I just wanted to take a second to mention a fantastic Google tool that most people don’t seem to know about. Google Alerts allow you to be notified by email every time there are new search results for keywords you have specified. There are some settings to help filter your results and you can also decide how often and in what format (individual emails or digest) your notifications are delivered. You have to be somewhat specific with your keywords or your mailbox will be overflowing within minutes. I set up an Alert based on the term “iPhone” with no filtering and a day later my mailbox was so full that Outlook locked up and I had a max capacity warning from my hosting provider…oops. However, if you set up an Alert for “Crestron” or “touchpanel design” and you limit your results to blogs and news items, you will undoubtedly start getting useful information as soon as it becomes available. Just try to resist the temptation to set up an Alert for all new “American Idol” news and your mailbox should be okay. Additionally, if you are an avid Twitterer, Google Alerts are a great way to find useful, up-to-date topics to Tweet about. You will need a Google account to use Alerts, but quite frankly, if you don’t have one yet, you’re missing out on all kinds of excellent, free tools and services.
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This little nugget of ingeniousness is going to pay for my early retirement. The idea came to me as I was sprinting to my mailbox in the freezing rain the other day to get my latest Netflix deliveries. I thought to myself, what if the mail carrier could just load my movies for me at the mailbox? It seems silly at first, but after all, that’s what people said about Netflix in the beginning also.
- The Mailbox DVD Player in action (prototype, of course)
At first, I thought of simply duct-taping an “el cheapo” dvd player to the mailbox, but then I figured, why not have a mailbox with the dvd player built in? It could be completely discrete, the disc drawer wouldn’t even be visible when it was closed. Security would be no problem because the entire unit would be built out of half-inch titanium (I don’t even know if that’s possible or if it would actually increase the security of the thing, I just wrote it because it sounded cool and I don’t feel like doing Google research on titanium right now…this whole post is a joke anyway, so don’t leave me some uber-nerd comment about how titanium wouldn’t work for whatever reason). Your mail carrier would have a user-definable “pin” that he or she could enter to open the drawer. Once the movie is loaded, all control of the unit is handled via rs-232 by your control system of choice from inside the house. The single-disc model is shown here, but a 6-disc changer version would also be available for Netflix subscribers who receive more than one movie at a time.
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We’ve got the “downloads” area of the NTDesigns website back up. Some of the stuff is from the old downloads page and there are a few new items too like the “Amber Plastic Icons”. I hope you find these useful.
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NTDesigns new partner site, The Button Zone, is finally online. The site
offers a variety of web buttons in an array of shapes and sizes at very
reasonable prices. All of the graphics are delivered in .png format for
ultimate versatility. We created the site in response to a large number of
requests for raw graphics as opposed to complete templates. We hope you
will stop by the site and check out what it has to offer. The site and it’s
offerings will continue to grow and we would love to hear your suggestions.
After all, the best ideas come from the folks who use the stuff on a day to
day basis!
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The official NTDesigns blog is up and running. It will help us keep you updated as to what we’re up to here at the shop and when new products are released. More importantly though, I am excited about the opportunity to share some of our collective knowledge with you to help with your own projects. As is the case with many technology based trades, interface design and development is learned largely through online tutorials and knowledge bases. So, because we have learned much of what we know this way, we want to share as much as possible through this blog. I hope you will let us know what you think as this page grows.
Also, please add our RSS feed so you can stay up to date.
Thanks,
Aaron Craig
Owner
NTDesigns
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