My book haul from the Crime and Justice weekend.

Photo of my book haul from the Crime and Justice weekend. Uploaded to Flickr and placed in this blog.

What a wonderful weekend. Every event seemed to be tailored to my reading taste. The agonising choices that had to be made. We made the resolution to do it all over again next year. If this inaugural year is anything to go by it's going to get better and better and it started from a pretty high base as well.

Anyway, enough of my rambling. This is a photo of my book haul. Now I will add in my own defence that I didn't actually buy all these books. I only paid for 4. We won the trivia competition - Helen, Karen and I in a three way tie. Simon, the event organiser wanted to have a run off but we told him we were all together and we could play nicely and share.

Another nice widget

This one is called Simply Recipes. Has a very nice clean look to it and is easy to use. My pageflakes pages are starting to grow and grow with all the things I'm finding.
The website that contains this widget is http://www.elise.com/recipes/

Page Flake

After considerable research, Pageflakes was tested.http://www.pageflakes.com/ This takes the form of customisable webpage. Elements may be added and removed to create a webpage with everything the user wishes to have at their fingertips. Blogfeeds, weather, calendar,video feeds, the list is endless. It also enables users to create more than one page, so if a user has multiple interests, each page can be customised for each interest. It is incredibly easy to use and there are hundreds of options.

My personal pageflakes web page is http://www.pageflakes.com/sunniefromoz/


It is very user friendly and not only has dozens of items that can be added to customise the page, but the layout may be changed at any time using a simple drag and drop method. There are templates to change the look of the page as well as being able to create your own individual design.

MySites

www.mysites.com is a website that promises a great deal. It claims to offer one password site for blogs, media streaming, webpages, storage and chat, all for free.

It all sounds wonderful, however the user interface seems to be lacking. It was possible to add a background colour, however there was no discernable way to add text to the webpage. The same applied to the blog utility. There was a help link, and that revealed a pop-up box which was blank. An attempt was made to construct a webpage in both Internet Explorer and Firefox, but to no avail. The website owners were emailed with a request for assistance but so far there has been no response.

Perhaps someone else will have more luck.

odiogo

Now this truly is a useful widget. Add it to your website or blog and it will convert your text to speech. It enables easy access for the vision impaired and those who don't have much time to read and want to keep up with what you have to say. Just visit the website, click on the listen now icon and you're off and racing.

http://www.odiogo.com/

You an also subscribe to an audio RSS feed as well.

It's completely free. The down side of that is that before each voice feed there are some musical notes and little message telling you about odio feed, and you don't get to choose a voice, but it's a minor price to pay.

It is a computer generated voice, so it can't manage the inflections of a real person reading but it's pretty good. I have yet to test it out on colloquialisms. But let's give that a try.

G'day mate.

Drongo.

Ooh roo.

See ya lata alligata

Screencast-O-Matic

At the top left of this blog screen there is a little box. It says Screencast-O-Matic. If you click on it you can add your own audio file and listen to my dulcet tones if you're in the mood for a little light masochism.

I can see dozens of practical applications for this neat little widget. Whether any of those will pertain specifically to my assignment topic remains to be seen. Nevertheless, have a go at it. All you need is a microphone.

Online applications and Widgets that might be useful.

For a start there's this blog site. Easy to use, easy to access. It's a great way to share information with others. There is no need to duplicate work. You simply find out what you want and then add it here. No Powerpoint presentations to prepare, no extras to forget. Accessible from any computer with an internet connection.

Screencast-O-Matic

This is a pretty new widget. Not only does it allow the user to record and store audio files, you can also create channels which means that others can add their own audio files without having to go through the process of registering and creating their own accounts.

The Pros: It's easy to use, allows for interaction and sharing audio files quickly and easily.
it can be embedded on a website..
Therein lies the biggest con: there is potential for abuse. However, let's test it out here and see how we go.