ZAM Ideas

Download photos and images from deviantART

2011-04-13T13:36:00.004+01:00

One of my biggest source of influences and references is deviantART. I think that for most designers, photographers and illustrators this is one of their top sites for reference.

Although we can easily add images to ou favorites, visit and join groups and make detailed searches, sometimes the mass download and select after is the best solution. There enters deviantArt Gallery Ripper.

This software makes it possible to download all the images in the gallery, favorites, and scraps of any user or group.

In the version I tested, in 0.1.2, the downloaded files are organized by username and then by gallery, favorites or scraps but does not create sub folders. Interestingly when we download from group images it creates subfolders in the galleries. Perhaps in a future version the same happens with users.

Now we can easily download to our computer the work of authors like or that serve as reference, it is worth remembering that the copyright license should always be respected.

Download this excellent software here.

bio:ware

2009-07-30T22:20:00.003+01:00

Hi, as for my first post here i decided not to post my desktop…(here’s why), coz it’s a mess as you might see…
Still here’s some nice peace of code anyone can say that it’s no safe… but the only safe thing is yesterday coz it’s gone.
But let’s go, i present Keylemon, a nice face recognition software that as two flavors, LemonSreen and LemonLogn. The first lock’s the workstation if you go away from it, the second log’s you in when you boot our any other time you get back in front of the machine.

.
All you need is a webcam connected to your desktop or a laptop with one. Just install, and you can configure the login’s with a wizard and decide whether or not you just want to use the login feature or also the lockout.
Pick the camera to use, take a snapshot, assigned it to a user, and “tell” keylemon” that user password, and your set!
Besides this you can also set other features such as, select if the pc lock’s out when nobody is front of it for a preset time or if your as to be you. Other feature is the capability to take mug shot's of any person trying to logon to your machine!!!

Desks, layouts and everything after

2009-07-24T04:50:00.006+01:00

Armando's last post reminded me that maybe I should share my views on desks and desk layouts.

I've always struggled quite a bit with my desk layout and I've never been fully happy with any work environment. Fortunately as of late I've been rather content with what I've came up with.

That's how it looks right now, and I've been pretty happy with the current setup, and here's why:

The main monitor is a 20" and it's right there in front of me, wile the laptop's monitor is to my far right... It's there for a very good reason: it's not distracting. I keep my Instant Messanger there, skype, IRC, tweetdeck and itunes... anything that I consider a concentration black whole is on that monitor, away from my eye sight, anything can flash, popup, or whatever it does to attract my attention... it won't get it unless I make the conscious effort of looking to my right side.

Another nice thing about having the laptop on my far right is that I can just swivel the chair and work on my music projects without having to rearrange anything, it's right there ready to record and I can even use the laptop's keyboard for that.

Now you see two keyboards on that desk, here's a cool trick: I connect the MacBook to the monitor's DVI input and the IBM Thinkcentre to the VGA input, et voila: an instant poor man's KVM. I just press the little button on the monitor to change inputs whenever I want. The only problem with this solution is really the double mouse and double keyboard issue. I partially solved that with IBM's Ultranav Keyboard that I got pretty cheap off ebay (It's awesome that people hate PS/2 connectors). The built in track pad is perfect especially if you use it mostly to run linux and the command line interface is your weapon of choice... I use the trackpad to change terminals more than anything else.

A desk itself can be a very complicated thing... hugely over designed and over engineered, but you know what? I seriously think that keeping it simple and heading for your local Ikea store and buying four legs and a desk top is still your best bet. You can add on to the desk as much as you like (corners, levels, etc) and Ikea doesn't seem to renew their office space lines all that much, so if in two years you need to add something to your desk you are more likely to find anything compatible in Ikea than anywhere else, really.

Also, here's another thing I'd advise: don't ever EVER get your desk to face a wall... I did it for years and still think that getting my desk to face an open space was the single most important decision I made. Somehow it got easier to sit down at my desk, and I can assure you that I take less breaks for some reason.

As a foot note, if you'd like to get some workspace inspiration, of if you are a working environment voyeur like me, click on this little link to get your fix.

Growing Notebook Superfit XL

2009-07-14T22:11:00.009+01:00

For about 2 or 3 years I don't own a desktop computer. All my stuff is done on my laptop, and old Fujitsu Siemens Amilo m1437g. Last year I made my own laptop stand out of some kline leftovers I had laying around. They were custom made, very limited but served me well. This is how my desktop looked 2 years ago.

