MIA

I’ve been rather remiss in posting, haven’t I? In my defence I’ve been busy knitting and spending time with Rosebud, my current endearment for this little cutie:

Also shopping for sleepers for same, going to the dentist (for a cleaning) and several other exciting activities. I actually finished the latest sweater, the Winter Dark Sassymetrical, for myself but haven’t photographed it yet since it has been so dark and rainy. It always amazes me how fast projects are when knit in worsted weight yarn! Must be because I knit a lot of things in tiny yarn and equally tiny needles, huh? Right after casting off, I cast on for another pair of knee socks. And an iTouch cosy for T-Man to fulfill his special request for a way to wear his music on his arm. I’m done the cosy itself, complete with flip-top, an eyelet hole for the earphone jack and a belt loop. Now I’m working on the endless tube to cover the elastic armband. I’ll sew velcro on the ends to attach the armband at a comfortable size to go over whatever jacket or shirt he will be wearing. Mindless knitting is just what I need right now. I also have a special request for a tea cosy so that’s also on my asap list.

No, I have not even glanced at my quilt-in-progress. ’Nuff said.

There isn’t much in the way of other news, but I’m slowly integrating Ruby (my iTouch) into my life. I found a $4.99 app called KnitMinder. It doesn’t really supplant my projects and yarn stash in Ravelry but it’s quite useful for quick on-the-go references and notes. Log entries are automatically dated which makes it easy to keep track of progress. (Or lack of it!) I like that you can either link to a photo already in the iTouch or use the built-in camera to include a quick snap of the project’s current state, the pattern photo, yarn and finished object. The drawback is that I haven’t found a way to extract photos taken within the app to use anywhere else. But they aren’t up to blogging or archiving quality anyhow. Really just a reminder of where you are at in the project’s progress. An especially helpful touch are the counters – you can have unlimited numbers of them labelled to keep track of increases and decreases, rows and repeats. Just tap to add one. (Cracks me up that the “undo” is labelled “frog”!) I also like the needle and hook inventory that includes an icon to indicate which ones are being used in projects. Great for figuring out where that 4mm Addi Lace circ has gone. Comes with a comprehensive help file but really, it’s pretty intuitive. There’s a free trial version of KnitMinder but at $4.99, the main program is not a budget-buster. And you can’t easily transfer your input from the free one to the main app.

Another useful app that’s also a helpful addition to KnitMinder is FileMagnet which allows me to read files like Word, Excel and PDFs offline. (Which is surprisingly missing in iTouch.) It even includes a desktop program that makes it easy to transfer the files by Wi-Fi to my iTouch without syncing to iTunes. Now I can bring my current knitting and crochet patterns along with me. Unfortunately it’s suffers a little from the iTouch’s memory limitations so large, graphics-heavy files fill it up rather quickly. Patterns in Word format could be edited resaved without the pics as an RTF or text file if that’s a problem. However unless you have the full version of Acrobat (or another similar program) or use a converter to change it into a Word file, you can’t edit PDFs. There’s a free converter here that will email the results to you. That might be the best way to go with a large PDF file. (I have no idea about any copyright issues this might cause!) I’m still experimenting!

My attempt to stay out of malls this time of year isn’t working too well. Before the dentist appointment yesterday, I went upstairs to get some hearing aid batteries and now my audiologist wants to give me a hearing test tomorrow afternoon. Yikes! At least I don’t have to try to find parking. I can walk or take transit. Just need to Stay. Out. Of. Shops.