Archive for the 'Web' Category

caturday special

Published on May 12, 2012 in Web. 0 Comments

When ads first started appearing on websites, they were already annoying… and advertisers started paying ridiculous amounts of money to advertise on websites and they got even more annoying. Ads on websites are even easier to ignore than ads in print media… so the pop-up was born … and it was awful. Training your eyes/brain to ignore banner ads and skyscraper ads and silly boxes that get injected into the middle of a story was not impossible, but when windows start popping up, it gets difficult. Those super-obnoxious dynamic ads that cover up webpages and/or make all sorts of annoying noises are even worse. Thanks to the plug-in and extension system built into modern web browsers, ad blockers became a reality. There are a bunch of them, and there are only two groups of people who don’t like them: advertisers and web designers who live on advertising money. Everyone else should use them and love them. The world would be a more pleasant place with less obnoxious advertising, right? One of the programmers who thought so, has made his adblock extension into his full-time job. Then that programmer put together a couple great April Fools’ jokes: Adblock Freedom and Catblock. Maybe the Adblock Freedom glasses are taking things a bit too far… maybe not, but Catblock was awesome. Not only was it a great reminder of all the ads that his extension has been blocking, but it added cats to almost every website. Popular demand led him to offer Catblock beyond the April Fools’ timeframe, if you support his efforts. It may seem wrong to support one guy who feels the same way I do, instead of all the websites that provide the content that I read online, but that is how strongly I feel about annoying ads.

Bonus: I submitted a couple pictures of our cat, Peanut, to be included in the catblock gallery, and now I see him in place of ads every now and then.

busy day off

Published on April 3, 2012 in Photo and Web. Closed Tags: Mom, Photo, Web.

No video games, not yet, anyway… the day’s not over, I guess.

I spent most of the day working on an upgrade to Mom’s quilt shop’s website. This is a project I started when I was out there in February, and just haven’t had the time to finish, until today. Unfortunately, I couldn’t finish it, completely. The whole reason I started the upgrade process was that her site suddenly used all its bandwidth, one day. The culprit seemed to be her cart software’s inability to create its own product thumbnails. It was just using html to resize the huge pictures, slowing all the loading times and eating up all her bandwidth. There was a system that would display thumbnails on the appropriate pages, if you created them and named them with a proper suffix and/or put them in the proper folder… but it wasn’t working. When I finally got things all upgraded and working again, I downloaded a bunch of her product photos, got them all thumbnail-sized … and then FTP stopped responding. Timeout, timeout, timeout. So, it’s not really done and the guy who might be able to look into why it’s not responding, and restart a service or something, is in England, and probably asleep.

Then I grabbed the Lumix GF2 that I got for Sarah, last year, and took a walk around the neighborhood. I haven’t really used it, but I found it pretty easy to get the hang of. It’s weird having to use the screen and not having a viewfinder, and I miss the flexibility of macro mode from my camera, which I couldn’t find in the menus upon menus… but it took some pretty nice shots, and the fact that I can change out that lens and even put something crazy like the Pinwide lens on there is darn cool. And it’s nice and light; I walked around the block with it on my neck and didn’t once feel it weighing me down.

circle

suburban pond

no skating

roots

twolips

flowering tree which will make a big mess soon

not latte art

cutes

Pop Tart Cat Live Wallpaper for Android (Work in Progress)

Published on April 19, 2011 in Web. Closed Tags: Computers, mobile.

Pop Tart Cat is undeniably awesome and I simply needed to have him as a live wallpaper on my android phone… So I looked into how I might make that happen. The first thing I found was a script that is supposed to make an application that installs a live wallpaper with the images of my choosing. I wasn’t having much luck with that so I installed the application that the script was based on onto my phone and after some slight modification (resizing and “finishing” some of the stars with some simple cut and paste) of the frames, I saved them on my SD card and told the app where to find the images … Voila! Pop Tart Cat Live Wallpaper on my Droid! But this is not conducive to sharing with the world… so I tried a little harder to get the script to create an apk that would install live wallpaper, and I did manage to get it working.

