Tracy Hooten from "The Student Tablet PC" has an interesting post about the possibility of classroom bias against Tablet PC printed homework. Handwritten assignments completed on Tablets often look like photocopies when they're printed out, so there's a chance that some TAs/graders could mistakenly think that they're copies of someone else's work.

I've been using my Tablet for all my notes and assignments since the Fall, and never experienced any such problems. Actually, being a CS major, most of my submissions are online, but I did have a few classes last quarter where I had to submit printed copies of handwritten homeworks. Maybe my TAs were just more tech-savvy and had seen or used Tablet PCs before. In fact, printed copies of handwritten notes/assignments look impressively neat and clear, so they probably might have even worked to my advantage. :)

Don't ask me why you would ever want to do something like this, but the video is hilarious, especially the gradually mounting levels of frustration. :D


[Hat tip to Omar Shahine for the link]

I'm a sucker for all kinds of optimization tips, so when I was skimming through my feeds today, Jeff Atwood's post on "Getting the Most Out of PNG" jumped out at me. Jeff points to a great PNG-optimizing utility called PNGOUT, which happens to be written by the guy who wrote the original Duke Nukem 3D rendering engine!

Check out the post for more info. I can confirm that PNGOUT works well, even on images that have already been run through other optimizers.

And while you're at it, you might also want to check out his post on reducing your site's bandwidth usage, which offers some simple and effective tips that I had already been using for a while, but which might be new to some of you.

Good stuff! :)

A new version of Twessenger is now available. This is essentially a bug-fix release that addresses some issues and also adds error logging support for troubleshooting purposes.

If you're using an earlier version, please close Messenger and uninstall the old version before you install the update.

As always, feel free to email me if you have any feedback or run into any problems. :)

Check out this video of an artist painting a portrait of John Locke in Photoshop. Three hours of work, compressed into a five minute long time-lapse video.

My jaw hit the floor by the end of the video. Simply amazing.


[Thanks to my bro for sending me the link.]