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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 2010-11-03

  • A NASA official may have made a 35-million-mile slip of the tongue. The director of NASA's Ames Research Center in California casually let slip mention of the 100-Year Starship recently, a new program funded by the super-secret government agency, DARPA. In a talk at San Francisco's Long Conversation conference, Simon “Pete” Worden said DARPA has $1M to spend, plus another $100,000 from NASA itself, for the program, which will initially develop a new kind of propulsion engine that will take us to Mars or beyond. There's only one problem: The astronauts won't come back.  The 100-year ship would leave Earth with the intention of colonizing a planet, but it would likely be a one-way trip because of the time it takes to travel 35 million miles. That’s a daunting prospect, partly because of the ethical dilemma, and partly because it may be the only recourse. "What psychological challenges should we anticipate in those who volunteer in good faith and with great courage
  • If you have multiple computers, you probably want an easy way to share your keyboard and mouse. There are different ways to accomplish this goal. You can try using a hardware KVM switch (Keyboard, Video, Mouse). I’ve tried a couple KVM switches, and they never worked reliably. How would you like free software to share the keyboard and mouse?! How would you like to handle both PC’s and Macintosh computers?! Synergy is a PC program. It’s rather complicated. I had to get help setting it up for multiple PC’s.
  • I’ve written posts like If I started today and Start From Nothing, where I talked about how I’d go about building my social presence. In this post, I want to talk about if I were managing a small team or department for an organization using social media tools. There are similarities, but there are some things I’d set up differently. In building any social media platform, if you don’t start with goals, you’re starting with a hope for failure. There are many possible goals: relationship-building, lead generation, sales, marketing, awareness, customer service. In my example, I’m going to set mine up with the goal of improving leads and sales, while helping out my customer service department. You can alter the recipe to taste. For internal communication, I’d use a mix of Yammer and Google Docs. I’d use Yammer for the “fluid” information for our organization and I’d use Google Docs for static information, such as spreadsheets and records and documents.
  • As the next part of our Web Design Layouts series, today we’re going to examine the “F Pattern Layout”; Rather than trying to force the viewer’s visual flow, the F-Layout gives in to the natural behaviors of most web surfers and it uses scientific studies to back it up. This tutorial will walk you through the principles of the F-Layout, why it works, and how you can create your own.
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    links for 2010-10-25

  • Building a Hackintosh from scratch—that is, installing Mac OS X on non-Mac hardware—has never been easier, and the final product has never performed better. Here's how it works. Note: This is our third and most recent Hackintosh build (here are the now-outdated first and second). This time, to make things really easy on you, we put together a video walkthrough of the entire process. You can watch the video in its entirety below, but we've also broken up the video next to the accompanying text in each step below.
  • The Dark Sun has risen again on the parched, magically devastated world of Athas, bringing with it the new rules and mindset of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. First introduced in the early 1990s during D&D 2nd Edition, Dark Sun was meant to be a brutal, unforgiving dark fantasy setting unlike anything the game had seen. Noble hobbits, wise wizards, and forthright knights gave way to a world devastated by an arcane apocalypse. Where once there had been a bright, green planet, there was now just sand and death. Civilization lived on in a handful of city-states dominated by all-powerful sorcerer-kings. Players took on the role of slaves, gladiators and other peons thrown to the bottom of society’s latter; the setting wasn’t about saving the world – it was about surviving it. It was also the first setting where psionics dominated the landscape, while magic was rare (and profane, as it caused the apocalypse that turned verdant Athas into a wasteland).
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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 2010-09-24

  • Michael Dell flashed a 7-inch version of its Android-based Streak tablet at Oracle OpenWorld…but offered no real details. Dell is apparently working on evolving its Android-based Streak tablet: at the Oracle OpenWorld conference in San Francisco, Dell CEO Michael Dell flashed a 7-inch version of the device, which is currently available with a 5-inch display. However, Dell offered no other hard details about the device, including important information like price, availability, and whether Dell still envisions tablet devices serving as fully-functional phones.
  • As far as House Judiciary subcommittee hearings on agricultural jobs go, this one had a bit more celebrity shine. Stephen Colbert, the comedian and satirist, knew that, and hoped his presence would vault the hearings up to "CSPAN 1" status. Here are his opening remarks, which differ from the testimony submitted in advance.
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    links for 2010-08-19

  • Experience with HP today…
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    links for 2010-08-11

  • The new school year is here for many teachers. For those who haven't started school yet, the new school year will be here soon. If you've set the goal of trying something new in your classroom this year (shouldn't that always be one of our goals), here are eleven techy things teachers should try this year.
  • One interesting characteristic of Star Trek: The Next Generation—one that separated it from the original series and most of the early films—was its widespread use of smooth, flat, touch-based control panels throughout the Enterprise-D. This touch interface was also used for numerous portable devices known as PADDs, or Personal Access Display Devices. These mobile computing terminals bear a striking resemblance to Apple's iPad—a mobile computing device largely defined by its smooth, flat touchscreen interface. To understand the thinking that led to the design of the Star Trek PADD, we spoke to some of the people involved in production of ST:TNG (as well as other Star Trek TV series and films), including Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Doug Drexler. All three were involved in various aspects of production art for Star Trek properties, including graphic design, set design, prop design, visual effects, art direction, and more. We also discussed their impressions of the iPad and how eer
  • Welcome to The Pac-Man Dossier! This web page is dedicated to providing Pac-Man players of all skill levels with the most complete and detailed study of the game possible. New discoveries found during the research for this page in December 2008 have allowed for the clearest view yet of the actual ghost behavior and pathfinding logic used by the game. Laid out in hyperlinked chapters and sections, the dossier is easy to navigate using the Table of Contents below, or you can read it in linear fashion from top-to-bottom. Chapter 1 is purely the backstory of Namco and Pac-Man's designer, Toru Iwatani, chronicling the development cycle and release of the arcade classic. If you want to get right to the technical portions of the document, however, feel free to skip ahead to Chapter 2 and start reading there. Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 are dedicated to explaining pathfinding logic and discussions of unique ghost behavior. Chapter 5 is dedicated to the “split screen” level, and several Appendices
  • Artwork being used for Celebration V commitment chapel.
  • A safe, private environment to use Aviary tools with your students • Create private student accounts • Manage assignments and projects • Use the image editor, vector editor, audio editor & music creator • All content and images are 100% school safe
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    links for 2010-02-27

  • A 5.1 speaker system with deep bass that immerses you in the sounds you love—even from 2-channel stereo sources.
  • Internet Explorer Six, resident of the interwebs for over 8 years, died the morning of March 1, 2010 in Mountain View, California, as a result of a workplace injury sustained at the headquarters of Google, Inc. Internet Explorer Six, known to friends and family as "IE6," is survived by son Internet Explorer Seven, and grand-daughter Internet Explorer Eight.
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