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December 10, 2024: Here's another, better photo of Vivienne Wilder playing my Blackstar bass guitar. The red stage lights detract from the gold look, but it's still a nice photo. Courtesy of Jonathan Sohn.
December 7, 2024: I'm ditching Adobe Creative Cloud after 10 years with it, and 30+ years with Adobe. I'm so sick of the cancellation process. Had to sit through a three-hour support chat with three different reps yesterday just to cancel my Creative Cloud seats (I'm retaining Acrobat Pro). All in, I was paying $300/mo. for the software that I barely used because I changed over to Linux in 2023. I've paid thousands of dollars over the last 10 years and thousands more buying physical boxes of software from Adobe since 1991 when I started using Photoshop. It turns out that my experience canceling is typical.
There are so many great alternative apps on Linux that it's not even funny. Here are the best ones:
- Photoshop -> GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). GIMP has essentially all of the features of Photoshop and is an easy transition.
- InDesign -> Viva Designer. This is an amazing product that reads InDesign files and has the responsiveness of QuarkXPress from the '90s (excellent). Should have done this years ago.
- Illustrator -> InkScape. Vector drawing program.
- Lightroom -> RawTherapee. Processes Canon RAW files wonderfully.
- Premiere -> DaVinci Resolve. Amazing product, with GPU acceleration and delivery encoding that's better than Adobe Media Encoder. Also reads RED cinema footage, which was the key for me.
Those are my main Adobe apps that I use. I use Photoshop and InDesign the most, so it's great having those great alternatives. DaVinci Resolve is unbelievably great and destroys Premiere and Media Encoder with customization and options, though it's harder to get used to than Premiere.
November 30, 2024: Hard to see, but these are the first known photos of my Blackstar tribute bass guitar being played in a show. The gold looks great under those stage lights-- I wasn't sure whether the matte finish would look shiny enough, but it seems to. The artist says it's wonderful and is set up perfectly, although she still has some feedback for the next one. As with the Purple Rain guitar, it's simply gratifying for me to have professional musicians use and appreciate my work. This is Vivienne Wilder playing in one of her bands.
It is definitely an interesting feeling. My first reaction was not to call it great, even though it is, because I feel conflicted about not being able to play these instruments at all. They say Leo Fender also couldn't play a note on his instruments, so I have inspiration-- and probably a similar feeling that Leo Fender would have had from people playing his early instruments that he couldn't play himself. I can tell you that it's a crazy-ironic gift to be able to build a world-class instrument but not play it at all. I'm not complaining, but it's a source of frustration because I would rather be a great guitar player than guitar builder. Proof that you can't often choose what you're good at, and that you should use your gifts so other people can use theirs.
November 23, 2024: Announcing DissoWare, a suite of family law software tools by yours truly.
