I thought I might share some links with you that I’ve found or had shared with me that I really like. Not because I’m bored or lacking for things to say but because I think they’re worth sharing.
Actually, I won’t lie, I was asked to share this link. Jeremy of Haunted House Dressing is a writer and this month he has a horror story published in the online magazine Chairoscuro. It’s called Camp. It’s fairly short and somewhat thought provoking. I don’t know if “enjoy” is the word for this kind of story but I certainly don’t regret reading it. Unless you’re particularly squeamish, I recommend reading it. Come back and let me know what you thought.
I really liked this Christmas post by Jeff. It may rub some of you the wrong way but I totally agree with what he says.
This swirl tutorial by Veerle is excellent! I was trying to make swirls of varying width recently but didn’t do a very good job. I ended up trying to vary the second swirl by each node; it wasn’t pretty. It turns out that rotating and scaling the second swirl is the key!
I don’t have Adobe Illustrator so I used Inkscape instead. It was nearly exactly the same process except for combining the two paths (select both paths and go Path>Combine or Ctrl+K), and then selecting both end nodes and joining them with the button in the toolbar. For the outside ends I made an extra line/node to connect the ends because joining them as they are bent them towards each other. Then you can add the filling. Perfect!
Make a Flake is a fun flash generated paper snipping program. You can cut up a piece of paper to your heart’s content to make pretty snowflakes. I found that I couldn’t download the JPEG version of my snowflake, perhaps a glitch in the flash-linux interaction.
Blogger is out of Beta! Now you can upgrade your blog and there shouldn’t be any pesky glitches. There’s now widget support (so you can change your sidebar without having to look at the code) and there are labels, so you can organise your posts and archives into easily accessible topics. I’m told that the posting speed is much quicker as well.
I haven’t been able to connect to Photobucket.com for over a week. Or more correctly, I can connect but the page never loads. I believe it’s because our internet speed had slowed down to about dial-up speed (In Australia you can get these capped plans, so you can pay for a certain amount of high-speed download, 4GB, 10GB, that sort of size. Then if you go over that, instead of paying extra your internet just slows down.). Still, if you always have dial-up then Photobucket is pretty useless for image hosting. Just today I found Image Shack. Free image hosting that can automatically create thumbnails, gives you links to the images, had a bunch of different uploading tools, actually loads when the internet is being slow, and it claims to give the copyright to the users. So it only had the right to distribute general info and statistics, it doesn’t claim the rights to the images you’ve uploaded. Seems like a sweet deal.
Huh, Photobucket has just loaded for me. It must have sensed that I was promoting someone else. Amazing.
I know I’ve mentioned it before but Escapa is a great, addictive game. Have fun!
