stephen's blog » Cool Stuff

Driving Directions to New York City

Stephen — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 13:58:20 +0000

Trying to plan my next road trip, I turned to the ever powerful Google Maps. I picked a destination (New York City), and asked Google Maps how I would go about driving there. It responded with some absolutely brilliant advice:

I just have to drive through three countries, with three short kayaking trips across the Pacific ocean. Sounds great! And, it will only take fifty-five days.

How many seconds until Christmas, I hear you ask?

Stephen — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 13:31:11 +0000

I whipped together a quick little application which counts down until Christmas tonight – but it is quite unlike most that you see around the place. I’ve dispensed with the needless and imprecise method of showing the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds, and just display the important stuff – the exact number of seconds until 12:00 AM on Christmas morning.

Download ChristmasCountdown
Requires .Net Framework 2.0 or Mono

Adobe’s Buzzword Word Processor

Stephen — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 11:00:37 +0000

I have been taking a look at Adobe’s new Buzzword word processor. Basically, Buzzword is a flash based web application, and I have to say, it is very nice. As you can see from the screenshot above, the text rendering absolutely brilliant, with access to real typefaces like Myriad and Minion, as opposed to the boring Arial you generally see in normal web based word processors.

Being written in Flash, it has quite a few other advantages apart from nice typefaces too – nice image wrapping for one; better tables another. The interface is also a lot more dynamic than most word processors – whether they be applications or web based. It’s certainly nicer than the new Microsoft Office look, and is very nice to use.

The application can export to a range of different file formats, like rich text, Microsoft Word formats, plain text, HTML and also Adobe PDF – although Evince wouldn’t open the PDF that I exported… It also boasts good collaboration features (like most other internet word processor), but that’s not much use to me, so I haven’t tried any of that.

All in all, it looks like a word processor that I might actually consider using in the future. It’s certainly a project to keep an eye on. Check it out at Acrobat.com – you have to sign up to use it first.

Photoshop CS2 in WINE

Stephen — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 12:23:02 +0000

A version of WINE (0.9.46), a free implementation of the Windows API for other operating systems released quite recently featured support for all versions of Photoshop up to CS2 to “just work”, so I decided to give it a spin. I’ve been using Wine mainly for games for a while now, and have found the support for DirectX very good. Still, I was very impressed with how well Photoshop ran – all the filters and operations I tried worked flawlessly.

Of course, there still are a few issues (like not being able to type into the serial number box in the installer, and a small issue with window focus), but for the most part, it was very impressive. The Wine developers have done an amazingly well, and I wish them luck with future versions.

You can see my testing report here. My screenshot is there too – with a slight spelling mistake…

Compiz Fusion 0.5.2 – Preview

Stephen — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 08:38:11 +0000

Here’s a review of the new Compiz Fusion 0.5.2 that will be included in many major upcoming Linux releases. The Screenshots look fantastic, and the configuration tool looks greatly improved.

Cat with bow Golf game

Stephen — Sat, 19 May 2007 00:48:18 +0000

You are a cat, with a bow and arrow, and you have to hit the target…. Starts easy, but gets difficult quickly!

A truly unique game…

Cool CSS Speech bubbles

Stephen — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 10:32:08 +0000

I found a cool CSS speech bubble script, and I think I might use it for my comments. It works in all browsers, and is made with XHTML, CSS and Javascript. I removed the link, because the guy was link baiting, so I didn’t want to improve his page-rank. You can get them at http://www.willmayo.com/2007/02/10/css-speech-bubbles/

-Stephen

An interesting article about ZFS

Stephen — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 10:27:52 +0000

Here’s an interesting article about ZFS (the Zettabyte file system), discussing its advantages. It looks like an interesting file system, and has a lot of great features like storage pooling and revisions of files and so on.

-Stephen
read more | digg story

Screenshots Of Photoshop CS3

Stephen — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 12:30:13 +0000

Adobe is releasing a beta of the new version of Photoshop tomorrow. It will be available as a universal binary for Macs, which can be used with both the PowerPC and Intel Macs. Here are some screenshots and new features.

Great Javascript Colour Picker

Stephen — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 11:33:39 +0000

I found this great Javascript colour picker today. It’s only 23kb, and looks great. You can check out a demo and download it at http://www.acko.net/dev/farbtastic.

-Stephen