Today I tried to create some nice icons for twitter and for "bookmark this page", one with a bird, two with t's and one with a star inside. Especially the star was kind of difficult, as the icon was 20x20 pixels. If you try to center the star by it's top peak you are either one pixel too much on the left or the right side, as you need an odd number of pixels to do so(if the star's most top pixel should be centered).
While trying to draw a star manually I occasionally used Google for "gimp star" and found the Gfig-Filter, which can create some really nifty shapes using vectors - and a "create-a-star" button was there, too. Currently there is one major drawback: The lack of a zoom function. I tried using Kmag(KDE Magnifier) and it was useful, but if you try drawing on 20 px, the mouse cursor covers larger parts of the image. Luckily there's already a ticket on GIMP's bug tracker :)
The result was acceptable, but I had to solve the centering problem and make some corrections. The solution was quite simple: I took the raw shape of the star and made the peaks 2 pixels instead of one, so its peaks got round.
After breakfast I went to my grandparents and because these visits sometimes can take longer than expected, I took the book with me which I recently bought in Munich. It's called "Limit" by Frank Schätzing and only costed about 26 Euro for 1300 pages. I only read ~150 of them until now and - truely- this book is awesome! The main plot takes place on 2025 and is about harvesting He-3 for power generation using nuclear fusion. As always, the facts Schätzing presents in his book are very well researched(plus a realistic extra candy of science fiction like in "The Swarm" and respects most recent political developments like Barack Obama supporting green energy.
This book is really awesome! Currently no english translation seems to be available at amzon.com so I could link to it, too bad.
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