It seems like some OSTG sites have jumped the gun (Edit: I guess they are using UTC) on April fools, so be sure to visit Slashdot, and check out ThinkGeek's latest sale item (you should already know, if you get their email, but if not check here)
I'm sure there will be more sites doing this kind of foolishness tomorrow, If I get a chance, I'll try and link some more (taking the SAT tomorrow).
Friday, March 31, 2006
Emaling Images
Keeping with this week's photography theme (I'll try and have more variety soon), I have an explanation for a common problem with sharing pictures.
The Problem:
When people send other people (particularly those with little image editing knowledge) pictures from digital cameras or scanners they often are displayed very large. This problem has even effected some friends of mine who I have sent pictures, because I don't like to loose quality any more than necessary. If you view the picture in older versions of Internet Explorer, and your webmail provider doesn't scale images automatically, you will have a very small portion of the image, which looks awful, and a huge amount of area to scroll.
Why:
This involves a bit of theory about how digital images work. Most digital images are bitmaps (as apposed to vector drawings), groups of tiny dots called pixels. Digital cameras these days are often sold by their number of MegaPixels (not as important as some other features, cameras with good optics, image stabilization, and good processing, are often better than those without these features but with a high MP rating). A MegaPixel is 1Million Pixels and is a measure of area (Length * Width), for example my 6.1 Megapixel camera produces images 3039 pixels by 2014 pixels. If you multiply that out, you will find that it comes out to about 6.1 million pixels. Those 6.1 million pixels are either reduced to something that can be more easily displayed/printed or compressed into tighter bundles. The number of pixels in a given area (usually an inch), or its resolution is what is important when displaying images (often expressed in DPI or dots per inch). To get a reasonably sized print, I would have to use a resolution of at least 600 DPI; However, many monitors (and older imaging programs) display images at 72 DPI. This spreading out of the pixels (dots) is the cause of your huge photo problems. Of course, spreading the pixels out in this way also makes your picture look very bad, unless you have a very good camera/scanner.
What to do about it?
Well, you have two choices, you can reduce the number of pixels, or increase the resolution. Many programs can do both. For displaying the picture, look for a zoom function, and zoom out. I find that 30% zoom or less works well, for my 6 MP pictures. If you are sending pictures, it may be a good idea to scale them. In GIMP, the option is called "Scale Image", and I would expect it to be similar in most programs. I would start with a value around 1024x768 or 800x600 (these are common resolutions of monitors, so the resulting image should just about fill the typical screen), be careful not to stretch the image, type one number in and make sure that the option to keep the aspect ratio the same is enabled (often an image of a chain, or a check box), the program should fill the other value in with something appropriate. This is also good because it will drastically shrink the file size, just be sure to keep a copy of the original, because since you are throwing away pixels, you are lowering the overall quality (save as). The same thing goes for printing, many image editing packages, have an option to adjust the print size (including the default image viewer in Windows XP).
If you don't have any image editing software on your computer, you can always import an image into your Word Processing program (in Word use Insert -> Object -> From File). Size it by using its properties dialog or by dragging the small boxes on the corners, just be sure no to stretch it.
This should get you started, but if you want more info about megapixels vs. camera features, and print resolution, take a look at this article or search google.
If you don't want to deal with all this, you could just use a photo sharing program like picassa or a photo sharing site like flickr or ophoto (there are many more, do a search)
The Problem:
When people send other people (particularly those with little image editing knowledge) pictures from digital cameras or scanners they often are displayed very large. This problem has even effected some friends of mine who I have sent pictures, because I don't like to loose quality any more than necessary. If you view the picture in older versions of Internet Explorer, and your webmail provider doesn't scale images automatically, you will have a very small portion of the image, which looks awful, and a huge amount of area to scroll.
