I like a wallet you can throw across a room without it garage-saling everything out. Also one that can handle a friendly interaction with the ground when the inevitable skateboard or bike crash happens. These beauties are 99% recycled seatbelt, bike inner tube and advertising banners. They have pockets for cards, coins and a bill fold for the crisp cash.

I have named them the ‘Stiglitz’ wallet after a personal hero, who is also keen on keeping cash safe.

When I bought my T61p from the USA i could bring it in at around half the price of the same machine online through Lenovo NZ. So it was with surprise that I saw really competitive pricing on the NZ site.  Yeehaaa. Dell has astonished me in the past with their (lack of) customer service, especially with a XPS Merle had which had well documented  design flaws they refused to take responsibility for.  If you know you’ve made a bad mistake in a product surely the length of warranty should be extended?

I was even more impressed that during ordering online I rang the 0800 number with a technical question and got a very helpful woman, I think in NZ or maybe Aussie, who obviously knew the product inside out.

Ontop off all this when the laptop arrived  it had excellent low key, recyclable packaging (see below). Which considering the machine is to be used in a packaging campaign is very apt.

Lenovo laptop packaging, simple, elegant, recyclable.

Inkscape is excellent. Once you get used to the key commands and find the necessary tools it is just mind bogglingly good for this sort of thing. I find the gradient editor to be better than Adobe and the path smoothing and triangle in/out is great. The Gui – especially for text spacing, on path isn’t as sweet as Adobe – but it does everything I need.

Also this week I installed a couple of work stations at Wastebusters. I have been fighting pretty hard to get Ubuntu in here as I believe it aligns with the Wastebusters values and seriously save some money over time. After a year or two I finally gave in and did my first ever POWERPOINT presentation, well actually done in Openoffice. This bored everybody into submission and I got my way, wow those presentations really work!

Using Ubuntu has allowed me to sneek in Openoffice as standard and lower ths cost of hardware over Windows 7. I got a couple of Lenovo M52 high quality dual core desktops for $250 each. So far both people using the workstations are very happy, Ubuntu feels like a real step up from Windows XP and stability has improved.

I’ve been saying it for years but I think we are just round the corner of some widespread adoption of some of this software. As more business computing heads into the clouds all you really need is a solid internet enabled PC and Ubuntu excels, ontop of that you get all the growing goodness of free software on Linux – Inkscape, Openoffice etc etc.

Disclaimer: I am not by any means an illustration guru, and only use the most basic features of an application. Most of my work in the past has been in Freehand or Illustrator.

The first is a set of three custom bags for Sisu Software in Wellington and their Dell 5500 laptops. These have custom printed panels with their logo, are padded and have a bicycle inner tube reinforced corners. They came out really well and now I just need to find some time to make one for me.

While sitting at the sewing machine I had an epiphany about a new design using the “Loop” for a wallet from seatbelts (have been trying to find new seatbelt uses for a while). The photo shows prototype #2, I think #4 or #5 will be useful and #6 or #7 perfect :-)

Merle and I have also been tapping away at the Loopcase site – it almost has enough stuff in it to warrant a new theme I think…or at the very least a tidy up.

I really like having a separate case for the laptop/mouse/power adapter to my pack or other bag. Having a laptop in with my soup pot or tape measure and pliers I seem to carry around doesn’t feel right. So this format – a padded sleeve with front pocket for the peripherals works really well. You can always throw it in another bag if needs be.

The result is “Loopcase” – the intention being a range of recycled material camera cases and shoulder bags. That in itself isn’t particularly new or exciting, but the closure, finish and general um … je ne sais quis? May well be. I am especially stoked with the compact camera cases.

I appreciated that what people want with their websites is…for it to work. With this in mind I am not out to confuse with high level server megaflops and a zillion features but rather to offer:

• Super stable and secure web hosting – hassle free
  
• New Zealand based servers which are faster for kiwis, unless you are internationally focused in which case a US server or European
• Great service, and an actual real person you can talk to
• Fair pricing, actually: a real bargain
• Help when you need it. Advice on improving your site and design/coding input if it is ever needed

I’ll make a zingy feature table sometime – but for now the plans look like this:

Please note:

Yes! You can get a server at Godaddy with a hell of a lot more of everything. You will not however be able to ring up a clever local web expert who can help you sort out your problems and give you sage advice on how you could make your website better, reduce your costs or increase your business productivity using the web.

This week I loaded up the new version 0.47 and tested it out on a few small, odd tasks I had to do. Strangely these did not include drawing which is Inkscapes strength.

• Extracting pages from a PDF
  I like to fill out forms on the computer as opposed to printing, hand writing, scanning and emailing. If you are lucky enough to have Illustrator or Indesign this is relatively easy. Inkscape now extracts single pages from a PDF, you can then lock that into a layer and type over the top – even place your pre-scanned signature. Inkscape performed this seamlessly. Excellent!
• Outputting as PDF
  I had a logo to output and my experience with PDF export in Inkscape has been sketchy in the past, crashing the application and strange clipping in some object fills. This time is was as fast and beautiful as I could have wanted. Again Excellent!

So… along with the excellent drawing main feature set Inkscape is an excellent PDF editor (at least for single pages).

No all I need is Google to put out a Linux edition of Sketchup. Please. Pretty please.