DoSomething.org & The BRICK Awards !

Ok so you have a good job and your career is going swell. So how about you turn your efforts to doing something good.

DoSomething.org is a community of people wanting to make a change in the world. Their website is a community where young people learn, listen, speak, vote, volunteer, ask, and take action to make the world a better place. Currently, only 23% of this generation actively volunteers. Our hope is to create a do something generation: a world where more than 51% of young people are involved with community action.



This website gives people like you and me a place to connect, a place to be inspired, be supported, be celebrated. They have harnessed the connectivity of the Internet to help young people change the world. They believe that young people have the power to make a difference. It is their aim to inspire, support and celebrate a generation of do-ers: people who see the need to do something, believe in their ability to get it done, and then take action.

They are giving out the BRICK AWARDS on the CW on April 12th 2007

You can vote : on which of these world-changers deserves a 2007 Golden BRICK Award® and an extra $15,000 for their cause.

There are 12 Finalists in 4 Categories

Global Impact

• Ruth DeGolia - Links Latin America's most rural and economically disadvantaged women's cooperatives to the US market.
• Kimmie Weeks - Survivor of the Liberian Civil War who vowed to help children in war torn countries.
• Cheryl Perera -Put herself on the line by posing as a decoy to catch a pedophile in Sri Lanka.

Education & Environment

• Ashley Rhodes-Courter - Raises awareness about poor conditions in foster care
• William Hwang -Teaches underpriveleged student Science, Technology, Engineering, Math (STEM).
• Kelly Voigt - Safety advocate who has reached thousands of kids.

Health

• David Fajgenbaum - Started a network of students to support each other through times of bereavement.
• Jennifer Staple - Bringing vision and curbing preventable eye disease worlwide
• Jennifer Zwilling -Is an advocate for understanding and acceptance.

Community Building

• Divine Bradley - Converted his home into a community center, giving kids in tough neighborhoods an alternative to crime.
• Hannah Taylor - Speaks out all over Canada about homeless people and how to help them.
• Jacob Komar - Obtains discarded computers, teaches prison inmates how to refurbish them and distributes them to local needy.

Vote for them : http://advision.webevents.yahoo.com/brickawards/

http://www.brickawards.com
http://www.dosomething.org

Creating a Portal for Your Memory Stick Files

Why not keep a directory of all the local images and text files on your Version 2.0 PSP in HTML format, for easy access via the browser? Better yet: why not automate the process with Perl and automatically grab all of your psp-tagged del.icio.us bookmarks in there to boot?

Well, you have a PSP with Version 2.0 or later of the firmware, so you don't have all the great homebrew emulators available for the earlier versions. However, unless you downgrade from Version 2.0, you are making do by loading every JavaScript-capable game or program you can find onto your Memory Stick and converting all your documents to text files for viewing via the nifty little browser that Sony included with Version 2.0 of the firmware.

Let's really trick out your PSP by putting together a Perl script that will run on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux, with only a few dependencies. This script will automatically scrape the photos contained in your Memory Stick's /PSP/PHOTO/ folder, scrape any text files contained in /PSP/NOTES/, optionally grab any links on your del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us) account that are tagged with "psp," and build an index.html file linking to all these files and located at the root directory of your Memory Stick.

How to assemble ebook for your PSP?

Once you're done converting the PDF to JPEGs, you should have a folder containing images named Page0001.jpg, Page0002.jpg, etc. Name this folder whatever you want the title of your e-book to be and place the folder inside the PHOTO folder inside the PSP folder on your Memory Stick. After you unmount your PSP from your computer, simply navigate to Photo, make sure the Memory Stick is selected, and hit the X button. Scroll through the images and list of folders until you locate your e-book.

