Swftools.com - Directory of Flash(SWF) tools and utilities — 29/11/2008 13:06
FlashDemo Studio is a powerful tool to record your PC screen activities in real time and publish as Flash movie. Ideal for create interactive demonstrations, tutorials and e-Learning materials
There are plenty of Windows Explorer replacements out there, and most of you probably have a favorite. While I'm normally content to use what Windows gives me, I'm always looking for a good portable replacement to help ease file management tasks on customer computers. Cubic Explorer has a number of options that have earned it the job. While it's packed with functionality and can be customized any number of ways, the interface remains mostly uncomplicated. It's a given that when you add tabs, breadcrumbs, bookmarks, previewing, folder trees, and everything else normally found in an Explorer replacement that the interface will become cluttered, but Cubic keeps things under control.
I've added all the folders I normally need to access during a repair to the favorites, like c:\windows, control panel, network connections, and my network app shares. After launching Cubic, hitting the bookmarks menu and open all in tabs quickly displays everything. It's much quicker than using start -> run every time I need to open a folder.
Cubic also supports sessions, allowing you to have several customized sets of tabs, bookmarks, and layouts. It's a handy feature for moving between customer systems, our office machines, and my home computers. Several themes are included, and your choice is saved with the session.
Cubic Explorer is freeware for Windows only, and both an installer and portable version are available.
I've been writing about plenty of manual ways to keep your hard drive neat and clean recently. That's a nice start, but what about some automated help along the lines of Auto-Delete?
While Download Mover is no longer actively developed, it's still good at what it does. Download and extract the zip file and launch the executable, and DM will ask you where and what you want to monitor. Specify the interval for checks and set your notification options, and you're done.
You can specify multiple folders to watch and specify different targets for each file type you add. I often forget to change my Firefox download preferences to save things in my d:\downloads folder. Setting Download Mover to scrape .exe and .zip files into the proper directory keeps my desktop nice and tidy with no interference.
If you've got another automated tool for handling chores like this, please share it! I'm always on the lookout for another app that can tackle tedious tasks like directory cleanup.
Local councils should be at the centre of the government's initiative to tackle the growing number of unemployed in Britain, an independent report commissioned by the Department for Communities and Local Government recommends today.
It calls on local authorities to coordinate action, research trends in unemployment and help local firms offer jobs to the rapidly increasing numbers of people on the dole.
Councils have already been given new powers to tackle unemployment by backing local non-profitmaking social enterprises.
The interim report proposes that government should require public sector employers to offer apprenticeship places, advertise all vacancies with Jobcentre Plus offices and encourage all bidders for contracts and local suppliers to provide job opportunities to local people.
In the most deprived areas it says radical action should include assisting the establishment of social enterprise companies to help people get back to work.
The review team – Stephen Houghton, the Labour leader of Barnsley council, Steve Olive, the former Orange Group executive vice-president, and Clare Dove, the chair of the Social Enterprise Coalition – was commissioned by John Healey, the local government minister, and Stephen Timms, the former employment minister, to examine how £1.5bn of Working Neighbourhoods Funding is being used, and to consider what more central government can do to support councils and their partners to tackle unemployment in their local areas.
Houghton said: "Since the launch of our review, the global economy has suffered a significant downturn – and the UK economy is not immune to this. It makes our work even more important than ever."
Healey today welcomed the report. "These measures, combined with the Working Neighbourhoods Fund, which gives local councils the flexibility to tackle worklessness in their areas, stand communities in good stead to weather this economic storm. Councillor Houghton's proposals could strengthen these efforts. I encourage councils and other bodies to submit their views to his consultation."
The employment minister, Tony McNulty, said: "I welcome the principle endorsed by the review team that local partners can and should do more, particularly for the most disadvantaged people and communities, and agree that this job is now more urgent.
"We need to support the local commitment and ambition to deliver on the employment targets identified in almost all of the 150 local area agreements, and seven multi-area agreements that have recently been signed, and ensure that the Working Neighbourhoods Fund is used innovatively and to best effect."
I'm always on the lookout for a good application to utilize the extra space on my widescreen monitor, and this morning I happened upon miniMIZE.
It's a free app for Windows that monitors the applications you launch. When you minimize a window, miniMIZE removes the button from your taskbar and creates a thumbnail. It's easy on system resources, only consuming about 7mb of memory.
Thumbnails can be dragged anywhere on your desktop, or you can let miniMIZE automatically line them up along any edge of your desktop. You can also choose to pin icons to the desktop or have them float on top of active windows.
Further tweaks include thumbnail size, opacity, customizable hotkeys, and application icon overlays. Any applications you don't want handled by miniMIZE can be added to an exclusions list - just drag the crosshairs onto the appropriate program.
Note that miniMIZE will only catch things after it's running - so you'll have to close and re-open your other apps after installing it for things to take effect.
What Swivel and Many Eyes is for social data visualization (minus the commenting), GeoCommons [geocommons.com] could be for geographical mapping: allowing "non-technical professionals" to view and analyze geo-located data, without the traditional GIS overhead.
Relaunched a little while ago, the "Finder!" part of the service is designed to discover interesting publicly sourced datasets through browsing tags and categories, as well as upload, organize and share personally owned data. The "Maker!" part enables the creation of the according online maps, styled with shaded thematics, proportional symbols, graduated icons, points, lines and polygons without any required experience from the user. The so-called "Map Brewer" interface allows users to further classify and slice the data (e.g. quantile, equal interval, standard deviation, maximum breaks), and choose a base map layer (e.g. from Google Maps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, Yahoo Maps or Open Street Map).
I might be missing something obvious, but while I would love to browse through the maps already being made, I could not find any easy way to do so (except of hacking URLs). Also, is there any way to embed the maps in blogs?
Windows only: If you've never played around with programming before, this weekend is a perfect time to start. Small Basic is a recent offering from Microsoft based on the venerable BASIC programming language and implemented with .NET. Designed for coding novices and children, the system is easy to learn and extensible with third party libraries. Out of the box Small Basic has only fifteen keywords to help new users quickly learn the core of the language and get them programming. Can't think of a pressing reason why you need to learn a programming language? Expand your mind with Project Euler, the only way to complete the entire sequence of puzzles is with some smooth programming chops. If tinkering with Small Basic inspires you to try your hand at other programing languages, check out the responses to Ask the Reader: Best First Programming Language to Learn, for some ideas on where to start. Small Basic is freeware, Windows only and requires .NET 3.5 Framework or higher.
Bugfix work continues, and the user interface has been streamlined - which developer Nick Bradbury refers to as "toolbutton slaughter." The new sharing and tagging icons caused some overcrowding, but users who still want the old icons displayed can customize the settings under options -> reading.
Several tag-related features have been added. FeedDemon's subscription home page now includes a tag cloud, making it easy to access similar posts you've tagged. Tags can also be dragged and dropped onto posts, and tagged items can be exluded when purging old news items.
The addition of automated error reporting to the previous version allowed Bradbury to correct nearly 30 issues. So far, the changes have made FeedDemon faster, easier to use, and more stable than ever.
Windows only: We've previously highlighted some disk space visualization tools with all kinds of neatgraphics, but Treesize Free shoots for just the opposite—a clean, simple interface showing how much of your hard drive is filled by which folders. As you might guess, it stacks up the root folders by size, then lets you collapse them in nesting trees to see which sub-folders are eating up that 160GB drive you thought you'd never fill. You can adjust for KB/MB/GB viewing, scan CDs and removable drives, and switch to percentages instead of data bits, but one of Treesize's really cool features is simply giving you all the same tools you have in Windows Explorer's right-click menu on its tree view pane—delete, copy, cut, etc. Treesize Free is a free download for Windows systems only.
Robert Laity of western New York writes in with this essay on our president-elect: Obama’s a derelict Robert’s been a busy bee around the internet posting this observation. Buffalo Topix: Barack is a derelict and now he’s “Present” Obama.Armadinijahed Loves him. MSNBC: Obama is a derelict who advocates letting survivors of the “Holocaust” of abortion die in the abortion clinic,on their own,without medical intervention. Newsvine: Obama “honest”, no. Obama honorable,no. Obama a derelict,y
All platforms: Clonezilla is an open source, Linux-based alternative to commercial disk cloning tools like Symantec Ghost and Acronis True Image. Unfamiliar with the process of disk cloning? In a nutshell, disk cloning makes a copy of a data disk for future restoration. A perfect time to create a clone would be after you'd installed your operating system of choice, your favorite applications, and tweaked the system settings to your liking. The next time you had to wipe your system and do a reinstall you'd save yourself the tedious hours of reinstalling and tweaking. From that point forward you'd have a customized installation on hand. We've covered how to image your disk with the System Rescue CD, and how to "hot" image your PC using DriveImage XML. Clonezilla is more similar to the former.
Clonezilla has support for a multitude of file systems such as ext2, ext3, xfs, FAT, NTFS, and HFS+, ensuring you'll be able to back up any Windows, Linux, or Mac systems you have. Clonezilla images only the used data blocks for increased efficiency on both the initial image and the restoration. Clonezilla comes in two flavors: Live and Server Edition. The Live edition is best suited for home and small business users, the Server Edition requires additional setup for network based distribution of disk images. If you have multiple machines to image the extra setup is worth it—the example deployment on their web site is 40 computers restored in 10 minutes via network distribution. Both flavors of Clonezilla are free downloads. Thanks Michael!
