February 22nd, 2009
Have you ever wanted to upgrade to an iPhone 3G, but the pricing deterred you? I know I have. Then I found a great site that sends its users free gear. I signed up, completed an offer, and passed the word to friends of mine. A couple of weeks later they sent me a brand new iPhone 3G free and clear.
How did I do it? First you sign up at this site: Free iPhone 3G. After filling in your address information, you complete an offer. I chose to get a free Netflix trial for mine. Then you pass the word out to your friends to do the same. It’s THAT easy!!
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October 29th, 2008
One of the most used apps that I keep on my flash drive is FastStone Capture. This small (less than 2MB app) is feature rich and comes in handy in the most unforeseen circumstances. First let me go a little into detail of the features.
Basically, it’s a screen capture that allows you to select what you are wanting to capture. For instance, say you want to save a picture from a PDF as a JPG. You start FS Capture and choose the rectangular tool from the toolbar. (It’s like the cropping tool from Photoshop…) It then allows you to click and drag the area that you are looking to capture, all the while giving you a zoomed in view (Screen Magnifier) of the precise corners. This makes it almost error proof in getting the exact edge without going over or under. As soon as you have the area selected, it brings up a window allowing you to save the screenshot to whichever format that you prefer. Snap!
The program allows you to save in BMP, GIF, JPEG, PCX, PNG, TGA, TIFF, and PDF formats. You can also send the captured images to several different programs, including email clients, Word documents, PowerPoint documents, and FTP servers.
It’s definitely one of those programs that you love keeping around! The software is shareware, so give it a try. You won’t regret it!
Categories: General, Windows |
Tags: bmp, capture, faststone, flash drive, gif, image, jpeg, jpg, pdf, png, portable, screen capture, tiff | No Comments
October 27th, 2008
So I recently signed up with YouMail which is an advanced voicemail service offered for many different cell phone carriers - completely free. It is really slick actually. It lets you designate different greetings for every different contact that you specify. Of course you must set these all up manually from their website, but all in all it’s a pretty simple process.
They have thousands of pre-recorded greetings to choose from. Almost all of these are completely free, but there are several that come with a premium charge. There is also a feature to “ditch” unwanted callers or callers that have their numbers blocked. Ditching a caller plays a VM
that by default tells them you don’t accept blocked calls and then hangs up - not allowing them to even leave a message.
Another feature, although it needs improvement, is a voice-to-text voicemail transcribing service that they offer. When callers leave a message, the service translates the voice to text and sends a TXT msg to your phone. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to comprehend a single message to date. The engine is drastically off.
Overall: it’s great when it works. I signed up for the service about a week ago, and have already experienced my first outage this evening. I had a family member call, and he was unable to leave a voicemail. He said that my number just stopped ringing and hung up. So I tried calling my own voicemail. No answer. Just hangs up. Their website as well won’t allow you to log in. I sent an email to support, but am still awaiting a reply.
My opinion is this. Even though they offer a free service, it’s not in beta. Therefore they should stand behind the service and should not be experiencing outages like this. I could understand if it was beta, but I can’t afford to not receive voicemail.
*** Update ***
16.5 hours after emailing YouMail’s tech support I received a reply. Basically they said that everything appears to be working correctly, and they asked if I’m still having trouble.
About an hour after emailing them last evening the service was restored. I stated this in a reply and also stressed my concern about the service. I’ll post their reply.
Categories: Website |
Tags: cellphone, voicemail, youmail | No Comments
October 27th, 2008
If you come across the following product, please be advised:
Banana Split Creme Oreo
I have not been able to get the horrid banana flavor out of my mouth for hours! Somebody brought these into the office and left them on the break table, opened. “Wow!” I thought, “Why haven’t these been devoured yet? There’s only 2 gone!”
That was at 10:30am. I ate only one since they taste absolutely nasty. It’s like eating an old, mushy banana crammed between two oreo wafers. The taste is still in my mouth at 2:30pm - 4 hours later! I keep burping damn bananas up! If these happen into your office, please stay far away!
(I hate banana flavored candy. I don’t know what I was thinking when I tried one of these!)
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October 27th, 2008
So I gave the Wordpress Automatic Update plugin a try today. I have to say that it’s pretty easy to update Wordpress now. It does all the work while you just click ‘Next’! It performs backups of your files and database tables, disables plugins, and even downloads the latest version of WP! How slick is that! So far I’ve updated two of my blogs with this plugin without a hitch. SNAP!
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October 27th, 2008
So I found that the latest version of Thunderbird doesn’t allow me to run one of my favorite plugins: Minimize to Tray. This is probably the first plugin that I install for Thunderbird. It allows me to “close” Thunderbird, by minimizing to the system tray. Then it still checks email and provides Lightning alerts while keeping my task bar clean. Nice!
But it’s not compatible with the latest version of Thunderbird. It gave me the version compatibility error. Well, here’s the workaround for that.
First, go under your Thunderbird profile and open the extension folder. Then find and open the following folder: ‘{31513E58-F253-47ad-86DB-D5F21E905429}’ . You should see a file called ‘install.rdf’. Open this with a text editor of some kind (e.g. Notepad, PSPad, etc). Under the ‘Mozilla Thunderbird’ section change the <maxVersion> line to the following:
<em:maxVersion>2.0.0.*</em:maxVersion>
That should do it! Save, close, restart Thunderbird. The plugin should now be enabled. If not, enable it manually.
