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  • Tom Goskar 2:55 pm on 22 April, 2009 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , archaeopix, , photographs,   

    Archaeopix: a Creative Commons archaeology photo search tool 

    Alun Salt and I have been working on a new website to help simplify the process of finding archaeology and heritage-related photos that have a Creative Commons license attached to them.

    Without further ado, introducing… Archaeopix!

    Archaeopix homepage

    The homepage features a photo of the day, which we hope to update daily. Clicking “Search” on the navigation bar takes you to the tool where you can look for CC licensed images which have been posted to a hand-picked series of groups and accounts on Flickr:

    Archaeopix search results

    This is what Alun has to say about the search tool:

    The clever bit is the search page.

    Searching Flickr can be hit ‘n’ miss. Generally if you want to use a photo for a blog or educational handout and you need it quickly, it needs to be licensed under a creative commons licence. You can search on Flickr for cc-licensed photos, but a search for “Rome” will bring up everything with Rome in it. Groups are handy because they’re themed. So you could search the Archaeology group for Rome. The problem then is that you’ll find a lot of ©opyright photos. You really need a group which is all cc-licensed. Chiron is a good example of that. However Chiron’s strength is that it focuses on the classical world, which means you won’t find prehistoric Europe in it, or anything Mayan. This is where Archaeopix search comes in.

    Head over to Alun’s Archaeoastronomy blog to read more about Archaeopix.

    Link: Archaeopix

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  • Tom Goskar 3:59 pm on 9 January, 2006 Permalink | Reply  

    Sandvox: Easy website creation for the Mac 

    Karelia have just released their first public beta of the long-awaited Sandvox website creation software, ahead of recent rumours that Apple releasing similar software entitled “iWeb” tomorrow, which could (well, will) threaten their new venture. For their sake, I hope the rumours are untrue. Karelia have been shot down once before when Apple, who developed a clone of their popular “Watson” internet search software, by developing their own, entitled “Sherlock“, and gave it away for free. The full story is available on their blog.

    To return to the release of Sandvox, I have had a brief play with it, and if you’re a Mac user and run a small website you must give it a go. This is the closest piece of web design software to WYSIWYG nirvana that I have seen. It uses Apple’s editable WebKit, and CoreImage, to great effect – no ‘blind’ preview pages with cumbersome preview stages, but pure in-place editing. The supplied templates contain some elegant designs as well as some awful ones – but that’s just down to personal taste.

    Sandvox Screenshot

    Bear in mind that this is a beta, and there are no instructions bar a basic introduction, but do go ahead and download it. Give them your support!

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  • Tom Goskar 11:49 am on 3 November, 2005 Permalink | Reply  

    Apple Mac Wikis 

    Apple-Logo-2A number of Apple Mac wikis appear to be cropping up. The first one that I came across is Wikitosh which hopes to be a repository for everything you ever wanted to know about the Apple Mac platform, from todays Macs and OSX, back to information about machines from days gone by (computer archaeology?!).

    Wikitosh has information of varying quality. One fantastic example is the section on Apple’s industrial design – “Jonathan Ive RULES at industrial Design!!” – is the sole entry. For some reason they have some odd conventions. Software is named SoftWare. Hardware is HardWare. I don’t like that one bit. Wikitosh has a long way to go before it becomes a mature source of information – and that, of course, is up to (literate) people contributing to and self-moderating it.

    The second Mac Wiki is Mac Guides, which was recently set up by Mac Rumors, the popular Mac news and rumours website. Rather than being over-ambitious, Mac Guides aims to “provide an organized outlet for the vast amounts of knowledge that are provided in the forums“. That means tutorials, solutions to common problems etc. This could help with the problem of repetition, and useful information becoming buried in their burgeoning (but extremely useful) forums.

    Keep your eyes on both – and remember to contribute something useful to help build a resource which benfits all Mac users.

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  • Tom Goskar 4:31 pm on 1 November, 2005 Permalink | Reply  

    Apple updates OSX to 10.4.3 


    Apple-Logo-2
    For those lucky Mac users across the globe – 10.4.3 should appear in your software update list as of today (well, depending which side of the International Date Line you are).

    I installed it on my PowerBook this afternoon, and all was fine, except once major issue. The update had deleted my monitor calibration files. I was stuck with the message “The factory profile for the display could not be found” when I tried to recalibrate, and everything was horribly bright, washed out, with a purple cast.

    I restarted (cue sharp intake of breath) twice, and it seemed to then magically reincarnate my monitor profiles, and all is well again.

    So – moral of the day for people experiencing odd behaviour on their Macs after installing the OSX 10.4.3 update – restart. If that doesn’t work, restart again…

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  • Tom Goskar 9:05 pm on 19 October, 2005 Permalink | Reply  

    Rapidweaver 3.2 beta 

    I recently bought a copy of RapidWeaver by Realmac Software to use for a number of mini websites which will be delivered on CD.

    I first looked at it some time ago (I think it was at version 2.x) and was deeply unimpressed – it lacked style, usability, and was too limiting for websites beyond a basic “Hello World” personal website. Version 3.1 arrived, and, well, what a change. RapidWeaver, once you get used to the semi-WYSIWYG editor (you can’t see any of your site navigation or design in the editor, only basic text styling), and discover the page inspector, you’ve actually got a lovely website creation tool.

