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Windmills of My Mind

I must protect...

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Various Artist

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Case Of The Missing Template

urrr where the hell is that minimal green template I was using? :mad: ...first my CSS broke now can't find a good template :bomb:

Safari 4 vs Firefox 3 vs Opera 9 – VERY Non Technical Review

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That B**** is FAST! :eyes: Safari 4 I mean ….seriously! I find Opera takes long to load in general but Safari’s load time is non-existent! Firefox 3 (with considerable plug-ins) loads pretty well but Opera takes twice as long :irked: Safari destroys them both.

Opera needs to watch it’s back cause the only thing that keeps me from switching is the way Opera handles Transfers in it’s own tab, the “Duplicate Tab” & “Paste & Go” features which I use extensively.

Another thing I love about Opera is the close knit community. If I have a problem I can contact Opera directly & get help in a second. I doubt that would happen with other browsers.

One quirk I dislike in Opera is the way it handles Bit-Torrent files. …because they have a built in Bit-Torrent program when I click a torrent file to download, Opera takes it by default. However I would rather use my own Program. There must be a way to turn that off but for the life of me I cannot find it. :irked:

I have a plug-in in Firefox 3 that gives me Speeddial (though not as much as in Opera) & Safari has a similar “Top Sites” interface. Yeah Opera came out with it first but in the end it doesn’t matter. Once it works on your particular browser. Therefore that feature is no longer an advantage for Opera.

Now this Acid3 Test I keep hearing about is a big thing for browsers. And apparently it’s HARD to pass because not even Firefox gets a perfect score. Opera fails…. & but Safari 4 gets the perfect score :insane:
I can’t begin to imagine how difficult making a browser & keeping it up to standard with current technology is, however it is a bit sad that for all Opera’s innovation (Speeddial, Unite etc.) that we don’t even get mentioned in the same sentence as the ‘Popular browsers’.

I remember hearing that the reason why some sites can’t load pages in Opera is not Opera’s fault but that the sites do not take the time to make themselves compatible with a browser of such small market share.
So I guess some problems will be resolved as Opera gains more recognition… but some (like the Acid3 test) they will have to resolve on their own.

Billboards with Gender Detection

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Wow what will they come up with next?… & I don’t necessarily mean that in a good way. For the source article you can read it here. But basically it says the billboards can detect if you’re a male or female & convey the appropriate Ad. Guys may see an AXE commercial for example & girls, some brand of nail polish.
Even before I read the comment on the article in my mind is said, “lawsuit” :D I mean... They are bound to get the gender wrong sometime… and what of those with both genders? Technology like this while helpful to businesses is bound to cause embarrassment to untold millions. That won’t stop businesses though if the majority of times they get it right & rake in more profits due to such targeted placement.
Here is another thing though; are Ads targeted to women totally useless to the male gender? Of course not! There may be a perfume Ad playing that is obviously targeted to women but one seeing that may opt to get that particular brand for their wife or girlfriend. It actually helps to see Ads aimed at the opposite sex because it rounds out your knowledge. You will be better able to gauge what is hot or not should you ever have to buy items for your loved ones.
In the end I think it may cause more harm than good. I believe the Technology itself is great! just the application of it needs to be tailored towards something with less social side effects.
The ability to gesture at the billboard thereby choosing which gender you want Ads displayed for may be a solution. The billboard itself should play Ads a random by default, ….well what do you guys think?

70's Mix

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Star Trek (2009)

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Oh how I pride myself on being able to tell if a movie is a 1 to 4 star just by a preview trailer ….and boy did I prophesy this time. Some people try to fool you with lots of action sequences but that’s not enough. Without a general idea of how the plot may go you can bet the movie will suck. Rarely do advertisers just show the ‘action’ alone in a preview when they have more substance to give us.

Now lets put this latest installment of Star Trek into perspective. “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” was good (for the non-comic book reader) & still the New Star Trek made X Men look like Mariah Carey’s Glitter. It was that cool & I don’t care what other reviews say but I’ll give it 4 stars (& yes… I mark a really hard scale)

Now I’m certainly no Trekkie, after all I can’t even remember the plots of the previous Star Trek movies however I’ve watch many of the TV episodes from the times of J. T. Kirk to Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
Two things you realize after watching Star Trek episodes or movies. It can be really cool & it can be really corny at the same time. For example, taking a ship to warp drive will always be cool also the acting done by William Shatner & Patrick Stewart was always spot-on. You really believed they were Captains of Star Ships. However love on the Enterprise was always a disaster, it just didn’t feel right in my book. Not to mention when certain ethical issues come up they must deal with it in the end of an episode & the dialogue there can sometimes be ‘cheesy’ to say the least.



