The OpenOffice Fork

Posted on December 15, 2011 by Dan Chambers

I’ve recently splashed out on a new computer to replace my aged, groaning PC which was one of the machines we used at Pesky for The Amazing Adrenalini Brothers. The new one has a fast (although loud) graphics card and more memory to play with, which should help me get acquainted with After Effects and 3D packages (I’m starting in Blender, mainly because it’s free, but also because I used it a while ago and always enjoyed piddling around with it). Having been faced with the task of re-installing all my software (Flash, Photoshop, Final Draft, antivirus, Steam, new drivers, Notepad++, Audacity and Lame, Blender, Firefox, Acrobat Reader, CCleaner, 7Zip, Skype, Deluge, KeePass) I found I needed an Office suite, mainly for word processing, but also the occasional expenses/income spreadsheet. I always used to use OpenOffice, but Googling around led me this time to LibreOffice, which is a spinoff of that product. There’s an interesting story behind the difference between the two suites – told here. If you haven’t got time to read it, the short version (from Wikipedia) is that “On 28 September 2010, several members of the OpenOffice.org project formed a new group called “The Document Foundation”. The Document Foundation created LibreOffice from their former project in response to Oracle Corporation‘s purchasing of Sun Microsystems over concerns that Oracle would either discontinue OpenOffice.org, or place restrictions on it as an open source project, as it had on Sun’s OpenSolaris.” Which basically means OpenOffice is dead, and the developers are all working on LibreOffice.

Filed under: adrenalini, animation, computing, directing, downloads, friends, gadgets, miscellaneous | Leave a Comment »

Pew pew pew

Posted on May 4, 2011 by Dan Chambers

For simple spot FX in animations, I found Tomas Petterson’s Sfxr to be a simple and powerful tool. It was written, in the author’s words, for those who “need some basic sound effects, don’t really care about top quality, have no idea where to get them.” Now there is a new version Bfxr which is even more fully-featured.

It’s simple to use, produces fun old-school sounds, and serves as a great introduction to electronic sound generation. I’ve always loved making electronic noise – my favourite tool for just mucking about was the Korg DS-10 cart, and before that I spent countless hours making my Gameboy SP splutter, glitch and hiss with the spartan beauty of Oliver Wittchow’s Nanoloop, which I now learn is available for iPhone and Android.

I have a fondness for 8-bit and glitchy old-school sound, having grown up with a computer that made no sound at all, and graduating to one that produced lots. I’m a sucker for anything (except the very experimental stuff) on the website 8bitpeoples.

Filed under: animation, cartoon, computing, directing, downloads, gadgets, miscellaneous, music, tips | Leave a Comment »

Lady Geek Show 10

Posted on September 16, 2010 by Dan Chambers

We’re nearing the end of the series… this current show is about games, and features Angry Birds (which is about literally Angry Birds), Words With Friends (which is literally about Words) and more games-related puns than you can withstand without your blood-pressure increasing slightly.

Filed under: animation, computing, downloads, friends, gadgets, miscellaneous, publicity, tips, tv, writing | Tagged: , , , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Dumb phone

Posted on September 13, 2010 by Dan Chambers


Look at it! Shiny! Isn’t it lovely?
Well, not really. After the best part of a year of teeth-grinding frustration using the HTC Hero, waiting for HTC to upgrade its firmware to the latest Android 2.1, rooting the phone so I could load custom ROMs, suffering the awful instability, clawing the battery out of the guts of the beast at least once a day, I’ve gone back to my old Nokia N95-

-which has a fantastic little camera and a clear microphone and speakers. The only problem is that the N95 doesn’t integrate well with the Google stuff I use – Calendar, Mail, Documents, etc. But I think I can live with that if it means getting a usable phone.
I trawled through the ROMs on various Android forums, looking for something completely un-flashy. I’d even plump for black-and-white if they made stability and speed a priority. I don’t want to watch videos on my phone, I don’t care about playing music on it, I just use Maps, the alarm clock, email, calendar and the phone itself. But there weren’t really any options to do this.

Filed under: gadgets, gripes, miscellaneous | Tagged: , , , , , | 2 Comments »

Lady Geek Show 7 – Fitness

Posted on August 27, 2010 by Dan Chambers

Here’s the latest Lady Geek App Show.

Lady Geek TV – The App Show – Episode 7 from Super Mega Action Plus on Vimeo.

Filed under: animation, computing, downloads, gadgets, tv, writing | Tagged: , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Pain in the Aspire

Posted on September 24, 2008 by Dan Chambers

I’ve just had an afternoon of delving into the guts of my new lovely Acer Aspire One A150 (sapphire blue) because of the confluence of the following circumstances:

A: The electrics have gone haywire in my house (specifically in my room) and I can’t use my desktop PC

B: I bought the laptop (kneetop?) because working in the house is making me stir crazy anyway. I forked out for the XP version because of Flash and Final Draft, both of which have issues working under WINE. I figured i’d easily be able to dual-boot Linux on the machine anyway (a miscalculation, it turns out)

C: Dvorak-layout is a bit easier to use on the netbook’s surprisingly big, but still little, keyboard.

D: I went to a coffee shop to work this morning, and-

E: I was a bit self-conscious and ordered a second large coffee to justify my taking up space there. So-

F: I was hopped up on caffeine, which made me slightly paranoid about leaving my laptop lying around. So I set an Administrator password… which I promptly forgot.

So I found myself back at the house trying desperately to log into the tiny and now implacable machine.

It occurred to me that I may have typed the password in Dvorak, meaning I had to try to back-translate the password as I was remembering it, as was typing it. Then I cottoned on to the idea of setting up my desktop PC in my living room (risking plugging it into the very sockets that caused the electricity problem in the first place), switching to Dvorak layout, typing what I thought was the password in Qwerty and getting the Dvorak output, then typing that into the laptop.

it didn’t work. So I tried to search online for a method of bypassing or changing the password. After having to shut down the  PC and moving it closer to the router in order to get a strong enough signal to access the internet, I found a method of creating a bootable USB drive (no CD drive in the Acer Aspire) which would then dig into and change the registry. I have no idea whether this process was illegal, and frankly I don’t care. But it worked.

Filed under: computing, downloads, gadgets, gripes, linux, tips | Tagged: , , , , , | Leave a Comment »

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

%d bloggers like this: