Whether you’re a professional graphic artist or someone that just dabbles with creating or modifying graphics on your computer the best tool to help you out, besides traveling back in time and apprenticing yourself to Leonardo da Vinci, is a graphics tablet.

Sure you can get along just fine without one but since the price of tablets have come down over the years what’s stopping you from giving one a try? Used to be even the small 4″x5″ tablets would set you back hundreds of dollars, but usually you can find even top-branded Wacom 4x5’s for $40-50 on sale these days! I say if it’s a gadget that’s under a hundred smackers it deserves a try to see if you’ll like it. Besides, if you don’t like it you can always take it back and get a refund, so it’s all good.

A few years back my good friend [let’s call her L to help protect her identity] gave me a Wacom Graphire3 tablet. She knew I used to draw a lot (I dabbled) so she bought me the tablet and gave it to me for Christmas. She figured since I knew how to draw I should be able to adapt to using a tablet and I did pretty freaking easily if I must say so myself. I love it! It was a 4x5 tablet, which is a good enough size for someone like me to use with easy. Larger tablets cost far more money and to be blunt, only die-hard professionals need such large and expensive units.

Using a tablet makes a lot of things easier, especially anything that requires free and fluid motions or precision. A tablet can definitely take the place of a mouse with practice not just for graphic applications like Photoshop but for using the computer too. Tablets can usually be used just like a mouse even outside the graphics application and it’s much easier on the hands. It can definitely help people who suffer from carpal tunnel, arthritis and other ailments that affect the wrist or hands.

I currently use a combination of my mouse and tablet to do my graphics work, depending on what I’m doing. If I need finer control then I definitely use my tablet. I really can’t tell you how using my Wacom helps me with creating or editing graphics; you’ll just have to try one out for yourself and see.

One word of warning though, pay attention to certain tablet specs like resolution and levels of sensitivity; the greater the better. And it’s best not to be lulled by chintzy no-named super-low priced tablets out there. Stick to name brands; it’ll save you a world of hurt. If you see a much larger no-name tablet going for the price of a Wacom 4x5, well you know the saying if it sounds too good to be true… don’t bother. In the words of Admiral Akbar from Star Wars: IT’S A TRAP!

I hug my tablet daily (as well strangers passing by on the street) and I’m sure if you gave one a try you would love it. So get out there people, there’s yet another shiny, geek gadget to buy!!!

Millions of people shop online every day and millions of people are wasting vast amounts of time, collectively as they wait for a store’s weekly ads to load up. As internet speeds have increased over the years, good optimized web design has sadly decreased. Slow-loading web pages are the norm filled to the brim with lots of graphics, javascript, flash or multimedia elements which clog the tubes that make up the Internet.

Former United States Senator, Ted Stevens from Alaska tried to warn us all about cramming too much into those tubes that make up the Net on that fateful day, June 28 2006 with these prophetic words:

“They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”

Like Al Gore’s Global Warming warning *cough* nosuchthing*cough*, Ted Steven’s cries of alarm rang in deaf ears. The Internet tubes continue to be overstuffed and clogged worse and worse these days. Which causes delays and makes us wait and wait and wait for valuable information like sports scores, random clips of the Daily Show, Twitter entries ad infinitum and oh yeah, perusing through weekly ads in freaking Flash.

Flash requires more bandwidth than simple HTML does and we all pay the price waiting for it all to load up so we can graphically flip through pages. Which is ridiculous. Why wait for graphical representations of page flipping when all we want is to see the ad pages themselves?

If you go to just about any retailer like Best Buy, Staples, Office Depot or Office Max after you click on their Weekly Ads there’s usually a Dialup or HTML mode option. Clicking on this time-saving option will present to you the ad pages you want to see in a fraction of the time the flash/broadband animated bloat option does. This saves you time. Not only that but it saves everyone time. Which helps keep those Internet tubes unclogged and working great for everyone. And that’s a good thing.

You want those ad pages to load faster right? You want to keep the Internet tubes unclogged right? Trust me, you don’t want to have to take a plunger to the Internet, do you? It’s much much filthier than a backed up toilet on Burrito Tuesday… *shudder* ack! Trust me.

Keep those Internet tubes clog-free and load those store ads much faster by choosing the Dialup/HTML option when viewing Weekly Ads. Why waste your valuable time waiting when you could be perusing and finding those latest bargains?