Why:
This involves a bit of theory about how digital images work. Most digital images are bitmaps (as apposed to vector drawings), groups of tiny dots called pixels. Digital cameras these days are often sold by their number of MegaPixels (not as important as some other features, cameras with good optics, image stabilization, and good processing, are often better than those without these features but with a high MP rating). A MegaPixel is 1Million Pixels and is a measure of area (Length * Width), for example my 6.1 Megapixel camera produces images 3039 pixels by 2014 pixels. If you multiply that out, you will find that it comes out to about 6.1 million pixels. Those 6.1 million pixels are either reduced to something that can be more easily displayed/printed or compressed into tighter bundles. The number of pixels in a given area (usually an inch), or its resolution is what is important when displaying images (often expressed in DPI or dots per inch). To get a reasonably sized print, I would have to use a resolution of at least 600 DPI; However, many monitors (and older imaging programs) display images at 72 DPI. This spreading out of the pixels (dots) is the cause of your huge photo problems. Of course, spreading the pixels out in this way also makes your picture look very bad, unless you have a very good camera/scanner.
What to do about it?
Well, you have two choices, you can reduce the number of pixels, or increase the resolution. Many programs can do both. For displaying the picture, look for a zoom function, and zoom out. I find that 30% zoom or less works well, for my 6 MP pictures. If you are sending pictures, it may be a good idea to scale them. In GIMP, the option is called "Scale Image", and I would expect it to be similar in most programs. I would start with a value around 1024x768 or 800x600 (these are common resolutions of monitors, so the resulting image should just about fill the typical screen), be careful not to stretch the image, type one number in and make sure that the option to keep the aspect ratio the same is enabled (often an image of a chain, or a check box), the program should fill the other value in with something appropriate. This is also good because it will drastically shrink the file size, just be sure to keep a copy of the original, because since you are throwing away pixels, you are lowering the overall quality (save as). The same thing goes for printing, many image editing packages, have an option to adjust the print size (including the default image viewer in Windows XP).
If you don't have any image editing software on your computer, you can always import an image into your Word Processing program (in Word use Insert -> Object -> From File). Size it by using its properties dialog or by dragging the small boxes on the corners, just be sure no to stretch it.
This should get you started, but if you want more info about megapixels vs. camera features, and print resolution, take a look at this article or search google.
If you don't want to deal with all this, you could just use a photo sharing program like picassa or a photo sharing site like flickr or ophoto (there are many more, do a search)
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Nikon RAW images w/o Nikon Capture
I touched on this earlier, in my GIMP post, so check that out if your not already familiar with GIMP.
Anyway,
Many of the more expensive digital cameras available today can save images in RAW format, with little or no compression and processing. This allows the photographer to do more post-processing with less image quality loss. Unfortunately, each camera manufacturer uses a slightly different file format, and Nikon at least requires that you buy special software to read the files (I recently bought a D50). Luckily, there are a few plugins for GIMP (and standalone programs) for converting and manipulating RAW files. After some experimentation, I have decided that I prefer UFRaw to the other alternatives (see my last post). UFRaw functions on most common operating systems, and supplies a standalone converter, a GIMP plugin and a batch conversion script. The GIMP plugin and GUI program have a nice import interface which allows you to adjust color curves, exposure, white balance and a few other options. Just using this screen alone, you can make drastic changes to your pictures. Once you get the image into GIMP/Photoshop, you can make even more changes, before saving as a jpeg or other lossy format, with almost no loss of quality. If your camera can produce RAW files, it is defiantly worth a try. UFRaw uses the DCRAW library, so in addition to the NEF files produced by my Nikon, most other common RAW files are also supported.
Because I have a good one on hand, below is a well cropped example produced by the UFRaw batch conversion script this afternoon of a frog (there are a lot of frogs in a pond near my home this week for some reason).
Well, back to my Biology homework ;-(
Have fun with GIMP
Anyway,
Many of the more expensive digital cameras available today can save images in RAW format, with little or no compression and processing. This allows the photographer to do more post-processing with less image quality loss. Unfortunately, each camera manufacturer uses a slightly different file format, and Nikon at least requires that you buy special software to read the files (I recently bought a D50). Luckily, there are a few plugins for GIMP (and standalone programs) for converting and manipulating RAW files. After some experimentation, I have decided that I prefer UFRaw to the other alternatives (see my last post). UFRaw functions on most common operating systems, and supplies a standalone converter, a GIMP plugin and a batch conversion script. The GIMP plugin and GUI program have a nice import interface which allows you to adjust color curves, exposure, white balance and a few other options. Just using this screen alone, you can make drastic changes to your pictures. Once you get the image into GIMP/Photoshop, you can make even more changes, before saving as a jpeg or other lossy format, with almost no loss of quality. If your camera can produce RAW files, it is defiantly worth a try. UFRaw uses the DCRAW library, so in addition to the NEF files produced by my Nikon, most other common RAW files are also supported.
