OpenBlu - a presentation theme for OpenOffice Impress/IBM Symphony

The great thing about open source is that it motivates everyone who uses the software to give back to the community. In fact, I this is the very reason I'm giving away my latest theme designed for OpenOffice Impress entirely using Open Source software (Ubuntu + Gimp + Impress) - OpenBlu.

What is OpenBlu all about?

OpenBlu is a theme that was designed to rival that of themes available for other software in the market, namely Microsoft PowerPoint and Apple Keynote. Now, with OpenBlu you don't have to feel that by using OpenOffice Impress (free and open source software - learn more here) you have to use themes that aren't as pretty and functional as themes that come with paid software.

For more themes like this (but not designed by me), you might want to see this post.

Download OpenBlu

OpenBlu can be downloaded from dropbox:

Click here to Download OpenBlu

Also, I've included the .png background files as well as the GIMP .xcf files so feel free to modify the theme. If you do modify it though, please do let me know if possible... I'd like to see what other are doing with OpenBlu.

How can I use OpenBlu?

Simple:

1. Download the .zip file from the link above
2. Unzip the contents of the .zip file
3. Double click on Blu.odp and use it like the template presentation to form your presentation
4. Edit/Add/Modify etc.
5. Save the file as your own presentation.
6. Optional: Share it with others and encourage them to use OpenOffice as well.
   

Note: To use OpenBlu you'll need either OpenOffice or IBM Symphony.

License

OpenBlu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License. This means that you can download it, share it and modify it. In fact, I encourage you to download it, share it and modify it to suit your own needs. However, you can't sell it for monetary value (this is mainly to keep the spirit of free and OpenSource alive).

Read More

How to search the web faster with Inquisitor

Have you ever wondered if there was an easier way to get to your search results without having to actually see the search results page? If you ask me... there is! It's free, download-able for Windows and Mac (and iPhone!) and it's called Inquisitor.

Originally, in order to search the web, you'd have to go to a search engine first. Like Google, Yahoo or MSN for example. Then you'd have to type in a query, and hit enter, and search the best results from a list of 6 billion search results (although you see them 10 at a time, there are a LOT of search results). Then you'd click the 3rd or 4th or may be even 1st link to go to the website.

Then came the advent of toolbars and inbuilt search bars, from where you could search the web without having to go the search engine website first. Plus, with the search query features you didn't even have to type in the full "thing" that you would have liked to search for.

Now there is a better way to search the web faster:

Instead of going to the website, inquisitor (sponsored by Yahoo I must say) takes the place of the normal search tool in your browser (currently it only supports Safari, Firefox and IE). However, the most important feature that inquisitor has is - it displays the SEARCH RESULTS of top 6 results from search results page right in the drop down menu! So, you don't even have to visit the search results page in most cases. You can directly go to the search results page without ever having to visit tie middle man. Plus, it also finishes your queries for you if you want, and gives you the option of searching similar queries in different search engines. Plus, it tells you the websites you've already visited, so if you're searching for the same website again, you can go to it instantly!

So the next time you want to search, you'll not only be saving time, but you'll also be saving some mouse clicks.

Read More

How to play tetris on your Mac with Terminal

Today, I noticed that it's the 25th anniversary of Tetris, through a Google doodle (you can learn some amazing things from a Google logo as it seems). So I figured, that it was only fair that I download tetris and play it since the last time I played it was ages ago. Turns out, if you use a mac, you don't have to download tetris.

Did you know that your Mac has another game besides chess that comes pre-installed with every Mac? Yes, your mac also has tetris, as it turns out. Although its not as easy to access as chess, and you'll admin privileges to do so, it still is a great time waster as TUAW (although the instructions on TUAW are kinda wrong.. they say tetrix instead of tetris... ) puts is.

So here's how you can start playing tetris on your mac. It's harder than normal tetris though, because it doesn't really give you a lot of options, but nevertheless, it's free.. and you don't have to download anything.

