WTTGG #3
I almost forgot for this week, but found some stuff today, so here goes….
And a small disclaimer, or explanation first. Instead of just making this a list of cool stuff out there, I’m going to try to tie it into the field of history or academia. That will get me to think a bit more and hopefully stay true to my desires to have this blog about history and new media.
So… First off we have a couple of gadgets, of the software kind:
Gadget #1: Paintbrush. [Mac only] Have you ever wanted to just make a quick drawing or picture in Mac. It’s not that easy without Paintbrush. It gives Mac users a semblance of Microsoft Paint. Now, what’s the application to history, et al.? Ummm… I don’t know either. I’ll get a strike for this one…
Gadget #2: Skitch.com This is a new service that allows you to quickly take an image and annotate, draw, and share. You can grab photos from your iPhoto library, take screen shots, or import images. When you’re done drawing and such, you can upload it to your own account on skitch.com and share your photos. Check out my test photo at http://skitch.com/mossiso/ This might come in handy as another way for historians to share photos and their ideas. A teacher could upload some images and draw specific things… yeah, it’s a stretch too.
Tip #1: US National Archives Research Online and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. OK, OK, here’s a real tip for the historians. I’ve been looking for some information on the “Quarz” project started by the Nazis in late 1944. There is supposedly some photos at the National Archives, but I haven’t found them yet. I was tipped off to this topic by a friend and co-PhD student at GMU who works at USHMM. She knew of some nice had drawn maps that relate to project Quarz. So I took some digital copies of these maps, and want to use them in a project this semester. The above linked resources help in searching for documents, images, etc.
Well, the tips, tricks, gadgets and goodies were a bit lacking this week. Enjoy what you can of it.
Popularity: 33% [?]
Weekly Tips, Tricks, Gadgets and Goodies #2
So, here it is. The second week of TTGG. I found a bunch of things this week. Enjoy!
Goodies #1: There’s a lot of hype lately about Twitter. Don’t understand it? Here’s a video that explains it in plain English. [Google Video] It still seems a little tooooo much for me. I don’t want to know what someone is doing every minute of the day, and I don’t want to have to update my info all of the time too. I’m an old fashioned tech-noob.
Goodies #2: We’ve got no T.V. at home. It’s a conscious and wise decision. It means more time to spend with each other, reading books etc. But we get the hankerin’ for some media entertainment every once in a while. I looked on pbs.org last night and found a cool show with good quality video feeds: Wired Science. The best were the “What’s Inside” segments featuring Chris Hardwick. He’s a pretty funny guy.
Gadgets #1: http://www.scribd.com/ This is a cool project for getting your documents in a viewable format without having to worry about programs. It will take a pdf, word document, power point, and anything from OpenOffice or the OpenDocument format, and display it in your web browser (using Flash and JavaScript). I’m thinking this will be ideal for letting people view research papers and such on a digital historians site. It would be cool to see this in JStor as well. Their current interface is a little clunky (one page at a time, slow loads, no text copy, etc). It would probably be even easier for them to get content on their site. Come to think of it, this would be great for any online journal.
They call it iPaper (everybody’s on this “i” bandwagon), and have a platform version available for you to embed the service on your own website. Look for it here one of these days.
Tip #1: Change your Leopard Dock even more using the LeopardDocks App from LeopardDocks.com I like the jet black look.
Trick #1: (not really sure what the difference between a tip and a trick is, but it allowed alliteration and acronyms to work) Take a quick snapshot of your screen in Mac OS X. Hit the Command-Shift-4 keys at the same time, and your mouse becomes a cross hair. Click some where, drag the box, and bing-o! a picture on your desktop appears. Quick and easy!
TipTrick #2: Get different languages in your Mac OSX dictionary. It makes looking up words in other languages easy. And, for the second part of this tiptrick, some people use QuickSilver for fast application launching and fancy program work. I haven’t had the time to figure it out, but stumbled upon an easy built in tool that works similar: SpotLight. Hit Command-SpaceBar and start typing. Type “Firef” and Firefox is your first result, hit enter and it opens the application right up! You can change the preferences as to what shows up first, and what shows at all. Type in a word, and SpotLight will give you a definition. Nice! Now the fingers seldom leave the keyboard!
Popularity: 26% [?]
Weekly Tips, Tricks, Gadgets, and Goodies #1
I think I’ll try and start a weekly tips, tricks, gadgets and goodies post. It will cover the neat-o things in the tech world that I come across during the week that don’t have a whole lot to do with history, but are fun nay-the-less.
Tip #1: Custom Leopard stacks and drawer images
Tutorial for customizing your stacks icons.
make a new folder, name it “0000″ for sorting by name, or “touch -mt 2020010101 foldername” for sorting by date added.
copy the image from Get Info, paste int onto the Get Info for the new folder.
Add your own image to your drawer using the steps shown here at usingmac.com.
And you get something like above.
Goody #1: Geotag your photos
Check out the Geotag application which is helpful for spatially locating your great photographs when your camera has no GPS built in.
Popularity: 29% [?]
Graphical representations of genealogy
I have this thought, and it was brought to mind again by an article on Wired which linked to this artists (Jason Salavon) work with the US census data. Basically, he took the US census data over 200 years and created an image with a ribbon of color representing each county.
My idea is similar, kind of. While thinking about projects to do for my history and maps class this semester, and while talking with a colleague, I wondered how one could graphically represent ones genealogy. Most of us in the United States have ancestors that came from somewhere else. Many of us have ancestors that came from multiple somewhere elses. Looking at my ancestry alone I claim Arizona, Colorado, Utah, England, Sweeden, Germany and I’m sure several other places I don’t yet know of. One thought as to how to do this would be with a world map and lines and dots representing locations and familial connections. The lines and dots would be in gradients of color, each color representing a date. I tried doing a mock up in Photoshop quickly, but it wasn’t working right. I’ll have to do it in Flash, since that behaves like I expect. Flash might be a better platform anyways, because the map is then dynamic and can be dragged, zoomed, and dots and lines can be given data associated with them.
Popularity: 26% [?]
Omeka goes live
Omeka, another fine product produced by CHNM, has released the public beta. This is a great tool for museums and other places (or individuals) who want to create online exhibits.
In other news, there is now a growing movement to archive old skills that are no longer used. Mr. Scoble started a list of obsolete skills on his blog and later made a wiki about it. Now everybody can contribute their obsolete skills. Not only is this a humorous way to look at the evolving world of technology, but it provides a useful archive for anyone who might run across the need to use one of these obsolete skills.
Popularity: 18% [?]