New Toy..

Feb 27

We travel a lot.

And more often than not, wherever we happen to be, we need would really appreciate having a laptop with us.

Our ThinkPads are great. Great, but BIG. And besides the fact that mine should only be used for business purposes (which, admit it, is rarely the case when you’re on holiday, apart if you just happen to own a corporate-sponsored Blackberry that is) and DBW’s is too “precious” to even be removed from its docking station, an alternative Internet Access/Farmville Player/Pic Uploader device was more than due.

Enter the Acer/eMachines eM250..

  • Intel Atom processor N270 1.6GHz 10.1″ LED LCD
  • 1GB DDR2 Memory / 250GB Hard Drive
  • 802.11b/g Wireless LAN
  • Multi-in-1 card reader
  • Webcam with microphone
  • Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 950
  • Windows 7 Starter
  • Mobile Intel® 945GSE Express Chipset
  • 1025 x 600 display

A GREAT little machine that covers exactly every expectation I had, including

  1. 3 hours+ battery life
  2. WIFI access even when I happen to be hanging around outside
  3. Decent display
  4. Responsive TouchPad

Currently available at MediaMarkt for CHF 299.00!

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Fringe Benefits

Sep 28

One of the greatest things about our family: even if we don’t get to see each other that often, (and none of us is really conscientious when it comes to keeping in touch), when we DO meet up, it’s as if time had stopped since our last reunion.

Actually, judging by the number of babies and the receding hairlines, maybe it WAS a while after all…. ;-)

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Hope My Monthly 25Gb Is Going To Last..

Aug 11

Hmmm: I wonder if it really was a good idea to host Vic’s video on our own server rather than YouTube.

FYI, the dark green bar represents the bandwidth consumed on the given day: I just wonder when DBW started phoning family, friends and colleagues..

Hmmm.. :-)

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WordPress 2.6 Tips and Tricks

Jul 21

Picked this up today via Amit Agarwal’s Digital Inspiration blog: brilliant stuff!

The WordPress tips and few hacks mentioned below may only apply to a self-hosted installation of WordPress version 2.6 or above.

*If your WordPress blog is hosted on wordpress.com, please skip this.

Tip 0: Change the Default Image Upload Folder

The default installation of WordPress will store all your images inside wp-content/uploads folder.

image-upload-folder

You can however use a different folder or even sub-domain on your web server for saving file uploads as in the setting screen above. This offers two advantages – your image URLs become relatively shorter and second, the size of your WordPress folder will always remain small and manageable.

Also deselect the option – “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders.”

Tip 1: Remove unnecessary code from your WordPress header.

WordPress by default adds a version number to the header of all your blog pages.

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.5" />

This information may prove a goldmine for WordPress hackers as they can easily target blogs that are using the older and less secure versions of WordPress software. To completely remove the version number from WordPress header, add this line to your functions.php file in the WordPress themes folder.

<?php remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator'); ?>

Tip 2: Prevent people from casually browsing your WordPress Folders

Since you definitely don’t want Peeping Toms to navigate your WordPress files and folders using the explorer view in web browsers, add the following link to your .htaccess file that exists in the main WordPress installation directory.

Options All -Indexes

Tip 3: Windows Live Writer Templates & WordPress

If you not blogging via the Windows Live Writer client, add the following line to your functions.php file.

<?php remove_action('wp_head', 'wlwmanifest_link'); ?>

The WLW-Manifest function is used by Windows Live Writer to download the styles / themes used in your WordPress blog. Windows Live Writer users who do not use the live preview feature may also turn off this function.

Tip 4: Turn off Post Revisions in WordPress 2.6

WordPress 2.6 introduced Wikipedia style document revisions where you have access to all previous version of the document making it easy to revert incase you make any mistakes.

This may be a great feature for blogs where multiple authors work on the same blog post but 99% of WordPress users don’t need it. Post revisions also increase the size of WordPress wp_posts table as each revision means an additional row.

To disable post revisions in WordPress 2.6, add this to your wp-config.php file.

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

Tip 5: Disable HTML in WordPress Comments

The comment box is WordPress is like a basic HTML editor – people can use HTML tags like <b>, <a>, <i>, etc to highlight certain words in their comment or add live links. If you like to disable HTML in WordPress comments, add this to your functions.php

add_filter( 'pre_comment_content', 'wp_specialchars' );

Tip 6: Change location of the Plugins & WordPress Themes folder

With WordPress 2.6, you can place the wp-content folder anywhere on your web server. This may come handy when you are upgrading the WordPress installation because none of your existing themes and plug-ins will get overwritten even if you replace all the WordPress files with a tar downloaded from wordpress.org.

If you decide to move the wp-content folder to another location, specify the path in the wp-config.php file:

define(’WP_CONTENT_DIR’, ‘http://www.labnol.org/assets/wp-content’);

Tip 7: XML Sitemaps – Change the Building Mode

If you using XML Sitemaps plugin in WordPress, try changing the building mode to “manual.”

xml-sitemaps

When you publish (or delete) a blog post via the WordPress write panel, the entire XML sitemap is recreated from scratch and hence may increase the overall time it takes to publish a post as you’ll have to wait until the creation process is over.

Tip 8: Turn Off Image Thumbnails in WordPress (workaround)

disable-image-thumbnails When you upload an image to WordPress, it creates two additional thumbnail images in the uploads directory. I don’t know how to prevent WordPress from creating image thumbnails but there’s a workaround if you publish posts via Windows Live Writer.

Just use the FTP publishing option for images and this will automatically disable thumbnail creation because the upload happens through a different route.

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iPhone v2

Jun 07

Ok: so we know that, despite the hype, iPhone v1 is missing a myriad features which simply belong to a state-of-the-art cell phone:

  • Songs as Ringtones
  • Any flash support
  • Instant Messaging
  • Picture messages (MMS)
  • Video recording
  • Voice recognition or voice dialing
  • Wireless Bluetooth Stereo Streaming (A2DP)
  • One-size-fits-all headset jack
  • 3G (EV-DO/HSDPA)
  • GPS
  • A real keyboard
  • Removable battery
  • Expandable Storage

It IS sexy, indeed, but for at least 4 of the above-mentioned “omissions” I wouldn’t consider purchasing one..

As Steve Jobs is said to be introducing V2 next Monday, what can we hope for?

See-Through iPhone

iPhone Pro

iPhone Pico

iPhone Air

Or maybe even my favorite:

iPhone Shuffle

We are waiting with bated breath! ;-)

via iLounge.com

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Quote of the Day

May 30

An extract from the comments I had to moderate today:

muslim hacker
http://www.dff.com | ss@ee.com | 62.150.3.106

be careful , i will hack the site after 10 days .. haha

Go ahead: make my day…

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