Monday, October 22, 2007

Extend OpenOffice with OxygenOffice

11:45PM Kevin Purdy | Windows/Mac/Linux: Add clip art, advanced PDF functions, and in-editor Wikipedia searching to open source office suite OpenOffice.org with OxygenOffice Professional, a modified installation package and extension. Along with adding roughly 3,400 clip art files and templates, OxygenOffice’s extensions also add support for Microsoft’s Visual Basic for Applications in the Calc spreadsheet program and conversion tools for the Office Open XML format used in Office 2007. Combined with the Writer’s Tools package, this gives OO.org a number of exclusive features. More »

Blog Offline with Google Gears at Blog.gears

11:14PM Kevin Purdy | Inspiration for great blog posts can be fleeting, but a lack of internet access can leave ideas in the dust. Webapp Blog.gears uses Google Gears to synchronise with a Blogger account to bridge that gap. Blog.gears allows Blogger authors to create new posts and edit older ones and synchronises the data upon connection. The offline editor doesn’t offer any of the rich text features as the online site, but it could work great for ideas you don’t want to forget about later. Blog.gears requires a free Blogger account and Google Gears, and runs wherever Internet Explorer or Firefox do. Blog.gears [via Google Operating System] More »

Keep Mail.app at a Glance With Mail.appetizer

10:00PM Kevin Purdy | Mac OS X Only: Freeware Mail.app add-on Mail.appetizer lets you read and delete email on the fly without having to open Mail’s main window every time a message arrives. What makes Mail.appetizer stand out from other notifiers is the customisation—you tell it whether to show headers, icons, quoted reply text and determine its size. Mail.appetizer is freeware, available in a seemingly bug-free beta for OS X 10.4 Leopard and a stable version for 10.3 Tiger. Thanks, dcharti! Mail.appetizer [Bronson Beta] More »

Refrigerate Onions for Tear-Free Chopping

8:00PM Gina Trapani | You already know how to cut onions so they don’t make your eyes tear, and it turns out there’s something else you can do to avoid bawling while making dinner: refrigerate the onion for 30 minutes or chill it in ice water first. The latest issue of Popular Science (not online yet) explains that a volatile sulfur compound from the onion floats into your eyes to make them tear. [The chill] slows down the action of [the onion's] trigger enzyme and saps some energy from the vegetable’s volatile molecules…. It reduces the tendency for the sulfur compound to volatize. Haven’t had a chance to test out this technique yet, but if you do, let us know how it goes in the comments. More »

Free downloadable box templates

10:08AM Sarah Stokely | Italian website Idee Montabili has a few box templates you can download, print and cut out to make your own boxes. Some of them look suitable for displaying items in a retail setting, but a couple of them are for.gift boxes. I’d print out the template, then trace the template onto some fancy coloured cardboard to make a gift box. With Christmas coming up this could be a fun DIY project for yourself or even the kids. Idee Montabili [via Make]   More »

A simple translation tool for your website

9:43AM Sarah Stokely | Here’s a tip from the Plasticmind blog which takes the fun of online translation tools (hello Babelfish!) and lets you put a tool on your website to let readers translate it into their native language. The tool uses Google Translate, and the author does warn that it is a ‘quick and dirty’ translation only. He also points out that it doesn’t play well with flash, or some positioned elements – so proceed with caution. A Simple Translation Tool For Your Site [Plasticmind]   More »

Put your iTunes Library on a diet

9:04AM Sarah Stokely | In the old days, a music collection was a pile of records or CDs (or tapes, or 8 tracks, depending on how far you want to go back!). I look back to those old days with some envy when I think about the the four different computers my household’s music is spread across. Consolidating all the digital music into one shared drive is going to take a while – and that’s not even taking into account all the CDs which should be ripped to really make it One Music Collection to Rule Them All. So, the 43 Folders blog post on putting your iTunes library on a diet really appealed to me. It’s pretty simple – weed out the stuff you don’t listen to anymore, and delete. Especially if, like me, Destiny’s Child tops your “25 most played” list. :) Or, if you can’t bear to do that: “… you may not have the guts to delete this stuff completely, but do yourself a favor and move the files to an external disk. Then put it away, mark down the date, and if a year later you haven’t touched it, delete that thing and use it for porn again like it was meant to be.” Put your iTunes Library on a diet More »

Conduct a time audit of your week

8:20AM Sarah Stokely | I mentioned on Friday that I’d be conducting a time audit of my working week this week. If anyone else is interested in trying it too, grab your favourite digital or paper-based tracker and let’s roll. :) Last night I looked at a few different apps for timetracking and decided to keep it ultra simple – I’m using the previously mentioned Activity Tracker gadget for the iGoogle homepage. Why? Because it was super easy to create a list of my regular tasks, I just need to hit a button to clock in and out on each task, and I’ll be able to view the data in several ways (a log, a graph). If you decide to take up the challenge and audit your time this week, let me know in comments and we can compare notes at the end of the week. Good luck! More »