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links for 2010-11-16

  • SoTel Systems, LLC is the premier wholesale supplier for business communications products and services. We offer traditional refurbished and unused voice and data equipment, authorized distribution of VOIP equipment, and commercial SIP Services for both inbound and outbound traffic. With nearly 30 years of experience in the telecommunications industry we provide your company with quality products, valuable expertise, and lightning fast delivery.
  • Only the best commercial- use free fonts Free fonts have met their match. We know how hard it is to find quality freeware that is licensed for commercial work. We've done the hard work, hand-selecting these typefaces and presenting them in an easy-to-use format. Here are some of our favorites:
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    links for 2010-10-09

  • MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Anyone driving the twists of Highway 1 between San Francisco and Los Angeles recently may have glimpsed a Toyota Prius with a curious funnel-like cylinder on the roof. Harder to notice was that the person at the wheel was not actually driving.
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    links for 2010-10-08

  • Google just announced that it plans to shut down 1-800-GOOG-411, its voice-powered directory assistance service, on November 12. GOOG-411, which launched in 2007, was the company's first foray into voice-powered search. According to Google, GOOG-411 "provided a foundation for more ambitious services" on smartphone platforms like Google's own Android and Apple's iPhone. Interestingly, today's announcement also notes that Google plans to put all of its resources "into speech-enabling the next generation of Google products and services across a multitude of languages."
  • A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online. The post prompted wide speculation about whether the device was real, whether the young Arab-American was being targeted in a terrorism investigation and what the authorities would do. It took just 48 hours to find out: The device was real, the student was being secretly tracked and the FBI wanted their expensive device back, the student told Wired.com in an interview Wednesday. The answer came when half-a-dozen FBI agents and police officers appeared at Yasir Afifi’s apartment complex in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday demanding he return the device. Afifi, a 20-year-old U.S.-born citizen, cooperated willingly and said he’d done nothing to merit attention from authorities. Comments the agents made during their visit suggested he’d been under FBI surveillance for three to six months.
  • You can quickly create a seamless background texture in our online image editor Phoenix. First import, and select your seamless tile with one of the selection tools. Next use the "Define Pattern" functions under the Select menu to set it as the foreground fill. Then use the paint bucket tool to fill the canvas with the new pattern.
  • Did you ever feel like there just weren't enough hours in the day? Have you ever stayed up late because you weren't tired enough to go to bed? Have you ever felt like you didn't get enough sleep and it was, too soon, time to get up? Have you ever wished for more free time to pursue different activities and goals? If you can relate to these feelings, you will be interested in the 28 Hour Day. Under the 28 Hour Day system, the current week would remain at exactly 168 hours. (24×7=168) However, this 168 hour period would be divided into six 28-hour days rather than 7 24-hour days. Some of the benefits of extending the length of the day are relatively clear: you would simply have more time to do the things you wanted to do. Everything you do now in a typical day could be done for a little longer: you could sleep longer, work longer, spend longer blocks of time with your family and friends, and have more leisurely meals.
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    links for 2010-09-29

