Category Archives: digiwild
Gadget lovers unite!
Win7, Bamboo Touch and Corel Painter Essentials 4, Oh My!
This past summer, I had a wonderful visit abroad with family and friends (more on that another time) and came home with a new-ish computer free-of-charge. My previous 6 year-old computer was running WinXP and my biggest hesitation to upgrading to Win7 was losing the ability to run my beloved and familiar PhotoImpact8. I’ve never upgraded to a newer version and when Corel bought PI in 2007, they discontinued it in favor of their own graphics programs. (Surprise! Not!!)
Which brings me to the reason for this post. My old Graphire tablet obviously (obviously!) wasn’t going to make the transition to the new computer thanks to hardware changes, so when the Friday paper came with an ad for the Wacom Bamboo Fun Pen & Touch with 3 free full-version graphics programs included, I dashed to the local computer shop with cash in hand. After spending a weekend installing and setting up the downloaded programs, it became apparent that Corel Painter Essentials 4 was the ugly duckling and refused to install and run correctly. Contacting the local Wacom distributor’s support was like putting my finger in a pencil sharpener and after 3 email exchanges with them (what can I say other than I’m stubborn and have a high tolerance for pain), it was clear I was on my own to solve this problem.
I finally found the answer to Painter Essentials 4 hangs on startup in Win7/64-bit in the reply given by Craig in a Windows7 Compatibility forum. Once I created the Color Profiles folder following Craig’s advice, the program successfully installed and I could update to v4.3, which is compatible with Win7. Putting this information out there will, hopefully, help other frustrated Corel customers.
So, what happened in the end with PI8, you might be asking? It’s here too, running in compatibility mode and (tfU! tFU! TFU!) so far, so good.
Made in PE4 and finessed in PI8
My Three WordPress.com Wishes: First Wish
Anyone who reads this blog on a regular basis knows that I 
WordPress.com. The wranglers, gardeners, engineers and poets do an amazing job of keeping our little home on the web the envy of the blogging neighborhood.
While surfing around the web a few months ago, I kept bumping into articles about apps or utilities that made me think how great it would be if WordPress.com supported them. So, here is the first of my three wishes for making my WordPress.com world rock a little harder.
More Mobile!
Dear @wordpressdotcom a mobile app for the rest of us who don't/won't have a smartphone. #1stof3wishes #11millionusers cc @snaptu @fring—
JenniferT (@wysiwygjt) July 02, 2010
Being resigned to the ranks of the un-cool using WordPress.com’s mobile site (m.wordpress.com), I found its bare bones functionality lacking a little something. Actually, lacking closer to everything.
With the estimated number of WordPress.com bloggers having reached 13 million+ (also according to one well-placed source) and WordPress.com celebrating the one millionth mobile user mark, one would hope there’d be some incentive to add an app to the growing arsenal of existing WordPress.com mobile apps for the rest of us without smartphones. Regular mobile phones still outnumber smartphones, especially outside the US. Sadly, however, nothing expected in the foreseeable future. (I know that it’s possible to post by email, but that’s just not the same thing.)
If there’s no incentive for WordPress.com to directly develop an app, then maybe Snaptu or Fring could pick up the challenge. With thirteen million blogs on WordPress.com alone, minus the combined WordPress.com and WordPress.org’s one million users using WordPress’ mobile apps, that’s a lot of potential users.
(The above tweet was brought to you by serendipity, as WordPress.com has just recently started using Twitter’s Blackberry Pie tweet embed. Thank you WordPress.com! #awesome #FTW)
There are, of course, two more posts coming with my additional wishes. Meantime, if you have your own wish that would make using WordPress.com more awesome for you, feel free to leave it in the comments. Better yet, why not start your own “Three Wishes” for WordPress.com. Who knows? Maybe between us, we’ll find that genie in a bottle.
Better shared!
