Wall art from any image – The Rasterbator enlarges images to multiple pages. Print and combine them into huge posters.
Category Archives: Tools + Annotations
handy tools and resources collected elsewhere which i use from time to time – stashed here so i can find when needed
Word Frequency Counter
Our word frequency counter allows you to count the frequency usage of each word in your text. Paste or type in your text below, and click submit.
Color wheel | Color schemes (Adobe)
stripcreator : make your own comic strips
Butterick’s Practical Typography
Online Etymology Dictionary
This is a map of the wheel-ruts of modern English. Etymologies are not definitions; they’re explanations of what our words meant and how they sounded 600 or 2,000 years ago.
The dates beside a word indicate the earliest year for which there is a surviving written record of that word (in English, unless otherwise indicated). This should be taken as approximate, especially before about 1700, since a word may have been used in conversation for hundreds of years before it turns up in a manuscript that has had the good fortune to survive the centuries.
WhatTheFont! « MyFonts
Seen a font in use and want to know what it is? Submit an image to WhatTheFont to find the closest matches in our database. Or, let cloak-draped font enthusiasts lend a hand in the WhatTheFont Forum
Kurt Cobain, The Rolling Stone Interview: Success Doesn’t Suck
Kurt Cobain, The Rolling Stone Interview: Success Doesn’t Suck
But you must have had a good time writing it.
We’d been practicing for about three months. We were waiting to sign to DGC, and Dave [Grohl] and I were living in Olympia [Wash.], and Krist [Novoselic] was living in Tacoma [Wash.]. We were driving up to Tacoma every night for practice, trying to write songs. I was trying to write the ultimate pop song. I was basically trying to rip off the Pixies. I have to admit it [smiles]. When I heard the Pixies for the first time, I connected with that band so heavily I should have been in that band – or at least in a Pixies cover band. We used their sense of dynamics, being soft and quiet and then loud and hard.“Teen Spirit” was such a clichéd riff. It was so close to a Boston riff or “Louie, Louie.” When I came up with the guitar part, Krist looked at me and said, “That is so ridiculous.” I made the band play it for an hour and a half.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/kurt-cobain-the-rolling-stone-interview-19940127#ixzz2yAIauDfd
Follow us: @rollingstone on Twitter | RollingStone on Facebook
The Oxford Comma, A Confounding Bit of Punctuation
The Oxford Comma, A Confounding Bit of Punctuation
This final comma at the end of a list placed directly before the main conjunction such as “and”, “or” or “nor” is called the serial comma or Oxford comma and it has long driven grammar nerds crazy….
You Have the Right to Stay Out of Jail
Middle Class Relaxing With Marijuana – Science Daily article reports
Middle Class Relaxing With Marijuana
Adapted from materials provided by University of Alberta, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS. Reposted here for education use
ScienceDaily (May 15, 2008) — A variety of middle-class people are making a conscious but careful choice to use marijuana to enhance their leisure activities, a University of Alberta study shows.
A qualitative study of 41 Canadians surveyed in 2005-06 by U of A researchers showed that there is no such thing as a ‘typical’ marijuana user, but that people of all ages are selectively lighting up the drug as a
way to enhance activities ranging from watching television and playing sports to having sex, painting or writing.
“For some of the participants, marijuana enhanced their ability to relax by taking their minds off daily stresses and pressures. Others found it helpful in focusing on the activity at hand,” said Geraint Osborne, a professor of sociology at the University of Alberta’s Augustana Campus in Camrose, and one of the study’s authors.
The focus was on adult users who were employed, ranging in age from 21 to 61, including 25 men and 16 women from Alberta, Quebec, Ontario and Newfoundland whose use of the drug ranged from daily to once or twice a year. They were predominantly middle class and worked in the retail and service industries, in communications, as white-collar employees, or as health-care and social workers. As well, 68 per cent of the users held post-secondary degrees, while another 11 survey participants had earned their high school diplomas.
The study also found that the participants considered themselves responsible users of the drug, defined by moderate use in an appropriate social setting and not allowing it to cause harm to others.
The findings should open the way for further scientific exploration into widespread use of marijuana, and government policies should move towards decriminalization and eventual legalization of the drug, the study
recommends.
“The Canadian government has never provided a valid reason for the criminalization of marijuana,” said Osborne. “This study indicates that people who use marijuana are no more a criminal threat to society than are alcohol and cigarette users. Legalization and government regulation of the drug would free up resources that could be devoted to tackling other crime, and could undermine organized crime networks that depend on marijuana, while generating taxes to fund drug education programs, which are more effective in reducing substance abuse,” Osborne added.
The study was published recently in the journal Substance Use and Misuse.
University of Alberta. “Middle Class Relaxing With Marijuana.” ScienceDaily 15 May 2008. 18 September 2008 <http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2008/05/080514111721.htm>.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/05/080514111721.htm
Automatic captions in YouTube | Official Google Blog
Automatic captions in YouTube | Official Google Blog
Since we first announced captions in Google Video and YouTube, we’ve introduced multiple caption tracks, improved search functionality and even automatic translation. Each of these features has had great personal significance to me, not only because I helped to design them, but also because I’m deaf. Today, I’m in Washington, D.C. to announce what I consider the most important and exciting milestone yet: machine-generated automatic captions.
Since the original launch of captions in our products, we’ve been happy to see growth in the number of captioned videos on our services, which now number in the hundreds of thousands. This suggests that more and more people are becoming aware of how useful captions can be. As we’ve explained in the past, captions not only help the deaf and hearing impaired, but with machine translation, they also enable people around the world to access video content in any of 51 languages. Captions can also improve search and even enable users to jump to the exact parts of the videos they’re looking for.
However, like everything YouTube does, captions face a tremendous challenge of scale. Every minute, 20 hours of video are uploaded. How can we expect every video owner to spend the time and effort necessary to add captions to their videos? Even with all of the captioning support already available on YouTube, the majority of user-generated video content online is still inaccessible to people like me.
To help address this challenge, we’ve combined Google’s automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology with the YouTube caption system to offer automatic captions, or auto-caps for short. Auto-caps use the same voice recognition algorithms in Google Voice to automatically generate captions for video. The captions will not always be perfect (check out the video below for an amusing example), but even when they’re off, they can still be helpful—and the technology will continue to improve with time.
In addition to automatic captions, we’re also launching automatic caption timing, or auto-timing, to make it significantly easier to create captions manually. With auto-timing, you no longer need to have special expertise to create your own captions in YouTube. All you need to do is create a simple text file with all the words in the video and we’ll use Google’s ASR technology to figure out when the words are spoken and create captions for your video. This should significantly lower the barriers for video owners who want to add captions, but who don’t have the time or resources to create professional caption tracks.
To learn more about how to use auto-caps and auto-timing, check out this short video and our help center article.