifications: I can now tweak, shade and otherwise work with this image in a way that is simply not possible with the calligraphy approach.

I think I’ll continue using the pencil for a while but I’m going to experiment on separate comics with the calligraphy tool.

I’ll try a few representations of the same theme.

I drew a few versions of the last panel, and none of them convinced me that much. I think this one kind of works but it feels a bit at odds with the rest of the page. Anyway, there it is!

Credit: The ‘prisoner cat’ resolution via escaping through the window idea and drafts were made by a Ninja that pops around here sometimes. Truth be told, that version included also scenes of happiness with a mouse that was not actually dead and instead a very good friend of the cat but I omitted those because I prefer evil.

Update: Changed font.

I was wondering if kidnapping a cat has a name. I thought… catnapping! But bummer it turns out it’s an actual English word :).

Update: changed the font and compressed the page a bit.

Here’s a sneak peek of what’s to come. Oh the mystery.

In order to have two comics I thought the site needed some changes, or else I would have to have two sites. I’ve never liked the navigation, but what I came up with is not that much better.

I uploaded the first set of changes, let’s see how that works. The visible changes are:

• The homepage now shows two small thumbnail viewers, one per comic
• Comics are loaded on demand, which should speed up initial page loading
• Homepage no longer displays the latest comic, you have to click to see it

Anyway, feedback welcome as usual. I expect to be adding and testing stuff now that I have a nice setup for testing it.

(ignore this page if you come from Google Reader… this is an old page)

UPDATE: Maybe I should mention that no kittens will be harmed in this comic. Ever.

Update: Changed font and split the page into two.

This is based on a TRUE story.

I’m playing again with different things and techniques, but mainly in the way I create the graphics. I’m trying not to reuse too many things in the hopes that by practicing at some point I’ll learn to draw. It’s too easy to take the same figure and copy it over and over, like they do in a lot of webcomics. There are some places where that makes sense (e.g. the boy’s face looking straight to the reader, I use it quite a lot), but in other places it’s just being lazy.

So here we go, this sequence takes two pages. I hesitated to publish this bit without the rest, because I’m trying to make every page a small story, but it was probably going to be way too much for a page, which is a recurrent problem I have.

Edit: Split page into two, and changed font.

Like in this example from the upcoming page:

Also, I might reduce the size of the drawings, I tend to do them too big. I’m hesitant though, because if you’ve got a nice big monitor they look much better. Maybe I should play with different resolutions.

First, I saved posts with the export tool (which doesn’t give that much peace of mind because it doesn’t include images). Then I did a full backup of the whole site and a dump of the mysql database. I do that regularly with a small script so that was easy.

After backing up everything I upgraded Wordpress. It had been asking for it for quite a while now, with a huge ‘Upgrade to wordpress 3’ button always visible in the Admin console. Instead of clicking that, I decided to go through Dreamhost’s panel because there are some things that need to be setup at Apache level that I know people at Dreamhost had taken care of, so it seemed the safe bet. I also figured I could get some support if I went that way (which I didn’t need btw).

The upgrade to Wordpress 3 went flawlessly. Well, flawlessly meaning in this case breaking most everything and rendering the site apparently ok but horribly broken inside. First, all comics had disappeared, which is a bit scary when your site is supposed to be mostly about that. But that was expected because neither Webcomic nor Inkblot (the theme) were upgraded yet. I upgraded Webcomic directly from the plugin directory and downloaded the latest Inkblot theme from their site. I extracted the inkblot theme into the themes directory and copied inkblot-child outside of it so that it sits directly under ’themes’, I then made sure inkblot-child was selected as the current theme.

Then, I went to Webcomic/Tools and upgraded the posts. This essentially recovers all the comic posts by migrating them to the new format. It was a relief to see them reappear, as every comic post had been lost until this step. The process is easy and consists on a small wizard-like dialog with a few steps, and one of them implies you manually moving your comic files to another directory. After that, a few of the posts weren’t correctly bound to their comic images so I just bound them again.

