- Published:
- January 31, 2008 – 4:31 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
I recently formatted my laptop and installed Windows first, using half of the hard drive, and then installing Ubuntu 7.10 on the other half. It had been a while since I tried Ubuntu – it has a come a long way – but that is another story. The install worked fine, however at the end, it just sort of hung while installing grub. GREAT. I reboot and it kicks me to a (grub) standard prompt. It took me a while to figure this out, but you can manually boot Ubuntu via the grub prompt. The tricky part is finding out the right commands since your system is totally inaccessible. You can find your available hard drive name by typing: 1> root ( <tab> pressing tab will list your available hard drives and partitions and hopefully your Ubuntu ext3 partition. Continue setting the root boot partition. This includes your partition….
Categories: Linux,Site Updates,System Administration,Ubuntu
Tagged: boot, grub, Ubuntu
- Published:
- January 30, 2008 – 8:01 am
- Author:
- By Dave
The goal here is to watermark all images in a certain directory, except for thumbnails or other selection. You can either do this on each file prior to placing on your webserver – which is probably wise for CPU load issues – but let’s just say you want to do this for all files served in a single directory dynamically, a gallery for example. The first step is to create a .png file with transparency which holds your watermark image. For this exercise, I’ve created this image: (I’ve added the border to stand the image out from the background of the page). Here is the original image we are going to test with: After we have our watermark and sample image, we need to write a php file to use PHP’s GD function to apply this image to our original image. The particular function we use is imagecopy(). Here is….
Categories: Code Samples,PHP
Tagged: apache, gallery, gif, htaccess, jpeg, no cache, PHP, USD, watermark, web server
- Published:
- January 3, 2008 – 8:13 am
- Author:
- By Dave
Downloading a CAB file to install onto your Windows Mobile device can be a pain – after downloading the cab file to your desktop, you need to first copy it to your device, then find the cab file to install and then proceed to install it. CABviaActiveSync is a simple, free program that adds a context menu to automatically parse the cab file on your desktop and install it via activesync. This can save you a bunch of steps and is incredibly handy if you are like me and are always installing/uninstalling programs to check out. Download CABviaActiveSync from Modaco.
Categories: Cell Phones,Programs,Software,Windows,Windows Mobile
Tagged: activesync, cab, install
- Published:
- January 2, 2008 – 10:22 am
- Author:
- By Dave
I’m trying to get more people to contact me via Skype rather than cell phone – so feel free to use the ‘Skype Me’ button on the right; or Add me to your contact list. By the way, Skype, why won’t you get Caller ID working for US based phone numbers? This is the only thing stopping me, and I am sure a lot of people, from adopting Skype full on. Many people block Unknown numbers, or won’t answer if they see 0012345678 calling them! On that topic… Skype Journal is a really great blog with regards to Skype and VOIP in general. If you are interested in VOIP, I would check it out!
Categories: Other Technology,Programs,Site Updates,Software
Tagged: caller id, caller identification, cellular telephone, skype, United States, VOIP
- Published:
- January 1, 2008 – 11:40 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
I recently purchased a Dell monitor and upon opening it up and plugging it in, I noticed a bright blue pixel ‘stuck’ on towards the center of the display. Note that a ‘stuck’ pixel is different than a ‘dead’ pixel. A dead pixel will be dark, while a stuck pixel will be a primary color – red, blue or green and constantly on. I read this article on fixing a stuck pixel. I also came across Jeff Patch’s article which refers to a video created by Nick Toohill. However, after practicing all methods for a good hour nothing seemed to be working. I kept the video playing overnight; I also used more and more pressure to ‘massage’ the pixel. I’m not sure how to describe the pressure I used – it felt pretty unnatural to be pressing on your LCD screen that hard. At some points, you could see ‘crystal’….
Categories: Hardware,Other Technology
Tagged: Dell, Jeff Patch, Nick Toohill, Screen I, stuck pixel fix how to
