just an asterisk

I know that no one really needs yet another piece of software, but I figured that this might be something fun to share with friends and to get the word out about Just An Asterisk.  I’ve created a little launcher to automate some commands for PC users.  It’s nothing fancy, but it does do a few of the tasks that I find most universal among computer users these days. Read more »

I don’t know about you, but normally when I get these spam emails, I read the first couple lines, chuckle about the possibility that this could fool anyone and then mark it as spam.  However, this one was so perfect in its pandering to every possible piece of human nature that I figured I’d post it on the blog.   I’m sure that some doctoral student is working on it now, but someone should explore the evolution of spam culture for the western world.  I have to think that this is the product of a long line of bad attempts and that the author has learned a thing or two about the average English speaker…

Obviously, I’m saying DON’T send money to people like this.  We can break down the letter, but these people are not nice.  They steal… Now on to the ridicule :)

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You’ve decided that your 15 pound laptop from 1999 is finally ready for the rubbish heap, but what kind of machine do you need?  What is your ideal computer?  Obviously, I can’t tell you that… It’s not that I  don’t want to, but your laptop choice is a very personal decision.  You are going to be spending a great deal of time together and frankly, the relationship can’t be one way: you are going to have to want to invest time in your laptop for your laptop to perform for you.  That said, the decision process doesn’t have to be difficult.  It can even be fun!

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Your children should learn to program.   Disagree?  Let me try an persuade you…  What follows is my take on the history of computers and where we are headed.  Obviously, it’s a mixture of my opinions and generally known facts.  However, please feel free to boooo in the comments :)

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Personally, I alternate between two states for my desktop background: 

Sometimes I keep only a solid color background – especially when I’m worried about my machine going slowly (this is, as I suspected and my research on the subject confirmed, completely a myth.  Your background doesn’t slow down your machine directly… It may however, make it harder to switch to the desktop, as your wallpaper may take a few extra seconds to load.) 

However, most of the time, I believe a good wallpaper to be the foundation of my productive workspace.  Changing my wallpaper frequently provides variation, inspiration and motivation (please don’t ruin this for me if it’s all in my head :) ).

However, finding safe wallpapers for download can be a bit tricky.  Many sites claim to provide free backgrounds but instead put all sorts of junk (some of which is very malicious) on your machine.  I prefer to avoid these, instead opting for sites like InterfaceLift.

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On Just an Asterisk, I try not to copy other site’s posts.  Normally, there is enough fun out there to write about and it simply doesn’t need to happen.  However, while reading a lifehacker this past week (a highly recommended site by the way), I noticed this article and had such a good time playing with it that I wanted to share.

TiltShift lets you fiddle with your images to make them look like models.  I decided to play with an photo that I shot in London a few weeks ago.

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It’s not exactly tech-related, but it is a website so we’ll just post this under Random… GoodGuide is a site that reviews the data on popular products that we use everyday.  I can’t vouch for the source of the data – it looks respectable, but it’s difficult to tell exactly who did the work.  The site explanation can be found here.  That said, I had a bit of a chill when I found out that my favorite facial moisturizer (laugh all you want…) has a rating of “Terrible”.

Looking further into the issue, it seems that my product has several data “gaps”.  When you click on the product rating, you’re taken to another site called SkinDeep, which focuses only on the data for cosmetics.  Here is a snippet of what I learned.

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~ab

Now for the second part on shortcuts…  The last post was about shortcuts that lead you somewhere, but this one is going to be about the kind of shortcuts that save you time, also known as Keyboard Shortcuts.

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