Daily Archive for November 30th, 2006

PDFCreator

Published
by
Graham
on November 30, 2006
in Software Tips
. 0 Comments

pdfforge_logo.jpg

Our printer at church died the other day and we won’t have a replacement for a time. A piece of software that we use has to print reports before moving on to other functions. Someone suggested we download a PDF writer so that we could at least print the information to file. I assumed that he was going to download PDF995, but he downloaded and installed PDFCreator by pdfforge. I had never heard of it before, but it seems to be an excellent tool.

For those who aren’t familiar with this sort of software, a PDF writer is software that acts as a printer. If you have a web page open, instead of printing it to the printer, you would print it to a file, in this case, a PDF. PDFCreator has a lot of options, and in my brief time using it I haven’t experienced any errors. You should definitely check it out!

QuickThumbnail - online photo resizer

Published
by
Graham
on November 30, 2006
in Digital Photography Tips & Info and Recommended Web Sites
. 0 Comments

Another Download Squad find…

QuickThumbnail is an extremely pared-down online service offering the ability to upload an image and resize, then download the resulting file. Uploaded photos and their resulting copies are kept on the server for only 10 minutes as a security precaution. Resizing options include resizing based on a percentage of the original image’s size, using one of a set of fixed sizes, or resizing my a set of “standard” sizes, for example 100×75 for an avatar, or 468×60 for a web banner.

Check it out!

For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs Big Debate

Published
by
Graham
on November 30, 2006
in Computer News
. 1 Comment

From the New York Times:

When computer industry executives heard about a plan to build a $100 laptop for the developing world’s children, they generally ridiculed the idea. How could you build such a computer, they asked, when screens alone cost about $100?

Mary Lou Jepsen, the chief technologist for the project, likes to refer to the insight that transformed the machine from utopian dream to working prototype as “a really wacky idea.”

Ms. Jepsen, a former Intel chip designer, found a way to modify conventional laptop displays, cutting the screen’s manufacturing cost to $40 while reducing its power consumption by more than 80 percent. As a bonus, the display is clearly visible in sunlight.

That advance and others have allowed the nonprofit project, One Laptop Per Child, to win over many skeptics over the last two and a half years.