create your own font from your handwriting | Ask The Admin This is a cool little 10-15 minute activity that will keep on giving back to you for years to come. That’s right add that final customizing touch to your Windows, Linux or Mac machine – Your handwriting as a font! With some free time a visit to a website called YourFonts.com, a scanner and a printer you can create a font for use in any application on your computer. To me this sounded way too cool to pass up. I went and downloaded the printable template from here and carefully followed the steps. The template looks like this: You print it out and add your letters to each corresponding box. So if you just wanted to have a font contain numbers, letters or characters just fill in those. I was pretty excited, I grabbed a sharpie and went to work on my page. Now I messed around with the scanning properties and decided to use the grey scale you see above at 200dpi. Most scanning programs can save as for you. I filled in the fields uploaded and then waited about a minute to be show this:
LAN-Party Optimized House - Aurora I live in a LAN-party-optimized house. That is, my house is specifically designed to be ideal for PC gaming parties. It's also designed for living, of course, but all houses have that. Here, let me illustrate: The house has twelve of these fold-out computer stations, six in each of two rooms (ideal for team vs. team games). I also have two big TVs, one 59-inch and one 55-inch, each of which has a selection of game consoles attached. For the 0.001% of you who read my blog before this post: Sorry for the long lack of posts. Hardware The twelve game stations all contain identical hardware: CPU: Intel Core i5-2500 GPU: MSI N560GTX (nVidia GeForce 560) Motherboard: MSI P67A-C43 (Intel P67 chipset) RAM: 8GB (2x4GB DDR3-1333) Monitor: ASUS VE278Q (27" 1080p) At the time I bought the hardware (March 2011), I felt this selection provided the best trade-off between price and performance for gaming machines that need to last at least a few years. Instead, the machines boot off the network. Security
Location-based social networking unveiled - The Independent Florida Alligator: Social Networking Location-based services have become very popular, especially in the context of mobile marketing. Tech titans like Google, Facebook and Twitter have already entered the arena with Google Latitude, Facebook Places and location-enabled Tweets. In fact, Google carved its own niche by patenting location-based advertising earlier in May. Delivering ads and coupons to customers is only part of the deal. Today, LBSs are strategically used to collect information from customers and make better marketing decisions. Mobile marketing takes advantage of the fact that a person carries their phone with them all the time. In addition to that, recommendation is another powerful tool – particularly when it has an immediate reach to a mobile user. The benefits all told don’t just woo any consumer into using these services and I think it’s worthwhile to get some insight into why LBSs haven’t become as popular as expected.
Give an Old Laptop New Life with Cheap (or Free) Projects SExpand Click to viewLike a famed race horse or a classic book, you don't just throw away a laptop because it's banged up a little. Even if it seems outdated and underpowered, most any laptop is still small, quiet, and relatively low on power consumption, making it a seriously valuable spare to keep handy—even without a working screen. Create a no-monitor, low-power spare systemP So everything on your laptop runs just fine—except the screen, the most important (and expensive) part. Convert it to a home serverP The idea of a "server" usually conjures images of rack-mounted, temperature-controlled boxes, or at least a desktop system, but a laptop's power-scaling abilities, small size, and built-in screen can actually make for a quietly-great unit. Make a better digital photo frameP Make it fly again with lightweight LinuxP If you're shelfing your trusty road warrior mostly because it just runs ... so ... slow, consider that it's not always the laptop's fault. Extend your wireless coverageP
9 (Arbitrary) Ways to Get Your Writing Rejected When novelist Helen Simonson ( Major Pettigrew's Last Stand) was asked to help winnow entries for short story contests and literary journals, it was her turn to switch from seeking approval to giving it out. Sparingly. As she puts it: Having spent many years putting hours of effort and creativity into my own work -- sending off brown envelopes filled with still-warm pages, to various editors and judges -- it is rather horrifying to discover that it takes me about a minute to know that yet another manuscript is about to be "binned" as they say. In a sort of apology, I feel the least I can do is to reveal a few of the instant signs that your writing genius will not be discovered by the judges this time around! What follows is a few of Simonson's deal-killers, from her only somewhat tongue-in-cheek article "Ten ways to get your writing rejected' : And here are a few of my own additions to the "get rejected fast" list: Copyright (c) 2010 by Susan K.
