Initial commit: HPR Knowledge Base MCP Server
- MCP server with stdio transport for local use - Search episodes, transcripts, hosts, and series - 4,511 episodes with metadata and transcripts - Data loader with in-memory JSON storage 🤖 Generated with [Claude Code](https://claude.com/claude-code) Co-Authored-By: Claude <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
153
hpr_transcripts/hpr3270.txt
Normal file
153
hpr_transcripts/hpr3270.txt
Normal file
@@ -0,0 +1,153 @@
|
||||
Episode: 3270
|
||||
Title: HPR3270: An Example of Using Layers
|
||||
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3270/hpr3270.mp3
|
||||
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 19:57:32
|
||||
|
||||
---
|
||||
|
||||
This is Haka Public Radio episode 3,274 Friday, 12th of February 2021, today's show is
|
||||
entitled An Example of New England and is part of the series Gimp, it is the 210th show
|
||||
of Ahuka, and is about 15 minutes long, and carries a clean flag.
|
||||
The summer is, creating a new head image for my WordPress site, New England and Gimp.
|
||||
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
|
||||
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org
|
||||
forward slash donate.
|
||||
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode
|
||||
in our Gimp series, and today the practicum arrives, we've been talking about various tools
|
||||
and techniques, and at some point you know the rubber needs to hit the road, so I thought this
|
||||
would be a really good time to put some of these things into practice, and having introduced
|
||||
layers, this is going to be really kind of the focus of this, but along with layers we're going
|
||||
to be using a number of other tools and techniques that we have talked about previously.
|
||||
Now I needed to have something to work on, you know, what's my starting point going to be here?
|
||||
So I decided to do something that had been on my mind for a while as a
|
||||
eventual project, and as developing a header image for my website, Ahuka Communications.
|
||||
Now I built this site using a WordPress theme that I like on the whole, but one thing I've
|
||||
always thought I would like to do is replace the built-in image, which does not reflect what the
|
||||
site is about in any way. The Ahuka Communications is a place where I have placed various tutorials
|
||||
mostly related to using software. I first developed some of these materials when I was the faculty
|
||||
development officer at Concordia University in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Some others I developed when I was
|
||||
assisting in courses at Smart Planet, which sadly is not anything at all like what it was then.
|
||||
The name was bought by someone and they turned it into something completely different.
|
||||
Then I developed my Libra Office series to use the techniques that I first developed for
|
||||
Microsoft Office and applied them to open source. And of course I'm now in the middle of a series on
|
||||
Gimp. So how can I create something that is going to reflect all of that? That's the challenge that
|
||||
I set myself. Now I'm going to first note that I am not really a programmer, and that means there
|
||||
are certain limits to what I can attempt. One limit that applies here is that I have an existing
|
||||
WordPress theme that I want to keep. So that means replacing the generic image it has with something new.
|
||||
And to do that most easily, I need to create a replacement with the same dimensions.
|
||||
If I go into the WordPress dashboard to appearance header, header image, I can see what I need.
|
||||
In this theme, and the theme that I have right now, if you're interested, is called Coraline.
|
||||
If you think that suggests I'm a fan of Neil Gaiman, you'd probably be correct.
|
||||
But it tells me there that the image is 990 by 180. So it's a wide but not terribly tall image.
|
||||
Well, it's a header image for a web page, so that kind of makes sense.
|
||||
And when I take a look here, WordPress says, hey, you know, change this if you want, but if I were you,
|
||||
I'd keep the same dimensions. And that does simplify everything. So that's what I'll do.
|
||||
Now, before opening up Gimp, the first thing I did was collect my assets.
|
||||
So I went to the Wikipedia Public Domain Image Resources page that I mentioned in the previous
|
||||
tutorial. I saw a listing there for a site. I'm going to think it's called Clicker, CLKER,
|
||||
which said it was a place for free in public domain images that can be used in open office.
|
||||
Okay, that sounded promising. I entered office computer as a search term found a few likely
|
||||
images. And you can see the individual images on my website, if you wish.
|
||||
And I've also linked to them. So you can download them yourself, if you wish.
