If you follow the fun-filled world of computing, you’ve probably heard that Microsoft announced the next version of Windows on September 30th. During their event, Microsoft showed off a few of their biggest features, and released a public beta. If you’re a Windows fanboy like me, you can download in install it through Microsoft from here.
Month: October 2014
To borrow a definition from MIT, affective computing is computing that relates to, arises from, or deliberately influences emotion or other affective phenomena. Anything that recognizes, analyzes, simulates, or interacts with human emotion generally falls under this term. Does it sound a little far-fetched for your computer to understand your emotions? Well, it may not be. There is already software that can understand emotion based on facial expression or voice intonation. In fact, a quick search should give you many, many different programs that do this.
For a quick and easy effect in Adobe Illustrator, the Image Trace feature offers a way to convert a photo or similar image into a vector trace of colors and shapes.
The gradient tool can be accessed from the main menu by going to “Window > Gradient”. Here, I have drawn a square shape which we will apply the gradient effects on.
The pencil tool is a great tool for creating freeform shapes and lines in Adobe Illustrator.
Following the shape tools is a menu which offers several tools for creating different types of lines and strokes.
In this tutorial, we will learn about the basic tools for creating shapes in Adobe Illustrator.
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Choosing the right editor
Microsoft Word and its open source counterparts are excellent at creating nice looking documents. No one wants to give potential employers a resume written in raw ASCII. However, sometimes you need to work on files at a much lower level than office programs will allow. For that reason, there are a number of text editors out there that are worth looking into depending on what you want to do.
There are a lot of humans on our planet – over 7 billion humans, in fact. And with a lot of people, comes a lot of waste. The average “life expectancy” of an electronic device (computers, phones, tablets, TVs) is only about three years. Of course we throw away our devices when they break, but most of this e-waste is due to upgrades and replacements. Do we need to upgrade our phone every couple of years? Probably not. Do we upgrade it anyway? Of course.
Have you had trouble finding a good site to help you create a bibliography? Tired of hunting down pieces of information about your source? Or maybe you’re not sure if you have enough information in your citations. Now there is an answer to all of your questions and that answer is Zotero. Zotero creates citations for you at the click of a button! It allows you to store your citations in folders or libraries for organization and upon registering with an email and password(for free) you can access your citations across multiple devices!
Encryption is the process of using a code to change a message into something that only the intended receiver can decode back into the original message. This was originally done with manual methods such as a Caesar Cipher, with tactics gradually becoming more and more advanced until World War II when the first computers were used to first break, and in later years make, codes so advanced no human could decode them alone. Now, encryption isn’t just reserved for military use but is instead used to keep our data safe every day online.
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Mobile Malware
Modern smartphones are becoming more and more like portable computers, which has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is obvious; having the functionality of a computer at your fingertips. The disadvantage is less obvious; there are some security compromises involved.
Have you been running your computer and has it been getting slower and slower to run? Do you you get any corrupted files, or unable to read files errors? If so, then Windows has something that will help you troubleshoot and fix problems on your computer. That something is a program called “CHKDSK” (check disk).
Have you ever dreamed of designing your own website? By taking advantage of the free and discounted software offered by IT User Services your dream may be closer than you think. One of the best tools available for website design is Adobe Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver gives users the ability to design and edit webpages using HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, etc. The software is available through the Adobe Campus Agreement for select faculty, staff, and students. You can see if you are eligible for the program by logging in at : http://www.oit.umass.edu/support/software/adobe-campus-agreement-no-cost-software-faculty-staff