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Firefly reading

ben — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 14:29:38 +0000

In case you don’t have the pleasure of living near me and experience my recent Firefly excitement, here’s what you are missing out on. This month Dark Horse released a comic written by Patton Oswalt entitled Serenity: Float Out which covers a story focusing on Wash’s friends. Check out this io9 page for some story spoiling and a preview of the first few pages. I however am still waiting on my copy to arrive via snail mail.

Dark Horse is also releasing another Serenity series starting November 24 called Serenity: The Shepherd’s Tale…obviously covering much anticipated backstory on Book. I can’t wait, although I am seeing mixed news on whether it’s a series, a one time graphic novel or what….either way, exciting.

The stories of how these both came to be are interesting too, google around because I’m lazy but feel free to start at this Wikipedia article.

And to keep you entertained in the meantime, here is an excellent Firefly fanfic mini novel from 2008 written by Steven Brust. I remember reading My Own Kind of Freedom on a business trip and thoroughly enjoyed reading it and the author really covered the characters and feel of Firefly well. I fully intend on re-reading this in the near future.

PrintWhatYouLike

ben — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 20:10:55 +0000

This is helpful for anyone that prints articles to read for later or whatever purposes you come up with, but also to anyone that reads articles online. If you haven’t run across it before, PrintWhatYouLike.com is an amazing service that lets you format a web page for printing. So get rid of ads, select and remove that annoying comment section full of trolls, enlarge certain sections…

The best part is that they provide a bookmarklet to easily format a page you are reading. Sometimes I will use it just to clean up an article I am reading not to print, just so I can focus on the content and not all of the cruft that makes it part of a website.

So go check out PrintWhatYouLike, save some paper and ink.

Ninite bulk installer

ben — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 17:44:36 +0000

Posting this is probably mostly for me as I keep forgetting the name of this tool, but it is worth sharing. I found this from a Lifehacker article a while ago, and if I could remember the name of it I would use it every time I do a Windows install. Ninite allows you to go to a web page, select a bunch of freeware apps you want installed giving you a custom made installer that will just go to town downloading and installing the software you selected, resulting in very few clicks and questions. One simple shot at installing a bunch of apps that would take at least an hour if done manually.

Their Ninite One product would be awesome to have on a USB disk as well, but I’m not paying for a professional license.

Chugworth! is back

ben — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 23:46:46 +0000

In college, I was a fan of a comic called Chugworth Academy. It had good art, interesting stories, and whatnot. Like all webcomics, it eventually started to miss schedule, and even skip weeks. There was even a point in which the server just failed to exist, and yet I still tried to read it. I eventually gave up on it, but added an RSS feed into Liferea just in case it was ever to come back.

Well, the RSS feed I had is still broken, but I happened to stumble upon Chugworth!. It turns out that the authors just completely archived the old comics, and started the site fresh. The new comic picks up around 6 months after the end of the old series, but is supposed to be separate enough that readers do not need to read the previous series. There are only 5 posts up, but it’s looking good. Welcome back guys!

Check out Chugworth! and flip through the old Chugworth Academy archives when you get a chance (warning: some old posts can be NSFW)

Week of catch up

ben — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:03:20 +0000

I am not at work this week, being out in Illinois for Jasig’s Fall 2009 Unconference. If you’ve glanced at my twitter feed you can tell I enjoy collaborating with people in this group.

Mostly for myself, but my goals for the week are:

get some fixes to CAS out for testing
start playing with CAS 3.3.x
personally implement uportal
work on the Glade presentation for next week’s LUG

I’m sure there was more but I am at a conference, and between that and flights that’s still an aggressive list.