Thing 5: Screenshots

For quite a few years, I've been using a rather old, cut-down, non-licensed (cut-down because it's non-licensed) version of Corel Paint Shop Pro to take screen shots. This has worked fine, but it's occurred to me from time to time that it would be good to find a completely open source equivalent. I was therefore very pleased to come (eventually) to Thing 5, and find LightShot recommended there.

I found it easy enough to install as an add-on to Firefox although I do have to confess that I wasted a good thirty seconds looking in the wrong part of the screen for the purple feather.

And so, I now have a new toy. What to do with it? Well, I could do with livening up my blog with an image or two. An image, perhaps, of a little bear... Googling "little bear", however, proved embarrassing. A whole page of primary-school cartoon images, all copyright. "Bear cub" was rather more promising:

A whole screenfull of little bears

But wait. I'm no wildlife photographer, and each one of those cute images is almost certainly copyrighted to someone who is. What I want - no, what I need - is an image that is firmly in the public domain. Wikimedia Commons has a few, labelled, in a most un-primary-school-like manner, as "Category: Ursidae (juvenile)".


The one I like is one up a tree. No author name is given, and it is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 3.0 Unported license and a GNU Free Documentation License. You can see the result on the left-hand side of my top page. I think it looks OK; if anyone reading this and who knows more about copyright (and copyleft) than I do suggests that I take it down, I will.

The constellation Ursa minor (Creative Commons image by BorgQueen)

Had I stuck to my first degree subject of Physics, I might well have landed up with an image like this one