It doesn’t rotate or stretch across the multiple homescreens, mostly due to the limitation of that Live Wallpaper Creator app that the script is based on, but if someone who really knows how to create live wallpapers is inspired to make a better one that does those things, please let me know!

The live wallpaper can be found here

Video from my first attempt

The source
The t-shirt

(An)droid.

Published on November 6, 2009 in moBlog and Web. Closed Tags: mobile.

This is a test as much as it is a blog. I replaced my phone, today, with a Motorola Droid. This is one of the first android devices on Verizon as well as one of the first with android 2.0. It’s a huge upgrade for me. I barely had web access, before, now I have a honest-to-goodness browser. I waited for android to come to Verizon and resisted the urge to switch to an iPhone, even when my enV’s screen cracked.

The reviews are true. The keyboard isn’t wonderful. The software keyboard isn’t half bad, though… so I find myself flipping back and forth, for now. The app situation is weird. With such a nice browser, are the apps I’m downloading even necessary? I don’t know the answer to this one, either. Another case of “time will tell.” I loaded some music on it, but will it replace my iPod for the train rides to work in the summer or for car rides? Too early to tell. I’ve only used the camera to try out the Amazon price-matching app. I haven’t even tried the GPS yet, and that’s what really eliminated any doubt… the new, free, google-maps based turn-by-turn navigation.

So far, though, it’s pretty awesome. I will keep you posted on my findings

upgrade anticipation

Published on March 22, 2009 in Computers, Photo, Random Thoughts and Web. Closed Tags: camp, Computers, Mom, movies, Photo, team.building.

I have a time frame for the macbook upgrade. If I haven’t done it by June 25th, it will happen that day. The fact that it is going to happen makes me hate the loud fans and uncomfortable weight of the Dell even more. I don’t actually hate the Dell, it’s had a bunch of good years, but it is time for the upgrade.

I don’t have a timeframe for the phone upgrade. I was waiting for the nuvifone, but there isn’t a release date for that yet, and the main reason I was leaning towards it was the GPS-centric nature of it. The word on the street is that the new iPhone OS will enable using the Google maps in other applications and allow turn-by-turn directions. I don’t know if I can go Apple in such a big way… but the iPhone does have great customer satisfaction ratings and such. My phone turned itself off three times, completely at random, on Thursday… it is definitely time for that upgrade, but it also might not happen until the summer.

I don’t know if it’s actually going to be an upgrade, but we’re supposed to switch from Dish to U-Verse next month. Our DSL is currently with AT&T, and it can’t even handle streaming Netflix movies… I don’t think we ordered any more speed, so it probably won’t change, but the girl who set up the install sure did try to convince us that it was a newer, better, more exclusive dsl line. As far as I’ve heard, U-Verse is just TV over DSL. It’s pretty likely that we’re actually trying to squeeze TV and the internet over the same pipe and actually downgrading. We shall see.

This site’s wordpress code is due for an upgrade, but I don’t have any desire to do that. All of my little plugins are working fine. Maybe, if I get a little more into tumblr/twitter/etc. after the phone/macbook upgrade, I’ll feel the need to tweak the code here to keep up with more mobile updates.

My car doesn’t need any upgrades… I guess Doug’s van is dead, though. We peeked at some craigslist ads for similar vehicles in our price range, but haven’t started actively looking at anything yet. I’ve been using the Sirius in my car much more often, lately. I got an eMail from Sirius and I was tempted to buy the latest portable radio while I can still “lock in” the current rates. Who knows if Sirius will survive? I’ve done my part to support them. I resisted the urge by telling myself that the radio I had put in my car works fine and I don’t need another portable music player… I like the idea of combining a couple devices, not adding one to carry around.

