Archive.

2026

Mar 19

Friday Sketches (part 2)

Continuing to share app icon design sketches on Mastodon every Friday.

Mar 18

GNOME 50 Wallpapers

Hexagons finally claim the default spot in GNOME's wallpaper lineup.

2025

Dec 08

Dithering

Using GIMP's GEGL dithering as an artistic device in GNOME wallpapers.

Nov 21

12 months instead of 12 minutes

How we iterated on GNOME.org's 3D hero image the old-fashioned way.

Oct 28

USB MIDI Controllers on the M8

Wrangling USB MIDI dongles to add pots and pads to the M8.

Sep 17

HDR Wallpapers

GNOME 49 wallpapers embrace wider gamuts and higher bit depth.

May 22

Scavengers Reign

An animated series so good I already miss it after the last episode.

May 21

Ode to HTML

Going back to basics with clean HTML and CSS, no frameworks needed.

2024

Sep 24

GNOME 47 Wallpapers

Wallpaper deep dive for GNOME 47, including a simulated depth-of-field trick.

Sep 13

Weyland

Alien: Romulus exceeded my expectations — mainly because I had none.

Sep 09

Autonomous Cameraman

DJI's tiny Neo drone is a button-operated flying cameraman.

Sep 04

Klatovy FPV

Hanging out at Czechia's longest-running FPV event, rusty sticks and all.

Sep 03

New Music

Discovering remarkable artists and remembering to actually blog about it.

Jun 14

Sketch Friday

Sharing app icon design sketches on Mastodon every Friday.

Mar 07

GNOME 46 Wallpapers

Bringing JPEG-XL and synthesized grain to GNOME wallpapers.

Jan 02

Looking Back at 2023

A dust spec reflects on music, FPV, and another trip around the sun.

2023

Oct 27

Colorful HIG

Making HIG illustrations work in dark mode with inline SVG tricks.

Oct 05

GNOME 45 Wallpapers

Geometry nodes, mesh gradients, and the stories behind the 45 set.

Oct 01

Skull Buster

Finally making a game after wanting to since I was ten.

May 01

Udev Rules for Dirtywave M8

A note to future me on getting the M8 working on Linux.

Feb 23

Flathub Brand Refresh

Look behind the Flathub rebrand.

Jan 30

GNOME 44 Wallpapers

Behind the scenes of GNOME 44's wallpaper set, mesh gradients and all.

2022

Nov 11

Running Shell in Builder

Testing GNOME Shell changes without the usual build nightmare.

Oct 31

Pixel Inktober

Another October of quick pixel dailies, now posted on Mastodon.

Sep 22

Came Full Circle

All the pixel art app animations assembled into one video.

Sep 16

Even Mo' Pixels

Continuing the daily pixel art routine across GNOME Circle apps.

Aug 15

New Alert Sounds

Crafting GNOME 43 alert sounds on a Teensy running Dirtywave firmware.

Aug 08

GNOME 43 Wallpapers

A fresh redesign of the full GNOME wallpaper set for 43.

Jul 25

Berlin Mini GUADEC

The imperfect, perfectly Berlin-flavored GNOME hackfest at C-Base.

Jun 13

Flatpak Brand Refresh

A contemporary update for Flatpak's visual identity.

Apr 10

Ingenuity's One Year of Mars Flights

Celebrating a year of Martian flights with Blender overlays and desert footage.

Apr 09

Blender Eevee is Magic

Rendering Stream Deck button assets in Blender's realtime engine.

Apr 02

Less is More

One-hour constraint jams keeping weeklybeats alive.

Feb 15

Fugue Machine on the M8

A weeklybeats jam combining the Digitakt and M8 in a fugue-like sequence.

Feb 14

Droneman

My son's spectacular performance and my only IMDB credit.

Jan 10

One More Trip Around the Sun

A narrow-angle look back at 2021 through synths and pixels.

2021

Dec 19

M8 — Drum and Base

Learning drum and bass on the tiny miracle that is the Dirtywave M8.

Nov 22

Pixel Sites

Building mini-sites for FOSS projects with plain CSS and pixel art.

Nov 01

Pixel Inktober

Completing a monthly pixel art challenge for the first time.

Oct 13

Mo' Pixels

Daily pixel art practice mixing app icons with nostalgia.

Sep 12

Null Amusement

Pixel art meets chiptune sound effects from SXFR.

Sep 06

Magic Bricks

Handheld iPhone footage so smooth it looks gimbal-stabilized.

Aug 18

How to Gradient When You Can't

Faking recolorable gradients in monochrome symbolic icons.

