A Blog of Very Little Brain

Everyone’s probably familiar with CafePress, the ole merchandising haven. The concept is so simple everyone goes “why didn’t I think of it before I ripped them off and got sued off my arse”. Actually, I doubt if there’s any trade secrets there, and if there are, Amazon probably patented it long long time ago.
Anyway, the idea is as follows. You send them a couple of images/designs from your site (or whatever else you want to use), and they create a virtual line of products, e.g. shirts, coffee mugs, hats, mouse pads etc. using your images. The products are actually PODed (Printed On Demand) so there isn’t any backstock or anything, and the store sets a minimum price for you. Everything above that, is your profit. (In a side note, just watched “DS9: Rules of acquisition” and if I hear the words “opportunity”, “profit” or something Ferengi, I’ll go postal.)

It appears there is a local (Israeli, look to the top right box of this site) site that attempts to recreate the concept here, called PrintMall. They are a bunch of very professional, very dedicated people, and after spending an hour in their office, I can tell you your site’s worth(less) merchandise won’t be in better hands than theirs. So if any Israeli guy (or girl, this is a free country) wishes to make some quick bucks, do with the clicking. And just to show you how non-Ferengi I can get, I’m not seeing anything from this.

I’ve been trying some stuff, modifying and correcting.
If things seems to be broken for some reason, do not worry, it’s all going to be alright in the end. Whenever that comes…

I’ve finally given up on jEdit. Too cumbersome, and I’ve not been able to get anything right from that one. I’ve decided to (re)try SciTE (Scintilla Text Editor). It’s much, much lighter than jEdit, and would probably get me kicking in the right direction. Hopefully. The concept here, is, apart from giving me a good text editor (obviously), is that extra mileage I need for Java work. It’s just too damn bothering to do any serious Java coding without some auto-completion aid, and SciTe can be extended in such a manner.
I’ve also been trying out the Opera 9.0 beta both on Windows and GNU/Linux. So far, a good experience. The 8.51 has been crashing too often for my taste. The only actual problem so far is that they changed the New Tab/New Window keyboard configuration. Until now, Opera used Ctrl+N for New tab, while FireFox used Ctrl+T (new Tab), and Ctrl+N for New window. Now Opera use the same thing. It’s a bit of a mess, I keep opening new windows instead of tabs, but those things are just a manner of habit, and it will help me to open less tabs when I use FireFox at work. It also handle gmail better than it used to be (although that’s hardly a breakthrough, it handled it horribly before).

I’ve been playing around with html editors, I’ve most recently been using NVU, and quite like it, however, just recently we’ve started using 1stPage2000 in class, and despite the somewhat old and clunky interface, it seems like a good choice. It’s a textual editor rather than a WYSIWYG (meaning you can only edit text in it, but it gives you a very thorough support for that) but then again I’ve always been one for a more bare-bones approach.

I’ve been also seeking some other CD-rom burning software than Nero. The 7.0 version is just so bloated. I never used anything in it bar the actual Burning Rom part, and now there are so many weird things there (what the hell do I need Nero Scout for, anyway?). Since I’m already been using mostly GnomeBaker anyway, I’ll hold on this one until I can find something small, free and stable.

Whoof. Enough software for one day. Well, one hour, honestly.