Author Archives: development

Using Grisbi for agreement accounting.

We have an agreement with each joint-venture project signatory and we need to “profit”-share according to the agreement terms e.g. a 70:30, 60:40 or 50:50 split of earnings after cost of production, shipping and other cost of sale expenses. Given … Continue reading

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Customs charges (US to Italy for Books via DHL).

Our first small shipment of 10 books arrived from Createspace via DHL (2 day service US to Italy) and we had to pay some extra fees when we picked this up. We have no complaints about these as this did … Continue reading

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Createspace combined shipping

When you are after rapid turn-around of proofs then for us in Europe we must use the fastest business shipping offered. So far we have been ordering 2 books per proof. Createspace provide 2 day service for about 32 dollars … Continue reading

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Stopping Createspace reviews – no can do.

It seems you can’t do this. If you have submitted a PDF file for review (pending printing as a draft) then, if you locally discover a problem with the file contents e.g. you notice that you forgot to embed a … Continue reading

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Book Cover # 2

I’ve just finished our second book cover. Whilst the first took some time the second took me only 1 day of actual work (and about 1 day of investigation work). The picture has been smudged to obscure the work-in-progress. We’ve … Continue reading

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Our Open Mutual company blog

We’ve just commissioned a new server to run as the Open Mutual Limited web site and have started a company blog here at www.openmutual.org. It will be more generic technical and company musings rather than specific Life Sign Press technology … Continue reading

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FeedBurner FeedSmith plug-in on Network multisite.

Though it doesn’t say it in the description the FeedBurner FeedSmith plug-in it does work on WordPress Network (Multisite) installations (WordPress 3.0X). See here, http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=78483 for the details on the installation. Where it says “Activate” then instead just click “Network … Continue reading

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Our Favicon Design

Simply shrinking a logo or brand name to an image that is 32×32 pixels is a recipe for disaster. Sometimes you are lucky and it works out, other times you end up with just a fuzzy blob that looks like … Continue reading

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Life Sign Press logo design

We started designing a logo for Life Sign Press by throwing all the ideas into a pot on the word “Life”, “Sign” and “Press” and came up with a number of designs but in the end they just didn’t work … Continue reading

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The legacy of Open Source code

My first use of Open Source software was around 1997 when we had a need to have cheap X-Terminals to access Sun Sparc machines from other parts of the building other than in the cold machine rooms. Commercial X software … Continue reading

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