Categories: General |
Tags: minimize to tray, mozilla, plugins, thunderbird | No Comments
April 24th, 2008
So I started getting back to reading newsgroups. Mainly just comp.lang.php and comp.databases.mysql to help hone my abilities. And the people in these groups strictly adhere to the “universal” newsgroup etiquette. I completely agree to the etiquette rules and believe that they are necessary to keep order to all of text-based Usenet.
For those who aren’t aware of this etiquette I hope to shed a little light on this topic. Below is a list of my own pet peeves of etiquette rules that seem to be constantly broken in many groups. Please note that this list is not an exhaustive list by any means.
1. Top Posting. Don’t do it!! You know when you reply to someone’s email and your message is on top of theirs? Well, that is a HUGE no-no in the Usenet world. Always reply below the quoted text! Why you may ask? Because the readers have no idea what you are replying to unless they scroll down, read the quoted section, and then scroll to the top to read your section. It completely disrupts the readers flow when trying to read your post. Many times your post won’t even be read.
2. Cross Posting. Many times people feel the need to post a thread to multiple groups. This causes two problems. The first is that you are most likely posting the message in multiple WRONG groups. Like posting a message in comp.lang.php, comp.databases.mysql, and comp.lang.perl when the post only concerns MySQL. People reading the other two groups do NOT want to read your off-group post! The other problem that it creates is unnecessary junk. Many readers do read multiple groups, and therefore receiving your post multiple times. Breaking this rule will often times get your message deleted as well.
3. Consideration. Be considerate. You ask a group of people a question that you receive professional advice. You need to realize that NOBODY is getting paid to answer you. This is a collective resource. A community of experts. I find that many times the OPs become upset at the community trying to help. When instead of receiving the answer they were looking for they feel that the group needs to cater to them. Also, what would it take for you to post a reply? I have seen many times when a question is asked, many answers are given, and the OP is nowhere to be seen. Did the problem get resolved? Did any of the advice help? Maybe you moved to South America.
These rules are typically followed in the majority of the programming-based groups out there. Yet lately I have been browsing over to some of the Microsoft groups. These people (mostly Microsoft-claimed credentials) have absolutely no regard for this etiquette. I just read a post where a gentleman gets wholly upset that the group is advising him take steps that he feels is not immediately directing him to his desired answer.
I think I figured out why this may be though. And if there’s anyone out there that has been more of an avid reader of the microsoft.public groups than me, maybe he or she could correct me if I’m wrong. With Windows Vista comes Windows Mail. In this Microsoft decided to inject their Microsoft Communities. This is actually just the lot of the microsoft.public groups. Now users can simply open up their default mail client and post a message across Usenet. Now given that MS only binds these ignorant messages to their own groups, which is fine for the rest. But in my opinion, this is ultimately polluting Usenet.
Sorry for such a long rant, but I have been catching up on my reading tonight and the above mentioned gentleman made me realize that a post was needed.
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April 11th, 2008
The other day I was looking at my domains in GoDaddy and found that a few of them were coming up to renewal. Renewals are charged at full regular prices, $9.95 for a .com domain. Being the frugal sort, I decided to start shopping around. I really wanted a package that allows free private registration for a real decent price. I was amazed at how many registrars no longer offer inclusive private registrations. I was even more amazed of the GoDaddy spawns, or sister companies, there were out there!
In the end, I decided to go with 1and1.com as they not only offered the best regular pricing ($6.99 / year) but private registration was included. I figured that it would be pretty unlikely to have any issues with a DNS-only service, even if it was with these guys.
Yet I do have to say though, you get what you pay for. Just making simple NS server changes seems to take HOURS as before it would only take minutes. And this isn’t due to DNS propagation either. Running a DNS query on their own servers can confirm this. Oh well. DNS changes very rarely anway and I can live with the initial “propagation”.
Next: My frugality persists. Host your sites and get your email hosted for free!
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March 29th, 2008
Since I have built a new PC, it was up in the air to what I was going to do with the one that was replaced. After some thinking I thought that I could make a Media Center PC. Now I’m not too familiar with the MythTV or BeyondTV feel, but I have always liked the Windows interface. So that’s the route I decided to take.
Let me explain my intent here first. I already have a Dish DVR box, so I am not interested in running a line from that to my PC and back to the TV. Why else run a Media Center then? First off, I have a ton of music. Secondly I feel that it would be simple way to store movies and/or videos and to play them directly to the TV. Lastly, and most important, I have all the seasons of Lost downloaded and I’m only at the beginning of the second season… :) (more…)
Categories: General, Windows |
Tags: 350, 500mce, harmony, hauppauge, logitech, mce, media center, pvr, wintv | 5 Comments
February 5th, 2008
I’m not sure why but I always need to look up the syntax of the ’scp’ command when I go to use it. Maybe it’s because I don’t use it enough on a regular basis. But regardless of the reason, this is how it’s used:
scp current_location.txt new_directory
Well, that’s the gist of it, but the whole idea is to transfer files/directories between systems. Logged in on server1, transfer a file to server2:
scp file.txt username@server2:/exising_directory
Or vice versa (logged in on server2 and transferring a file from server1):
scp username@server1:/path/to/file.txt /path/to/existing_directory
Or now let’s say you want to copy an entire directory. Just use -r:
scp -r whole_directory username@server2:/path/to/place/directory
And to specify a port, just use ‘-P number‘.
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