Inkscape

 When I lived in Norway, I started using Adobe Illustrator. When I moved to Britain, I seem to remember I still had access to it. When I moved to Bangor, though, I found it did not offer this software to its employees. As an academic, though, you do get a discount, so I convinced my line manager to buy me a copy. But software does not have an endless shelf life! Moving from contract to contract and computer to computer I managed to take Illustrator with me, but the time did come that the computer didn't recognise it anymore. So now what?

For a while it didn't matter; my RSI was way too bad for me to do anything graphic anyway. But I sometimes really would like to use graphic software, even though I really have to be careful with to what extent I use it. So I decided to just see what it is you can get as academic staff these days. And the university turns out to be very generous; they offer you free graphic software. In theory, that is. I decided to give that new software a go. I didn't manage to download it from the University portal, but it being free anyway, I found it on its own website.

So now I have inkscape. I have only just started using it, but so far it does everything it needs to do. I am sorted again! And given that it is free I can get used to this and then use it for the rest of my life…