If you ever get tired of flipping back and forth between two browser windows or tabs when what you really want to do is be able to read two articles at once, (or read one article while composing a blog post or email in another window), there's a Firefox plugin called Split Browser that can help. But what if you're not using Firefox? What if you're using a browser like Google Chrome, which doesn't even support plugins?
Then you can use a Javascript bookmarklet called Google Chrome Dual View. Just drag the bookmarklet to your bookmark toolbar and when you hit the button Google Chrome will ask you to input two web addresses. It will then open them up side by side in a single browser tab.
No, it's not the most elegant solution. But it works. As an added bonus, the bookmarklet works in Firefox (and possibly other web browsers) as well. I just don't see why you'd choose to use it instead of Split Browser.
Write or Die from Dr. Wicked is quite an interesting application. You must keep typing or you will receive reminders to get back to work. Sometimes those reminders are quite unpleasant.
You can choose nice, gentle reminders, in the form of pop up boxes, the normal reminders which make the screen turn red and play music, or kamikaze reminders which start undoing what you have been typing if you stop. There are also Electric Shock reminders but, you can't always check that box.
This would be a perfect tool for anyone who needed to get a lot of words on paper in a specific amount of time. You can set word goals or time goals - or both. I gave myself a goal of 10 minutes and/or 20 words for writing this post. It is quite handy little tool for writers, bloggers or students who really need to get stuff done.
Plus, it's a lot of fun and the reminders are a good way to keep yourself on track if you have a tendency to stop working, stare off into space or get easily distracted. Or, if you're like me, having a word count goal and a timer makes me work that much harder to get all the words in before the timer goes off!
I don't do a lot of ISO creation, so when I do find myself needing to compile an image I like a nice, uncomplicated app to get the job done.
Free ISO Creator's self-explanatory interface makes the process about as easy as it can get. Browse for files and folders to add, choose where you'd like your ISO to be saved, and click convert. It's speedy, compiling my test CD in about 12 seconds.
Bootable images can be created, and CD, DVD-5, and DVD-9 are supported, and you can also specify your ISO to be created as ISO 9660 or UDF. I'd get in to more detail, but this is a simple, straightforward app, and there's nothing at all tricky about using it.
Free ISO Creator is a 1mb free download for Windows only.
[Image: From the "atlas of hidden water." Check out the original PDF or simply view it larger].
An "atlas of hidden water" has been created to reveal where the world's freshwater aquifers really lie. "The hope," New Scientist reports, "is that it will help pave the way to an international law to govern how water is shared around the world." This prospective hydro-geopolitical legislation currently includes a "draft Convention on transboundary aquifers."
[Image: The "hidden water" of South America].
"What the UNESCO map reveals," New Scientist adds, "is just how many aquifers cross international borders. So far, the organisation has identified 273 trans-boundary aquifers: 68 in the Americas, 38 in Africa, 155 in Eastern and Western Europe and 12 in Asia." One of these is the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, whose waters are nearly a million years old. According – somewhat oddly – to the International Atomic Energy Agency:
The ancient system’s massive reserves, estimated at 375,000 cu km of water (equivalent to about 500 years of Nile River discharge), are confined deep inside the earth’s underground chambers – staggered, tiered, and pooled beneath the sands of the Sahara Desert, oasis settlements, wadis (dry riverbeds that contain water only during times of heavy rain), small villages, towns, and large cities.
If the surface landscapes there are already so beautiful, how exciting would it be to explore those underground staggered tiers and pools... A more detailed map is due out in 2009 – meanwhile, several more can be downloaded here.
Amit Agarwal at the Digital Inspiration blog has flipped the Google Maps API around so anyone can find the exact street address of any point on a street by clicking on it. In other words, if you can point to a great restaurant on a city map but don't know the address to give for driving directions, simply navigate to the site and click. One of those features you really wish was implemented in Google Maps itself, but it's a pretty sweet mash-up to use in the meantime.
Looking for an easy way to share photos with your GMail contacts? Adding the GPhotoSpace extension to your Firefox install provides you with a solution that's just as easy as using "send to: email recipient" in Windows.
Once you've installed the addon, you can open it by clicking the status bar icon. If you're like me and your status bar is hidden, you can also customize your main toolbar and dropping the included button (which is a little lo-fi) or bookmark chrome://gps/content/gpsMain.xul to access it.
The interface is extremely simple. Create a new album, describe it, add photos, and save it. The only adjustment you can make is the size of photos to share: 320/640/1024/1536 pixels. Make sure you change this setting if you want to upload full-size digital images, as it defaults to 640 pixels.
Remember that this is a GMail hack, so "sharing" an album actually just fires off an email to your recipient that contains your photos. Still, it's a much simpler way to send multiple images than using GMail's attachment button.
If you're simply in need of a good, free way to back up your photos, sign up for a new GMail account - the 7 gigs they provide will give you room for several thousand images.
Be aware that GPS currently only supports jpeg images. That shouldn't pose a problem for most users, but I'd like to see it at least support a couple other formats like png and psd.
GPhotoSpace is free, and currently only available for Windows - a Mac version is in the works.
[Image: The charismatic boundaries of an earlier worldview – here, the Hereford Mappa Mundi].
Note: This is a guest post by Nicola Twilley.
Another question for the topic of whether or not a “dense assortment of buildings” can ever be a real city: What is London for an eighteen-year old whose entire urban experience is confined to 200-square meters and who has never seen the Thames?
Researchers at the University of Glasgow, sponsored by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, have spent the past two years asking young residents of Bradford, Peterborough, London, Glasgow, Sunderland, and Bristol to draw maps of their own individual urban experience in order to explore micro-territoriality as both a cause and a symptom of social exclusion. You can read the full PDF of their report here.
“In Glasgow, Sunderland and Bradford,” they found, “a recognizable territory might be as small as a 200-meter block or segment.” In Tower Hamlets, London, fifteen and sixteen-year old boys mapped their world into three streets, a football pitch, a barber shop, mosque, Indian restaurant, and – just beyond the clearly marked “Front Line” – an off-license, or liquor store.
[Image: From the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report, "Young people and territoriality in British cities" (download the PDF)].
Some of the sketches even remind me of medieval maps: the known world is an island of familiarity, simultaneously shown much larger than scale but made tiny and precious by the monsters of “Terra Incognita” that surround it. In the case of a 15-year-old girl from Bradford, today’s dragons are “moshers,” “chavs,” “Asians,” and “posh people” – all “Enemys.” The researchers found that teenage boys display an even more complete ignorance of the world beyond their perceived boundaries: these two maps of the same area in Glasgow were drawn by young men in the same class at the same school, who live on different sides of the same road.
[Images: From the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report, "Young people and territoriality in British cities" (download the PDF)].
The report’s authors examined the causes, nature, and impact of micro-territorialization. Their research uncovered Bristol’s “postcode wars,” where gangs spray-paint their postcode in rival areas as a form of aggression, as well as descriptions of the maneuvers involved in going to school in one part of Bradford that match the Schlieffen Plan in strategic complexity. “In some places,” they note with reference to Glasgow and Sunderland, “territoriality was a leisure activity, a form of ‘recreational violence.’” In other words, bored and economically deprived teenagers are transforming 1960s council estates and Victorian terraces into a real-world, multiplayer World of Warcraft.
Of course, excessive loyalty to the local, and the resulting lack of mobility, has a significant and negative impact on access to education, services, and job opportunities. In the words of one interviewee from Glasgow:
If your horizons are limited to three streets, what is the point of you working really hard at school? What is the point of passing subjects that will allow you to go to college or university if you cannot travel beyond these streets? What’s the point of dreaming about being an artist, a doctor, etc., if you cannot get on a bus to get out of the area in which you live?
The report points out an interesting irony here: current policies in urban regeneration are dominated by strategies to increase “place attachment” as a means “to reinforce social networks and maintain the quality of an area through pride.” However, the areas that actually generate such loyalties are, in the authors’ words “often ones that have little that conventionally invokes pride.”
It was difficult to say which was more depressing – the relentless defense of a featureless piece of open space on the fringes of a Glasgow housing scheme where there is nothing whatsoever by way of amenities, or the confinement to a socially isolated but densely populated and built-up quarter-square-mile of London of young men for whom the culture and wealth of one of the world’s great cities might as well be on another continent.
The report goes on to identify 244 anti-territorial projects (ATPs) currently in progress across the UK. Most use sports or other “hook” activities to encourage association and to teach networking skills. Disappointingly, none tackle the issue in terms of the design of physical space.
So what does the anti-territorial city look like? Some things to consider: unsurprisingly, the report found that most conflicts “occurred on boundaries between residential areas, which were typically defined by roads, railways, vacant land or other physical features.” The city center also becomes a venue for bigger showdowns: a youth worker in Peterborough explains that “the flashpoints are in the city center, the ‘big stage,’ the one place they all, you know, congregate on a Saturday.” Finally, the researchers found that micro-territorialization took place across the spectrum of low-income housing stock, from “high-density, flatted, inner-city estates; traditional, pre-1914 areas of terraced housing; and suburban, often council-built environments.”
