Dropbox

Of course, you’ve heard of Dropbox. It’s a simple idea but it’s a game changer. It’s a piece of software that creates a folder. It stores anything you put in that folder in the cloud and on every computer on which you have installed Dropbox and it keeps all of these different folders in sync when the computer carrying them is online. It’s so useful I have set it as the default save location in my Wordprocessor. It deals with the vexed problem of backups by ensuring that I have the file in Dropbox on that computer, on any machine Read more…

The Angel of Fire

I thought I would say a little about the work in progress today. The Angel of Fire is a story of the Imperial Guard during the Macharian Crusade. It follows three friends, Leo, Anton and Ivan, part of the crew of a Baneblade, who by a series of strange accidents and the occasional bit of heroism end up saving the life of Macharius himself. It also involves huge armoured battles, urban combat in the streets of a Hive and a particularly nasty bunch of pyromaniac Tzeentch cultists. It’s been a lot of fun to look inside the 41st Millennium from Read more…

Bye Bye Rift, Hello Again WoW

I cancelled my sub to RIFT yesterday evening. It was not because I did not enjoy it. It was fun — a polished, pleasant fantasy MMO that played well. It just did not excite me all that much, which is the danger of following too closely in the footsteps of a market leader like World of Warcraft. Everything is just a little too familiar. I ended up feeling that if I am going to play a perfectly polished clone of WoW, I might as well play WoW where at least I have guild, friends and family. I stopped playing WoW Read more…

Apple Sales Growth and Guardian Spin

Over at the Guardian tech blog Charles Arthur points out that over the past five years Apple has enjoyed growth of up to 27% while Windows PC manufacturers have seen sales slump. Sounds impressive, doesn’t it? Surely it’s worthy of serious investigation! There must be something that Windows PC manufacturers could learn here. And yet the same article points out that Apple’s overall market share has grown from something like 3.35% worldwide to a mighty 4%. That sounds a lot less impressive, doesn’t it? Apple are a great brand and they make very nice machines but 4% market share is Read more…

Monday Again– Let the Writing Begin

So here we are at the start of the work week. I have been doing my usual Monday morning thing — making lists of what needs to be done this week. I started this on a sheet of paper last night– I don’t touch a computer at all on Sundays unless it’s an absolute emergency. (This is not because I belong to a Sabbatarian Sect — its simply to give my RSI a rest.) I put aside time every Sunday to think about this, just as I spend the last day of  each month plotting what I will do in Read more…

Scrivener on Linux

I just downloaded the .deb package from the Scrivener forums and installed them on a Linux virtual machine running Ubuntu 10.10. It worked flawlessly. I am looking forward to testing this next week. Below is a screenshot of The Angel of Fire imported from OpenOffice Writer. In case you are wondering why the word Scene appears so often in those Binder headings it’s because I put it there to mark scenes in my OpenOffice file before I imported it into Scrivener for Linux. I then performed a search for the word and used the Shift+Control+K hotkey combination to split the file into individual Read more…