Aug 16

Onboarding Sketches

Explorations behind the GNOME 41 onboarding illustrations.

Aug 05

Avoid Head Spinning

Disabling Inkscape's canvas rotation before it drives you mad.

Aug 04

Deescalating Tensions

Taming Inkscape so it stops ruining your SVG diffs.

Aug 03

Single Cycle Rave

Breaking through creator's block with single-cycle waveforms on the Digitakt.

Aug 02

5G Backup

When a 5G phone just works as an internet fallback.

Jun 22

Pixels

GNOME icons reimagined for a 320x240 alternate universe.

Jun 07

Troubled Minister

Weekend synth jam meets FPV flights around Liberec.

May 24

What am I?

Making a track outdoors on a hardware tracker from Poland.

May 20

125BPM vs 100KPH

Pairing a high-speed drone cruise with a live synth jam.

May 12

DJI FPV Video Out

Someone cracked video out from DJI FPV goggles without the Smart controller.

Apr 30

How to Symbolic Icon

A walkthrough of creating GNOME symbolic icons with 2021 tooling.

Apr 16

Jammin' on Elektron

Finding joy in terrible live performances on Elektron boxes.

Mar 22

Ingenuity FPV

Rendering NASA's Mars helicopter in Blender and mixing it with FPV flights.

Feb 25

Tour Sketches

Sketching illustrations for the GNOME 40 onboarding experience.

Feb 18

Perseverance Landing

Tuning in to watch NASA land a rover on Mars.

Feb 14

Night Mode Magic

Marveling at what a tiny phone sensor can do in the dark.

Feb 06

Git Worktree — Concurrent Development

Running gtk3 and gtk4 side by side without the checkout dance.

Feb 05

Animated Tour

Using CSS keyframes to animate the GNOME 40 onboarding tour.

Feb 04

Curtail

A handy GNOME Circle app for lossless image compression.

Feb 03

iPhone 12 mini

Singing praise to a magic pocket camera that happens to make calls.

Feb 02

Ele[k]tronic

Rediscovering the joy of making electronic music after a 20-year break.

Feb 01

New Blog. In 2021!

Ditching social media algorithms for good old RSS.

2020

Sep 01

Shelved Wallpapers, Part 2

More wallpaper variants that didn't make the 3.38 cut.

Apr 06

Art vs Design

Why nightly app icons aren't art crimes.

2019

Dec 02

Conferences

A year of FOSS travel — Berlin icon hackfest, GUADEC Thessaloniki, and Shell hackfest in The Hague.

Jan 23

The Big App Icon Redesign

The why and how behind GNOME's radical new icon style.

2018

Jul 18

Detail Considered Harmful

Why our complex multi-size icon guidelines need a radical rethink.

Mar 14

Builder Nightly

Designing an icon to tell nightly builds apart from the stable app.

Feb 12

Shelved Wallpapers

GNOME wallpaper outtakes too nice to keep shelved.

2017

Nov 27

London UX Hackfest

Designers and developers refocusing on the GNOME Shell experience.

Mar 31

Recipe Icon

A quick video walkthrough of designing an app icon for GNOME Recipes.

2016

Jan 29

Rio

GNOME design hackfest in Rio — visiting favelas, meeting users, and bridging Endless and GNOME.

2015

Dec 10

New Cantarell Maintainer

How Nikolaus Waxweiler fixed Cantarell's hinting and brought GNOME's typeface back to shape.

Oct 21

Wallpapers

How Blender, noise, and obsessive light play shape GNOME's default wallpapers.

Oct 13

SVG animation

Chasing a viable SVG replacement for translated getting-started videos.

Mar 24

High Contrast Refresh

Replacing fuzzy double-stroked PNGs with crisp recolorable SVG symbolics.

2014

Sep 17

Making of GNOME 3.14

A behind-the-scenes promo video showing the design work that goes into a GNOME release.

Jun 14

Adwaita 3.14

Major surgery on GNOME's default theme — fewer colors, no engine, all SASS.

2013

Dec 05

Updated App Icons

Kicking off the high-resolution app icon initiative for GNOME 3.12.

2005

Jan 11

New Zealand, Part 4/4

Queenstown thrills, Fox Glacier, and the final stretch north.

Jan 05

New Zealand, Part 3/4

Milford Sound on a sunny day and waterfalls along the way.

2004

Dec 30

New Zealand, Part 2/4

From Moeraki Boulders to sea lions at Surat Bay.

Dec 30

New Zealand, Part 1/4

First leg of a road trip across New Zealand, near-misses included.

Oct 17

Industrial Gtk Engine Fixups

Tweaking focus cues and tab rendering in the Industrial engine.