How to use and customise gradients in Adobe Illustrator

Illustrator Tip

Quite often getting gradients to do exactly what you want them to do can be a challenge. In this short article, I’ll cover gradients within Adobe Illustrator but the principles can be used in other Adobe products. First up, what is a gradient? It is the smooth transition from one colour to another colour or more colours. This is done mathematically by apply some of the target colour to the starting colour in the pixels between those colours. A gradient starting out as black and ending as white will go

Secure Ubuntu connection via AWS authentication token using CLI and FTP

PuTTY and FileZilla

This is a bit of a specialist article that shows how to do something in specific circumstances rather than try to cover all eventualities but hopefully it will be useful outside of the narrow example for those that need help. In this article I set up a secure connection to a Linux server running Ubuntu 14.04.4 LTS on Amazon Web Services (AWS) with authentication through a token. The connection to the server examples is shown from both a Command Line Interface (CLI) and a File Transfer Protocol (FTP) client. I’m