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Now that I’ve released the next version of what is now called Tracks, the awful realisation has hit me that my icon designing skills leave everything to be desired. The icons I made for Tracks are grey blobs. All of them. So I’m on the hunt for some replacements. I’d like some 16x16 pixel icons for edit, delete, show note and perhaps also a ‘done’ bullet point (a tick or checkmark in a circle).

IconExperience and IconBuffet both have beautiful royalty-free icons which would be ideal, but as I’m not making any money out of Tracks, I can’t really afford their packages. Also, I only need a few of the icons, so a full package wouldn’t be very good value for me. Does anyone know of any free (as in beer and speech) sources of suitable icons? Or does anybody feel like contributing something of their own? Tracks is GNU GPL licensed now, so I can offer you only the undying gratitude and rapt admiration of everyone who has to peer at my blobs and wonder, “Is that an edit symbol, or a delete symbol? Uh-oh.”

This purchase was inspired by seeing Gillian Welch and her partner David Rawlings play an acoustic set on BBC4, although I was slightly familiar with Gillian’s work from the soundtrack of ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?’. Their virtuoso acoustic guitar playing and gorgeous hamonies blew me away, and—thankfully—the album didn’t disappoint.

Some of the tracks (for example, ‘Red Clay Halo’ and ‘I Want To Sing That Rock and Roll’) have a strong bluegrass sound, which might be off-putting if you don’t like that style of music, but there’s quite a variety of sounds on the album. I love ‘Revelator’, which is sweetly mournful, and ‘Elvis Presley Blues’, which glues itself in your mind for days afterwards. Given that Gillian and David are life partners as well as singing ones, I was quite amused to see what facial expression David would adopt when Gillian sang ‘My First Lover’. I have to say that he was annoyingly deadpan, but he might have been seething inside.

Gillian and David’s voices and playing dovetail beautifully together, without them even looking at one another. I wonder what it would be like to have a lover you could harmonise with so sweetly? I’m a bit jealous.