As the authors rightly point out, lack of jobs and economic hardship are key structural forces contributing to “problematic territoriality.” But what role does urban planning, landscape design and the built environment have to play?
Can the design of the city itself generate – or mitigate against – territoriality?
(Note: Read the Guardian's take on the Joseph Rowntree Foundation report here and here).
Windows only: See how much time you spend instant messaging friends and crafting PowerPoint presentations with time tracker app JournalLive. JournalLive logs everything you do on a computer, from gaming to email, including who you communicate with and what documents you're working on in applications. It automatically generates all sorts of reports for tracking productivity on the web site, including timesheets—perfect for recording billable hours. The pro edition allows managers to track employees, presumably so hard workers can be recognized and shirkers get sent to human resources for a stern lecture. The personal edition is free, the professional edition costs €10 per user, for Windows only. Thanks, owenconnor666!
A recent usability study conducted by Yahoo shows that users are still confused by OpenID—the single sign-on technology out to eliminate multiple usernames and passwords. Tech site Webmonkey reports:
The study observed nine female Yahoo users in their thirties who considered themselves of medium-to-high internet savvy. The participants were told they could log in with their Yahoo ID at a third-party site. In many cases, the users tried to log in using the site’s main login, rather than the OpenID login. Users don’t understand multiple ways to log in, at least not without some education.
Do you use OpenID? Does OpenID deliver on its promises?
Truth be told, while the OpenID concept is very exciting, adoption has been disappointing—and it's most likely due to the usability problems surrounding it. Over a year ago, Lifehacker alum Wendy Boswell ran down the pros and cons of OpenID, and her review was pretty mixed. Tell us whether or not you're using and loving OpenID in the comments.
The Social Media Classroom (SMC), started by Howard Rheingold, includes a free and open-source (Drupal-based) web service that provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media that each course can use for its own purposes - integrated forum, blog, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, and video commenting are the first set of tools. The Classroom also includes curricular material: syllabi, lesson plans, resource repositories, screencasts and videos. The Collaboratory (or Colab), is the web service part of it. Educators are encouraged to use the Colab and SMB materials freely, and SMC will host your Colab communities if you don't want to install your own. Disclosure: eHub founder, Emily Chang, and her company, Ideacodes, worked on the public website for the SMC. URL: Social Media Classroom.
It’s raining, so plans to bike down the lakefront to the new Calatrava designed museum are scuttled, but Lily has a school friend Andi here who has a better idea. A group of us pile into Andi’s car and head for the house of Andi’s friend Paul, who lives in a boat that was built on dry land. Paul, says Andi, is a bit of a historian of the rich local culture, so together they’ll take us on a mini tour.
Paul’s house was originally built by a man who accidentally sank an identical boat in the harbor. Out of remorse or sheer perversity, he decided to rebuild that boat, but on dry land, “where it could never sink again.”
When he applied to the local city board to build this structure, the approval was denied, so he built it off site and surreptitiously dragged it up here one night. Needless to say, it’s since become a local landmark; Paul says it’s not uncommon for couples to consummate their relationship on the lawn. After that, a dentist lived in the boathouse and is the current landlord. Not your ordinary dentist — a wacky dentist/inventor who among other things invented a dog-powered chariot and a dental hovering device, consisting of a series of bungees and pulleys that would allow him to perform dentistry while suspended ABOVE the patient! I wish I could have seen this device. Can you imagine being this dentist's patient? Paul said this dentist also performed a root canal on himself. “Those damn dentists are so expensive!” he was quoted as saying.
Paul said that when he was in 8th grade, he was hitchhiking and he got in a car and the driver was playing the song “Life During Wartime.” Young Paul found the music somewhat disturbing and told the driver he really didn’t like this kind of stuff and could he get out immediately. Of course, a year or so later, he changed his mind.
As in Pittsburgh, some parts of town that were deemed not worth “saving” in the urban renewal schemes in the 60s and 70s are now the neighborhoods that are the most full of life, the ones that are coming back in some fashion. Where Andi lives, there’s a food co-op that only sells organic and local foods, artists studios, and a Polish social club whose traditional mission was to provide gymnasiums for the youth of various cities. This one still has a gymnasium attached. Nearby is a tiny herring factory and downtown there are still big sausage works. The breweries that once dominated this town used to build little taverns on every corner, to feed and lubricate their workers. Some of these remain, but not very many.
We head over to the ghetto, to Satin Doll’s Lounge, run by Doll — Minette D. Wilson — a former dancer with Duke Ellington and others. She wasn’t going to let us in at first, as someone across the street had called her and said, “There’s a white man taking a picture outside.” That was me.
She did let us in, however, and we had a round of drinks while Paul caught up with her. Someone had poisoned her dog, which was not good news. The room was filled with Christmas decorations, faded photos of Doll with Duke and some more recent soul singers, stuffed animals and Milwaukee police patches. One door was labeled “sleeping room” which we guessed must be a place where customers who were too drunk to get home could sleep it off. Paul claimed that I was a gun freak, so Doll pulled a .38 revolver from under the bar and we passed it around. She removed the bullets before handing it to me.
Paul explained that Milwaukee experienced one of the last waves of Black migration from the South. And therefore, those who came only experienced about 20 or so years of the city’s industrial heyday. That’s not long enough for a second generation to get a good foothold. The 1st generation of newcomers are often just surviving and it’s their kids who more easily navigate their way into the workforce and build new neighborhoods. But just before this might have happened, Milwaukee, like a lot of other industrial cities in the US, went into a decline. The folks in this part of town were discriminated against and had little recourse or resources to enable them to rise. It became a welfare zone, which it still is to a large extent.
On the way back, towards the center of town, we passed the home of a Cherokee with a McCain placard in his yard. And what a yard it is:
Around the side there was even more. The planter in the foreground is a coffin!
We continued our Milwaukee tour with an impromptu stop at a Shriners Lodge, the Tripoli Temple. The building is a massive faux Arabic pseudo-Taj Mahal, designated a historical landmark. The side door was open so we went in. A woman, sensing our curiosity, generously offered us a tour.
She said they had recently renovated the place, at considerable cost, as all the walls were discolored from years of cigar smoke. Here’s an ashtray designed to hold multiple cigars.
The décor was, as is typical in these lodges, a hodge-podge — a mash up of what folks in the US must have imagined was oriental. Thus, in the Oriental theater here, Buddhas, camels, and Arabic motifs are all mixed together. Why the fascination with the Middle East? Was it because it was the “holy land?” Was it the birthplace of masonry (the pyramids) and of the weird and ancient mysteries — arcane links to the order of the universe once known only by the wise inscrutable ancients? An order kept hidden and encoded for centuries, not to be told to just anyone, but to be revealed to American businessmen smoking big cigars and doing good works? Needless to say, whatever it emerged from, it’s truly impressive. A grand physical metaphor for something, something we can’t quite put our finger on. A kind of syncretism seems to be at work here as well, a melding of opposing beliefs and a substituting of one set of symbols for another.
I gather that these types of places went into decline with the emergence of television. The rise of mass entertainment meant that these men (and they are mostly men’s organizations) could now zone out in front of the tube and forgo the dues and duties of these social organizations. Something was obviously lost — a community, a network, and the fulfillment of a biological need to be together in a large room. Now they hold weddings here. We were shown the room where brides could select from potential reception décor. And wedding parties don’t have to be dues-paying Shriners to be welcome anymore.
We headed for our last stop, the Calatrava designed wing of the art museum, situated right on the lakeshore. As in other cities, these architectural baubles are, I imagine, built to attract cultural tourism and also to give the city a visible “brand.” Don’t know how well it’s achieved those goals, but his work is certainly spectacular. Here’s the parking garage located under the museum:
The entrance foyer is the most alien biomorphic cathedral-like space in the building, pretty awe-inspiring.
There was one show in this particular “building,” although most of this building more accurately functions as a gateway to the older museum building alongside it (designed by Eero Saarinen).
The current show, of techie interactive art, had one spectacular and creepy piece. It was by Daniel Rozin, whose work more often consists of wall mosaic-like structures that mirror, by tilting their various “tiles,” the person who is looking at them. There was one of those in this show as well and there were a few in the “Machines and Souls” show I participated in over in Madrid.
This one was a little different. In a dark room, a sort of semi-transparent screen had a projection, which mirrored anyone who stood directly in front of it. But the mirroring was weird and disturbing. It saw the edges of our shapes, the outlines, and filled them in only if you stood still; and then if you moved, the pixels projected on the scrim would disperse, fall and disintegrate, as if you were crumbling like a pile of powder. In the way some insects only see things that move, this only sees things that hold still. Here is an image of Andi (Andrea Maio) who got up close…you can see a really creepy smile.
In the older museum building, Paul rushed us up to an upper room that had quite a few pieces by the late Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, the “outsider” artist from around here who worked in a variety of media and styles. He made vaguely, almost abstract, apocalyptic paintings by smearing paint with his fingers, baking tools, and his wife’s hair (!) into contorted plant-like shapes. They’re very colorful and slightly disturbing. He also made sculptures out of chicken bones. I’d previously seen little towers. Here, there were a couple of tiny thrones made of painted chicken bones.