My camera also doesn’t need to be upgraded, but I haven’t used it much, lately. When I had time to be taking pictures, I was mostly playing video games. I’ll bring it along on the field trips for work and maybe that’ll respark my desire to shoot. Maybe a new toy would help… Or maybe I should get a Diana+ for myself, since it seems to be getting all the cool attachments and add-ons lately.

Upgrade fever is similar to Spring fever. All of our vacation planning is definitely keeping the typical spring fever symptoms at bay… unless vacation planning is a symptom of spring fever. Mom’s coming up during my spring break, we’ve got a family vacation planned for early June and a wedding back east in late June… and we’ve yet to pick out a show, but we plan to hit APT/Theater in the woods again this summer. I guess there are a few weeks between the team-building season and the camp season that I haven’t thought about, yet. There’s always video games…

pulled the trigger on a new (to me) Mac

Published on October 27, 2008 in Computers, Photo and Web. Closed Tags: Computers, friends, memories, Photo, Web.

I found a plugin that’s supposed to crosspost from my wordpress blog to myspace. That would cut down on a lot of copying and pasting for each blog entry. There may be formatting issues. We shall see. This entry is mostly a test to see how well it works.
[Update: didn't work at all]

First, I should mention that I entered this shot of Penny into a photo contest with the extremely vague theme of “Black & White.” Sarah found the contest, she entered too – You should vote for us.

Sarah is working today. She went from no jobs to one retail job at Jo-Ann fabrics, one photojournalism gig at a local paper and one Promotions gig (web design, print newsletter design, photo slideshows, etc.) for a non-profit in Florida. It’s weird to be home while she’s not; that hasn’t happened in a while.

While she was in Florida, gathering photos for this job and meeting the people she’d be working for, I replaced the G4 with a G5. I grabbed a last-generation G5 (just before the intel switch) on eBay. It’s crazy fast, compared to the G4, and stable, so far. I got everyone’s accounts migrated onto it without too much trouble. The handles got a little bent in shipping, but that’s ok. The G4 has been a trusty computer for many years now, mostly as a backup, occasionally as Mark or Drew & Candace’s main machine in Woonsocket, but I think my constant hardware tweaking was finally too much for it. It was crashing at random. I mostly suspected the not-really-for-a-mac video card, but I didn’t want to go back to the one that was slowing the whole machine down. It’s downstairs and hooked up to that behemoth of a CRT monitor that Zombie is hooked up to. When I have time, I’ll mess with it and see if I can make it stable. Unfortunately, it never crashed on my watch, so I don’t know if I can duplicate the problem.

I’d like to be downstairs, now, playing with the other computers and catching up on my TV shows, but Frank’s friend Karol is sleeping on the couch down there. I’m trying to think of a way to make noise and wake him up but not give away the fact that I’m doing it just to wake him up.

boredom

Published on October 19, 2008 in Photo and Web. Closed Tags: Computers, Photo, Web.

Looking back, I could’ve used my time to do some cleaning around the house or do my paperwork for adventure ed or sort pictures from camp for the poster/collage or decide on pictures for a calendar. Let me recap some of the things that the boredom has made me accomplish instead of all those useful things:

I made all of my eMail go through Google Apps accounts, and then, instead of using POP to retrieve everything to my main gmail account, I’m having it forward there. Then, I made new labels for all of the mail. Then I went through my old labels (per account) and made filters for everything; All of my junkmail and advertisements go where they should and all my shopping related mail goes where it should and all my financial related mail goes where it should, etc. It is, essentially, the way I used to organize and filter my mail when I used Thunderbird to check all the POP accounts. I set up most of those filters as messages came in, though; For these, I went through my thousands of eMails and looked for any with no new labels on them, and, when appropriate, made a filter. Gmail is nice enough to find all the other existing eMails that match that filter and label them at the same time.

