My flatmate (and twice contributor to TheDayToday) has started his own tech blog focusing on web development. He started it in January with some sort of encouragement from his employer - it’s refreshing that companies are acknowledging the existence of weblogs, and the benefits they can have to their staff’s development. Of course there’s also the cynical view that it’s a way to spy on your staff, but I think there’s a responsibility to the blogger to remain somewhat anonymous and to also set some boundaries before you begin writing - don’t dig your own grave! Anyway, he’s got some handy tips and best practices as well as news and reviews. Check it out here.
Archive for the ‘Links’ Category
Weekly Web Dev
Wednesday, February 13th, 2008Link love 3
Friday, November 2nd, 2007It’s Friday and I don’t really feel like posting so it’s another roundup of things I’ve found funny or interesting recently. I have to say that I’ve been using StumbleUpon less frequently while I catch up with TV episodes and prepare for my trip to Florida - I’m still not entirely sure what I’ll be doing out there! Anyway, here are the links!
TrueCrypt - This deserves its own post at some point, but for now I’ll like link to it frm here. This great toold allows you to encrypt an entire partition on a fixed or removable drive, or create an encryption volume within a partition. I’ve used this on my USB drive to secure documents, and also to hide security tools from virus scanners.
Busted Tees - Some great t-shirt designs. I’m definately tempted by a few of these!
cl1p.net - The Internet clipboard is a useful tool that allows you to copy and paste between two computers with an Internet connection. It works by providing a URL for a fixed amount of time (a week is the default) where your copied text will be stored.
GuerrillaMail - These guys provide you with a disposable e-mail address. Once you have your address you can send and receive e-mails for 15 minutes. The account is then removed. Simple.
Free fonts
Monday, October 29th, 2007Continuing the current trend of short posts, here are some cool fonts, one of which I used for my online photo gallery. I’m quickly using up all of my draft entries with a single hyperlink in, so you can expect a decent length post again soon!
Link love 2
Thursday, October 25th, 2007It feels like a Friday today for some reason… Today I thought I’d share a few sites I’ve found using StumbleUpon recently. I’m going to be away from 4th-9th November so I’m looking for anybody that might be interested in guest blogging for any (or all) of those weekdays. Let me know.
Sunrise, Sunset Calendars and Local Time - Useful for finding out when the sun will set/rise in your location. I used this recently for taking some photos of the setting sun over Primrose Hill.
Stop Shooting Auto! - Another site related to my photography, this one I found and almost immediately added it to my feed reader. It’s a well written blog aimed at demystifying the complexities of your digital SLR.
Daily Color Scheme - This one’s a great resource. Unfortunately it hasn’t updated in over a year, but there’s an archive of colour schemes for use in web design.
Zoomed in food… - Yet another photography one. These are inspiring close up macro shots of food with tiny models of people. These kind of photos make me want to buy expensive lenses!
EasyUbuntu - On my list of things to do is ‘Install Ubuntu’. I came close recently when I tried installing it to my USB flash drive, but didn’t get far. When I do look into this again I’ll probably be revisiting EasyUbuntu, which claims to make the process easier. I’ll try it the ‘hard’ way first though!
Run Ubuntu Linux from a USB pen drive
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007I recently purchased a 4GB SanDisk Cruzer USB flash drive, and decided to try running Linux on it. I’ve not succeeded yet, as Linux always seems to come up with challenges for me, but the guides over at PenDriveLinux are a great place to start. It’d be even better if they explained each step as I’d find it easier to learn rather than just follow instructions. I think the issue I’ve currently got is with hardware compatibility, but I’ll keep trying and let you know how I get on.
Free secure online storage
Monday, October 22nd, 2007If you need to share large files between computers with an Internet connection there’s a better solution than e-mailing it, and a cheaper solution than sorting out web hosting. You can use a service like divShare.
divShare offer unlimited storage totally free and make their money by offering the option to brand your media files when they’re viewed directly from their service. They claim that it takes just 15 seconds to sign up, which I decided to test - it took me closer to 10 seconds! They have a very clean interface and I’m certain I’ll be using them to share photos from my upcoming trips!
BOFH
Friday, October 12th, 2007Yesterday I was reintroduced to the The Register’s BOFH (Bastard Operator from Hell) stories, and spent wasted some time reading through some of the more recent entries. They’re worth checking out, and can certainly break up the day. My favourite quote is below regarding Windows Vista:
“You should go to Vista.”
“So you like Vista?”
“Not really, no. I run a Vista simulator.”
