Work have kindly provided me with a 15″ Macbook Pro. I love it. It has Bootcamp & Parallels with XP Pro just in case I need that (which I haven’t yet… ). The screen quality is fantastic. Leopard kicks ass. I don’t know what else to say. I am hooked

I also have a Wacom Graphire 2 tablet on loan, and I don’t know how I managed to do any kind of artwork without one. I will be buying one of these, even at £200+ it is still good value. Sketching and graphics manipulation is 100 times easier than with a mouse, and it even makes normal windows or Leopard operation faster and more intuitive. Fantastic!

A new website has recently been put live for Custom Solutions, a Leicester based engraving and fabrication company. The site is powered by Expression Engine by EllisLabs, our first site using their content management system. Previous sites had used Code Igniter, another EllisLabs product, but Expression Engine made the deployment of the Custom Solutions site even quicker.

Clive can now update his own pages and products through the easy to use administration system, and has been adding new products already! The advantage of having a content managed site instead of having each page hand coded is that the whole site can now be backed up in one go, and each page is guaranteed to be consistent.

Have a look at Clive’s engraving and fabrication at Custom Solutions.

The site for my web design business is now sorted and online at FCS Websites. There are many website designers in the Nottingham area, but we offer something different. Visit our site and read up about what makes us the best choice for your new site, or the redevelopment of your existing site.

Our services include:

• web design
• Custom made content management systems (CMS)
• E-commerce for small businesses
• Windmill powered green hosting
• Search engine optimisation and web marketing training
• Accessibility reports and W3C compliant coding
• Usability testing and user experience engineering

We have a couple of projects in the works, mostly customised versions of our very own content management system. We wrote the system from scratch so we know it inside out. It allows clients to update their web sites whenever they want, from any computer with an internet connection. The ongoing costs of content managed sites are very low, as no web designer is needed to keep it up to date!

(Don’t worry if you are miles away… While we are in Nottingham, hiring a local web designer is not vital as everything can be done via telephone and email )

I have been flirting with using Linux for audio production for several years, but kept getting stuck with either driver issues, lack of software or just general lack of Linux knowledge. The Ubuntu Studio project has pulled everything together on top of the lovely Ubuntu Linux distribution. Once I have obtained a second machine, I will be trying this new package out

Home | Ubuntu Studio

Get yourself some funky colours for your web/print/whatever design jobs at:
GenoPal Online
or Adobe’s Kuler