The latest Star Trek did not suffer from those ‘cheesy’ lines like some others did. The cast all acted like people in their roles should …and a delicate balance of action, humor and romance ensued. While there was enough action to make you spill your popcorn they didn’t rely on those sequences to ‘make’ the show. The plot was deep enough to be satisfying without going into overly detailed & complex explanations. The hard thing about doing a movie with such a long history is that you HAVE to appeal to the long time fans or else! but when you can do that AND draw in newbies then you’re in business & that’s exactly what this movie does. You will love “Scotty”, Spock, Sulu & Kirk even if you have no idea of what they are supposed to be like from previous series. Provided you do know something you will be impressed with the faithfulness of the movie to past character personalities.

There is no down time or lull in this movie… just warp drive. From the first minute, I turned to my friend & said “it’s all ready better than Wolverine” & she agreed with eyes wide open.

I asked one of my friends if they were interested in seeing this but they said it was not their kind of movie. I personally think they would have loved it though. So in closing I have to recommend this to everyone. Even if Sci-Fi is not your thing or if you have pre-conceived ideas about it based on its history… I assure you, you will not be disappointed.

Bleeding Ink

Searching for a Printer has to be harder than searching for diamonds! First of all new printers come out every month it seems, there are many brands to choose from, many classes within a brand & older unsupported models to review.

The easy part is deciding your needs. Do you want a Photo printer or one just for regular prints? Do you need one that scans, copies & makes you breakfast? (multifunction) or maybe a Photo / multifunction? If you got cash to burn maybe a mono or colour laser printer is for you?

Most consumers will do with the regular ink-jet printers but you’re still a long way off. Reading printer reviews is rather exhausting. Amazon gives you a good enough gauge as always so research there. However because printers have to work along with computers everyone will have a slightly different experience with setup etc.

Don’t believe everything you read! Some of the most horrible printers can get rave reviews! Of course by the ‘tone’ of the writer you can pretty much figure out it’s a very casual user. Maybe it’s just the man or woman that needs to print a family portrait? or a few word documents? In that case the will give 5 stars. So should you search for ‘the complainer’? Not necessarily… some do a good job with citing pros & cons & some just had a defective product or unusual circumstance & needs to vent. Most times you can’t go wrong with a printer that has many reviews (40 or more) & very few 1-3 star ratings. (of course that will go for most products)

Compounding the problem of ‘too much choice’ is the fact that Manufacturers will deliberately sabotage their mid-range & lower end products so that consumers will buy their flagship product. (Marketing = Evil) So if you think your getting a good deal you might just be in for a surprise when you find out how fast your ink finishes & how often you have to buy refills. Some make smaller ink cartridges to sell at the same price. To get more for your money buying Non-OEM ink may help but if could also ‘choke’ your printer because of the low quality.

One product I reviewed had loads of features including Ethernet (as I have a small wireless network) but it slows to a crawl on larger jobs! Down to 1 page per minute! Another I looked at was perfect… except that when one ink cartridge finishes it cannot print! Even though all other colours are full! Yet another keeps on asking you to reinstall the printer drivers & when it gets going bleeds ink! Absolute non-sense right!?

In the end I found a great printer though….. but you guessed it…. the supplier for Canon in Trinidad does not bring that model! Thankfully they do bring the ink cartridges so I can buy the printer online & source refills from them. In case you’re wondering it’s the Canon MX860 that looks like the winner. A regular Ink-Jet printer that is multifunction. (with Ethernet of course)

A consumer printer may not be the most expensive piece of equipment you buy but it’s very valuable & you’d hate for something to go wrong when you need a print & your deadline is in the next 2hrs. Better go for something reliable the first time around. Remember ‘Cheap’ can be expensive.. & in the case of laser printers, ‘Expensive’ can be cheap! Just do your research, else you’ll hate yourself later.

Splitting Headache

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So here I was on my Mac with a 7GB .dmg file (Disc Image) that I wanted to transfer to an External hard drive for safe keeping. Easy as copy & paste right? (more like ‘yeah right’)
Most Hard Drives (like my external HD) are FAT32 formatted. Standard for PCs etc. HDs in FAT32 can be recognized on the Mac as well so it’s a good thing to have this format if you have to swap files between these 2 Computer types.
But here is the thing… a FAT32 formatted drive cannot copy or have pasted to it a file that is larger than 4GB. Therefore I cannot get the downloaded file off my computer to external media for safekeeping.