All the tweaking on my inkblot-child theme was lost, which was not a real problem as I prefer the new structure. I just uploaded a banner for the header, tweaked font size and type and played a bit with the list format.

I tested the design that I commented sometime ago, with a blueish/magenta background, but it seems to clash with white images. I’ll try it again at some point.

So, in summary:

• Upgrading wordpress to 3.0 is easy
• Webcomic doesn't upgrade too easily (I moved from the latest 2.x to 3.04). I really think most people will end up with a broken site. Good news is that there's lots of support from the Webcomic guys, and a nice video illustrating the process.
• Inkblot may upgrade nicely but I really didn't even try, just started from scratch with the new version.

There we go, first part of this sequence. Let’s get to know Ana as a little girl.

I kind of like the black and white characters over some basic colors. Maybe more than when I try to go for a more elaborate coloring.

Edit: Compacted the image a bit, and changed the font.

In the meanwhile, how’s that for little girl Ana:

It feels much better to draw happy things :). ]]> https://gatillos.com/yay/2010/07/06/lifeinterior-therapy-9/ 2010-07-06T01:07:01+02:00 New page.

So… how’s this for a face? She should be kind of cute and very simply outlined…

In case you missed it, I did another post a couple of days ago. Together they should set a more reasonable starting point while hopefully keeping somethings unknown so to keep people interested.

PS: A side effect is that page size is increasing so probably load times will increase too. Let me know if it seems too slow for you. I’m using dreamhost and it’s usually quite slow, but at least it’s cheap.

Edit: Reformatted, changed font and split the page in two.

Credits for naming the junkie “Craig” go to my private linguist. I like how ‘Craig the junkie’ sounds.

Funny thing, I’ve been re-reading my old comics and they do help the reader with little bubbles of information and more obvious sequences, even the more ‘artsy’ of them. I’ll try to remember, and copy, that.

Edit: Reformatted, changed font.

(*) The text in Spanish is an extract from La luna y la muerte by Lorca. I wouldn't dare translating it. ]]> https://gatillos.com/yay/2010/07/01/blog-i-will-update/ 2010-07-01T01:15:10+02:00 Just some words, not even a drawing.

This LIFE/interior thing is far from dead, I know lack of updates seems to point strongly to a looming future –but that’s not it! It’s only the usual spiral of unwanted events that keep conspiring against it, diseases mix with happy moments and stress mixes with relief, and between all of that there seems to be no space for little things like a continuing story.

All is not lost! Many drafts took life from otherwise dead trees and graphite and script and new moments are already in the land of future. Their migration to the digital world is taking longer than I’d like, and sometimes I think that this lonely tear of sweat on the side of my face doesn’t only come from the hot summer but also from the guilty feeling of lousy comic parenting. Also, the unborn pages keep asking me to get my **** together and do some drawing, now (unborn pages talk like that, they are a bit foul-mouthed).

There’s weekend hopes! Some nasty pieces of life will have taken care of themselves by then, and drawing will resume.

Promise.

It’s on the Internet. It must be true.

But today I discovered what a webcomic is really good for: feedback!

Let me explain. I have the rare opportunity of actually talking to real ‘readers’ and ask them about the comic and I was interested about the last two pages, because a very important characteristic of the older Mr Mann is supposedly revealed there, and some key elements are introduced. But.. a suprisingly high percentage did not get the message I was trying to convey on those two pages. At all. It’s not only the message, which can arguably be missed as it’s only a couple of pages, but the actual sequence of events was unclear for almost everybody. That is, they didn’t understand what happened.

The comics are here and here.

My original intent was to stop that sequence there and go to a flashback introducing the character ‘Ana’, but I’ll add another page to the therapy sequence, trying to further explain it because it’s kind of important.

I believe there’s two main issues there: the main character is at times difficult to recognize as I still need to improve drawing, and more importantly, when I tried to display the contradiction between what Mr Mann is telling the psychiatrist and what he was actually doing (and what he is remembering), well, essentially I failed.

