Strange Duck - Tech Talk in Plain English

Ok, this is not quite a tech related post, but you can consider this your non-tech mechanical tip. You can donate your old car to charity - do good, feel good about getting that stinky clunker off the road, and receive a tax receipt to boot - without exerting much energy at all.

My old beater died and since I had no idea how to get rid of it, I asked some friends, one of which told me about the programs that allow you to donate your car to a charity of your choice. They come and pick it up, tow it free, take it apart and sell the good bits, give the proceeds to your charity, and dispose the rest properly. Some even super nicely - in an eco friendly green manner.

A quick Google turned up a few options for us Canadians on where to donate our cars. As usual Americans get a bit more choice.

Donate your car to charity

Charity Cars

Car heaven

Here are a few other reasons to pat yourself on the back:

You will be making an invaluable contribution to the less fortunate in your community.

They handle the forms for you, saving you time and trouble.

Most believe in eco-friendly recycling, making sure all standards of vehicle disposal are reached and kept. That means hundreds of tonnes of beaters are recycled annually. The balance of your beater is reduced in volume by 90% - and that saves a lot of landfill space.

Getting a beater off the road is good for the air. That’s the stuff we breathe, and here in Toronto, it gets so bad that we are told to keep our children inside so the cars can go out and play. Older than 1995 vehicles emit 20 times more hydrocarbon emissions than a 2001 vehicle, and 65 times more than a 2007 vehicle. That’s too much.

I am donating because it is simple, convenient and nice. I save time, and I do good.

Vector Magic takes bitmapped images and turns them into beautiful vector images.

Huh? What’s that mean?

Well, very simply, it takes photos or other complicated graphics and turns them into line drawings. Line drawings that can be stretched to infinity.

That’s the original photo on the top left. The other 3 squares have been traced using Vector Magic’s three settings - high, medium and low.

Yup. A Stanford University team has developed a tool that makes it super easy to do, and does it better than most other auto-tracers, like the one in Adobe Illustrator.

Basically, there are 2 ways a computer can draw pictures:

1. with tiny little squares, or pixels, called bitmap, or raster.
2. with a command that says something like “draw a circle and make it red with a circumference of 10 pixels. ” This is called a vector image.

The trick is to know when to use which one.

For example, ever try to take a jpeg and make it bigger? It turns all squarish and jaggedy - or pixelated - meaning you start seeing the individual pixels the image is made of. Now if you shrink the same image, it will get all blurry.

That’s not good for some things, such as logos. For those, you want them to be either teeny weeny, or something to paste on the side of a skyscraper. That means you need a vector image.

Now I can’t tell you the number of times I have received bitmaps instead of vectors when someone sends me their logo. This can be a big headache, especially if it’s sitting on a background colour.

Not anymore. If i get one of those nasty things, I will shoot it up to “Vector Magic: The Online Tool for Precision Vectorization” and change it to a more usable form for logos.

In fact I had to use this myself. I never made a proper logo for Bitter Tonic as I was in a big rush to get content up, and so a friend just made a great header for me. And being too busy, I never got around to doing the work. So I tested this by uploading a TIFF of my logo to Vector Magic.

I gotta hand it to them, it makes traces beautifully and the site is easy to use too. And even keeps your photos stored online for a whole month. Check out the difference. The top is a bitmap.

Magnifico!

Did I mention how fast it is?

I wish this team would develop for my ridiculously not-easy-to-use cell phone.

Click here for great tracing by Vector Magic

Tags: free tools, online tool, vector, auto tracer, Vector Magic, line drawing, trace, logos, Stanford University

Non-techies listen up - now you too can have a Wordpress blog set up and running at your own domain.

The how-to instructions on how to do a manual install of Wordpress can be rather intimidating. This is because you need to set up a database on your web hosting server to run Wordpress, and in order to do so, you need to get into the “tech guts” of your server. Spooky.

That’s why One-click installs are great - all you have to do is follow the instructions set up by your web hosting company, which usually amount to clicking a few check boxes. The trickiest part in the operation will be naming the database, but that’s basically all you have to do: name it. The rest is done for you.

Another thing that is great about One-Click Installs is that they make handling updates to the Wordpress software easy. The kind Wordpress developers keep making their software better and safer, and so it is a good idea to keep updating to the latest version of Wordpress. With one-click installs, the web hosts will upload the latest software for you, and when you are ready to install it, it’s just another click away.

Here are a few reputable companies that offer one-click installs. Sign up with either one and you could be blogging in about 10 minutes.

Hostgator

We are happy to say we have started using Hostgator as a web site hosting company and are delighted with the servers and with service. With packages starting at $7.95 USD per month, Hostgator is a sweet deal. It is also the host of choice for many pro Internet Marketers who use the Reseller Package to host all their web sites. It boasts Cpanel and WHM control panels.

• Click here to check out the Hostgator web site or to sign up for an account.

Dreamhost

Is probably the most popular one-click install company, probably because of their very popular affiliate program. There are as many Dreamhost evangelists as there are detractors, but the one thing you can be sure of is that Dreamhost’s newsletter will make you laugh, as it boasts the wittiest corporate writing out there.

A big plus - the company is very honest about what’s going on with their service and have a blog and wiki set up so that you can stay up-to-date with what is going on with your server’s status.

Dreamhost’s Crazy Domain Insane! package costs $7.95 a month if you sign up and pay for 2 years up front. This will get you 150 GB of web host space, which increases weekly by 1 GB. Yes, this incentive is quite unique, but it seems to be working.

Your allowed bandwidth or transfer amount increases weekly too, starting at 1.5 TB and increasing weekly by 16 GB.

With Dreamhost, you can host as many domain names as you like on this package and have unlimited MySql databases running - enough to set up a blogging empire. You also get 1 year of free domain name registration.

I am currently hosting this site and a few other blogs with Dreamhost and I have had very little problems with them and found their support service quite speedy.

• This way to review the Dreamhost package in more detail.

Midphase

Is growing quite a strong fan base. Their packages tend to be a bit more costly, but advocates swear the service is worth it.

Midphase’s basic package is $7.95 and will get you 200 Gigabytes of space, a domain name for life, and 3oo GB of bandwidth. You have to bump up to the $11.95 pro-phase package to get unlimited domains.

• More about Midphase

AN Hosting

An Hosting is offering a lot of great deals recently. Their usual package is 250GB of disk space, 2,500GB of bandwidth, 20 fully hosted domains and a free domain for life, all for $6.95 a month. But if you wait for sale time, you can get some pretty good deals - like this $4.95 a month special that is available until Nov, 22, 2007.

• More about AN Hosting

As usual, do your research to choose the right company for you. A quick Google search of any company name above and you will find tons of fan mail, heated debates, as well as a few horror stories. But I think you will be safe with any of the companies above unless you plan on getting millions of hits a day, which in that case you should be able to afford a dedicated server (one that you do not share with anyone else.) And that is a good problem to have

This post is part of my “Blogging with Wordpress Made Super Easy - Well, Almost” series. More coming soon.

Tags: wordpress, blogging made easy, one-click installs, web hosting, blogging for beginners