Building a Font Library

Learn more about this at the link.
From the site:
We’ve been testing Typekit over the last few weeks with a small group of foundries, type designers, and web designers. The results have been incredibly valuable, helping us learn more about how fonts perform in browsers as well as a host of other issues. We are very grateful to these folks for being so generous with their time and expertise. And a large number of these foundries have agreed to jump in with both feet, adding their work to the Typekit service from day one.
The full list of Fonts is available at the site.

Jing - a free tool for helping you

It is always useful to find tools that help out in your ongoing work. One such tool is called Jing (located at this site).

A few ways to use Jing:
Collaborate on a design project
Share a snapshot of a document
Narrate your vacation photos
Capture that pesky bug in action
Show Dad how to use iTunes
Comment verbally on students' homework
Post tidbits from your life on Twitter or Facebook

Jing remembers everything you capture on your computer and stores the images and videos as thumbnails in the History.
The Capture Hotkey is pretty handy. Not only does it save a couple of clicks, but it also makes it possible to capture things like drop down menus--like in the example below.
Jing is tied to TechSmith's Screencast.com. When you install Jing you must create a Screencast.com account associated with a valid email address (unless you already have a Screencast.com account). This becomes your "Default Account". If you have multiple Screencast.com accounts (such as for work or personal) you can associate whichever account you wish on a per-button basis.

LibTIFF - TIFF Library and Utilities

This software provides support for the Tag Image File Format (TIFF), a widely used format for storing image data. The latest version of the TIFF specification is available on-line in several different formats.

Included in this software distribution is a library, libtiff, for reading and writing TIFF, a small collection of tools for doing simple manipulations of TIFF images, and documentation on the library and tools. Libtiff is a portable software, it was built and tested on various systems: UNIX flavors (Linux, BSD, Solaris, MacOS X), Windows, OpenVMS. It should be possible to port libtiff and additional tools on other OSes.

The library, along with associated tool programs, should handle most of your needs for reading and writing TIFF images on 32- and 64-bit machines. This software can also be used on older 16-bit systems though it may require some effort and you may need to leave out some of the compression support.

The software was originally authored and maintained by Sam Leffler. While he keeps a fatherly eye on the mailing list, he is no longer responsible for day to day maintenance.

Learn more at this link.

Photo making collage - PhotoMix

What is PhotoMix ?
PhotoMix is a full-featured collage making software. It allows any user to create professionally looking collages with a couple of clicks - no experience in image editing required. Create a collage by compiling various pictures of any size and form, or work with one photo and give it a unique look by applying numerous actions. Collage can be exported as an editable project or single image, you can send it by email or print.
Learn more at this link.

Cucumber - A tool for testing

Cucumber is a tool that aids in testing, using something called Behavior Drive Development (link) . You can get details about Cucumber at this link. Some extracts from the site:

Cucumber lets software development teams describe how software should behave in plain text. The text is written in a business-readable domain-specific language and serves as documentation, automated tests and development-aid - all rolled into one format.
Cucumber works with Ruby, Java, .NET, Flex or web applications written in any language. It has been translated to over 30 spoken languages. Cucumber allows you to write feature documentation in Plain Text. It means you could sit with your Client or Business Analyst to write down the features to be build on your application.

You can get more documentation at this link.

Photoshop.com Mobile Android App

Photoshop.com is a Flex / Flash based online application where you can upload your photos (either directly on the site, or from Adobe Photoshop Elements). Sometime back, a version of the site that was meant for use on mobile phones was first released on the iPhone, and now it has been released for the Android version. Read more about it at this link.

Perfect your pictures with the Photoshop.com Mobile App on your Android phone. Simply drag your finger to crop, adjust color, apply effects—you name it.
- Crop, rotate, and color-correct with the touch of a finger.
- Add soft focus or change to black & white with a click.
- Go classic by adding a sepia tint.
- Intuitive Photo Browser for viewing local and online images.

Creating a Photo Mosaic

A photo mosaic can be a beautiful photo creation, with a composite photo being created from multiple photos, with the individual photos being used as tiles that together make the mosaic. You would need good tools to create these, and an example of a software that you can use for this purpose is called AndreaMosaic (link). From the site:

With AndreaMosaic you can create your own photographic mosaics made with your own pictures. A photo mosaic is an image composed of many tiled photos.
AndreaMosaic is a little program for to create mosaics made with photographs. To create such kind of mosaic you need a collection of images to use for the tiles of the mosaic and you also need an image to use for the original, as a matrix for the mosaics. Then you can set the parameters of the program for to create very different kind of mosaics.

