Category: Geek Stuff

In this post, I showed you how to use Adobe Photoshop to make your own kubrickheader.jpg file for the default WordPress theme, so you could replace the boring old blue graphic with something a bit snazzier.

There’s just one problem with my method: by default, WordPress will still want to display the blog name and tagline over the graphic. Although you can change the color of the text via the “Custom Header” applet in the Admin panel, this is not always the way you’d want to go about it. You cannot easily change the font, nor can you easily change the placement of the text. So sometimes your cool graphic gets “cluttered” with your blog’s name and tagline.

You could always go to Customer Header > Advanced and click the “Toggle Display Text” option, but this presents another problem: once you do this, the text will disappear, but the header graphic will no longer be clickable. So if someone comes to a specific page on your site via a search engine, they won’t be able to simply click the header graphic to go to your home page – they’ll have to manually edit the address bar back to your home page. And that’s just not satisfactory. What’s more, most people that are familiar with Photoshop would probably rather use the text tools included with the app to make their own text in the font, color, place and style of their choosing.

Continue reading “Making Kubrick Header Clickable”

So I signed up for Twitter a couple of months ago, mostly just to give you readers one more way to stay in touch with me. I installed a WordPress plugin called Twitter Tools that automagically adds a tweet any time a new post is added here, so people using iPhones or Blackberries with Twitter apps will be able to use it like an RSS feed.

Other than that, though, I don’t personally use Twitter all that much. I use ping.fm to add tweets and to update my statuses on Facebook and MySpace… and I also satisfy my voyeur impulses by occasionally checking out what celebrities are up to on Twitter.

As you might know, dozens of celebrities use Twitter, and almost anyone can add them to their “Twitter contact list” (or “follow them”, in Tweetspeak).

Some celebrities, like Al Gore, use Twitter mainly to disseminate information; most of his posts simply say “read this article” or “watch this video”. Other celebs, like Richard Branson, user Twitter as a marketing tool (typical tweet: “get 50% off fares to Miami this week on Virgin Atlantic!”). Other celebs – like Lost and Fringe creator JJ Abrams – set up accounts ages ago and never seem to update them. Still others, like Britney Spears, farm out tweeting to assistants, and it’s blatantly obvious that it’s not the actual celebrity doing the tweeting there.

Below is a list of the celebrities I follow on Twitter. In most cases, these are the actual celebrities themselves (and not assistants). They’re also people that post interesting stuff (unlike, say, Al Gore, whose feed is not much more than a link farm, really):

Jamie Oliver – British celebrity chef.

Dexter Fletcher – British actor, best known as “Soap” in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, but also Hotel Babylon and Band of Brothers.

Sarah Silverman – Comedienne and actress.

Mindy Kaling – Writer, producer and actress (“Kelly Kapur”) from The Office.

Rainn Wilson – “Dwight Schrute” from The Office.

Stephen Fry – English actor, writer, comedian, author, television personality and film director.

Continue reading “Celebrities on Twitter”

Good news from the broadband front:

Proposed legislation would require large broadband providers to submit volume usage pricing schemes to the Federal Trade Commission for approval. If the FTC determines a pricing plan is imposing rates, terms, and conditions that are unreasonable or discriminatory the agency would be given authority to can the plan.

Prompted by the grassroots support for his opposition to Time Warner’s proposed broadband cap plan pricing scheme, U.S. Rep. Eric Massa introduced June 17 the Broadband Internet Fairness Act (H.R. 2902) to require the phone and cable companies to disclose their pricing plans to the FTC (Federal Trade Commission).

Continue reading “Bill Targets Bandwidth Caps”

The exploding popularity of Facebook is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s cool that more and more of your old friends and classmates are joining up; on the other hand it’s a bit of a drag that people like your mother and boss are signing up… because this presents a problem. You can’t very well deny a friend request from good ol’ Mom or your boss… but you really don’t want them to see those pictures of you doing Jager shots off a stripper’s belly, either. What can you do?

Thankfully, Facebook has a nifty, built-in way to avoid this whole mess. It might seem lengthy at first, but it’s actually pretty easy:

1) Log in to Facebook.

2) Click the “Friends” link at the top of the page.

3) Look for the “Friends List” in the left hand sidebar. You might see a list called “Limited Profile”. If you do, click on it and add the friends you want to restrict to the list. If you don’t see a “Limited Profile” list, click “Make New List” and give it a name like “Limited Profile” or “Safe Profile” or what have you. You may add friends to the list at this time or do it later – it’s up to you.

4) Click the “Settings” button at the top right of the page. Click “Privacy Options” from the drop-down menu.

5) Click “Profile”.

6) You will now see a list of all the aspects of your Facebook profile, such as “Basic Info”, “Personal Info”, etc. Choose each part you’d like to block by clicking the drop-down box for that particular entry and selecting “Customize”. At the bottom of the pop-up window, click the box in the “Except these people” option and start typing “Limited Profile” (or the name of the list you created in step 3).

7) Repeat step 6 for every section you’d like to block your friends from seeing.