A couple of weeks ago I bought this awsome notebook stand from growing.cc at Radio Popular for about € 29,90. I love the simplicity and flexibility of the design. you can use it in a couple of different ways, and it's very easy to carry, as it fits in most laptop cases.

The biggest problem I found in most laptop stands, is the low elevation they give to the screen. because when you use a laptop on a desk, the top of the screen should be as eye level and very few can give you that elevation. (Click here for more desktop ergonomics tips)
One other nice touch of this product is the cooler that you can place anywhere on the stand thanks to the smart punctures that allow for air circulation, cooler fitting, and elevation fixation virtually anywhere allowing for maximum flexibility.

Trust TB-7300 Widescreen Design Tablet Review

2008-12-10T23:47:00.014Z

I've been using my TB-7300 for about 6 months now, and it's about time to review it.

The price tag was the first thing that caught my attention and, of course, the size. I had an old Wacom graphire that I've been using since 1998 or so, and jumping to this wide tablet felt like heaven to me. I just keep struggling with the tilt, that doesn't seem to work but it may be that my pen is damaged somehow or the apps don't work well with it, but I didn't realy use that feature before so I don't really miss it.
For me it's the best tablet you can get for a price tag under 150 €. The controls are very helpful for zooming, rotating or panning, and the 32 configurable buttons are great for those quick shortcuts and it works great with wide and regular screens thanks to a wide and 4:3 mode.
Pressure sensitivity is nice although in the begging it was a big hard, but I supose it gets softer with use. (Or my wrist and fingers got stronger)

I've been using it mainly with Painter X and Art Rage. You can check my works on my flikr album.

I totally recommend it for students and hobbyists who don't have that much to give for a large wacom tablet. I guarantee that it's great value for your cash!

UPDATE - 2009 Jun 02

I just switched from windows XP to Ubuntu 9.04 did a litle google search for TB7300 on Linux, and came across this post at Twisted Evolution Studios.
I must then add this new info:

The tilt "feature" actualy means that the pen works at a 60 deg. angle and does not input any tilt information whatsoever... now that wasn't very nice of you Trust.
This tablet works best with this drivers:
www.waltop.com.tw 32Bit Windows XP/Vista
www.waltop.com.tw 64Bit Windows
www.waltop.com.tw MacOSX

UPDATE - 2010 Oct 18

Meanwhile The URLs for the drivers went dead, I just fixed them.

I learned that the "tilt" on the specks only means that the pen "works" even with a tilt of 60º. It does not input any tilt information.

I was also having trouble finding a way to use the TB 7300 on my Dual Screen Windows 7 PC, after a lot of digging I found a forum post that gave me the answer.

In order to map the tablet to both screens, a particular screen or a particular area of the screan, download the latest drivers, unzip the driver package, open the file aiptbl.ini with your text editor, find the line AdjustPage = 0 and replace it with AdjustPage = 1. Then install the driver. A third tab in the control panel will apear where you can adjust the area the tablet gets mapped to.

Why is the default 0, beats me...

Notes on NoteCase

2008-05-23T16:24:00.005+01:00

Last week I came across this rather cool hierarchical note manager called NoteCase.
I'll leave you with some notes on this promising open source project.

On the up side:

1) Portability, this is probably the strongest point for this application, there is a port for virtually any platform, such as Windows (Install and Portable), Mac OS X, Linux, Sharp Zaurus, Nokia N770/N800.

2) Import / Export, NoteCase can import notes a lot of formats such as, MM/LX Mindmap/Outline, StickyNotes and gjots2. Also important it can export notes to: HTML, text and a very nice stand alone EXE file.

On the down side:

3) Formating, is rather basic and limited, there is no text indenting, and no bulleting which I think it's rather unacceptable for an app like this. There is a "Pro" version of this software that for € 35 besides a couple of more import / export formats, and some extra features allows you to better format your text... I think minimum text formating is essential for a decent note manger, there for I leave my request for the NoteCase development team not to hijack text formating to the pro version of this nice software.

If you are a Windows only user, I recommend you The Guide an Open Source, and Portable hierarchical note manager.