Because I have a good one on hand, below is a well cropped example produced by the UFRaw batch conversion script this afternoon of a frog (there are a lot of frogs in a pond near my home this week for some reason).
Well, back to my Biology homework ;-(
Have fun with GIMP
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Need an Antivirus Program?
Normally, I recommend AVG, but if you are in search of an antivirus program and don't like AVG, then you can get a free, 1 year trial of EZAntivirus (RoadRunner/TimeWarner gives this one away to their subscribers also).
Either Way, you should have something installed. I talked about other free options awhile ago .
Thanks to Techbargains for the link (if you haven't already, you should also check them out)
Either Way, you should have something installed. I talked about other free options awhile ago .
Thanks to Techbargains for the link (if you haven't already, you should also check them out)
Monday, March 27, 2006
Sending Large Files
Just a quick post tonight,
If you want to send large files to friends you can have a bit of a problem, unless you run your own file/web server. Email usually tops out at <10M (you shouldn't send anything that large by email anyway). One convinient option is a service that was recently pointed out to me called YouSendIt. Basically, you upload the file to YouSendIt (up to 1G) and they email the recipient a link to download it. If you prefer, rootshell.be will host up to a 700M file for a set amount of time, which you can upload to, and send a link manually. Either service should work well for most uses. If you want to send something larger than 1G, setup an FTP server or consider using bittorrent ( Azureus, among others, has an integrated tracker making it easy to publish torrents)
If you want to send large files to friends you can have a bit of a problem, unless you run your own file/web server. Email usually tops out at <10M (you shouldn't send anything that large by email anyway). One convinient option is a service that was recently pointed out to me called YouSendIt. Basically, you upload the file to YouSendIt (up to 1G) and they email the recipient a link to download it. If you prefer, rootshell.be will host up to a 700M file for a set amount of time, which you can upload to, and send a link manually. Either service should work well for most uses. If you want to send something larger than 1G, setup an FTP server or consider using bittorrent ( Azureus, among others, has an integrated tracker making it easy to publish torrents)
Friday, March 24, 2006
DARPA Grand Challenge
NOVA, on PBS is going to air a documentary on the DARPA Grand Challenge. For those who don't know, the Grand Challenge is a race for autonomous robots through a desert. They are airing it (the first time) at 8:00 PM (check your local PBS station to be sure) on March 28. Here in the Rochester area, its both on HD and regular PBS. The have a trailer on CNN, and some clips on the NOVA website, for the impatient. If you don't get PBS, you will still be able to watch online, here
Thursday, March 23, 2006
Uses for Old Technology
You know an older Technology is dead when people start making robots out of it. It started out, at least in my time, with floppy bots (most commonly using 3.5" floppy drives). Soon after, it has gotten to the point where its a pain to get a commercial computer with a floppy drive. Now people are racing tape players and to think, even last year many people were still using those for music.
I guess now the mp3 player is the only way to go. How long until someone takes apart an Ipod and uses the hard drive motor for racing? Speaking of sick ipods, if you have one, this site might be useful (not my fault if you break your ipod, from lifehacker).
Oh well, this is kind of sad, but it might be fun too! I have heard CDs make pretty good wheels for smallish cars.
Back to useful activities ;-(
I guess now the mp3 player is the only way to go. How long until someone takes apart an Ipod and uses the hard drive motor for racing? Speaking of sick ipods, if you have one, this site might be useful (not my fault if you break your ipod, from lifehacker).
Oh well, this is kind of sad, but it might be fun too! I have heard CDs make pretty good wheels for smallish cars.
