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darktable

May 15, 2025

Adobe's move to distribute their photography tools with a monthly subscription alienated many users who started looking for alternatives. darktable and Raw Therapee are the open source applications commonly suggested as "Lightroom alternatives". After a quick evaluation period, I decided to start using darktable (all small letters, no caps!) for my photo processing workflow. This coincided with the long-awaited release of darktable 5.0. Not having used Lightroom ever, I can't comment on how good darktable is as a Lightroom replacement, but I do know that it is a very capable raw file developer and an adequate image library management tool. darktable is surely a quirky program, from the sometimes rough around the edges UI to the complexity and overlapping of the processing modules. However, if you overcome the quite steep learning curve, it proves to be very usable and powerful.

microStudio

April 13, 2025

microStudio is a very nice web-based game creation system. It's a code-first system, programmed either in its own language (microScript) or in Javascript, Lua or Python. The games generated are by design low to medium resolution. 3D support is minimal. The engine creates HTML5 games and these can be packaged for various platforms (Web obviously, Windows, Android, iOS etc).

I like microStudio a lot and have created various games with it. Three of them (Letter for you, Codebreaker and Pop and Order) have also been published on Google Play for Android. Here is my profile on microStudio's page.

Kick-Off Association

April 1, 2025

If you were around at the age of 16-bit computers, namely Amiga and Atari ST, chances are you know about the legendary Kick Off 2, probably the best football game ever.
Kick Off Gathering is the place were lovers of the game lurk and organise tournaments on original hardware even today, almost 35 years later! If you get there, don't forget to check out the KOA Statistics Institute