Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Google Docs Offer Collaboration Tools
Microsoft Office is expensive, and as a result, there are a lot of people trying to get by on half-baked applications like WordPad and Microsoft Works. Neither of these are good choices, especially if you need documents that play nicely and share with others.
One alternative is the online word processor / spreadsheet / presentation manager called Google Docs.
The editing tools in all of the applications are very basic, but where the program shines is in its sharing tools. The files are stored online at Google, so you can access them anywhere you have internet access. You can export your documents as Word files, RTF, OpenOffice and even pdf files (very useful if you don’t have a full version of Adobe Acrobat). You also can publish the document to the internet—Google will give you a unique url with which to find it—to your blog, or to another web page. Finally, Google Docs allows you to designate other people as collaborators, and they can work on editing and changing the document as well. Google Docs also keeps tracks of versions so you can go back to a previous version.
In all, I think that Google Docs has a great deal of potential use, both for business and hobbies. For wargamers in particular, it coudl make the creation of “group” rules sets more feasible.
Sunday, August 12, 2007
Make Your Own Movie Posters
Photojojo has a page with a list of eleven tutorials describing how to use PhotoShop to create movie posters.
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
PikiFx Online Photo Editing
PikiFx is a nice (and free!) online photo editing tool. It allows you to apply a number of effects, frames and add text.
Saturday, July 21, 2007
Deal A Day Sites
Wargamers as a whole are cheap: Witness the people playing games with “figures” made from bits of hair brushes and the howls of complaint when a manufacturer raises his prices a few pennies for the first time in five years.
Deal A Day sites offer great bargains and are a lot of fun to follow. For most of them, the format is the same: a single item in limited supply is offered for sale each day. When the site runs out of the item, the sale is over and you have to wait to see what shows up the next day.
Woot: the first deal a day site I found, and one I visit every day. They focus mainly on electronics, but even when you don’t like the offering, the item descriptions are brilliant writing. Fun occasional features of the site are the “Woot Off” and the “Random Crap”. During a Woot Off, the site offers a series of items in rapid succession. As soon as one item is out, another appears—no waiting until the next day. “Random Crap” is a mystery bag; you pay $5 and get a bag of random stuff. Some people have made out like bandits on this one.
Thing Fling: The second site I discovered. It features household and soft goods as well as electronics. It’s not quite a deal a day site, though, because items are offered consecutively. As soon as one runs out, another deal is posted.
Bits de Jour offers a new windows software deal each day.
MacZot offers new Macintosh software each day.
Yugster offers electronics.
Giveaway of the Day offers a different FREE licensed software title each day. Some of it is quite good.
Game Giveaway of the Day offers a different FREE licensed game title each day.
Shirt A Day offers a new t shirt each day. The more of each shirt they sell, the lower your final price is.
Daily Swag offers a variety of hard and soft goods.
3000Toys offers some good “while supplies last” deals on toys. I’ve seen some nice die cast stuff here.
Cigar Monster offers daily cigar deals.
Midnight Box is another deal a day for electronics.
Hat Daddy for daily hat deals. No. Seriously.
Use the comments section below to add your own favorites!
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Universal Package Tracking
I found this very useful site that offers universal package tracking . Using Google maps and RSS, it will track your package and provide you with an RSS feed to keep up with it.
Very useful if you are doing a lot of mail order—which, given the paucity of historical miniatures stores, is likely.
