mintCast wallpaper challenge voting has begun!

[Rizla]

Hi guys!

I didn't see it mentioned anywhere in the forum, but the mintCast wallpaper challenge voting has started.

http://www.mintcast.org/2010/02/mintcas ... -voting-2/

If you fancy voting why not pop over?

There's some great papers, some have spent ages on their works - I'd like to see some of these wallpaper styles in the next official mint release - what do you think?

Good luck to all!

[dlkreations]

wow, some of those are amazing... it's so difficult to choose one.

[Aevum]

wow, some of those are amazing... it's so difficult to choose one.

They really are.. I'll have an hard time on piking one!

[COlsen]

wow, some of those are amazing... it's so difficult to choose one.

Good news, then ... you don't have to limit your pick to one. You can vote for your top 5 favorites.

[Oscar799]

Just had a quick look,
Very high standard- picking the best 5 will not be easy

[AfterEight]

Very high standard- picking the best 5 will not be easy

Second that. This is going to take some time and a lot of thought.
Luckily we can pick 5, any less would result in a headache of major proportions.
A big thumbs up to all the entrants. All winners in my book.

Just a heads up, you might want to write down the numbers of the wallpapers you like, because every time the page reloads they sort themselves into a different order !!

Now, where is my thinking cap ? and, oh yes, my best friend Talisker

AfterEight

[Husse]

PM me and I'll make a post in the forum if you - the podcast team - wants an announcement

[exploder]

I took a look and some of those wallpapers are extremely nice.

[Rizla]

Don't get me wrong, I love competitions and the opportunity to show off my works - but when there's a prize invloved it can bring out the worst in some. One of the sad things regarding this kind of wallpaper competition, for one, it's not how good necessarily your image is - art is subjective as we all know anyway. But I wish the votes we're from an independant group from mintCast, as if you've got plenty of freinds online, you can get them to vote for you - Just think of all those that can do it through their solial networking sites. Makes me a bit sad...

What do you guys think?

Rizla.

[tower]

Yes but remember there are two prizes and we can vote for 5 different wallpapers...
To be honest there are move than 5 I would love to have on my desktop!

[Oscar799]

I've noticed in the last few hours the lead has been swapping back and forth between 3 entries,it seems the competition is tight.
I'm a non-partisan observer of this,I have no idea who has entered,I only know that I didn't.

[tower]

I didn't know there was an area that displayed the number of votes, the wallpaper page displays the images in a random order each time the page is viewed, so as not to favour any one entrant

[Oscar799]

This is the page I was looking at:-
http://www.mintcast.org/2010/02/mintcas ... -voting-2/

[Rizla]

I don't think anyone got my point - what I was saying is that if you told some freinds (they don't have to be using mint, could be your granny or friends on facebook), they can go online to mintcast and place a vote for your image. All that is required is that you either show them which is your image, or descibe it to them. Either way, like I said, if you've plenty of mates online, then there's nothing stopping you raising your rank.

This seems a bit unfair as those that work this one out can win the competition without having to worry about the odd few votes they get per chance from mint users/mintCast listeners.

Having the images judged by the mintCast team, would a) allow mintCast to select the image that they actually would prefer to use, and b) allow the competition to be completely fair to everyone.

Simple re-ordering the images before you vote doesn't really do much if you know which image you intend to vote for.

Similarly even if you don't have loads of freinds to do it for you, but have access to more than one PC, home, work, friends house, internet cafe etc you can increase your votes - I'm assuming that the single vote per person is an IP address - by using an anonymous proxy site this could also be an avenue.

Additionally those that would do this, could vote for wallpapers that aren't doing too well so as not to bump themselves off the top.

It might seem that I have a devious mind, but I'm not the only one that's mentioned this to me, so I'm not alone - maybe we're all devious!

Rizla

As I have several images in the list, I could have done this myself - but to me the point of the competition isn't just to win a laptop, but to display some of what I can do digitally - in some way that's more important, I have a PC anyway.

[tower]

Yes, I see your point of view, from someone who entered the competition and hopes to win, but don't forget the purpose of the mintCast challenge, to get more folks aware of mintCast.

Given that as the goal, then getting a lot of strangers to visit the mintCast site is a win and maybe more so than a panel mintCasters judging the contest?!

The rules seemed very open to me, there was no entry code in the podcast to prove you were a listener.
There is no requirement that an entrant has even used Mint or Linux software to create their entry.

I used the contest to give me a reason to learn to use GIMP starting from scratch, it has been a steep learning curve but I am surprised at what it can do! (Though it has it's own frustrating idiosyncrasies)

[Rizla]

Hey tower,

Don't take me the wrong way, as I said before in my posts - after all I started this post to advertise the competition had begun as there was no mention of it in the forum. I was hoping more mint users would get involved with mintCast by being more aware of the competition and head over to mintcast.org and maybe with that download some pod casts.

I've not had much time to listen to all the pod casts so far as I'm new to mint (2 months), but they seem like a good bunch of guys and the topics can be interesting and amusing sometimes, and I think it's great that there is something specific to mint - lets face it, it's called "mint"-Cast.

