Advanced LaTeX

ScienceSoft’s online Latex compiler is simple and reliable. But there are those times when it is too simple, and you discover your .tex file is throwing errors because of missing styles of classes.  Baywifi provided a webapp with slightly more advanced functionality, including the ability to upload sty files; you can access it here.

How many email accounts have you got?

2 Prong may be giving us a reason to have one less.
Sometimes companys you simply don’t trust require a working email address, but you just know that if you give it to them they’ll fill up your inbox with spam. A more convenient way then maintaining two boxes– one for spam, one for real mail, as I’ve been doing– is taking advantage of 2 Prong’s “disposable email” system. No signup required; it seems to be ideal for those one time uses.

Update:
Malinator seems to be providing a very similar service. The benefit of theirs is that you don’t need to login to activate your “email account”, you can make it up while away from your computer– at a dance, on a conference call or in a meeting— and then go and check it for mail later on. The downside seems to be that multiple people may be using the same address, and that all mail is deleted in a few hours– if that one email from the guy in the conference call might be important, and it might be five hours before you can get on the computer, it might not be the best option.

LaTeX

For those days when you’re stuck at a library, away from linux computers, winedt installations, or any local way to convert tex; and that lab report needs one correction to the source before you can print it out and turn it in (due in five minutes), science soft offers an online converter.

I haven’t triedit yet, but there have been plenty of times in the past when I’ve desperately wanted something like this (Do I turn in the bad pdf I made this morning? do I run home, and come to class an hour late? do I spend the time installing everything? do I have permissions on this computer to do all that?)

Document Conversion

Note to self: try Zamzar next time you need to convert a file into something read/send/usable.

Launched just over a week ago on Oct. 30th, they offer  over 150 conversion types. Thanks, guys; this was something that was really needed!

photoblogging

I always find it difficult to find a decent number of photoblogging themes; so here is an attempt to catalogue those that are available. This list will be updated as time goes on.

• Nishita– demo here.
• Kineda‘s Cookies and Cream
• Taly’s Themes (6 variants)
• Desenfoque
• OrbyOnline promises a download of his theme, eventually……

Plugins:

• Yet another photoblog
• Gallery Manager

If you’re annoyed enough at the current state of things you may consider moving to movable type, where this would be one possibility. But movable type has a host of it’s own problems, and you’ll have to pay for hosting.
Alternatively one could just go with a gallery installation.

WordPress Themes Worth Remembering

• Quilm!2 imageless & minimalistic, but with enough character to make up for it.
• Balance by Thought Mechanics. Currently buggy, but a fun theme with potential
• v. 2. Kiwi 1.0 A dynmic theme based off 5ThirtyOne v2.0
• Squible , again from Thought Mechanics. Not so spiffy-looking right out of the box; but a bit of customization can go a long way…
• Fauna but whatever you do, don’t use their default headers. It looks fine if you delete the header altogether
• Subtle from Glued Ideas– my all round favorite theme.