Archive for the 'General' Category

Liquids on a plane

Published by
Mike
at September 23, 2007 in General. Closed

The other week while passing thru O’Hare International Airport, I was caught off guard by how short the line was. Usually while waiting in line I empty my pockets and dignity into my travel bag. I untie my shoes, get my laptop and liquids ready for easy emptying into dirty gray bins.

This time I walked right up, showed my credentials, and started emptying things into gray bins. I forgot to clearly display my liquids, and they didn’t notice(or care). It was 6:00am, so maybe they didn’t complete their first cup of coffee yet.

lowering the email load

Published by
Mike
at July 30, 2007 in General. Closed

For the first time in a few years I am down to under five email accounts.

I own about a dozen domains, and I have always had email active for each one. I also had about six Google mail accounts. Now my one gmail account checks every other gmail accout. I upgraded my gmail account for w.oods.name so I could get the IMAP import of my old data. Now my Google hosted email for this domain also handles my other domains. The work accounts still seperate.

I should have done this a long time ago.

Best Python Quote Ever

Published by
Mike
at June 13, 2007 in General. Closed

I don’t know much about Python other then seeing a demo online. It gave me the impression that Python enables you to develop quickly while picking your nose. #

The PrintWiki Foundation today publicly launched PrintWiki - The Free Encyclopedia of Print.

Published by
Mike
at October 31, 2006 in General and Technology. Closed

Rochester, NY, November 1, 2006 - The PrintWiki Foundation today publicly launched PrintWiki - The Free Encyclopedia of Print.

The PrintWiki Foundation’s goal is to provide a comprehensive, open-source encyclopedia of printing and publishing.

The PrintWiki.org website provides a collaborative platform that enables anyone to contribute to the collective knowledge of the printing and publishing community. The result is a rewarding, constantly improving experience for anyone seeking or sharing knowledge about printing and publishing. Anyone can contribute and edit content to the catalog of quality information on the printing and publishing industry. The site belongs to no single person or group. The site will be continually updated, expanded, and improved upon by the community.

PrintWiki is not a staffed organization and is maintained by a group of volunteers who carry out editing, site maintenance, code development, and other administrative support.

All content contributed to the site is released under a Creative Commons License. Under this license anyone may copy, distribute, display, and make derivative works available for personal or commercial use.

For more information visit PrintWiki.org

About the PrintWiki Foundation

The PrintWiki Foundation is currently formalizing as a non-profit legal entity and will provide oversight for the PrintWiki Project. The founding board has chosen Adam Dewitz to serve as interim executive director during the formalization process.

###

Disclaimer - Michael Woods the author of W.oods.name is a founding board member of the PrintWiki Foundation.

Dual booting WinXP and Fedora Core 5

Published by
Mike
at October 5, 2006 in General and Technology. Closed

Today I decided to tackle a WinXP and Fedora Core 5 install on my Sony PCG-K13. My company uses Fedora as a server platform, and I always wanted to have a server in my office to use and experiment with. I had also always wanted to dual boot my laptop just for fun.

I will admit I was a bit intimidated at the idea at first. So I pulled up del.icio.us and looked for some guides on how to dual boot your computer. I was willing to erase my hard drive for this setup, so I wasn’t to worried about having to try it a few times.

This quick guide assumes you have installed Windows XP and Fedora before

  1. Backup your data. Backup your user data and anything else important, you will be formatting your hard drive.
  2. Boot from your Windows install CD
  3. When you get to the Windows partition page, split your drive up into two segments. My drive is 30GB so I split it in half. It will look something like this once you set it up:
    • C: Partitition New (Raw) 15000MB
    • unpartitioned space 15000M
  4. Select your new C: drive and format it as NTFS and go
  5. Finish the complete Windows install process
  6. Boot from your Fedora Core 5 CD 1
  7. Choose install in graphical mode and start the process
  8. When you get to the Partitioning Options Screen choose:
  9. Use free space on selected drives and create default layout
  10. Check the box for Review and modify Partitioning layout
  11. The next screen will be the Disk Setup Screen. There will be a bunch of things in the window, you should have three volumes
    • a NTFS volume
    • a swop volume
    • a ext3 volume

    and some other stuff, but if you have those you are good to go.

