crazy insane insights
If you’re using an RSS reader, chances are you’re subscribed to tons of blogs and other websites. It’s just to easy Damn you usability experts!
Anyway, I went through my list of subscriptions and got rid of all the stuff that wasn’t worth my time. I’m now subscribed to only 6 feeds instead of 70+. It’s awesome. You should try it!
I just got interviewed by crowdSPRING and they asked me to send them a “stylized picture” of myself. I got creative with my new Wacom pen tablet and this is the result. Thanks to Tommy Köhlbrugge for taking the photograph.
I was just browsing through Apple’s Trailer page which is pretty cool but I don’t like the fact I have to click through multiple pages just to see a trailer. Front Row is better but you still have to launch it and navigate to the specific page. So I just decided to create my own little website. That was 2 hours ago, here’s the result:
Extra features like sorting chronically and RSS feeds coming soon! (maybe)
Mail.app’s signature feature is an easy way to add a signature to every outgoing email. However when replying to a message the signature would be added to the very bottom of the message instead of before the quoted message.
Today I noticed Apple has fixed this issue by adding an option to place your signature above the quoted text. It can be found in the preferences in the Signatures-tab.
I’m not sure when this feature was added but I remember checking the Preferences-window including searching the internet and couldn’t find a solution so I guess they added it recently within a software update.
There’s a discussion going on at Digg.com about Google punishing Made-For-Adsense websites.
The title of the story suggests Google will filter all websites that have loads of ads and little content. However, if you read the article closely you will understand this is not the case.
Google is only punishing websites that have loads of Google Ads (using the Google Adsense program) which are advertised themselfs at Google (using Google Adwords).
So this basically means you won’t find any ads for MFA-sites on the Google site but you may still find them in the search results. (which is very unlikely to happen because of the little content).
I may be wrong but this is what I make of it. I guess we will have to wait for an official announcement.
While creating an Automator action for uploading screenshots to Flickr I came across the term PTP. After some research I learned PTP (which stands for Picture Transfer Protocol) is a protocol for connecting your Digital Photo Camera via USB.
Normally when you attach a camera via USB the camera will be recognized as a USB Mass Storage Device and your camera (or memory card if you want) will be mounted to your desktop. The problem with this is you have to manually unmount the USB Mass Storage Device in order to prevent the risk of data loss.
However, with PTP this problem is gone. When you set your camera to use PTP it will not be mounted on your desktop but will still be accessible by programs like iPhoto.
So if you reguarly connect and disconnect your camera try using PTP (if your camera supports it) and you won’t be nagged by those “USB Device was unsafely removed, blah blah” errors.
Let me know how it works out for you!
PS
I haven’t tried this on Windows (or Linux) but according to Wikipedia Windows should support it and I’m sure Linux does too perhaps with some extra software.
I’ve always used about:blank as my home page because I don’t want to load a whole website everytime I open up a new browser window. This approach worked pretty well but the one thing I didn’t like about it is the fact the about:blank page is completely white and I wanted it to be black. I find it easier on the eyes.
So hereby I announce Oozd.com, The About:Blank Alternative. Just suffix oozd.com/ with the color you like to use and you have your own colorful about:blank. Some examples:
Oozd supports normal english color names (e.g. red) and hexidecimal values (e.g. f00 and ff0000). Support for RGB (e.g. 255,0,0) is coming soon as some other features will.
Today Digg released their API:
The Digg Application Programming Interface (API) has been created to let users and partners interact programmatically with Digg. The API returns Digg data in a form that can be easily integrated into an application or a web site.
I had a quick look at the API documentation and it looks like the API is pretty well-designed. The available information is pretty slick too.
I’m planning on experimenting with it this weekend so expect some Digg related tools soon!
As returning visitors may know I have been using the default Wordpress theme since I started this weblog. Since today however, I’m using a modified version of Phu Ly’s excellent Treba theme.
As soon as I get some spare time I will create my own custom theme, but I think this new theme works pretty well too.
As some of you might know I’m hosting at MediaTemple for about a week now. I went for a GridServer which normally costs about US$200 a year. I got 50% off using the coupon code surfstation.
Signing up was pretty straight forward. It looked like they didn’t support Paypal but after an email to MT support I got an email with explanations how to pay using Paypal nevertheless.
The GridServer doesn’t come with a Plesk controlpanel but with a custom one. Overall it’s pretty self-explanatory and with the help of the MT KnowledgeBase I didn’t encounter many problems.
One thing I should notice however, is the fact the control panel is originally meant for one website. It’s possible to add several domains (I’m using about 25 at the moment) but you get only one controlpanel. Some options can be changed for every domain, some options are system-wide. If you’re hosting several big websites I wouldn’t go for the GridServer.
I encountered several problems which were mostly my own fault for not paying attention to the notices I got when adding domains. I have filed a couple of tickets and the average response time was about 18 hour which I think is pretty long. They do have a knowledgebase however which covers a lot of problems.
I haven’t experienced any downtime yet.
A couple of friends told me MediaTemple gives free hosting to design companies and the like, that’s why you find their logo at every design site. Also, these websites get better support so they let their visitors know how great MediaTemple is, although it’s just a normal webhost like any other.
I still have a couple of weeks to go before my 30-day money-back guarantee expires and I’m not quite sure what to do. I will post here again when I have made my decision.