Now Macs HDs are formatted in HFS which can copy files over 4GB! So why not reformat my external HD to HFS you say? Because HFS formatted drives will not be recognized by a PC so I’d only be able to move data between Macs. :faint: Initially I thought not even burning to a DVD would work as a DVD can only hold 4.7GB & my file is 7GB. Thankfully I found some solutions:

I could upload my file to an online storage site, then download to any computer with an Internet connection. There are many free services like this, but they usually set limits on how large one file can be & your file can be deleted if you are not using their service regularly. To over come this you would have to have a paid subscription that is usually around 4 - 6USD a month. The best service thus far is SugarSync. (Which does much more than just store stuff)

Toast it! Being on a Mac I’d use toast to burn data files, little did I know that as of version 7 you can split files over several DVDs if it’s too big to fit on 1. Windows users would have similar applications.

But the best solution was actually splitting the file myself using a dull knife…. just kidding… using a Terminal command. A simple spotlight search will help you find the Terminal. Basically it’s equivalent to the RUN feature you find on Windows. Here is what you type in to split your .dmg (Disc Image):

hdiutil segment -o mydvd -segmentSize 100M /Users/[your Mac username]/Desktop/dvdimage.dmg

The “mydvd” will specify what you want your files to be named, so change it to whatever is relevant to you.

The “-segmentSize 100M” specifies the size you want each part to be split into, just change the megabyte number to what ever you like. However I chose to replace that line with “-segmentCount 3” meaning I want the file to be segmented into 3 parts.

The last part of the code is “/Users/[your Mac username]/Desktop/dvdimage.dmg” & this is where the file you want to split actually resides on your computer. In the example it shows the file is on the Desktop & it’s name is “dvdimage.dmg”. After replacing those fields to suit you just type (or better yet paste) it into the terminal window & hit Return. The larger the file the longer the process will take. My 7GB file took about 10mins.

When its finished you will automatically see your newly created files in your Home Folder.
The first file will be (the name you specified in your code).dmg
The second will end in .002dmgpart
The third, .003dmgpart etc.

Only then it was possible to transfer my smaller files over to the external hard drive as they were all under the 4GB limit.

To use / mount my Disc Image again I just have to double click the first part of the segmented file & OS X will do the rest. …there! Easy as Pie! :yes: well.... maybe Pi. :left:

(some credit goes to flash tekkie)

Proposed CSS

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Okay so Doc invited me to another CSS group. However I was a bit down cause every time I update the CSS, Opera updates their site & breaks it :irked: so then I have to ask & beg everyone for fixes (which they are polite enough to do) then I gotta implement them in a few blogs I did for people :eyes:
Some of you may realize I just stopped with the fixes cause things were getting crazy.
However Doc offered to help with some of the fixes should problems arise in the future & that inspired me to illustrate a design I’ve been mulling over for some time now. I had a basic sketch on paper of the Blog page but only Friday gone I drew it up in Illustrator. The hard part is actually turning the artwork to code & you know that’s NOT my forte. I tried to keep things as minimal as possible so that any colours or background designs used with this proposed CSS should blend very well.

Blog | Archive | Photos (overview) (content) (view image) | Links | Friends | About

As you can see there are no right & left margins that define the ‘blog area’ yet all posts are aligned in such a way that an imaginary line forms.

The whole CSS is made up of 3 main areas of either images or just plain colour: The Banner, the large background & the footer area.

The background image stays stationary, only text would scroll up or down & disappear behind the banner or footer respectively.

There is NO ‘sidebar’. In an effort to streamline things I put everything in ONE COLUMN. Therefore Recent Visitors, Friends, even the calendar will be shown underneath every pages main set of items.

Thin separators are used between items, comments, etc. A separator in the shape of a Diamond is placed between post. On a page with comments I like the fact that the there is no bottom separator on the last post. Keeps things as simple as possible.

All photos carry a borderless design with a slight drop shadow by default. I don’t know how hard that would be to implement, just that it would look cool as hell :lol:

There are many other little things but I’ll spear the general public the boring details. Oh! & sorry for the drab illustration colours. If the CSS were made that would be the easiest thing to change :wink: NOW! ….where do I find skilled people (with enough time) to attempt a design like this? :worried:

HELP ME Obi-Wan Kenobi!! :cry:

Examples: Citylife | Charcoal
July 2009
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