Strange Duck - Tech Talk in Plain English

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

Get it now before September 1, 2007, as this is a good deal.

The Avid Free DV video-editing software is geared towards students and those just starting out making videos. It is meant to introduce, and then hook people to the Avid interface and software, so that they upgrade and buy the pro video-editing tools which have a lot more functions and power.

It’s got what the new or casual user needs to start with. The Avid Free DV includes basic video and audio editing capabilities, up to two streams of real-time effects and support for both Windows XP and Macintosh OS X platforms.
Avid’s professional line of products include the Avid Xpress DV software and Avid Xpress Pro systems. You can compare Avid’s products here.

Avid was the standard video editing software in the industrly until Apple’s Final Cut Pro came on the scene.

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

I just came across this Classified ad site which has just launched called Canuck.ca, which is offering Canadians the opportunity to advertise their goods for free.

Free is always good, but Canuck aims to go a bit further by becoming the first Canadian Classifieds website that enables people to include free video into any classified ad -  the idea here being that if a picture is worth a thousand words, a video should sell the object itself.

They also have a button that allows you to switch to a French text version of the site. Truly Canadien.

Organized by main city, the Canuck site has a pretty interface (that means design or look basically) and is divided up logically into 8 main categories; For Sale, Animals, Personals, Jobs, Community, Motors, Services and Housing. From there it is further subdivided into a whole bunch of subcategories.

Each subcategory has its own RSS feed, so that you can be notified when a new post is added to it. If you want to learn about RSS feeds adn how they can save you time, I’ve written a cheat sheet on They also have button that allows you to switch to French text.

Canuck is brand new and still in beta, so if you run across a problem, let them know and they will fix it. In the meantime, distinguish yourself by being one of the first to post on a brand-spanking new web site.

I’m attending Podcamp Toronto this weekend and the first day has proven to be a blast as well as a gold mine for great ideas and information. I have gotten loads of really hot tips and advice from each session I’ve attended, and so have decided to share some of the best ones here.

If you don’t know what a Podcamp is, it’s a BarCamp style meetup for podcasters and listeners, bloggers and readers, and web types. What’s barcamp you ask? Well, as explained on the Official BarCamp web site, it’s an

“ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment…with discussions, demos, and interaction from participants. The name BarCamp was inspired as a complement to FooCamp…“

And so the Camp phenomenon goes. And grows. There are even CaseCamp’s for marketing case studies.

Podcamps have been hosted in seven cities so far, and this is Toronto’s and Canada’s first. The presenters are generous and have come in from places like Boston, Indianna and Montreal. The atmosphere is friendly and warm. And to make it all just perfect, registration, coffee, donuts and even lunch - are all free.

And so, onward to the Top Tips.

Numbers 1-3 are from the session “Giving Your Podcast A Google Presence” with Julien Smith of In Over Your Head.

1. You need to use text to speak to Google.

That’s the language Google speaks, and so you will need to deploy it to get a good Google ranking. Your page title is most important for SEO. Make sure you choose your page title wisely and compose it so that your most important keywords come first - Google has a tendency to cap the amount of words in a title that they will index.

2. Use the free SEO for Firefox plugin.

Once installed, the SEO for Firefox plugin allows you to check up on other people’s web sites so you can do a little snooping about their rankings. Just surf to a competitor’s page, right click on it, and you can choose “Highlight Keyword”, then type in a keyword to see everywhere it appears. Or choose “Keyword Density” to view and assess why other people are ranking higher than you.

3. Giving things away for free can drive people to your web site

Wonder why giving things away for free can be good for business? Because everyone starts talking about you and your product and linking to your site from their blogs or sites. For example, Aaron Wall created this SEO plugin, and if you go to Alexa.com and type in his site’s URL, www.seobook.com, his web site is the 993rd most popular web site on the Internet. And that’s pretty damn good.

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I think RSS is great. I have been using RSS to keep in touch with what’s new at my favourite web sites for about 2 years now. It’s convenient, saves you lots of time, and is actually quite easy when you get the hang of it.

You’ve probably seen the acronym RSS on web sites. Sometimes it’s beside a little orange icon, like the one at left. Sometimes the words “Subscribe to this feed” are placed beside it.

If you’re curious, you may have clicked on the link and been taken to a weird-looking page, where most of the same content was displayed again but without the pretty formatting. Something like the page below.

That’s what happened to me the first, second and third time I clicked on the link. I scratched my head, felt stupid and left.

It took me a while to get the courage to go back and try it again, but since it’s my business and I am a research hound, I had to learn about it.

So I picked a morning where I wasn’t feeling pressured for time and typed the word I type most often into Google: “tutorial”. This I followed with the letters RSS.

I probably had to read about 10 articles before it started to make sense to me and I felt comfortable enough to try and set it up. Now I am a complete RSS addict, and I hope you become one too.

So here are my “Coles Notes” style cheat sheets on how to use RSS.

What is RSS good for?

To explain it simply, RSS is a way for you to find out when your favourite web sites have been updated - and even better - have these latest articles collected and displayed for you to read all from one spot.

It’s like having your own personal assistant whose job is to cut and clip out the latest articles from your favourite sites, arrange them all for you in an orderly fashion, and place them on your desk waiting for your imminent arrival. Now how handy is that?

How does it work?

You don’t need to worry about what it stands for or how it works. There are tons of articles explaining that if you are interested. What you need to care about is how to make it work for you.

The first thing you have to do is set up an account with a news reader, sometimes called news aggregator. It’s pretty easy; the hardest part is choosing the one you want because there are lots of good ones out there.

There are 2 types of readers: 1. those that are actual little programs that you download to your hard drive and run from your desktop, and 2. readers that run off the web. I suggest starting with the latter because they are free and don’t require a huge investment from you. Popular ones to try are: Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo and NewsGator.

For the sake of clarity I am going to only talk about how to use the Google Reader. This is the one I started using a few months ago, and am quite happy with. Since then it has become super popular. It doesn’t hurt that everyone knows the Google name either.

First thing you have to do is sign up with the Google Reader. Go to google.com/reader.

The “Sign In” area is on the right (see A). If you have a Gmail account, or Google account all ready, you can use that login and password to sign in. If you don’t, there is a link under the blue box (see B) that says:

“Not using Gmail or other Google Account services? Create an account now.”

Click on that and fill out the few requisite fields. That’s it - you now have a reader. PS. Don’t forget to save your password.

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These tips on how to write a verse for the twelve bar blues are are kindly contributed by Paul Quarrington of the Toronto band PorkBelly Futures. To see the tips in action watch and listen to “The Canadian Blues,” a blues song written by the audience using these tips.

Paul’s 12 Bar Blues Song Writing Tips

The blues typically begins with a statement regarding history and/or emotional state:

I WOKE UP THIS MORNING, MY BABY HAD LEFT

This line is repeated for dramatic emphasis:

I WOKE UP THIS MORNING, MY BABY HAD LEFT

Finally there is a resolution or recapitulation, which ends with the apposite RHYME:

I WAS SO SAD, DISHEARTENED AND BEREFT

As you can see, upbeat sentiments are somewhat frowned upon, but we can make allowances given the time of year:

WELL, IT’S CHRISTMAS TIME, ALL JOYFUL AND FUN
WELL, IT’S CHRISTMAS TIME, ALL JOYFUL AND FUN
IF MY BABY DON’T COME BACK, I’LL GO AFTER HER WITH A GUN

Good luck!!
PorkBelly Futures

Click here to learn to play blues guitar like a pro.