I think I should have added something more obvious, like some kind of cloud separating thoughts or memories and inserting more shots of Mr Mann’s face while explaining it. For your knowledge: the idea here is that Mr Mann lies to the psychiatrist, pretends the whole event was a very simple thing, and hides the fact that after that ‘flip out’ at the office he went and beat the crap out of that new character that appears (the junkie) in something which has to do with another character yet to appear (Ana).

So FAIL for me ;). I’ll try to learn something from this. It’s good to have this kind of feedback so early in this process, because I can react quickly.

And if by any chance you did understand it, do post. Maybe my user sample was biased :)

I didn’t want to make it too gory. This is the end of this sequence, not sure if I managed to transmit the intended effect, or any kind of effect for that matter. Does the gray at the end work at all?

UPDATE: Made last panel a little more easy to understand, and arguably uglier ;)

Edit: Reformatted, changed font.

I think I’m improving a bit, the woman doesn’t look like a guy nor a transvestite which is good I guess. I like also the darker tones as they match perfectly well with the storyline. Also, I changed the look of Mr Mann a bit to make more prominent that these are his ‘old’ years.

The next drawing will hopefully be up in a couple of days. See the blog entry below for the story of the semaphores :).

The junkie is almost a self-portrait :P.

Edit: Reformatted, changed font.

There is another approach, which is basically ripping off from a friend that has a great sense of composition but works in another area, like, let’s say, photography :). Today I decided to steal another photo from a friend, in this case the photo is not that great from a technical point of view, after all it was one of the very first ones he took as a learning exercise, but the composition was there and fits very nicely with the one I had in mind. What I did is very simple and not that difficult: 1) find a nice photo, 2) either sketch it maintaining the composition or as I did with this one, actually copy the main proportions, 3) forget about the photo, concentrate on the drawing itself.

I think it works. I like the lack of perfection on proportions and the slightly skewed perspective, although I might fix some of that too. This new thing I’m doing with colors and shadows is also quite entertaining. The drawing should still get some more shades somewhere but I’ll do those later.

Here is the process, in all it’s glory:

The original photo is from Haripako (shusssh don’t tell him). This is the second time I rip one of his photos, more to go ;).

So here is my artistic approach to a bit more coloring and a new way to draw main shadows.

Right now I think it looks ok, although I finished it a bit hastily as usual. I’m pretty sure in a few minutes I’ll think a 3-year old would do it better. Let’s press Publish quickly.

UPDATE: abide to the grammar nazis out there :)

Edit: Reformatted, changed font.

I decided to combine that with a different approach: create shadows as just basic shapes with color and put them in the same layer as the rest of the picture, as regular ‘citizens’ in the drawing. That means I can draw the shadow of a table and then put a table on top of it, without having to spend too much time trying not to accidentally draw over the table while shading.

Mmmm. Maybe that doesn’t really make sense, particularly if you’ve never tried to draw with a vector program like Inkscape.

Anyhow, you can find the result below. First is the draft by hand, then I outline it, then adjust it and make it more round, and finally I play with color and layers:

I created the color palette displayed below the pictures using http://kuler.adobe.com –I don’t know much about color, but those just seem right. I’ve been using the same palette since the beginning, although I sometimes play with transparency and grays.

UPDATE: some spelling corrections :). And since I’m mostly using American spelling, what previously was a lift now mutates to an elevator.

Edit: Reformatted, changed font.

I’ll try to keep this a bit more interesting by posting again some drafts and then compare those to whatever they come out to be. Usually I redraw things so much they barely resemble the original sketch, so this makes for an interesting test.

As you can see my drawing of females isn’t improving that much, but I keep trying.

Edit: changed font and the text’s layout.

Edit: reordered this page.

Edit: Reformatted, changed font.

So currently I’ve drawn mostly the childhood years and some snapshots from the young years (although I should revisit them and slightly change the look of the character a bit). Now I need to draw the character quite a few years later. It turns out it’s quite difficult to actually age characters (but fun too!). I’m starting to understand why most comic characters don’t age at all. Take a look at this amazing guide at Cedarseed’s site or if you prefer, at Deviantart. Of course, as my style of drawing is quite different, not all of that applies to my particular case but it serves as a very nice starting point.