8) Click the “Save Changes” button when done.

To verify these settings, type the name of a friend from the Limited Profile list into the “See how a friend sees your profile:” box.

Note that you can have multiple lists and multiple privacy rules. So you could have a very restrictive profile for family, a “looser” profile for coworkers, and a “standard” profile for your friends.

From the “why isn’t this built in to Windows already?” department:

Taskbar Shuffle is a small, free program that lets you move not just items on the taskbar, but icons in the system tray (by the clock) as well. It also has a few grouping tweaks and also allows you to close taskbar items with a middle-click.

I’m only reporting about this now because the author only recently released a version that works on x64 Vista. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, and I just love it.

Read more about it (or download it) here.

Back in December, I posted this article about using “content blogs” instead of Bittorrent to download your favorite movies and TV shows.

To recap, “content blogs” use blogging software (like WordPress) to post links to movies and TV shows that are hosted on public file-sharing sites like RapidShare and Megaupload. This has several advantages over using Bittorrent.

For starters, it doesn’t require any specialized software, only a web browser.

Secondly, it’s safer, since you’re only making one connection to a public web site, as opposed to hundreds of connections to random strangers’ computers (and possibly computers owned by the Music Police).

Lastly, using content blogs saves you bandwidth because you only have to download the file in question, not share it out to everyone else. You see, Bittorrent chops a file into a bunch of pieces, and once you’ve downloaded a few pieces your computer starts sharing them out with other users. This is what makes Bittorrent so fast – you’ve not downloading a file from just one person, you’re downloading it from dozens of other people. Most private Bittorrent trackers require you to maintain an upload:download ratio of 1.0 or higher, which means that a 350MB TV episode actually costs you 700MB of bandwidth with Bittorrent.

It’s this last thing I wanted to talk about today. My router runs Tomato, an open-source firmware replacement for the Linksys WRT54G-L router. Part of Tomato’s feature set is the ability to track the amount of bandwidth used. After a few months of using content blogs as much as possible, I can report some rather stunning news: my weekly bandwidth consumption has dropped from 33-36GB/week to 10-12GB/week. That’s simply stunning. While it is true that I’m not downloading as much stuff as I used to, I’m still downloading around 17 shows a week. To go from running through Time Warner’s proposed 40GB cap in just over 8 days to making it last almost an entire month is simply amazing… and will hopefully keep TWC off my back.

I also wanted to give you some links to other content blogs. I’ve downloaded stuff from all of these places, and can vouch for them (keep in mind that any link posted in a “Commenst” section could come from anyone, and they occasioanlly have fakes or viruses there):

Releaselog (still my fave!)
SceneDDL (British site; has a lot of UK TV)
ZeroSec
Netloaded
Scene Source
Scene Releases

Windows 7 will sport a nifty new feature called “XP Mode”. Basically, this is a virtual machine embedded in the OS that boots a VHD containing an image of a XP SP3 computer. It’s not revolutionary, but it is much more convenient than downloading and installing Virtual PC and installing XP SP3 on a virtual drive by yourself.

The only issue with this feature is that it will require hardware virtualization. How can you tell if your computer is up to the task? By downloading a small, free app from Steve Gibson’s website (yes, that Steve Gibson, of the “Windows Security sky is falling!” fame). It’s called SecurAble, and it will tell you in an instant whether your processor is up to snuff:

The first column tells you if you have a 32 or 64 bit processor. The second column tells you if your computer supports D.E.P. (which protects against certain types of malicious software). The third column, the one marked “Hardware Virtualization”, is the one we’re interested in. If it says “Yes”, then you can run XP Mode in Windows 7. If it says “No”… you’re out of luck.

Consumers Union is the latest group to call out Time Warner on their “metered broadband” plans.

The organization, which publishes Consumer Reports magazine and recently purchased the consumerist.com website, used Time Warner’s own shareholder reports to throw some more cold water on the “fire” that is “capped broadband”.

You can read their report here, but the gist of it is thus:

• TWC’s revenues from broadband during the first three months of this year rose 11% percent over the first quarter of 2008, climbing from $994 million to $1.1 billion.

• At the same time, TWC’s costs to provide broadband service to its customers dropped 18%, from $40 million to $33 million. That dramatic drop in costs came even though its number of subscribers grew from 7.9 million to 8.6 million.

• Overall, TWC’s profits were down for the quarter, falling from $242 million to $164 million. But the company says the drop in profits was due mostly to restructuring costs rung up when it was spun off in March from its parent company, Time Warner.

Once again, I just can’t believe that TWC would take the whole “woe is us” approach to metered broadband, especially in the day and age of the Knowledgeable Internet Consumer. These days, a large company like Time Warner just can’t outright lie to people… but they tried anyway.

Remember… I’m still watching you like a hawk, Time Warner!

I was so busy working on the Ashes to Ashes recap (coming up at 9am this morning), that I forgot to mention that SP2 for Office 2007 was released today… so fire up those download engines, folks! It’s available here.