Sweet Home 3D

Via Lifehacker (as usual): Sweet Home 3D is free software to help you design your rooms. I'm a little bit blown away by the sheer loveliness of some of the renderings in the gallery, so I might have to give it a try. It's available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Are you using it? What do you think?

Google Sketchup models your home

via Lifehacker: Model Your Home, Plan Improvements in 3D with Google Sketchup - Google Sketchup

Google Sketchup is free, and I think it does a very good job. Sketchup has quite a learning curve, and I'm not as crazy about some of the effects as some commenters are, but it's still great for this kind of home application.

A year later...

...I finally got around to installing Ubuntu. Of course, we're in a whole new distribution now: 9.04, the Jaunty Jackalope. So far so good. Details to come.

Open-source sewing

Free Penguin Project: Free patterns to make stuffed penguins. From the project's description (because what's an open-source project without a good description?): "The starting point of this project was the question: 'Why is it that on the one hand in the Linux world all code of software is freely available and on the other hand the code to compile a soft toy penguin is still not open source?'"

Sewing often appeals to the same kind of DIYer that Linux appeals to, so it's a natural fit.

If you're more into the apparel side of things, Burda, a very cool European pattern company, has made many of their patterns available free online as well. The user community provides some great help with picking the right size and altering the patterns. As another bonus, you'll look about 50% more hip in a blouse by Burda than in one by Simplicity.

Giveaway of the Day

Giveaway of the Day is a recent discovery. Every day they offer, for free, a software title that isn't normally free. Some of them are poweruser tools that most of us probably won't use, but often they're very useful home-type apps. They're only free for a day, so the best way to stay on top of them is to set up an RSS feed and read it every day.

[NOTE: I've been suspicious of the utility of a few of these, but generally, reading the comments from other people is a good way to weed out the ones that aren't worth the time to download.]

Try this out

Via Parent Hacks: Tux Paint is a free, open source drawing program for children. Runs on just about anything you're likely to have around the house. Maybe even your Newton!

References

Here are some of the sources I'm reading BEFORE I start messing around with repartitioning my hard drive:

• LinuxDevCenter.com -- Creating a Dual-Boot Windows XP and Ubuntu Laptop (an oldie but a goodie)


• Illustrated Dual Boot Site (this one is actually currently being updated for the just-released version of Ubuntu! Wow!)


• Dual Booting Ubuntu Linux and Windows on a Toshiba Laptop (very detailed)

Ooh... fun weekend reading! :-)