I'm not knocking the Potter Fanchise, but I thought this was amusing: [image: harry_potter[1].jpg]

The problem I have with "single world" anything is that it has nothing at all to do with the people or the world, or making the world a better place. There is no altruistic reason for this, no reason to stop war, no halt to genocide, no cessation of doing all the stupid things humanity has done for a thousand years. If they wanted to create such a world, why not make it for free education? Free health care? Jobs for all? Stop the production of arms and ammunition worldwide? I figure this is every bit as reasonable as a centralized world government. The reality is: It's about money. It's about business. It's about greed. It puts all the power and money in the hands of a few and makes it easier for businesses and commercial entities to access and control the flow of goods and resources around the world. Unless a "New World Order" includes a system to level the playing field for all peoples, it serves no purpose other than the aforementioned. Even if it did, it would never work; if a system of government like that actually worked, we would have started using it a long time ago.

@dyppmo said: I'm not sure why the last 2 images have a black background when uploaded but I'm not going to fix it right now. Sorry but I can't contribute any meaningful just about this; the thumbnails of png files with transparent backgrounds, when made by the forum software, always show up like this. Don't worry about them.

@ Malaise Même chose avec un ventilateur et une éolienne! Same thing with a fan and a wind turbine! [image: ventillo.jpg]

That's just crap. The words are intelligible they sound in such a way that you can probably come up with dousins of versions of the lyrics,

It appears Wave won't be happening until closer to the end of the year. @unknownuser said: on September 30th, Google will start sending out about 100,000 invites for the next version of Google Wave. via http://mashable.com/2009/07/21/google-wave-invites/

Hi, That 2mm Aluminium would do the job. As for designing the box, that would be the easy part, it's the fabrication that'll cause the real hear scratching! But if you go with the "make you own" method, give me a shout if your stuck. Bending metal is part of my working day and I even have formulas for flat patterns. I think I'm what you call old school

Thanks Chris, Between your, and Modelhead's post, I am no longer downloading files from that site. I have been experimenting with ways to us MS's blog features to store images, and videos. Some how they picked up on my storing videos, and currently block my uploads. Funny how normal images are OK but video's are not. If I hadn't upgraded Win Live Writer, I might have been OK. Oh well, its their prerogative

In honor of the anniversary of the first landing on the moon I thought I would post this space capsule. This is the same capsule the Russian Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, flew in 1961. Spartan even by early Apollo standards, he was lucky to get back alive, many early space pioneers did not. [image: volstok4.jpg]

$260,000. I know I can do better. I 've caused that much damage just on my own house!

If you just want to put text effects over still images or maybe a slideshow with various transitions effects, rather than actual movie footage, you could consider something like Swish...Flash without the pain. The effects can be quite sophisticated and virtually drag and drop. You could then export as avi and splice into whatever animation you already have. http://www.swishzone.com/index.php?area=products&product=max&tab=demos

I love fish pies! Have tried that very receipe myself. Although it was a disaster. I have no culinary talents...

I am out of a job too but luckily going back to uni in September. Right I am taking the opportunity to learn Rhino and Grasshopper. Maybe you could take a course in something you've always wanted to learn? Just a suggestion.

Bob, you are welcome. Dylan, hope you will model it , also the germans had something interesting on rails in WWII, here it is: [image: http://www.the-blueprints.com/blueprints-depot/trains/trains-0-9/280mm-kanone-5-e-leopold.gif]

I really like the intuitive way of drawing in Sketchup. Microsoft tries to copy it for their own program, but I haven't ever found something similar for linux. There seems to be no way to do 3d on linux (assumed that I do not want/not have the time to learn blender). My following thought might be absurd or insane: What if Sketchup would have always been open source? How would we feel in modeling or suggesting new ideas or reporting bugs to be fixed? Graphic cards to be supported and so on... Currently, Google does not put much resources into developing SU, which forces us to include everything with slow/sluggish plugins (for additional features, plugins are ok, but not for missing basic functions). There are not much progresses for the main application, it is intended that Sketchup is extended by the community. I'm myself very skeptical about this and don't know if it would be really preferable, but maybe one time, they will clean up there profile (SU is no web app)...

Shawn Tennant worked on turning his PSP into a render engine, running Linux, and then be able to turn many of them into a render farm. I think he succeeded to some extent. I used to have about 4 machines hooked up at home as a mini render farm. It is remarkably useful. Its nice to be able to send a render of to other machines and keep working without the render hogging all resources. Chris

There is an option within microsoft for office 2007 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en agrazdi

Here is a video of how he made it...These two videos even made it into the Sketchupdate! http://sketchupdate.blogspot.com/2009/07/he-made-music-video-with-sketchup.html [flash=480,295:1tht3y39]http://www.youtube.com/v/FIwf7Wzrn4k&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0[/flash:1tht3y39]

Still in the process of scanning all the albums, scrapbooks and loose photos my parents have collected in their 70 plus years, I'll tell ya that fiddling with the photos on the bed so Photoshop Elements 5 could recognize the gaps (and you must leave decent gaps) so it can separate the pictures out of a scan bed full was too much hassle. Not enough contrast on the edges of photos, like those with light skies, made this an impossible job for Elements to handle. My HP 6210 all-in-one printer/fax/copier/scanner helps me sit and scan as many as two hundred photos in a day (long day though), a scan bed full at a time without restarting the software. It'll stay open for me to continue adding more pictures and when I finish the batch on the glass, I just hit new scan and repeat selecting each photo by double clicking in the center of the photo usually or use the box to narrow down to one photo like using a crop tool and move that box to the next photo when done capturing it. When done with a batch, the software will save them all in a format I choose in a numbered sequence. Even if you run some software that causes a crash while scanning, the files scanned in the middle of a batch are in a temp folder in bmp format to recover manually. Worked great for the over 4,000 photos I've scanned so far. Next come slides and 8mm films... Thank goodness for audio books as they keep me from getting bored while my hands do the loading, unloading and pushing buttons.

Hows this? Select the capture method, dig the window, and save to file. [image: temp.jpg]