Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

Are you still making do with plain old ice cubes when you could be enjoying artisanal ice cubes at only a dollar a pop?

Probably you are still making ice the old fashioned way, in ice cube trays in the freezer, or if you are less primitive in your ice-making method you let the ice-maker in the freezer part of your refrigerator-freezer spit cubes into the bin as needed.

If you buy bags of ice for parties and cook-outs, chances are those are the low-tech kind too. You can tell because they are not perfectly clear, due to the presence of tiny bubbles trapped inside.

Think how humiliating it would be if, at your next dinner party or holiday bash, some guest holds  an ice cube up to the light and drops it back into his glass with a splash, muttering, “Not artisanal.” Actually, unless your ice-making method produces cubes two inches wide, tall and deep, it would be possible for your guests to see at a glance that the rocks are home-made or store bought.

But at least your favorite bar or restaurant should offer the option of artisanal cubes, right? Especially if the place claims to offer craft cocktails.

Artisanal ice is frozen in special machines, from the bottom, not the top, hence no bubbles. It is stored at negative two degrees. It is cut into those big, clear cubes from huge slabs, using a special band saw.

Why is it better? It melts more slowly, watering your drink less. That is because the cubes are larger and denser. It costs about $1 a cube extra, where it is available.

This is the same kind of ice that has been used by ice sculptors, those artists who make elaborate ice carvings for special events.

I wonder what Berdie Tuttle, the late editor of the Wellsville Daily Reporter, would say. She used to order “Scotch, no rocks, Chivas if you have it.” Then she would say, “I don’t like ice in my whiskey. It’s the rocks that get you drunk.” Perhaps she would have permitted artisanal ice in her Chivas, though, just one three-incher, which she would have kept using for at least her first three drinks.

Artisanal ice takes three times as long to make, in any quantity you name. Then it has to be cut to size, packed in dry ice and delivered. That’s why it costs so much.

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Recently I was printing tri-fold brochures for a client. She knew I was juggling some paralegal work, some news work and another printing job, and offered to fold the brochures. Great!

“I wish I could do more of the work, but I don’t have a color laser printer or the software, and if I had the software I still wouldn’t know how to do it,” she said.

I hastened to assure her that she could lay out her brochures, with some software that works for that. She doesn’t have to have Adobe In Design! Microsoft Publisher would do the job. And a decent inkjet printer would turn out nice brochures on the appropriate weight and type of paper.

But if she has a version of Microsoft Office that doesn’t include Publisher, there are other possibilities out there.

One is Scribus, an open source desktop publishing program that is easy to use, powerful and free. It handles CMYK and spot color, creates PDFs, and did I mention how easy it is to learn?

There’s LibreOffice, which is a free alternative to Microsoft Office. You can do lots of layout things in its word processor module, inserting images and tables, using columns and flowing text around objects. It exports to PDF too.

You might know of GIMP as a platform-independent, free image-editing program. As a raster-image program with lots of horses under the hood, it also can do text. The learning curve is steeper than with some others, but the investment of effort will be worth the while of most users. especially if they want to polish their graphics. One drawback is that each page becomes a single image; multi-page documents don’t “flow.”

For Chromebook users and others in the world of Google there’s Lucidpress. Used on a Chromebook it plays nicely with Google Drive. It’s free unless you need more storage space than 25MB, and provides few templates, but you can upgrade to a roomier account with more templates, for $7.95 a month. But then, some versions of Adobe Creative Suite don’t cost much more.

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Raspberry Pi has been mentioned here before. It’s the board, or set of motherboard and some progeny, that costs $35 and can do all sorts of stuff if you put in some time and effort.

Raspberry Pi coders are familiar with TL; DR. It means Too Long; Didn’t Read. We aren’t talking brain sprain or boredom so much as some limitations in the design, as to instruction size. Dang! We had that with DOS, right?

That Raspberry Pi isn’t easy as pie might be intuited from the fact that the recently-published “Raspberry Pi for Dummies” is 432 pages long!

But now comes Kano, which is a kit you use to build a computer. It does include a Raspberry Pi board, and cables and a keyboard, a case, and what you need to make a speaker.

Kano is intended for kids. Its instructions are like a storybook.

What a great gift to give to youngsters! What great classroom tools! Everyone who builds a Kano will know a lot about how computers work and what is inside them. Each owner/builder will have a functional computer capable of playing games, processing sound and doing real work.

The first 18,000 Kano kits have been shipped, some to the Kickstarter investors who crowd-funded the startup. They will cost about $150 plus shipping if you pre-order on the website.

http://www.kano.me/kit?gclid=CC3i39aL3cECFbPm7AodAlMAjw is the URL, or just put www.kano.me into the slot in your browser or search engine.