Posts filed under 'links'
If you haven’t got around to shopping for gifts for kids at this point you are probably in trouble. Most of the good stuff is probably gone. But there is still some free stuff online that you might be able to get away with. I guess it would be hard to wrap, but face it, your choices are limited at this point.
LEGO Digital Designer is free official LEGO software that lets you design models, find out how much they would cost to build, and even order the pieces to make it. Obviously that last part is why it makes sense to offer a free Digital Designer, but up till then its just fun.
ArtRage 2 Free Edition is really fun for playing around with making art. The interface is pretty unusual, but kids should adapt easy. Making art on the computer is a lot less messy than in real life and kids can get some exposure to the different types of brushes and other art supplies they probably would not get otherwise.
Paint.NET is pretty good too for those a bit older who want to mess around with photos or drawing or those who just want to make squiggles and scribbles. I didn’t go into it very deep, but it looks pretty good. I used to use paint programs with about that level of features when I was in middle school.
Sebran’s ABC wasn’t my favorite of what I found, but I am not really the target audience. It doesn’t seem as polished as the others but is more educational and aimed at younger kids.
Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory looks great if you aren’t worried about top of the line graphics and stuff. I tried it a few years ago and didn’t like it much, but I have never been much of a gamer. I want something that is easy and fun rather than something where I get killed over and over again.
Rockstar Games has three classic games updated to run on modern PCs available if you give them your email address including the first two Grand Theft Autos.
Scorched 3D is based on the classic DOS game Scorched Earth that we played in computer class almost daily in high school. I have not tried this update, but it looks a whole lot nicer.
If you are really geeky, you might setup Tyrian 2000, and official remake of the original Tyrian which I loved years ago. It was released by the author as freeware. The site says it might require DOSBox. Without any effort it ran for me in Windows XP, but it was choppy and had no sound.
And finally, Railroad Tycoon. I have never played it, but it seems to have lots of fans. It looks a lot like the first SimCity.
December 21st, 2006
He be dead for nearly a century, but Mark Twain knew what it takes to be a good blogger. The Mark Twain Guide to Better Blogging. Surely this article was written mostly as link bait, but that doesn’t mean its any less interesting. Not only is it funny to be getting advice from an old dead guy on technology he couldn’t have dreamed of, he is right. He knew what his audience wanted and he gave it to them. As the article says, Twain would have really loved blogging.
Here is another Twain quote I found relevant to blogging:
“I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English - it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in.”
December 20th, 2006
Flickr is very addictive. Two of my photos made it to Flickr’s Explorer (top 500 highest interestingness) according to Scout and the one below just got blogged on the We Are the Cat site by Terry Bain. Thanks Terry.
November 13th, 2006
Halloween Fonts just in case you need to make any last minute posters in creepy fonts.
Ghosts of Halloween is a site for a pretty elaborate yard haunt. It is very impressive, but I am happy with my much smaller one night haunt. He has a really nice grave yard which is a new addition to my yard this year. Maybe I should have visited there before to pick up some tips. Anyway, I did one thing I like better, I left some grass unmowed around the grave markers to make it look a little more unmaintained. I bet the neighbors though we were nuts with a bunch of unmowed spots in the yard.
Spirit Halloween Online Store has a 50% off sale on whatever they have left until midnight tonight so you can stock up for next year cheep. I ordered a few things and I am lucky to have a physical Spirit store located nearby so will be shopping there tomorrow to see if there is anything left worth picking up that I couldn’t get online.
October 31st, 2006
Do You believe in Ghosts? I have never seen a ghost. I don’t know if they really exist or not. But this video shows some really compelling evidence. You really must see this for yourself.
October 4th, 2006
Links to John Sadowski’s castle illusion seems to be going around all over the place lately. Not to be left out, I have to post a link as well. Really I just don’t want to forget the address, it is such a cool illusion. In one of my classes last year we covered some of the causes for optical illusions like this so it is very interesting to see how well this illusion works. None of the examples in the book were this cool. John even has a tutorial so I may try this out on some of my own photos someday.
More optical illusions with scientific explanations can be found here.
June 11th, 2006
I have no clue how well it works, but WikiHow explains a couple possible ways to fix a stuck pixel on an LCD monitor. I have heard about the video of quickly flashing colors fixing things for some people. But this site suggests something else for when that doesn’t work, you lightly massage the area of the screen with the dead pixel. This blog post adds some confirmation that these methods can work and suggests you might try combining them. Massaging my LCD is not something I would like to do, but if the pixel was annoying enough I guess I would give it a try as a last resort. Luckily so far I don’t have any that I know about.
April 3rd, 2006
Yesterday I posted of my rabbit photo hunt, just in case anyone actually reads my blog, here is the explanation. For the last few years one of my usual April Fool’s pranks is to find a photo on my victim’s desk, scan it, edit it, and replace the original. This year involved a couple bald heads, tattoos and a spiky dog collar, and bunny ears and buck teeth.
Don’t remember how I ran across this, but Filmwise specializes in removing actors from photos. They leave the clothes and you have to guess what movie it is from. Very interesting. And very good photo manipulation skills. Since I am into photo manipulation a bit I was really impressed, what I do is not simple but compared to these mine are nothing.
I also found this when searching for a screen saver that flips the screen upside down (which I was unable to find). I was working on late April fools for work. No one at work to fool on Saturday, but it also gave me more time to prepare. How about a start menu that keeps avoiding you when you try to click it? Or a program to flip the screen (not screen saver as I wanted), but still pretty good. How about one that you can email prank people that open executables in email.
It acts like it is sending an email to everyone in your address book and you can’t close it. I just did it to someone I was otherwise unable to get today. She fell for it. I walked by and heard a lot of mouse clicking, must have been frantically trying to close it. 
It makes a pretty good case for why you should not open EXEs even from people you know. AOL’s spyware blocker did catch it, but not before it ran long enough to give her a good scare.
The Museum of Hoaxes has the Top 100 April Fools hoaxes of all time. Also interesting there is the list of real discoveries that were believed to be a hoax.
Since this post is partially about digital photos, this isn’t too far off topic. I found something to look into if you need photo organization and searching on Linux. It is imgSeek. It has lots of organizational stuff, lets you search by picture similarity, it even lets you draw what you are searching for and apparently finds things. My Linux box is slow and the hard drive is still nearly full so it will probably be a while before I try this out. In the mean time, Picasa is pretty good at managing my digital photos for Windows, but doesn’t offer nearly the image searching capability of imgSeek.
April 3rd, 2006
Hunting for rabbit photos for my annual April Fool’s photo editing, I ran across an interesting site archiving photos of yawning bunnies.
April 1st, 2006
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