Categories
Delicious

links for 2010-04-20

  • IDW’s Dungeons & Dragons series will each offer new stories and playable characters to existing game campaigns. The Dungeons & Dragons title will take place in the core world, as seen in the gaming supplements and upcoming novels, followed by a Dark Sun series starting in January 2011. Plans also include a series for the longtime fan-favorite Forgotten Realms setting. Each comic book will also be collected at intervals into graphic novels. The many planned projects will be distributed to a wide audience through comic book outlets, trade bookstores and mass retailers.
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-04-19

  • There's any number of great antivirus tools that help protect your PC from viruses, but what about when you encounter an already-infected PC? Your best bet is a boot CD, and the free AVG Rescue CD cleans viruses easily. The AVG Rescue CD comes in two flavors: an ISO image that can be easily burned to an optical disc, or a compressed version that can be installed to a bootable flash drive. Once you've done so, you can simply boot from the drive of choice directly to the AVG menu, where you can scan for viruses, edit files, test your drive, or even edit the registry. Since the bootable CD is based on a version of Linux, you can also access a number of common Linux tools to make changes to your system and hopefully make it bootable again.
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-04-18

  • This presentation is an HTML5 website
  • One of the most powerful tools for marginalizing non-religious thought in America has been the perception of a "moral supermajority" – the idea that believers outnumber the rest of us by a huge margin. Poll after poll has suggested that, indeed, a huge majority of Americans believe in God, and that many of those who do believe in the literal words of the Bible, including a young Earth and that evolution is a sham. Right or wrong, believers win by being numerous – after all, might, defined by numbers, makes right in a democracy. I always felt this seemed far removed from my own experience in terms of how people I knew personally viewed religion. Of course, I live in a pretty liberal part of the country, so I kind of explained it away by figuring that there must be a huge enough number of religious people SOMEWHERE ELSE that it would offset my own experience. While I'm sure geography is a factor here, it turns that it may not be THE major factor. Pew Research recently conducted a study
  • The line between nerd and sports fan is almost invisible when you get down to it: Is there really that much of a difference between a cosplayer wearing a bathrobe and waving a glow-stick at comic-con, and a fat high school burnout wearing a $200 Walter Payton throwback jersey while referring to the Bears in the first person plural? Whedon groupies and Jim Rome's clone army share the same doomed wish. But at least the jocks pine to matter in sports that actually exist. For the rest of us, we can always dream of sports like…
  • flMMU.gif (GIF Image, 1025×648 pixels)
  • Geek and you shall find
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-04-17

  • For decades, shoppers have taken advantage of coupons. Now, the coupons are taking advantage of the shoppers. A new breed of coupon, printed from the Internet or sent to mobile phones, is packed with information about the customer who uses it. While the coupons look standard, their bar codes can be loaded with a startling amount of data, including identification about the customer, Internet address, Facebook page information and even the search terms the customer used to find the coupon in the first place. And all that information follows that customer into the mall. For example, if a man walks into a Filene’s Basement to buy a suit for his wedding and shows a coupon he retrieved online, the company’s marketing agency can figure out whether he used the search terms “Hugo Boss suit” or “discount wedding clothes” to research his purchase (just don’t tell his fiancée).
  • Baking surveillance, control and censorship into the very fabric of our networks, devices and laws is the absolute road to dictatorial hell
  • Connecting an external hard drive to your Wii to backup and play your games is a simple way to keep expensive discs out of harms way, decrease game load times, and organize your collection with swanky cover art. Here's how it works. Last year we shared two guides with you that other people had written—the original and a revision—on how to back up and play your Wii games from an external hard drive. Unfortunately, like many things on the internet, the guides faded into the digital night (read: they were taken down). Setting up your Wii with an external hard drive is a wildly popular topic, however, and since the old guides went offline, we've received daily emails on the topic. In response to the demand, here's our own complete guide to setting up your Wii to play games from a USB hard drive. When laid out screen-by-screen this guide is quite lengthy, but the process itself only takes about 10 minutes start to finish—if you're not stopping to take lots of screenshots and write a tutor
  • The New York Times writes that Nintendo and Netflix will announce Wednesday that streaming movies and TV episodes will soon be available on the Wii—with one or two caveats. The service will be available free to Netflix subscribers with an unlimited streaming account, but will require a free software disc to be shipped from Netflix and kept in the Wii while streaming. The Wii's hardware limitations will also rule out HD-quality streaming, though that may be a subtle nod toward a possible HD-capable Wii coming down the line. No start date was given, but given that the streaming software sits on a disc, the service could start as soon as Wednesday. Does Netflix on Wii fill out your home entertainment options, or will you hold out for a higher-definition solution? [New York Times]
  • Since 1998, DynDNS.com has provided more than three million home and small business users with a suite of comprehensive domain services. From secure and reliable DNS hosting to registration, email, SSL certificates and VPS hosting, DynDNS.com helps you keep connected.
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-04-16

