Meep’s Musings

Archive for the ‘Nerdy’ Category

I had two epiphanies today: 1) it’s a holiday and I forgot to buy food. Dang. 2) I know why my XAMPP doesn’t display any images. It’s nothing to do with the Apache configuration and only marginally with permissions. It was simply caused by my very restrictive .htaccess rules, and since disabling it, all is fine again.

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In attempt to be better (hello, belated New Year’s resolution), I’ve gone on a hunt for freeware programs. After some searching, I’m quite happy with the result: 98% of the programs I use now are officially free!*

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Another example of why it’s always a good idea to not listen to those pesky “Update now!” messages: FileZilla is an Open Source FTP program and so far has always been simple to use, reliable and highly tweakable. New release candidate 3.0.4.1 takes care of all three things and blasts them into oblivion faster than you can say “Hey, where did my connection go?”.

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Wordpress 2.3.1 came with a few good things but the dashboard is still the same bloated monster with the links to the Developer Blog and other news, which slow down loading considerably. Here are a few tips how on how to streamline it a bit and give you only what you need.

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Just took some long hours and now I have a (hopefully) working new theme on my blog. There might still be some bugs and quirks, so if anything looks strange, please tell me!

I’ve just updated to Wordpress 2.3.1 and still have to tweak plugins and themes, so please bear with me and the ugly default theme!

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The geek in me likes to carry a USB stick when I’m on the road or somebody asks for my computer help. The geek in me rejoices at PortableApps, which makes it possible to have a bunch of useful programs running on your USB device - that means you can open your files everywhere, without the need to install anything on another machine. It’s especially useful for having your e-mails (Thunderbird) and bookmarks (Firefox), but there is a whole range of portable applications to choose from, like FTP, audio editors, anti-virus software, instant messaging, the whole OpenOffice suite or media players. The installation is really easy and the use is equally trouble-free. All in all, a really good idea even if you’re not a geek ;).

What you need for this is first of all the SimpleTags plugin and an icon (quick image search). You will need to edit the file simpletags.php in your ‘wp-content/plugins’ folder.

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Anybody who uses a computer has had the problem: you have a multimedia file, but it’s the wrong format for your player. Or you want to extract audio from a ripped DVD file but don’t have the right program. Another scenario: you have a Quicktime movie you want to edit on a Windows PC. Without further ado: I think I might have found the solution!

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A very personal selection of so-called extensions (i.e. add-ons) for the Firefox browser. They add certain functions to your browser, most of them very useful (not all, though :P). Remember however that the more extensions you install, the longer your Firefox takes to load.

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