KinKey is a tiny app that makes it easy to type with a US keyboard the special characters of
-Spanish
-French
-German
-Portuguese
-Italian
-Catalan.
It works in Windows XP/2000/Vista.
KinKey is now running in the background (and will run itself at every startup unless you uninstall it). At any2 text-editing place you want, you can now, say, press E and ^at the same time(in the same way you press Ctrl and C to copy) to get French’s e circumflex, ê. The order doesn’t matter, you could just as easily have pressed ^ and E to get ê.
Here’s a list of the characters you can type with KinKey:
Example:
Pressing A and / results in á.
Pressing Shift (or with CapsLock on), A and / results in Á.
To uninstall KinKey, close first the program by right-clicking its traybar3 icon, , and selecting Exit. Now just delete KinKey.exe itself and Kinkey’s gone. Similarly, if you want to move KinKey.exe close first the program.
Para desinstalar KinKey, cierra primero el programa haciendo click con el botón derecho en su icono a la derecha de la barra de tareas (al lado del reloj) y seleccionando Exit. Ahora simplemente borra Kinkey.exe y Kinkey ha sido desinstalado. Similarmente, cuando quieras mover el archivo KinKey.exe cierra primero el programa.
Second LifeWP, a 3d online community, recently hosted a live concert by Suzanne VegaWP and of course someone had to make her and her guitar’s avatars. Robbie Dingo did. And he made a video of the making (of the guitar avatar). Breathtaking. Go straight to the Quickitime video or see it embedded as a flash in Second Life’s website.
In the post-scarcity society of Cory Doctorow’s fun Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom (which you can read for free), money has been replaced by whuffieWP: a reputation-based currency, an ubiquitous measure of how much other people like you. Now, of course, PageRankWP comes immediately to mind, no? (And here’s a good post linking both.) But the main difference till now was that whuffie was instantly viewable by anyone (through brain implants!) and PageRank is just a behind-the-scenes measure (though of course tremendously important).
No more. I installed Firefox Extension Search Status in a flight of fancy but it has become second nature to me to look down and right at the status bar icon where PageRank (and AlexaWP Traffic) is displayed. We are social animals after all.
Remember those classic time-lapseWP videos of fluid cloudscapes and opening flowers? (Or, to be more uptodate, of girls taking a pic of themselves every three years?YT.) Well, this is something similar: Justin FrankelWP, ELZR, Winamp creator and one of this generation’s software virtuosos, spent the better part of a year creating an audio-editing program called Reaper, took pictures as the developement months went by and mashed them together into a webpage. Amazing. (via Justin’s blog: c[a,o]s[a,o][s] de justin)
..a class of software that is so rich in potentially useful features that even after years of use there is still more to be discovered.. And these aren’t useless features that bloat the product—rather the software is so mature and has been worked on by so many for so long that there is so much in it to explore.
To my constern, I could only venture Vim, Mathematica, and some tentative candidates to his growing list, so please pay his post a visit and contribute.
There was on the thread, though, one nomination to the title of deep software that I simply can’t skip, because I happen to agree that the nominee is one of the best pieces of software there has been (and its author build it when he was, get this, eighteen; see Rolling Stones article on him) and because the nomination itself is just damn good writing.
...over the past few months I’ve become convinced that there were only two really revolutionary pieces of non-game software released in the 1990s that completely dictated what followed in their fields. One was NCSA Mosaic, and it doesn’t really fit into your criteria. The other one almost certainly does, though you don’t realise it until you really start exploring. Also, it’s not “productivity” software in the same sense as the others, but I think it’s inspired just as much creation.
Okay, enough with the hyperbole. Have one guess, and then click here.
Time is turning yet again: a beloved CIMAT teacher just send me one more of his one-every-24-months email, my 2nd out-of-school anniversary is around the corner (September 14), and today I found, via Joel1, that Rails just celebrated its second anniversary itself (yup, we were born to the web around the same date).
Let’s share a brief moment of guilty pleasure for proving them wrong, then move on to the longer lasting pleasure of simply sticking to it for our own sake. And have understanding for those conditioned by past disappointments to classify all that is new and ripe with passion to be uninteresting, to be all hype, no calories.
