September 29, 2007
September 26, 2007
links for 2007-09-26
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I've been using this for ages now. Great piece of graphics software, especially as it's free.
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Easy to follow videos showing you how to use Paint.Net to do cool things with photos.
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More tutorials on how to achieve cool effects with Paint.Net. Written rather than video, but there are lots of them.
September 21, 2007
Run To the Hills
An added bonus of having people come to visit is that it gives us that added push to get out of Turin and explore some of the surrounding area. On Saturday we did just that, and headed off into the Alps.
We've been into the Alps to the west of Turin before, when we first arrived by car and also when we took some visitors to Sestriere; so this time we struck out to the north - past Ivrea and up towards Monte Bianco (or Mont Blanc, if you're on the French side).
Our destination was Aosta, about an hour and a half's drive from Turin and an easy run on the autostrada. It's a picturesque little town, very much a town rather than just a ski resort (in contrast to Sestriere, where there wasn't that much to do when we visited as it was the middle of the summer).
Aosta is sometimes called the Rome of the Alps, as there are old Roman ruins and ancient walls and arches everywhere. We spent a lovely afternoon wandering around in the 33 degree sun browsing the shops and soaking up the atmosphere in little cafes.
My favourite bit of Aosta is its relationship with the surrounding mountains. The streets are fairly narrow and the buildings a few storeys high, so at every corner you get a fabulous glimpse of a different fragment of snow-capped Alp, framed by these old apartment blocks.
September 20, 2007
links for 2007-09-20
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I find it rather ironic that social networking sites, of all things, call part of their protocol for interacting (and presumably proliferating) OFF.
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Learning a foreign language gets the Web2.0 treatment. I've been trying the Italian course, and it seems pretty good so far - you get to hear and see the phrases, with nice touches like being able to repeat part of a phrase by clicking on it. Good for a
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Stephen Fry has a blog! Who's going to tell him that the entries aren't supposed to be quite so long? If he carries on like that he'll give the rest of us a bad name...
September 14, 2007
September 13, 2007
links for 2007-09-13
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An all-in-one Ruby on Rails stack so you don't have to worry quite so much about which software requirements you've got installed (web server, etc.)
September 12, 2007
links for 2007-09-12
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OAuth - a new standard specifying how services can gain access to other web services without you having to hand over your username and password.
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An easier ways to deploy Ruby on Rails apps
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A tool to ease deployment of Ruby on Rails apps.
September 10, 2007
links for 2007-09-10
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A huge list of clubs and bars in (and around) Turin. Not sure we'll visit all of them, but we'll give it a shot... ;-)
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Very good resource for people wanting to learn almost any language (that's real, spoken languages rather than those computer ones). One of these days I'll start using some of this stuff rather than collecting resources...
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Index of materials for people learning new languages (not computer languages)
September 07, 2007
links for 2007-09-07
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Good presentation about how to improve the speed of your web pages. Check out the links to the four-part YUIBlog series too.