Tutorials available on this page (link).

Activity Monitor on Snow Leopard

For Snow Leopard (a Mac OS) users, it used to be difficult to find out exactly why some applications would start to slow down their machines. After all, when a user has a high end machine, the user would expect that any program should be able to run on their machine without causing the machine to slow down. Unfortunately, for long time users, they know that such a thing is not possible, there is no such thing as too much memory. Well, for people wanting to know what is causing their machine to behave slowly, here is this application called Activity Monitor (read more about it here).
Read more:

Before, you'd just see that Safari was nailing your CPU. Now there's a more specific breakdown, which shows the true culprit. Plug-in sandboxing is good thing. It is especially helpful when a plug-in is not responding and you want to quit it without killing your browser session

Tool: Doing screenshots of web pages

How often have you found yourselves wanting to get a screenshot of some web page. You are writing a report, or doing some documentation, and want to get a screen shot of some web page. What can you use ? There are tools available, but many of them need to be purchased, and others put some watermark on the images. Well, here is a tool that can do the work (link to site).
From the site:

WebKut is an AIR application that allows you to capture web pages, or parts of them in a very simple way. It provides you 3 capture options: the entire page, the current view, or only a selection.
Limitations
On Microsoft Windows, PDF document and some Flash animations in web pages will be replaced by blank spaces.
The maximum dimension for an image is 2880 pixels

Java Tool: IntelliJ IDEA - Now open source

Java has many editors, both free and commercial. One of the best such tools is IntelliJ IDEA, and it is now Free as well as Open Source, with users no longer having to pay for it (learn more). From the site:

Community Edition — Free and OS Java IDE
Intelligent code editor has all the smarts for understanding Java code; provides refactorings, code inspections and intentions, super-fast navigation and search — all that we have accumulated over the years.
Integrates with such essential tools as JUnit and TestNG, Ant and Maven, and popular version control systems: CVS, Subversion and git.

pdfpirate.net: Web site that removes document restrictions from PDF files

Site: http://pdfpirate.net/
Free, online and no limits pdf restrictions remover
A site that aims to remove restrictions such as No Printing, No copy and paste that have been put on a PDF document. Useful for students and others who want to copy from PDF files.
To remove all restrictions, simply upload the document to PDFPirate and it will automatically remove the restrictions. You can then download the unlocked PDF document and start working on it. No option to do batch upload, need to do it one by one.

Make money from blogs - AntiLeech Wordpress Plugin: How to protect your RSS feed from getting copied automatically

For bloggers, a RSS feed is something critically important. With a RSS feed, you can build a set of dedicated readers who get pinged everytime you generate new content, as well as be able to control how much of your post you want them to see. If users are impressed with what they read, they will come to your blog more often to read other content on the blog, and spread the word around. So, having a RSS feed is critical. At the same time, a RSS feed is also a very useful tool in the hands of somebody who wants to make a simple automated system of copying your feed. Such a person will have a website build of content from many similar blogs, and automatically generate content from these different feeds. And since Google does not index RSS feeds, this other site will use a mechanism to take this feed and create a post on the other site. Of course, you hate this, but what can you do, short of stopping your RSS feed. Or you can take the effort to try and identify this person from your RSS feed and block, but it is no easy matter.
Another option is to use a Wordpress Plugin to try and give a different content to such an automated system (called a splog, a blog build from feed spammers who automatically take content from feeds and convert them into content on another blog, hence stealing your content). One way to reduce or prevent such stealing is through using a Wordpress Plugin called AntiLeech Wordpress Plugin (site). What does this Plugin do ?
From the site:

AntiLeech does not prevent the splogger bots from accessing your site. It produces a fake set of content especially for them that includes links back to your site (and mine, too, ok?) and sends it only to them. When they steal this content, it appears online just like normal, except now you've turned the tables on them and have provided them with useless content.
AntiLeech can detect a splogger bot using its User-Agent string (an identifier that some bots send when they are collecting data), or by IP address. You can enter a User-Agent or an IP address into the Options panel of your WordPress blog. When a visitor with a qualifying (any checked option on the options page) User-Agent or IP address visites your site, they will see only the generated content.

