And so it begins…

The official change from summer to fall is here and brings with it another birthday. Where has the time gone?!

May the coming New Year 5769 be one of health, happiness, peace and prosperity for everyone.

Photo released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0 License

PS And a warm and heartfelt thank you to the former Prime Minister of Israel for the early birthday present. Buh-bye!

Ready, Set, Knit! (…Maybe)

It’s true. This is a post about knitting. Don’t blink or it just might disappear.

Once upon a time, when I had oodles of free time, summer was my planning season for when the weather finally cooled down enough to permit knitting to commence. Unlike my former home in Minnesota, the coast of Israel is warm 10 months of the year and not having central A/C is the biggest deterrent to my knitting year-round.  The weather is changing, enough so to get me thinking about picking up my 3 projects languishing in the UFO cabinet. This year I won’t be dashed on the shores by the Siren Song of NaKniSweMo. Oh, no, no, no. I’ll be content to just finish the current lot of projects. (Though I am coming to the belated realization that the Kaffe Fassett “Kill’em Cushion Cover” may eternally be a UFO, as it requires some serious solitude and quiet to work on. I haven’t seen either of those in months/years.)

With one magazine subscription and few online knitting newsletters, I’ve tampered down the constant pull of new projects to a minimum, but the temptation to start new projects instead of turning UFOs into FOs is certainly there.  Who doesn’t love to start something fresh?!  One-Skein Wonders, which I received recently, could be my Achilles’s heel! (Woo hoo! Now I need to knit a camera cozy!)

Speaking of newsletters, does anyone else think the noise-to-signal ratio on KnittingDaily is nearing the breaking point? When they first started out, it was pretty low. Now I’m sorely tempted to unsubscribe from the newsletter to avoid getting the at least twice to three times a week ads in my mailbox. I think Knitty is much more in tune with its subscribers.

To my delight, I discovered today that Ravelry members blogging on WordPress.COM now have their own group. Rock on!

And to spammers targeting WordPress.COM’s “knit” tag, take note of this important announcement from the fellow who does the clean up http://mark.wordpress.com/2008/01/15/knitting-a-tip/ (Sorry for the lack of linkage.) If you are knitblogging here on WordPress.com and surf the WP.com tag surfer, I can hear you chuckling from here.

Sticky Posts-Another new feature to love on WordPress.com

And are we loving it, or what?!

If you blog on WordPress.com there are two more things that might interest you to know:

• WordPress.com bloggers can now post to their blog by email! According to this casual comment by Nick in the Support Forum, a new 3rd party service Posterous makes it possible. Haven’t tried it yet, so NAYY YMMV
• And, for those WordPress.COM musicians who lament that there’s no widget to play music in your sidebar that wouldn’t allow visiting listeners to download the music, it is possible to set up the free Box.net widget to disallow downloads of mp3 files. It’s in the folder set up on Box.net.

So much good news and it’s only Monday! (Knock wood! Tfu, TFu, TFU! Throwing salt over my shoulder!)

PhotoImpact, Anyone?

I know. I’m not keeping up with releasing new PI Goodies as often as I’d hoped when I started offering them again last year, but at the moment I’m suffering a severe bout of “vitas interruptus”. Until things return to a more normal schedule, I do want to share a few small things I’ve found on the Net for those visiting who are graphically inclined:

Return of a functioning Alphabet Synthesis Machine-Launch the Machine! Uses Java to create a PC True Type Font which, after you download and install on your computer, you can type a few characters onto a blank canvas in PI, run through PI’s Bend tool and create some amazing dings/ornaments/frames/masks/whatever catches your fancy. There’s also a large archive of “fonts” generated by users available for browsing and downloading.

Look in my PI File Sharing Widget in the sidebar and you’ll find both a preview of this month’s Goody and the download file (200809-JenT.zip). The download file contains 2 True Type Fonts I made with The Machine and a UOL file with 3 sample dings created with PI’s Bend Tool which you can import to your EZ Palette. As with all my PI Goodies, this one is released under a Creative Commons Attribution/Non-commercial/Share-Alike 3.0 License. If you are having any trouble or have a question about using this PI Goody, please feel free to use the contact form on my *About page. I’m always happy to help.

FontStruct: Using a Flash workspace, FontStruct lets you design your own font from scratch after you sign up with a user account. Am still experimenting with this one, so can’t really venture an opinion yet. Definitely broadband access only (it also seems to be processor heavy.)

Kuler: Yes, I know I’ve gone on about Kuler before. Even if it’s an Adobe application, it’s just too darn cool not to mention again. The other online color tool I love to use is ColorSchemer Online. I keep saying that if I were to buy one color sampling and generating app, this would be it.

Tiled Backgrounds Designer: Dings and ornaments in the service of a neat online app that generates repeating tiles. Here, too, you can control nearly every aspect of the elements that go into making the tile, from color to texture to pattern placement and angle. Again, there’s a large archive of existing tiles made by users that you can browse and download.

That’s this month’s Goodies. By next month I hope to be able to add a new character to my PhotoImpact Halloween Menagerie.  Stay tuned by subscribing to either my blog’s RSS feed or my Box.net RSS feed.