The 50 Best Registry Hacks that Make Windows Better - How-To Geek - StumbleUpon We’re big fans of hacking the Windows Registry around here, and we’ve got one of the biggest collections of registry hacks you’ll find. Don’t believe us? Here’s a list of the top 50 registry hacks that we’ve covered. It’s important to note that you should never hack the registry if you don’t know what you’re doing, because your computer will light on fire and some squirrels may be injured. Also, you should create a System Restore point before doing so. Otherwise, keep reading. Prevent Windows Update from Forcibly Rebooting Your Computer We’ve all been at our computer when the Windows Update dialog pops up and tells us to reboot our computer. There’s a couple of ways that we can disable this behavior, however. Prevent Windows Update from Forcibly Rebooting Your Computer How to Clean Up Your Messy Windows Context Menu One of the most irritating things about Windows is the context menu clutter that you have to deal with once you install a bunch of applications. Disable Aero Shake in Windows 7
playground - ArduinoUsers :: Exhibition :: The place to share and show off projects Until someone finds a way to categorize what is here, be sure to remember that your browser has a "find in this page" tool (ctrl-F in Firefox) which can help you find what you are looking for! Arduino user projects How Did I Improve My Central Heating Control with Arduino? - Before I started this project, my central heating was controlled with Danfoss TP7000 room thermostat only by switching heating pump ON-OFF. Then I heard about Arduino, get interested, and decided to make an advanced control system for central heating: weather compensated heating controller, room thermostat, web-based remote control for the whole system, and web logging.
5 Twitter Services and Applications to Bypass 140 Character Limit (Firefox extensions included) A lot of people I know are twitterholics and I believe the way things are going I might also become one of them. Some of the people have also started to use it as one medium where they can discuss or have a communication around social media because it’s usually the social media guys who you’d see making most noise on Twitter or for that matter friendfeed. In these situations one often feels the need of 140 character limit annoying. I dugg for some twitter based application and services which can bypass the 140 character limit or shorten your messages on twitter. TinyPaste is TinyURL for text. Twitzer is a Firefox extension which shortens your long twitter messages. 140it is another similar web service where you can shrink your tweets but it uses less effective approach by removing the extra spaces and turning well-embodied words into sound-similar but grammatically absurd clones.
5 Sites To Learn How To Repair Your Own Computer Here on MakeUseOf, we’ve shared DIY stuff before (5 awesome DIY sites, ThomasNet ““ An Awesome Repository Of Technical Information for DIY Men, 3 Cool Science Experiments You Can Do At Home). The purpose of this article is to share 5 pages that help more specifically with how to learn computer repair. Have you ever had a problem with your computer and gotten a quote from one of those box stores? If there was any possibility to do some of those PC repairs on your own, and therefore save a few buck, is that something you’d learn how to do? (1) Fixing My Computer… 100% free step-by-step guide If you can get by the pink, blue, and green pastel colors, this site can be a real great resource in you journey to DIY computer repair proficiency. (2) Yahoo Answers Community – Computers & Internet I know, there are many communities out there on the internet that are ready and willing to give answers to your questions for nothing more than a few kudos. (3) LaptopMag.com – 11 Ways to Fix Your Laptop
5 Ways Not to Write a Novel Writing a novel? There's first-draft flow, and there's editing flow. And then there comes a time when you think you might be done, yet the manuscript is still not quite "there." To sell your work to an agent, and then to a publisher, and finally to a great many readers, put thoughts of flow aside now, and consider the following advice. , such as "Danielle was a woman of medium height with brown hair and brown eyes." , such as: "He shaved, and then he wiped off the shaving cream," "She walked to the corner, and she looked both ways," or "We opened the door, and we found the mail on the porch." . such as the following: the difficult task, both share, blend together, on account of, considering the fact that, report back. [Better: Add some tension, impending tension, or trouble to every page. * Did you miss my post about the sometimes unpolished writing of Stephen King ? * Or the one about best writers' resolutions ? Copyright (c) Susan K.