He idolized his wife Marie, and had a unique way of showing it. He took lots of pictures of her, dressed and more often undressed, quasi-classically posed, a little like in girlie magazines sometimes, and sometimes wearing crowns he had fashioned for her.
Oh, to be worshipped, to be the muse and inspiration of a genius who fills the house with chicken bones.
Our show is at the ornate and beautiful Pabst Theater. The metal chairs in the top balcony all say Pabst in metal across their backs. During soundcheck, we started working on a new old song, “Air,” a song I haven’t played live in 30 years, I suspect. In figuring out the tune, I notice that the lyrics have no rhymes and that’s not the only peculiarity. The song moves back and forth from rhythmically stop-start sections in minor keys to lyrical sections in major keys. I can see a link between the approach to the text and the rhythmically abrupt sections and the band who some of us rush over to see after our show.
Deerhoof and a few other bands were playing at what seemed like a former social hall on the 3rd floor of a building downtown. We catch the end of their set. It’s pretty magnificent in a fractured way. Very sophisticated. There’s ultra precision in the drums and guitars — abrupt, perfectly timed short outbursts — while the vocalist, Satomi Matsuzaki, sings in a calm voice. Their lyrics have no relationship whatsoever to typical rock lyrics (though I can see a link to the non-rhyming lyrics of “Air”). The vocal melodies are atypical as well. I’m not claiming to be an influence on Deerhoof, though it would be flattering if I were, but more that songs like “Air” are part of a link in a chain, or drops in a small river, that approach music and lyric writing from a different, slightly mutated angle. As if to emphasize that none of their musical structures are accidental, the band sells sheet music at their merchandise table, as well as the usual t-shirts and CDs. They made the sheet music for one song available to fans before their new record was released.
Guitar Dance
I’m standing on a chair watching and listening and admiring the physical interplay between the 3 guitarists, and Greg the drummer, who sometimes rises out of his seat and even walks around his drums at times. It’s a kind of dance that’s evolved over the course of many performances, both consciously and unconsciously. I don’t imagine anyone says to the others, “When I do this sound and movement with my guitar, or drums, what if you did that, physically, in response?” but it’s a kind of emergent choreography all the same. Of course, I now think to myself, “What if we did a new thing with the dancers that made that 'guitar dance' more explicit?” I write to Annie-B, who it seems, is thinking almost the exact same thing. There are a few days in the November break when we can try something out.
This Wednesday, October 15th, is Blog Action Day—which means thousands of weblogs across the internet (including this one) will post about a single topic: poverty. The purpose is to raise awareness about the interesting ways people from all walks of life are helping those in need. We're putting together our Blog Action Day feature story now, and we need your help. What experiences do you have in fighting poverty? What are your favorite charities, volunteer opportunities, or projects out there related to poverty? Tell us your story in the comments—and when you can, include links, images, videos, anything you've got—and we'll feature our favorites here on Wednesday. If you're a blogger, be sure to sign up to take part in Blog Action Day. Thanks in advance for your help and participation.
Personal finance blogger Ramit Sethi guest-posts on the Get Rich Slowly site about his best advice for those looking to start a business, no matter the scale: Take a successful entrepreneur out to lunch. Sethi says successful types usually want to see others succeed on their advice, and in these tough economic times, a sandwich and chips can be a lot cheaper than a business consultant. [photo]
Freelancer Collis Ta'eed makes about $200 each month from work he mostly did years ago and hasn't touched. From putting his (admittedly clumsy) illustrations up for sale on stock photo sites, he steadies his freelance income and makes better use of his time between projects:
With the holiday season coming up, work usually slows down and it’s a good time to do some side work to build for the future. So that years down the road you also are watching residual royalties accumulating every month.
Have you regularly sold work through stock media sites? How do you ensure your work gets actual use? Tell us what works and what doesn't in the comments.
Government officials have been forced to admit that they have lost more than 20,000 cows in Britain, the latest in a series of lost property blunders to hit Whitehall.
In a situation described as udder chaos, officials at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) admitted in Parliamentary questions that 20,979 of the animals had been mislaid.
The livestock should have been logged on Defra's Cattle Tracing System, devised to protect public and animal health after the BSE and foot and mouth epidemics. However the cattle have disappeared from the system, while another 1039 are believed to have been loaded onto cattle trucks and never heard of again.
Jonathan Shaw, Defra minister, was forced to admit the embarrassing blunder in response to a Parliamentary question.
Peter Ainsworth, the Shadow Environment secretary, said he was astonished at the loss. "Laptops, data, and now cows, is there anything this Government can not misplace?" he said. "Defra's performance would do credit to Little Bo Peep."
A Whitehall source said: "It's a farce. They clearly cannot tell their Ayrshires from their elbows at Defra."
This is Rusty. He’s my current preferred mode of transportation. Or at least he would be, if he had one more component: a bicycle chain.
He did have one when I bought him. He cost me £15 at the city markets. Worth every penny too. I’d had nothing but trouble with that other bike I bought from Sports Direct, who had to be threatened with a lawsuit from Trading Standards before they would give me my money back on a product they had sold me that was faulty from the outset.
Normally, you expect when you buy a bike that the cogs on the back wheel that the chain uses to push the thing along would be in some way attached to the bicycle, rather than spin freely on their own, whilst moving from side to side in a wobbly and disinterested manner.
So after a week of arguments, phone calls, and dejected walks home pushing a bike that while looking brand new, was completely and utterly useless for the purpose it was purchased, I finally got my way and they decided that their illegal store policy (to refer annoyed customers to their supplier) was in this case more trouble than it was worth.
They’ve sent the bike back to head office just “to check it really is faulty” and then they’ll happily refund my money. In time.
So yeah - I picked up Rusty down at the markets, and he’s been delightful. I’ve ridden him the 8 or 9 miles to my work in Perry Barr and back. Braved the Stratford Road in rush hour (yes, of course I wear a helmet - do you think I’m stupid?) and took the A4540 Ring Road around Digbeth through to Aston.
Yesterday, I thought I’d try taking the canal routes home. I don’t know the canal routes at all, but I was reliably informed that they are lovely and flat, and entirely traffic free.
Sadly I was misinformed. This picture shows one of the few flat, traffic-free bits of the canal system in our fair city. Thanks to an intricate system of locks, the Birmingham/Fazeley canal is basically an uphill waterway from Aston to the city. There’s a steep incline about every 2-3 minutes of cycling. Travelling that way by canalboat must be a complete bitch and take about a week. And worse, there are other cyclists and joggers coming the other (more sensible) way at high speed.
It was on one of these steep inclines in the face of high speed racing cyclists (and the odd drug deal going down under the bridges) that my chain snapped. I was about a third of the way home.
I walked almost an hour to the Jewellery Quarter - taking my best guess at where to come out of the waterways. It’s very difficult to tell where you’re at when you’re down at the canals. The roads above can’t really see you, and you can’t really see the roads above. Signposting down there is a joke and it’s an alternate world beneath the city, which follows its own bizarre rules of geography.
From there, it was a train home, then a 10 minute walk from the station, pushing poor Rusty all the way.
It has been pointed out to me that I must have bad bike karma. Or perhaps that I should not be quite such a cheapskate when it comes to my transportation choices. At any rate, Rusty’s at the shop now. He’ll be home on Monday, and we’ll give this biking to work thing another try.
Birmingham Post - Home - Blogs & Comment — 11/10/2008 20:08
John Alden, whose lifelong ambition is to keep asking awkward questions about Birmingham City Council’s labyrinthine financial processes, is not for the first time in his life feeling a little confused.
A Penzance businessman received a public apology after a judge slammed the Crown Prosecution Service for taking him to court for carrying knives he needed for his work.
Peter Drew spoke of his relief after Judge Paul Darlow took the extraordinary step at Truro Crown Court of demanding prosecution barrister Philip Lee apologise to the defendant.
Mr Drew said afterwards he felt disgusted the CPS had pursued him, after Penzance police pressed charges over knives that were found in his work van in February.
Judge Darlow let Mr Drew free and then poured vitriol on the CPS, demanding: "I want to find out why we've got to the start of the trial – and the CPS are suddenly saying 'Oops'. I don't think the CPS can escape criticism or blame if they leave it to the last minute to make up their minds: we despair of trying to run these courts in any sort of efficient way."
The judge went on: "I think some sort of public apology to Mr Drew from the court would not go amiss." Mr Lee responded: "On behalf of the CPS I apologise that it has taken this long: some decisions are very obvious and some less so, and I wouldn't say this was an obvious decision."
Brian Eno is one of my favorite composers, so I was thrilled to hear that he was releasing a new composition tool for the iPhone. It's called Bloom, and it lets you generate, play and visualize ambient music. It's hard to explain how this works, but you basically tap the screen in different places to generate sounds. The sounds you play repeat periodically to form a composition. Because the notes are all on different cycles, the sound evolves as you let it play.
