I, for one, am glad to see the back of April 2012. Not only did we see the wettest month for some considerable time in many parts of the country, but those of you who know me personally, will know that I also had a major family tragedy with which to contend. I am therefore looking to May to help make amends for a truly miserable month.

There were a few things, however, that came out of April that are worthy of note. The first being the launch of Ubuntu 12.04 which, I believe, has managed to convince one of my friends of 50 years to admit that Linux might be a good thing! I have also learned how to make (albeit somewhat dodgy) tutorials for Gimp and Inkscape, which I have posted earlier on this blog. For this reason, I took a bit of time off tonight to produce an Ubuntu wallpaper in celebration. I hope that this will inspire some of our readers to give Inkscape a go so that we can start a small gallery of our work. I offer this as my ‘opener’ for, I hope, many more contributions of this type:-

Ubuntu Wallpaper

All the techniques used to produce this 1600 x 900 pixel wallpaper have been covered by my tutorials on this blog so, theoretically, you can all produce something similar (or, hopefully better) by giving my tutorials a go.

We have a lot lined up for our readers in May, including:-

• Rock Challenge stuff from Cockermouth School ( and others),
• More information on the Glasgow Kettlebells event,
• Results from our ‘sponsored’ team at the Crimond Stock Car races,
• Information on the Aberdeen Ice Hockey scene,
• More competitions in conjunction with Waves Radio,
• More of ‘Billy’s Bargains’ (hopefully as good as the pen drives from last month),
• Tutorials from yours truly on Gimp use,
• Postcards from around the world (I am going on holiday),
• Much more of our usual features.

If anyone else would like to help with contributions, please make yourself known to us, as we would like to keep this blog lively and relevant to our readers’ interests.

I am also waiting for contributions coming in for inclusion in our ‘user clip art galleries’. All contributions, no matter what their quality, would be gratefully received and would help to contribute to the community nature of this blog.

A last appeal to all of our readers in North East Scotland to help support our radio show on Fridays by entering our prize competitions. We intend to be offering some ‘Ping’ polo shirts for our “Where’s Waves?’ contest this week, so be sure to tune in to 101.2 FM at 6 o’clock on Friday!!