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diff --git a/published/2015-review.txt b/published/2015-review.txt
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+For the desktop Linux user 2015 was a banner year. There were major updates for nearly every single desktop available, launches of brand new desktops, even an impressive new distro that's forging its own path. Popular software packages also saw impressive updates -- like GIMP, <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/05/19/inkscape_review/">Inkscape</a> and LibreOffice to name just a few -- and new applications continue to emerge seemingly everyday. 
+
+Sadly, the year ended on a tragic note with the death of Ian Murdock, co-creator of Debian (the name Debian is a combination of Ian and Murdock's girlfriend at the time, Deborah Lynn). Murdock's impact on the Linux world was massive (ever use apt-get? Thank Murdock), indeed there would be no Linux as we know it without him, and he will be missed. 
+
+Though it ended darkly, much of the rest of 2015 was lit up by some impressive releases. Still, despite all the good news for desktop users in the last year one star shined perhaps a little less brightly this year -- Ubuntu.
+
+For the second year running Ubuntu, arguably the most widely used Linux distro, had "meh" kind of year. The distro did stick to its twice-yearly release schedule -- which is actually impressive, try to recall the last time Ubuntu missed a release date -- with two solid releases that fixed bugs and introduced a couple minor new features each time. By and large though desktop Ubuntu was a bit boring.
+
+And Ubuntu Mobile didn't fare a whole lot better. While there are a couple devices now on the market, Ubuntu-based mobile devices feel, if not vaporware anymore, at least like perpetual beta-ware. 
+
+Ubuntu also fell well short of its stated goal to have 200 million users by the end of the year. Speaking at a developer summit back in May 2011, Ubuntu creator Mark Shuttleworth said "[Our] goal is 200 million users of Ubuntu in four years." Alas the stats currently on Canonical's <a href="https://insights.ubuntu.com/about">website</a> currently claim a mere 40 million users. 
+
+Still, if you time travelled back to 1993 and told early Debian users that eventually 40 million people would be using a downstream project, to say nothing of Debian itself, no one would believe you and you'd probably be laughed right off the mailing list. Which is to say, Ubuntu might have missed its goal, but its efforts are impressive nonetheless. 
+
+Luckily for users outside the Ubuntu ecosystem 2015 had an embarrassment of riches.
+
+Fedora found its groove again with Fedora Next and turned out its most impressive <a href="http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/11/17/fedora_23_review/">releases</a> to date. More than just a great release though, the Fedora Project feels re-energized, like Fedora suddenly remembered what it was and where it was going. That's great news for Fedora fans, but it's also great news for RHEL and its many derivatives. 
+
+OpenSUSE had a similarly exciting year with its new Leap project. The core of Leap is SUSE Enterprise Linux, but the userland applications are maintained by openSUSE. In other words, Leap delivers the best of both worlds -- the stable underpinnings of an enterprise distro with the up-to-date packages of openSUSE. It also means that the openSUSE project doesn't have to develop all that low level stuff and can focus on the things that make openSUSE different than SUSE.
+
+Linux Mint put out of series of impressive releases this year and, thanks in part to its decision to stick with Ubuntu 14.04 throughout its release cycle has been able to focus on its Cinnamon desktop without worrying about whatever changes Ubuntu was making under the hood (notice a theme here?). In fact Cinnamon is arguably the best desktop available right now, an impressive feat considering the size of its development team and that Cinnamon is not yet four years old.
+
+Distros weren't the only exciting things happening in Linux this year. Linux desktops had a banner year as well. The KDE project released a major update and introduced Plasma 5 and the new Breeze UI. With its flat, "modern" look, Plasma 5's Breeze gives much of KDE a refreshing new feel that makes it look significantly less like a desktop that just crawled out of 1995. Under the hood there's been a lot of effort devoted to speeding things up with OpenGL-based graphics as well.
+
+The GNOME project did not have such an exciting year, but it did continuing to roll out its suite of integrated core applications, with a couple new ones like Calendar and Maps. 