If it gets boring, you can shake the screen to clear what you have, or tap anywhere to add more sounds. If you don't feel like making anything up, there's also a "listen" mode, and once you have something you like, you can freeze it to keep new notes from being introduced. Each sound pops up as a dot on the screen, and Bloom can be mesmerizing to watch as a visualizer. I hooked my iPod up to a dock and some speakers, and let it run as a little art installation on my desk. That's pretty good for 4 bucks!Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
As a music lover, one of my favorite innovations of the last five years or so has come in the form of music discovery services. Services like Last.fm, Pandora, Rhapsody and iTunes 8 have made it easy to find artists or songs that are similar to your musical tastes and preferences. The only problem with these services, is that they are based on limited databases (like the iTunes Music Store, for iTunes's Genius Mode), reviews or ratings by other users and overall popularity. That means that the music discovered might indeed be similar, but it really limits results to mainsream songs and generic genre distinctions. This is great for an automatic playlist, but not so great for really finding new bands or artists.
This is why Mufin's new music discovery engine is so unique; it analyzes the actual structure of the song, not just the genre meta-data. Mufin's discovery engine just entered private beta, but Download Squad readers can get in on the action by using this invite link: http://beta.mufin.com/start?ic=e75eecf85a4a547ca9379d6f8b6c23bb.
Co-developed at the Fraunhofer Institute (the creators of the MP3 format), Mufin uses audio recognition technology to analyze the actual musical characteristics of a song. Mufin creates a unique "fingerprint" for each song, using 40 characteristics like tempo, instruments, rhythm structure and sound density. Then, when you search for a song in Mufin's database, an alogrithm compares the fingerprint of that song against the database and presents you with results of songs that are similar in structure.
One of the biggest limitations I see is that its keyboard shortcut is only available from within Firefox; I really want to be able to invoke it from whatever application I’m currently using.
To address this issue, Bartholomew created a small program that creates a global shortcut that invokes Ubiquity no matter what application you're using. It's all written in a few lines of AutoHotkey, so keep reading for a closer look at the code, a link to download the executable, and a reminder of exactly what Ubiquity brings to your Firefox installation.
First, if you need a quick refresher on what Ubiquity can do for you, check out the screencast below:
In addition to the features shown in the video above, Ubiquity has also seen integration with popular to-do list manager Remember the Milk. Now let's take a look at how the AutoHotkey script works. (If you're not interested in the code, just grab the download here and be on your way.)
Now let's take a look at the code:
; Make ubiquity ubiquitous #space:: ; Change shortcut if needed FirefoxTitle = Mozilla Firefox FirefoxPath = %programfiles%\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe SetTitleMatchMode, 2 IfWinNotExist, %FirefoxTitle% { Run %FirefoxPath% } WinActivate, %FirefoxTitle% WinWaitActive, %FirefoxTitle% Send, ^{Space} ; Change shortcut if needed return
As you can see, this works very similarly to TabsLock, the application that switches to or opens Chrome or Firefox whenever you tap you Caps Lock key. The difference: Instead of opening a new tab once Firefox is active, this script invokes Ubiquity.
If you wanted to change your keyboard shortcuts—whether you've set a different shortcut to invoke Ubiquity from Firefox or you'd prefer a different gloabl shortcut—you can do that directly in the script.
Recently our sister publication, TUAW, did a series of posts about each blogger's favorite iPhone and iPod Touch apps. We thought here at Download Squad that we'd take that same approach and apply it to our favourite Windows applications. This first post is my first of three in this vein that will cover Evernote, FeedDemon, and MindManager.
It seems you can't go very far online these days without someone extolling the virtues of Evernote. While this note-taking application has been around for a long time, it has recently been reborn as a cross-platform powerhouse. The original concept behind Evernote was that you had one scrolling piece of note paper that you could continue to add notes to, then easily search within them both based on content and based on a timeline of when your notes were created. While this paradigm still exists, it's no longer Evernote's claim to fame.
Evernote now has a powerful web application that serves as a central nervous system for your note taking. All of your notes that are created in the local Evernote client on your Windows (or Mac) computer are synchronized to Evernote's servers, where they can apply OCR (optical character recognition) to any images that you have included in your notes. This means that you can search for a word that is visible in a photo, and Evernote will find it.
Evernote's interface has been refined over the past few years and is very easy to navigate and use. On the Windows platform most people seem to pit Evernote against OneNote from Microsoft, and in my opinion with the advent of Evernote's server-based system and reliable synchronization, it's no contest.
A free account at Evernote is enough for most users, offering up to 40 MB of file transfer per month, but if you find you are a heavy user you may need to upgrade to a Premium account, which offers 500 MB of transfer per month, plus other features.
I’ve finally given up on Linux on my Eee laptop. Last night I installed Windows XP SP3 — with the aid of the free Nlite (which removes all the bloat from Windows before you install), this precise step-by-step guide, and a cheap £7.99(!) GoGo USB 2.0 external DVD/CD-Rom drive from the Hong Kong (find them on eBay) which is required for installing a kosher version of XP and which works perfectly.
I still have 1.2Gb left free on the Eee’s tiny 4Gb drive — even after adding XP Service Pack 3, a shedload of Windows updates, installing Open Office, Java and the separate Java Media Framework, the hefty Windows .net frameworks and C+ libraries, Sound Forge 4.5 and other apps.
Recording audio with my new Sampson C04U microphone at 22khz, 1.2Gb of disk space is enough for at least 90 minutes of recording.
It was certainly interesting to see how Linux did things, especially the console’s nifty commands like ‘apt-get install’, but XP is just so much more familiar. Sometime too familiar, with at least one fatal crash/lock-up in the first three hours. Using Vista, I’d forgotten those.
On the list for the rejuvenated Eee is finally nailing down getting videos to play natively inside Open Office Impress/Powerpoint presentations (more on that soon). I’m hoping it’ll happen with a cocktail of Java Media Framework, codecs, and the latest Open Office.
The social feedback hub. A community of web enthusiasts crowd-sourcing user feedback by reporting bugs and requesting features for any website. Empowering the users to surface the most requested features and to reproduce the most reported bugs on their own environments. Users interact directly with the product team members to fix, improve and shape the websites/apps they love. URL: UserFix.
Evolution is an Outlook clone for Linux that serves as an email client, calendar application, and a task and contact manager. DIP Consultants has released a version of Evolution that runs on Windows machines. If you don't want to shell out the cash on the latest version of Outlook, Evolution offers many of the same features, plus a few extras.
It supports a whole slew of online services including Exchange, IMAP, POP, iCal, and Google Calendars. Evolution also features integration with the Pidgin chat client.
Evolution for Windows supports Windows XP and Vista. But I have to say, it's not exactly an Outlook or Thunderbird killer just yet. On my test machine it took an unreasonably long time to launch. And it frequently froze while downloading messages from my Gmail account.
When I first moved to Newcastle, the main road from the coast into Newcastle was a single carriageway that went all the way down into Jesmond Dene. I used to get the 306 or the 308 bus and it just to crawl all the way down into the Dene and all the way back up into Cradlewell. It used to go past all these shops.
The road, now a dual carriageway, now lies behind those parked cars, on the other side of the wall.
Cafe Bar One on this stretch of road is good, as is Cafe Antipasto - which opens for coffee and breakfast at 8.30am.
When it comes to the online office app market, Zoho absolutely kills the competition in terms of its offerings. To me, the product that most outshines the competition is Zoho Creator. I love the forms in Google Docs, but Zoho Creator is far more robust. With Zoho Creator, you can basically very easily create a database driven web app using drag and drop form elements and support for functions and scripting (if the scripting stuff is too complicated, you can just create a standard form that will store data in a spreadsheet/database). With enough time and skill, you can do some pretty amazing things with Zoho Creator.
Thus, it's not that surprising that Zoho has launched a marketplace where users can offer up and download user-created Zoho apps. The Zoho Marketplace, which offers both free and paid apps (though I haven't been able to even find any pay apps), offers users the ability to take advantage of pre-written apps and integrate it into their workflow. Everything is hosted on Zoho, so you don't have to worry about compatibility or viruses.
Users can even request a specific application and get a response from the development community. If you want to sell or offer up your own Zoho apps in the Marketplace, listing is free.
To go along with the new Marketplace, Zoho also rolled out version 3.0 of the Zoho Creator. I've been playing around with Zoho Creator in the last couple of days, because I need to automate a data collection process, and am really impressed and excited by the changes. You can now create custom HTML pages that are actually part of the app itself, and embed forms and widgets and other elements into those pages. You can also now use something called Stateless Forms, which basically means you can use the Zoho Creator tools, but not have the data store in Zoho. So if you have your own database system already set-up, you can just use Zoho to collect and export the information.
I started playing around with Creator after I hit a wall in what Google Docs would let me do. Not only did I solve my orignal problem, I now have all kinds of ideas for future stuff, now that I know what Zoho Creator can do.
Zoho Creator 3 and the Zoho Marketplace are available now. Free business and personal accounts are available for Zoho, and paid monthly subscriptions for more storage space, the ability to create more applications and support more users are also available.
