1. October Summary

In less than a week this blog will record its 100th entry. Though I had little doubt that there would be enough to ensure a new entry every day, I was not sure what it would be, nor where it would come from. Like all bloggers I use a large number of sources of information, and sometime it is difficult to decide which entry to include, there are so many. So firstly, a big thanks to all those individuals, bloggers, commercial interests and others who provide inspiration to the entries. As a dyslexia-friendly website, I try to limit the number of words and so do not add to the burden by listing all the references.But if anybody wants to know the source of some particular information, I would be happy to share.

On the entries for this past month, this can be broken down into a number of categories, for which to me Entry of the Month was www.searchme.com, the visual search engine (6). Full marks for this.

This month saw the launch of PATS, or the Portable Assistive Technology Software (26), with other examples of (offline) free software being image manipulation software (GIMP, 7), screen capture software (Camstudio, 13) and magnification (Zoom It, 8). This was discussed against a backdrop of financial uncertainty (5,12).

Online shared documentation started with Smartsheet online spreadsheet (3), and ended with sharing existing (offline) documents online (29). In between there was an online whiteboard (10), shared concept mapping (15) and a reminder system (20).

For text to speech (TTS) applications there was Blogbard – the text to speech for blogs (11), while IMTranslators provides TTS (16) in many languages, as well as a useful computerised translation service.

Firefox has a couple of entries, as the Beta launch (27), screen capture (4) and recovering passwords (28). Google had an entry through Advanced Search (17)

There were four commercial entries, with touch typing (9), a scanning translator (14), a fun speech-to-text controller, and speech-to-text software (23).

While I do not usually cover social networking, Webbr (21) seemed to be worth of a mention due to its visual nature. Another entry due to its visual nature was hotels.com (25).

The Project of the Month was Calldysc (31), which was related to a discussion on “mobiles” (2).

Extras included mega-storage (30), touch screens (19), and a little fun (22)!

One that had to be updated was plagiarism, where a previous entry no longer functions. However, three good alternatives have been found (24).

Finally, just to warn people that in December I shall be asking for nominations for “The ten most significant items”, whatever that may mean.