stay-calm.com | Internet Home of David Bagshaw

Google Drive announced

24. April 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: News, Recommended, Tools

Google announced their cloud data storage tool, called Google Drive, today. One major feature for my clients is the fact that Google Docs will now be available off line, so that documents can be accessed from the more remote parts of Vancouver Island, for example. Another is that you can apply the same rights to view or change files that exists on Google Docs – so you can prevent one user from deleting files created by another, for example.

They are rolling it out over the next while, my own Google Drive is ‘Not Ready Yet’. I’ll keep you posted.

Text Editing

20. March 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Tools · Tags: notepad++, text, text editing, word

Towards the top of my list of essential tools for Windows is Notepad++, available at ninite.com. Today I had to use it to remove some carriage returns and line feeds from some text that someone had written in Word, before I could paste the text into a blog. I had to look up the process, and I stumbled on some other tips here (warning: animated gifs).

Time tracking tools

20. March 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Tools · Tags: business, online tools, timetracking

I made accounts at two time tracking sites recently, and looked into some locally installed alternatives as well. I have settled on toggl at this point, but not without hitting a snag or two. Having gotten use to Toggl now, I really like it. The free functionality is all I need at this time. If they ever got in to invoice generation, I could see paying for that.

I found ‘FreshBooks‘ via toggl, and then discovered that FreshBooks also has a timing feature, which may be all the timer I need. The freshBooks free account is limited to three customers, from what I can see. The cheapest paid account is $20/mo, which allows for 25 clients. I guess those are ‘at a time’ numbers…I may try it out.

Before today, I was using the Time Track extension for Chrome, which served me well. Toggl is more powerful, and has iOS support. It generates very presentable reports in pdf format, which can be presented to a client alongside an invoice.

Working with Inkscape

18. March 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Howto · Tags: howtos, inkscape, intros

I spent some time today going over some basics in Inkscape with Paul from Alexander Designs, a skilled carpenter with a good eye for composition and line. The essentials we covered were:

Opening a new file and setting the dimensions and units (when to use inches vs pixels).
Need to use .svg file format, and fact that different applications (e.g. Illustrator) may react differently to a given file.
Saving versions of a file when you are doing something which could go wrong.
Using one hand on the mouse, the other on the keyboard.
Zooming laterally and vertically.
Copying and pasting from one layer to another – use ‘CTRL+ALT+V’ to copy or cut and preserve position
Opening and working with the layer (CTRL+SHIFT+L) and fill (CTRL+SHIFT+F) dialogs.
Selecting and moving objects.
Putting objects on their own layer.
Putting a fill in an object.
Changing the width of the stroke.

That’s enough to fill even a large human brain. A next session might start with a discussion of paths, strokes and fills, and bezier curves.

I’m using Illustrator as well for one job in particular. A few of the keyboard shortcuts for Inkscape are shared with illustrator, including CTRL+SHIFT+G to ungroup a selected object.

Flickr still considered helpful.

16. March 2012 · Write a comment · Categories: Uncategorized

I’ve spent some time organizing my photos on flickr, after editing them in GIMP. The GIMP command under the ‘Colors > Auto > White Balance’ in the main window improves the picture more often than not. The rest of the settings under ‘Auto’ do not produce worthwhile results. I find dragging my pictures from a Windows Explorer window on to the GIMP window is a handy way to open them for editing.