Be higly productive with 3 great Open Source applications

2008-02-19T22:45:00.006Z

On the verge of going back to freelance web design, I started to gather a couple of tools I used to make use in the good old days. Working for big companies we get used to all those powerful and expensive Micro$oft and alike tools to do the most simple things. Enterprises pay heavy bucks for a lot of features they never use to do simple tasks as to receive their email, manage an agenda, tasks and projects.
Of course all those tools have their place, but are they really worth all those bucks for the need of most companies? I believe not.

For my email need I can trust Thunderbird, cross-platform, open-source and portable, with lightning and Provider for Google Calendar extensions it's my perfect outlook replacement.

As for my project management tool my favorite has alway been gnome planner available on any Linux distribution, Windows and Mac OS.

My tasks are currently managed on my Pocket PC with a nice freeware called ReenSoft Outliner a very light and flexible outliner tool. But as a desktop and cross-platform task manager I definitely recommend Task Coach, it has a lot of powerful features, allowing notes, links to documents and effort tracking to name a few.

As for notes and documentations you can read on through the previous posts.

Notes on Microsoft's OneNote free alternatives [Updated]

2008-02-10T21:46:00.004Z

I must admit that ever since the release of Microsoft Office 2003 I've been struggling to find an application that even resembles OneNote. Probably the most intuitive and natural note taking application around.
So my journey started at the usual place, google. I came across tens of applications for note taking, note management, outliners, but not so many came even close to OneNote's most delightful features.

After a couple of links I came across EverNote3 a free, light but yet very powerful note manager. With a very intuitive and friendly interface, feature rich and best of all FREE, this one quickly became the top of my list as a OneNote alternative. And now totally cross-platform as it runs on Windows, Mac, PocketPC, iPhone, and Web. Unfortunately Linux is not supported as a desktop application, but the web interface is rather nice. Besides being amost cross-platform, evernote has a superb OCR engine that allows you to ink your notes or to paste some images, synchronize your notes and voila you can search text inside your images, perfect for taking notes with your cellphone cam, sending them directly to your evernote email account and having them available as a fully text recognized image.
Talking about linux, I also found a superb alternative that although open source is a linux only application, BasKet is a KDE based note manager with lot's of features and a very nice interface. It's the perfect alternative for the linux user.

And for the Mac users, there is also an alternative, Journler lot's of cool features, like video recording, tabbed editing, iPod exporting, iLife integration, great importing and exporting capabilities, truly a must have application in every Mac.

And for the cross platform flavor alternative I present you Memoranda a Java based diary manager, that besides being a pretty decent note manager, it has a nice task managing tool, an agenda, and a resource tool, were you can keep a link or import resources like files and hyper links. I just hope they can improve on the notes import features that unfortunately doesn't support web clipping. Nevertheless it's a very promising application.

Besides this desktop applications there are also some good web based solutions like Google Notebook and Zoho Notebook.

Right now my note taking solution sticks with a EverNote and The Guide mix.

Control window behaviour with dual monitor setups

2008-02-06T21:49:00.000Z

Picking up the first post about multiple monitor setups...

It's evil isn't it? how windows hasn't got the slightest clue if you have an extra monitor plugged into your laptop or not.

So for a change some nice folk decided to do MS's work and give power users a hand and create a nice application that does what the OS should do by itself.

Meet Display Fusion

Display Fusion will let you pick different wallpapers for each monitor, even with different resolutions if you wish.

But the really cool thing about it is that it solves the silliest problem that most laptop users complain about: when you unplug the extra monitor, fire up an application and it shows up in the monitor that isn't there!!! ok...enough stressing. Keep the button focused on the task bar and press CTRL-WIN-X and you'll cycle the window to the next monitor, or CTRL-WIN-A will not only cycle it, it will maximize the window.

pretty neat, huh? there are more hot keys for other functions.

If you love it, consider paying for the application and among other things you can get to customize the hot keys to your liking.

(little extra tip: want an easy solution for two laptops and one monitor? shop for one that has two inputs, connect each computer to each input and then choose which one you want to visualize with the "source" button on the monitor...easy peasy)

And you can find multiple monitor friendly wallpapers at http://www.mandolux.com/

3 cool open-source PHP IDEs

2008-02-05T01:20:00.000Z

As my first "come back" webdesign project is done, a simple CSS & XHTML website for my cousin's start up. We came up with some new ideas and add-ons for the site so I'll upgrade it to PHP soon. And for that task I needed a nice IDE. Although Aptana is my IDE of choise for the moment, I thought it wouldn't hurt to give it a try with some other open-source PHP IDEs out there.
I came up with two other pretty decent contestants.
Komodo Edit 4 aka Open Komodo and my good old friend Dev-PHP 2.
I played arround with all of them for a while, and I must say I've got so used to Aptana's/Eclipse's workspace that it's hard to feel at home anywhere else...

