Paint.NET

Paint.NET ScreenshotI stumbled across this one while I was looking for a solution to an odd problem in .NET 2.0 (C#, trying to save a changed datasource.)

What’s cool about Paint.NET is that it’s a free Open Source photo editing software. The other cool part is that it’s written in .NET… that makes it really cool. It currently is only available for Windows but Miguel de Icaza (of Evolution and Mono fame) did try porting it to mono and it was mildly successful. As Mono improves they hope eventually to be able to get it to run on Mono properly, which will mean that it will become available on Linux (and the other *nix that can run Mono) and Mac OSX.

Paint.NET is not a direct replacement for something like Adobe Photoshop or the Gimp but rather a photo manipulation application thats easy to use and does the stuff that most of us really want to do. This is going to be the photo editing software I recommend to all my friends for there Windows machines (replacing the Windows port of the Gimp) simply because it’s so much easier to use.

Paint.NET Official Website.
Paint.NET Wikipedia Entry.
Rick Brewster’s Blog – One of the developers of Paint.NET

Apple’s new product – iTV

iTVSo if you’re a Apple fanboy you’ve probably already heard about there cool new piece of hardware coming to a TV near you… sometime in the not too distant future…
What is this new device? oooh well it’s kinda like a mini MacMini… you plug it into the network or let it join your wireless one and then it’ll stream music/video/photo’s from iTunes…

I currently use my MacMini for this, it’s plugged into my LCD TV and acts as a sort of “entertainment PC” and plays all the stuff I have on my desktop Linux machine. But this new little box is smaller than a MacMini, doesn’t need a keyboard, mouse or anything and will have things like component video out.

So as you can tell I want one.. and I want one bad… the bad news is they’ll only be coming out sometime next year and they not going to be extremely cheap but probably less than a MacMini.

You can read more about it here and here

My (not so) new toys…

I’ve got a problem that I really like buying computers, and while I don’t always have an exact use for them when I buy them I normally find something for them to do.

A few weeks back (about 2) I went round to a company called Bridgeport Technical Services. These guys sell refurbished computers. The nice thing is the machines are rather cheap and they don’t come with any Operating System so they perfect for installing Linux on to.

So I bought two machines, although I really wanted to buy alot more.

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Two IT Guys were talking in a bar…

Two IT guys were talking in a bar after work. “Guess what,” says the first IT guy, “yesterday, I met this gorgeous blonde in a bar.”

“What did you do?” says the other IT guy.

“Well, I invited her over to my place, we had a couple of drinks, we got into the mood and then she suddenly asked me to take all her clothes off.”

“You’re kidding me!” says the second IT guy.

“I took her miniskirt off, and then I lifted her and put her on my desk next to my new laptop.”

“Really? You got a new laptop?”

Emailed to me from a friend (Hi Chantel)… The scary part is how true this is…?

CraftZine

This one is for my mother… but the rest of you might find it interesting.

I was reading one of my favourite blogs, Makezine when I saw the link to the CraftZine site. CraftZine is very similiar to Makezine but aimed more at arts and crafts, So if you’re interesting in making your own clothes, knitting, scrap booking or any of the other craft like things check the site out. You really need to checkout the blog on the site too, it gives links to lots of cool stuff you can make.

Homemade full size flight sim

I stumbled across this site today and I just had to share it. I know that at least one of my friends (Hello Eduard ;P) will love the idea of having your own real flight simulator in your garage.

simulator.jpg

matsim.jpg

Some crazy australian is busy building his own flight simulator, now I’ll admit that I’m not all that interested in learning to fly but I still wouldn’t mind building the simulator. [Found via Makezine]

Open Source CAD

I’m always desinging something, I admittedly never build anything… or not once I’ve worked out it’s do-able but I enjoy designing weird stuff. Almost all of my designs are scribbles on paper and I never actually make any kind of plans for them. Paper’s cool because it’s simple, you don’t need much to draw something and it’s quick. It does have it’s down sides, things aren’t that straight it’s hard to get the scale right without rulers and possibly the worst part is that when you decide to move something or want to see if perhaps putting a hole through the case would look ok or moving the bathroom next to the kitchen to see if it’s better you need to re-draw everythng because you can’t just move stuff around and theres no undo button.

Which brings us to CAD software, I’m not looking for anything fancy, my needs are simple. I want something thats easy to use and that I can draw any kind of technical drawing. Ideally I want to be able to in the same program do the floor plan for my million dollar mansion or the design for my new tv cabinet or the case for the ultimate HTPC. The problem is that I have a minimum requirement that the program works on Linux and it would be nice if it also ran on MacOSX and Windows and that it shouldn’t cost anything.
And so the search starts for an open source CAD program.
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Last.Fm is really cool…

I love all the new sites that are coming out… one that a friend recently introduced me to is called Last.Fm.

Now last.fm is very hard to describe but basically through special plugins in media players your computer sends them information on what music you listen to all this is then stripped of any “private” information and then grouped together with a the information gathered from thousands of other people. They then do lots of fancy stuff on all the data and finally come out with info that says “People who like Katie Melua will also like KT Tunstall”. By signing up for your own account at last.fm you can tell them what you like which means that they’ll then be able to give you better more accurate information on other artists you may like.

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The Internet Archive

A while ago I was watching an episode of NerdTV where Robert “X” Cringely interviews Brewster Kahle? the? creater of the Internet Archive.? I must admit that the only thing I? knew or ever used of the internet archive was the Wayback machine which? allows you to “go back in time” and view an older version of a website.

But in the interview they were talking about Movies, Audio, Books and all kinds of other stuff that the Internet Archive now archives so I decided to go take a look…

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