Geek Stuff – Page 21 – jimcofer.com

March 28, 2009

All About Bookmarklets

Bookmarklets are tiny snippets of JavaScript code that can be stored in a bookmark (or Favorite, if you’re an Internet Explorer user).

Although many bookmarklets can handle tasks that browser extensions or plug-ins can do, bookmarklets have a few added advantages: they’re platform agnostic (most bookmarklets work in all browsers, so if you want to switch from Firefox to Opera most of your bookmarklets will still work); they don’t require any type of installation (Firefox extensions require a browser restart after installation, and also occasionally “break” when a new version of Firefox is released); they use far less memory than even a well-written extension; and lastly, bookmarklets work with bookmark synchronization sites and software, so if you use something like Weave or Foxmarks, you can easily have the same bookmarklets on every browser you use.

So… what can you do with bookmarklets? Check out this quick list I threw together:

Share on Facebook – One of Facebook’s most popular features is the “Share Link” app, which allows you to paste a website address into a Facebook window and send it out to all your friends. To use this feature, you normally have to to copy the target URL to your clipboard, open a new tab and login to Facebook, then paste the URL into the “Share:” box. With this officially-supported bookmarklet, you just go to a web page that you want to share and load the “Share on Facebook” bookmark; this makes a pop-up window appear with all the pertinent sharing information, so you can share it on Facebook with far fewer mouse clicks than the old way.

PressThis! – PressThis is like “Share on Facebook” for WordPress. You can highlight some text on a web page and click the “PressThis!” bookmark… a pop-up window will open to your WP blog with the text you highlighted already added to a new post. It’s awesome! Go to your WP dashboard and click on the main “Tools” menu to find out more.

Legiblize – converts the active web page to a more readable format. Excellent for older web pages or long Wikipedia articles.

Continue reading “All About Bookmarklets”

March 27, 2009

Sprint Fail

The missus is looking at new cell phones, so we stopped by our local Sprint store yesterday. Here’s a pic of their automated payment kiosk:

Sorry about the “shaky cam” – the store manager was giving me the stink-eye when I snapped it.

March 26, 2009

New Vid Card Goodness!

As you may know, I got a new computer for Christmas. The new machine’s pretty boss, but came with a rather disappointing onboard graphics chipset. So I ordered a new video card for my birthday: a Sparkle GeForce 9400 GT from Newegg. My first PCIe card, the 9400GT has some pretty amazing specs, considering the less than $50 price tag.

I suppose the most amazing is the 1GB of onboard video RAM. I remember getting really excited when I doubled the amount of video RAM on my old Pentium II 350 from 8MB to 16MB. That was something… and here I am, years later, fawning over a video card with 1000MB RAM!

The new card really boosts my WEI rating, too. Here’s a screencap from before the upgrade:

Continue reading “New Vid Card Goodness!”

March 23, 2009

Guest Mode in Windows 7

Windows NT (and Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows Vista) has always had a “guest account”. In theory, you could enable the guest account to allow friends, family members or house guests to access your computer without messing things up too badly. Unfortunately, Microsoft has never made it quite clear (to home users) just what the “guest account” is, and how access rights operate under that user. So most people just don’t bother using it at all.

Windows 7 has a groovy new feature called “guest mode” that’s like the guest account on steroids. It can do this because it uses an improved version of another Microsoft tool – Windows SteadyState – to take a before and after “snapshot” of your PC. As soon as someone logs in under guest mode, a snapshot of your system is taken. The guest user will not be able to change system settings, install any software, or write anyone on the disk outside their own user profile folder. Once the user logs off, any changes made to the profile folder are discarded by SteadyState, and you’re presented with a shiny “new” guest account again. Also, drives can be “locked”, and users would not be able to change anything on a locked drive on your system.

It’s a cool feature, especially for folks like me that are too paranoid to let anyone else use their computers!

Read more about Guest Mode at Lifehacker here.

March 21, 2009

Stupid Region Codes

While the rest of us have been dealing with Hollywood’s stupid “DVD region system” for years, it’s only now that Tinseltown’s folly has hit the corridors of power. It seems that President Obama gave British PM Gordon Brown a basket of 25 “American classic” films during his recent visit to the US. Brown, not normally a film buff, was reportedly “touched” by the gesture… that is, until he actually tried to watch them. It seems that no one in the White House knew about regions, because when Brown popped one of the discs into his player he got the dreaded “Wrong Region” error message.

I find it hard to believe that no one in the White House knew about R1 vs. R2 (to say nothing about the NTSC\PAL thing). How hard would it have been to have someone order them from Amazon UK? Or have someone at the US embassy in London hit the nearest Virgin Megastore and Fedex them to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue?

This is our technology president?

Amusingly, one British journalist wondered if Clueless might have been included with the film…

March 16, 2009

iPod Shuffle Update

Last week I wrote a nasty missve about the new iPod Shuffle. Much of what I said was based on incomplete information. Sadly, fresher information is actually making me like the new Shuffle less, not more.

