Make that boring pair of socks into a parcel that begs to be opened. Plenty of inspiration at here at Wrap Art (also damned useful if you run out of conventional wrapping paper and the shops have shut!)
Dog Violets
1 year ago
Showing posts with label useful. Show all posts
Showing posts with label useful. Show all posts
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Print your own wrapping paper....
...assuming you've got a colour printer and some small-but-perfectly-formed 'things' to wrap of course.A4 sized pdfs to download here
But I recommend a voyage of discovery round the whole site if you're short of (papercrafty) things to do over the holiday season....just make sure you've laid in supplies of glue before the shops close!
Saturday, November 15, 2008
Where's the Path?
Google aerial photos alongside Ordnance Survey Maps.....nice! (warning for evening users....there's a 30,000 cap on the number of daily OS images displayed, morning use recommended)Thursday, November 13, 2008
Feelgood timewasters
Sometimes you need to justify your timewasting activities (even if it's only to yourself)....here's 4 possibilities.....
"Galaxies evolve over billions of years, which is why like evolutionary biologists, we can't just sit there and watch galaxies change. Instead, we need to look at the fossil record contained in the galaxies around us which provides only *one* snapshot of the universe.
The way scientists get around this problem is by analysing pictures of galaxies with up-to-date technology in as much detail as possible. Astronomers have spent many decades trying to measure basic galaxy properties such as age, mass or dustiness that may give us some clues as to how they formed and evolved and what precisely the connection between spiral and elliptical galaxies is. However, most studies of galaxies so far have only looked at a few dozen or hundred galaxies in the nearby universe and many aspects of galaxy formation and evolution are still a mystery.
However, with the advent of the 21st century the age of large-scale astronomical surveys has arrived! The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is taking images of a large portion of the sky and will eventually find a million galaxies. With such a large number of galaxies, astronomers can finally begin to understand how they form and evolve by comparing various populations to each other with large enough numbers to draw real conclusions about their origin.
But out of these million galaxies, how do we know which are spirals and which are ellipticals? The answer is simple: look at them! Indeed, until now galaxies have been classified by visual inspection of their images. And in fact, technology is of little help here. It turns out that the human brain is far better than a computer at recognising the patterns that divide ellipticals from spirals. So visual inspection works well for a handful, or even several hundred objects....but one million? There are just too many galaxies for even the most dedicated of astronomers to look at. We need thousands of people to inspect galaxy images and to classify them as spiral or elliptical. We need you to help us."
Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research. This page describes the science behind Foldit and how your playing can help.
Now this one needs a bit more focus, involving transcribing scans of vintage (UK) data for the greater good....so possibly not for the faint-hearted (I've done a few stints, enjoyable but hard on the eyes!) They say "FreeBMD is an ongoing project, the aim of which is to transcribe the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales, and to provide free Internet access to the transcribed records."
Find out more at FreeBMD
But let's just say you can't be arsed with all the above but you're quite happy for your computer to search for extraterrestrial life while you're having a nice cup of tea and your screen saver kicks in....no problem.....
"SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.
SETI@home
"Galaxies evolve over billions of years, which is why like evolutionary biologists, we can't just sit there and watch galaxies change. Instead, we need to look at the fossil record contained in the galaxies around us which provides only *one* snapshot of the universe.
The way scientists get around this problem is by analysing pictures of galaxies with up-to-date technology in as much detail as possible. Astronomers have spent many decades trying to measure basic galaxy properties such as age, mass or dustiness that may give us some clues as to how they formed and evolved and what precisely the connection between spiral and elliptical galaxies is. However, most studies of galaxies so far have only looked at a few dozen or hundred galaxies in the nearby universe and many aspects of galaxy formation and evolution are still a mystery.
However, with the advent of the 21st century the age of large-scale astronomical surveys has arrived! The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is taking images of a large portion of the sky and will eventually find a million galaxies. With such a large number of galaxies, astronomers can finally begin to understand how they form and evolve by comparing various populations to each other with large enough numbers to draw real conclusions about their origin.
But out of these million galaxies, how do we know which are spirals and which are ellipticals? The answer is simple: look at them! Indeed, until now galaxies have been classified by visual inspection of their images. And in fact, technology is of little help here. It turns out that the human brain is far better than a computer at recognising the patterns that divide ellipticals from spirals. So visual inspection works well for a handful, or even several hundred objects....but one million? There are just too many galaxies for even the most dedicated of astronomers to look at. We need thousands of people to inspect galaxy images and to classify them as spiral or elliptical. We need you to help us."
Give the dedicated astronomers a break at Galaxy Zoo
Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research. This page describes the science behind Foldit and how your playing can help.
Now this one needs a bit more focus, involving transcribing scans of vintage (UK) data for the greater good....so possibly not for the faint-hearted (I've done a few stints, enjoyable but hard on the eyes!) They say "FreeBMD is an ongoing project, the aim of which is to transcribe the Civil Registration index of births, marriages and deaths for England and Wales, and to provide free Internet access to the transcribed records."
