EasyBib

My daughter sent me this site a couple weeks ago, when I was asking her if she knew how to do MLA bibliography citations. It's called EasyBib. It will do MLA6 and MLA7 citations for free. If you need APA or Chicago/Turabian style citations, MyBib Pro runs from $4.99/month up to $14.99 for an entire year. You can also get a free 1 week trial to MyBib Pro to see if it's something you really need.

Another thing that you can do automatically with MyBib Pro does is set up your footnote and parenthetical citations. If you are writing a master's or doctoral thesis, imagine how much time this could save.

The biggest time-saver, in my opinion, is the ability to auto-cite using a book's ISBN. This does not work with all books, but for those which it does, it is, to be cliche, the best thing since sliced bread.

Deke

I added Deke McClelland's site to the blog roll on the side. I don't know why it didn't occur to me to do it before, but let me tell you, this man is THE man when it comes to Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. From what I gather, he bugs some people, but I like him. He is incredibly knowledgeable and he's funny.

I have learned so much from his podcasts that I went ahead and bought his book Adobe InDesign CS4 One-on-One. I've got his channels and mask book on my Amazon wish list and will be buying his Illustrator book as soon as it's released - which, unfortunately, isn't scheduled until May 2010.

So anyway, check Deke out. His podcasts are free, as are a bunch of other videos. You'll laugh and you might even learn something useful.

Project 4 - SketchUp

What? An actual, completed project? Why yes, indeedy. These are some screen shots of the house that I built in Google SketchUp, a program you can get for free here. There is a pro version available, but unless you are doing some serious architectural rendering, you don't need it. You can build just about anything 3-D through SketchUp.

The first shot is of the whole house, taken at an angle from the front.

This shows one side and part of the back. Note the bay window up near the front corner.

Here is a close-up of the dormers.

A closer look at the back of the house, including the sliding glass door.
And lastly, an overall look at the rear of the house.

I'm fairly pleased with the over all looks. Some day I would like to go back and flush out the interior, but that was beyond the scope of the assignment and would have taken far longer than the allotted time frame.

SketchUp is quite easy to learn when it comes to the basics. It's also a lot of fun to play around with. If you decide to get into it, check out the video tutorials, both at the download site and on YouTube.