When Graphic Designers Get Bored (Cool and Funny Pictures)

This is what happens when graphic designers get bored!

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Best Free Windows Calculator Replacement

Moffsoft FreeCalc is a freeware calculator application that is the best Windows calculator alternative. That’s right — you can completely replace the in-built calculator within Windows with this freeware tool because it provides so much more functionality.

Firstly, the calculator is resizable, so gone are the days that you had to carefully click on each number (yes, I know you can type it in on the keyboard as well). With Moffsoft FreeCalc, you can expand the calculator window so that it even fills up the entire screen if you wish! This makes pressing those buttons SO MUCH easier. Just check out a screenshot of it running on my laptop here:

Secondly, you get a useful tape (optional - can be turned off) that is displayed on the right of the main calculator window, and it’ll record down all the operations that you’ve performed.

Just these two additional features alone have made me switch from the calculator in Windows to this great little freeware application. Try it out! Moffsoft FreeCalc can be downloaded here. And if you want a premium version that comes with even more features (and I mean A LOT), then you’ll be pleased to know that Moffsoft offers a premium version of their calculator as well. Want even more calculator software? Then check out this site, because it offers a really wide range of freeware and software downloads.

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Convert PDF to Doc with Free Software Download

I use a Treo 650 smartphone, and it’s been one of the best investments that I’ve made because of how it has allowed me to make use of idle time to read. With so much to read and so little time, every moment counts, and I love reading ebooks on my Treo. There’s no need to carry around an extra book, because everything is loaded in the memory of my Treo, and there’s no worry about low light because I can read in any kind of lighting condition with the Treo’s lighted screen.

The only problem I found is that documents must be in plaintext for best results. I’ve tried loading in PDF files, but the PDF reader doesn’t load as fast as the eReader software, and the process doesn’t seem as smooth. So I convert my PDFs to DOC format, and then convert them to PDB with the easyPDB software. Here’s a screenshot of how the PDF to DOC converter looks like - simple and efficient!

The great thing is, both these software are free!

Dowload the free PDF to Doc software
Download the free easyPDB software

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How To Edit .htaccess So That SSI Include Code Will Run

If you have tried adding in SSI include codes into your HTML files, but find that it doesn’t work, the problem may be that you might not have enabled SSI yet.

The easier way to do so is to edit your .htaccess file to have these lines of code:

AddHandler server-parsed .html
Options Indexes FollowSymLinks Includes

By setting this, you are telling your server to parse all HTML files. There’s a drawback though — ALL HTML files are parsed — even if they don’t have SSI or include code in them. So, there’s a bit of an overhead. Otherwise, this is fine.

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Toastmasters Table Topic Ideas for Impromptu Speaking – Sales Training

A great Table Topics idea is to have your Toastmasters practice their selling skills! Have your Toastmasters give a sales pitch about a particular product. The sales pitch can be in the form of a TV commercial or as if they were actual sales staff at a sales booth. For the products, you can either bring actual physical products, or print out pictures of them, both work equally well.

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Toshiba Announces End of HD DVD, Sony’s Blu-ray Triumphs

I was just reading in the papers about the decision of Wal-Mart dropping HD DVD for Blu-ray, and wondering what the impact of that would be. I guess I found out. Toshiba has just officially announced the discontinuation of its high-definition video format, HD DVD, after numerous bigwigs such as Wal-Mart, Netflix, Best Buy and many others abandoned HD DVD for Sony’s Blu-ray.

It appears that Wal-Mart was the final straw. With no major players backing up its format, Toshiba could only admit defeat. HD DVD was the first to appear on the market, and is cheaper by a margin, but it appears that Blu-ray wins out. It’s not a bad thing, because Blu-ray is technologically more superior. In any case, it’s still a fact that is made even clearer after this episode that the majority of consumers will create enormous market forces that can make or break a new technology or format.

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How To Solve “No available system font while editing PDF in Adobe Acrobat” Problem

If you’ve tried editing PDF documents using Adobe Acrobat (using the Acrobat Touch Up Text Tool), then you’ve most probably come across this problem that says “No available system font”. Bummer.

Now some of you might legitimately have the font when you created the PDF, but might have switched computers, went through an upgrade, or anything of that sort that caused you to not have that particular system font now.

The conventional way was to go out there and buy that font again, so that you edit your PDF document in Adobe Acrobat right? Well — that will work, but it’s not a very scalable solution. Imagine having multiple fonts that you had to buy, or perhaps you only had to edit the document, and having the exact same font didn’t matter at all to you.

That was the problem I faced — the fonts that I used were pretty, but it wasn’t crucial that I continued using them. In fact, I would have been happy with just Arial or even Times New Roman. So the main thing is to get the editing operation to work.

So I gave it some thought, and I realised that I could actually masquerade some fonts as the required fonts by Adobe Acrobat. However, it wasn’t as easy as I thought. I discovered that just changing the font’s filename wouldn’t work, so I searched around this software download site for a solution, and found it in the form of FontCreator, a font software created by High-Logic.

FontCreator is, in essence, a very powerful font-creation tool that even professional typographers and graphic designers use. But it’s simple and user-friendly, and best of all, affordable enough for home users to buy.

The font editor allows you to easily select and modify the entire character set of any TrueType® font and fonts based on OpenType® font technology. You can even convert images to outlines! I tried scanning in my signature, and made a font with my own signature. Then I tried the same process with my handwriting! So now I can select “My Handwriting” as the font in any application (such as Microsoft Word), and have my documents written in my signature, digitally!

Most importantly though, it allowed me to edit the property of an existing font. So I made a copy of an existing font in my system (I can’t remember which!), and then used FontCreator to change the name of the font to the one that was embedded in my PDF document. Next, I opened up Adobe Acrobat again to edit my font, and viola! IT WORKED.

So if you’re looking for a long-term solution that’s infinitely more scalable than always having to buy individual fonts again and again, try out FontCreator. It’s a great piece of software to add to your collection, and you get to have added functionality like creating a customised font to mimic your handwriting!

Update: Ah! I found a coupon for 10% off…but only after I made my purchase!

If anyone wants the 10% discount coupon for FontCreator, it’s “VGHK-D515″ (without the quotes).

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