Daily Clerks

Initiative to incorporate energy conservation into the daily lives of 100 million people using an energy conservation software program called Save Our Planet.

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Jason Scott posted a collection of 1,700 arcade manuals in PDF format, he writes -

If you were saying to yourself “Now, where can I browse over 1,700 arcade manuals in PDF format?”, your prayers were just answered. This is over three gigabytes of manuals, schematics, and general information about arcade machines, scanned in by an anonymous army of dedicated people, and going back up to 30 years.

My collection was previously at around 300, but that initial collection was from a different source, and the filename structure isn’t compatible with what I got in my latest set. So I’ve knocked it to a separate section from the main collection. They are likely doubles, and I’ll deal with that in the future.ASCII by Jason Scott: Arcade Manuals - Link & download.

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Maryland steps up to take on Global Warming. It is no longer just California anymore. Read about how the Chesapeake Climate Action Network is taking on this fight through incredible grassroots activism, like the National Polar Bear Plunge or dumping Coal on the Capitol, at their new blog.

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The tipping points in the Global Climate systems just keep getting scarier. What do we do to avoid the risk of hitting them? Are we really willing to gamble the future of the human species like this?

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Lately, I have been finding myself cropping images and screenshots very often, which has become more of a time-wasting chore. I am constantly loading up Photoshop or Illustrator which takes longer to boot up than it takes for me to do the actual cropping and editing.

That is when my search for a better solution took me online, where I discovered EasyCropper, which promises to provide "a simple way for you to crop any image for use on the web."

The process is very simple, but does EasyCropper provide the easiest online image cropping solution?

Upon my first look, EasyCropper seems to provide a very simple interface with no frills or extra features. It is what they claim to be… a way to crop photos, and that is it. Killer Startups believes that "it is easy enough for anyone to use, even if you have never before edited photos online." I started noticing its first flaws very early on, however.

The screenshot above is the first screen that you arrive at when starting the cropping process. It is simple, but not descriptive enough about what the "width" and "height" fields should include. Should you provide the original resolution of the selected image, or are they wanting the desired proportions?

After completing this step incorrectly the first time around, I discovered that users are expected to enter their desired image resolution. This in turn, led me to the next screen, which got even simpler. There was a highlighted box on the screen (matching the size of my given dimensions) with the photograph behind it. The portion that is within the box is what will be included after cropping, while the grayed-out portions of the photo will be the portions to be removed.

The photograph is draggable, allowing you to choose a specific area to include. Also, there is a slide bar located at the bottom of the screen, which allows you to scale the photograph in size. I did notice, however, that this does reduce the quality of the image, as I expected. I was hoping for a way to edit the size of the "bounding box" but in order to do this, you must go back to the first screen and enter in new dimensions, which I found time-consuming and disappointing.

Once you have your final selection, you continue by simply clicking the "Crop It!" button, which will lead you to the following screen to download the image by clicking on the arrow.

Overall, to answer my question of whether EasyCropper is the easiest cropping tool, the answer is yes, but at the expense of more features… At least for now. I found EasyCropper to provide a great service that may work well for some, but it is lacking in some areas for those of us who need more. For example, it could be useful to anyone who needs to develop an avatar for a profile and is given specific maximum dimensions. You could just use this service to load up the image, enter your maximum resolution, make a few final changes, and there you have it.

If you need more capabilities and a more detailed interface, I recommend SnipShot. It provides a similar crop function, but allows for more advanced editing. Missing from EasyCropper, but included in SnipShot, is the ability to resize the bounding box while determining what you want to crop out.

Also, SnipShot can handle larger files, which posed a problem to EasyCropper. An attempt to load an enormous 9 MB TIFF image file with EasyCropper failed to load, while SnipShot was able to load it right up (although slowly).

Whichever option you choose, it is sure to make the process of cropping photos a little easier. If you don't have any software to crop images at all, then you should give both of these services a try to see which one better suits you.

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This is a great short article that describes the DSIRE database for home improvement rebates. It gives you a great tip on how to quickly navigate the database to find energy rebates for your home improvement project(s).

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These are great! bit, byte, kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte and terabyte figures - Link.

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A Texas-based spark plug manufacturer has launched a new type of automotive plug that can help drivers save money at the gas pump while reducing emissions. The Halo spark plug is the world’s first to use an innovative 360° Firing Technology to improve fuel efficiency by up to 10% and reduce harmful emissions by up to 20%. The Halo is currently being used by various organizations, including cities, police departments and schools to increase the efficiency of their fleets.

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The new chair of the California Air Resources Board owns stocks in several oil, coal and utility firms, some of which are likely to be affected by rules the agency implements as part of the state’s groundbreaking law to fight global warming, The Chronicle has learned.

Mary Nichols’ stock holdings include shares in oil giants Chevron Corp., BP and Royal Dutch Shell, as well as a stake in a Bermuda tanker company that transports crude oil, according to economic interest statements she filed this week.

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In a move that spells trouble for India’s forests and one that blatantly favours private interests, the government has asked that the Supreme Court disband a forest protection panel that has been overseeing forest management for the last ten years and to instead leave it to the executive branch of the government.

The forest protection committee was put into place by the Supreme Court in 1996 as a body that would supervise and report on the use of forested areas, in addition to keeping tabs on the environmental effect of development. Logging in forests now requires permission from the Supreme Court – and that includes any kind of industrial or commercial development. B…

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