I noted (as an update in the comments) that Apple will be making an adapter available for third-party microphones. What’s news is that adapters must now be chipped. That’s right – to use a different pair of headphones or to hook a Shuffle up to computer or car speakers, you now have to buy an Apple-approved accessory that has an Apple-approved chip inside. So your days of buying $1.99 iPod adapters off eBay are gone.

Third-party “Apple approved” headphones are now appearing, with the average price being $49. The latest estimates for the price of an adapter alone are in the $19 – $29, with $29 looking more realistic with every passing day. There again, why shell out $79 for the new Shuffle if you’re going to have to pay $49 for additional headphones? Why not just buy a Nano that doesn’t have that stupid requirement?

Also, word is that the new Shuffle’s battery actually has less capacity than the 1G or 2G Shuffles. Apple’s official specs for the 2G Shuffle were 12 hours per change, although 18 hours was actually more common in practice. Apple says the new Shuffle only gets 10 hours, and early reviews have indicated that it struggles to meet even that low standard.

Lastly, the new Shuffles simply don’t represent a good value. Paying the “iPod tax” was OK when the 1GB Shuffle was $48 and the 2GB was $68. But it’s just silly to pay $80 for a 4GB media player in this day and age (to say nothing about the now- needed accessories). You can buy a 4GB USB stick for $10 almost anywhere, and if it’s a flash-based player your after, there any dozens of other fish in that sea.

March 16, 2009

There’s a camera in his eye!

BRUSSELS – A Canadian one-eyed documentary filmmaker is preparing to work with a video camera concealed inside a prosthetic eye, hoping to secretly record people for a project commenting on the global spread of surveillance cameras.

Rob Spence’s eye was damaged in a childhood shooting accident and it was removed three years ago. Now, he is in the final stages of developing a camera to turn the handicap into an advantage.

A fan of the 1970s television series The Six Million Dollar Man, Spence said he had an epiphany when looking at his cellphone camera and realizing something that small could fit into his empty eye socket.

via TheStar.com | Smile, you’re on eye-socket camera.

March 9, 2009

The end of the megapixel race

For the past couple of years, I’ve been saying that the “megapixel race” between camera makers to push out cameras with ever more megapixels is silly and counter-productive. Although megapixels are important, they’re only a small part of what makes a digital camera good (or bad).

It seems that I was right. Akira Watanabe, manager of Olympus Imaging’s SLR planning department, has officially declared 12 megapixels to be “enough for covering most applications most customers need”. And Ars Technica agrees:

Throwing more megapixels at the digital imaging problem is akin to bumping up the processor speed on a motherboard with a slow bus and small amounts of RAM, or adding a turbo to a small engine on a car with lousy brakes and wobbly suspension.

It’s about time you guys listen to me! 😉

via The end of the camera megapixel race – Ars Technica.

March 4, 2009

NEAT SOFTWARE: Fences

Some people keep their Windows desktops free of any icons. Others cram as many icons as they possibly can on their desktops. Most people, however, fall somewhere in between: more than a handful of desktop icons, but less than a screenful. Wouldn’t it be cool if you could somehow organize all those icons by project or type?

Well, now you can – thanks to the Windows UI tweakers over at Stardock! They’ve just released a new program called “Fences“. Fences allows you to create one (or more) containers for desktop icons (called “fences”). After you create the containers, you can drag whatever icons you’d like into each container; you can then move and\or resize each container as you see fit.

So, for example, you could have a fence called “My Computer” that holds all your default icons (My Computer, My Documents, Recycle Bin), another fence called “Downloads”, another fence called “Political Science Term Paper” and another called “Jones Realty IT Upgrade Project”. You can then drag related icons onto each fence, which will keep them nice and organized. What’s even better is that you can double-click your desktop to make the fences (and their icons) disappear or reappear (you can also exclude certain fences from this behavior, so that your “My Computer” fence is always displayed).

Here’s my desktop at the moment:

Fences is free for personal use and runs on 32- and 64-bit versions of Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7. For more information, click here.

February 23, 2009

A Virtual Unknown: Meet “Moot”

The bar is in New York’s Chinatown. It’s a recent Saturday afternoon. It looks beer-stained and sweaty with the lights on, packed with plastic folding chairs and power cords. A giant disco ball hangs above an audience of 425 who are all on their MacBooks. They talk, blog, tweet and text during presentations in one fluid, convergent communicative stream. Even virtual people like to have actual conventions.

There are a few people at this conference who qualify as Internet celebs — people you either have or haven’t heard of in direct proportion to how much time you ever spend online: Obama Girl is expected to be here; so are well-known bloggers, fontmakers and stunt artists. (Hey, there’s the guy who once a year inspires hundreds of people to ride subway systems at the same time, without pants.)

But the guy everyone really hopes to meet is named “moot.”

via A Virtual Unknown: Meet ‘Moot,’ the Secretive Internet Celeb Who Still Lives With Mom. – washingtonpost.com.