This is what a first approach to The Three Ages looks like in my world (not exactly like these other Three Ages):

It was a very interesting effort. I chose the gray eye lids and the white hair as a guidelines for the three figures. The old age I’m trying to draw is not supposed to be really very old but it’s more a case of premature old age (more on that as the comic advances).

Another fundamental point about ‘old age’ is that whenever I try to draw the character as a premature-old person I start drawing him with very unlikely clothes. I mean, old people in my mind always wear a slightly ragged, dark colored suit, maybe some kind of hat and of course a walking stick. Question is, how will old people look like 20 years from now? Will we see them in their ‘vintage’ G-STAR RAW jackets and think they need to renew the wardrobe? Oh the difficulties of life.

This page brings backs the main storyline and is linked to one from a few weeks earlier, remember that one with the taxi driver and the bikes? Yep, that one.

See? There is an actual plot here, it’s not only me playing with Inkscape.

Update: Rearranged text, added references to time.

Edit: Reformatted, changed font.

I’m publishing again without much time for polishing but I think it works the way it looks, and I need to keep moving the story forward. :)

Update: rearranged and changed text.

Now, add in the fact that you need to release periodically. Even more, you must. That’s actually the key point, if I ever learn to draw it will be thanks to being forced to do it :):

Thing is, I didn’t have enough time to review and check the last page I published. Then the next day, it felt completely out of tone with the idea of the comic. So I committed a sin and changed it and it’s very interesting to see that some people noticed, but of course most didn’t until I pointed them to the change (Facebook power).

The actual changes I made are not so evident so the new version seemed better than the previous one although it was unclear why. Let me illustrate you with a Before and After comparison:

The most important bit is the text, previously it was too verbose, I must learn to leave some things for the reader to infer.

On a side note, Google Reader doesn’t care about updated items –other feed readers will tell you there was an update, but someone at Google decided they didn’t care, although updates are displayed correctly they are not marked as new content so it’s easy to miss them.

BTW: I should change the stroke size for the characters at the bottom of the page, they look so horrible. Should I? Shouldn’t? Where do I stop? HELP ME!

I doubted about using ‘mom’ or ‘mum’. The dictionary tells me that saying ‘mum’ is über-british and mom seems more international, so I went for international.

On another topic, I’m really wondering if I’m making the panels too big…

UPDATE: Changed quite a lot… removed all the silly text, changed the layout, reduced panels, added some background. I’ll try not to do this too much, otherwise I’ll keep changing all the drawings forever :).

Update: Rearranged text (again…).

Edit: Reformatted, changed font.

So the solution is clear: add long hair, a ponytail or some earrings in order to provide clues, or combine it with a nice skirt. Women’s Rights defenders will campaign against me soon. All that is good but limits my spectrum and sort of makes my drawings too stereotypical. Take this sketch as an example, that could easily come from a fairy tale. And I’m not sure why I used the manga eyes on it, btw. Ok, I was in a plane so the pressure changes may have affected my brain.

I have no trouble drawing really muscular guys, with impressive chests which easily border the homoerotic. I figure that’s ok as long as I don’t salivate while drawing them. Must be because I remember reading Savage Sword of Conan when I was growing. The fact that I seemed to focus on the muscular types and not the gorgeous women Conan was constantly saving may be worth a visit to the therapist.

In any case, what constitutes a girl’s figure is very interesting, I have a few books on the subject, but I still need to practice quite a lot before I can introduce a female character. It’s still going to be all boys for a few weeks. One of the books actually describes in detail how to draw women’s breasts, with a whole chapter dedicated to ‘women holding their breasts together by pressing them with their arms’. Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.

So here it is, a second page. Hopefully next one will be up earlier, as I already have some material for that.

(Update: fixed a typo in the word ‘admittedly’… I really need to configure the spellchecker for Inkscape)

(Update: fixed a bit the text layout)

Edit: Reformatted, changed font.