|
||||
Then the next site I went to was one called Clip Arts by, and I did a similar search.
|
||||
But remember, I'm careful about licensing. So, you know, I want to know what the license is and
|
||||
that it's one that I'm comfortable with before I download and use anything.
|
||||
And with Clip Arts by, I saw some things I didn't like.
|
||||
Things that were say, well, it's okay for personal use. Well, is my website
|
||||
for stuff I'm doing on Hacker Public Radio is that personal use? I don't know.
|
||||
And then I saw like licenses I've never heard of before. And it sounds like, hey, we decided
|
||||
to write our own license. And as I said last time, and that's always something that I give a
|
||||
sideways eye to. So I left Clip Arts by without using anything. And then another site I found was
|
||||
called NeedPix.com. And that's seen more promising. It said all the images were public domain.
|
||||
Now, public domain technically or public domain in practice can be two different things.
|
||||
We talked about this last time. So if it's a Creative Commons Zero license, that is equivalent to
|
||||
public domain. And it's basically someone declaratively stating that, you know, I'm relinquishing all
|
||||
rights you can do what you want. So I went there and I found a few more images. And again,
|
||||
you can see the images or links to them on my web page. And all of these links are in the show
|
||||
notes. So you shouldn't have any trouble following up. So I found six images I liked.
|
||||
I did not worry about the size, but if I had the option of large versus small, I took the
|
||||
smaller size because I know what I'm, you know, I'm going to fit all of these into that header image.
|
||||
So they're not going to be very big. And I can trim and resize as necessary and gimp after all.
|
||||
That's the whole point of this exercise. I also went to Font Library, again, link in the show notes.
|
||||
We talked about this last time to grab an open font license font called Cooper Hewitt.
|
||||
I downloaded that. And with all my assets in hand, I was ready to begin.
|
||||
So in gimp, I started by opening up a new image with the 990 by 180 dimension.
|
||||
And then filled it with the blue green gradient for a pleasant but not too busy background.
|
||||
Now to do this, I went to Tools, Paint Tools, Gradient. I clicked on the top left corner to start
|
||||
and dragged it down to the bottom right corner. Then I needed to start using my assets.
|
||||
I had six downloaded images in a variety of sizes, some of which needed to be resized,
|
||||
and one of them cropped. Fortunately, the images all had transparent backgrounds,
|
||||
so I didn't need to strip out a solid background. Not that it is hard to do, okay? We talked before
|
||||
about color select. If you just click on the background, select that color. You can select everything
|
||||
that color and then click Delete. Now that occasionally is going to bite you in the butt if
|
||||
some of that color also shows up in the image that you want to keep. But you know, it's one way of
|
||||
doing these things. So I started by opening the images as six new layers. That way I could work
|
||||
with each image individually and move them around and resize them without any problems.
|
||||
Now to do this, I went to File, then Open as Layers. I selected all six of the images and each one
|
||||
is on its own individual layer. So you see Gimp really makes it easy to do this.
|
||||
And all of the layers have a transparent background, which is exactly what we want.
|
||||
Now we can use the i icon to turn off all but one of these layers and focus on just one. To make
|
||||
it easier, I did change a few file names to make them more understandable. Because some of these
|
||||
images I downloaded had, you know, file names that were like 12 digits long, which is pretty abstract.
|
||||
So I tried to give them names that reflected what it was. And the Gimp, when you open an image
|
||||
as a layer, will give the file name as the name of that layer. So if you first change your
|
||||
file names when you open as layers, it will be really easy to work with.
|
||||
So first layer had an LCD screen. It's not bad as it was, but it was in the exact center.
|
||||
So I used the move tool to grab it and move it to the right.
|
||||
Second image was too big, but it only had one section I wanted to use. So step number one, crop.
|
||||
Now I first opened the image separately to crop it, then opened the cropped image as a layer
|
||||
and deleted the previous one. What happens is that, you know, I tried cropping it
|
||||
in the layer and what it did is it cropped the entire image file I was working with, the whole Gimp
|
||||
file. And that's not what I wanted. I only wanted to crop that one particular image.