Back to useful activities ;-(
Another Online Word Processor
I commented awhile ago about the various free, word processors on the net. The CEO of Linspire (the company formerly known as Lindows), has sponsored another one of these word processors called AJAXWrite. Ajax is a fairly new programming language for the internet. While AJAXWrite seems to work well, and loads quickly, its nothing particularly new and exciting. The interesting part of this announcement is a related site which will follow regular new releases of more webapps to replace other programs. Both sites might be worth checking out, but it will be very interesting to see what else comes of this announcement.
The same company is also involved with
Project Gizmo
PhoneGaim
NVU
and some others
The same company is also involved with
Project Gizmo
PhoneGaim
NVU
and some others
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
More on Online Storage
I posted awhile ago about box.net, a promising new service offering 1G of free storage online, with lots of fancy bells and whistles. Afterward, I found another site for those of you not into bells and whistles. Streamload offers 25G of storage (G = gigabytes =1024M) for free (more for a fee). I haven't actually tried it out yet, but it looks like a good service for people who want to back up relatively small amounts of data (ok, so I know plenty of people with hard drives smaller than 25G) or exchange larger amounts of data. It has an upload utility for windows users that makes it easier to upload huge amounts of data over slowish connections. If you didn't already know, most DSL and cable Internet connections have very slow upload speeds when compared with their download speeds, so uploading 25G will take awhile. Anyway, it is at least worth a look.
Not too much time for blogging this week, so I'm going to call it a night.
Not too much time for blogging this week, so I'm going to call it a night.
Monday, March 20, 2006
Hearing Loss
While I'm waiting for my DVD burner to finish up for the night, Wired News has a tip for loud music lovers. People who listen to very loud music risk hearing loss (no news here), and most people (particularly teens/ my age) don't seem to care. It is amazing how loud an Ipod can be, even though those tiny ear buds. Anyway, check out the article, and try to keep hearing loss to a minimum (other people shouldn't have to listen to "music" from your earbuds)
If you haven't already looked at the article,
Click Here!
(Can you tell I find loud music in school and other public places mildly annoying??)
If you haven't already looked at the article,
Click Here!
(Can you tell I find loud music in school and other public places mildly annoying??)
Saturday, March 18, 2006
Image Editing with the GIMP
Adobe Photoshop has become a verb among digital photographers. Computer image editing is at a point were you can manipulate pictures to the point where you have no idea what the original was. Popular Photography has an image editing contest going right now, with pictures from previous year's contests, if you want some examples. The trouble with Photoshop, is that it costs a small fortune. Luckily for us, the open source world has produced a reasonable alternative, GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). Gimp is best run on a Unix like (Linux, etc) machine, though there is a Windows port. The trouble with both the GIMP and Photoshop is the learning curve. Both programs take considerable effort to learn (and a hefty CPU with lots of RAM, or lots of patience). While it is hard to do the stuff requested by the Popular Photography contest, there is plenty of documentation on the web to get you started using GIMP to clean up your day to day digital pictures. I took some pictures with a point and shoot digital the other day, in auto mode (which didn't use the settings I would have), and while looking for better noise reduction plugins I stumbled across some sites that people might find useful:
The obvious place to start learning GIMP, would be the official documentation. If you are not already familiar with image editing software, you might prefer to look at some tutorials on Gimp.org.
As a photographer, I have found that the GIMP for photographers site has some more generally useful tips. This site also has some (some of them more odd) short tutorials that might be useful under certain conditions.
GimpTalk.com has some discussion forums as well as a bunch of tutorials, plugins and scripts.