+
+Even the perpetually unexciting Xfce desktop managed to release its most significant update in many years. 
+
+About the only major desktop without a major update this year was LXDE, which is in the middle of a massive re-write to the Qt framework. Look for LXQT to emerge later this year.
+
+2015 was also the year Linux phones took the market by storm. Just kidding. 
+
+Last year I predicted 2015 would either be the year we got Linux on mobile or it would be the year we got a mobile addendum to the longstanding "Year of Linux" joke. Given that we did actually get a couple of mobile devices, but that those devices remain obscure and used primarily by a handful of hard core Linux fans, I would say 2015 was the year that proved "Year of Linux" jokes will never die. 
+
+Sorry fellow Linux fans, there will never be a Year of the Linux anything, so you can throw those phone dreams out the window. Sure, there are Linux phones but they're never taking anything by storm. Unless you count Android, but that would be like counting ATM users as Linux users. Then again, many, perhaps most, ATM users *are* Linux users and that it already has been the year of Linux many times over. Linux is just buried beneath other things, quietly powering the digital world. In that sense, Canonical might have not have lived up to its lofty user goal, but Linux and open source in general already did a long time ago. 
+
+
diff --git a/published/gimp-bit-depth.jpg b/published/gimp-bit-depth.jpg
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diff --git a/published/gimp292-review.txt b/published/gimp292-review.txt
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+The Gimp project recently announced GIMP 2.9.2, which, despite the relatively obscure version number, represents a major leap forward for the popular image editing suite.
+
+This latest release is still considered a preview, but the features here will form the base of the stable release GIMP 2.10. In the mean time I've found the 2.9.2 to be very stable, though you will need to compile it yourself in most cases. 
+
+Why bother compiling? This release has a lot of under the hood changes, particularly it largely finishes up the move to the Generic Graphics Library, better know as GEGL. GEGL is GIMP's "new" image processing engine and the project has been slowly incorporating GEGL code for quite a few releases. In fact, while the GEGL in GIMP still gets referred to as "new," the project itself began life in 2000 and GIMP has been slowly porting over to GEGL since 2007.
+
+GIMP 2.6 (which came way back 2008) featured a few GEGL-based color grading tools and an option to use GEGL "filters," which were label as "experimental". With 2012's GIMP 2.8 GEGL made its way into "projection—flattened representation of stacked layers".
+
+Now the upcoming GIMP 2.10 will use GEGL for pretty much everything.
+
+That means GIMP 2.9.2 has support for high bit depth image (16/32bit per color channel processing). There's even an option for 64bit images though that appears to be a feature planned for the future. The GEGL support also means GIMP now has basic support for the OpenEXR high dynamic range imaging image file format. In addition to OpenEXR, GIMP 2.10 has been upgraded to read and write 16/32bit per color channel data from PNG, TIFF, PSD, and FITS files. 
+
+The other big news in this release is the new on-canvas preview for image filters. In past versions of GIMP most filters only offered a very small preview window within the filter dialog box. It works, but it often means you have to stop interacting with the filter to zoom and pan around your image to see what the effect is doing. With 2.10 many filters will be able to apply their effect to your image in the background in real time. 
+
+According to the <a href="http://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Hacking:Porting_filters_to_GEGL">GIMP wiki</a>, 57 plugins have been ported to become GEGL operations, with another 27 in progress. Another 37 plugins still need to be ported. Unfortunately some photographer favorites like Unsharp Mask, Gaussian blur and Red Eye Removal -- all of which become much more usable with real-time previews -- are still works in progress (if you use the <a href="https://launchpad.net/~otto-kesselgulasch/+archive/ubuntu/gimp-edge">bleeding edge PPA for Ubuntu</a> you'll find that Gaussian and Unsharp Mask have been updated to GEGL). Still, strictly by the numbers, the majority of GIMP's filters now offer live previews.
