Month: September 2004

eMachineShop

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Hazard has sent me the link to eMachineShop.com. It is a website where you can order customized parts. You can design whatever form you need cut, drilled, and bent, from which materials, of what size, etc, and these guys will make it according to your design and they will ship it to you in exchange for some money.

Examples of things other people ordered include: keychain tags for club members, cover for ocean buoy, parts for model helicopters and rockets and battery holder.

This can come really useful when you need something that no shop sells and you lack the experience, materials, and/or tools to produce.

Kleptography

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I am pretty often enjoying sites of professional photographers. These guys seem to do everything right – their pictures are perfect, light loves them, compositions are original, dynamic and interesting, and they forget much more information about equipment that they use than I ever knew in the first place. But all these is pretty much expected from professional photographers…

Now, when I stumble across a website of “some guy” who just bought a more-or-less simple camera and started learning and producing excellent photographs, I get really really impressed. One of the examples of such guys is at Kleptography.com. Some really nice photographs there. And if that was not enough, the guy is sharing his experience, what he did, what he got, what he thought, and what he is doing now. Very interesting. But if you are interesting only in pictures, he’s got a whole bunch of them. And on different topics – nature, street photography, architecture, portraits, etc.

Dvorak keyboard layout

A lot of people out there have no idea that there are keyboard layouts other than QWERTY. And, maybe, the layout that is used on Nokia phones. (Of course, there are a lot of people out there who don’t know that keyboard layouts and mobile phones exist at all). QWERTY is the de-facto standard currently. Keyboards shipped with new computers are, by default, QWERTY keyboards. Most touchtypists are QWERTY touchtypists. And in some places you don’t even have a chance of finding any other keyboard layout in the computer shops.

Dvorak keyboard layout is something I was interested in for some time now. I haven’t tried it, but it does look yummy. I haven’t seeen any Dvorak keyboards around and I doubt I will do so in the near future. My job requires me to use a number of computers, which are used by other people too, so, I guess, I will either have to stay away from Dvorak, or find myself another job. ;)

But if it was just for one or two computers, I would really liked to try it out. If you had or have a chance to, then do so and share your experience…

Downtime

Today there was a somewhat long downtime (about 7 hours) due to a power failure in the region. Power was cut off for about 3 hours, but because it happened in the middle of the night and there is nothing much to do without light, TV or Internet at this time, I slept for another 4 hours. All the lights were out – UPS or no UPS. It is the first time that I remember that power was cut for such a long period of time without any warning from the authorities. Maybe there will be something in the news.