December 20, 2015

The catastrophic failure of my download machine

It is indeed a dark and tragic day. The Dell Inspiron that I bought back at the beginning of 2010, that has served as my faithful download machine ever since, went to sleep for the last time. I have no idea what went wrong only that the machine was fine the night before, doing it’s duty in serving up the 60+TB worth of music and media that it stores, only to try and turn it on and find that all the lights had gone out. It wasn’t that the drives had failed or that it wouldn’t boot correctly, it was quite literally pushing the power button did nothing. There was no power to the keyboard or mouse and no signs of life when I tried a different power cord. Normally with a Dell, you get that small rush of power to let you know the machine is alive when you plug it back in. I got no such sign. After […]

December 20, 2015

RightNote Standard and Professional on sale for 50% Off

As I build up a new writing workflow, I need a new tool to replace Microsoft OneNote since it’s still the 2007 version and isn’t getting updated or supported. I’m not going to install the new version of OneNote for a variety of reasons including I don’t like the way it looks and I have privacy concerns in regards to how Microsoft is treating it’s latest apps. Microsoft is getting far too entrenched in this idea that simply because I use one of their apps, whatever I do with it or create with it is somehow theirs. I prefer to keep my data local and I prefer to make sure it stays mine. With that, I have brought in RightNote as my new multi-purpose, multi-tabbed writing environment. Like OneNote, you can create multiple "pages" to organize ideas and separate out topics. From there, each page can have multiple notes in a tree structure that can easily be moved around and […]

December 11, 2015

Open Live Writer – Looks and works just the same as Windows Live Writer

As I mentioned, when I got back to a Windows machines I downloaded the very small (<5MB) Open Live Writer and let it install. As of right now, it’s a very stripped down installer, as in you don’t get to pick any options, but that’s no problem. It copied over just fine, presented the usual blog config dialog box and was up and running in just a minute. From there, it looks just like Windows Live Writer. In fact, if you have the two of them side by side, I doubt you could tell the difference. The layout is the same, the ribbon is the same, and all the buttons and drop downs are in the same place. The UI is the same from 2012 and hasn’t been trashed up to look like Windows 10 yet. Maybe we’ll get lucky and they keep it that way? I’m quite excited over this project and think it’s a big step forward that […]

December 10, 2015

Windows Live Writer resurrects itself as Open Live Writer

Here’s the irony, just as I’m looking for Blog software for the Mac, I come across an article stating that Windows Live Writer is coming back from the dead and has been released as an Open Source project from Microsoft under the name Open Live Wrtier. So, you mean one of the better blogging tools out there isn’t really dead after all? Windows Live Writer launched in 2006 and had some pretty good updates and was a suprisingly usable tool. In fact, it’s still my primary publishing tool, even though the last release was in 2012. It still works with WordPress, so why change? However, it’s been a few years and with all the changes going on, it seems only a matter of time until it stops working, so better get ahead of the curve and see what else is out there. My first port of call was the new WordPress desktop app from WordPress themselves, which looks pretty neat […]

November 30, 2015

Scrivener for Windows and Mac Black Friday/Cyber Monday Sale – $25

As a final offer before the all the festive holiday sales come to an end, if you’re a writer, or an aspiring one, you might want to check out Scrivener which is on sale for $25. That’s around a 50% savings off the regular price. To be honest, I’m not as familiar with Scrivener as I should be. It has long been held as a quality writing tool and is very often mention in November to coincide with National Novel Writing Month (NANOWRIMO). I keep toying with the idea to get a copy and now I simply can’t argue with the price. I think this will couple quite nicely with Notebooks for Windows that I just picked up. I can use Notebooks to write down ideas for articles and then transfer them over to Scrivener if they’re going to take more research and links. The features for Scrivener are simply to numerous to mention, but from everything I can see, […]

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