Category: Miscellaneous

My favorite #PhotoOfTheDay sites

August 24, 2019

I haven’t written much on this site because I’ve been concentrating mostly on the site I created for Nanci’s Naughties, my Second Life store. If you follow me on Twitter you know there has been some good news lately that I need to post here.

Something else you may know from Twitter is that I have some websites that I hit every day for a Photo of the Day rotation, and I wanted to share them with everyone here so you can have a place to find my list if you find you want to join me in checking out some pretty pictures every day.

I originally found these sites thanks to the Photo of the Day widget created for KDE 4 on Linux. The widget doesn’t work anymore since I upgraded my laptop to KDE 5 on SolydK Linux but I have a page of links I created for my start page so I can continue checking them out every day.

The first site is the Astronomy Photo of the Day. If you love looking up at the stars you need to visit this site often, and they even make it easy for folks who follow them on Twitter.

Next comes Steve’s Digicams with their Photo of the Day contest. Every day you get a picture from around the world. I use a slideshow of photos I find online as my desktop wallpaper (I generally have my laptop busy too often to set up a screensaver) and there are a lot of photos from Steve’s contest in the mix. I could also include them in a screensaver but my laptop is in use so often that I don’t use a screensaver.

Another great compilation comes from National Geographic, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone. NatGeo is known for their gorgeous photography, and their Your Shot program is the source for another folder of amazing photos in my wallpaper rotation. They also have the pictures in their NatGeo Photography Twitter stream, giving you another reason to follow them.

A site that used to be in the app is Wikimedia Commons, but a change to their site broke their part of the KDE app a couple of years ago. They make it easy to check a month worth of pictures, and one of these days I need to get in the habit of checking their site often again.

A non-photo site to hit daily

There’s another site I hit every day, but not to see pretty pictures. FreeKibble.com was created by a then 11-yeard old Mimi Ausland as a way to provide food to animals in shelters. Simply answering fun, one-question quizzes about dogs and cats provides ten pieces of kibble to our furry friends, and there’s even a way to provide litter for the kitties. My bookmark starts with the kitty quiz, and after feeding the felines I provide them with some litter I give the doggos some food, too. Plus you get to learn a little something about our furry friends. It doesn’t cost me a dime, just a little time, and they regularly have double days where you can double the amount of food you provide without doing anything extra.

Mimi recently launched a new site, Free The Ocean, to help clear our oceans of plastic. Every day answering the quiz helps remove one piece of plastic from the ocean. Yeah, it’s not much, but as I write this, people on the site have helped remove over 77,000 pieces of plastic from our oceans. And I’ve learned a little more about the planet I live on, which is always a good thing.

Do you have a Photo of the Day site that you check often? Let me know in the comments and help us all find more beauty to add to our lives.

This site has a new identity

January 2, 2019

As you probably noticed the site is no longer called Words from an Author. This is because I haven’t been doing much writing in a while and it felt wrong to have a site about my writing that isn’t getting written.

The site is now a more general site as I look at both my real life and my adventures in the virtual world Second Life (SL). You’ll still see my updates about life as a trans woman, but I’ll probably be posting more about SL. You can still find my ebooks in the menu at the top of the page, and who knows, there may be an addition to my books at some point.

I’ve also changed the theme for the site, and I may change it again if I find a theme I like better. What won’t change? The URL for the site. It’ll still be jmhardinwrites.wordpress.com. I hope you stick around.

New Year, New SL Digs

January 2, 2019

In addition to buying a new motorcycle, I decided I’d start the new year by getting new land in Second Life so I have the room to use the Novatech Smith II Console Room. I’d prefer to use either the Capaldi version of the room or Jody Whitaker’s new TARDIS, but neither are available for Novatech’s Type 100 TARDIS as of yet. I could use it on my land in Gilum, but I don’t have the prim allotment to use it and a house. (My land in Gilum is for sale, and at what I feel are pretty reasonable prices. I’ll add SLURLs below in case you’re interested.)

The new land is a pair of parcels in Oppeano so I have almost 900 prims available, and it’s right on SL Route 12 so I can ride my motorcycle easily. I tried flattening the land, but my new Key West house from InVerse would either have land poking up in the back or I’d have to rotate the house, which I really didn’t want to have to do. The property faces south, so I’ll get the morning sun in the windows. Between buying the land and buying my new house someone bought the parcel directly to the east of mine, but once I finished setting up my house and finished dinner they realized someone was actually going to use the two parcels west of them and abandoned the property. (Sorry!)

I was going to put a driveway between my house and Temple North, the property to the west of mine, but I couldn’t get it to work very well. Luckily I discovered I have access to the highway on the east side of my property.

The inside of my new house is even nicer than my previous house. Unfortunately, my felines won’t be able to climb the stairs so access to the bedroom and bathroom are all mine. I ended up parking the TARDIS in my entryway, but I may move it to the living room if adding a room to the TARDIS needs more space on my parcel. Directly opposite the TARDIS is a cute fireplace with some plants beside it. There’s no chimney, which I think is an interesting design decision, but I can turn it off if I don’t want to use it.

The sofa’s not much to look at, but I have a free TV to watch once I find something to program into the set. I’m guessing the columns on either side of the TV are cabinets, but I can’t see how to open them so they’re just decoration. It’s ok because they’re pretty just like they are.

At the top of the stairs is my bedroom, complete with a tub behind a screen. I may have to either darken the windows completely when I get in the tub or either put another screen between the tub and window or put up some curtains. I’m not sure how often folks use Temple North but I’d hate to give them a free peep show. The pictures so far have the windows on the Mid Opacity setting, but I realized I needed to turn off opacity completely for the next pictures.

This is the view form my headboard, and you can see how nice the view can be through that big window on the front of the house.