Open Komoto is still an infant in the open-source fields and it's a branch of the Komodo Edit mixed with the Komodo IDE, although it has some project features, isn't much more than a basic PHP editor, for now at least. But it look promissing.
As for Dev-PHP it's a rather mature PHP IDE with lots of cool features, class browsing, intelisense, external browser preview, html and form tools, Snippets, Bots, and a nice built in Help tool, that with the propper documentation files can become super handy. It also has nice debugging features and PHP-GTK suport!
There is also a portable relase of this awsome IDE so you can work on your projects from a portable pen drive. (Check out portable xampp for a perfect portable PHP development studio)
Kudos for Dev-PHP!
But in the end of the day I'm still faithfull to my dear Aptana Studio, mostly because of it's superb javascript tools, and the new 1.1 release brings this new jaxer toy to play with!

Free Webdesign / Webdevelopment tools

2008-01-30T22:26:00.000Z

Being back to webdesign projects and unable to aford tools like Dreamweaver, Flash and Firework the "de facto" tools for webdesign, I was forced to scavenge a little for some free or open-source alternatives.
Athough WYSIWYG editors are nice, for me they are not a requisite, as I find that most of my time I'm fixing HTML because those tools insist on adding a lot of code I don't really need.

I like my code clean and simple.

After a little search I had to give it to Aptana Studio a open-source, cross-platform IDE for HTML, Javascript (with awsome debugging features), PHP, Ruby, AJAX (It's main purpose) and CSS. Based on the Eclipse IDE it has all the solid features and flexibility of it's big brother. There is also a commercial version of the Aptanta Studio IDE, that supports Internet Explorer javascript debugging, JSON, FTPS, SFTP, a Remote Project Import Wizards, Project Reporting Engine and Support.

I also came across a really nice WYSIWYG tool called Komposer a rather nice web authoring tool based on NVU a Linspire sponsored "rival" to FrontPage and Dreamweaver although not much of a rival it is a rather nice app and quite powerful. With a lot of features as site projects, css editor (not very powerful but does the job), website publishing through FTP, tabbed editing, templates, and the best features are open-source and cross-platform.

Both this tools are great, specially Aptana that has a great CSS editor.

For the graphics I didn't have many options, for the vector drawing I couldn't find anything better than Inkscape, an excellent open-source / cross-platform vector drawing tool.

My image editing tool of choice was The Gimp, the best open-source / cross-platform image editing tool that is the closest thing to photoshop there is.
Another option is Paint.Net, which is also open-sorce, but is .Net framework 2.0 based wich restricts you to windows platforms.

These are my work tools for now, let's see what I can do with them.

Hope they can be useful to you to. Have fun coding!

Timekeeping - Analog to digital and back

2008-01-27T02:48:00.000Z

About a year ago I bought my all in one mobile device, gift wrapped as a brilliant catch on ebay, I used it extensively for the duration of the year (no, it wasn’t a Steve Pavlina experiment, but maybe I should take up his method, though).

I had a fully analog way of time keeping that during that time, was focusing heavily on David Seah’s Emergent Task Planner. Getting the PDA made me go 100% digital because…well…all the perks of digital were there: at hand, everywhere I was and since I’ve alway been liberal with GRPS traffic always “update-able”, having the PDA also made up for my utter lack of memory for certain items (birthdays, addresses, locations, name of someone’s wife, etc) it was right there all accessible and at that it never failed me.

First headache was really all the syncing going on…I have two exchange accounts (one for Safira and one for Sonaecom) and since I feel strange committing my personal life to any of those calendars, I also had a google calendar. Activesync is as hopeless as it’s always been and bluetooth connection with activesync just makes it even more unbearable.

So I was juggling calendars, fighting activesync on daily basis and doing reboots so that bluetooth would work with it this time around… In all honesty it’s just so broken with annoyances that I find it hard to understand why anyone would subject him or herself to that sort of aggravation. (maybe other people just “sync”, maybe the cradle is a safer bet then bluetooth (it really is!) maybe they just don’t care that much about the “unresolved sync issues” and that there’s no clear way of fixing them. But me? I’m too anal to have unresolved sync issues).

