Archive for April, 2005

04-30-2005

Pflickr Panoramic Photo Pfun


Austin panorama

Thanks to a recent unexpected gift from Brian Mitchell, I now have a flickr pro account to play with. I just posted my first photo, a panoramic view of the Austin skyline, made with AutoStitch. AutoStitch is a new program that simplifies the process of making panoramic composits by automatically piecing together multiple shots.

I’ve been interested in panoramic photography ever since I saw an exhibit of old black and white panoramic photos made by a camera that litterally panned as it exposed the film. One of the shots included the same clown twice because he was able to run behind the camera to the other side of the shot before the camera finished it’s pan.

One of my all-time favorite photos is a panoramic shot of the Austin skyline from 1910, on the Library of Congress website.

Posted by Matt in Austin, photography | No Comments »

04-30-2005

Dominic System

Merlin Mann recently linked to the Mentat Wiki on 43 Folders and specifically mentioned the Dominic System. While the Mentat Wiki page has much more in-depth information about the system, I thought it would be a good opportunity to plug my own Dominic System wiki page, which includes multiple entries for many numbers, in case it might help someone else create their own customized version before committing it to memory.

It’s also a good opportunity to point out another set of wiki pages by Ron Hale-Evans, Games to the Rescue, which I think is a great project.

Posted by Matt in general | 1 Comment »

04-30-2005

Portable RSVP

I just read a Boing Boing post about a new RSVP reader application for cell phones called Monket. A similar application for Smartphones has been around for a while, but Monket has the added advantage of being open source.

It’s nice to see the new developments in RSVP readers; however, my fascination with RSVP has waned a bit lately. Instead, I’ve been using text-to-speech software to mainline information. I use the freeware version of ReadPlease 2003, piped through a single earbud to listen to long text documents. It’s also quite handy for proofreading my own writing. The advantage of text-to-speech over RSVP is that your eyes are freed up to do other things.

Posted by Matt in reading, tech | No Comments »

04-26-2005

Unexpected RSVP

While out of town recently, I received an automated email message from my wiki notifying me that someone had edited my page comparing RSVP programs. The wiki has been getting hammered by spammers lately, so I was very pleasantly surprised that a legit new program called dictator had been added. On first glance, it appears to have the best mix of features of any of the freeware or open source RSVP readers I’ve checked out.

For the curious, RSVP in this case stands for Rapid Serial Visual Presentation, which is a method of presenting text in which words are flashed on a screen in rapid succession in order to boost reading speeds while allowing the eyes to relax.

Posted by Matt in reading | No Comments »

04-16-2005

Firefox/Wiki Users Rejoice

I have been a big fan and supporter of Firefox for a while now. I love being able to customize, customize, customize. I’m also a frequent user of wikis and blogs. Unfortunately, Firefox versions since 0.9.3 have all had a bug which kept the find feature from working properly inside text boxes, like the ones used to edit wikis and blogs. As a result, I’ve been using Firefox 0.9.3 for a while now and holding off on upgrading.

I’ve been watching Bugzilla, and it doesn’t look like the bug is going to be fixed anytime soon. Fortunately, someone created an extension that circumvents the problem by making the find feature work the way it did in previous versions. So, I’m finally getting around to upgrading and checking out some of the newer extensions that aren’t compatible with older versions of Firefox.

Update: I spoke too soon. The extension above does solve the problem of searching in text-boxes, but it also causes some problems with the “Find Again” function. Overall, I consider it an improvement, but it still has some kinks that need to be worked out.

Posted by Matt in tech | No Comments »