WebGyver Revisited

WebGyver Receives Honest Scrap Award

Posted by admin on March 12, 2009  |  No Comments

Thank you Sandra Dee for bestowing the much coveted and highly prestigious Honest Scrap Award unto me and my humble blog. Sandra Dee, of course, runs the outstanding AT YOUR SERVICE blog.

Award description and requirements (per Sandra Dee’s blog):

This award is bestowed upon a fellow blogger whose blog’s content or design is, in the giver’s opinion, brilliant.

When accepting this auspicious award, you must write a post bragging about it, including the name of the misguided soul who thinks you deserve such acclaim, and link back to the said person so everyone knows she/he is real.

Choose a minimum of seven (7) blogs that you find brilliant in content or design. Or improvise by including bloggers who have no idea who you are because you don’t have seven friends. Show the seven random victims’ names and links and leave a harassing comment informing them that they were prized with Honest Weblog. Well, there’s no prize, but they can keep the nifty icon.

List at least ten (10) honest things about yourself. Then pass it on!

Choose a minimum of seven (7) blogs that you find brilliant in content or design.

1. Anup Shah – onenaught.com

2. Susannah Gardner – Buzz Marketing With Blogs

3. Mack – The Viral Garden

4. Bea Fields – EDGE!

5. Bridget Ayers – The Get Smart Blog

6. jafagirl – Javabrit’s Art

7. Xacur – Android’s Dungeon

List at least ten (10) honest things about yourself.

1. WebGyver is my alter-ego, based on MacGyver.

2. If it would have somehow worked out, I would have done something else with my alter-ego’s name. Like Magnum P.I.

3. Me and my girls love semi-authentic cheese fondue, from Switzerland.

4. So far, I have seen the original Queen band perform live three times.

5. Actually, I’ve also seen Barclay James Harvest three times live.

6. Unfortunately, I have never seen Electric Light Orchestra perform live.

7. PhotoScape and FastStone Capture are my secret weapons.

8. Once I had to call somebody called Fu-ming Wan at work (no joke).

9. While programming, I listen mostly to Carbon Based Lifeforms and similar music.

10. If I could travel back in time, I would like to meet Danny Kaye, Freddie Mercury, René Descartes and several of my grandparents & great-grandparents.

Amazing Web Stats

Posted by admin on January 12, 2009  |  No Comments

Adam Singer just published a list of “49 Amazing Social Media, Web 2.0 And Internet Stats” over at the futurebuzz blog. I think he gathered some amazing statistics, and I recommend you visit his blog for the full story, along with all the citations for the sources, plus additional, relevant information.

Adam organized his stats in multiple sections, such as Google, YouTube, Twitter, Blogosphere, etc.

Browser Statistics

If you’re interested in web browser statistics, or browser stats, and browser display information (or even individual “per browser” statistics), head on over to W3Schools for all the relevant information.

Check out the navigation menu on the left to see a number of available statistics.

Global Internet Statistics

If you’re into “the big picture” and want to know a little bit more about who might be browsing the web worldwide, or per continent, have a look at Internet World Stats.

They say that they re “”an International website featuring up to date world Internet Usage, Population Statistics and Internet Market Research Data, for over 233 individual countries and world regions.” And, yes, they do have a link called The Big Picture.

Dropbox :: Free online file storage, sync & share

Posted by admin on December 30, 2008  |  No Comments

This may be old news to some of you, but I had totally forgotten about my nifty Dropbox account.

The free account allows me to store 2GB’s worth of files on the web. The Dropbox desktop interface handles all the uploading and synchronizing and is available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

The premise is simple:

Have you ever wished that you could access your files from anywhere? We made Dropbox because we were tired of e-mailing files to ourselves or carrying around a USB key.

Your Dropbox account can be accessed from multiple computers. Obviously, that means that you can have access to your project files at work, at home at a client’s site, etc.

Is it secure? According to the folks at Dropbox, “All files are transported over SSL and encrypted using AES-256 (banks use this too).”

All in all, the dozen or so people at Dropbox have done a great job at providing on-the-go file backup & access. What surprised me was to learn that at least three of the Dropbox team members are MIT drop-outs who thought that starting their own company would be more meaningful than finishing their degree (and at least two of the guys only had a year or less to go).

SONGBEAT

Posted by admin on December 1, 2008  |  No Comments

If you’re like me, you like to have some background music while you’re programming, designing, invoicing, etc. In my case, background music helps me tune out distractions — whether I’m in a cubicle at work or in my basement office at home.