As of late I found myself missing two meetings, not being informed about stuff happening in my own life…and the last time that sort of stuff happened was…well…never! checking calendars the events were there, they were just not on the pda…AGAIN! so I decided to take it like a shot of lousy scotch…”I’ll lose a day working on this, but I’ll fix it…” so I decided to use two pieces of software: One for syncing both my outlook accounts with google calendar and then google calendar with the PDA, leaving activesych with the heafty (!) task of syncing just the address book and whichever emails are in the mailbox in that point in time (I admit, in the past year I only checked for a work related email on the PDA once, so…not that important).

Oggsync will sync the outlook calendars with google talk. The free version will sync only the 3 days around the current day (which didn’t bother me for testing purposes), they ask for 30 bucks a year in exchange for the pro version that syncs more days and can flag events as private among other niceties… 30 bucks a year is a sheer rip off, but hey…

Gmobilesync will sync my wm5 device with google calendar (which thanks to oggsync now has two extra calendars with both outlook accounts).

it’s all good. My pda has all the events, everything is fine.

And today this happened:

I downloaded the latest version of David’s ETP and started adding stuff. And finally, again, I feel I have control over my schedule. It’s a strange feeling, that me of all people (the early adopter, the guy who fearlessly tries out stuff and sticks to digital every time the chance arises) felt much more in control with some printed out PDF’s and my dreadful handwriting then with it’s digital counterpart.

Going back to paper has at least one advantage: I’m not blindly trusting that stuff is synced…actually, there’s no syncing at all, just a few sheets of paper that keep track of my day.

Google calendar is still a big repository of stuff…but there’s really just this big block identifying “working hours”, the ETP is really where I go down to the little parts that encompass that big block. So Google Calendar gives me a macro vision of my day, ETP gives me some more verbosity, that I can scratch, draw, jot down and mess as much as I see fit.

ETP feels like home, I like home…it’s safe there.

Productive Desk

2008-01-25T22:43:00.000Z

As a developer and web designer for about 5 years now, I got to find I can't live without my dual monitor desktop.

Then came a time I felt like "I need more", triple display would be the real deal!
But unfortunately my desktop computer is long dead, and all I have now is my Fujitsu Siemens Amilo M1437G laptop and a really old Toshiba Satellite pro 4300 laptop that was actually laying around doing nothing.
Both of them support dual-monitor display, but they are limited to 2 diplays, and the Toshiba as totally useless for dual-monitor with just 256MB of ram any how, so I started with a dual-display setup with my fujitsu siemens laptop and a ViewSonic VP171p LCD monitor.
I got a usb keyboard and mouse and got the laptop on a stand to have it in a proper height and keep it side by side with the ViewSonic monitor.
But then I thought, what if I can turn my old Satellite pro into something useful?
I thought about MaxiVista as a possible triple monitor setup, but I guess as my system isn't as fast as I wish it would be, having 3 displays might considerably slow it down.
So I came it with such a work area:
In my old Toshiba I keep my email, downloads, mp3, videos, reference and "stuff", and in my dual-monitor Fujitsu I keep and do all my "real work".
But this solution had a problem, I needed to change keyboard and mouse to switch from using one laptop to another. I needed a KVM or something like that to be able to control the 2 systems with only 1 keyboard and 1 mouse.
A hardware KVM would be nice but a software KVM would be perfect as I only needed to drag the pointer to the edge of the screen to seamlessly switch from one laptop to another.
So as a open-source and freeware apologist I searched for a freeware or open-source solution for my problem.

I came up with synergy2 (open-source, cross-platform solution) and input director (freeware, windows) .

Although synergy2 is a realy nice piece of software and cross-platform, synergy2 is a bit harder to setup and has less features than input director, as both my laptops have Windows XP installed (I really need them that way...), I chose input director as my solution.
But if you have a mixed system like (Mac & Linux or Windows & Linux or even Mac & Windows ) synergy2 is definitely the way to go!

Input director as a little more "eye candy" with a really cool wirlpool effect around the mouse pointer whenever you switch from one computer to another.

Both of them support copy & paste from one computer to the other, sycronized system locking and unlocking and screensaver.
They are both easy and intuitive to use and have good documentation.

This solution saves me resources from my working environment and enables me to be more productive with quick access to three sources of information.

I hope this can be useful to you too!