The New York Times drops its paid online subscription service Times Select. Unlimited access to its archive will be free to everyone starting tomorrow, featuring articles from 1987 till the present as well as articles from 1851-1922. More »
Webapp TwitterNotes separates notes to yourself from all the other chatter on Twitter. Simply log on to Twitter and type a note to yourself prefixed by the + sign, and check TwitterNotes to retrieve it later. Organise your TwitterNotes with tags by surrounding tag words in the tweet with asterisks, or listing tags at the end of the tweet. For people who love and live on Twitter, this a great way to separate notes to self from other status messages and conversation. If you’re looking for a scheduled solution or a way to get consistent reminders, you can try the Twitter timer or Remember the Milk. Otherwise, TwitterNotes should do wonders for those who might be, ahem, tweeting during class or a business meeting.
TwitterNotesI’ll be a guest on Melbourne community radio station RRR’s computer show Byte into It tomorrow night – Wednesday, 19 September. Hosted by Phil Wales, Byte into It is broadcast on Wednesday nights from 7pm to 8pm.
If you’re not in Melbourne, fear not. You can listen to RRR streaming online, or download the Byte into It podcast. More information here. More »
Fresh out of the oven, web-based travel organiser TripIt takes all the work out of storing your travel plans in one place. Instead of making you enter all the details like places and times by hand, just forward reservation confirmation emails to TripIt so it can do all that heavy lifting for you. Register for a free account at TripIt and start forwarding travel plan confirmation email messages from “virtually any” online travel site to plans@tripit.com, and the web service will parse out dates, times and locations and generate your itinerary with lots of additional information, like a calendar, photos, weather, maps, online check-in links and even collaboration with fellow travelers. Check out a sample TripIt itinerary that came together by fwd’ing a few emails from online bookings. Now, this is a travel organiser I might actually use (versus just saving all my trip-related messages in my email software.)
TripItGoogle finally rounds out their web-based office suite with the addition of a Presentations to Google Docs. Create a whole new slideshow in Presentations or upload an existing PowerPoint file to get started. Kick your web-based presentation into slideshow view mode and invite others to see it real time as you move through slides—with chat built right into the sidebar. Make the slideshow public or invite specific collaborators to edit and/or view. Check out my test Life Hacks 101 presentation, an existing .PPT file imported into Google Docs, which I used at a talk this summer. While I wouldn’t use a browser-based slideshow to give a real-time, in-person presentation, for collaborating on a set of slides remotely, this looks ace. Of course, web-based presentation-makers aren’t new; Zoho Show and Preezo have been around for some time now.
Google Docs (now with Presentations)Google’s launched the latest in its online office application arsenal – presentations. Posting on the official Google Blog, software engineer Attila Bodis said:
“Starting today, presentations — whether imported from existing files or created using the new slide editor — are listed alongside documents and spreadsheets in the Google Docs document list. They can be edited, shared, and published using the familiar Google Docs interface, with several collaborators working on a slide deck simultaneously, in real time. When it’s time to present, participants can simply click a link to follow along as the presenter takes the audience through the slideshow. Participants are connected through Google Talk and can chat about the presentation as they’re watching.”
They’ve also parked some screenshots on a Picasa gallery here. More »
Two years after imposing a $US50 subscription fee for people to view its archives and columnists’ writing online, the New York Times has decided to reverse the decision and open up all areas of its website for free browsing.
It seems to be a global trend in the online world, but I thought this was particularly cool – in addition to opening up its website, the Times will also make its archives from 1987 to the present freely available, as well as those from 1851 to 1922, which are in the public domain.
ExtremeTech has previewed KDE 4, which is slated for release in December. This overview looks at KDE 4′s range of freely available applications which take advantage of its new development framework, as well as the latest version of the Qt GUI toolkit. Their conclusion?
“A major new version with as much of a claim to the term “revolutionary” as Vista could ever boast, ports of its most exciting applications to Windows and Mac OS X, and financial backing from the biggest names in the industry ought to be enough to propel its software onto your computer for at least a test drive.”
Photoshop tutorial blog PSDtuts has come up with an absolute stunner with this Philip Pullman* inspired tutorial.
Creating a stunning, old-world look in Photoshop
* The His Dark Materials trilogy of books by Philip Pullman. The series starts with The Golden Compass (formerly titled Northern Lights). Fantastic, intelligent ‘young adult’ fantasy series. Soo much better than Harry Potter et al… worth checking out. :) More »