Read more about this plugin from other blogs at Google Search (link)

Make Money from Blogs - Wordpress plugin: Display your Page Rank on any page

For people with an understanding of what Google's Page Rank is, having a high Page Rank is a badge of honor; if the Page Rank is not high, people make all sorts of effort to get a higher Page Rank. They will link to sites with a higher Page Rank, post to article directories (to try to get some of the high rank of these sites). In fact, whenever Google does a review of Page Rank and either bumps up a person, or pushes up the Page Rank, there is a huge amount of emotion involved. For an individual site to have a high Page Rank, it is probable that they will get a corresponding larger amount of traffic (from search engines, as well as from people who would want to link to a site with a high Page Rank).
Hence, if you have a high Page Rank (in fact, a Page Rank of > 3 is good enough to display), you might want to display the Page Rank. Somebody with a lower Page Rank might look at the high Page Rank, and want to link to your site. Or you might be justifiably proud of the high Page Rank, and display the Page Rank on your site (link to article):

If your wordpress blog has a better page rank, here is a better chance to reveal it to your blog readers. That is Wordpress Page Rank Plugin Show-My-PageRank. You can also change the size, caption text, text color, font size etc from option window.
If you want to show your page rank to a custom area , say footer.php or header.php , just add the below line to corresponding section in theme editor window.

Go ahead and try it out; if you have a High Page Rank, why not display it as a badge of honor.

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Wordpress Plugin: Take control of your database access

Wordpress depends on the Database for almost everything. All the values your enter, all your content, everything that goes to make your blog is actually stored in a Database, mostly MySql. It is very much possible to use a Database connectivity frontend, typically provided by your hosting service, but it requires somebody with technical talent to make that happen. Instead, why not try and use a tool from within your Wordpress to make this happen.
Well, there is a Wordpress Plugin that can make this happen, and it is called WP-DBManager 2.50 (available at this link)

Manages your Wordpress database. Allows you to optimize database, repair database, backup database, restore database, delete backup database , drop/empty tables and run selected queries. Supports automatic scheduling of backing up and optimizing of database.

Go, ahead, and take control of the DB. Remember, for a Wordpress site, the Database communication can make or break a site in terms of performance, so you should understand more about how your Database connectivity works.

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Wordpress Plugins: Use a plugin to update your plugins

If you have a blog on Wordpress (or multiple such blogs), there are a lot of extensions you can make for your blog. You get a cool theme, and then start looking for plugins that give your blog additional features, whether these be administration, or allowing users to tag or search, or the plugin shows other related posts and comments. Okay, so your plugin is now in place, and your blog is ready. What happens a couple of months down the line, when the plugins you use may have some updates, such as having some bug fixes, or some new features, or the plugin has been updated to work with a newer version of Wordpress. How long will you keep on trying to track down updates, and manually updating these plugins ? This can be pretty painful, and take a lot of effort.
So, there should be some way to automate the process, or at least make it simpler, and there is an answer - Single Click Plugin Updater WordPress Plugin (site).

This plugin extends the plugin update notification feature introduced in WordPress 2.3 by adding an “update automatically” link to update notifications. When you click the link, the new version of the corresponding plugin is downloaded and installed automatically. It also lets you know which plugins have update notifications enabled.

There are a lot of comments in the page, so if you have a problem, it should be easy to find the solution.

In addition, you can read more at this page on wordpress.org (link)

Single-click plugin upgrades in WP 2.3 and up. The techniques that this plugin uses are slightly different from the built-in plugin upgrade feature in WP 2.5, so it's possible that on some blogs the plugin updater works and the built-in updater doesn't (or vice versa).
Quickly determine if there are any pending updates and how many plugins are active. This plugin displays that information right below the "Plugin Management" headline.

