DC member Eric Wong (VideoInPicture) has been on fire lately creating all sorts of cool new utilities.  This one is bound to be useful to some people, especially with its high degree of customizability..

http://easyunicodepaster.wikidot.com

September 4th, 2008

• Version 2.0 of Easy Unicode Paster is released.
  
• The structure of the program has been changed. The Config.ini file is now separate from the character sets used.
  
• Includes over 100 different character sets.
  
• Access all the character sets from within Easy Unicode Paster.
  
• Utilizes a table of "buttons" for better performance and a cleaner look.
  
• Program will automatically change the layout of the table according to how much space is available. It makes it so that you only have to scroll vertically when there is not enough room to display all the items.
  
• Has support for pasting multiple characters with one button. See the "Example Character Set.ini" file in the "Character Sets" folder for details.
  
• The items on the toolbar and the context menu have been tweaked. Gone is the option to make EUP not topmost because this was not a very useful option in practice.

With this release, I firmly believe that Easy Unicode Paster is one of the best and easiest to use unicode character maps out there and can compete with products that charge for something similar. All the other character maps I have tried have failed in their ease of use or how the program operates. Easy Unicode Paster pastes unicode characters in whatever document you are working with using just 1 click for one character.

This weekend kicks off the first Great International Newsletter Project.

What is it?
In celebration of traditional communities brought together by the printing press, the Great International Newsletter Project is an effort to encourage people to make contact with their neighbors by creating an actual printed newsletter.


How do you participate?
Simply put, create a new newsletter this weekend:

• Do you live in a school dorm? Start a newsletter for your hallway, your floor, or your building.
• Do you live in a condo? Start a newsletter for your apartment building.
• Do you live in a big family? Start a newsletter with family news and gossip.
• Do you have a favorite band no one has ever heard about? Start a fanzine newsletter about them.
• Do you have strange political or philosophical views? Start a newsletter about it.
• Do you live in a small town or a small neighborhood? Start a newsletter about it.

It doesn't have to be anything fancy -- a double sided single sheet of paper would be fine for your first issue.  Use a newspaper front page as your model -- make sure you have headlines, bylines, a title and a date.  Put your address and email on it somewhere so people can write to you to subscribe.  But it *must* be distributed in printed form to qualify!


Get it out there!
The only qualification for a "successful" newsletter is one that gets printed and shared.  If you have friends already who want to help, great -- but if you don't then let people know on the newsletter how to get involved.

Writer Cory Doctorow has an important blog essay up today about the downsides of writers trying to solicit payments directly from readers to support their work.

The essay touches on many of the issues I raised in my article on the first year of DonationCoder and our attempt to set up a donation-funded website here.

To concretize the metaphor: I don’t care about making sure that everyone who gets a copy of my books pays me for them — what I care about is ensuring that the everyone who would pay me decent money for a book has the opportunity to do so. I don’t want to hold 13-year-olds by the ankles and shake them until their allowance falls out of their pockets, but I do want to be sure that when their parents are thinking about a gift for them, the first thing that springs to mind is my latest $20-$25 hardcover...

More well thought out stuff worth excerpting about how the relationship changes when you ask for money, and not always in a good way..

http://www.locusmag....w-macropayments.html

A new publicly available memory stick of sorts is capable of downloading the entire contents of a mobile phone's memory simply by plugging it in.

http://news.cnet.com...wsEditorsPicksArea.0

If someone asks to borrow your cell phone, or you leave it unattended, beware!

Unless you actually watch them use it, they may be secretly grabbing every piece of your information on the device, even deleted messages. If you leave your phone sitting on your desk, or in the center console of your car while the valet parks it, then you and everyone in your contacts list may be at risk, to say nothing of confidential e-mails, spread sheets, or other information. And of course, if you do not want your spouse to see who you are chatting with on your phone, you might want to use extra caution.

A UK ISP tells of phishers who are cold-calling people, accusing them of piracy and insisting they pay up.

http://www.theregist...ingement_phone_scam/

Fraudsters have begun cold-calling householders to accuse them of copyright infringement online and threaten them with court action, an ISP has reported.

The development comes soon after the law firm Davenport Lyons won a widely-reported £16,000 default court award for a videogames firm from an alleged filesharer. Davenport Lyons followed up the default judgement by telling newspapers that it had identified 25,000 more targets that it would take to court if they did not pay a £300 settlement.

Diaries written by 4 historical figures, written in code and now deciphered.

The 300,000-word journal of Charles Wesley, the co-founder of the Methodist movement, which was written in an obscure shorthand, has been solved and the diary transcribed. It has taken nine years.
...
Beatrix Potter: The only surviving entries of this diary are between 1881 and 1897. Unlike other secret diaries - which held secrets that could ruin careers or cost lives - this diary was personal, expressing feelings that she wished to hide.

http://news.bbc.co.u..._7586000/7586683.stm