Highlight your e-book and press the X button to load the first page. If you hit the Triangle button to bring up the control panel, you can select the first option on the top row, View Mode, to set the page to be zoomed in, so that you can easily go through all the pages of your book by clicking the R trigger without having to continually rezoom. To scan up and down the page, use the analog stick. Most pages will load centered, so you will need to scan up to the top of the page and then scan down as you read. If you need to zoom in on a section of the text, hold down on the square button and move the analog stick up and down to zoom in and out.

The great thing about this tips is that every document that is printable from your computer can be converted into JPEGs for viewing on your PSP on the go.

How to Convert PDF to JPEGs?

After I have my 8 inch by 9 inch PDF file, I need to convert it into a series of JPEGs numbered in sequence and all contained within a folder that I can place inside /PSP/PHOTO/ on my PSP's Memory Stick. For the most part, any imaging program capable of working with PDFs can be used to convert PDFs to JPEG, so make sure you look at the following programs before you go searching around the web for a PC version of programs like PDF 2 PSP.

Adobe Acrobat.
Most likely, you already have a copy of Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat Reader on your computer. They are actually both the same program, only Adobe has recently renamed Acrobat Reader as Adobe Reader. If you don't have either on your computer, you can grab a copy for free directly from Adobe (http://www.adobe.com). This program will allow you to view the PDF you have created, but unfortunately it does not support exporting the page images into different formats.

If you own the full version of Adobe Acrobat, you can export the PDF file as a series of JPEGs, and Acrobat will even do the work of naming each separate page as another image in sequence (Image001.jpg, Image002.jpg, etc.).

Preview.app
If you are on Mac OS X, you can use Preview (included with the operating system and located in the Applications folder). If you open the PDF for your e-book in Preview, you can use File Save As to manually save each page as a separate JPEG file. For a large document, this can be laborious to say the least, so it is not the ideal solution.

Image-editing programs
Using an image-editing program such as Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you can open a selected page of the PDF and resave it as a JPEG with high quality compression. On Mac OS X, Graphic Converter (available from http://www.lemkesoft.com/en/graphcon.htm for $30 USD) can do the same. You might already have some sort of image-editing program that came with a digital camera or scanner and is capable of opening PDFs and converting them to JPEGs. The GNU Image Manipulation Program, GIMP (http://www.gimp.org/), is available for Windows, Linux, Unix, and Mac OS X, and can handle a wide variety of formats, including PDF and JPEG.

PDF 2 PSP
If you are using a Mac, then you can grab a helpful, free little program called PDF 2 PSP (http://pdf2psp.sourceforge.net/).

In PDF 2 PSP, you choose the location of the PDF and then a folder where you want the collection of sequenced JPEGs to be stored. If your PSP is connected and mounted on your computer, you can even have the program output directly to /PSP/PHOTO/ on your Memory Stick. You have the option to either adjust the picture to be displayed in portrait or landscape view on the PSP, you can set the quality of the image, and you can set the size of the pages to a variety of options: Original Size, Fit to Screen, Fit to Width, 2x Screen Width, and High Resolution. I recommend choosing Original Size, 2x Screen Width, or High Resolution to ensure legibility of your document on the PSP, and setting the layout to portrait to allow you the ability to both zoom in on the image and pan and scan around the page.

iPSP
iPSP (http://ipsp.kaisakura.com/; $19.99 USD) features the ability to convert PDFs to JPEGs formatted to fit on your PSP, but there aren't as many configuration options available as there are with PDF 2 PSP. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, however, as iPSP does a good job of converting PDFs to JPEGs. There are both Mac and PC versions of the program, but at this time, it looks like only the Mac version supports PDF to JPEG conversion. As an example for this hack, I took a PDF copy of the PSP's manual from the PlayStation site (http://www.playstation.com/manual/pdf/PSP-1001K_1.pdf) and converted it into a folder of sequenced JPEGs for reading on the PSP.

With iPSP, there is no need to locate the folder of converted images and then move them to /PSP/PHOTO/ on your Memory Stick, since the program automatically places the files in the proper location as it converts.