Strawberry Tuesday

This is amazing - imagine a product that looks a bit like a printer, but instead of printing on the paper- it cuts shapes out of the paper. Now imagine that you can control what it cuts with true type fonts on your computer! This is an incredibly flexible tool. Instead of printer cartridges there are replaceable blades, and cutting mats - and it is expensive - but for producing high volume customised cards, this product is worth a look. Non copyrighted .GSD files, .GST files, and .DXF images can also be cut.

Quickutz release images based on their existing Dies on the 1st and the 15th of the month - all in all a great package.

MonocoDirect has the Quickutz Silhouette and more information...

I was struck by the similarities between my TIVO and my freezer after listening to a Radio 4 programme partly about the impact of freezing on cookery in the 70's.

OK so maybe this sounds crazy, but run with me on this one - only for a bit...

The freezer allowed people to keep food for longer, not only that but it enabled a certain degree of flexibility in the consumption of that food. Previously food was preserved, but not preserved in its original state (i.e. with salt or pickled etc.) The freezer enabled food to be stored in as close to original format as possible for consumption at a time of choosing. This was indeed a revolution. Breaking from the need to buy "fresh" or even to buy "in season".

The knock on was to increase the flexbility of people to consume. Later combined with the defrosting ability of a microwave oven - made it quicker to consume - and must have resulted in a significant change in peoples behaviour - and I guess eating patterns.

I hope can see where I'm going on this one...

Like TIVO some things are better to freeze than others. Leaks are particularly awkward since they contain a lot of water and don't have the right structure which means when they are defrosted they tend to lose their form. Current affairs programs lose their freshness when frozen in your TIVO.

Many many people understood and bought into the benefit of freezers, but relatively few made the conceptual leap to TIVO in the UK while it was being offered, and many only make the leap once they have actually used PVR's or a TIVO. Effectively they are converted to its use - getting functionality as part of something else and then realising the benefit later.

Perhaps that's the difference - I don't remember freezers being sold on the basis that they revolutionised your life and eating habits, they were just sold as a way of keeping things for longer and the revolution was perceived as an unintended consequence.

To pitch a product too far into the horizon of peoples expectations is asking a lot, even if there are clear and obvious benefits.

Just my 2 pennethworth.

In the 20 years between the two I think the labeling of the items got a whole lot better with TIVO!

The following is probably an over engineered solution, but a solution nonetheless.

The problem was as follows:

Integrate coppermine photo gallery and an os commerce shop in such a way that products from os commerce can be displayed in the gallery (against a particular picture) and images in the gallery could be displayed against the appropriate products.

In my case the context was a craft web site. So the images in the gallery are projects that people have made with materials that are available in the store. I'm sure that you can see how having an example of the finished product in the shop can help prospective buyers imagine the possibilites for their own projects when browsing through the shop.

I looked at all the contributions relating to coppermine and os commerce, and I needed to do some digging in order to find them.

None of these really seemed to fit the bill, but I did find a contribution for os commerce that provided an XML feed and an equivalent for Coppermine.

The solution was to implement the integration using AJAX techiques. A handler was developed in PHP. This handler receives methods from the Javascript calls, determines the appropriate course of action based on the methods, gets the XML from the appropriate contribution, uses XSLT to translate the XML into HTML, and finally returns the target location and the HTML to the calling page.

It was necessary to modify the osc and the coppermine XML feed contributions so that the output could be filtered, a couple of additional methods were added.

So from the calling page you need to identify the location which will be overwritten by the returning data. In coppermine some DIV's were added with an ID="nameofsection". In OS Commerce I created another infobox, which has a ID attribute attached to a TD tag, rather than use a DIV.

In coppermine I created links to be clicked to activate the AJAX calls. I used the keywords as the search criteria for the XML, so these keywords are passed to the AJAX hander along with the method name (to switch between searching for different things in the XML), a result limit - which isn't fully implemented yet - and finally a XSLT stylesheet for the translation of the XML.

In OS Commerce I wanted the images to display "onload" of the page. Since the body tag seemed to be encoded in the product_info page I had to undo that and manually code it so that it called the AJAX Handler.

The solution has the following advangtages:

1. minimal code changes to each of the products
2. flexible and dynamic integration, without putting both the products in the same database.
3. useful introduction into AJAX

You can find links to the the resources used and the live examples here:
http://del.icio.us/waxingdigital/stajax

Bizarre as it sounds - knitting wire - some of the results are quite astonishing. Here's a couple of example results - the first one ~ I like a lot.

