Don't use Spamhaus

Ah, the joys of running your own mail server - mine has bounced incoming mails for the last week. The cause: Having the Spamhaus blocklist in my acceptance chain. Their promise was that the data set is available for free for low-volume non-commercial users. Which my mail server is. Which they have now randomly decided my mail server is not. The number of queries they received from me in said week: 16.

Last week, another blocklist provider went full Leeroy Jenkins and classified every query as spam. Great stuff.

Three-dimensional text in a thumbnail

I couldn’t find a textual answer to this problem, so here it is: Let’s say you want to make a thumbnail from an existing picture and add three-dimensional text. That is: Something in the foreground (e.g. a face), then the text, then something in the background. The trick is to add a layer mask. Here are the steps for GIMP.

1. Open the picture
2. Add a text area with your text
3. With the text area still selected, go to Layer > Mask > Add Layer Mask > White (full opacity)
4. Use a black brush to hide parts of your text behind objects and a white brush to bring it back.

Seems simple enough once you know the steps…