Author’s statement: Neither I or SitePoint condone the website referenced in this article. This is a topical news story and we take no responsibility for any loss of productivity! Many of the visitors to SitePoint are freelancers and small business owners. Wasting time at work is our prerogative and it’s directly related to our profitability
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Can’t You See I’m Busy … Playing Games?
Despite all precautionary measures, firefighting remains a risky task that poses life-threatening challenges in front of the firefighters all over the world. Making the life a bit easier and safer for the firefighters, the Firegard is an autonomous firefighting robot that reduces the exposure of the firefighters to intense situations. Capable of operating in different conditions and terrains, the Firegard records important pictures and information via built-in sensors and cameras, which helps the officials assess the situation and execute their operation without risking the life of the firefighters.
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Firegard: Autonomous firefighting robot makes life easy for firefighters
Slated to be launched at DistribuTECH next week, the “Vision” from Tendril is a next gen in-home energy display that reduces energy consumption by an average of 10-15 percent and envisions low electricity bills. Connecting to the electric grid, the energy smart device not only provides the real-time information of the users’ energy consumption but also the cost of energy throughout the day, so you could manage your household work during the hours when the cost of electricity is minimal. Via: Treehugger / Gizmodo
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Tendril Vision Clock envisions low electricity bills
Fotomoto is a service that’s been around for a couple of years but I only became aware of it a few weeks ago thanks to a Twitter friend. Since then I’ve been playing around with it on my own photography site and thought it might be of interest to photographers or web designers who are creating sites for photographers
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Fotomoto: An Easy Way To Sell Prints Or Send E-cards From Your Site
Episode 53 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week your hosts are Stephan Segraves ( @ssegraves ) and Kevin Yank ( @sentience ). Listen in your Browser Play this episode directly in your browser! Just click the orange “play” button below: Download this Episode You can also download this episode as a standalone MP3 file.
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SitePoint Podcast #53: “I’m here with the booze!”
At one time or another, anyone who runs a graphic design website has written the ubiquitous ‘ Rules of Logo Design ‘ article. Oh, it’s not like we haven’t been guilty too.
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Logo design heresy? A Devil’s Advocate look at The 10.5 Commandments of Designing a Logo
After a quiet holiday season, the PEAR community has started rumbling again. Digg gave PEAR a plug , new versions of Mail , Services_Facebook , System_Daemon , and html_Template_IT were released, the number of bugs reported dropped to less than one per package for a brief time, and two promising new proposals in PEPr arrived.
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PEAR in March 2010 – Official Blog of the PEAR Group/PEAR President
Brandon Savage approached me with an interesting issue regarding ZF bootstrap resources, and accessing them in your action controllers. Basically, he’d like to see any resource initialized by the bootstrap immediately available as simply a public member of his action controller. So, for instance, if you were using the “DB” resource in your application, your controller could access it via $this-> db
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A Simple Resource Injector for ZF Action Controllers – Matthew Weier O’Phinney
From findingada.com : Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science. Women’s contributions often go unacknowledged, their innovations seldom mentioned, their faces rarely recognised. We want you to tell the world about these unsung heroines, whatever they do
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Ada Lovelace Day 2010 is March 24th! – Maggie Nelson
It’s Friday, and inbox zero claims are popping up all over the place as we wind down the week and try to get ourselves to believe that we really do control our email and not the other way around. What is “inbox zero,” why is it such a coveted status and is it realistic in today’s email-focused world
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Inbox Zero: Don’t Believe the Hype
The last SabreDAV announcement I made here was 1.0.4, which happened in January. Just today I’ve released 1.0.9, so I figured it’s time for a small update. A public demo site I’ve bought the sabredav.org domain, and placed a live demo on it for people to try out
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SabreDAV 1.0.9 released & CalDAV news – Evert Pot
Many books have been written about guerilla marketing, but few small business owners can define it. The same way a guerilla uses creativity to win a war, the small business owner can use ingenious and original methods to triumph over the competition. Here are a few ways you can use guerilla marketing to find success in small business
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Guerilla Marketing for the Small Business Owner
Anyone using SimpleDNSd is strongly encouraged to update to latest SVN (you will have to erase the php-5.3.1 directory and recompile php to get it patched correctly). The current SVN version will most likely go release candidate and be released later. Current SVN release includes many fixes and improvements, including for SimpleDNSd, the DNS daemon written in PHP
Heads up, Aussies! In April and May, I’m hitting the road to teach JavaScript workshops all around Australia, and I’d love to see some of the SitePoint crowd there when I do! In case you don’t know me, I’m the co-author of Simply JavaScript and host of the SitePoint Podcast . I also help write the SitePoint Tech Times newsletter , and manage the motley crew of developers who put SitePoint together
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Aussies: Learn JavaScript with Kevin Yank in April/May
One thing I really liked in Python is the data structure set , which is built into the language core. A set in Python is defined as known from mathematics and beside mathematical use cases, it is helpful in everyday programming live. In this episode of my series on Python, I give you a short insight into how sets work in there, how you can achieve similar results in PHP and why I like the Python approach.
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Python. Good, bad, evil -2-: Native sets – Tobias Schlitt
Rolling Stone LA , a 10,000-square feet blend of restaurant, bar, and private event space slated to open later this summer in Los Angeles, needed a new logo. And who better to tap for the gig than Jim Parkinson , the renowned designer of the original Rolling Stone magazine version. Parkinson has been designing logos and letterforms for over four decades, beginning his career as a lettering artist for Hallmark Cards before redesigning the Rolling Stone logo in 1977, and designing lettering for bands such as Creedence Clearwater , Taj Mahal , The Doobie Brother s and Kansas .
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Snippets: Rolling Stone logo, Hindu Gods, Twitter copyright angst & crowdsourcing blog content edition
If you’re showcasing a product on your website or in a print ad, you can make it look more professional by giving it a decent background and by adding a few special effects. For my “product,” I’m using a photograph of a non-descript media player which I downloaded for free, here from Stock Xchng .
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Create A Studio Style Backdrop In Photoshop
This installment of our business startup series discusses the importance of your home workspace. One consideration when you decide to start a business is figuring out where you will do your work. On the surface, this may seem like a minor decision, but your workspace and surrounding environment can play a huge role in your productivity, efficiency and overall level of stress
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This is My Space: How to Set Up a Home Office
SnackTools , a suite of rich internet applications for creating web content, has a Facebook quiz that tests your knowledge of Photoshop. By taking the quiz, you could be awarded with licenses for up to 10 months depending on how well you score! How It Works SnackTools is giving away 10,000 BannerSnack licenses
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Are You a True Photoshopper? Take This Quiz!
Zend Studio is a great IDE and we use it a lot at Ibuildings (in addition to NetBeans, PDT and Vim). One of the nice features is the code formatter that helps develop code according to agreed standards, which is useful to keep projects consistent
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Zend Studio formatter for Zend Framework and ATK – TechPortal