The Wyr Knittr, the newest innovation for crafting with wire, uses 28-, 30- or 32-gauge wire to knit tubular mesh for making jewelry, embellishing scrapbook pages and creating home decorating accents. The Wyr Knittr also knits in beads by just dropping them through the center of the machine into the wire mesh. Or thread the wire with seed beads or small bugle beads for even more interesting projects. The knitted mesh can be flattened, compressed, braided, folded, twisted etc.

I've found an FAQ here - always useful before making a purchase!

These are nice. In the same way that you can combine the corner adorner punches from EK Success - like the Wrought Iron & Iron Eagle punches - together to make easy and decorative pockets for slipping photo's or other elements into your scrapbook or card design. The Card Creators are named in pairs so you can easily tell which work well together.

You know how I love the “Wrought Iron” and “Iron Eagle” corner adorners.

Here is a quick link to the punches:
http://www.monocodirect.co.uk/store/craft-punches-paper-shapers-corner-adorners-c-84_164.html

These are still difficult to get in the UK. They're from EK Success, and in fact the product's called Fastenater rather than Fastenator, and it took me quite a while to find them in the UK. There's a recent thread on UK Scrappers relating to them that's quite helpful (link above). The actual stapler, by all reports, is very large (long reach) and takes thick staples which are coloured i.e. not just your standard steel staple, but copper, pewter blank ones and also staples with decorative patterns on the outward facing part. I found that you can use the staples without the stapler as the staples are so large you can bend them yourself, although I'm sure if I could get my hands on a stapler it would be easier!

Been experimenting with the Empuncher border craft punches which produce an embossing pattern at the same time as as a punched border. The punch is quite large, and you can punch one next to the other to create a repeating pattern, with this method you can cover quite large areas quickly. A nice effect - when I have time I'll scan photo the effect so you can see it more clearly.

Monoco Direct. Useful source for craft and scrapbooking materials. A nice line in punches and rubber stamps. Not only that but they have dufex products.

Inspired by a collegue this entry is to log as many different translations of strawberry that we can muster.
Here's a few to get started.

Spanish: fresa
French: fraise
German: Erdbeere (earth berry)
Italian: fragola
Norwegian: jordbaer (earth berry)
Portuguese: morango

Coral Content Distribution Network. Just append .nyud.net:8090 to the end of the hostname. Example: http://www.strawberrytuesday.co.uk.nyud.net:8090 - routes you through the coral servers and takes the bandwidth strain from your site.

Take this example search for inurl:"view/index.shtml" which is searching in the URL rather than in the text of the page. Here are some others: allinanchor:"strawberry" and link:"www.google.com".

Nice page all self contained. Stores your edits in the page, can be downloaded and still edited. Anyone worked out how to synchronise these so you could save the current copy and then re-sync? When you're back from your travels...

This from backstage. Nice demonstration of the integration of content from multiple sources. The Flickr stuff's from Yahoo there's a lot of BBC content. Backstage RSS feed: http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/prototypes/index.xml
http://www.dynamite.co.uk/local/

News from a collegue on holiday in New Zealand led to a search for this advert that brings back childhood memories.

Since it is possible to generate CSS on the fly. It should also be possible to base the CSS on physical or temporal factors. For instance the background colour could be governed by the current temperature, at a fixed location - or through an approximate geopip lookup the current temperature of the users location. The cascading strawberry on this page could also be exchanged for an appropriate image of rain or snow or several running in tandem (the original script was for snow) to reflect the current weather state. XML based weather lookups are available to achieve this. The current time of day/season/analysis of the last referrers could also be used to affect the style of the site.

Take a geoip address for the user, push that through google maps to get distances. In parallel get list of current offers, by store, from Wagamamas members and present that with a single line indicating how far - click for directions and if there is an offer that you can take advantage of.

Useful link to someone else who's been through this and taken the time to write it down.

10Mb gets you the Google branded and integrated keyhole corporation product allowing you to to navigate the world google style. Public today. Has to been seen to be comprehended fully. Neatly integrated with the google maps, and makes finding the nearest Chicken Katsu Curry as easy as it should be. Panning and zooming from the Keyhole product retained. Reminded me of an old version Neotrace - the part that geolocates IP addresses as your packets traverse the world on their own special journey... Has anyone integrated geolocation from IP addresses with Skype? Would be nice to know where callers were calling from. Suspect not possible since the P2P infrastructure will obscure the originators IP Address.

Only the start, using voice recognition PODCAST content is now searchable through a web interface. This takes the convenience of timeshifting and makes the content so much more accessible. Video content is also searchable, in this case searching the subtitles. Submit your Podcasts here: http://www.blinkx.tv/beta/PodcastSubmit/

Neat list at the end of things to consider. Also see wikipedia