teknohippy.net

It is just me or are USB keyboards slow? Everyone that I have ever used has a little bit of trouble keeping up with my typing sometimes. Is this something that anyone else has experienced?

Perhaps it’s just poor membranes and the completely unpositive feel. That’s it I’m going to finally bite the bulllet and get a nice Cherry M8 mechanically switched keyboard.

There you go, ordered. Matter of fact my boss was kind enough to pay for it.

Cheers Brian!

I’ve just downloaded Windows Live Writer (WLW), Microsoft’s desktop/offline Blog composer/writer software.

Set up was very easy, I simply game the address and login details of my blog. Not only did WLW determine what my blog was running on, but it also has downloaded and used my CSS.

Editing in the WLW is therefore truly WYSYWIG as I am typing I am seeing everything styled by the CSS from my site. I’ll do a screen shot.

There you go, all I did was ALT-PrintScreen and paste. Looks like it’s inserted a thumbnail with a link. Ah yes it has, there are plenty of handy properties to choose where it links to and how big it is etc.

I’m quite enjoying this, let’s try and publish now.

– edit –

Well that published fine, I forgot categories as always though. I can also do those here, it’s picked them up. Can’t add any new ones though. Still I think I may find this a useful place to store the longer type of heavy thinking articles.

Ahah! I have just discovered you can also open and edit from a list of existing posts. I was wondering how you did that. Overall this is quite a handy utility.

http://ideas.live.com

Having recently acquired some unix hosting I’ve been experimenting with various PHP/MySQL based applications. Wordpress for example that this blog runs under, as well as Joomla for CMS and phpBB for forums.

Having been a long time user of ASP applications some of my experiences have been quite refreshing, especially with respect to ease of installation on shared space in some cases.

Now just the other day I decided I needed a Wiki for a new project. I’ve been using the ASP.net driven FlexWiki for some time now and have been very happy with it’s ease of install and the small changes I usually want to make to look and feel. When it came to choosing a unix based option I immediately plumped for MediaWiki, it seemed an obvious choice being that it runs the most famous Wiki out there, WikiPedia.

Oh how wrong could I have been though. When it came to skinning it to get a look that suited my purpose, it became a complete nightmare. The skinning system is a complete disaster area and it requires more work than I have time for to get your head around it. Yes it can be done, as witnessed by the Mono-project website or the Mozilla Dev site, but it’s a complete bitch. The mixture and muddle of markup and PHP code is just simply unprofessional.

So I had a look around and after a while searching I came up with a beautifully easily skinnable Wiki software. PMWiki has a great philosophy behind it’s code base and a simple skinning system that is a joy to behold after wading through the nightmare depths of MediaWiki.

I shall enjoy designing a nice template later tonight.

http://www.pmwiki.org

Sigma’s new D-SLR the Foveon X3 powered SD14 is looking very nice. The teaser site has some very luscious photography on it, mostly portraiture, that has the look of well scanned transparencies rather than digital pics.

I must admit I find the whole Foveon sensor concept very appealing, yet I’m never likely to go the Sigma route now that I have a collection of EF mount lenses. Now if Sigma were able to build bodies with different mounts as they do with their excellent range of lenses then I expect you’d see many many more people thinking about upgrading to a Sigma body. Especially if the sample images from the SD14 are anything to go by.

Also announced at the same time though is the new Sigma DP1 compact digital camera. This a similar Foveon X3 sensor as the SD14 with the same 14 mega pixels. So if you’re looking for a compact and want to try out the whole Foveon lark then this seems the perfect route for those of us that can’t see ourselves switching to a different mount for our SLRs.

It has a prime lens equivalent to a 28mm. Looking t the pics it also has a large LCD screen, and manual controls. Looks promising.

Here’s one for anyone who feels like they are the opposition.

I designed a t-shirt today for my fabulous wife. Unfortunately spreadshirt don’t make a shirt she considers long enough. Here it is anyway. Available in three colours.

If you’ve ever wanted to add convincing hair or fur to a photograph then look no further than this quick tutorial.

http://www.digitalmediadesigner.com/articles/viewarticle.jsp?id=19756-3

Just saw this old vid on YouTube, funniest thing I have seen in a long time.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5OHPgne1S4

The BBC are currently broadcasting a four part radio programme about peak oil. Presented by Tom Mangold and titled Driven by Oil it is broadcast on Radio 4 on mondays.

On the BBC website you can listen to past shows.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/drivenbyoil/

I’ve updated my Millenium/Gollancz SF Masterworks List to include all the latest releases and even a few that are not quite released yet. They are now upto seventy in number.

Have fun reading.

I’m thinking about creating a dynamic list where you can sign up and select the ones you have purchased so you have a quick way to tell which ones you still need for the collectors out there. Anyone think that’s a good idea?

http://www.teknohippy.net/masterworks

An incoming link (http://notesfromthegeekshow.blogspot.com/2006/09/stuff.html) made me realise people must actually use the list, so you have them to thank.