Week 15 Tech Tip: Image Resizing

This is from a painting I found on Wikipedia Commons. It is called Harbor Scene: An English Ship with Sails Loosened Firing a Gun and is attributed to Peter Monamy, placing its date of creation some time in the late 17th to mid-18th century. I chose this image because sailing ships are cool!

Week 14 Tech Tip: URL Shortener

Black Gate is a fantasy fiction blog that I frequent a lot since it has a lot of useful information on the genre, great book recommendations, and helpful advice on the topic of writing in general. The URL isn't particularly long, but since it's a website I visit a lot, I thought it wouldn't  hurt to get it shortened.

The result was that I went from this:  

www.blackgate.com

To this:

http://goo.gl/MBCL5G

I guess in this case they couldn't think of a way to shorten it any more, so they gave me a slightly longer and more complicated link to remember. I think I'll stick with the original URL for this one.

Week 13 Tech Tip: Google Timer

I normally try to designate specific times for when I want to stop studying and start studying. However, since the times are just things I make up as I go, I tend to ignore my time goals and procrastinate for a prolonged period of time. This timer feature sounds like it could be a really easy and simple to set up way of better enforcing the amount of time I spend studying and taking breaks. It also  might be useful for when I'm writing, since it's important to be disciplined so as not to get drawn away from the keyboard or to some random time-wasting site when I should be focusing on the writing project.

Week 11 Tech Tip: Google Define Tech Tip

For this tech tip I looked up the etymology of . . .  etymology!

Since the screenshot is not coming out in good quality I'll just link to the page at etymononline instead here: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=etymology

It's originally a combination of the Greek words etymos and logia. Cool!

Google Search Tech Tip

So my storybook is covering the adventures of Sigurd the Volsung, so I decided to do a site-specific google search for one of the legendary swords associated with the Volsung lineage, Balmung. Balmung was a sword wielded by Sigurd's father Sigmund in some of the stories centered around him (Gram was originally the sword of Sigmund and Sigurd in the earliest tales about the Volsungs from what I understand). The top result after I did the search led me to one of the chapters from a book called Teutonic Myth and Legend. The chapter is entitled "Siegfried and the Nibelungs," and it focuses on one of the episodes in the life of Siegfried. Here's the link.

Painting of Sigmund by Arthur Rackham (1909) (Wikipedia)

Youtube Tech Tip

Best Cat Jump Ever JUMPS OVER BABY GATE

Google Search-by-Image Tech Tip

So I chose a picture of Geronimo to do my Google mystery image search:

Photo of Apache freedom fighter Geronimo taken in 1887 (Wikipedia)

For more information on Geronimo, one  need look no further than the Wikipedia article on him.

Blogger Templates Tech Tip

For my new template, I chose one of the Awesome Inc. designs. This design features a nice green and cream color scheme (totally wasn't going for the rhyme there), with red lettering for titles and important words. The menu bar with my labels on it is very visible and easy to read, and looks better than the one in the more plain template I originally had. I don't have much experience with blogging, so I don't know what passes for a good template, so I can only go off what looks good to my unschooled eyes. In my case, I found the pleasant-looking but unobtrusive color scheme and the use of red to highlight important things like hyperlinks to be very good qualities.

D2L Profile Tech Tip

I've been using this picture on D2L for quite a while now. It's a rather somber-looking picture of me when I was in Fayetteville, Arkansas last spring (don't let my expression fool you, I had a great time while I was there). I don't have any particularly special reason for choosing this picture. It just happened to be the most recent picture of myself that I had on hand at the time.

(Image Information: Screenshot from a Christians on Campus Slideshow made in Spring of 2014)