That’s why I’m always interested in fidning out about new ways to a) find and b) listen to music. My music, that is. The latest tool to help me find suitable music at a moment‘s notice is called SONGBEAT.

The free download (currently for Windows only) is a search tool and a player all in one. Download and install SONGBEAT, and the rest is quite intuitive. You can search for music by song title, author, album, etc. The search was quite impressive. Searching for tunes from one of my 60’s idols, Donovan (as in Donovan Leitch),  returned a variety of results, including Terri Reid, who did a cover version of Superlungs My Supergirl.

Additionally, you can download songs that SONGBEAT finds for you.

With Songbeat, its not only possible to listen to the results of your search directly from the internet (no need to download before listening) – its also possible, after downloading, to organize and play them in the integrated media player in the Library.

Not bad, eh? Other gems that are hidden in this seemingly simple and quite user-friendly tool are the Mixtape function, the Station (or cassette recorder) function and several other tools (such as transferring to your iPod with one click).

The one thing that wasn’t entirely clear to me — but I’m sure I will find out as time progresses — was the benefit of the $29.99 upgrade. There is some talk about “unlimited downloads” and being able to “download 25 times for free,” but other than that, there was very little persuasive upgrade information available on the web site.

Addendum: Perhaps it’s just me and my Windows XP OS, but after a while, I encountered a bunch of errors when I tried to search for stations.

After dismissing all the debug information and shutting down SONGBEAT, the music was still playing, and only closing the SONGBEAT process, by way of Task Manager, finally made it all go away.

Perfect Opportunity for the Right Candidate

Posted by admin on October 9, 2008  |  No Comments

For about two years, I’ve been subscribing to various online job search engines. You know, just to keep an eye out and see what’s in demand.

At any rate, every now and then, I see something awe-inspiring, similar to the following:

Say what? The perfect opportunity for the right candidate! Unlike the perfect opportunity for the wrong candidate. Or any other permutation, involving the words perfect opportunity and right candidate.

Then again, it’s a rough economy, and those twenty-something hot-shots from the recruiting firm are running out of ideas.

What are your favorite phrases from job ads?

Streaming Museum

Posted by admin on October 3, 2008  |  No Comments

It is Friday, and most of us creative types deserve a good diversion every now and then. How’bout Streaming Museum?

Basically, artists and innovators exhibit hip and happening stuff — ranging from music to stories to film excerpts and lectures — that’s going to be displayed in cyberspace and public space on seven (7) continents.

Among the exhibitors are Emanuel Dimas de Melo Pimenta, James Nachtwey, John Cage (whom I interviewed back in 1992), Agnes Denes, Buckminster Fuller, Jacob ter Veldhuis, Anni Rapinoja, Brian Mackern and several others.

Currently showing is “Artists and Innovators for the Environment” Part One.

Enjoy your Friday! 

Wacom Graphire 4×5 Graphics Tablet for $39.99 (refurbished)

Posted by admin on September 26, 2008  |  No Comments

JR.com is currently selling refurbished Wacom graphics tablets for $39.99.

The Wacom UCTE440 Graphire 4×5 Graphics Tablet is a 4×5 inch graphics tablet that includes Adobe Photoshop Elements 3 and more. It also includes the Pressure Sensitive Pen & Cordless Mouse, is ideal for drawing & painting and comes in metallic blue.

The graphic pen with eraser has 512 levels of pressure sensitivity for natural brush control. Flip it over and it acts as an eraser in such software programs as MS Word and Photoshop. By the way, the tablet comes with free copies of Color Efex Pro 2 GE, Corel Painter Essentials 2, Evernote Plus and JustWrite Office 4.

According to Jr.com’s web site, This Wacom UCTE440 has been Factory-Refurbished to perform as if it were new. It comes with a 1-Year Warranty from Wacom.

Free T-shirt for Computer Geeks

Posted by admin on July 10, 2008  |  No Comments

As seen on TV. Extreme PC Garage is giving away free T-shirts. As long as supplies last. Hop on over to their web site and sign up. It’s relatively painless. Enter your name and address, then answer a few questions about the show.

You have seen the show, right? It’s a program made by gamers for gamers. The premise is to build the most “awesomest” gaming PC, using the hottest hardware, the latest accessories and gadgets and matching all of that to a lucky person’s unique gaming style. The show proclaims that their only rule is: There are no rules!

The end result? One lucky gamer (and it could be you) will witness the transformation of lackluster PC into a “killer one-off custom screamin’ hot gaming machine.”