Using: Adobe Illustrator CS and any subsequent version.

Here's a quick and dirty way of creating woodcut-style pictures in Illustrator.

This example image was made by tracing a photograph using the technique shown in this tutorial.

Let's create a woodcut circle. First, draw a circle in Illustrator using the ellipse tool ('l' on your keyboard). Press 'shift' to constrain the ellipse.

Now, using your pen tool (type 'p' to select), draw a rough circle inside the one you have drawn by clicking the pen tool and creating straight lines. Do not bother fussing about with the bezier whatnot or trying to be too accurate. After all, you are replicating quite an unsophisticated artisan work.

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Just like most little girls as soon as The Cat could hold a crayon she didn't stop drawing. Drawing is a great leveller - unlike a lot of disciplines, singing and drawing are things that everyone is encouraged to have a stab at from an early age. And, judging by the endless stream of tone deaf warblers that subject themselves to humiliation on shows like the X Factor, everyone thinks they can sing. Similarly, anyone with a computer suddenly becomes a whizz with the Wordart.

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Today I found in my spam box the following email. It looks as though it really did come from Lycos, although for some reason they sent it to an old email address and so it got filtered.

Customer information

Dear Matthew Chatfield,

As you might have heard in the media, the management and the board of directors of LYCOS Europe N.V. have decided to liquidate valuable businesses and cease unprofitable activities. Unfortunately the webhosting business is one of these.

This means for you, that we will continue providing our webhosting services for only a limited period. A solution is sought, so that online-presences of our customers can be transferred to another provider without causing adverse effects or additional costs.

We will inform you about any upcoming changes in sufficient time. Though details are not yet clarified, we expect the webhosting platform to be operating during the first quarter of 2009.

As soon as we have further details about the planned measure, you will immediately be informed. We expect this to happen in a few days.

We are sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. We strive to enable a smooth transfer of your presence. We ask for your understanding that we cannot provide you with further information at this point of time. We also ask for your understanding that you might experience delays in response times from our support team in the next days as we expect an increasing volume of requests.

Please refrain from contacting our support team with request in this matter as no additional information can be provided by this channel at the moment.

We will contact you as soon as we have any further information.

Thank you for your patience and your understanding.

With best regards

Your LYCOS Webhosting Team

That almost certainly isn't good news. We've been using Lycos webhosting and as domain registrar for over five years. Pinkeye has several clients still on Lycos, altogether we are gradually moving them all across to our favourites EUKhost as each package expires.

If anything happens, we'll let you know. Meanwhile, if anyone's got any information - we'd like to hear it.

External link: http://www.thewhir.com/marketwatch/112608_Lycos_Europe_to_Sell_Close_Assets.cfm

This really annoys me. When installing a new program, you get language options. The default is always something called "US English". Well, clearly that isn't me. So invariably I take the trouble to change the default to the only other English option: something called "International English".

International English? I'm not sure what that is. Nobody would ever describe themselves as an International English speaker - I certainly don't. The word 'international' is actually being used here as a euphemism for 'foreign'. US English is foreign to me, but I wouldn't be inconsiderate enough to make any US English-speakers describe themselves as foreign.

Perhaps we should just call International English 'English'. And make it the default. If anyone wants to specify a country they're welcome to do so, but if not, just leave it plain and unqualified.

I've used Copernic Desktop Search for years at home as my local search tool of choice. It's always done well, and has the killer feature that it will search network drives, so my little NAS under the desk, where most of my letters and family snapshots live, can also be indexed. Fantastic.

But then - along comes Copernic Desktop Search 3. A free downloadable update, and like a mug I just downloaded it.

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External link: http://www.copernic.com/en/products/desktop-search/cds-compare.html