The items on the list are rated with point values – the more accurate, creative, and funny your submission is – the more points you get. The list includes a combination of artistic/creative items – painting with unique materials, for example, fundraising items – like getting 15 donations to a charitable cause – and just plain strange items – like dressing up as ghosts in an actual ghost town. Teams can be localized, already know each other, or complete strangers – usually a combination of both. Early August each year (and for a few weekends occasionally), a list of prompts drops for teams – groups of 15 players (aka gishers) all over the world. It’s hosted by Misha Collins (Castiel in Supernatural), and the charity Random Acts of Kindness. It’s an insane week of fundraising, donating, creating, painting, sculpting, recycling, and a combination of annoying the people you know and scaring random strangers with weird requests. I use the Fedora distribution of Linux.If you haven’t heard me talk about this, GISH is short for “greatest international scavenger hunt”. Of course, I have to mention running GNOME on Linux. And the QEMU console lets you issue a screen dump in PPM format, which is ideal for grabbing screenshots to include in the book. You can boot FreeDOS inside any PC emulator, including VirtualBox, QEMU, GNOME Boxes, PCem, and Bochs. QEMUīecause this book is about installing and running FreeDOS, I needed to actually run FreeDOS. Sigil even has a preview function so you can see what the EPUB will look like. I used Sigil to tweak the EPUB file and make everything look right. I haven't tried creating an EPUB with LibreOffice 6.1, but LibreOffice 6.0 didn't include my images. LibreOffice can export directly to EPUB format, but it wasn't a great transfer. While it's great to use GIMP to do the fine work, sometimes it's faster to run an ImageMagick command over a set of images, such as to convert into PNG format or to resize images. After some experimenting, I found it easier to create an SVG image in Inkscape that looked like the banner I wanted, and I pasted that into the header. And in preparing the PDF version of the ebook, I wanted a simple blue banner at top of the page, with the FreeDOS logo in the corner. Most of the FreeDOS logos and fish mascots are in SVG format, and I used Inkscape for any image tweaking here. Usually, this was simply cropping or resizing an image, but as I prepare the print edition of the book, I'm using GIMP to create a few images that will be simpler for print layout. I used GIMP to modify these images for the book. My book includes a lot of DOS program screenshots, website screenshots, and FreeDOS logos. And page styles allowed me to easily modify the layout and appearance of the page. Graphics styles let me apply certain styling to screenshots and other images. Character styles let me modify the appearance of text within a paragraph, such as inline sample code or a different style to indicate a filename. Paragraph styles made it easy to apply a style for titles, headers, body text, sample code, and other text. I love LibreOffice's rich support of styles. I started on LibreOffice 6.0 but I finished the book using LibreOffice 6.1. I'm sure there are open source collaboration tools, but Google Doc's ability to let two people edit the same document at the same time, make comments, edit suggestions, and change tracking-not to mention its use of paragraph styles and the ability to download the finished document-made it a valuable part of the editing process. I uploaded my first drafts to Google Docs so my editor and I could collaborate. Google Docs is the only tool I used that isn't open source software. I'd like to share a brief insight into the tools I used to create, edit, and produce Using FreeDOS. The book was produced almost entirely with open source software. (I'm also planning a print version, for those who prefer a bound copy.) You can download the EPUB and PDF versions at no charge from the FreeDOS e-books website. Using FreeDOS is available under the Creative Commons Attribution (cc-by) International Public License. I've been working on this book for the last few months, with the help of a great professional editor. It is a collection of how-to's about installing and using FreeDOS, essays about my favorite DOS applications, and quick-reference guides to the DOS command line and DOS batch programming. Using FreeDOS is my celebration of the 24 th anniversary of FreeDOS. I've written or contributed to dozens of open source software projects, although the one that I'll be remembered for is the FreeDOS Project, an open source implementation of the DOS operating system. I first used and contributed to free and open source software in 1993, and since then I've been an open source software developer and evangelist.
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