I started a side blog to blog.electronsmith.com called journal.electronsmith.com. The thought that the journal site would be more of an auxiliary brain to catch stuff that I watched to remember, but it takes too much time to maintain something like that so I rolled all the posts over to this blog and closed down journal.electronsmith.com.
Wordpress really made my day. It was so easy to move the posts over I couldn’t believe that it was actually done. All I did was export the posts from journal.electronsmith.com to a file on my desktop, import them with blog.electronsmith.com, and choose what users the posts would map to. I just need to clean up some duplicate categories, but other than that — Done.
Posted by benjamen as Wordpress, blog, productivity at 2:02 PM UTC
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An old Biostar motherboard I am using for my Mythtv backend has two SATA connectors, but they are only compatible with the 1.0 spec. OK, so the drive should recognize that and revert to SATA I compatibility mode. No, at least not Western digital drives. My motherboard refused to recognize the drive.
I remembered from an old Tech Guy podcast that someone was complaining that his motherboard wouldn’t acknowledge the drive without the 150MB/s pins jumpered. Remembering that I searched and found this document from Western digital explaining what the jumper pins were on their SATA drives — of course OEM drives come with no such documentation, remember when WD actually used to put the jumper settings on the drive itself?
So jumping pins 5 and 6 enables 150MB/s transfer speeds. After reconnecting the drive: Viola! The motherboard enumerated the SATA drive and I was on my way.
Posted by benjamen as SATA, Western Digital, computer at 6:31 PM UTC
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On a website for a client, I named one of the images Advertisement.jpg. I thought this made sense because it was a picture of an old advertisement. The problem was in one of my Firefox profiles I couldn’t view the image on the website. I banged my head against the wall (figuratively) trying to figure out why in this one case the image wasn’t showing up.
It turns out I was using AdBock Plus in the profile and it was blocking the image because one of the preset filters was configured to block files with advertisement in the name. After changing the file name the image suddenyl appeared.
Posted by benjamen as Firefox, add-ons, web at 7:48 PM UTC
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Lifehacker recently posted it’s Top Ten firefox extensions for 2009. Number ten on that list was Autocopy, an extension that automatically copies selected text and lets you paste it with just a middle click — within Firefox only of course. Although this behavior is somewhat standard in Linux it does not extend to Firefox.
One of the options in the AutoCopy preferences is to use the Copy Plain Text extension. What this does is strip formatting from the text you copy. This is very useful if you are trying to copy marked up text or text from a table.
Using these two extensions together save a bunch of keystrokes, mouse clicks, and time wasted stripping out foramtting by hand.
Posted by benjamen as Firefox, add-ons, linux at 8:57 AM UTC
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I had to look up what bounce rate was today. Here’s the definition:
Bounce Rate [Wikipedia]
Bounce Rate = (Single Page Access)/(# Of Entries to that Page)
In other words, it’s a measure of whether people stick around to look at more pages after entering the site or they leave after viewing only that page.
Posted by benjamen as web at 7:27 PM UTC
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Supposedly you can still get System Builders copies of XP Professional until June 30th, 2009, but I have read that there might be activation problems even if you are just reinstalling an existing copy.
Dell is still offering downgrades for the $99 purchase price of Genuine Windows Vista Business BONUS, they had pledged earlier to do this until 2010, but it remains to be seen if they actually will.
Windows Life-Cycle Policy
Windows XP Support Life-Cycle
Posted by benjamen as Uncategorized, Windows at 2:01 PM UTC
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The Conficker Eye Chart is a very simple test to detemine if your computer is infected by the Conficker worm.
Posted by benjamen as Windows at 1:13 PM UTC
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Jason Bean from everyjoe.com shares this bit of brilliant wisdom:
Instead of writing email in this order:
- Input recipients
- Write subject
- Write body of message
- Attach files
Write them in this order.
- Attach files
- Write Body
- Write Subject
- Select Recipients
If you can’t figure out why, here’s the orginal article.
Posted by benjamen as email, productivity at 6:18 PM UTC
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