+
+Third party filters are a different story. Most have not yet been ported to GEGL. For example the incredibly powerful (and very popular) <a href="http://gmic.eu/">G'MIC plugin</a> has not been ported to GEGL (and probably won't be any time soon given the fact that G'MIC is a stand-alone framework used in quite a few applications). G'MIC does, however, work just fine in GIMP 2.9.2.
+
+The work on the GEGL port also has another great fringe benefit in that downsizing operations -- that is, for example, downscaling an image for the web, now produces higher quality results. There's another new feature handy for images bound for the web: basic support for  reading and exporting WebP images. 
+
+WebP is Google's proposed image format that claims to produce smaller files at similar resolution to JPGs. So far it's only supported in the Chrome and Opera web browsers. GIMP's WebP support is missing a few features, like the ability to embed ICC profiles or metadata and support for WebP's animation feature, but given that the primary reason to use WebP is to reduce file size, stripping metadata is arguably a feature, not a bug.
+
+Completing the move to GEGL also puts some exciting new features on the GIMP roadmap, including the holy grail of image editing -- non-destructive editing. You'll have to wait for GIMP 3.2 before non-destructive editing lands, but in the mean time the high bit depth support and filter previews feature already make all the work (and users waiting) for GEGL feel well worth it.
+
+GIMP 2.9.2 also features a completely re-written color management plugin. It offers quite a few new features and much better color management support. It means that GIMP no longer completely fails with combining images with different color spaces. To go along with the high bit depth support GIMP now uses LittleCMS v2, which minimizes color fidelity loss when you convert images between the high and low bit depths.
+
+Like all odd-numbered releases, GIMP 2.9.2 is considered a technical preview. Unlike some past previews though, I've found this one to be rock solid in my testing. That said, don't try to do production work in this release. GIMP has a "when it's ready" release policy, but much of what's due in 2.10 is <a href="http://wiki.gimp.org/wiki/Roadmap#GIMP_2.10">already in 2.9.2</a> so hopefully an official release of 2.10 won't be too far in the future.
+
+screenshots:
+
+gimp-bit-depth.jpg Processing high bit depth OpenEXR images in GIMP 2.9.2
+gimp-filters.jpg Live, full image previews with GEGL filters in GIMP 2.9.3
diff --git a/published/mint173/mint173-desktop.jpg b/published/mint173/mint173-desktop.jpg
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+The Linux Mint team recently turned out a new release, the last release in the Mint 17.x line: Linux Mint 17.3, nicknamed "Rosa".
+
+Linux Mint 17.3 will be the final Mint release based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and is the culmination of work that began nearly two years ago with Mint 17. With the stability of an Ubuntu LTS release as the base system, Linux Mint has had eighteen months of development time to focus on the things that make Mint, Mint.
+
+The result is one of the best Linux desktops you've ever used.
+
+Linux Mint come in two primary flavors, the flagship Cinnamon desktop and the lightweight MATE desktop designed to keep the dream of GNOME 2.x alive (KDE, Xfce and other desktops are also available for Mint). Both are quite capable and provide a more traditional desktop experience than what you'll get with the latest GNOME Shell or Ubuntu Unity releases, but Cinnamon is where Mint really shines.
+
+Linux Mint 17.3 ships with Cinnamon 2.8, which is notable for all the work that's gone into Cinnamon's suite of tool bar applets. The sound applet has been completely revamped for this release, adding track information and media controls, which makes it possible to control everything from a single spot. The applet acts as an all-in-one control center for whichever app you're using to play music -- whether that's local files with Banshee (Mint's default music player) or through a streaming service like Spotify.
+
+It sounds like a relatively small change, but controlling the playback of music is something you probably do dozens of times a day. These small changes are indicative of the level of polish you'll find in this release. 
