How to create a highlight in rectangular or oval shape with GIMP

If you read this blog regularly, you may notice that I sometimes use a red rectangle to highlight important parts of images. In today's post, I will show you how to draw a rectangle and oval highlight with GIMP.

Suppose you got an image and you want to draw a rectangle around some part, the tool you need to use is the rectangle select tool, which is the first icon on the tool box.

Click on that icon and drag around the part you want to highlight and you will have something like this:

After that, click "Select" on the Menu bar and select "Border":

Then choose the width of the border that you like, I normally use 2 pixels for the width:

And you will have something like this afterward:

And the final step is to fill the border with a color, the tool to use is Bucket Fill Tool.

 Just click on the icon, select the color then fill the border. And here is the final result:

Similarly, you can draw an oval highlight by using the Ellipse select tool to get this:

Codethink launches little Linux ARM servers with 8 quad-core CPUs per node

Codethink, a Linux consulting company headquartered in the UK, has launched a new ARM-based linux dedicated server product called the Baserock Slab. Each individual node includes eight quad-core ARM CPUs. Two nodes can fit in a single 1U slot, for a total of 64 cores per rack unit.

The company says that it can fit up to 76 nodes in a full-size rack, for a total of 2,432 cores, without requiring specialized power or cooling infrastructure. The eight System on Module (SoM) boards in each Slab node use Marvell Armada XP ARMv7 chips clocked at 1.33GHz and have 2GB of RAM. The servers are compatible with Codethink’s own custom Linux environment and Debian. The company’s website says that support for additional distributions, including Ubuntu, will arrive soon.

ARM linux dedicated hosting servers like the Baserock Slab offer high density computing with relatively low power consumption compared to conventional x86 servers. Codethink markets the Baserock Slab as an option for energy-efficient cloud computing, ARM build infrastructure, or server appliances. There are a number of products from other vendors that offer even higher density, such as HP’s Redstone server platform, which packs 288 quad-core Calxeda SoCs in a single 4U chassis.

Such configurations are potentially useful for handling certain kinds of heavily distributed workloads, but it’s still not clear whether they are truly cost-effective in common cloud usage scenarios.

From Arstechnica