|
||||
So I just did it separately. Now in Gimp, you can have several things open at once,
|
||||
and it creates tabs on the top that let you switch back and forth between them, but there you
|
||||
can work with them separately. So I cropped the image and then copied it into the layer.
|
||||
So I continued with each image, resizing them to fit within my overall image border and made all
|
||||
of them visible at once when I was done. This way I could do any fine tuning necessary with further
|
||||
resizing and moving. And this is all so much easier when you have each thing on its own layer.
|
||||
And it was on to the font. Now I liked Cooper Hewitt, and as I said, it is licensed under the
|
||||
open font license, so I downloaded the zip file, extracted it, and then copied the font files folder
|
||||
to my tilde slash dot fonts folder. Now this is what I'm seeing in my Kabuntu machine.
|
||||
Last time I talked about installing fonts in different systems, et cetera. So
|
||||
if you're going to do this in Windows or Macintosh, you can figure that one out.
|
||||
But this is kind of a standard gimp way of doing things as you put it into the fonts folder.
|
||||
So I put it there and I opened a tab in the bottom dialog box, the one that already had patterns,
|
||||
gradients, and so on. By clicking the right hand to configure this tab button,
|
||||
then add tab, and then fonts. I then clicked refresh on the bottom,
|
||||
and my Cooper Hewitt fonts all appeared in my list. Now you may remember this as being similar to
|
||||
how we added patterns in a previous tutorial. Gimp is reasonably consistent in how it does things.
|
||||
Now to put it to use, I created two new layers for two phrases. One was a B-more productive,
|
||||
and the other was use software intelligently. Now I did not need to create a layer first,
|
||||
because when you use the text tool, Gimp automatically creates it on a text layer.
|
||||
In fact, if you created a layer first, you would just wind up with two layers,
|
||||
and only one, the one gimp created for you would actually have the text. Gimp is doing by default,
|
||||
in other words, what you should do anyway. So work with it, and not against it.
|
||||
I first selected my font from the list. I chose the Cooper Hewitt weight equals 712 italic.
|
||||
I put the text on the layers in 20 point size, and that in turn meant a little rearrangement
|
||||
of the images and resizing one of them. And I finally had a result that I was happy with.
|
||||
So I exported it, because that's the next thing. Right now, what I have is an XCF file,
|
||||
which is a Gimp Native file, and if I want to use it anywhere, I needed to export it,
|
||||
and I chose to do it as a PNG file. It's typically what I do.
|
||||
So now I have my image. I had to put it into my WordPress theme.
|
||||
So I went back to my WordPress dashboard, and went to appearance, header, and selected header image.
|
||||
Now, I'd already uploaded the new image to my media library. So all I had to do was
|
||||
click add new image, and then select it in my media library. Although I could have uploaded it
|
||||
at this point as well. It just happens that I already uploaded it.
|
||||
And when I did that, it replaced the previous image. Now, the one last step, you actually have to
|
||||
click the publish button. I did that, and now it graces every page on this site.
|
||||
Now, the individual images I used are all linked. There's links in the show notes. There's links
|
||||
on the page on my site. And also, if you go there, you can download the Gimp Native file,
|
||||
the XCF file, that has all of the layers, and see what that looks like.
|
||||
So, you know, this would be a good one to maybe follow along with, and see what we're talking about.
|
||||
Now, there is still more to learn about layers, so we shall continue. But for now, I think this
|
||||
is enough for a nice little tutorial. So, this is a hookup for Hacker Public Radio,
|
||||
signing off and reminding you to support free software. Bye-bye!
|
||||
You've been listening to Hacker Public Radio at Hacker Public Radio.
|
||||
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday, Monday through Friday.
|
||||
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HPR listener like yourself.
|
||||
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, and click on our contributing,
|
||||
to find out how easy it really is. Hacker Public Radio was founded by the Digital Dog
|
||||
Pound and the Infonomicon Computer Club, and it's part of the binary revolution at binrev.com.
|
||||
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on the website
|
||||
or record a follow-up episode yourself. Unless otherwise status, today's show is released on
|
||||
Creative Commons, Attribution, ShareLive, 3.0 license.
|
||||
Reference in New Issue
Block a user