Portable Applications

Portable applications are little programs that you can run directly from your flash drive without actually installing them onto a computer. They are a great addition to the files you carry around on your flash drive as you go from home to work, internet cafes, computer labs, business centers, etc. The great thing about having your own portable apps is that you can see and use your files your way, without having to worry if the host computer has the program you want or the setting you prefer. Here's a short list of the apps I've recently tried and like:

• Portable Firefox - This is a stripped-down version of the browser that lets you carry your bookmarks and passwords with you without worry about leaving a trail of your info behind on a host computer. The cache and history are set at 0 so that you don't write a lot of web pages to your flash drive.
• Portable Sunbird - Mozilla's little calendar application. This is a stand-alone version; there's also a version that installs inside Firefox.
• Coolplayer - A very small mp3 player. The default skin is really ugly, but there are other skins you can download.
  
• Xnview - Lets you view, convert and do some editing of graphics files. It supports many, many graphic file formats.
• PStart - A launcher program that doesn't have to be installed on your hard drive (follow the directions for portable installation). Allows you to set up a handy launcher panel for all your portable apps and favorite files.
  

Photo shoot

Factory Wall
Originally uploaded by trailerfullofpix.

I'm taking a four-week digital photo class with a pal. The best thing about it so far is that it's given me the kick in the butt that I needed to take my camera off AUTO and play around with the manual settings. On Saturday, JJ and I went out to take pictures for our first assignment in which we were supposed to choose a composition and photograph it at three different f-stops to show how the depth of field increases as you stop down the lens. But the experiment was a big bust. I'm not exactly sure what we did wrong, but all of our pictures in the sets of three looked essentially the same, so we'll need to go out and do the assignment over again. In the meantime, I took this shot of the brick wall of a factory in Easthampton.

Knitting Project #3

This really didn't start out to be a knitting blog, but here I am posting another one of my projects. I just finished knitting this sweater for a pal's baby's first birthday. This morning I sewed the buttons on, picked as much of the cat fur off it as possible, put it in a gift box and was about to wrap it when I remembered -- just in the nick of time -- to take a picture for the blog. It was a really fun sweater to knit. It's done by knitting back and forth on circular needles, starting from the collar and working down. At the bottom of the yoke, you put the first sleeve onto double-point needles and knit down to the cuff. Then you knit across the back and do the second sleeve on dps. When the sleeves are done, you knit the rest of the body, so it's all in one piece when you're finished. Brilliant. I want one in my size!

The Internet Wayback Machine

Remember Mr. Peabody, his Wayback Machine and his boy Sherman on The Bullwinkle Show? Mr. Peabody invented a time machine, and he and Sherman would travel backwards for historical adventures. Now the web has The Internet Wayback Machine. This is the front-end to an archives of zillions of pages that are no longer shown on the web. I did a search for my old site that used to be on the Hampshire College server (Hampshire deleted my webspace when I stopped working there). The old site is in the archives! Not all of the pictures are there, but the text is, so the story of my roadtrip to see the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota lives on. One photo that wouldn't load is the one of the larger-than-life chicken somewhere west of Minneapolis -- that's the photo I use in my profile on my Frappr map, which at the moment looks like I have no pals so you all should add yourselves pronto.

A possible downside to the Wayback Machine for all you LiveJournalers -- that trashy stuff you post may live forever in Cyberspace.

Photos

I only had a little bit of time this weekend to play around with the camera, in between two loads of laundry and meeting pals to see Match Point (which was great, BTW). I'm using Picasa to organize and edit photos (I'm not really thrilled with the software that comes with the Canon camera). On this photo, I tried experimenting with the color saturation and a couple other effects. I've started a photo page on Flickr called A Trailer Full of Pix and have put a few things up this week. I'm just trying Flickr out for a while, so I've got a free account with limited space, i.e. there's a 20MB monthly allotment of bandwidth and I've already used 55% of it this month. So, I'll probably wait till the end of February to decide if I have any more pix that are Flickr-worthy.