If I move to the railing you can see there’s water not far from my house, and you can see it even better from my front door.

It turns out the beach is just a short flight to abandoned beachfront property in Quilassito, the next region to the south of Oppeano. I may keep my eyes peeled for when it goes on sale or up for auction, but I may just install my pool on the current property.

As I said earlier, I’m selling my two parcels in Gilum since I no longer need them. The smaller parcel on the left is 512 ㎡ and I’m asking L$1500. The parcel on the right is 1024 ㎡ and is L$3000. The property to the left and right is owned by other people so they may want to buy my land when they realize it’s for sale. (When I get notified that either or both parcels have been bought I’ll edit this post to reflect the change.)

If you’re in Second Life feel free to give me a shout. My avatar’s name is Nanci Barthelmess and I’d love to hear from you.

Purry Catmas!

December 24, 2018

I don’t have a picture of Eliza and me for a Catmas card picture but I was able to take a picture of my Second Life avatar and my in-world kitteh for a card so I wanted to share it with everyone.

Purry Catmas from Nanci and Eliza!

For those curious, here are the credits on what everything is. Where possible I provide a link to the item in the SL Marketplace. Otherwise, I’ll provide a link to the in-world store the first time I mention the developer.

I hope everyone has a safe, happy, and love-filled Catmas/Christmas or whatever it is that you celebrate at the end of a year. Just remember, even if you celebrate the holiday all by your lonesome, whether by choice or because your circumstances require it, you are one hell of a creature, and you’re important because nobody else in the world is YOU!

Au revoir, WBZ News

February 7, 2018

When I moved to Boston from New Orleans almost 30 years ago one of the things I had to do was find a local tv station to get my news from. After checking out the options I ended up going with WBZ, the local CBS affiliate. The fact that I watched the news on the CBS affiliate back in New Orleans may have helped, but mostly it was the fact that I liked how WBZ presented the news, both in content and in the anchors and reporters.

But over the last three months or so, I started to become dissatisfied with the WBZ news, mostly because of how many times the news got delayed or flat-out preempted by sporting events on the weekend. Part of it was due to all the coverage of the New England Patriots, a team I’m sick of hearing about in a sport I couldn’t care less about. Yes, WBZ is the official broadcast partner of the Patriots, but while some folks I know refuse to watch the WBZ News because of that fact, I preferred WBZ’s news in spite of it. more “Au revoir, WBZ News” …

One Holiday to Rule Them All

November 21, 2015

(I wrote this for my sister’s site two years ago, and since her site is no longer available I’m reposting it here.)

One Holiday at a Time PleaseLike so many people this time of year, I hate when retailers roll out their Christmas merchandise as soon as Halloween is over. I even made an avatar a couple of years ago that simply asks, “One Holiday at a Time Please.”

When I went into my local CVS the day after Halloween this year to take advantage of the Half Price Chocolate Day specials I was surprised to see that all the space that had been dedicated to Halloween products and candy were now filled with Christmas merchandise, mostly candy. The lone exception was a simple shelf width of Halloween candy. That shelf was empty by the end of the day and Christmas candy had already filled the empty space.

As I was talking to a friend about it that evening I came up with an idea. Instead of having six holidays spread from the start of fall to the end of the year, let’s instead have one big holiday that extends from 31 October to 1 January. The name of this combined holiday?

Hal-giv-hanu-mas-za-year.

I know that’s a mouthful, but it does what retailers want to do anyway and make all these holidays one big celebration and marketing opportunity:

  • Halloween
  • Thanksgiving
  • Hanukkah
  • Christmas
  • Kwanzaa
  • New Year’s Eve

I know people will be angry with me, saying each holiday should be its own celebration, and families can celebrate each individual holiday as they choose to do. But I ask you to look at it from a marketing perspective. This way all new holiday decorations can be created for the continuing holiday and this way we won’t be kvetching because Christmas decorations push out the skeletons and tombstones instead of making turkeys and horns of plenty follow the graveyard decorations. Plus, if you use an advent calendar think about how much fun it will be for the young tykes of all ages with an extra month worth of doors to open. What do you guys think? Are you going to join me in wishing people a

Have a Very Happy Hal-giv-hanu-mas-za-year!

(For those who don’t know me that well, my tongue is quite firmly planted in my cheek, but as Aaron Altman says in Broadcast News, “I’m semi-serious here.”)

Je suis Paris – Je suis humain

November 14, 2015

In support for the people of Paris in the wake of the horrible attacks of 13 November 2013Last night the world was saddened by the terrorist attacks in Paris. As I was listening to coverage while one my way home from the grocery store I decided I wanted to make an avatar that included “Je suis Paris” in support for the city, similar to how so many people said,”Je suis Charlie” after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January.

It took a while to make it, after finally finding how Facebook was allowing people to add the French Tricolor to their profile pictures. A few hours before I heard that some were using “Je suis Paris”  but others were using “Je suis humain,” because it wasn’t just Paris values that were attacked but human ones as well.

I’ll be making this picture my profile picture on all the social networking and forum sites I’m on, and I want to help others use the text as well. I can’t help you with getting your image tinted with the Tricolor, but you can download this png image, a 720×720 image with a transparent background that you can use in your favorite image editor to add it to any picture you care to use it with. I’m publishing it with a Creative Commons attribution 4.0 International license. If you want to share the file I created all I ask is that you give me the credit for creating it, but you are completely free to do anything you want with any images you create with it.

 

As an aside, I find that France 24 has the best coverage of the attacks, and the link goes to the English version. There is also a French version (bien sûr) and there is also an Arabic version available. Both are available from the page I’m linking to.

Je suis Paris et Humaine (layer)
Creative Commons License
Je suis Paris et Humaine by J.M. Hardin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.