Cutting The Cable Cord

Internet, Money, Netflix, Roku, Technology, Television

With the economy the way it is, everyone is looking for ways to save money. For awhile now, I’ve thought about how much our cable TV costs us per month and whether/how we would do without it. We currently have Time Warner Cable’s All-In-One package (Internet, Phone and Cable) with two boxes. One is a DVR and one is a plain cable box. The phone line and Internet we would need to keep. (Ok, technically we could cut our land line and go cell phone only, but that’s a thought experiment for another day.) Switching to Time Warner’s “Surf & Talk” plan would save us about $65 per month.

Of course, our cable TV doesn’t go unwatched every day. NHL and JSL watch it. B watches it. I watch it. So we can’t just rip out the cable line and pocket the monthly savings. Some kind of entertainment is going to need to replace the cable TV loss at or below the cost of cable TV. In doing research on this, here are some of the options I’ve come up with:

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Freeware Review: Quoth the Raven, Blog It More!

Blogging, Freeware, Review

I’ll admit that, as much as I love blogging, part of me hated writing blog posts. It was filled with annoyances. First I had to go into WordPress’ admin panel. For some reason, I’d always wind up logged out, so I’d have to load up PasswordSafe to retrieve my password and log in. Once in, I’d have to navigate to the New Post page. When I was there, I’d need to type in my post, remembering to hit Save every so often lest my browser crash and I lose it all. (Somehow, auto-save never works when you need it to.) When I wanted to put images in my post, I had to upload them then add them to my blog using a variety of tactics.

All of these little annoyances meant that it was hard to write a blog post. At least harder than it should have been. All I wanted was a local version of WordPress’ admin panel (so I wouldn’t need to log in) with more of an application’s feel to it. After some Google searching, I found Zoundry Raven. Zoundry Raven gives you a local copy of your blog to work on. It uploads changes (posts, photos, etc) via XML-RPC. What this means is that you load up Raven, select a blog post (or create a new one), add images via dragging and dropping and then hit Publish to send it all to your blog. No messing around with a separate FTP tool. No stopping writing to upload some files.

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One Year Blog-o-versary coming up. What to do?

Blogging, TechyDad.com

In three weeks, I’ll celebrate one whole year of blogging at TechyDad.com. So much has happened since I first launched this blog. I attended my best friend’s wedding, JSL had two trips to the hospital, my grandmother passed away, JSL turned 2 (wow, I thought I blogged about that – guess I owe JSL a blog post), we went to Disney World, NHL turned 6, to name a few. I know that some people do special things for their blog-o-versaries, but I couldn’t decide what to do for mine. Anyone have any ideas?

Yes, I know that technically I pushed this post live on Thursday, but I’m still going to make this an Aloha Friday post. So my Aloha Friday question will be: What should I do for my 1 year Blog-o-versary?

Thank you Kailani at An Island Life for starting this. Please head over to her blog to say hi. Also, remember to sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

Freeware Review: Shape Collage

Freeware, Photos, Review

B likes putting photos together into collages for her blog. They help save space when she wants to display a series of related photos. However, her usual tools for making collages weren’t working out well so I went hunting for a new one. Something that can arrange a series of photos in a layout and allow her to decide how (or if) the photos are cropped. Unfortunately, I didn’t find such a tool. (If you know of one like this, tell me about it in the comments section below.)

What I did find was Shape Collage 2.5. Shape Collage will take a set of photos that you specify and toss them together into a shaped photo collage. It comes with 3 preset shapes: Rectangle, Heart, and Circle. You can also enter some text to use as the shape. The real strength of the program, however, is the “More” category. Here, you get to draw your own shape or load one from a file. The photos will take on the shape of whatever you draw.

The first use I thought of for it was making a poster of our nearly 3,000 Disney World photos. I loaded the directory with the photos and decided on a shape. After a quick experiment drawing a “Mickey Ears” shape (turned out well enough, but my drawing skills are lacking), I decided to take it to the next level. First, I found a PNG image of Mickey online. (Shape collage uses PNG and I figured this would be the best format to modify into a shape.)

Mickey_Mouse_web.png

I tossed this into a photo editor (Paint.NET), gave it a white background (instead of transparent) and turned Mickey completely black so that the image turned into this shape:

Mickey_Mouse.png

I loaded this shape into Shape Collage, changed a few settings around (e.g. I told it to only use 1,000 photos) and clicked Preview. After a short processing screen, I was treated to a sequence of photos appearing and rearranging. They quickly formed the Mickey Mouse shape. Once this was done, I clicked Create and got my image:

Mickey Mouse Photo Collage 1000_web.jpg

Trust me, the original photo is huge. Almost 100 megapixels huge! That would be big enough to make into a poster (which isn’t a bad idea for displaying your vacation photos). Here’s a crop from the original:

Mickey Mouse Photo Collage 1000_Crop.jpg

The only caveat is that it puts a “ShapeCollage.com” watermark on the resulting image. You can pay $25 for the Pro version which doesn’t add watermarks and adds a few other features like exporting the image into Photoshop/GIMP formats (complete with each photo on its own layer).

Even if you stick with the freeware version, I’d highly recommend this piece of software. I know I’ll be having fun putting together some shaped photo collages in the near future!

NHL the Astrologer

Humor, NHL, Science

A few weeks ago, we looked through a local community college’s summer camp brochure trying to figure out which sessions to sign NHL up for. We definitely wanted a dinosaur one since NHL loves dinosaurs. (Even moreso after we saw Walking With Dinosaurs.) For the other session, this listing caught my eye (click to enlarge):

Did you notice something wrong with that listing? That’s right, they’re calling the study of the planets, space and stars “Astrology.” I wanted to make sure that they wouldn’t be teaching my son about birth signs and how the alignment of the planets determines our destiny so we called to confirm. Yes, they meant “Astronomy”, not “Astrology.” While I found this mess-up a little funny, it was also a little scary to imagine that someone in the community college didn’t know the difference between the two. I’d recommend whoever messed this up head on over to the Bad Astronomy blog, run by the wonderful Phil Plait, and find out just why Astrology is wrong.

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