Although I doubt that those that aren't actually using linux or mint will be that interested in the mintCast. It's good publicity, but only for mint users in the end. If you're a linux user on other distros, you'll probably be listening to TuxRadars pod casts. Personally I think the "mint" in the title doesn't help mintCast if they want to get listeners from the rest of the community to listen. I could be wrong, but that's my opinion

You mentioned that the rules seemed very open, no entry code in the pod cast to prove you were a listener - but I think that would have been fairer and maybe an incentive for those to listen to the casts so they could take part - how secure it would me though, I'm not too sure.

It's nice to hear of other users getting into Gimp, I've used Photoshop for the last 15 years and moving over to the Gimp was a bit daunting and to begin with I wasn't sure whether it was up to scratch - the floating panels for one taking up valuable working space was one real annoyance. I also missed the way things are selected in the layers, but when I realised you can float the selections, I was a lot happier. Don't forget to check out Inkscape and Blender!

But all-in-all it's a great piece of software and very capable, plus in the next few years there's going to be a lot of additions/changes which I'm really looking forward to.

Good luck with the comp!

Rizla.

[tower]

Good points about the podcast and TuxRadar is one of the best with good audio quality

It also has a good selection of topics in each episode and the only problem is the usual one, in jokes that seem to exclude the listener!

This is my first time with graphics other than resizing images for Ebay! I have never used Photoshop so cannot compare it with the GIMP.
I looked at Blender tutorials but it is very scary! The work you produced with it is very impressive though!

As for voting, because the scores are not known, tactical voting on any individual wallpaper would not really work - how would you know that the wallpaper had a high or low score?

[rothgar]

I thought I would chime in on what my hopes were for the challenge.
The contests number one goal was to get more people to know about the site/podcast and hopefully through that Linux Mint (or the other way around). Either way, the podcast is trying to not only promote Linux in general, we just typically prefer Linux Mint, but we also are trying to be helpful to beginners to Linux and Linux related software.
As for the contest, I myself wanted to learn more about GIMP and also wanted to allow other people to dive in and get started using it. I felt like creating a wallpaper was an easy way to play around with filters and rendering. The prizes was just incentive mainly because I didn't feel like we would get very many entries without some incentive. I was probably wrong after seeing how many entries we got and how many of them went beyond my expectations. I am very pleased with the entries we got and so far the voting page has been viewed over 3000 times so I feel like even with friends the voting should be pretty balanced. I expect that to be over 5000 views by the time the voting ends because we haven't even announced the voting on the podcast yet. I tried to be as fair as possible with randomly loading the entries as well as renaming all of the entries to generic names but I realize if someone wanted to cheat in the competition they very well could. The only other option was to require logins to vote but then I felt we wouldn't get as many votes and results could still be skewed with users that know each other.
I hope that helps explain where we were coming from and let me know if you have any other questions/concerns.
Good luck in the contest!

[Rizla]

Hi tower,

Yet again, I've only listened to a few TuxRadar's (as I'm on dialup), the ones that are usually on Linux Format magazine (good magazine by the way). So I can't comment on the in jokes having only listened to a few, but some of the topics have been quite interesting, even to a new linux user.

Glad you've made the break to start doing graphics, it's a great pastime and can be very rewarding!

Thanks for your comments on the quality of my work, but it's not that impressive lol! But give me a bit more time, and you never know

One tip I would suggest is try and get a good variety of fonts, it always helps to get inspiration from the available styles that fonts give. Additionally trying to work out how others do designs is always fun.

Blender is going through a transformation right now, the interface is changing big time, which should appeal to new users a great deal. Currently it's in the Alpha stage and can be downloaded from www.blender.org (look for the Alpha logo). It's pretty stable at this point even though it's an alpha, the beta is due in the next month or so, but there's not as much documentation on it right now. Most 2.9 tutorials work just fine, but as I say the interface is different, so might be a little confusing.

If you've a high speed connection, then your sorted with rich tutorials which can be much easier to follow than HTML ones. Wiki also has great documentation on blender, and just like Gimp, there are good books available - always nice to a have a printed manual!

With regards to the tactical voting with mintCast, at the base of the mintCast wallpaper comp there is a link to see the current votes so far.


While I'm here, Hi rothgar!

I haven't meant to sound negative towards your pod casts, or your competition. It's a great pod cast, and I look forward to many more!

I hope the comp gets you more listeners, but I can imagine that for some they thought they might have a good chance with their design, and if it's down to people getting votes with there mates helping, it will be a bit disappointing for them I imagine, especially if they in-turn have to resort to such measures - if they can't and they know there work is good, maybe it's worse.

But hey, at least they get to show off their work, so in the end it's no bad thing.

Some of those design would make nice mint wallpapers, albeit with a mint logo instead!

Thanks for getting in touch with the mintCast listeners/competition entrees and explaining your expectations and your thoughts - such a good community we have here

Rizla.

[tower]

Anther benefit of the podcast competition is that it shows Mint users that they can contribute to a community distro - without being a programming wizard!