Adrian's Scrapbook
Ramblings from Adrian Cho about the Impressions in Jazz Orchestra, jazz, music and arts in Ottawa, software, technology, intellectual property, business and collaboration, dogs and cats, and whatever else comes to mind.
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Aussies at the Olympics
As usual, the Aussies are racking up an impressive medal tally at the Olympics; one that is disproportionately large given the population of the country. Compared to the Aussies, the Canucks are not faring so well (and that’s ignoring the 50% greater population they have over the Aussies.)Zenphoto
After years of running the Gallery web-based photo management package, I’ve decided, like many other people have, to dump it and move to Zenphoto. Gallery has become a dog - a very sick dog. It’s slow and prone to breakage and the installation at the IJO website was so broken that we couldn’t upload to it anymore nor configure it.
Zenphoto, like Gallery, is an open source package. It’s fast, lightweight and simply works. At least for now anyway. The other great benefit for me is that my hosting service handles all maintenance of Zenphoto so I don’t even need to waste time on the upgrades, etc.
Check out the IJO photo gallery running on Zenphoto.
Impreza Redux
At the beginning of this year I posted about our purchase of a Subaru Impreza for Duffy and how we had become a two-Subaru family.
A couple of weeks ago I decided to let my Subaru Outback go to the big scrapheap in the sky. It has done over 300,000 kms and it’s time for a replacement. After much pondering, I’ve decided to purchase a - yep you guessed it - Subaru Impreza. We’re now going to be a two-Impreza family! In my book, if you want an affordable, all-wheel drive, standard transmission vehicle, there is simply no better choice. Over the last six months I’ve gotten to know Duffy’s Impreza quite well and look forward to having my own. This is a simply great vehicle. It’s got the feel and the ride of a big car in a small package. The wonderfully torquey engine puts out 170 hp which is a good 20 - 30 hp more than most cars in the same class. As a bonus I can fit the bass and a passenger. In fact it is more convenient to carry the bass in the Impreza than the Outback; it’s easier to load and unload and there is greater visibility once the bass is in the car.
To avoid too much confusion my car will be Newport Blue in colour so we can quickly distinguish it from the Lightning Red of Duffy’s car. I should have it in a few days.
Lightning GT
RoboCup
Jott
For at least a few months now if not longer, I have been using Jott, a service that transcribes your spoken words into text. Swing dance extraordinarie, Byron Alley referred me to this service and I must say that it has proven to be extremely useful. One of the things I use it for a lot is to send myself a reminder about something that I may think about while I am driving. Jott transforms your spoken words into text not by using software but instead with a team of people. As a result, the accuracy is a lot higher. It’s usually 100% accurate as long as you speak clearly and spell out complex words or names. You can also say grammatical things like “comma” or “new paragraph.”
One of the nice things about Jott is that it can interface with all kinds of services such as Tumblr, so I can dictate a blog post and Sandy, the anthropomorphized e-mail-based personal assistant.
In addition to Jotting things to yourself and interfacing to a variety of systems, one of the basic things you can do is send e-mails to one or more people. If you have a group defined on Jott, it makes it really easy to send that entire group an e-mail while you are driving along (such as “I’m running late, please feel free to start without me.”) To interface with Jott, you simply call the Jott number (they have local numbers for most cities in addition to toll-free numbers). Of course I have “J” setup as the speed dial for Jott.
Now Jott also has applications for BlackBerry and iPhone, allowing you to reply to e-mails using your spoken words. All very cool stuff.
Open source software
I wrote a while back that I’ve been using Pidgin as my sole instant messaging client. It handles every protocol I need including MSN, Yahoo, AIM, Google Talk, Skype (although you still need the Skype client installed) and Jabber for anything else (like Meebo).
Nowadays I’m also using Inkscape which is a vector drawing package like Adobe Illustrator and GIMP which is a bitmap editing packaging like Photoshop.
These are all great open source packages. High quality, full-featured, freely available, and constantly being updated.
