If you have more than one email address, you can have more than one signature. And  that signature can get pretty jazzy.

Our Gmail signature contains a caricature of ourselves we ordered from myfaceicons.com, plus a list of the newspapers in which our column appears, and a link to our website and Twitter page.

To add a signature, click “Settings” from your Gmail page. Scroll to the signature area. Type in the text you want, and click the picture icon to add a picture. Click the chain icon to add a link. We noticed that the picture must come from the web, so you’ll want to upload it to some photo site or other repository first. If you don’t have a Gmail account, you can get one for free from gmail.com, and have all your email automatically forwarded there. You can even make it appear that the email you send is coming from your old address rather than your new Gmail account.

You can turn your PC  into an eReader with a new LCD display that screws in to your existing laptop. This creates a screen that is unaffected by outside light. It’s from MAKE Magazine and Pixel Qi. They’re already sold out at makershed.com.

So far the screens have only been approved to work with two brands of laptop, the Samsung N130 and the Lenovo S10-2. But that doesn’t mean it won’t work with others. We’ve read that it just takes five minutes with a screw driver to see if it will work on your laptop.

The screens have an “e-paper” mode that is supposedly three times the resolution of the e-ink you see on the Kindle and other devices. But at $275, you may want to wait for a laptop that comes with this kind of screen.

The Epson “IU-01 Interactive Module” connects to a computer to turn an ordinary projector plus wall into an interactive whiteboard. At $599, it’s apparently the first such “affordable” device to accomplish this trick. We looked them up and noticed that most interactive whiteboards sell for $1,000 or more.

The IU-01 can be used on any existing whiteboard, wall or smooth surface. It provides up to 96-inches diagonal and 102-inches diagonal of useable interactive area. Here’s the press release.

A You Tube video that’s been viewed over three million times tells you how to do this using a Nintendo Wii remote.

Microscopic image would make a good fabric design

Spoonflower.com lets you upload your own images and have them printed on fabric. Or, you can select some beautiful fabric that others have designed. We’re going to upload some pictures of crystal formation seen through the microscope.

"Vintage" fabric design from Spoonflower.com

]]> http://oncomp.com/2010/06/put-any-image-on-fabric/feed/ 0 http://oncomp.com/2010/06/photo-collages/ http://oncomp.com/2010/06/photo-collages/#comments Fri, 18 Jun 2010 16:21:50 +0000 Bob and Joy Schwabach http://oncomp.com/?p=3128 There are lots of ways to make photo collages, but here a re our favorite feebies.

Photovisi.com

Photovisi has lots of choices. We liked the photos framed  in a couple of large hearts. They also have a soccer ball you fill with photos, and many standard designs.

It’s a three-step process. Click to add photos, click to save, then click to download. You don’t have to buy anything, but if you want, you can have the pictures printed on mugs, t-shirts, postcards, mouse pads, etc. We ordered a mug. It was expensive, at $17, but has our favorite picture on it.

Google Picasa

Picasa is a great free photo editor. To make a collage, choose “create’ from the top of your screen and then “picture collage.” There are half a dozen choices. Your collage can look like a pile of pictures tossed carelessly on your desk, or a neat grid, a mosaic, a contact sheet, etc. Each photo can have a white border or not; you decide its width. If you like, you can set it to be your desktop background, save it or email it.

WordPerfect has millions of users partly because it’s cheaper than Microsoft Office and has lots of useful features. The new “WordPerfect Office X5.” for example, has a built-in screen capture utility; you can “grab” all of part of anything on the screen, including pictures.  And it has its own PDF utility; you can bring in any PDF files and edit them.

That means you can keep the parts you want, erase the rest, add pictures or comments– all things you can’t normally do with PDFs. (PDF files retain the original content and page formatting.)  If you use this capture utility while surfing the web, you can capture anything you want from a web site and convert it to a PDF. You can pull parts or all of it into whatever you’re writing.

WordPerfect X5 includes a spreadsheet, a presentation program (like Microsoft PowerPoint),   and one of our all-time favorites: PaperPort, a powerful file organizer.  When you start PaperPort, all your files appear as thumbnail images. We find this extremely handy. If you drag and drop one PDF thumbnail into another, they combine. PaperPort also lets you convert scanned slideshows into PowerPoint files or scanned spreadsheets into Excel files.  Basically, any piece of paper you can scan can be edited with this program. Just about anything you do in WordPerfect X5, can be saved in a format used by Microsoft Office, and this works in reverse as well.

X5 includes a customized version of Mozilla’s Thunderbird email, which has a built-in calendar, mail merge functions and can pull in news feeds from Reuters, ESPN and other sites. For the first time, WordPerfect is compatible with Microsoft SharePoint, which is what most business people use for collaboration on the web. You click “check in” to view and make changes or add comments, then click “check out” to make those changes stick.

A warning: The Microsoft Word documents we opened in WordPerfect came in as bold text, instead of standard text; we had to use WordPerfect’s “reveal codes” feature to return it to normal. (“Reveal codes” is very useful and we haven’t seen it elsewhere.) This problem of text being made boldface without our permission only happened when we pasted in documents from MS Word that used the “Calibri” typeface. Unfortunately, Calibri is now Microsoft’s default typeface, though many say it looks ugly in print. (Could Microsoft have been thinking ahead about how to make life difficult for WordPerfect?) In any event you can easily change the typeface to a more common one, like Times Roman or Arial. Or you can re-select Calibri from the drop-down menu. The second time it comes in un-bolded.

This tiny complaint may not bother you, especially if you’re a lawyer who likes the built-in legal aids, or a novice who likes an easy-to-use program.  We’ve always liked the way WordPerfect handles the insertion of pictures: the text automatically wraps around the art work. Everything is pretty easy in WordPerfect, and they make it even easier with a big “Reference Center,” that has links to tutorials and tips for all of the included programs. The standard version of the program is $250, the student version just $99, at Corel.com.

Besides including your name, address, phone number and any other personal information you want, the card can link to your LinkedIn account, Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites. The card can also show a map of your business location.

A DooID card can be as public or private as you wish. Visitors looking at your card can be required to send a password request if they want to see private info. Though the basic “DooID” is free, there are extra features that come with the professional version for $3 a month if you sign up for a year or $4 a month for a short term. For instance, you can let visitors email you directly through your DooID account and see your resume; you also get a count of how many people are viewing your card. You can also get an iPhone version of DooID.

Our DooID card was easy to create. It didn’t work right away with our Gmail, since Gmail doesn’t let you embed images in your email signature. So we installed a Firefox add-on called “Blank Canvas,” which lets you add images. You can see our cards at DooID.com/joyschwab and DooID.com/bobschwab.

Facial animation from FacePro.net is $5 per second of finished animation. That sounds like a lot till you figure that even a 10 second animation might really make your company website, email or online brochure stand out.

The whole process is web-based, so all you do is place an order, upload your audio files, and your animation is available for online review.  If you approve the animation the first time around, it is available for download – and if you want to change anything, you post comments online and the system posts the next round for review.

commons.wikimedia.org is a good place to go for royalty-free art you can use anywhere.species.wikimedia.org gives you a “species of the week” and lots of animal facts. When we checked it was about polar bears. We learned that an adult male weighs around 770–1,500 pounds, while an adult female is about half that size. They’re fast and smart too, so don’t mess with the bear.  (By the way: Bob thinks it’s pretty interesting that not only is the North American Grizzly Bear the largest mammalian carnivore on Earth, it is the largest mammalian carnivore that has ever lived on Earth.)