Linux Wacom Tablet

So for Christmas my wife got a me a Bamboo Wacom Tablet.  I wanted it for photo-editing and digital drawing.  (I want to make my own comic strip/book thing)  So after we got back from our Christmas break I managed to get it working by following the tutorial here: Ubuntu Forums. 

When I first got it running the extra buttons on the pad wouldn't work, but I think I had made a typo when I entered the commands to make them work.  The next big thing for me was to get the pressure sensitivity and the eraser to work.  A quick Blingo search took me to the Linux Wacom site where they mentioned setting the preferences within GIMP itself.  A few mouse clicks later and now my Wacom Tablet knows that the other end of the pen is used for erasing, and pressure sensitivity works as well.  I am really thankful for the smart people who made this, and those people who made it work for Linux.

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Python

As mentioned in my purpose post, I will be hopefully teaching myself (read: reading books about and asking for help from others on forums) the Python language. I believe that it is technically a scripting language. I'm opting to learn it over (or just before) Perl because it has a more rigorous syntax and promotes well written code with comments. I also want to use it because it is cross-platform so I should be able to write programs/scripts for most operating systems (Windows, Linux, Mac OS). I would eventually like to write or improve a program for my gaming group. We'll see how well that goes. For now I'm starting by looking at tutorials...for non-programmers, because even though I've had a few years of using Microsoft's Visual Studio (Visual Basic Language), a semester of C++ in college, and some experience with HTML (which while not 'programming' is still learning to use a language so I count it), it has been a while since I have done any of them.

So I'll be looking here to start.

As well I'm thinking about picking up a python book or two from Amazon.

Purpose

It's good to have a purpose when writing a blog, or really doing anything for that matter. So the purpose of this blog is really quite simple, it is to keep track of my trials and errors (probably have a lot of the latter) as I experiment with teaching myself about Linux, Python, and whatever technology related adventures I come up with. I envision this as being a repository of information for how I have been learning. So it will likely have snippets of code, How-To's (probably How-Not-To also), and links to sites that I have generally found useful.