Since I only use the scanner for sketches and basic character traits, I don’t really need that much precision but I do need it to be focused and not distorted.

1. iPhone photos. Crap. iPhone lacks a flash and is completely incapable of applying the right focus.

2. iSight camera from my rusty macbook. So-so, it has a pretend-flash and seems to be better at focusing, but it forces me to hold the paper at just the right distance.

3. Cheap Nikon Coolpix digital camera. Clear winner. Using the ‘close-up’ mode it seems to be able to focus perfectly on the drawings.

So 3 it is. All this effort is because it seems to be easier for me to outline a sketch using the ancient method of pencil and paper. See this example below, which had a threshold applied to make it black and white.

And I even used a movement line (the curved line that goes from top to bottom) to define the shape of the cat. I’m going pro.

I changed my mind regarding the font used for the lettering, it doesn’t seem to suit this script. Now it’s YanksHand 18pt, 100% space, for the geeks out there. I’m also learning a bit more about Inkscape and starting to figure out just the right layer layout. Shading is now in a layer on top of the inking, using the magic ‘Darken’ blend mode. That little change allowed me to create shapes with a solid background which makes creating the figures easier sometimes.

Anyway, as promised, story starts to unfold and it follows an actual script. Yay!

Edit: Reformatted, changed font.

Not so bad. I kind of like the style, pending adding detail, probably changing the pencil width, etc.

The thing is that unless you are a the correct zoom level, most of the traces you draw with the table are not actually represented in the drawing, so when I quickly did the traces for the head of a mouse (that’s what the child is supposed to be holding), all the detail disappeared. I’m posting it nonetheless, so that the world can see how that evolves to something :).

And I did draw the small child looking to the left, had to play a bit with guides in Inkscape to make it proportional, but it looks fine enough. Not sure about the hands, maybe I can make the character wear prosthetic hands because that is what they look like…

I like the expression it has. It’s missing some shadows (one under the eye), but it’s still a bit of a draft.

So yep, this is what I do on a weekend:

Actual main character is supposed to be the last white haired one, the black haired one is just me playing to see how tweaking distances in the figure can completely change the look of a character. My initial thought was that the child version of the main character should have a different hairstyle, because usually when you are a child it’s your mom that decides how you look, but I think using the same hairstyle makes him easier to identify. I did want it to have distinct, more comic-like, eyes.

Tricky bit is now doing the same character in various positions…

Here’s what it looks like:

By the way, I enjoyed the UK Webcomix Thing 2010 today. Lots of talent there, I talked with quite a lot of people which were quite nice and I hope someday I myself will have something to show there too :). Lots of different styles, but I seem to prefer the somewhat cute ones, like Timothy Winchester, if only because of the business cards he was giving:

Well since I have some difficulties finding the right spot to draw, I’ll update the site putting it closer to the webcomic layout. I’m using a wordpress plugin called webcomic and the inkblot theme, no customizations yet.

I’ve been doing quite a lot of traveling lately (Dublin, London, Barcelona) and that’s seriously getting in the way, but I shall prevail!

Have defined the story and will start posting pages in an orderly manner, while also continuing with the blog. It’s part of the magic of the webcomic plugin.

In this post, a bonus bulldog drawing :9. Inkscape instructions: create a circle, draw some straight lines, select, convert nodes to curves, then tweak a little the nodes. tada! ]]> https://gatillos.com/yay/2010/03/21/more-background-story/ 2010-03-21T15:39:46+01:00

So I’m continuing with what could be thought of as the introduction. The narrator continues to present a bit of himself as a prelude to the story.

First panel is actually a rendition from a photograph from my friend Haripako (check it at his flickr page and take a look at the wonderful photographs he takes as part of his ongoing 365-day photo project, used here under permission :)). The rest are based on old photos I had around and some googling for inspiration.

Need to finish the remaining panels and apply some shades. The overall tone should be dictated by the first panel’s color.

