Lots of websites are protesting the American SOPA/PIPA acts, going dark altogether or posting some kind of banner etc. I’m joining in by not posting the regular short story update today – instead you’ll have a set of informative links about these pieces of proposed legislation.

While I’m not an American citizen (and I’ve never even been to the US), my site is hosted on a server somewhere in Texas, so I’d be directly affected by these acts. Actually, everyone would be directly affected by these acts, as you’ll shortly see if you follow my links.

Depending on how much time you have, here are a bunch of options to educate yourself without having to wade through any legalese.

5 minutes:

The EFF’s one-page guide to SOPA

+ one real-life example (the most common argument for SOPA/PIPA that I’ve come across was “these extreme scenarios anti-SOPA/PIPA activists posit will never happen”… um, they are already happening, and these laws will only make them more likely to happen!)

15 minutes:

What Can You Do About SOPA and PIPA? from Ask Slashdot

20 minutes:

interesting video rant by a British gamer/lawyer – there is a bit of ageism in there re the US policymakers, but otherwise the video is informative and entertaining.

Once you’re finished, spend an additional 5 minutes telling others about this issue (if you’re an American citizen, be sure to email your representative).

My wrist is getting better and I can type with both hands now, though I still can’t do everything I’d like to do. Updates will resume shortly IY”H, though this week is going to be fairly busy for me, and my health is not perfect either (even besides this unfortunate injury, sigh).

I took down a comment spam filter a while ago – I had problems with it and I was frankly curious what would happen. It’s strange, most of the spam I get consists of lengthy, baroque, and sometimes downright bizarre compliments. I guess people are most likely to approve comments containing compliments? There was even one which said that my site increased the size of their testicles. Lolwut?

Along completely different lines, I also got spammed by a Chareidi website (I’d rather not say which, but it’s not one I normally visit). Spamming is asur, people!

I’ve been messing around with Inkscape for a new art project… Inkscape is a free and open-source vector drawing program that seems to be capable of pretty much everything I want from vector art software and with a minimum of hassle. (Though I have to say I haven’t tried to print from it with accurate colors etc. I won’t really need that for this particular project.)

I hate GIMP with a passion. (Yes, I do use it, I only have Linux on my laptop and I can’t live without a bitmap image editor – this is not a case of “I hate GIMP because it’s not Photoshop and I choose to ignore it”, I hate it as a regular user. ) I have to admit that for a long while I did not even try Inkscape because I’ve heard recommendations from people that went like “Inkscape is essentially GIMP with vectors”. It’s not, and thank G-d for that. (Here have a few more essentialist explanations!)

Anyway, so far I really enjoy Inkscape, which has to count for something given my dislike of vector art in general… I thought it’d be interesting to point out a few things that seem to be missing from the usual documentation. (There is a lot of useful documentation, be sure to check out the free Inkscape book!)

You can actually use it as a freehand drawing program. At this point I think it’s the best there is for line-art sketching (especially at the great price point of zero ): your sketches can scale up indefinitely and they do not take up a lot of space in your hard disk because of the vector format. The downside is that erasing is not as easy as with a bitmap program.

The built-in calligraphy tool looks completely useless for serious drawing at first glance, but if you play around with the settings, you can come up with something interesting.

Here are my current tool presets:

Width: 4-6
Pressure sensitivity varies width but not opacity
Thinning: 0.10
Angle: 30 degrees
No angle sensitivity (my portable device does not support this and I haven’t tried it on my desktop)
Fixation: 0
Caps: 2.50
Tremor: 0
Wiggle: 0
Mass: 0.02

Here is a nice tutorial that does a good job at explaining the options, but doesn’t really provide sample presets. I thought I had some of my presets from a different tutorial, but I can’t locate it anywhere (pointers would be appreciated, I’d like to offer some credit). Most of the presets people recommend – and indeed the defaults – I don’t really like and IMO they are not very well-suited to sketching. Give mine a spin if you are a predominantly bitmap artist like me

I have to thank WildGica whose enthusiasm for Inkscape proved sufficiently infectious

I updated my two lists of articles: English / Hungarian

Yet another gigantic heap of articles in Hungarian… lately I’ve also been writing hardware reviews, it’s great fun as long as the device doesn’t want to explode in my hands Right now I even have a cool infobox listing my ebook reader reviews on the main page of nyest.hu, just below the Facebook app.

I should write more in English, I know, I know! I haven’t written anything in months and now it’s just the backlog. It’s time to send out a bunch of article queries! And there is also research to be done… *cue Portal theme song*

I updated my list of Hungarian magazine articles with the October stuff, I wrote a lot on quite diverse topics  ranging from WWII to ebook readers and everything in between. Nyest.hu now has Facebook integration, so I can directly gauge the success of each article by how many people press the Like button It’s pretty cool – when you do a lot of freelance writing, it can be quite hard to get feedback other than “well, the magazine bought my article…”.

