Every now and then you find a guitarist that is pretty damn fancy pants. Erik Mongrain will make your jaw drop. I was stumbling around the web the other night and before I was stopped by drop dead boring animation, I discovered this fantastic musician.
Check out his two videos on Google Video:
Airtap
Percusienfa
10 fancy pants bananas.
Saturday, January 20, 2007
Tuesday, January 16, 2007
My favourite Portable Apps
Sometimes you love a program so much you just have to take it with you. Thank goodness for Portable Apps. Now you can run many of your favourite apps right off of your USB stick. Here are some of my favourites:
Make sure you get a program to launch your portables. I use PStart, but the Portable Apps Suite has a great little launcher of its own. Oh yes ... I also usually keep all my apps in one folder so that they don't fight with my other documents on my USB. Portable Apps are mean, I once saw some having a bucketOf.tar eating contest.
PortableApps.com
Wikipedia List of Portable Apps
Thunderbird Portable/Gmail Combo - 10 bananas
Gmail is fantastic. More space than you'll ever need. Great interface. Best of all its portable - you can get your mail from any computer with an internet connection. But there is something great about having a smart mail client.
Using Thunderbird Portable you can store your mail on your flash drive for retrieval at any time - whether or not you can get to an internet connection. Plus you get a great portable mail client from the guys that brought you Firefox.
Here's how you set it up...
- Get a Gmail account (or any other web account that supports POP3 download).
- Go to the Forwarding and POP tab under the Settings page and enable POP Download.
- Set up Thunderbird Portable with your Gmail account with the settings found here.
- Smile at your achievement.
- Take your email anywhere.
Tip from the Smoothie:
This combo can make a great present for someone who doesn't have their own email address.
Buy a USB stick.
Get a Gmail address for the presentee.
Set it up.
Deliver the present.
Collect 10 smoothie points.GIMP Portable - 8 bananas
GIMP is an image editing program - a free alternative to Photoshop, Corel Draw etc. I often have to edit icons, GIFs and simple pictures at work and MS paint just doesn't cut it. All graphics on this site have been done with GIMP and I would say that 90% of it was done with GIMP Portable.Mozilla Firefox Portable - 7 bananas
I'm afraid its come to a point where I can no longer tolerate having to use Internet Exploiter. Now I can take the 'fox with me no matter where I go. Granted - most of the computers I use already have Firefox installed, so I don't really get to use it much(hence the rating). Get it here.SciTE - Scientilla Text Editor - 7 bananas
Great text editor with syntax highlighting, folding and other arb features that only a software developer could love. Really, it is just a text editor after all. I use SciTE extensively for editing HTML, XML and especially web.config files on remote servers. If you can handle using Notepad, then you're a better man than me.XAMPP - 6 nerd bananas
A complete Apache/MySQL/Php/Perl development server that you can carry with you. Easy setup - just copy the folder to your USB and go.VLC - Video Lan Client - 8 bananas
VLC is my favourite media player anyway. I hardly ever find a video file it can't play. Ok, maybe I could try harder but even if there was some hypothetical file that it couldn't, it still plays better than Media Player and Real player. The portable version is here.
Setting Up The Arsenal
Make sure you get a program to launch your portables. I use PStart, but the Portable Apps Suite has a great little launcher of its own. Oh yes ... I also usually keep all my apps in one folder so that they don't fight with my other documents on my USB. Portable Apps are mean, I once saw some having a bucketOf.tar eating contest.
More
PortableApps.com
Wikipedia List of Portable Apps
Monday, January 08, 2007
Writing Better Web Content - From One Turkey to Another.
I haven't made any new posts for a while. I was online, but just in a very lazy mood. On top of that I had stuff to do at work. It always sucks when work gets in the way of pretending to work. To make it up here's a long post that I managed to make look well researched.
Now I'm not the best writer at the best of times. I'm not Charles Dickens at the worst of times and I'm not funny any of the time. But man I wish I was - well except for Charles Dickens. Writing a fantastic article is extremely satisfying. Reading a fantastic article is even more so. Here's a statistic that I made up - 9 in 10 internet browsers will favour an easy to read article over a more factual one. If you're looking to build a steady readership - up your writing skills.
I did quite a bit of research here and here is my list of writing essentials (taken and summarised from various pages):
Post regularly. If you're looking to get more readers, make sure there's something new for them when they come back. No one likes going to a site and finding nothing's changed. No one even visits a site they know hasn't changed. Great content intrigues readers. New content keeps them.
Wield it like a sword. Waaaaarrh!! If you want to improve your running, you get good shoes. If you're playing squash, you get the best squisher you can. If you want to write good content, make sure you're using the best that the language has to offer. Get whatever help you can. The web is full of articles on writing, here's a great site full of solid advice by Roy Peter Clark. There's 30 tips there but he later extended it to 50 in more detailed series found here. Take it slowly though. Improve one thing at a time.
