There are new villains in the fight against illiteracy and inelegant language. In the past the blame for poor communication skills, especially written skills, was tossed between school authorities (teaching methods and curricula) and parents (lack of involvement and poor reading habits). Today the blame is being assigned to an international community of bloggers and twitterers, and to the 'new' technologies that enable just about anyone to publish to the world without editors, proof-readers or fact-checkers.
Gotta love your desktop
Why look at the same 'wallpaper' every day? Editor Ali Kayn admits to an addiction to cat cards and pretty pictures of houses, waterfalls, snow fields and the like? But how often do we look through scrapbooks and albums?
Instead of leaving these much-loved images hidden, she embarked on a project of scanning her collection, including cards from friends and created a frequently-changing on-screen album.
Images that were too detailed, making icons difficult to see, were put in a folder called "screensavers". Images with fairly plain areas for icons to sit were put in a folder called "wallpapers".
Bionix Wallpaper Changer is used to swap the wallpapers and regular intervals, and AnyImage Screen Saver kicks in when the computer is not in use, displaying photos, cards, favourite places and more in a continuing slide show.
On her media PC, movie posters of all the films in her collection rotate against a constant background when the machine is not in use.
See her article on how to create a dynamic photoalbum or notice board using AnyImage.
Games and informational software for the younger set are reviewed in Kids in Cyberspace, and there's a list of links that have been recommended to us as well.
Go to Kids page
previous articles and reviews
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For a site search, we use KSearch from KScripts. KSearch can be installed on Unix or Windows sites. Perl (5.003 or higher) must be installed to run both the indexer and search scripts. KScripts are Open Source Software.
Products we use:
We scan in our still images using an Epson scanner
Images are resized and otherwise manipulated using Ulead's PhotoImpact
Images are sorted and renamed with the invaluable Ulead PhotoExplorer
Digital photography is done with Sony cameras unless otherwise stated.
Festivale is compiled using orb.exe by Craig Berry.
All code automation is done with scripts written by Ali Kayn in NoteTab Pro
The new forms on the site use a MySQL database and PHP. These are excellent tutorials:
Freewebmasterhelp.com
No software or hardware products are scheduled for review during the rebuild project.
Published in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia 
Last updated: 21-Jun-2010