+
+Much of the polish in Cinnamon revolves around things you will likely never notice explicitly. Playing music is just dead simple, you open an app, play something, send it to the background and control it with the applet. The same can be said for the power applet, which now tracks the battery levels of any connected devices (for example, a Bluetooth mouse). Again it's a tiny feature, but an invaluable one when you need it.
+
+This is in fact the overall experience of the Cinnamon desktop at this point. Cinnamon's level of refinement makes it fade into the background so that you can simply work (and play).
+
+Nemo, Cinnamon's default file manager has some similar improvements, including support for an old Windows favorite "quick rename". Now you can rename files in Nemo by clicking them, waiting a bit and clicking them again. This one is actually off by default, but you can enable it by heading to Nemo's Preferences, selecting the Behavior tab and checking the option to "Click twice with a pause in between to rename items".
+
+Again, a small but useful feature that solves one of those (potential) paper cut problems you encounter every day.
+
+The MATE desktop is similarly polished, though not a lot has changed in this release. MATE is not quite as slick as Cinnamon, but then its role is different -- MATE is designed first and foremost for those who still want the GNOME 2.x experience. To be fair though, at this point MATE is leaps and bounds beyond GNOME 2.
+
+This release sees MATE continuing to expand its window compositor options with new support for Compton, Compiz and even Openbox if you want a really stripped down (but fully functional) desktop. And while Compiz support for "wobbly" windows arrived in the previous release, it's now turned on by default. Take that 2004. Slightly more pragmatic is MATE's new support for two and three finger clicks -- as right and middle click respectively -- on track pads that support it.
+
+Both Cinnamon and MATE benefit from some lower level changes in this release, including continuing refinements to the already well done Mint software update and sources system. Linux Mint 17.3 adds a feature to Software Sources that will helpfully offer to scan the available mirrors to find you the fastest connection. It's even smart enough to detect your location and start its speed tests with mirrors near you. Of course if you use any kind of proxy connection this might not work quite as expected. Still, I've tested this with four different installs now, from a multitude of locations through holiday travels and every time Mint has been able to more than double my download speeds thanks to updating the mirrors. 
+
+Mint's Update Manager has a new feature that also checks your mirrors to make sure they're up-to-date and will let you know if the mirror or your local cache of it is corrupted. The updated Driver Manager now alerts you to the open source status of all your drivers and can even help out with the horrors of installing Broadcom drivers when it detects a Broadcom wifi chipset.
+
+Under the hood improvements in this release include more tweaks to the HiDPI detection. The Linux Mint blog mentions TV screens over HDMI as the main benefit, but this is also the first release where Mint's HiDPI support has worked for me in a VMWare virtual machine.
+
+It's also worth noting that this release has been rock solid in my testing; Cinnamon is not crashed once in over a month of use on several different hardware and VM configuration.
+
+The Linux Mint blog has full details on how to <a href="http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2972">upgrade</a> from various previous releases.
+
+This release is the last before Mint updates its base system to sync with the upcoming Ubuntu 16.06 LTS. 
+
+When Linux Mint does update its base system there will be some nice new things available thanks to Ubuntu updates over the last few releases -- there's a "<a href="https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Kernel/Reference/ZFS">technology preview</a>" version of ZFS support, systemd (there goes one of the last holdouts) and Python 3 under the hood among other improvements. How many of these will have an impact on the next release of Mint remains to be seen, but at the very least a newer kernel will be welcome.
+
+With the level of polish already present in this release, all the Mint team really needs to do is make sure Cinnamon works with 16.04 and they'll be ahead of just about every other distro out there. What comes after that so far is a mystery, though a <a href="http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2975">recent post</a> on the Mint blog promises "a new look and feel" when Linux Mint 18 arrives later this year.
+
+screenshots:
+
+mint173-desktop.jpg The stock Cinnamon desktop in Linux Mint 17.3.
+mint173-music.jpg Controlling Banshee with Cinnamon's new music applet.
+mint173-mirror.jpg The first time you open Software Sources Mint will helpfully check to find the fastest mirror.
+