Archives for the month of: October, 2007
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The True Future of Online Office Productivity

October 24, 2007 //
1

Screw Google Docs or Writely or whatever. Forget about ZohoWriter and MS-Office Online…

If you’re looking for a truly awe-inspiring online word processor, look no further than WordPerhect.

You be pleasantly surprised by the advanced interface and a truckload of innovative features such as:

- the ability to write on a variety of media from the back of silver cigarette foil to a torn off strip of cardboard
- the ability to customize your writing instrument size
- the choice of colour (as long as it’s black)
- the ability to save your documents, and even print your documents
- in the spirit of less is more, the delete key scratches out the previous character, there is no delete per se.

Make sure that you use your browser full screen since the highly advanced rendering engine will scale accordingly and enhance readability.

ps. The pop up dialog system will undoubtedly be the model for OS’s in the future.

;)

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Categories web

The Dirty Car Art Gallery

October 24, 2007 //
2

Wow. Have you ever seen the Dirty Car Art Gallery. Absolutely amazing. I’m used to seeing what we call the old ‘Charlie Weiber’.. which amounts to a simplified version of a portion of the male anatomy usually seen on the back windows of dirty white construction vans. This is a few million notches above that! :)

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Categories web

Okay – now I’m officially famous… ;)

October 24, 2007 //
1

Several weeks back, Chess Griffin put the call out for contributors to a series of guest segments over at the fabulous LinuxReality podcast. A couple of weeks ago I pulled up my knickers and gave it a shot. If you’re interested in some talk aimed at people who are new to Inkscape, you should check it out. My full recording was an hour with the intent that it be split into a two parter. Part 1 is now up as part of Episode 82. Thanks for the opportunity Chess!

After doing that recording, I have to say that I have a ton of respect for Chess and others. It was very tough. It took me a couple of awkward moments before I got into any sort of groove (if it even merits the term ‘groove’). Chess, Dave Yates, and others do such a great job just to do it so naturally week in and week out. Props to all of you podcasters who make my commute so enjoyable!

Since I’ve now achieved fame (fortune not so much), I’ll be signing autographs in my car outside the Burger King in the north end of Mississauga over the lunch hour. I think I’ll spend the rest of the day bossing around heathenx to celebrate. ;)

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Back on the StumbleUpon Wagon

October 22, 2007 //
0

About two and a half years ago I posted about StumbleUpon. After being a little bored with my feeds this weekend, I decided to get back on the SU wagon and give it another shot.

On the face of it, it doesn’t appear to have changed much. I am however, finding it quite addictive. It seems to bring me to a ton of interesting and new sites. You might have noticed a short flurry of brief posts about some interesting stuff over the past couple of days. Those came from my Stumble’ing. In fact, I had to restrain myself from overposting. There were a ton of interesting sites, but I didn’t want this blog to become a steady stream of regurgitated links. Still, I find many of the sites fascinating and I’ll definitely share the odd one or five in between what will hopefully be more substantial and more consistent posts.

If you’re keen on finding new and interesting sites in your own fields of interest, then StumbleUpon might be a great tool for you.

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Categories blogging, web

My Graphic Love Affair with Design

October 22, 2007 //
0

For quite a while now I’ve been harbouring a lusty affair with design. Mostly of the graphic type. ;) My notebooks and Inkscape are an outlet for that (I’m due up for a new screencast big-time btw). 

A few months back I picked up Thinking With Type by Ellen Lupton. A great book if you’re interested in typography and text related design. Another great find was the September/October issue of Good magazine which focused on design (a very interesting magazine on the whole by the way). And just to round out the package, I recently subscribed to the I Love Typography blog which seems to have lots of interesting posts as well. They’ve got a presentation posted there with Ellen Lupton which I’ll definitely watch when I get the chance.

So while there’s not a lot of meat to this post, I just thought I’d share a few things in case any of you harbour the same illicit affair with design that I do. ;)

Do you harbour a love affair with something unrelated to what it is you do everyday for money?

