In less than 7 years, Mercedes-Benz plans to ditch petroleum-powered vehicles from its lineup. Focusing on electric, fuel cell, and biofuels, the company is revving up research in alternative fuel sources and efficiency.
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It's been a while since I've updated Comment Luv for Drupal and I've had a number of requests for a update for Drupal 6.
I've been talking to Andy from FiddyP who's updated his version for Wordpress recently and I hope to have an updated version of Comment Luv within the coming weeks. I've not used Drupal 6 much yet so this will be a good chance to learn some of the updates, I had been waiting for the CCK and Views modules to come out of beta before starting any work on Drupal 6 (I've not used it on any production sites at work yet either).
Today I took part in the Shrewsbury Dragon Boat Race to help raise money for Shrewsbury Hospice. Our team made up of 17 people from our office (The Pump House), the majority representing Marches Energy Agency, I represented Information Solutions (and obviously world famous ImAFish).
Click on any picture to see a larger version on Flickr.
The boat we had to race.
I'm a huge Command & Conquer fan so when I saw the new box set of all the games in the series for £20, i brought it.
I'm not a huge fan of serial numbers, those annoying things you always have to enter. Never the less I put up with them but the Command & Conquer First Decade install took the piss.
The first screen asked for the First Decade serial followed by this screen:
Then after this I was asked to enter another one!!!
The game is still installing, looking forward to playing it.
*comments now disabled* - Please do not email me asking for codes.
This is slightly off beat for this bank holiday weekend however after reading a post on the 43 folders website about how Merlin Mann made his presentations better it got me thinking of how this technique could be used to improve presentations I have done.
Powerpoint makes it very easy to make presentations quickly, the problem is that they look all the same and do not necessarily use the best techniques for slide layouts.. From sitting through presentation after presentation at University you quickly see the good from the bad. Unfortunately the majority of presentations are bad, they are usually too long, have too much text and don't look nice.
One of my favourite points Merlin Mann makes in his blog post is about using stock images in his presentations. Merlin recommends using iStockPhoto for getting cheap stock images however there are a number of free stock image sites which have great libraries of professional photos. I use the Stock Xchng for almost all my images (like the bubbles at the top of this page) and have found it to be the best free site.
Other good free stock image sites include (from the forum):
http://www.adigitaldreamer.com/gallery/index.php
http://www.kavewall.com/stock/
http://www.stockvault.net/gallery/
http://pstutorialsblog.com/?p=44
http://www.morguefile.com/ (excellent)
http://yotophoto.com/ (excellent)
http://www.everystockphoto.com/ (excellent)
http://stock.deviantart.com/
http://www.imageafter.com/
http://www.photogen.com/
http://www.freedigitalphotos.net/
http://www.photolib.noaa.gov/
http://www.burningwell.org/
http://backgroundsarchive.com/
http://pdphoto.org/
http://www.public-domain-photos.com/
http://www.wpclipart.com/working/index.html
http://www.unclesamsphotos.com/
In my final year of University we had a group project to discuss digital technology and the motorist. While we got a good mark for the presentation I always thought we could have improved the slides, here are a few improvements based of the techniques Merlin has described.
The original opening slide:
Redesigned slide, I think half the car works very well here:
Original objectives slide:
Redesigned slide, here I removed some unnecessary text:
Original Audi Quattro Slide
Redesigned slide, here I made better use of the graphic as it is the most interesting point:
Finally the destroyed Gatso slide:
Redesigned slide, the border around the image is not needed neither is the title:
When I have removed unnecessary text it is usually because it's either obvious or should be spoken. In Merlin's blog post he links to a couple of presentation methods that are a useful read, the Kawaski method and the Takahashi method.
Hopefully this has given you some ideas for your own slides layout and that well designed slides do not take much more work - just mainly common sense.