I have been slacking as of late when it comes to updating the site here. September was a slow month of posting! Sorry to disappoint my 3 readers. I’m trying to pick up the pace in October.
There are some new features here…the comments section and form have been cleaned up a little. I think they look nicer. I’ve also been working on the content on the right side of the screen. I’ve taken out some things and added others – including a link to my Amazon wishlist. Now you have no reason not to buy me something! ;-)
I also added a direct link to NewsGator. If you have an account with them (it’s free), you can add my site to your news feed list by clicking the button. Then, whenever I submit a new post, you’ll know it via NewsGator. It’s pretty cool. I use it to keep up with about 15 different sites. Very handy.
I’ve also been busy working on side projects. I’m making the web site for my brother-in-law’s resort in Nicaragua. You can check out the progress at http://www.straightblue.com/~local/. Once we’re finished with it, it will be accessible via www.localtreasureinternational.com. If you have any feedback on the overall appearance of the site, let me know. Just keep in mind it is not finished right now.
Another thing I’ve been working on is helping two guys with their open source photo gallery products. One is called zenphoto and the other is photostack. I’ve been working with Noel from photostack a lot more than zenphoto, but I give feedback and bug reports to both. They are both really neat tools. I’m using zenphoto at the resort site I mentioned above and I’m testing photostack on this site (it’s hidden right now…). If you are looking for this type of software for your site, I highly recommend both products. It’s been a great learning experience for me, even if my contributions are minimal, at best.
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posted 10/06/2005 03:00 PM
Man…where was this when I was little? Lego has created the Lego Factory that lets you build your own creations on your computer. OK, that’s kind of neat, but stay with me. The really cool part is that you can actually turn your design into a real Lego kit that the company will send to you in its own box. So, say you design your dream house out of Legos using the system. If you want, Lego can get all of the necessary pieces together, put them in a box and ship them to you. Now you have your very own, unique Lego set. Even cooler is that Lego is turning some of the designs into real kits that can be purchased by anyone. Amazing.
[2] | posted 09/15/2005 12:22 PM
We have one of the original Tivo’s – a Sony SVR-2000. Lately it has been acting strangely. The biggest problem was that it would freeze and the only way to get it working again would be to unplug it and plug it back in. After doing some research, it sounded like the hard drive was the culprit.
I went to TigerDirect and ordered a new 160GB hard drive. After searching around, I found the Hinsdale How-To site and went to work. My friend Joe also recommended this site, but I found the other one to be more helpful.
The whole process wasn’t too bad, as long as you’re comfortable with taking apart both your Tivo and your computer. You need to understand how your hard/cd/dvd drives are hooked together in your system so that you can connect the new hard drive and the old Tivo drive. The process can be really quick if you don’t need to save the shows that are currently on your drive. I needed to save mine so I did a direct copy from the old disk to the new. It took around 2 1/2 hours for the copy to finish and about 15 to put everything back together and the Tivo back in place.
Once I finished the upgrade, my recording capacity went from 9 hours at high quality/30 hours at low to 45 hours at high, 150 at low. Now we can store an almost infinite amount of Elmo, Thomas, Clifford, General Hospital and whatever reality show my wife is into. I think I need my own Tivo…
[2] | posted 09/07/2005 03:29 PM
I have a Sony DRU 540A DVD burner that suddenly decided it didn’t want to burn DVDs for me anymore. I had probably burned about 40-50 discs since January with nary a coaster but suddenly things changed. I called up Sony tech support after running their diagnostic tool and this is what they had me do:
- First they had me try and use different media. No dice. Same problem.
- Next, I called them back up and they had me do the following:
- Make the drive a master by itself
- Remove the Nero software I was using that was installed with the drive
- Use Nero’s “general clean tool” to do whatever it does…
- Re-boot!
- Reinstall the Nero Suite
- D/L and install the Nero updates (1 and 2) from their web-site. The interesting note on this one is that they had me install update #2 first, then #1.
I thought this was a bunch of bs and didn’t think it would work at all. I went home last night, did everything they said, and now it works. Go figure.
The only problem is that right now my Sony cd burner isn’t connected because I have the dvd burner running on its own. I’ll eventually get around to hooking it back up and seeing if they can play nicely together again. I have no idea why this suddenly happened, or which step from above fixed it, but it works.
So, hats off to Sony tech support and an apology for my lack of faith in their proposed solutions. Mmmmmm….crow.