“Virtual Server?” the Boss asks.
“Nah, I just turned on all the flashy crap in XP, changed the background image, took some memory out of my box and clocked down the CPU. Then broke Media player. Works like a charm.”
My essential Firefox extensions
Wednesday, October 10th, 2007I’ve been having an issue with Mozilla Firefox for some time now, where I can’t start it multiple times. Opening a new window is fine, but attempting to launch from a shortcut results in the error “Firefox is already running, but is not responding. To open a new window, you must first close the existing Firefox process, or restart your system.” I determined some time ago that this was related to my profile and that sorting out a fresh one would resolve the issue (copying the profile failed to do this).
So it is until now that I have delayed the deletion of my profile and creation of a new one, mainly because it didn’t bother me too much. The thing that finally pushed me to do this is that after a recent cleanup of my machine, Firefox has become unstable. I have now uninstalled/reinstalled and am ready to get this profile mess sorted. Removing the profile will of course cause me to lose any information stored, including passwords (I keep these in my head anyway so not a problem), bookmarks, and extensions.
I have the bookmarks covered using Google Browser Sync (which can also syncronise cookies, passwords, history, and open tabs) but there are a few other extensions that I find essential and will need reinstalling in the new profile. I did look at using FEBE to backup all extensions so I can just restore them in the new profile, but I prefer to use moments like this to perform a cleanup - so I’ll be getting rid of almost as many extensions that I seldom use.
Below I have listed my essential extensions, along with a description and a link to the download location. This is really so I can refer to this list to perform the reinstallation, and is in a way my backup of extensions.
- ColorZilla - Adds a eyedropper tool to the status bar, allowing you to get the hex value of any colour displayed on a page. A very useful tool for website designers.
- Extended Statusbar - This adds useful information to the status bar such as image count, page size, and how long the page took to load.
- Faviconize Tab - I don’t use this much (because I forget I have it) but it’s great. You can double click any tab and it will reduce to only display the site’s favicon - a great space saver if you use lots of tabs.
- Firebug - XHTML/CSS/Javascript debugging tool. Absolutely essential!
- Google Browser Sync - Essential for syncronising my bookmarks between machines. If only the bookmarks appeared on Google Bookmarks so I could access them online (apparently this is on the todo list).
- Google Notebook - A handy place to keep notes such as flight numbers, and other reference codes. I often forget I have it though, and most of these details get e-mailed to me anyway.
- Greasemonkey - This allows user scripts to run any website, which can be very handy. I used to have a script that added RSS feeds to Google Mail but I stopped using it, now I only have Facebook Autopoke (that’s right - I only poke because it’s automatic - now you feel less special?)
- IETab - Great for testing sites in Internet Explorer without loading it up, this allows you to change the rendering engine for any tab to IE. It’s also handy for sites that wont work in Firefox such as Outlook Web Access, or my work’s Intranet - you can configure sites to load using IETab by default.
- LiveHTTPHeaders - Shows what conversations happen between Firefox and the visited site(s). This can be handy for debugging problems or investigating site security.
- StumbleUpon - Essential for those moments where you think you’ve read the entire Internet already. Hit the Stumble button (after configuring your preferences) and you’ll get a seemingly random site displayed. Once you’re bored of that site, rate it and hit the button again!
- SwitchProxy - I use this all the time to avoid the proxy server at work, basically it routes all your traffic through another server. This can be very handy for security purposes.
- User Agent Switcher - This lets you tell Firefox to masquerade as another user agent. Sometimes it’s useful to pretend to be Googlebot for example, and see the web as Google see it.
- Web Developer - Lets you deconstruct and diagnose problems within a website. This one is essential if you consider yourself a web developer.
Of course this list wouldn’t be complete without including my own Firefox extension! It’s called the iCONSULT Search Assistant and unfortunately it’s not publically available, but even if it was it probably wouldn’t be on many people’s essential list! It basically adds a context menu item to perform a lookup against Elsevier’s Clinical Decision Support tool.
For details on managing Firefox profiles see Firefox Help: How To Manage Profiles.
Update: Everything reinstalled and I still have the same Firefox error. D’oh! Any suggestions would be cool, but I’m not that worried as I wont have this machine for much longer, and this was a good excercise.
Link love
Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007It’s a slow day and I can’t think of anything to post. Instead of letting a weekday go without posting I’ve decided to share a few sites that I subscribe to:
I’m looking for new contributors to this site, so if you would like to post for TheDayToday please leave a comment. I’d like to keep the material technical, but I’m open to suggestions.