When it comes to choosing a content management system (CMS), the open-source Drupal is often a great choice for large or content-rich sites, because it scales well, supports multiple authors and is thoroughly customizable. The downside of all of this power is that for new users especially, the learning curve can be pretty steep. Although Drupal 6 was a huge step forward in overall usability, from a web admin perspective, it's still not exactly easy. Acquia, a company founded by Drupal creator and project lead Dries Buytaert, has just launched Acquia Drupal, which packages Drupal and some of the most popular and highly rated community modules together and also offers commercial support. This is a big win for both Drupal and current and future Drupal users.
Acquia Drupal is a free GPL-licensed download. It contains the Drupal 6.x core (currently at 6.4), a bunch of community contributed modules, like Google Analytics, Mollom (Dries's spam-fighting content solution), and rating and image gallery tools. I installed Acquia Drupal on my local test server and also installed the latest Drupal release, 6.4. The install process was already easier with Acquia Drupal, because I didn't have to create a settings.php file in advance before filling in my database details. The additional modules also made for a nicer user interface (see screenshot) and contained an additional site theme.
My mouse has two buttons, and dammit, I'm going to use them both. The Windows context menu is a trusted tool, and I rely on it heavily.
Moo0's Right Clicker makes several welcome additions to the default options. I particularly like the folder bookmarking feature, which makes it a snap to navigate between folders in any explorer view. Couple it with the copy to and move to features, and managing files and folders in Explorer is much simpler.
It also adds a "go up" option to the menu - much quicker than mousing up to the Explorer toolbar - and the ability to copy a file's name or full path to the clipboard. Right Clicker's duplicate feature will spawn a new window with the current location (even from a file dialog). I find this particularly useful when I'm uploading or editing something and notice some file system untidiness that needs to be addressed immediately.
Right Clicker is available in free and paid versions, and my only real gripe is that the advanced options are all visible but grayed out. You know, just to remind us what we're missing out on. Still, it provides a nice set of functions that context menu aficionados are sure to welcome.Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): The Firefox Universal Uploader extension (aka fireuploader) uploads and downloads files to and from popular web sites through a simple dual-pane interface. In essence, the Universal Uploader acts very much like previously mentioned FireFTP—the extension that turns Firefox into an FTP client—but it uploads directly to popular web sites like Flickr, Facebook, Google Docs, Picasa, Box.net, and YouTube. So rather than require you to log in to those sites to upload photos, videos, documents, or other files, you can fire up this extension and simply drag and drop files to the webapp you want to upload to. The extension is a little rough around the edges, but it's a great idea and works as advertised.
On Friday we had our inaugural "open thread" post using our new threaded commenting system, where readers could ask each other for suggestions and advice. Here are only a few of the most interesting threads (which you can bookmark for easy reference):
My affinity for Firefox comes as much from the fantastic community of addon developers as it does from the program itself. Now, I'm sure you will have heard of some of these before: good Firefox addons tend to spread like wildfire. I hope I've managed to include some that you might have missed.
I've ranked just over a dozen addons that I find to be particularly useful - even to more casual Firefox users.
1. Cybersearch - Customizable Google searches in my Awesome Bar? Yes, please! It also supports keywords so you can enter things like "ds firefox addons" and limit your search to a specific web site (like Downloadsquad, for example). Enter a comma separated list of URLs to search a group of sites.
2. LastPass - I used to use KeePass, but I just like LastPass better. It did a great job of importing (and then removing) my Firefox stored passwords, and its secure password creation tool makes using different passwords on new sites a snap. The web interface is a great way to manage my logins and groups.
3. FEBE - As with anything else on your computer, it's never a bad idea to back up your Firefox install. FEBE will back up everything - extensions, themes, bookmarks - or just what you choose, and you can set up an automated schedule. It's also got integrated Box.net support, which is actually a fairly nice way to roll-you-rown manual Firefox syncing.
Windows only: Rename the thousands of MP3 files in your digital music library and add or edit tags, lyrics, and album art in one fell swoop with free utility TagScanner. Not only can TagScanner clean up the artist, album, song title, and track number information for your digital music files, it can rename your songs based on a pattern you define (like %artist% - %title%), it can make music playlists, and search online databases like freedb and Amazon to automatically tag music missing information. It includes a built-in player as well so you can listen to tracks while you edit. We've recommended Media Monkey to whip your music's metadata into shape, but TagScanner looks like a solid alternative. TagScanner is a free download for Windows only.
The power of persuasion can get you far in this world, even if you're not in sales, and a few simple communication techniques can go a long way to get someone to agree with you. Tutorial site wikiHow runs down "subconscious" actions for persuading others, like framing, mirroring, timing, or even touching the person on the arm or shoulder. This list is similar to our previously posted (and controversial!) top 10 conversation hacks. How do you convince someone to come on over to your side in conversation? Let us know in the comments. Photo by jurvetson.
The Congress for the New Urbanism has just released Freeways Without Future, their top-10 list of aging highways that should be demolished in favor of city-friendly boulevards. "There's a whole generation of elevated highways in cities that are at the end of their design life,"says John Norquist, head of the Congress for the New Urbanism. "Instead of rebuilding them at enormous expense, cities have an opportunity to undo what proved to be major urban-planning blunder." Take that, RobertMoses.
Jewelry designer Nicole quit her day job to sell her handmade wares online, and she shares how she took the leap from working for someone else to being self-employed. In a featured interview at Etsy, Nicole shares how she got to where she is, and offers a thorough, seven-point checklist of stuff she did before taking the plunge. Nicole says:
1. I first figured out how much money I would need to make each week. 2. I also calculated how much I would need to put away for taxes and met with an attorney to ensure I was recording things properly from the start to avoid extra work later.
3. I had already formed an LLC when I began thinking about my graphic design business, and then a couple of years ago I added a DBA name, Lillyella, when I began designing jewelry and doing shows, so that was taken care of. 4. My biggest concern was health insurance, so I spent a good amount of time researching providers and small business organizations in my city, and then getting myself set up with good coverage. 5. I also decided to stock up on as many supplies as I could while I still had a steady paycheck coming in and I also rearranged my workspace. 6. I went through my monthly expenses and figured out where I could save some money. I called my cable company and just told them I felt my bill was too high, and they lowered it! I was on a roll after that: who else can I call to save money?! I called my car insurance company to tell them I would only be driving about 10 miles a week, as opposed to the 300 miles per week I was driving before, and my premium went down by about $75. That's a great tip that some people may overlook. 7. But lastly—and this is by far the most important—I enjoyed eating enchiladas at our favorite Mexican restaurant a few last times. I figured that the luxury of eating out would be one of the first things to go!
Nicole's is a fabulous story of someone taking a risk to do something that she loves to do—if you've got the itch to do the same, it's a worthwhile read. All you freelancers out there, would you add to Nicole's checklist? Post up anything else you did before starting out on your own in the comments.
I get a cut of your good Karma if you win. So Google has committed $10 million to fund up to five ideas selected by their advisory board.What's the kicker? Anyone can submit an idea. My idea will definitely be a Hummer that isn't driven by an douchebag. Either that or a moneyholder/lender that doesn't need a $700,000,000,000 bailout.
Japes for Owre Tymes is a blog that translates one newspaper comic strip a day into Middle English. "Why? Because it can..." If you want to try reading the translated strips but need a bit of help here's a Middle English dictionary.
Buy My Sh*t Pile, Henry! With our economy in crisis, the US Government is scrambling to rescue our banks by purchasing their "distressed assets", i.e., assets that no one else wants to buy from them. We figured that instead of protesting this plan, we'd give regular Americans the same opportunity to sell their bad assets to the government...
Windows only: Free application Gbridge sets up a virtual private network between any computer over the internet using your Google account as a starting point. Once set up, Gbridge allows you to share files, connect to and remotely control a computer using VNC, sync folders, and back up files to another computer. If you've got Google Talk/Gmail chat friends using Gbridge, the app provides the same functionality between your computer and theirs. It all sounds a little convoluted, but in effect it's actually a relatively painless way for anyone to setup up a VPN between computers, and assuming you've already got a Google account, it doesn't require you to sign up for anything else. The application could be a bit more intuitive in practice, but in terms of what it accomplishes, it's a winner. Gbridge is freeware, Windows only. Despite the name, it's not associated with Google.
Universal Algorithm of Experience: Rev. Luke Anthony Murphy has produced four books of graphs over the past five years: Relationships, Spiritual Matters, Money, and Problems. These graphs are attempts to give shape to the conditions that produce the internal environment of anxiety. Recently a group of these were presented in a show called Wilderness at Bernadette Salvage Fine Arts in conjunction with 7hours in Brooklyn.
Rev. Luke Anthony Murphy is a painter and shows this work as well as his digitally produced drawings and photos in New York, Toronto, and Berlin. He currently lives in East Harlem, New York, and works for CBS.com.
sandbag.org.uk is a not-for-profit website that allows members to buy up surplus "permits to pollute" that form the currency of the European Union's emissions trading scheme (or EU ETSs). Members can then "retire" them so that they cannot continue to be traded between the industrial polluters - cement, steel and car manufacturers etc - forced by EU regulation to operate within the system. "I suppose it's a bit like burning money in front of someone so they can't spend it on something bad," says the founder, Bryony Worthington, to the Guardian. Their site also has a map where you can see the locations of the UK's biggest carbon emitters and their annual allowances.
A tonne of carbon is priced at about €25 or £20 or $35.