The Whole World Audio Extravaganza
Even though I’ve lived in Israel since 1980, I’m still pretty much an Anglophone. Give me a book in Hebrew and maybe it will be finished sometime this year. Give me a book in English, most likely it will be done by the weekend.
The same thing happens to me when listening to audio. Having grown up in the American Midwest, where speech is slow and deliberate, speaking and listening to Hebrew is something of an uphill struggle in 1st gear. While still at uni back in the 70′s, my Hebrew professor warned us that Hebrew is spoken quickly, but in our classroom environment he never duplicated experiencing a conversation between native Hebrew speakers. Whenever I’m around native Hebrew speakers, I know they’re slowing down their conversation so the non-native speakers can keep up.
But I digress.
Somewhere around 2006 (which is, not coincidentally, when I bought my Rio Carbon 5G) I discovered BBC’s podcasts, which covered a huge breadth of topics, from history to comedy to interviews to documentaries, in addition to the World Service news programs. Granted in 2006 the weekly roundup of available programs for listening was only huge. Jump to 2009-2010 and “huge” has become “gargantuan”. The number of available podcasts, which range between 7 minutes to 50 plus minutes, now number somewhere around 260 and are not only in English, but there are also special programs for speakers of Gaelic, Russian, Persian, Arabic, Chinese and other languages. There are programs covering environmental issues, online life, medicine, the arts, sports, religion, fishing, farming, food, philosophy, women’s issues, Bollywood, music, etc., etc., etc. (Due to licensing restrictions, many music programs are limited to UK listeners only.) With an average of 30 minutes per program, that’s about 5 and a half days’ worth of podcasts one can download and listen to each week! Additionally, most of these podcasts also have their own webpage on the BCC site, so if you want more information about the program you’re listening to, you can look them up on the web. Going even further, some podcasts even have entire Open University courses based on them.
And among all this, bless them, BBC4 worries that they’re not doing enough to promote podcasts. (Though you might want to click and read the caption on that photo.)
The podcast that has captured my imagination, along with about 3 million other people, is “A History of the World in 100 Objects“, or AHOW for short, which is a marvelous marriage of history, archaeology, art, sociology and museum-hopping, some of my favorite subjects. Besides the podcast, which the BBC has said will be available forever, there’s a highly informative website that accompanies and fills out the listening experience. The second series of 30 object starts next week, so if you haven’t listened or experienced this program yet, you can catch up with it this weekend.
Most of BBC’s podcasts are available for listening and download only for a week following their original broadcast. Besides AHOW the other exception to that policy is BBC World Service’s Documentaries, of which there are now over 500 episodes. The range of topics covered is again enormous and, given my love of language and the subject matter, the two below I found especially wonderful.
(Disclaimer: please note that the BBC Documentary website allows embedding of these two podcasts in your website under these terms and conditions, however, the script they use is not compatible with WordPress.com. © All Rights Reserved BBC)
If you have a special podcast that you’d like to recommend, please leave a link in the comments.
Twitter Millennial
Celebrating my 1000th tweet since posting my first one on August 1, 2008. (Obviously I’m not a power user like some people I know).
(via TweetStats and wordle.net)
I’m not going to try to compete with the many posts about getting the most out of Twitter, but I will list here a few of my favorites that helped me when I started out:
- Webware’s Newbie’s Guide to Twitter
- TheGuardians’ How to make the most of Twitter
- Digital Inspiration How to do interesting things with Twitter
And a recent find for the Twittercentric, ” TwiTip“.
Now if WordPress.com could only get the new Twitter widget to display status updates consistently! Though given the number of apps that are built around and hit up the Twitter api regularly, it’s a miracle that it works at all. So another 2 sites worth bookmarking, “Twitter Status” and “Twitter Help“.
Update! In the category of “Things I wish I’d known before I started using Twitter”, “Ten Things You Must Know Before Using Twitter“. (hat tip @jeffpulver RT @hilzfuld on, what else, Twitter!)
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