What's been on my mind

Was listening to an old webdevradio podcast (which I've just discovered and really like) and Michael mentioned wink, a freeware tutorial and presentation creation software. This captures screenshots and mouse movements that can then be outputted to a variety of formats, including flash swf. This could be quite useful for anyone who does any kind of computer/website training. I know that I do and am definitely going to give it a try on my next training project.

Here's an update to the Google desktop privacy issue, in what appears to be a more level headed and less sensational article.

Read an article on the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) site that urges people not to install the new version of Google desktop (currently in version 3 beta), due to it's new "Search Across Computers" feature that stores copies of files on your pc(s) on Google's servers. If you're at all worried about your privacy and the contents of your computer, check it out.

I often need to send photos via email, and because it's good practice and good manners not to block up the recipients inbox with very large photos (ie. leaving the photos the default size that the camera creates) I always used to use Adobe Photoshop to optimise them to a manageable file size. Recently, I started using Microsoft Windows XP's built in "Send to >> Mail recipient" which you can find by right clicking on the image(s) you want to send and choosing "Send to", and then "Mail recipient" from the menu, but found it to be a real pain and incredibly buggy, even though it was much easier than optimising in photoshop. So I decided to find out what other options existed to perform this simple function.

I've been desperate to see Metallica live since high school, and finally they're going to be playing in South Africa. They are the latest and by far the greatest band that's confirmed their place at the " COCA-COLA COLAB MASSIVE MIX" concerts to be held in South Africa on the 18th (Pretoria), 21st (Durban) and 25th (Cape Town) March 2006. For more information, check out the 5FM site and the computicket site for tickets.

If you're wanting to set up your own blog and don't know which software to use, check out this article on sitepoint. It takes a look at 3 of the biggest/well known blogging tools and goes in to some detail on the strenghts and weaknessess of each one. I personally haven't tested them all, but use wordpress on this site and find it very easy to setup and administer. The three blogging tools looked at are:

• Movable Type

Yesterday (the 15th September 2005) was the South African Johannesburg launch of Macromedia studio 8 at the Dimension Data Campus (Bryanston). Being someone who develops solely in Dreamweaver (not only for design but also for PHP coding), and who also uses Flash whenever I get a project that's suitable, I thought I'd check it out.

Top of my podcast list are the following (in no specific order): [I've given links to their websites and podcast feeds]

• Geek News Central :: website :: podcast
• IT Conversations :: website :: podcast

For those that don't know it yet, there has been a split between Miro, the original creators of the Mambo content management system and the Mambo developers. It seems that disagreements regarding how Mambo was controlled led to the split, and the developers have created a new project called Joomla!. This will leave many wondering which project to follow: Mambo or Joomla!