Windows only: Experimental Firefox extension FoxTab introduces a new tab switching interface to Firefox complete with five different thumbnailed views. Firefox already has a new Ctrl+Tab switching interface in the works for the 3.1 release with the Ctrl+Tab extension, and FoxTab tosses another attractive hat into that ring. FoxTab views include several familiar ideas, like Vista's new Flip 3D or OS X's Cover Flow—but for your Firefox tabs. FoxTab is a free experimental plug-in (which means you need a username and password to download it from Mozilla Add-ons) and it runs in Firefox.
According to Wired, hacking VP-hopeful Sarah Palin's email account was easy: all the hacker needed was Palin's birthdate, ZIP code, and the name of her high school—all of which are no more than a Google search away. In fact, password security questions may have always been the weakest link in email security, since anyone with an acquaintance's knowledge or access to the internet can divine answers to most of your security questions within minutes. So how can you make sure your email account is secure?
Obscure the Answers to Your Security Questions
Password retrieval tools are there for a good reason, and most of them aren't going anywhere. You can do your best to choose the most obscure questions when you're signing up for a new account, but you still can't guarantee that that information is outside of the reach of anyone.
The basic structure is: [Snarky Bad Attitude Phrase] + [Core Noun Phrase] + [Unique Word]
Although these are not my actual phrases, let's map them for example:
Snarky Bad Attitude Phrase = StupidQuestion
Unique Word = Booyah
Thus, when I'm asked the following question: What is your favorite sports team?
My answer would be: StupidQuestion SportsTeam Booyah
The only question in Palin's account that offered any difficulty asked where she met her spouse. The hacker correctly guessed Wasilla High, Palin's high school. If Palin were to have followed the technique above, the answer could have looked more like InsecureQuestion Spouse Awesome.
Of course you're not limited to the technique above by any means, and you could build your own system to provide unique but secure answers (more secure than your ZIP code by itself, at least). Simply adding and remembering PIN of some sort for every answer would go a long way. (e.g., 5429 Wasilla High).
Choosing a Secure Password
While security questions are a major weak link, passwords are just as easy to break if you aren't using a strong one. Again, we've covered how to choose and remember great passwords in the past, and there are even several strongpasswordgenerators available to help you pick a secure password.
If you prefer to choose the password yourself, don't use simple words, especially by themselves. As security expert Bruce Schneier points out:
...a typical password consists of a root plus an appendage. A root isn't necessarily a dictionary word, but it's something pronounceable. An appendage is either a suffix (90 percent of the time) or a prefix (10 percent of the time).
So if you want your password to be hard to guess, you should choose something not on any of the root or appendage lists. You should mix upper and lowercase in the middle of your root. You should add numbers and symbols in the middle of your root, not as common substitutions. Or drop your appendage in the middle of your root. Or use two roots with an appendage in the middle.
All of your new passwords will be much more difficult to hack, but they're also very difficult to remember. Luckily there isn't all that much to it. All you need is to find yourself a solid password manager to keep track of the details for you. Check out our roundup of the five best password managers for more.
What do you do when you're locked out of your Gmail account for no apparent reason? Google says that since it asks for so little personal information when you sign up, verifying ownership is difficult when they've locked down an account because it may have been compromised. But there's one interesting tidbit they offer for quick account restoration you may not have known:
Always keep the verification number you get when you sign up for Gmail. When you sign up for Gmail, we'll ask you for a secondary email address and then email a verification number to that account. This number is the best way to prove ownership of your account, so be sure to hang on to it.
Most users probably toss that initial verification email, but this seems like a good reason to save it just in case.
The Stanford Engineering Everywhere program offers online access to full courses in the school's engineering program—including classes in computer science and artificial intelligence. Courses include lecture videos, reading lists, handouts, quizzes, tests, and even a social network for fellow online students. Not quite your speed? Check out other ways you can get a free college education online.
Conceptual designer Danny Kuo has prototyped an ingenious solution for getting to the topmost levels of a tall bookshelf with his StairCASE design. The bookshelf combines the functionality of drawers to make steps to reach the high shelves, as shown. For small apartments with high ceilings, this is a pretty ingenious space-saver. For similar storage as ladder, see how to turn your steps into drawers. The StairCASE doesn't appear to be available for purchase, but a DIY version wouldn't be too hard for someone out to build a new bookshelf.
Yahoo Pipes mashup SnackUpon takes the ideas behind two popular web applications—Delicious and StumbleUpon—and creates a customized RSS feed that delivers content you might like based on your Delicious bookmarks. The idea is brilliant: You already subscribe to sites with your newsreader because they deliver content that you like, but you don't have much control over what content the publisher of that site covers. With SnackUpon, it's like you've created a blog that publishes content based solely on your likes. Granted, that assumes the SnackUpon works as advertised, but after testing it out on my Delicious account, this is one feed I'm planning to keep in my newsreader. If you plug in your Delicious ID, let's hear how well SnackUpon matches your taste in the comments.
The right mouse button—beloved by geeks for its power, theoretically unnecessary on a Mac, and generally under-utilized on the average desktop. Right-clicking can be a powerful tool for automating file actions and saving yourself time and arm effort, but only if you've put your own stamp on the offerings of that secondary button. Today we're rounding up some of the best tools for adding power and precision to your right-click menu on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems, so check out what can be done from the other side of the scroll wheel. Photo by geobeo.
10. Add convenient actions to Nautilus (Linux)
The default file manager for GNOME-based Linux systems has a pretty sparse right-click menu when first installed. Install a few helper packages, however, and soon you're rotating and resizing images without an editor, popping open terminals for quick system work, and skipping the sudo command entirely with a "Run as administrator" link. Ubuntu users can install the nautilus-gksu, nautilus-image-converter, and nautilus-open-terminal packages for starters; users of other distributions should search their package manager for "nautilus" (or "konqueror" for KDE-based systems) to see what's available for quick right-click fix-ups.
9. Use two fingers for trackpad right-clicking
If you're new to Macs, or you just haven't dug deep into its configuration options, it's easy to miss this one. Mac laptops only have one button; instead of stretching your hands an octave-length to the Control key, put two fingers on the trackpad and click. To enable it, head to the Keyboard & Mouse section of System Preferences, under the Trackpad section, check this option: "For secondary clicks, place two fingers on the trackpad then click the button."
8. Get Google Map directions without a street address
You can know where "that restaurant with the good burgers" is (a few blocks over from the big intersection) without knowing an actual street address. Find the general spot in Google Maps, right-click, and click for directions to or from that area. You might find it helpful, or you might not truly appreciate it until you're on a scarcely-there Wi-Fi connection, trying to find a way across town and furiously Google-ing for possible addresses.
Anyone with access to their own web space, or with a need to do a lot of FTP transfer, should add RightLoad to their file-swapping arsenal. Set up your FTP servers in RightLoad's preferences, and sending files to the server is as easy as right-clicking and choosing a server. After you're done, RightLoad creates HTML-formatted links for quick web writing or friend-linking, and automatically renames duplicate files. Your overworked FTP client thanks you for the downtime.
6. Tweak Windows' Send To Menu
If you're not a fan of installing contextual applications or power toys on your system, Windows' built-in "Send to" menu on the right-click box can offer a lot of flexibility—you can create instant shortcuts, email or open a file, and much more. Lifehacker reader Howard Dickens explained the process for adding "Send To" actions and items in Windows 98 and XP; for the Vista method, check with the How-To Geek.
5. Customize the Mac Finder's actions with FinderPop
One of those apps that gives back the more that's put into it, FinderPop is a hugely customizable tool for cutting down the number of clicks needed to copy, move, or alias files between locations on your Mac. FinderPop can also launch applications or kill runaway processes, making the right-click (or Ctrl-click) menu a powerful launching pad.
Programs come and go from your computer, and even after they're thoroughly scrubbed, they can leave behind annoying traces in your context menu. ShellExView is where you get complete control over what shows up when you right-click a file, your desktop, or even Internet Explorer. You can add any program, delete useless links, and otherwise hook yourself up with time-saving shortcuts.
3. Roll your own right-click Mac actions with OnMyCommand
Let's face it—some of the work you do is creative, and some of it is just resizing a bunch of images to 400 pixels wide and converting them to JPEG. Automate those mandatory tasks with OnMyCommand, an AppleScript/command-line app that adds your own scripts or already-compiled offerings to Finder's right-click menu. Check out SimpleHelp's concise and clear guide for help getting started with OnMyCommand.
2. Create file-aware right-click options
Many of the tools listed above make adding custom file-wrangling options to your right-click menu easy, but only for every file or folder you click. If you want to get specific with certain file types, adding custom for-this-file-type-only actions isn't as hard as it might seem. Adam has explained the custom context menu process (pulled from a MetaFilter thread) for Windows XP; Vista users should check out FileMenuTools, detailed elsewhere in this list.
1. Combine lots of right-click tools with FileMenuTools
If you're a Windows user and only have time to try out one of the right-click tools we've gathered here, FileMenuTools is a safe bet for maximum utility. It doesn't get as in-depth as some of the utilities it rolls together, but it lets you create contextual file actions, improve your Send To menu, add super-helpful tweaks like "Run Command Line from Here" and "Copy Path," and generally geek out your right-click menu without touching the registry or hunting down obscure command line options.