  • Technology is opening up new opportunities for people who want to work at home. Finding and landing profitable work isn't easy, but we've listed some options. These jobs will give you the flexibility you want and the income you need to keep paying your bills and maintaining a health credit score.
  • The film adaptation of 'The Lord of the Rings' prequel has suffered multiple setbacks — the latest a worldwide union boycott. Is it time to throw in the towel?
  • Other than the frenzied anticipation for the coming breed of tablet PCs, the one topic that dominates the mindspace of the technorati these days is the world of e-readers. More specifically, a great debate is brewing; each of the e-readers and their associated online book stores favor differing standards and file formats, and we may have another good ole fashioned format war on our hands. (Nothing gets a techie's blood pressure going more than watching as competing technologies duke it out.) Format wars are to the tech world what elections are to politics, or what playoffs are to sports: a chance for competing candidates to go big or go home — based on the preferences of the masses. The most cited example is the great Betamax vs. VHS war of the early '80s (in which the objectively better standard got trounced), but, in truth, battles over standards have been with us since the first wheel was chipped from stone.
  • Last week I talked about 960 Grid System is Getting Old. Surprisingly a lot of comments have been made. It seems like people are using 960gs because of the "golden ratio" — all numbers are even. I’m a designer, not a grid scientist. Why restrict your layout so that it can fit into this 960gs? A grid is supposed to help you in design, not to limit your creativity. The 978 grid, that I mentioned before, is not just about increasing the page width, but to loosen the gutter space so users can read it more comfortably. Today, I would like to write a follow up post to further ellaborate on some of the points I brought up initially.
  • Designing and critiquing logos for web-based companies and startups is a pursuit of endless fascination for many of us. Over the years, we’ve seen enough startups come and go (and rebrand and merge) to fill a volume with how and how not to develop and execute a logo for a web company. We’ve also picked up some knowledge about trends in this field. Some of the trends are good; others, regrettable. Others still are simply overused, which is the saddest scenario of them all. We hate to see a good design trick or typeface grow hackneyed over the course of a few months, but it happens all the time, unfortunately.
  • While we all know the importance of the content of any webpage, what we often ignore is the first impression that the visitor forms when visiting any webpage. It is of paramount importance to know that the first thing that any visitor looks at is the look of the page. If the look is appealing enough only then does the reader move on to read the content. Graphic designers today are laying a huge importance on typography to make a webpage look attractive. When creating items like E-Books, brochures and pamphlets, it is important that the design and layout of the font is managed well so as to make any webpage look attractive. At earlier times, typesetters used manual modes to perform this action but with the advancement in technology, it is now possible to design fonts on the computer. There are some fantastic typography tools that are available for use now that enable the webpage creator to create some fantastic font styles to attract the readers.
  • Monet’s paintings evoke a sense of energy and life, they leap off the canvas with color and contrast, but Monet somehow managed to avoid using the color black for nearly his entire painting career. By avoiding black in your own designs, you can replicate some of this dynamism.
  • Amazon’s Kindle can do a lot more than just buy and read Amazon-sold e-books. This is often a surprise. I usually wind up in conversations where someone says “I’d like to try a Kindle, but it can’t _______.” Usually, it can. I was actually surprised when I bought my Kindle not just by how much it could do, but by how well it did it. The Kindle suffers from two things: 1) it’s never going to do everything that a full-fledged computer or even a color touchscreen tablet can do; and 2) the Kindle 3 has improved on a whole slew of features that were either poorly implemented in or entirely absent from earlier iterations of the Kindle. Here I want to gather up knowledge generated from and circulated by many of my favorite e-reader blogs, just to try to give you an inkling of all the things that a new Kindle can do.
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    links for 2009-12-26

  • A new computer is like a blank state–there's a lot of potential there, but without some work on your part, it's useless. It's not hard to get started, but there are some essential first steps that everyone should follow when breaking in their new PC. In this guide, we've compiled a step-by-step list of essential tips, tricks and advice from many of our other features, to provide you with just the information you need to get off to a great start with any new PC. So if you got a new rig under the PC under the tree this year, or even if you're just thinking about getting one in the future, read on to find out more!
  • Pure digital and exclusive sheet music with audio files to download instantly
  • Welcome to the portal page of the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)! We at the IMSLP believe that music should be something that is easily accessible for everyone. For this purpose we have created a music library to provide music scores free of charge to anyone with internet access, with several other projects in planning. IMSLP is also entirely collaborative, and all contributions are greatly welcome.
  • Endless hours of great classical music are only a few clicks away at Piano Society. Piano Society offers artists, amateurs and professionals alike, free space, bandwidth, and a personal biography page by which they are being presented. Today you find 197 pianists at Piano Society, who have uploaded more than 4,500 recordings by 214 different composers. For you, as a Piano Society visitor and listener, this means endless hours of listening for free, which we hope will bring you a lot of pleasure and joy. With more than 100,000 unique visitors and over 1,000,000 downloads per month, the Piano Society is the largest resource of free classical piano recordings on the Internet. Since the start, more than 40,000,000 downloads of piano recordings have been made which proves the huge world-wide interest in classical music.
  • Nick Crocker is MD of Native Digital and co-founder of We Are Hunted. It seems as though the first era of digital music may have come to an end. Napster died, P2P lived in some black market twilight zone, streaming services on ad-supported revenue were suffocated by unsustainably high licensing fees, and subscription services sputtered along, never quite capturing the imaginations of music fans. 2009 ended in a flurry of acquisitions (LaLa, iLike), launches (Vevo) and shutdowns (iMeem), which dramatically rearranged the digital music landscape. When the dust finally settles, expect digital music to begin anew. With that in mind, here are my five predictions for music in 2010.
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