In 2017, I only had one New Year’s resolution: to document a highlight for each and every day that year. Not only did I managed to keep the resolution, I’m still doing it to this day, and I can’t see myself ever stopping!
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Projects
As a programmer, it’s often tempting to try and solve your problems by writing programs, rather than hunting for solutions written by others. But that doesn’t mean you don’t want to share them, and hopefully help someone else, like I did with MessagePop, and like I’m doing again with this new program I’ve written called wpTracker.
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Because I couldn’t find a little piece of software to do what I wanted, I went and made one, and I thought there might be a few other people out there who might want to use it too. All it does is display a message, which you set via command line arguments, in a windows which stays on top of any other windows. You can set the body text, title text and OK/close-button text. Continue Reading
Something I did do today, this may become the wallpaper here soon…
Because I’ve been a bit stressed and anxious about Uni starting this week, and the possibility of a new IT Support job, and we haven’t had internet for the last few days I haven’t really gotten round to writing a blog. So, here I present to you something a little different, but hopefully just as interesting and entertaining (or maybe even more so!).
Because I’ve had my Raspberry Pi for about six months now, I feel it is time that I told you a bit about what I think of it. However, on some levels, I still don’t feel ready to review it. I haven’t used it that much yet, and I feel that I don’t fully grasp it’s power or purpose yet. Continue Reading
So, it nearly the end of the year, which means I’ve nearly done a whole year of blogs. So far, it’s been really interesting, and I hope everyone who have been reading them have enjoyed them. I’ve learnt a few things doing this, but now I’ve also got a few questions for you. If possible, could you please fill out the survey below. It’s only 6 questions long!
P.S. This is not my blog post for this week; I haven’t written it yet, but that’ll go up later this week.
DFTBA,
Nitemice
So, for the last few years, I’ve been creating these little time capsules for myself. A month or two after my birthday, I’d write a bit of a letter to myself just jotting down a few ideas about the future, then I’d collate a bunch of random documents, clippings and any other little object that’d fit in an envelope with the letter, and I’d seal it up and put it away to open in a year or so. Often I’d forget about them, but when I eventually found them again, I’d read the latest one, critique it and write a new one for the next year. This year, I decided to formalise the process, and step it up a bit. I wrote a list of questions that I can use year after year, but also can add to (or remove from if the questions become really irrelevant). I’m calling it the Longitudinal Study of Me, and I was thinking you may want to try it too.
So, if you haven’t been watching The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, this post isn’t going to make much sense to you. But you can fix that by simply devoting the time to watching all (so far) 43 videos. I better give you some context: The Lizzie Bennet Diaries is a modern adaptation of Pride & Prejudice, told primarily through the medium of YouTube vlogs (video blogs), as well as though an extensive deluge of various other social media posts, predominantly Tumblr. The other social media is used to explore the story from the point of view of many other characters, some of which are minor in the original narrative.
So, I’ve always wanted a Wacom tablet. For years now, I’ve wished I had one. Ever since I heard about it, I’ve thought it would be cool to be able to draw straight into the computer. I see myself as a bit of an artist, and I’m definitely a tech-head, so a Wacom tablet is a meeting of passions for me.
It’s for this reason that recently I’ve been seriously considering different models. I’ve been trying to weigh up the different features and types to find which one would be best for me. Some of the specs are easy to envision and understand, but some aren’t as easy.
One thing that’s deceivingly hard to wrap your head around is the side of these tablets. The size that actually matters is the size of the active area, which is the part of the tablet where the pen, or touch if the tablet supports it, will actually work. If you’re like me and have been looking at getting one of these tablets, you’ll have spent much wasted time hunting around the room with a ruler, looking for a book or piece of paper that just happens to be the same size as these dimensions. That’s why I’ve made some templates for you to print out, so you can get a better feel for them.
Now, you’re probably thinking, “What’s special about that? I could’ve easily cut a piece of paper to size. It’s called a pair of scissors.” Ah, but the difference with my templates is that they comprise of a rough diagram of where all the stuff in an image editing program would be on screen, and you print the diagram at the same size as the active area.
Why is this important? Because the active area on one of these tablets is mapped to match your screen layout. What I mean is that if you tap in the top left corner of the active area, your mouse will go to the top left corner of the screen. The same is true for all the other corners, as well as any point onscreen. So, the upshot of this is that while the active area might be massive, if your working area onscreen is less than the whole screen, then you won’t get to use the whole active area as that working area. That’s why I’ve created the diagram to roughly show you how much screen and active area space the toolbar, taskbar, and all the different tool windows take up. Continue Reading
Nitemice 