Find out more at FreeBMD
But let's just say you can't be arsed with all the above but you're quite happy for your computer to search for extraterrestrial life while you're having a nice cup of tea and your screen saver kicks in....no problem.....
"SETI@home is a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). You can participate by running a free program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.
SETI@home
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Green webpage printing
"Have you ever printed a webpage only to find your printout consisted mostly of empty space, ads and other junk you didn't want? PrintWhatYouLike is a webpage editor that lets you control how webpages look when printed."Wednesday, September 03, 2008
Saturday, August 02, 2008
A mildly techie post...converting .avi files to play on an iPod Classic
Mainly for Chris....
....first off a warning, this is not something you should leave until an hour before you leave for the airport, and probably not something you'd want to do at all if we're talking a "watch once then discard" film....just keep it for all-time favourites. It's not a quick process, one hour playing time will take at least double that to convert to mp4 format.
The best freeware conversion software I've found and used is WinFF. Download, unzip and install, and you're off! Documentation here, but I doubt you'll need it.
....first off a warning, this is not something you should leave until an hour before you leave for the airport, and probably not something you'd want to do at all if we're talking a "watch once then discard" film....just keep it for all-time favourites. It's not a quick process, one hour playing time will take at least double that to convert to mp4 format.
The best freeware conversion software I've found and used is WinFF. Download, unzip and install, and you're off! Documentation here, but I doubt you'll need it.
Still to come (because I haven't tried it yet!)....converting traditional DVDs to mp4 using Handbrake (also freeware)
Wednesday, July 02, 2008
Make a HUGE poster when you only have an A4 printer
"The Rasterbator creates huge, rasterized images from any picture. Upload an image, print the resulting multi-page pdf file and assemble the pages into extremely cool looking poster up to 20 meters in size." You can either do it online within certain limits, or download the desktop app here.
Monday, June 23, 2008
Saturday, June 21, 2008
Foldit.....playing games for science
Sounds like it might be worth a try! (it's all to do with protein folding) They say...."Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research. This page describes the science behind Foldit and how your playing can help."
Jump right in and Try Foldit........feel better about timewasting!
Friday, June 06, 2008
All of Google on one page
....because it's pretty big! A handy page to access all of Google's services, software and blogs from one place.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Holiday packing
A useful online service for those of you (Anne and John!) in the process of packing for holidays in sunnier climesDon't forget your toothbrush
Friday, May 16, 2008
Packing light
This one's for Anne and John who are off to the far east on holiday in a couple of weeks....don't suppose they'll take any notice though!Link to OneBag
Science videos search engine
"every science video on ScienceHack is screened by a scientist to verify its accuracy and quality"
Search ScienceHack
Haven't got time to read that now.....
....but monkiri could be the answer. Someone asked me where I got ideas for posts a while back, and until early this week it involved keeping an open email to me-at-home while I was at work, then copying and pasting possible links to content until hometime as and when I came across them. monkiri allows you (after registering and downloading a 'button' for your Internet Explorer or Firefox toolbar) to 'snap' an area of the screen and quickly add a title that automatically posts to your monkiri blog along with the address of the source page and any text you feel inclined to include....you can have as many as you like, so great for research purposes. It doesn't seem to have a huge take-up so far (as of today I was top of the list of posters with 30!) Check out the story so far here (I'm treating it as a sort of visual sieve for content....and it's a lot better than a load of individual daily emails cluttering my inbox!) I've used a rather retro, minimalistic template that sits comfortably with my geeky work persona.....there's other, more visually attractive templates available!Monday, May 12, 2008
Design your own font
Why not get creative? fontstruct is a free, online, modular toolkit that allows you to build your own downloadable truetype font.....or you can just be lazy and download one that someone prepared earlier! Requires registration.
Wednesday, May 07, 2008
Free video conferencing/chat stuff.....
....I had to search today for free software/online apps for boring work purposes, but I might as well disseminate the results....because I know for a fact the some of you have webcams!
ONLINE APPS
Bog basic, no registration, name-your-chat-room-and-go MeBeam
ONLINE APPS
Bog basic, no registration, name-your-chat-room-and-go MeBeam
You need to register to use, looks good for educational purposes (though I had some problems linking to another user that only had a headset/no webcam) probably worth the effort in the end! VYEW
I think I like this one best....but time will tell! PalBee
REQUIRES A DOWNLOAD
Monday, May 05, 2008
Cleaning tips
How To Clean Your Toilet With Coke
Lots more cleaning tips here at VideoJug It makes me feel quite tired!
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Printable Paper
All manner of printable (pdf) paper available here.....dotted, lined, graph, music, ledger etc. Also check out here for blank certificates, business cards, signage etc
Previously posted PrintFreeGraphPaper
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