On the topic of Plugins and Scripts, GIMP has a plugin interface as well as scripting support for Perl and a proprietary language. The GIMP Plugin Registry has a lot of these available for download. A few of them have windows binaries, which can be put in the plugins subdirectory of your GIMP install directory, but many need to be compiled (good luck with that on Windows). For Linux/UNIX users, this is simple (assuming you have a recent copy of gcc installed). Just run the make script packaged with the plugin or run "gimptool --install plugin.c". If you use GIMP-2.X then you might have to use gimptool-2.0. For fixing my pictures, I found that the Dcam Noise2 plugin helps a lot with noise due to high sensor sensitivity settings. Besides noise removal plugins, there are a wide variety of other enhancement, artistic and file format plugins available. If you find a GIMP script-fu script, these can be installed on a Linux/UNIX machine using "gimptool --install-script script.scm"
If you have a Digital Camera that can produce a image saved in a RAW format, you will almost certainly want to be able to take advantage of the improved quality this can offer. Dave Coffin's dcraw library/converter seems to be the standard way of opening most RAW format images on Linux. It comes with a GIMP plugin. This site lists some alternatives, particularly if you have a Nikon DSLR, but talks about packages that can read other RAW formats as well. If you are a Windows user, you can try some of the tools based on dcraw, but you are probably better off with your camera manufacturer's software or some other commercial program.
If you want to do some sort of batch image processing ImageMagick may be better for you.
Happy Image Editing. Maybe I will post some of my own GIMP tips in a little while, but for now this should get you started.
The obvious place to start learning GIMP, would be the official documentation. If you are not already familiar with image editing software, you might prefer to look at some tutorials on Gimp.org.
As a photographer, I have found that the GIMP for photographers site has some more generally useful tips. This site also has some (some of them more odd) short tutorials that might be useful under certain conditions.
GimpTalk.com has some discussion forums as well as a bunch of tutorials, plugins and scripts.
On the topic of Plugins and Scripts, GIMP has a plugin interface as well as scripting support for Perl and a proprietary language. The GIMP Plugin Registry has a lot of these available for download. A few of them have windows binaries, which can be put in the plugins subdirectory of your GIMP install directory, but many need to be compiled (good luck with that on Windows). For Linux/UNIX users, this is simple (assuming you have a recent copy of gcc installed). Just run the make script packaged with the plugin or run "gimptool --install plugin.c". If you use GIMP-2.X then you might have to use gimptool-2.0. For fixing my pictures, I found that the Dcam Noise2 plugin helps a lot with noise due to high sensor sensitivity settings. Besides noise removal plugins, there are a wide variety of other enhancement, artistic and file format plugins available. If you find a GIMP script-fu script, these can be installed on a Linux/UNIX machine using "gimptool --install-script script.scm"
If you have a Digital Camera that can produce a image saved in a RAW format, you will almost certainly want to be able to take advantage of the improved quality this can offer. Dave Coffin's dcraw library/converter seems to be the standard way of opening most RAW format images on Linux. It comes with a GIMP plugin. This site lists some alternatives, particularly if you have a Nikon DSLR, but talks about packages that can read other RAW formats as well. If you are a Windows user, you can try some of the tools based on dcraw, but you are probably better off with your camera manufacturer's software or some other commercial program.
If you want to do some sort of batch image processing ImageMagick may be better for you.
Happy Image Editing. Maybe I will post some of my own GIMP tips in a little while, but for now this should get you started.
Friday, March 17, 2006
Followup on the Blogger Problems
It turns out the people at blogger are having trouble with some of their servers. I guess you have problems if you are on one of the effected servers. My account seems to be fixed right now (hopefully it will stay that way). The Blogger support team got back to me this morning, suggesting that people watch the blogger status page for more info. Check it out here.
Happy St.Patrick's day (be sure to check out the Google homepage)
Happy St.Patrick's day (be sure to check out the Google homepage)
Thursday, March 16, 2006
Blogger Problems
If you are wondering about this blog's downtime, blogger seems to be having trouble republishing blogs after updates, breaking the existing setup. Maybe it's just me and maybe not, but It may happen again. I have sent blogger support an email.
Hopefully it will be fixed soon
Thanks.
Hopefully it will be fixed soon
Thanks.
Free Web Storage
A place on the net to store files for exchange or just to move them between computers has long been needed. While surfing tonight, I came across a post on pocketpcthoughts.com about Box.net, a new service offering 1G of storage, for free. Unlike gmailfs it is actually intended to be used as storage, and seems to work quite well (though it is late, so I haven't had a chance to play with it too much yet). They also give you the option to upgrade to bigger accounts. When you sign up, just leave the credit card number box blank (kind of odd that they did signup this way) and you will be given a free account. Another nice feature is that they support "mobile" devices (all you have to do is go to m.box.net once you have an account) which has great potential (empty the digital camera from a internet cafe with a pocket pc maybe?)
