Makoyi's Fanfic Recs and Other Stuff

Someone on the Nanowrimo forums mentioned WikidPad a few months back and I have now tried it out and decided it's awesome.  WikiPad is a program for taking notes, organizing and cross-linking between them in a file tree format.  It saves all your information on a single database file on your harddrive.  Unlike a lot of other free wiki software, WikidPad stays on your computer and doesn't connect to the internet at all.  This lets you keep control over your data and allows you to work on it anywhere, regardless of connectivity - that's a big plus from my point of view.  It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, is 100% free and its open source!  WikidPad is great for writers who do a lot of world-building but it would also be great for students taking notes, genealogists organizing their research, and all sorts of other applications.  Another Pro- it autosaves frequently.  1 important con - 1 file means it only takes one bad error to destroy the whole file tree so be sure to manually back up your file periodically.

I don't know if any of you are teachers or professors or otherwise forced to write exams regularly for your work but if so, this post might be helpful to you.  I've been wanting to learn to write LyX layout files for awhile now and my previous experience learning CSS and LaTeX suggests that jumping in with a practical problem to solve is the way I learn coding best so I've spent the last few days writing up a .layout file to make exam class work in LyX (software that's sort of halfway between a word processor and a LaTeX processor).  LyX's automatic numbering and formatting makes writing exams quick to do and it's handling of equations, linguistic symbols, and tables/graphs/figures is great since the program is based on LaTeX.  You can find the contents of that layout file: here.  Be sure to read the class documentation for all the options the class offers for headers, footers, printing answer keys and points tables, etc.

This post isn't really about writing, or fanfiction, or even really related to that stuff.  But I used to have this guide up on deviantArt and people thought it was helpful so I thought I'd post it.  It's good for making any kind of pattern where you need to provide to-scale pattern pieces for people to cut out and trace.  If you've never used a printable to-scale PDF pattern before, they can be kind of unwieldy --- they involve taping together a lot of pieces of printer paper --- but they're the main method for distributing amateur and semi-professional patterns online.  They do work, they just aren't as intuitive as tissue paper patterns from the craft store.

The goal of these instructions is to help you create a PDF sewing pattern without having to buy pattern design software.  The progam I use for doing this is LyX which is free for download and multi-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux).  While it's designed more for word processing, it is possible to make a clean-looking pattern, with to-scale pattern pieces, step-by-step instructions and images all in the same file so you can distribute your pattern designs online fairly painlessly.  In my previous post, I went over some of the pros and cons of LyX so check that out for a bit more info.

Have you ever been writing along in your story and suddenly realized you need to know more about something slightly shady in order to describe it? Maybe you're writing about a character attempting suicide.  Maybe they're about to commit a crime.  Maybe they're gay or transgender.  Did you have to stop and think if you really wanted to research that, just in case someone else found out and made assumptions about your reasons for researching that particular topic?  Maybe you share a computer with family and perhaps you don't want your granny to know you write explicit gay slash fiction.  Maybe you're using a college internet connection at one of those colleges that expels LGBTs or maybe your college has monitoring software in place to alert someone to students looking up information about violent crimes or suicide methods.  Well, if you have had these worries (or if you do now), this might be the tool for you.

Tor Browser is a really nice 100% free browser for doing research anonymously. Anytime you have a question you need an answer to that you worry might give your network admins the wrong idea or even put you on a watchlist somewhere, you can use the Tor Browser to search and read about it without anyone being able to connect your IP address or your Internet account to your search terms or viewing history.

Another thing that Tor is really fantastic for is finding quick answers to daily life type questions for contemporary characters that live in a different country than you do.  You just force a particular country for an exit node by opening the torrc file (in the Data>Tor folder) in a text editor and type ExitNodes {} at the end then type the two letter country code for your character's country between the curly brackets.  Save and exit, then open Tor again.  Now google will think that's your country and give you results tailored to it. That's helpful if, say, you want to know where the French might shop for bed linens or what OTC pain reliever a German character would reach for. It would take more time and some creative keywords to find an answer like that on a regular browser.

You can read more about the Tor Project and their browser at The Tor Project's website.

To get started:
1) Go here to get the browser package. Be sure to download the proper one for your operating system (Windows, Mac, or Linux).
2) Extract the file by double clicking the downloaded file.
3) Open the folder created by extracting and double click on the "Start Tor Browser" file (the one with the little onion icon).
4) Wait. It's a little slow to start up. After about a minute, it should connect and open the browser for you automatically.
5) Success! Configure the browser as you like it or just browse straight to your search engine and do your research without fear.

There is no installation because this browser is designed to be portable. This means all the files the browser needs to run are located in the unzipped folder. You can place the folder on your desktop for easy access or keep it on a USB drive so you can take it with you to a workstation at your school or library. You can also "pin" the exe file (the one with the little onion icon) to your Quick Launch or Start Menu in Windows or put a link to it on your desktop in Linux.

There are a few things to be aware of when using Tor Browser and the Tor network.
1) Don't log in with usernames and passwords to non-encrypted sites. That means don't input passwords to sites that have http instead of https in the URL [That includes this one!]. That said, you can run the Tor Browser at the same time, on the same computer as any of the other major web browsers (provided your computer can handle that workload) so you could be logged in on your regular browser while doing research on the Tor Browser.

2) Don't log in to Google and then make your searches because Google will connect your login with your search queries just like with any other browser and that would defeat the purpose of using this browser to research anonymously.

3) Google doesn't always work – you can end up in a Captcha loop because is doesn't believe you're not a bot. If that happens, just switch to another search engine for a while – Yahoo, Bing, Ixquick, etc. After awhile, you'll end up with a different connection, one that's not so busy, and you'll be able to use Google again if you prefer.