[1] | posted 08/24/2005 11:07 AM
I’ve discovered a few tools that I like and thought I’d share them with you. Most of these aren’t Earth shattering and are probably old news to most, but you never know…
NewsGator is a decent rss-aggregator (get it?). If you’re not familiar with what this is, an rss-aggreagtor goes out and collects snippets from whatever sites you want (provided they have a feed) and presents them all on one page. It’s a handy way to keep up with new content from various web sites without having to revist them multiple times a day. So, my page has feeds from espn, cnn, national review, freakonomics, signal vs. noise, cnet and others. I refresh the page and I can see what’s new in an instant.
del.icio.us is a neat tool that allows you to collect and organize bookmarks from around the web. How is this different than the bookmarks functionality in your browser? Well, del.icio.us is on-line, so you can access your bookmarks from anywhere. Also, it has a feature where you can assign keywords to your bookmarks to help organize them. Another thing is that it will add some buttons in your browser’s toolbar so that when you want to bookmark a particular page, you just push the button, enter some descriptive text, and you’re finished. If you run your own web site, you can send out your bookmarks as a rss feed (this is what I do with the links on my links page).
BlinkSale looks like a good way to deal with invoicing customers, if you’re into that type of thing. I run a very, very small web design business on the side and finding a good way to invoice customers is a challenge. Paypal has new invoicing functionality that is decent, but not very flexible. BlinkSale is much more flexible, but it can also cost more, depending on how many invoices you plan to send out per month. There is a free version that I’ll try out soon.
| posted 08/12/2005 04:59 PM
You see…this is why my wife made me stop playing video games years ago. I’ve never played Starcraft before, but it sounds deadly!
Here is the article.
[1] | posted 08/10/2005 01:37 PM
I’ve been playing around with a program called Jinzora. You can check out a demo at their web site, but it’s basically a way to stream out your music collection over the internet or your home network or a CMS, or all of the above. I was looking for a different way to do this than by using MusicMatch, which is a cool program but it doesn’t run on Linux and I have to worry about licensing stuff that I don’t have time for. It installed fairly easily and I had it up and running on my debian server in no time.
Just goofing around at work I tried to see if I could hit the site from here and I could. So, I’ve been listening to my music today. Not sure how the bandwidth police would feel about that but I did increase the compression so hopefully it hasn’t been too bad.
There are a few things I’m not too crazy about – I don’t know how to edit artist’s names, nor do I see an easy way to categorize things, but all in all, it’s a neat program. I’m still in the early stages of playing around with this but so far I think it will work. My biggest problem, as mentioned earlier, is dealing with all of my wma files. Linux doesn’t seem to like them so I can only listen to tunes on a Windows PC at the moment.
I did check out a few other programs, most notably slimserver, but I didn’t fool around with it too much. I think there were a few dependencies I didn’t set up or something. Basically, if I have to compile anything, I’m hosed because I haven’t mastered that yet.
If you have any suggestions for good alternatives to Jinzora or slimserver, let me know.
| posted 08/02/2005 05:07 PM
I have a ton (around 50GB) of wma files on my pc and I want to convert them to mp3. Does anyone out there know of an easy to use tool that can do a big ol’ batch conversion?
I’ve found a lot of tools that will convert the files, and a few that do batch conversions, but I don’t like how they do the batch conversions.
What I want, and this is probably a pipe dream, is to just click on my “music” folder and have it go to work. Most of the batch programs I found had you open up each folder, select all of the files, and add them to a cue. If I only had a few folders to deal with, this wouldn’t be a problem. But I’ve got something like 350 artists, who all have one or more sub-folders per album, so all of that clicking is a big pain.
Just curious if there is a solution out there.
Update
I ended up using something called Advanced WMA Workshop to do the conversion. I could not find an easy to use program in linux so I had to run it through Win XP. I had a couple pc’s running non-stop for 3 days and it finally finished this morning. Now I have to re-build the Jinzora database and I should be good to go. Phew.
| posted 08/02/2005 12:41 PM
Ummm…Dean and company must be hooked up to a caffeine iv or something because rc5 was released today. There are a lot of new features, which I find pretty amazing since rc4 was released just a few days ago. I’ve installed it here, but haven’t had time to check out the new features. Actually, I didn’t have time to check out the new rc4 features. Does this mean rc6 will be released on Friday?
| posted 08/01/2005 03:24 PM
Well, Dean and the gang have released the latest update to textPattern, rc4. I installed the new version in about 5 minutes. The only problem I encountered was an extra <br /> tag being inserted after each of my links in the sidebar. I fixed the problem and that was it. No problems with the plug-ins I’m currently using or anything else. All in all it was a painless procedure.
[2] | posted 07/29/2005 02:54 PM
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