Vicarious Thoughts » Tech

Chicken

Strudel — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 09:18:15 +0000

I’m too chicken to write about most of the stuff that’s going through my brain at the moment. I haven’t made much progress on the NaNoWriMo front either yet – but my plan is to knock this blogpost out of the pack and then hunker down with some music blasting in my ears and churn out some pages. On the upside, I’ve got my characters talking now!

By the way, if you’re looking for “normal” character names I’ve found Seventh Sanctum to be helpful. The site has a whole bunch of different generators and you can kill quite a bit of time checking them all out (ask me how I know).

Something else I thought I’d mention is a Firefox add-on called LeechBlock. This is a really useful and powerful tool for people who procrastinate by killing time on the web. Let’s say you have discovered another webcomic recently and you have a compulsion to start from the very first strip all the way to the current one so you don’t miss out on any of the in-jokes and understand the back story. With LeechBlock installed you can restrict your access to the site to only a certain number of hours on certain days. One of my friends has done the opposite and restricted her web access so that she can only visit a number of websites that are related to her work activities. Obviously there are ways to circumvent the restrictions you’re putting in place but – the very act of circumventing can help you get back on track by realising the level you have stooped to to procrastinate. In which case, you should ask yourself – If I want to procrastinate so badly, I should really be cleaning the toilet/fridge/oven/freezer/(insert your worst chore ever) instead. At least that way you can say you did something productive – just not what you should have been doing.

Podcasts I listen to

Strudel — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 00:53:14 +0000

I listen to quite a number of podcasts each week. I thought I’d highlight a few that I really enjoy:

Quirks and Quarks – A Canadian Radio Broadcast about various science topics each week. Most have some connection to a Canadian but there are topics that are based all over the world and the content is easy to digest. As an extra bonus often the segments are recorded the same week they’re published in mainstream science publications.

Grammar Girl – A quick and dirty guide to the intricacies of the english language. Comes out weekly plus the occassional bonus podcast.

Friday Night Comedy – A BBC Radio production and a bit of lightheartedness for the week. It seems to alternate between two shows and my favourite is the News Quiz which is easier to follow when you’re not from the UK.

FLOSS Weekly – Covering an opensource project each week this is a neat way to either learn some more about something you already use or know about, or to “discover” a project you haven’t explored yet. I like that they’re covering projects that are simply open source rather than restricting it to linux-mainly projects.

Mediawatch and many other Radio New Zealand podcasts – well produced and interesting podcasts, including history, current events, science, classical music and my favourite Mediawatch which is a look at what the media got up to over the past week. They once profiled how a newspaper covered a story which involved a group I was a member of.

Media 7 – Produced by the relatively new TVNZ documentary Channel 7, this is an interesting video podcast of weekly events in New Zealand and/or World media and related background topics where panels of experts are interviewed.

For Kids (and kids at heart :):

Sesame Street – Normally each week a segment is released revolving around a chosen word presented by the Sesame Street gang and a relatively well-known personality/celebrity.

Storynory - a british website presenting traditional folktales and fairytales in podcast form. Some, due to their length, are split over multiple podcasts. Pleasant voice to listen to with no overwhelming sound effects.

Storytime – a Radio New Zealand production. I haven’t listened to too many of these but they tend to be more contemporary stories with a Kiwi flavour than the kind Storynory produce. I have fond memories of listening to Storytime on a weekend morning especially Bad Jelly the Witch. The RSS feed has been removed for this programme but there is still a list of downloadable stories available on the website here.

Just two items for today

Strudel — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 11:42:33 +0000

Not a lot tonight because I’m tired, have other work to do, and still unsure about presenting the following two items alongside a bunch of home education stuff.

Why not change your desktop background for the month to one of these lovely background images featured on Smashing Magazine. They all feature a calendar of March 2009 but most are available without the calendar if you so wish. I grabbed the one entitled “Japanese Girl’s Day” as I like the japanese style and I’m a sucker for all things Origami :)

Quite a while ago now, I transitioned from two 17″ LCDs to one 19″ widescreen LCD and, now the novelty has worn off, I’m getting frustrated at constantly resizing applications to do work between them, to the point where I’m reverting to switching between virtual desktops, or good ole Alt-Tab, which seems like a waste of real estate. Just two days ago, I told my husband I was thinking about going back to the old LCD setup as it’s having a negative impact on my productivity. Well, just today my rss feed came to my rescue with this gem, MaxTo, which I can testify works alongside VirtuaWin. I should probably have prefaced this blurb with I’m currently running WinXP 32-bit having just “downgraded” from WinXP 64-bit, where I got tediated at the wrangling involved in getting my semi-supported printer printing. (via Daily Cup of Tech).