Update: defined faces a bit more.

• You need to create pages within a reasonable time
• Once a page is up you can update it, but most people will miss those updates
• Most importantly: you can't rearrange the order of pages
• The layout of the site should focus on the webcomic, one page at a time

I think I’m ok with this, I think as long as you understand it, the end result can be great. One approach would be to define the story completely before drawing anything else. The other would be letting it evolve and ‘define itself’. I think the story will definitely benefit if the major plot points are well define beforehand, but I also like to have the ability to tweak it along the way…

On the subject of the site itself, I’ll be updating it shortly to display the comic in a more ‘webcomic-like’ layout. I think I’ll keep the blog as it is and create a new page for the webcomic itself, with a separate RSS feed. I like also the idea of creating an iPhone-specific version as was suggested to me by a friend.

Anyway, I’ve been drawing some faces to train myself and also looking for the face of the main character. The more realistic ones were drawn based on photographs, and as such are probably not really suitable for main characters.

Will probably design some title or play with different fonts. I’m feeling again this need to just add some very basic shades to this draft and call it a page. Strange that my artistic feelings tend to align with whatever is easier.

Anyway, lo and behold, the new version, with panel 2 included and what could pass for dialog.

I also got tired of the previous Blog theme (“Bold Life”), so I’m back to this plain one that allows for more space to be used for content (update: changed my mind!)

I came to the realization that I need to draw more accurate drafts by hand, because it’s quite difficult to define shapes on-the-fly, I like the old man approach of ‘inking’ over an scan.

Oh, by popular request, girl-on-a-bike received a new hairdo and some more detail.

Fonts on balloons were changed too, but I kept the font for the narrator.

I’m posting my progress just for the fun of checking how it evolved later.

One thing I don’t really like is, well, color. That’s a pretty bold statement, I know.

The thing is I like some color, but just very basic lines, traces of it. That may or may not be linked to the fact that applying color is a real pain too, and that I lack any kind of talent to handle color.

So let’s take my previous canvas, now with a bit more of inking and some test shades. I also added some color to the background. Something simple as this would work for me, I’m not a fan of details… I’d like to focus on the story (yeah, maybe I should be writing a book!). Anyway, I’ll gather opinions.

By the way, I followed the best advice you can get when working with Inkscape: save often, save with different names, activate autosaving. It’s fairly stable, but it still has a tendency to crash with certain operations and, worst, leave your file in a corrupt state.

You may have noticed the fonts I used on one of my previous uploads. Somehow, those fonts seem too simple.

Of course, having yet to decide colors and overall the general look that the comic will have, it’s probably too early to worry about fonts. But it’s fun to play with them.

I tried a few (recommended to me by a real designer). From top to bottom, the fonts are: AlexsHand 36 points; Flood Std 36 points; Freestyle Script 48 points; YoungsHand 36 points. All 100% spacing.

At this stage I seem to prefer the first one, although I’ll try all of them again when drawing the final page. By the way, it takes ages to ink…

So today’s panel is part of the story. Problem is, my English will need some proofreading. I very much prefer not to type in any actual words unless it’s within Inkscape, so that I can change them quickly and easily. Somehow, in this case I did write something on the panels, as a guide. Maybe I should just remove it before posting. But it’s part of the fun, seeing where this will evolve, mutate.

So learning Inkscape is quite a steep learning curve compared to Illustrator. This is from a complete novice, I only know the very basics of Illustrator but it took me no time to create some random drawings. With Inkscape it takes a bit longer. It was nice to see it recognizing my wacom with just minor tweaking (well, not even tweaking, just activating it).

Anyway, here are some silly pictures drawn user Inkscape.

Oh, did I mention that Inkscape is free?

This is drawn directly on screen, so maybe I can actually draw on screen if I try enough…

I’m trying to figure out what would be the best way to approach this… most blogs I see are from people that already now a lot about drawing…

I can’t draw directly on the screen. I can’t draw directly on paper.

Maybe I can’t draw at all, maybe I should accept and embrace that.

Never!