Fiction writing has taken a backseat, and that poor visual novel game has been at ~90% completion for ages now, untouched; I apologize and I’ll try to do something to make up for the delay once I have more time away from work (B”N because now I’m hesitant to promise anything).

I made a page listing my articles, reviews, etc. in Hungarian and put it in the sidebar. It only includes recent articles and at present I have no plans of making a backlist – I’m sorry, but it would simply take too much time. The upside is that from now on I’m going to list absolutely everything someone hired me to write. Blog posts are not included, unless someone hires me to blog!

I have to say upfront that Google Translate does not really work with Hungarian yet; sometimes you can get the gist, sometimes you get the exact opposite! (Sometimes you get nonsense, but nonsense is not as misleading as when a sentence gets translated to the opposite of its intended meaning.) I’m mentioning this because some enterprising friends of mine have already tried to read my Hungarian-language articles using Google Translate and were quite baffled by the results!

*

Most magyarul is elmondom – csináltam egy oldalt a magyar nyelvű cikkeimnek (főleg tudományos-technikai ismeretterjesztő cikkek és kritikák), érdemes megnézni és olvasgatni. Mindenkinek különösen ajánlom a Beszédfelismerés a videojátékokban 2. részét, történeti áttekintéssel – van benne többek között beszélő hal Spock kapitány hangjával, sikítozós Pikachu-terelgetés és a világ talán legnagyobbat bukott játékkonzolja! (Nem, nem a Virtual Boy. )

Two of my friends want buy webhosting at Hostgator (where my site is hosted), and I realized there was an affiliate system… so you can click on my button to sign up and I get a commission.

This is mostly for my friends who asked for it, so feel free to disregard this post if you’re satisfied with your current hosting provider! But if you need a new host, click on the banner below and both of us will be happy I apologize to everyone else for the interruption.

Some of the buttons are quite surprising (there is one which advertises “American” hosting, with a flag… I guess there is a market for that!). I think this one looks nice, but I could do without the animation. Also, $4.95 does not get you the ability to have multiple domain names, you need the “Baby Croc” hosting plan if you require that, which is a bit more expensive (but not by much).

You can use the coupon code “TWITTER” to get 20% off your initial purchase and “hgc25″ to get $10 off.

KTamas asked for a post on this, so here we go! Some of the stuff that follows was written a long time ago, some right now, etc. it’s a big mess, but maybe there are some interesting bits in there. Just don’t expect a coherent treatise on the subject.

(more…)

Have you ever been to a journal club where someone wanted to present an article, didn’t feel like making a a set of slides, but still had to show something (after all, someone had to lug the projector all the way…)?

If you are a grad student, you probably have Here is a very easy solution that beats putting your average pdf reader on screen and suffering around with the scrollbars! (Scrollbars on an unfamiliar laptop can annoy the heck out of even the most patient presenter. Trust me on that.)

I talked about making complicated zooming presentations with Impress!ve in the previous entry, but this versatile little piece of open-source software can be used for this purpose too, and you don’t need to do anything taxing.

Just install Impress!ve (it should run on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, but I only tried the first two) and run it on the article pdf! Absolutely no configuration necessary, though you might want to launch it with the -e parameter if zoomed-in pages are low resolution (depending on your video card and drivers).

That’s it! You immediately have the article on your screen and converted into a nice presentation. Useful commands:

* Left/right arrow to move forward/backward

* Tab to create an overview (choose between pages)

* Enter to create a spotlight (really spiffy! You don’t need that laser pointer)

* Z to zoom in on the page (it zooms where the cursor is placed)

Have fun!

I had to make a presentation and I wondered if I should try using a zooming presentation editor – I usually don’t use them because most of the time I don’t need flashy visuals, and they can be quite distracting if your content doesn’t lend itself to a spatial metaphor. But this time was different.

However, I was faced with an obstacle. None of the major zooming presentation editors like Prezi (no relation to me despite the name! Though I worked together with one of their founders on a research project, Hungary is a small place…) or Ahead offer easy printing. Maybe there’s one which does, but I was in a hurry and didn’t find anything. Also, my laptop only has Linux, so Windows and (especially) Mac solutions like Keynote were also out.

I came up with a solution that worked quite well for my purposes, though it probably wouldn’t work for you if you expect full Prezi-like functionality like the rotating virtual camera, etc., and it only offers three levels of zoom, so I don’t claim it’s perfect. But since several people have been asking about it, here is the howto beyond the cut! Note that it assumes that you can make a regular presentation, and you have some computer proficiency. (If you have specific questions, comment away and I’ll do my best to answer!) (more…)