I also got rid of a superfluos account on the mac. My music was on a separate account (named itunes). I think I set up the account because I wanted to do simple ipod syncing and there was weird music in the itunes library of my actual account, not necessarily stuff I wanted on my ipod, stuff that past roommates had left on there. So I went through all of that music and threw away most of it, then exported the library from the itunes account, imported it into my account and deleted the itunes account. I also Restored my ipod. Maybe it’ll make that occasional error on start go away, maybe it won’t… but at least it’s a mac formatted ipod, now, so I can update its software, if there’s ever another update, from the computer I’m always hooking it up to.

Today, I started going through all my pictures on Flickr and assigning some of them to groups that I joined a long time ago and forgot about. This was a pretty futile excercise, though… it’s not streamlining the computer or making my eMail any easier to sort through, so I’ll probably just stop doing it, right now. I think it was just an attempt to kill the boredom while working at the front desk of the Y.

still hate homework

Published on October 2, 2008 in Family & Friends, Photo, Web and Work. Closed Tags: my.head, Photo, team.building, Web.

I hate the paperwork related to the every day operation of the adventure ed. program. It’s just like homework, when I was in school. I did the work already. The team is progressing. Why do I have to write about it? Boo homework. I don’t mind doing the survey result statistics, because the whole reason we do the surveys is for comparative statistics… but the journals don’t help the team at all. Boo homework.

In exciting/fun news, one of Sarah’s polaroids from our trip back east is shot of the day on Polanoid … she even gets a gift card! Woot!

upgrayedd

Published on July 27, 2008 in Family & Friends and Web. Closed Tags: camp, driving, friends, movies, Photo, Web.

I upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.6 today. I started the process at work, at the Y, which I was worried about, since the computer there is a little slow and I don’t have any of my backup versions of files there. It went fairly smooth, though… basically only left the custom, random header image thing to do here, and a little debugging. This will serve as my Livejournal crosspost test, since that is a new/old plugin… development on the one I had been using seems to have ceased. I guess this will also test all the other new and old features. There’s a new Flickr plugin, too. It’s been a good n’ geeky day.

We’re going to see Step Brothers tonight with our recently engaged friends Jess and Jason. It looks like a typical Will Ferrel flick, which is usually a good take, and we used our $5 coupons from the opening night of Hancock… so it’s totally worth the price of admission, pretty much, no matter what.

Next weekend is our Theater in the Woods/Troll/etc weekend. I’ve definitely been looking forward to it. That also means that I have a four-day work week for camp… which is awesome. Not that camp’s hard, but it is a little draining. Only three weeks left, now. It also means that I get to do some more driving. Taking the metra/cta into work all summer has been fun, but I miss driving, and this should help make up for it. I guess I have to be more careful, now that I’m on my extended warranty. I didn’t know it was going to cost me a $100 deductible every time I needed something fixed for the next 50,000 miles.

summer: exhausting, but fun

Published on July 13, 2008 in Photo, Web and Work. Closed Tags: camp, movies, Photo, team.building, Web.

Camp is a much easier than adventure ed, but the hours are longer. We (the adventure ed facilitators) complained amongst ourselves about not being paid for all the time between classes, but those hours were nice, relaxing breaks. Breaks just don’t happen in the summer. I don’t have to think nearly as much; I’m barely doing any programming at all, only running or playing games a couple times a week. But all the running around and gathering supplies, moving lunches, taking pictures, etc. keeps me busy all day and makes me exhausted by the time I get home. I should be taking more days off, especially these weekend days doing front desk at the Y. I took next Sunday off, since it’s the day after Can’t Stop the Serenity in Chicago… and I’ve got the the first weekend in August, including the Friday, all blocked out for our theater / trolls / house on the rock weekend. No more 15 days in a row, this summer.

In other news, I’ve found a new feed aggregator that I like: Swurl. It has a much more blog-like design, and the timeline feature is really neat. Here’s my swurl. I also got a new camera bag. The one that came with the Pentax owed me nothing, since it was, essentially, free… it finally got too beat up to be used, so I got a Crumpler 6 Million Dollar Home and it fits a lot of stuff.