light in the shadows

Claire Donald has just shown us a nifty new visualisation tool developed by IBM: Many Eyes
We believe that visualizations gain power when multiple people use them to communicate, and that communication gains power when multiple people can [...]

Posted on December 9th, 2009 under Cool Tools. Comments: None

UMW: a university with blogs
http://umwblogs.org/
“No parameters, just engage honestly with what you are doing, thinking about” – Jim Groom, in his OpenEd session.
2900 users in 2300 blogs.  People given their own spaces.  Jim’s Blog.
Case study: “I want my students to build a literary journal”  http://literaryjournals.umwblogs.org/ They did it.
Random links: Flickr blog shots | The Blog [...]

Posted on August 13th, 2009 under Blogs, Cool Tools. Comments: None

Tomorrow our time.

1.3 million and counting
The only browser still to have things I am jealous of is Safari.

Posted on June 17th, 2008 under Cool Tools, Events 08. Comments: None

Just catching up with a little glitch in Gmail, and looking at the Google blogs.  Got diverted into the Picasa blog.
1. Picasa now runs on Linux.  One step closer to a M$ free machine.
2. Control-Shift Y in Picasa gives you teddies.

For the whole story, go here.  And yes, you should be using Picasa with a [...]

Posted on May 15th, 2008 under Cool Tools. Tags: Cool Tools. Comments: 1

Provide a structure for your story, scenes, chapters, numbering etc etc.
Then write.
Then, when you need to: see things in overview, detail, structural, character, scenes etc.
Repeat 2 and 3.
When you have finished, export it to your DTP program.

http://www.spacejock.com/yWriter.html

Posted on June 20th, 2007 under Cool Tools. Comments: None

PDF writer.
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=57796&package_id=53473
Quite a nice little programme: automatically installed as a print driver in Word.  Have created several PDF’s and they all seem very fine.
Evernote
This is like a personal receptacle for all your thoughts and ideas with a flexible tagging classification system.  Quite remarkable.
From the PR: “EverNote is an ambitious attempt to categorize the uncategorizable. The [...]

Posted on April 24th, 2007 under Cool Tools, GTD. Comments: None

Last year my laptop was reimaged, and I’m just getting some basics sorted – like some Firefox plugins for delicious. I still have not found what I’m looking for.
I tried a plug-in I had not seen before. Delicious Bookmarks.
This extension integrates your browser with del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/), the leading social bookmarking service on the Web. [...]

Posted on February 1st, 2007 under Blogging, Cool Tools, Web 2.0. Comments: None

Alex Boschmans discovered yesterday I’d commented favourably on his blog design, but with a little throw away comment on the Google Ads.
Alex’s comment:
It’s true, I admit it, I put a google ad on my frontpage. But it’s supposed to be just the one wee small text-ad, it shouldn’t take up much space…
I can’t see it [...]

Posted on February 1st, 2007 under Blogging, Blogs, Cool Tools. Comments: 2

I’ve just discovered an open source cross platform Desk Top Publishing program.

http://docs.scribus.net/index.php?lang=en&page=index
I’d wondered why I had not come across it.  OS X port in 2005, Windows Port in 2006, originally Linux – that’s probably why.  Looks good with just a short tinker, has understood the paradigm of DTP (which is NOT word processing), has a [...]

Posted on January 12th, 2007 under Cool Tools. Comments: 6