So heres what you do to open it:

1. Open Terminal (Finder > Applications > Utilities > Terminal or Alt + Space , then type in "Terminal" and press enter)
2. Then type in:
emacs
3. Then press the enter key, and after emacs loads, press the Escape key
4. Then type in:
x
5. Your cursor will start blinking beside the blue text, after which you should type in tetris and press enter!

To control the game: Use the up and down arrow key to change the block configuration, and obviously use left right keys to change the location of block. And press the spacebar to let the blocks come down quickly. Press the p key to pause.

Pretty cool huh?

Read More

How to improve your comprehension/vocabulary score for SATs, ACTs and APs

Here's something for fellow students who might be practising for a standardized exam (to the older readers: yes, remember those?). Learning vocab words and lists for standardized exams isn't what most people consider to be an enjoyable task. But I've recently figured out that it can be enjoyable... if you know what to do. People always ask me about how I have such a great vocabulary (ok, not really... but pretend that they did) and this is what I always tell them:

The best ways to improve your vocabulary are...

1. Reading (my english teacher swears by this one - according to her, you'll retain 5% of the vocabulary from anything you read):
I for one hated reading. Especially the "romance" novels that are supposed to make you feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Why? Because first off... they make so sense, and second, they take too much time (and did I mention, they never have any pictures in them?!) So often, I just ended up reading the first few chapters, and then never touching the book ever again.

But the truth is, you don't always have to read "the classics" or "the quintessential Socrates series" if they don't make any sense. There are several other, dare I say enjoyable, sources of inspiration that you can plunge into. Especially if you like technology, there are several other things you can read, to improve your vocabulary and improve your comprehension skills. Remember though. If you come across a word that stumps you, you might want to check out what it means (I recommend using one of the dictionaries mentioned in this post) before continuing.

Here are some "good" websites where you might find interesting (if you don't like Harry Potter and all that kind of stuff that is...)

The Onion (America's Finest News Source!) - A great news source. Although, I advise that you take everything you read on that website with a grain of salt.

e-Books online - There are a ton of e-books that you can potentially download (or even read) online. If you get board with one of them, why not just switch to another. It's easy, and who knows, you just might find something interesting.

News Websites (NYTimes, Globe and Mail and even CNet sometimes)- Like The Onion, news websites are a great source of information, provided the english they use is good. However, I would stay away from the depressing kinds of news though... you don't want any nightmares.

Crossword Puzzles - Crosswords are a great way of improving your vocabulary, especially when it comes to big words.

Write! - The best way to learn how to read, is to learn how to write. Try to use big words when you're writing though so that you get a feel for certain "esoteric" words. If you want, you can publish them online (in a blog), and if you have something to say (like I always do) I'm sure you'll build your own group of readers as well. This is good, because you'll be able to get feedback, and also do well on the writing portion of the standardized tests. Although I recommend that you practice writing too, because unless you're taking the MCAT, you'll be using a pen, and not a keyboard.

Vocab Lists - Vocabulary lists are the least preferable method of learning for me. That's because rote memorization almost always never works unless you're a savant. However, if you feel like you need to brush up on a little bit of vocabulary, here are some tips concerning vocab lists:

• Never simply memorize the words. You'll be memorizing them for 5 minutes and then you'll forget it all!
• Instead, what you want to do is put the word in a memorable sentence of some sort, and "use the word". This way, you'll retain the word better, and hopefully you'll be able to recall it when necessary. [Rinse and Repeat!]
  

Bonus: If you're Canadian, you might want to check out some columns by Rex Murphy. Even though he is from Newfoundland he never uses a word that smaller than 9 syllables.

In my opinion, there is no substitute for reading. So incase you're wondering what to do a year before the standardized test, I suggest you start reading first and then try the other tips I've mentioned here!

Good Luck!