Yahoo Briefcase is a similar service that has been around awhile, but it only gives you 30M of storage (nothing by today's standards).
It looks like a great service. If you give it a try, sign up by clicking the button below (They are offering account upgrades if you refer more users)
Yahoo Briefcase is a similar service that has been around awhile, but it only gives you 30M of storage (nothing by today's standards).
It looks like a great service. If you give it a try, sign up by clicking the button below (They are offering account upgrades if you refer more users)
Categories for Blogger Blogs?
Category tags are a feature of many blog services, but not blogger. They conveniently label your posts, so people can look at only the posts that interest them. The owner of labelr.com seems to have found a way to fix this. Unfortunately, his service seems to be in closed beta right now, but it is defiantly something to watch if you have a blogger blog, and wish you used a service with categories.
Check it out here if you are interested.
Check it out here if you are interested.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Google Video and RSS
As is probably obvious by now, I am a big fan of Google Video, and RSS (Really Simple Syndication). Tonight, Google has posted links to the Google Labs "Google Group" with links to testing RSS feeds for popular videos, and search results. I guess they want people to test the feeds and make sure they are standards compliant. Whatever the reason, Its a great feature. You can find the links here, and some discussion here. If you prefer, just subscribe to this link, for the most popular videos.
Have a nice night ;-)
Have a nice night ;-)
Google Talk, Jabber Gateways
As I assume everyone knows by now, Google Talk is a jabber based instant messaging service. Recently, it was opened up to inter-server communication (part of the jabber protocol). If you have a lot of friends using different instant messaging protocols, this has a significant advantage to you. Jabber servers can supply gateways, which allow you to connect with users of other services. Awhile ago, jabber.org listed public servers that are capable of doing this, but it seems that they no longer do. Since that list is no longer available, I went googleing and found you a tutorial that suggests a server with gateways to most of the common services (just change icq in the example to aim or msn, etc).
Go check out the tutorial (one less thing I have to write)
If you have trouble, it looks like this server also supports some of the common gateways.
Edit: There is another tutorial here, using exodus instead of psi, if you prefer.
Go check out the tutorial (one less thing I have to write)
If you have trouble, it looks like this server also supports some of the common gateways.
Edit: There is another tutorial here, using exodus instead of psi, if you prefer.
Monday, March 13, 2006
Google Mars
If you haven't already, click the Google logo today. Google has a shaded relief map of the surface of mars up today, with a lot of historic and scientific landmarks, well, marked. There are also options for infrared photography and visible, black and white, images. Not particularly useful to the common person, but cool to look at.
Link for future reference
Edit: If you are interested, Google has officially posted about this on their blog now.
Link for future reference
Edit: If you are interested, Google has officially posted about this on their blog now.
Sunday, March 12, 2006
Free Microsoft Visual Studio
Whats the catch?
All you have to do is go here and watch three webcasts on web development technologies. It is the "Standard" edition, but should be more than enough for most hobby developers.
Free Software and free info, what more could you want. I did this to get a free copy of VB.NET awhile ago, so they do actually ship the software.
Thanks to Dad and FatWallet for pointing this out.
If you can't wait and have a fairly fast connection (or way too much time) you can always download the normally free "Express" editions. These are much more limited than the software being offered for watching the webcasts though (see MSDN for details).
All you have to do is go here and watch three webcasts on web development technologies. It is the "Standard" edition, but should be more than enough for most hobby developers.
Free Software and free info, what more could you want. I did this to get a free copy of VB.NET awhile ago, so they do actually ship the software.
Thanks to Dad and FatWallet for pointing this out.
If you can't wait and have a fairly fast connection (or way too much time) you can always download the normally free "Express" editions. These are much more limited than the software being offered for watching the webcasts though (see MSDN for details).