Right-click menus are definitely a to-each-their-own tool, as the most useful tools depend on what you're trying to get done. So we ask our dear readers: What right-click actions, links, and tweaks help you act quickly and shuttle files more efficiently? Share your own tips in the comments below.
With the usual snail-like speed of community arts publicity, news comes in (with just three hours to go, and I’ve not spotted it elsewhere) of the Birmingham launch today of a “Community Arts Apprenticeships: West Midlands Pilot”. This is to do with the new Creative & Media Diploma and the Creative Apprenticeships, designed by the Sector Skills Councils…
“The Creative Apprenticeship will be targeted at existing and new staff; as there will be those individuals who want to expand their Creative skills and knowledge, as well as those wanting to access Creative Industries for the first time. They will gain valuable experience working directly with you and a training provider, whilst studying for a Level 2 or Level 3 Certificate in Creative & Cultural Practice.”
Please join us on Wednesday 17th September at The Studio, Cannon Street [ Birmingham ] from 2pm to explore apprenticeships within the Community Arts sector further. […] 0121 224 7308.”
Windows only: Free right-click enhancer Moo0 RightClicker adds contextual images and a host of useful features to your standard right-click menu in Windows. Copying and moving files and folders to bookmarked or standard system folders is made easy with quick-collapsing menus. Perma-deleting items (as opposed to merely "recycling" them) is added to your options, and intelligent copying—the name, path, or contents of an actual file—is a nice touch. Best of all, Moo0 doesn't eliminate any customizations you've already made, and lets you customize what you see on right-clicking, so it works nicely with any other utilities you may have installed. Moo0 RightClicker is a free download for Windows systems only.
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Small Basic Teaches Programming Fundamentals [Featured Windows Download]
Windows only: If you've never played around with programming before, this weekend is a perfect time to start. Small Basic is a recent offering from Microsoft based on the venerable BASIC programming language and implemented with .NET. Designed for coding novices and children, the system is easy to learn and extensible with third party libraries. Out of the box Small Basic has only fifteen keywords to help new users quickly learn the core of the language and get them programming. Can't think of a pressing reason why you need to learn a programming language? Expand your mind with 
Windows only: We've previously highlighted some disk space visualization tools with all kinds of 
Is Obama a floating ship or dry land?
The Atlas of Hidden Water
[Image: From the "atlas of hidden water." Check out the 
[Image: The "hidden water" of South America].
Amit Agarwal at the Digital Inspiration blog has flipped the Google Maps API around so anyone can find the exact street address of any point on a street by clicking on it. In other words, if you can point to a great restaurant on a city map but don't know the address to give for driving directions, simply navigate to the site and click. One of those features you really wish was implemented in Google Maps itself, but it's a pretty sweet mash-up to use in the meantime. 
[Image: The charismatic boundaries of an earlier worldview – here, the Hereford 
[Image: From the 
[Images: From the 
A recent usability study conducted by Yahoo shows that users are still confused by OpenID—the single sign-on technology out to eliminate multiple usernames and passwords. Tech site Webmonkey reports:
Social Media Classroom
10.15.2008: Milwaukee
This Wednesday, October 15th, is 
Personal finance blogger 
Freelancer Collis Ta'eed makes about $200 each month from work he mostly did years ago and hasn't touched. From putting his (admittedly clumsy) illustrations up for sale on stock photo sites, he steadies his freelance income and makes better use of his time between projects:
Government officials admit losing 20,000 cows in Britain
This is Rusty. He’s my current preferred mode of transportation. Or at least he would be, if he had one more component: a bicycle chain.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=4326ac04-e592-4e2c-a7dc-acb6d6b3003b)
Software engineer and Lifehacker reader William Bartholomew loves 
Recently our sister publication, TUAW, did a series of posts about each blogger's 
Linux - do not want
Firefox only (Windows/Mac/Linux): The Firefox Universal Uploader extension (aka fireuploader) uploads and downloads files to and from popular web sites through a simple dual-pane interface. In essence, the Universal Uploader acts very much like 
The power of persuasion can get you far in this world, even if you're not in sales, and a few simple communication techniques can go a long way to get someone to agree with you. Tutorial site wikiHow runs down "subconscious" actions for persuading others, like framing, mirroring, timing, or even touching the person on the arm or shoulder. This list is similar to our previously posted (and controversial!) 
Windows only: Experimental Firefox extension FoxTab introduces a new tab switching interface to Firefox complete with five different thumbnailed views. Firefox already has a 
What do you do when you're 
The 
Yahoo Pipes mashup SnackUpon takes the ideas behind two popular web applications—Delicious and StumbleUpon—and creates a customized RSS feed that delivers content you might like based on your Delicious bookmarks. The idea is brilliant: You already subscribe to sites with your newsreader because they deliver content that you like, but you don't have much control over what content the publisher of that site covers. With SnackUpon, it's like you've created a blog that publishes content based solely on your likes. Granted, that assumes the SnackUpon works as advertised, but after testing it out on my Delicious account, this is one feed I'm planning to keep in my newsreader. If you plug in your Delicious ID, let's hear how well SnackUpon matches your taste in the comments.
The right mouse button—beloved by geeks for its power, theoretically unnecessary on a Mac, and generally under-utilized on the average desktop. Right-clicking can be a powerful tool for automating file actions and saving yourself time and arm effort, but only if you've put your own stamp on the offerings of that secondary button. Today we're rounding up some of the best tools for adding power and precision to your right-click menu on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems, so check out what can be done from the other side of the scroll wheel. Photo by 
The default file manager for GNOME-based Linux systems has a pretty sparse right-click menu when first installed. Install a few helper packages, however, and soon you're rotating and resizing images without an editor, popping open terminals for quick system work, and skipping the 
If you're new to Macs, or you just haven't dug deep into its configuration options, it's easy to miss this one. Mac laptops only have one button; instead of stretching your hands an octave-length to the Control key, put two fingers on the trackpad and click. To enable it, head to the Keyboard & Mouse section of System Preferences, under the Trackpad section, check this option: "For secondary clicks, place two fingers on the trackpad then click the button."
You can know where "that restaurant with the good burgers" is (a few blocks over from the big intersection) without knowing an actual street address. Find the general spot in Google Maps, right-click, and click for directions to or from that area. You might find it helpful, or you might not truly appreciate it until you're on a scarcely-there Wi-Fi connection, trying to find a way across town and furiously Google-ing for possible addresses.
Anyone with access to their own web space, or with a need to do a lot of FTP transfer, should add RightLoad to their file-swapping arsenal. Set up your FTP servers in RightLoad's preferences, and sending files to the server is as easy as right-clicking and choosing a server. After you're done, RightLoad creates HTML-formatted links for quick web writing or friend-linking, and automatically renames duplicate files. Your overworked FTP client thanks you for the downtime.
If you're not a fan of installing contextual applications or power toys on your system, Windows' built-in "Send to" menu on the right-click box can offer a lot of flexibility—you can create instant shortcuts, email or open a file, and much more. Lifehacker reader Howard Dickens explained the process for 
One of those apps that gives back the more that's put into it, FinderPop is a hugely customizable tool for cutting down the number of clicks needed to copy, move, or alias files between locations on your Mac. FinderPop can also launch applications or kill runaway processes, making the right-click (or Ctrl-click) menu a powerful launching pad.
Programs come and go from your computer, and even after they're thoroughly scrubbed, they can leave behind annoying traces in your context menu. ShellExView is where you get complete control over what shows up when you right-click a file, your desktop, or even Internet Explorer. You can add any program, delete useless links, and otherwise hook yourself up with time-saving shortcuts.
Let's face it—some of the work you do is creative, and some of it is just resizing a bunch of images to 400 pixels wide and converting them to JPEG. Automate those mandatory tasks with OnMyCommand, an AppleScript/command-line app that adds your own scripts or already-compiled offerings to Finder's right-click menu. Check out 
Many of the tools listed above make adding custom file-wrangling options to your right-click menu easy, but only for every file or folder you click. If you want to get specific with certain file types, adding custom for-this-file-type-only actions isn't as hard as it might seem. Adam has 
If you're a Windows user and only have time to try out one of the right-click tools we've gathered here, FileMenuTools is a safe bet for maximum utility. It doesn't get as in-depth as some of the utilities it rolls together, but it lets you create contextual file actions, improve your Send To menu, add super-helpful tweaks like "Run Command Line from Here" and "Copy Path," and generally geek out your right-click menu without touching the registry or hunting down obscure command line options.
Windows only: Free right-click enhancer Moo0 RightClicker adds contextual images and a host of useful features to your standard right-click menu in Windows. Copying and moving files and folders to bookmarked or standard system folders is made easy with quick-collapsing menus. Perma-deleting items (as opposed to merely "recycling" them) is added to your options, and intelligent copying—the name, path, or contents of an actual file—is a nice touch. Best of all, Moo0 doesn't eliminate any customizations you've already made, and lets you customize what you see on right-clicking, so it works nicely with any other utilities you may have installed. Moo0 RightClicker is a free download for Windows systems only.