I’m currently using windows live writer to write my posts (hence the speed at which they go online is a lot faster now/ it seems to work great thus far on my vista pc. it’s free software which allows you to edit text like in word and then upload it immediately to the weblog software of your liking (Mine being whatever Erik decides to put on his website : ) ) I still have to look up how to do the categories thingy here, but thus far, I really love this approach.
Archive for the ‘Software’ Category
Windows Live Writer
Monday, July 20th, 2009Linux try-out
Saturday, December 20th, 2008So I got myself a netbook. A really cheap acer aspire one with 512 meg ram, 8 gig flash drive and an additional 8 gig SD card. Plenty of room to surf and email, but coming from a windows machine, you quickly run into arguments with the linux operating system. This have been my major annoyances thus far;
* No drag and drop of menu items. I mean, windows has been doing it for years now. you want to add a program, you simply drag it where you want it to be on your start menu bar. Why do I have to go trough tedious menu’s where i have to choose an icon, at title and the location of the program?
* No standard install. No really, don’t start talking about the packages or automatic install manager because when I choose something from the list of packages it disappers. I installed text games with a ROT13 game, selected it from the list, it installed the downloaded files and now? I mean there is nothing in the start menu bar, there is nothing in the games menu, Linux can’t seriously think I enjoy going on a hunt trough my hard drive to find out where the files are now located and how I have to start the programs? Give me a windows installer with the option to create a shortcut to the program any day.
* It can’t install anything without an internet connection because everything requires a load of packages to be downloaded first. Even to install picasa which was over twenty megs when downloaded, I first had to connect online to download other stuff before the installer (Fortunately it has one)
* Printing is nearly impossible. Both my new canon printers are classified as “paperweight” according to the linux printer driver websites I found. Yeah, paperweight means it’s good to keep your papers from falling down your desk, but you can’t actually print with them. So the only recourse I have is either using my windows laptop again or creating a bitmap of my documents, putting them on an SD card and inserting the SD card into my printers so that they can print it out without computer.
The annoyances are fortunately offset by two facts:
it’s incredibly cheap at only 200 euro for a netbook and everything works out of the box with linux preinstalled. So it’s a great way to get to know linux without having to spend days on configuring it.
Google Sketchup
Thursday, March 6th, 2008Gardening Design
I have been trying a number of design-your-own programs to get a feel of what kind of layout I would like for my garden. None of them with much sucess I’m afraid. I don’t want to spend the time to learn something as complex as autocad and most home software either has severe limitations or is way too expensive for a simple proof of concept.
Google Sketchup
Enter google sketchup. A free program from the team who provides your favourite search engine. The software can be downloaded from their website and is amazingly easy to use. All kinds of material and colors are provided to maak your drawing look like the real thing. I tried it out and in less than three hours was able to learn the software and make a pretty nifty model of what my house might one day look like.
Tips
- The easiest way to do things is simply drawing a rectangle and pulling it up or pushing it down untill you get the desired shape.
- Combine the rectangles untill the drawing is nearly finished before adding the ornaments, since they require a lot of processing power to display while rotating.
- To create an inclination, select the line where the inclination ends and push that line down with the move/copy tool (looks like four red arrows in a brown field)
- You can map photos of your desired object over your design (e.g. pictures of your house on the 3D model) which is amazingly cool.
Disadvantages
Everything works pretty well, but every so often my computer will freeze when using the program. I can kick it out of windows memory with the help of the task manager, but after that my display acceleration is messed up and scrolling trough other windows takes ages so that I have to restart the computer. I hope this will be resolved in later versions of sketchup but untill then, saving often is probably the best way to do things.
Result
So what would I like my garden to look like? Well, here is the result of my first attempt. A little greenhouse, a waterfall and a swimming pool would be cool.
Gardening Layout test for a buddy of mine:
