Hi folks. Guess what: my girlfriend is on America's Got Talent this year! And now she's in the semifinals, holy cow. Her name is Abigail Baird, she's an acrobat, and her act is called Aerial Animation. Here's her first audition a couple months ago:


She has been working incredibly hard on this and it's pretty amazing to see her dedication and perseverance. She's been a professional acrobat and teacher for a number of years now and she has been getting by on earnings from teaching acrobatics to kids and the gigs she has been able to get here and there (it turns out making a living as an acrobat is hard!), but this could be an opportunity to perform full-time and it's tremendously exciting.

I've been pretty quiet around here lately, I have to minimize my DC time because otherwise it'll take most of my *free* time. But I still consider you guys part of my Internet family and this remains one of the best communities around, so I'm excited to share this moment in my life. I know some of you have already seen Abigail on the show, so hopefully it's interesting to know she's a distant DC cousin, in a way.

Abigail will be be on the live show again for the semifinals coming up August 26th, and she'll need votes to continue. If you're already watching the show, vote for your favorites, but maybe put a couple of your votes in for her even if she's not your top pick. If you weren't already watching, then you weren't going to vote anyway, right? So I figure you might as well give her *all* your votes. There are 3 ways to vote and you get 10 points for each voting method. But I'll go into all that a bit more in an update early next week before the show.

Anyway, I've been encouraged to post about this by mouser and other DC'ers, but in the spirit of community involvement I also want to open this up a bit more widely. Because as it turns out at least one other DC'er has an upcoming brush with fame (you know who you are), and maybe there are more! So if you've been on a talent show before, or have an appearance/audition upcoming, or you just have a talent you want to showcase, let 'er rip! Singing, dancing, expert armpit fart noises, playing the William Tell Overture on 5 parts of your body (real talent a friend of mine showcases at parties), whatever you can do, let's see it! In the meantime I'll be posting occasional updates about my sweetheart, including shameless requests for your votes.

- Oshyan

Martin Brinkmann, at the excellent ghacks, has a nice comparison of keyword-powered launchers for windows, and I'm proud to say that my own Find and Run Robot (FARR) gets the recommendation in the end.

The main idea behind application launchers is to speed up that process. Ideally, all you have to do is enter what you are looking for in the program's interface to load it right from there.

Most launcher apps come with shortcuts that you can press or active to display the frontend on the screen to start issuing your commands.

While most launchers support the basic operations listed above, it is extra features that distinguish them mostly. Some may support web searches for example or to run Windows commands to quickly shutdown the PC.

...While that is the case, it is Find and Run Robot that gets my seal of approval.

http://www.ghacks.ne...aunchers-for-window/

While working with regular expressions today I stumbled over regular expressions 101. Not only does it test your regular expression as you type, but it also picks it apart and explains it to you piece by piece. Amazing!

Nice roundup of virtual-printer tools that let you print to PDF from any application that can send output to the printer.

What’s the best PDF printer for Windows? We checked 7 of the most popular options to find out.
It’s kind of shocking that printing in Windows 8 doesn’t come with a PDF option; Mac and Linux users have had this by default for years. Windows users still need dedicated software, and it’s all of varying quality.

PDF printers let you save any file you can print as a PDF, meaning that any computer on Earth can open it without much trouble. Because these programs disguise themselves as regular printers, you can use them to create a PDF file in any program that lets you print. We’ve shown you how to print to PDF on Windows 8, but such software is by no means new: you can use it on any version of Windows.

Read Full Story: http://www.makeuseof...est-tools-print-pdf/

Nextdoor is a social network designed to stay local within a neighborhood.  I don't think the claims of how many "neighborhoods" are using it mean much, but I do love to see when people explore alternative spaces -- and especially when they take a concept and look for ways to invert it.

Nextdoor is a odd outlier among today’s social networks. Signing up is an onerous process, requiring substantial proof of both your identification and address. People post messages, but they are seen only by others in the immediate area, and there is no share or retweet button to proliferate messages across the network. It feels more like a modern update on a message board or web forum than a social network. But it has struck a chord across the country.

http://www.theverge....-40000-neighborhoods

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from http://www.osnews.co...97/The_anti-Facebook

I've recently discovered Applits

It's a social voting site that claims to make your ideas happen.

It works via voting and the app that gets the most votes goes into a list where developers and designers communicate to make the idea happen and you get a percentage of the profits.

This isn't much of a website review and I'm guessing, for developers, not many would like the thought of sharing an idea that might get stolen.

Can't say I blame you but for someone like me who has more ideas than skills, I find it reassuring that someone out there might make my ideas happen.

At the very least, I hope some users find some use to the page. Maybe an inspiration for a NANY project or an unexpected view of what some people's desire are.

Cheap spam:

Currently my ideas (2 public, 1 waiting for approval) need some vote so please kindly donate a vote or comment in the page or hell comment on this thread without signing up.

Why Oh Why Me?! Social Writer

The Extreme Undead To-do List