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Make money from Blogs - Relating your Flickr photos to your Wordpress blog

There are many different ways you have to express yourself, such as doing so through social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, through photo sharing sites such as Picasaweb, Flickr, Photos on Facebook, personal blogs, and so on; similarly you can share on blogging sites such as Wordpress, Blogger, and so on. Unfortunately, many of these sites are not linked, and you would be finding yourself duplicating some of your work. Consider the example of a great photo that you want to put on Flickr, and also share on your blogs at Wordpress or Blogger. So, what do you do ? Well, the hardest way is to upload these to all the services individually, while manually tracking the status of which photo has been updated to which site. The smarter way is to figure out how to upload at one place, and use elsewhere in a smart way with minimum effort. Google already does that at Picasaweb since it owns both Blogger and Picasaweb; so a photo updated to Blogger actually is stored at an album in Picasaweb.
If you are a great user of Flickr and Wordpress, then there is a solution available to you as well. This is in the form of leveraging the Flickr API to make this connection, and here is a Wordpress Plugin that allows you to do that (link to plugin page - called Flickr Photo Album for WordPress). Read more on the site:

This Flickr plugin for WordPress will allow you to pull in your Flickr photosets and display them as albums on your WordPress site. There is a pretty simple template provided, but you can customize the templates 100% to match the look and feel of your own site. And if you want, you could also hook it up with Lightbox or any other number of display libraries.
On the backend, this plugin will also add a new Flickr icon to your WordPress edit screen which will allow you to easily insert your Flickr photos into your blog posts with just a couple clicks. You can either have your inserted photos link back to your WordPress Flickr photo album or directly to your Flickr.com photo page.

Installation instructions along with a detailed feature set are available on the page.

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Wordpress Hack Block: Login Lockdown

What does somebody do when they try to figure out your password for Wordpress account ? They try multiple attempts at your password, and Wordpress allows an atacker to make multiple attempts. Would it not help you if you could get a report whenever somebody makes multiple attempts to access your login account. Here is one Wordpress Plugin that helps you in this effort. The plugin is proactive in these security measures, since it directly blocks access from an IP range if there are a number of invalid login attempts from that range.
Page to read more and download (link here)

Login LockDown records the IP address and timestamp of every failed WordPress login attempt. If more than a certain number of attempts are detected within a short period of time from the same IP range, then the login function is disabled for all requests from that range. This helps to prevent brute force password discovery. Currently the plugin defaults to a 1 hour lock out of an IP block after 3 failed login attempts within 5 minutes. This can be modified via the Options panel. Administrators can release locked out IP ranges manually from the panel.

Weird News: Getting a gun free with your vehicle

This can only happen in the United States, where the Constitution (reinforced by various Supreme Court judgments) has made it possible for almost anybody to buy almost any type of weapon, except for a few class of heavy weapons. You could go to a gun show and buy a machine gun without any problem, or go to a regular shop, and after a cooling off period of 7 days, buy guns to your heart's desire. However, this post is not a direct commentary on the Second Amendment, more about the connection between people who buy trucks and who also buy guns (link to article):

Buy a truck and get a free AK-47 gun. That's the deal a Missouri truck dealer is offering new customers who buy a pick-up truck in August. Mark Muller, owner of Max Motors in Butler, says he knows people will be bothered by the promotion.
But not to worry, Muller is not handing out free guns. Instead, he will give buyers a voucher to use at a gun store after they obtain a license to carry a concealed weapon.

Wonder how many people are bothered by the fact that owning a gun is now made an incentive; you buy a vehicle and you get a free assault rifle; and keep in mind that an AK-47 is not a hunting assault rifle, it is a short distance multiple rounds per minute gun that is not accurate over the distances required for hunting.

Spreadtweet - A twitter tool

Twitter is becoming more popular, with a lot more people adapting to it. However, as something becomes more popular, using it in office environments becomes more difficult because of the thought of being seen using something that is non-official. And hence the concept of a tool such as Spreadtweet- which is a Twitter tool disguised as a spreadsheet.
Welcome to Spreadtweet.
It's Twitter, disguised as a spreadsheet.
Choose between Office OSX, Office 2003 (Windows), and Office 2007 (Windows).
Get it at this link.

Rapid Environment Editor

Rapid Environment Editor (RapidEE) is an environment variables editor. It includes easy to use GUI and replaces small and inconvenient Windows edit box. RapidEE 3.x supports Windows NT, 2000, XP & Vista. If you still use Windows 9x or ME, then use 2.x branch.

Editable tree
Show environment variables and values as an editable tree. Click the thumbnail to view the full size image

Multilanguage interface
RapidEE is translated into number of languages (English, Russian, Japanese, French, Polish, German, Italian, Latvian, Slovak, Greek, Spanish, Chinese), and the language can be changed on the fly.

Variable inspector
Inspector shows miscellaneous information about variables: name, type, value, short file name in the 8.3 naming convention for each long file name and vice versa.

More details and download at this link.