The vast differences between PCs, Macs and Linux Boxes: A Graphical But True Representation

Do you agree with the above depiction about the different computer OS’s? Why? Why not? Seriously it took me a while to make that graphic up, the least it can do is get the discussion going. It’s OK to disagree, but applause is still the coin o’the realm…

The PC vs Mac (or Mac vs PC) debates are silly, as I’ve previously mentioned. But for new computer users, how do you make the choice between a Mac or a PC? Like a good geek, I try to do what I can to help you first time upcoming computer users make a complex decision as simple as possible:

No need to thank me, I’m happy to help any way I can.

Seriously though the issue is a complex one. What did you decide? Which do you use? PC? Mac? Linux? Etch-A-Sketch? Abacus? Commodore 64? Why did you choose what you’re using over the other choices out there? Or are you using a mix? Inquiring minds want to know what you use and why.

My geek heart skipped a few beats when I stumbled upon a joint venture between Google Books and Popular Science, which allows anyone to view EVERY SINGLE Popular Science Magazine ever published online for free!

If you don’t know what Popular Science magazine is, I feel very sorry for you; just like I feel sorry for anyone that didn’t see Star Wars when it first came out in the movie theaters. Popular Science magazine is the ultimate geek mag, dealing in what’s coming up in science and technology. Everything a modern-day geek likes was in it’s pages from the time it first came out, well over a century ago.

Before the internet, before computers, before planes, video games or automobiles, there was Popular Science! Don’t be sad if you weren’t there from the beginning, it’s never too late to enjoy PopSci in all it’s online glory!

Thanks to Google Books and PopSci (they like to sound trendy to the kids today), you can see all 137 years of Popular Science’s mags for free. No, I’m not kidding, they’ve been printing these geek mags for 137 freaking years! No lie. Honest Injun! They first started publishing in 1872!

You can either go to Google Books and do a search for Popular Science (I did an advanced search for magazines only with the title of Popular Science) or head on over to PopSci’s online archives site. Heading over to this site though will not allow you to go to a specific magazine issue, you have to do a keyword search. Which will bring up any articles pertaining to what you searched for like girls, plutonium, tanks, girls, motorcycle or yeah girls. Once at an article you can browse the whole magazine if you want exactly as it was published including the ads! (A cool trip through time!)

Popular Science is a great magazine and is definitely geek-worthy of reading. In fact, to claim geek status you have to have read at least 10-50 years of PopSci. There’s a test too.

So head on over, some of you’ve got a lot of catching up to do!

Since I took on this self-imposed tech version of the Julie/Julia project, posting 365 Worth The Geek Read™ entries all by my lonesome in a year, I’m using graphics a lot more. I used to put images in every other post and I liked how that looked. However since I’m doing a lot more now I try to think of appropriate imagery to go along with just about every post now, to break up all that text.

I look for nice ways to make it easier on myself and my ever-emerging Photoshop talent. Most of the stuff here I either did or modified to make it more suited to my purpose. My evil nefarious purpose.

Bwa-haha-haha-haha-haha-ha! HA!

However, I still want to make it as easy as possible on myself. After all, if I don’t who will?

**cricket chirp**

That’s what I thought. Enter today’s image of an iPad (ie The Etch-A-Sketch 0.2 by Apple) converted to ASCII courtesy of a fun site called picascii.com. THANKS picascii!

If you want to convert any image to ASCII (stop pretending you don’t know what ASCII is you goofballs) all you have to do is either enter the URL of the image to picascii or click the Browse button to select an image on your hard drive. Enter size desired (1 is smallest, 5 largest and you can figure out 2-4 on your own), check the COLOR box if you want the ASCII image to be color and click the Generate button and POOF! there’s your ASCII converted image. Picascii also give you the code as TEXT or HTML so you can copy and paste it into whatever program or message board you’d like.

It’s nice and simple. So simple a caveman can do it™. And if a caveman can do it well then so can you, Billy boy! Yeah, I know the odds of your name being Billy is slim but hey, imagine the look on Billy’s face when he reads this!

*waves*

HI BILLY!

Anyways, please feel free to point your webby browsie lookie thingamobob to picascii.com and have fun experimenting. ASCII art rules!

(Anyone think the ASCII iPad looks better than the real one? Hmmm…)