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Categories design

Useful tool for downloading/converting online videos

October 21, 2007 //
1

Another quick link, (this time somewhat useful) ;)

If you want to download online streaming videos to your pc, you could try vconvert.net. A very simple (and pretty) dialog box awaits you there. You enter the URL to the video (like a youtube link) and then check off which conversion you want to download. One nice thing that I found useful is that they will provide an audio (mp3) version of a streaming video. Many times there are presentations and things that I find interesting, but I end up wanting to listen to them in the car during my commute instead of watching them. I could always do the conversion to extract the audio myself, but this might prove simpler. It appears to be free but I believe they offer up a 3x speed increase with a paid version.

The conversions available are .wmv, .mov, .mp4, .3gp, .mp3 and .flv. I tried it with a couple of our Inkscape YouTube vids and it seemed to work flawlessly - I’ve only tried the mp3 and flv conversions. But of course, as with just about everything online, you spins the wheel and takes your chances. ;)

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The Eight Irresistable Principles of Fun

October 21, 2007 //
0

If you’re anything like me, there are times when you get in a rut, creatively or personally. If you need a quick kick in the pants or just something to pick you up and get you on your way again, check out The Eight Irresistable Principles of Fun.

It’s not anything too nutty or pie in the sky. Just a very well done and attractive presentation with eight very common sense principles. I probably violate every one of them at one time or another - but also hold each and everyone of them in high regard.

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Beautiful Flash Toy

October 21, 2007 //
0

From the land of completely pointless, but simply beautiful flash animation demo’s, check out:

http://www.zefrank.com/snowflake/

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Categories design, graphics

The Lady Loves me…

October 19, 2007 //
2

Have I ever mentioned the fact that my almost-6 year old daughter has a thing for Elvis?

Turns out she’s fascinated by Elvis.. well more accurately, Elvis, Priscilla and Lisa-Marie.

I find myself answering a flurry of questions… Why was he called ‘The King’? Was Priscilla the Queen? How did get so fat? Why are all those ladies screaming?

Turns out she also loves the YouTube. The YouTube has the Elvis. Actually, it has an untold number of Elvis and Priscilla slideshows set to music and snippets of concert footage. Turns out Elvis Fans have figured out The YouTube too!

So I’ve steered her away from Bratz, only been to Build-A-Bear-Empty-A-Wallet once. Kept her on the straight and narrow so far. And the fact that she prefers the young handsome Elvis to the old fat sweaty one makes it that much easier to live with.

Elvis movies are the next wave. While in Vegas a few weeks back, we picked up a VHS copy of Viva Las Vegas for her. It’s wearing thin after about 40 plays (seriously). We know the words to “The Lady Loves Me” almost completely. Which in itself leads to more questions like: What is Russian Roulette?, What is a moonlight tete a tete? What is playing hard to get?

We signed out Blue Hawaii from the library only last week in a bid for some sanity.

However, if I have learned one thing during this stage of fatherhood, it is this….

Ann Margret was indeed the hotness… ;)

Enjoy:

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Categories family, humour

FSF, GNU sites updated -> butt-ugly 2.0

October 16, 2007 //
0

I just read an article about the improved navigation and appearance of the gnu.org, fsf.org and the Free Software Directory sites. Good news since I’ve always found them to be antiquated looking and a general mess. I decided to go and check them out.

While they may be an improvement in a navigational sense, I’d say the appearance improvement is very very marginal. They’re still ugly. And it’s frustrating to me.

I’m sorry, but I don’t care if you are a non-commercial entity, there are thousands of free software users out there who are talented web designers (I’m not one of them) and who would be happy as a clams to provide some guidance and help on site design. As it stands, I still think they’re a mess. I’d love to point somebody to these sites and be proud. I can’t. I’m not sure if it’s the font choices, the colour schemes, layout or all three. But definitely something is missing.

And I’m not talking about rounded corners and earthy tones. The Free Software directory has that. But it also has mixed up font styles and a very primitive looking blog template. The search box looks like something I’d design (and that’s likely not very good).

C’mon FSF and GNU. I realize the content is the important thing, but so is image. We’re talking about software, technology and freedom. You want to inspire people into understanding the message. It’s hard to do that with an uninspiring series of websites.

And one other thing. Call me a freedom hater if you want, but I can’t stand that GNU logo. I don’t like it and never have. I’m no big fan of the whole penguin thing, but it’s tolerable. But the GNU? No way. Sorry. I don’t care who designed it. It’s simply unappealing. They should change it.

Am I just a raving freedom-hater? What do you think?

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Categories graphics, linux
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