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
OpenOffice Charts
I wrote about creating charts with OpenOffice awhile ago at the request of some of my friends. Techtarget.com has some more tips on the "hidden treasures" in the OpenOffice chart drawing tools. While I wouldn't call them treasures my self, There is a lot of good information for people just starting to experiment with charts, so it is definitely worth a quick look.
Also posted on Slashdot (as soon as something like this comes out, its all over the web, very fast)
Also posted on Slashdot (as soon as something like this comes out, its all over the web, very fast)
RSS/Atom and Blogger
I am surprised how few people use RSS instead of visiting the site. I find that RSS is much easier to work with. Some of it may be, that until today the autodiscovery meta-tags on this blog were set to the default blogger generated feed. I have changed them to a feedburner version. Since there is no convenient option to do this, I expect a few of you might be interested in how it is done. There is a little info in this thread on the feedburner forums, but the basic trick goes as follows:
Edit1: I made the font size of the code "tiny" to reduce problems. I also added extra lines. The code should still be accurate, but It may not be. Best to follow directions and copy/paste your own.
- Open your blog in a web browser and view the source code. This can usually be done by right clicking an empty spot on the page
- Select and copy the first few lines (control+c), starting at the title tag (</title> and ending before the <style type="text/css"> tag. My code looks like the following (after I adjusted it):
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content= "true" />
<meta name="generator" content="Blogger" />
<link rel= "alternate" type="application/atom+xml" t
itle="Ben's Computer Tidbits" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/FeedName" / >
<link rel="service.post" type= "application/atom+xml"
title="Ben's Computer Tidbits" href= "http://feeds.feedburner.com/FeedName" />
<link rel ="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml"
title= "RSD" href="http://www.blogger.com/rsd.g?blogID=19227845" />
<link rel="alternate" type= "application/rss+xml"
title="RSS" href=" http://feeds.feedburner.com/FeedName" />
- Open up your blogger template and replace the <$BlogMetaData$> tag with the code you copied to the clipboard
- Change all the links in the pasted code (they start with href="http://") to your feedburner feed
- Add a line looking like this, right after the pasted code (and adjust the links): <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href=" http://feeds.feedburner.com/MyFeed" />
- Your code should be similar to mine above. Make sure you didn't break anything, using the preview button. If all looks ok, republish your blog, and try it out.
Edit1: I made the font size of the code "tiny" to reduce problems. I also added extra lines. The code should still be accurate, but It may not be. Best to follow directions and copy/paste your own.
Monday, March 06, 2006
Package Tracking on Google Maps
isnoop.net , which has some very interesting web apps, and is well known for its' now shutdown, "Gmail Invite Spooler" has added a nifty mapping page. It takes a UPS or USPS or FEDEX or DHL tracking number, and plots the progress of the package on a Google Maps map. It also creates a rss feed with the information. If you are waiting for a package, go try it out. If you have some time to kill, take a look at the main page, and check out some of the other neat pages, like the fridge.
Saturday, March 04, 2006
Lectures (and more) from the Googleplex
As those of us who keep close track of Google know, the Googleplex is Google headquarters. Apparently, they frequently have speakers come and keep their employees educated. As pointed out on the Google Blog (google it, I've linked before), they are posting videos of some of these talks on Google video. It looks like they have some interesting subjects, so when you are bored, take a look.
Skype Conference Call Limits
As you may have noticed, it was announced awhile ago that the popular (and rather good) Voice over IP program Skype has limits , allowing people on Intel CPUs to have larger conference calls that users of other processors. Today, a third party has removed this restriction, and published a patch, along with an explanation of how the patch was made. I don't know about the legalities of either action, but it is good news for users, so if you use Skype on an AMD or other processor, then you might want to check it out. Only for Windows users right now. The followup to the original article on Slashdot is also available.
Command Line PDF Creation, for free.
If you want to make a pdf out of another file type, you have relatively few options, unless you want to buy expensive software. You could use OpenOffice (a recent version) and the pdf export function, which is nice, but If your original file was done in MS Word or something else that can't save in OpenDocument Format, the conversion might mess up some formatting. Scribus (a page layout/ graphics program) also has good pdf export features, but has even fewer import options. On a Unix like system, using the CUPS print system, you can use cups-pdf, which works very well, but produces very large files.
