A Consuming Experience

Monday, 7 August 2006

Free Creative Commons e-books

I'm a Creative Commons fan so I like to help publicise CC-licensed stuff - which is mostly free for personal use.

There's now a list of electronic books for download under the CC license, on a range of subjects both fiction and non-fiction (e.g. 55 Ways to Have Fun With Google), I see from the Creative Commons blog.

Happy reading!

Funny place names

Read in the 5 August 2006 New Scientist, in an item about a place called Whorehouse Meadow (for entirely accurate historical reasons), that there's a fishing village near St John's, Newfoundland, Canada called Dildo, whose residents fought hard (geddit? Ahem that was me, not New Scientist!) to keep its name despite a campaign to change it to something more tasteful.

And I only recently heard that there was a village in (some might say "Where else?" but of course I shan't) Essex, called Ugley, which had its own "Ugley Women's Institute" - until they changed its name to "The Women's Institute (Ugley branch)".

Free animated GIF creator

Just a little free online tool I found: Online Image Editor (OIE) Animation Wizard Index, which lets you upload at least 2 images (max 250x250 pixels each, but they can be different sizes) to create an animated GIF i.e. an animated image which fluctuates between the uploaded images. You can even choose how you want the transition between the images to work.

There's the size limit, and it's slightly erratic in that sometimes it doesn't work (probably when it's very busy), but hey it's free. Handy for e.g. avatars for bulletin boards and forums if you want to have an animated avatar, though in that case you may need to further reduce down the size of the pic to fit in with any image size restrictions imposed by the forum.

Pages

Monday, 7 August 2006

Free Creative Commons e-books

Funny place names

Free animated GIF creator