Read More

Replace add with art by using a free firefox addon

Are you tired of viewing annoying ads on websites? Yeah me too. I find that just plain text ads (like the kind on this blog) are okay as long as they don't block up too much space or distract you from seeing the "real" websites. But sometimes, a lot of websites just tend to go overboard with the annoying type of ads - banners and animated ads.

For such cases, Firefox has a great add-on called Add-Art that instead of just blocking out the ad replaces it with art! Check out the demo:

Introduction to Add-Art from Steve Lambert on Vimeo.

This is one step better than normal extensions such as adblock plus that merely block the advertisements. Plus, sometimes, the creators of a website reserve some space for an ad (through CSS) and so when you visit such websites with Ad-block plus, you'll end up with a white rectangles all over the place. For instance you can see a big white square in the Nytimes.com page below.



Update: Hah, with extensions like Adblock plus, I forgot that this website displays advertisements too! I guess if you don't want to see advertisements on this website or any others, you can get yourself an adblock extension. I for one appreciate the measly revenue I get from Google's advertisements.

Read More

5 reasons I dislike Windows Live Hotmail

I have nothing against Hotmail. Except may be the fact that I’m kinda being forced to send mail to it because everybody else has already started using it. This makes it something bad from a sender’s point of view. Here are a few reasons why I dislike windows live hotmail:

The very first reasons why you should switch is because it offers only 2MB or storage space. Although it does offer mail in HTML, 2MB I think is too low. Don’t believe me? Click on screenshot below to enlarge.

Okay, so it might not be true that hotmail offers 2MB of e-mail storage… they just apparently need to update their description tag on Google (or perhaps it’s Google’s sense of humour?) Because as it turns out, Yahoo and Live.com each have different descriptions of the website.

Nevertheless, here are some more reasons for which I dislike Hotmail with a passion:

1. It only allows 10 MB e-mail attachments! What?!?! Most e-mail providers out there have atleast 20 MB attachment limits. This means that I can send a 20MB attachment (like I often do) to a person using Gmail or Yahoo Mail – but I can’t send it to a person using Hotmail/Windows Live Mail. How annoying is that?
2. No Mac/Linux Mail App Support. – Unfortunately, Windows Live Hotmail and even Hotmail are inaccessible from Mail.app or Entourage or even Thunderbird on a Mac. Why? Because Microsoft wants people to use Windows Live Mail. No seriously. That’s the only reason I can think of for not having some kind of POP/SMTP Structure to allow people with a Mac/Linux OS to use hotmail with an e-mail client of their choice, Yes, I realize that there are ways to run hotmail on a mac with Apple Mail, but they’re too inefficient.
3. Annoying vertical banner advertising that takes up too much space and is just plain annoying. Enough said.
   
4. It’s slower than other webmail applications out there – especially on platforms other than a Windows PC. For some reason whenever I try to open a mail message, it seems like it’s way too tardy to be even considered as good as Hotmail. Plus, using folders is so slow that it’s almost inefficient.
5. Embedded advertisements inside e-mails! Wow, this is just great. First, they stick you with annoying banner ads, and then they even add messages to advertise their services inside e-mails sent from hotmail.

Honestly, if Hotmail would like to compete with other service providers then they’d better improve their standards.

Read More

Ubuntu Audio Does Not Work - Static Sound Instead

Have you ever experienced the static sound on Ubuntu when you should have been hearing something (perhaps the start up sound or something) from your speakers? Well, you might think that your sound card has stopped working or something, but as it turns out.. there's a quick way to get your audio back to normal.

It's not that your sound isn't working... it's just "muted" (although I wonder why it makes the static sound instead of being completely quiet...).

To get your sound back here's what you need to do:

1. Double click on the speaker icon in the menubar
2. Alternatively, you can press Alt+F2 and type in: gnome-volume-control and click 'Run'
   
   

Then on the volume control window, choose the appropriate device where it says "Device:" and just turn your "PCM" volume all the way up... if this slider is all the way at the bottom you'll just get static from the speakers instead of sound.


Hope this helps others out there who experience the same audio "stuttering" problem.

Read More