A convenient option I have found to work well is GNU Ghostscript, which can convert a postscript file to a pdf quite nicely. On a windows system at least, it is very easy to get a postscript file. All you have to do is create a new local printer that prints to the "File:" port and use a postscript printer driver. I have found that a Minolta color laser driver works very well, but just look for drivers with PS in the name. When you print to this printer you will be asked to save a .prn file, which is basically a postscript file, as long as you are using an appropriate printer driver. Then you can install and use ghostscript (you can find a windows binary on the net, search for ghostscript, there are a few different versions). Recent versions of ghostscript (just about every recent Unix machine will already have some form installed) have a script called ps2pdf, which does the conversion.
Anyway, the main point of this post, was to point you at this great article, on using ps2pdf to generate a PDF. You can also look at the main ps2pdf documentation.
This setup works well for me because, I am converting a huge and complex Word File (on a windows machine) to PDF on my Linux machine, although it may not work well for everyone. If this doesn't meet your needs, Adobe has trial versions of Acrobat and most of its other software available. I expect that is its easiest for most people to simply use OpenOffice though.
A convenient option I have found to work well is GNU Ghostscript, which can convert a postscript file to a pdf quite nicely. On a windows system at least, it is very easy to get a postscript file. All you have to do is create a new local printer that prints to the "File:" port and use a postscript printer driver. I have found that a Minolta color laser driver works very well, but just look for drivers with PS in the name. When you print to this printer you will be asked to save a .prn file, which is basically a postscript file, as long as you are using an appropriate printer driver. Then you can install and use ghostscript (you can find a windows binary on the net, search for ghostscript, there are a few different versions). Recent versions of ghostscript (just about every recent Unix machine will already have some form installed) have a script called ps2pdf, which does the conversion.
Anyway, the main point of this post, was to point you at this great article, on using ps2pdf to generate a PDF. You can also look at the main ps2pdf documentation.
This setup works well for me because, I am converting a huge and complex Word File (on a windows machine) to PDF on my Linux machine, although it may not work well for everyone. If this doesn't meet your needs, Adobe has trial versions of Acrobat and most of its other software available. I expect that is its easiest for most people to simply use OpenOffice though.
Friday, March 03, 2006
Scrabble
If you enjoy scrabble (word game, owned by Hasbro in the US) and don't have (or don't want to deal with) one of the aging official computerized versions, the Internet Scrabble Club might be for you. It is java based so works fairly well with most operating systems, and is free. Definitely worth checking out.
Now back to my Scrabble game ;-)
(Edited 8:31 PM EST, Maybe it would help if I gave you the link)
Now back to my Scrabble game ;-)
(Edited 8:31 PM EST, Maybe it would help if I gave you the link)
Thursday, March 02, 2006
Norton Security Software, Keyloggers
This should be a quick, but funny post:
According to Slashdot (and other sources), Norton protects against the Spybot worm by disconnecting IRC (Internet Relay Chat) sessions when someone types "startkeylogger", which is overreacting (just a bit). It is always good to know that your security software is working, but this is overboard. If you are looking for an alternative, I suggest AVG or Avast combined with Zonealarm firewall. On Linux (and other similar OSes) I use clamAV, which seems to work (but I haven't had a virus to try it on in a long time).
Remember, At least for Windows, You should defiantly have a virus scanner (as well as some other tools), even if you have to put up with some minor problems.
Oh well, back to my homework ;-(
According to Slashdot (and other sources), Norton protects against the Spybot worm by disconnecting IRC (Internet Relay Chat) sessions when someone types "startkeylogger", which is overreacting (just a bit). It is always good to know that your security software is working, but this is overboard. If you are looking for an alternative, I suggest AVG or Avast combined with Zonealarm firewall. On Linux (and other similar OSes) I use clamAV, which seems to work (but I haven't had a virus to try it on in a long time).
Remember, At least for Windows, You should defiantly have a virus scanner (as well as some other tools), even if you have to put up with some minor problems.
Oh well, back to my homework ;-(
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