We’re past the point of infatuation, this is love, and love is inclusive. Happy birthday Rails, happy birthday Railers.
In a surprising study, Jakob Nielsen found out most (85%) of the learning gleaned from usability tests came from your first 5 user tests; 3 users tests will still give you a whopping 67% of the learning there is. He then goes on to advocate small and iterative testing over a single massive one (say, three tests with 3 users each and improvements in between instead of one lone test with 9):
You want to run multiple tests because the real goal of usability engineering is to improve the design and not just to document its weaknesses.
Combine that with Joshua Schachter’s, founder of Del.icio.us, idea of “Starbucks usability tests” (“offer someone coffee to sit down and play with your product.”) and you’ll know why I’ll be this Friday on Minerva’s Starbucks harassing three every pretty girl I can find with Domburi (TeenVogue recently had a feature on young fashionistas being excellent for usability tests, can’t find the link though).
This (anonymous) feedback on Imagery just came on Saturday.
If your searches could also generate the academic citations for the images, that would be ultracool for those of us out in education-land trying to teach kids that they do not “own ” the internet without at least giving credit. I know some blog tools do this (David Warlick’s blog does it).
A person who teaches teachers and sends them to cool places like this.
Some sort of auto-citation of images is a fantastic idea (as anyone who uses EverNote or Google Notebook will know firsthand) and my gratitude goes to whoever sent it to me, I’d never have thought of it myself. And yet, for a while I almost decided to willfully not implement it:
I strongly disagree with the way citations are usually handled within “education-land”: little more than curtsies one must mindlessly perform to pay respect to others’ property (and it is against such moralistic establishment that I am one of those kids who believes he owns the internet). Citation styles are taught and required simply as one more formal hoop for students to jump.
But citations can be much more than that! They allow readers to recover and rewalk the path the writer followed, and in that they perform an invaluable service to readers, but they can also be immensely profitable for writers too, starting with forcing them to walk paths in the first place (one is so loathe to do the slightest of researches when in the thrall (or duty) of writing, so very prone to simply rearrange one’s prejudices and call it even). Citations make for more rigorous reading and writing—that’s why we should encourage them (not simply because they make, arguably, good fences).
So yes, I thought I saw some of that ownership-based, rote teaching of citations (copyright-instruction) in that email—in a scared flash of exaggeration I glimpsed a DRM image-search engine—and my recoil reaction was so surprisingly strong I thought of deliberately not implementing any sort of auto-quotation. Lawrence Lessig has talked already on the power technology’s architecture has to regulate conduct and the weight of such responsibility was suddenly overwhelming.
Careful thought has shown me the error of my ways. My overreaction to such friendly (and helpful) feedback was not called for. An auto-citation feature in Domburi would be very helpful indeed and will be implemented. But it’ll be tinged with my prejudices and that means it will be open-ended.
I’m knee-deep in Jef Raskin’s The Humane InterfaceAM. You’ve got to love a book on interface design so fundamental and visionary that it dares to ponder such deep digressions as, say,
There is but one “I” in each us. But to say that there is one personhood per human being begs the question. That is, why are there not multiple personhoods per mind-body ensemble?
Studies of the brain performed with such techniques as magnetic-resonance imaging (MRI)WP and positron-emission tomography (PET)WP are helping researchers to elucidate the physical correlates of various mental activities. These technologies are mentioned because they may, at a future time, be directly helpful in the design—and, especially, in the testing—of interfaces. For example, there is an inverse correlation between a person’s localized glucose uptake—an indicator of how much energy the brain is using in a particular physical structure—and the ease with which that person uses a tested interface feature. Interface testing in the future may well make increasing use of direct measures of brain activity, but a further exploration of these methods lies outside the scope of this book.
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, and selecting Exit. Now just delete KinKey.exe itself and Kinkey’s gone. Similarly, if you want to move KinKey.exe close first the program.
I’m knee-deep in Jef Raskin’s The Humane Interface