A link is worth a thousand words. Link to whatever reference the reader might need. Link to other sites the reader might enjoy. If the information is out there - and it probably is - take the time to find it and link to it. That way you can keep your articles shorter and more direct. Any interested reader is a click away from the information, but your article stays on topic at all times.
Especially if you're a blogger, don't just link to a cool site. Add your own opinion. If you're just linking to other pages, then you're just an obstacle. Readers will just pass right through, grumbling as they trip over you. Add something that adds value to the web. More content will increase your ranking on search engines, thus increasing your visits from Googlers and other searchers. Invite them in for tea. Give 'em something to read.
Use headings, block quotes and paragraphs. Use colours, bold text and different font sizes. Do whatever you can to get away from the drab.
Most web readers don't read continuously. They skip whole sections and paragraphs. Break up your articles into sections so they can find what they're looking for easily - and skip the stuff that they don't need. Learning some basic HTML will help you understand what you can and can't do on the web. Don't overdo the formatting though. Clean is what you are going for here, not fancy. Take note of what other sites do.
Read your work before you publish it. Check that the links work. Preview the formatting. This is always easier for shorter articles but longer articles are usually the ones to benefit from a good review. One page I read suggested that you should be able to hear someone speaking the article back to you. It should be real. Real smooth:)
Finally, don't stop writing. Don't let your perfectionism stop you from writing your content. If you're struggling to get that perfect first line, relax your constraints. Rather get the idea down and rework it later. I can spend hours with nothing, blocked up looking for the killer article. Let it go. It will come. You don't get better at writing by not writing. Anything is better than nothing.
Here are the pages I worked from. They're all great, but I put them in order of what I got out. Enjoy.
Ten Tips For A Better Weblog
10 Tips on Writing the Living Web
Thirty Tools for Writers
How to write for the Web
Fifty (50!) Tools which can help you in Writing
Now I'm not the best writer at the best of times. I'm not Charles Dickens at the worst of times and I'm not funny any of the time. But man I wish I was - well except for Charles Dickens. Writing a fantastic article is extremely satisfying. Reading a fantastic article is even more so. Here's a statistic that I made up - 9 in 10 internet browsers will favour an easy to read article over a more factual one. If you're looking to build a steady readership - up your writing skills.
I did quite a bit of research here and here is my list of writing essentials (taken and summarised from various pages):
1. Write often.
Post regularly. If you're looking to get more readers, make sure there's something new for them when they come back. No one likes going to a site and finding nothing's changed. No one even visits a site they know hasn't changed. Great content intrigues readers. New content keeps them.
2. Learn to use the language.
Wield it like a sword. Waaaaarrh!! If you want to improve your running, you get good shoes. If you're playing squash, you get the best squisher you can. If you want to write good content, make sure you're using the best that the language has to offer. Get whatever help you can. The web is full of articles on writing, here's a great site full of solid advice by Roy Peter Clark. There's 30 tips there but he later extended it to 50 in more detailed series found here. Take it slowly though. Improve one thing at a time.
3. Use links extensively.
A link is worth a thousand words. Link to whatever reference the reader might need. Link to other sites the reader might enjoy. If the information is out there - and it probably is - take the time to find it and link to it. That way you can keep your articles shorter and more direct. Any interested reader is a click away from the information, but your article stays on topic at all times.
4. Add you own content.
Especially if you're a blogger, don't just link to a cool site. Add your own opinion. If you're just linking to other pages, then you're just an obstacle. Readers will just pass right through, grumbling as they trip over you. Add something that adds value to the web. More content will increase your ranking on search engines, thus increasing your visits from Googlers and other searchers. Invite them in for tea. Give 'em something to read.
5. Format your articles.
Use headings, block quotes and paragraphs. Use colours, bold text and different font sizes. Do whatever you can to get away from the drab.
Most web readers don't read continuously. They skip whole sections and paragraphs. Break up your articles into sections so they can find what they're looking for easily - and skip the stuff that they don't need. Learning some basic HTML will help you understand what you can and can't do on the web. Don't overdo the formatting though. Clean is what you are going for here, not fancy. Take note of what other sites do.
6. Always review
Read your work before you publish it. Check that the links work. Preview the formatting. This is always easier for shorter articles but longer articles are usually the ones to benefit from a good review. One page I read suggested that you should be able to hear someone speaking the article back to you. It should be real. Real smooth:)
7. Write anyway.
Finally, don't stop writing. Don't let your perfectionism stop you from writing your content. If you're struggling to get that perfect first line, relax your constraints. Rather get the idea down and rework it later. I can spend hours with nothing, blocked up looking for the killer article. Let it go. It will come. You don't get better at writing by not writing. Anything is better than nothing.
Here are the pages I worked from. They're all great, but I put them in order of what I got out. Enjoy.
Ten Tips For A Better Weblog
10 Tips on Writing the Living Web
Thirty Tools for Writers
How to write for the Web
Fifty (50!) Tools which can help you in Writing
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