    RapidWeaver really isn’t software you would use to design a site from scratch, with your own design, but if you would like to make an elegant site based on well designed templates, then RapidWeaver is a good choice. It’s worth noting that you are able to customise the supplied themes if you have the know-how (which is fortunate for me, as I do – if you don’t you’ll have to use the templates as-is).
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  • Tom Goskar 10:17 am on 15 July, 2005 Permalink | Reply  

    Ecto: The Review 

    Ecto Logo Ecto is a fully-featured desktop blogging application, that helps you get the most out of your blog. It allows you to manage your blog using a fully OSX integrated interface, compose posts offline, integration with iPhoto, manage your pings and trackbacks, and support for multiple blogs using multiple blogging engines. Its burgeoning list of features make this an essential tool for bloggers.

    In this mini-review I am using ecto 2.3.7 for OSX.
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    • Brian 5:52 am on 19 July, 2005 Permalink

      Thanks for that very thorough review. I have been using MarsEdit but just tried ecto today and agree with your assessment. One thing you didn’t mention was the iPhoto integration. It seems to just upload the image without an option to resize — is that right?

    • Tom 8:48 am on 19 July, 2005 Permalink

      Hi Brian,

      I mentioned iPhoto integration a few times in the review, and it works in exactly the same way as dragging an image in from the Desktop or Finder (with the exception of showing your iPhoto albums etc).

      I have just tested it, and it does offer all of the normal options to resize. When you import from iPhoto, it puts the image in as a thumbnail, as usual. Double-click the image, and from the image dialogue just check the “embedded” radio button, go to the conversion tab, and select the relevant options from there.

      It even gets the title from iPhoto, and puts that in the ‘alt’ tag.

      It’s a stunning bit of software, and I haven’t really touched on some of the advanced features. Download the demo and give it a go.

    • Paul 9:18 pm on 20 July, 2005 Permalink

      Tom,
      Have you come across anything similar for windows…? My Mac is less than portable! I too have been looking to find an easier way to blog when i’m pootling round the country but haven’t found anything of any real benefit.

      ttfn,
      p :-)

    • Tom 12:31 pm on 21 July, 2005 Permalink

      Have I come across anything for Windows? Yes.. Ecto for Windows :-)

      Go to http://ecto.kung-foo.tv/ and look it up. It doesn’t have all of the functionality of the OSX version, but I would imagine it would do the trick.

      You could also look up BlogJet (Win32 only), which is apparently a reasonable client.

      Cheers,

      Tom

    • Adriaan 2:50 am on 29 July, 2005 Permalink

      Wow, quite an extensive review and very flattering, thanks!

  • Tom Goskar 9:44 pm on 13 July, 2005 Permalink | Reply  

    Desktop Blogging Software: Ecto (again) 

    I first posted about Ecto back in May, and, after much playing with the demo for OSX, I have bitten the bullet and purchased a copy. The more I use Ecto, the more powerful I realise it is. I will post a full review here in the days to come, but I really couldn’t recommend it enough. Even the support forums for Ecto are checked regularly by the author.

    Check back soon for my review.

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  • Tom Goskar 11:50 am on 14 June, 2005 Permalink | Reply  

    Sandvox 

    Karelia Software are soon to be releasing a novel new app for designing websites, that levers the best of Tiger’s new technologies such as CoreImage and the newly open-sourced WebKit. It is slated for release during Q3 2005, and will feature drag and drop assembly from other applications, easy publishing, RSS generation and an extensible plugin architecture.

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  • Tom Goskar 7:10 am on 8 June, 2005 Permalink | Reply  

    Apple and Intel 

    Intel-Apple-2Apple announced at the WWDC conference on Monday 6 June that it would be using Intel CPUs in forthcoming Macintosh computers from 2006. How might this affect the future of the Mac and OSX?

    At about 6.30pm GMT, Steve Jobs announced on stage at WWDC that the rumours were true. Apple were moving the Mac platform to Intel CPUs, beginning now. A brave move.

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  • Tom Goskar 1:29 pm on 2 June, 2005 Permalink | Reply  

    RapidMetaBlog 

    A nice chap called Nigel Kersten has written a nifty little widget for Apple OSX Tiger’s Dashboard called RapidMetaBlog. It’s nicely designed, in terms of look and functionality. Panes slide out from the compact widget, allowing plenty of space to write your post (I’m writing this in it), and another pane slides out from the post to show a preview.

    RapidMetaBlog supports categories, essential functionality if you like to keep a tight structure on your blog. When writing your post, you have to use HTML, but for simple jottings, it’s very handy indeed. All you need is paragraph tags (remember to close them!), and perhaps an href here and there. You can’t insert images at this time (unless they’re already online, and you know the URI), but then this is supposed to be a widget, not a full-featured weblog editor like Ecto or MarsEdit.

    I’ll post some screenshots later.

    You can download RapidMetaBlog from Nigel’s blog or from Dashboard Widgets.

    (More …)

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