  12. On the next screen you will set the boot loader configuration.
    • Choose Fedora Core if you want your default to be Fedora
    • Choose other if you want it to be Windows
  13. Continue configuring everything to it’s default, add the apps you need and you will be good to go.
  14. Restart and boot Fedora and boot Windows to see if they work
  15. Boot Windows load your anti-virus and anti-spyware applications then run Windows update
  16. Finishing configuring your systems and have fun.

photo book designing

Published by
Mike
at April 20, 2006 in General, design and photography. Closed

minibook

With the purchase of my new all-in-one printer-scanner-copier I have started to scan a bunch of old photos from my families albums. Now that I am familiar with the scanner and my quality of scans has increased I want to print my first book of the old scans.

I use flickr to share my photos. They use QOOP to print books, posters, and all sorts of other stuff. I like the minibooks the best. Their size and style fits my tastes perfectly. I like the ease of which they let you assemble a book from an group of photos in your account. What I don’t like is that they sometimes mash your photos into their slots which results in images cropped the way you do not want them cropped. I want the images at the original size, not some new unknown size. They also make you use the same layout through out the book. I signed up for the QOOP beta program which might solve these issues, but I’ll have to wait and see.

Now I suppose I could crop the photos to fit their dimensions and re-upload them, but that seems like a lot more work for me. I am willing to layout the entire book myself in InDesign. This works the best, and would be simple with InDesign’s center content button.

So I went looking for a book printer that could do short 1 or 2 off runs. I found lulu.com. A self-publishing website that offers you the ability to upload a variety of formats and they will pre-flight it and print them on demand for you. They offer a variety of sizes, but they do not offer a decent stock for a photo book.

So my friend who is a print purchaser told me about SyNet Media, a company that he sometimes sends work to. They have a manual layout option That would allow me to get close enough to what I desire. There site seems to run a bunch of java applets and is not the easiest to work with. However I think it will end up being the best option available.

Do you have any experience with photo book printing? Have you used any service that you would recommend?

Continue reading ‘photo book designing’

6 weeks

Published by
Mike
at April 17, 2006 in General. Closed

My parents

Time is counting down to the wedding day.

I never realized planning an event like this is so much work. My first advice would be to just hire a planner if you can afford it. But if you cannot afford that, just keep it small and simple. Choose a small intimate venue. Don’t have your ceremony, dinner and receptions at different places.

On that note, I must say Jim Raffel does an amazing job co-ordinating and planning the user group meeting for ColorMetrix every year. That event is entirely different, but I can sympathize on the amount of thought that must go into just the planning.

And one last piece of advice to the wedding planners. Register somewhere like Amazon.com. You will never run out of items to add to your registry.

Parents new house

Published by
Mike
at March 15, 2006 in General. Closed

So my parents called me this last weekend. They said they put a bid in on a new house in Tucson AZ. My parents sold their house and started traveling and living full time in an RV. They have been doing it for three years now. I don’t think it is going to slow down their travels to much though.

Congratulations mom and dad!

See some pictures of their new house here.

Snow Day

Published by
Mike
at March 13, 2006 in General, Minneapolis, Minnesota, Snow and Winter. Closed

Today we woke up to a good 5 inches of snow. Steph left early for work, and driving slowly she made it there ok. At that time the power was out for about 39,000 Xcel Energy Customers. The hardest hit areas were the Southwest suburbs, which we live right next to, so our place in SW Minneapolis probably didn’t get hit quite as hard

MnDOT is advising no unnecessary travel in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Winter weather dumped 3 to 7 inches. As of 8:45 a.m., Xcel Energy reported about 39,000 customers without power — about 13,000 in the eastern metro and 26,000 in the western metro. Of that area, the hardest-hit are in the southwestern suburbs.

IMG_2139.JPG

This tree usually does not touch the ground.

Weekend over

Published by
Mike
at March 12, 2006 in General, Minneapolis and Minnesota. Closed

Steph’s brother came up from Madison on Friday. We went to the Como Zoo and Conservatory and Minnehaha Park this weekend, and bummed around town. Check out the pictures the Como and Minnehaha Park.

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