  • Because everyone needs a little Chewbacca in their life.
  • Few companies are dedicated to making your advertising and printed material look good like we are. Founded in 1999, We have crafted a reputation for delivering high standards of printing work and a variety of complementary services and products to meet the demands of modern-day communications. We make a difference to our clients by always having their best interest in mind. From business cards, plastic cards, and postcards to lenticular card printing and usb business cards we always deliver superior and innovative solutions. Furthermore our graphic designers can always assist with good advice, tips and professional design service.
  • A different (maybe better) title for this might be: the most frequently banned topics on the internet. Below I present a set of questions that are so counter-intuitive that their very mention can set off the right audience into a complete flame war. Each of them has been known to paralyze various online communities resulting in monster threads and lots of insults (and in one case, the company stepping in to solve the dispute). You can tell the intellectual average of a community based upon the sophistication of the brain-exploding questions that give it fits.
    (tags: math funny blogs)
  • If you're a Windows user, it pretty much goes without saying that you've encountered a frozen program before. Often these jammed apps get labeled with the dreaded "Not Responding" message and simply refuse to do anything, even close. Usually, the only solution is to open the task manager, find the appropriate process, and choose to close it. Fortunately, a quicker and easier way exists. As the good people at Lifehacker have pointed out (with the aid of HaxAttack), you can create a desktop shortcut that will automatically close any "Not Responding" applications whenever you double-click the shortcut. Here's how to set it up — it's really easy: 1. Right click while on your desktop and select "create a new shortcut." 2. Quotes included, enter the following as the location: taskkill.exe /f /fi "status eq not responding" That's it. From here, you can change the icon to make it prettier, or even set a shortcut key if double-clicking is too much work for you. When you launch the sho
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-04-15

  • Over time certain conventions and best practices have been developed to help improve the general usability of websites during their design and build. This roundup of ten usability crimes highlights some of the most common mistakes or overlooked areas in web design and provides an alternative solution to help enhance the usability of your website.
  • Instead of paying good cash for cd cases, which eventually break and end up in a landfill, how about creating your own, unique folded-paper cd cases that are biodegradable and take up a fraction of the space?
  • You couldn’t have failed to notice that pretty much every website on the face of the planet has a homepage, and that every homepage uses the same basic layout. Masthead at the top, navigation underneath and/or along the side(s), main content taking up most of the page, and a footer at the bottom. It’s common because it works. It differentiates the content that needs to be differentiated, it presents it in a logical order that follows how people read and interact with websites, and it’s relatively simple to code. In fact, HTML5 encourages you to code this way. If you want to succeed as a web designer, you should stick to this paradigm. The trouble is, although you know you need a header, navigation links, main content and a footer, it’s pretty hard to decide exactly where to position each, what margins and padding and fonts and colors to use, what items to include or exclude, and all those other details. You need a process you can rely on to ensure that you meet your client’s needs,
  • This is a tutorial on creating a PHP website template starting with HTML and CSS. We will start with the basics and you can also download the final product. Please remember that I am using very basic CSS styling in this example just for you to get the idea, and not so much to make it look pretty. The download will contain both the styled example as well as a complete blank template that you can use for your own starting point for any project personal or commercial. The demo files are released under GPL V2. This tutorial assumes you have basic understanding of html and css. At the end of this tutorial you should have a basic understanding of using php and converting an html site to php.You can also download the demo files here. The actual template will be created in 10 easy steps. I will then take it a step further to show you how to add variables to your template.
  • Nonsense, of course, but it helps illustrate a point: You will need a computer password today, maybe a half dozen or more — those secret sign-ins that serve as sentries for everything from Amazon shopping carts to work files to online bank accounts. Just when you have them all sorted out, along comes another “urgent” directive from the bank or IT department — time to reset those codes, for safety’s sake. And the latest lineup of log-ins you’ve concocted won’t last for long, either. Some might temporarily stay in your head, others are jotted on scraps of paper and stuffed in a wallet. A few might be taped to your computer monitor in plain view (or are those are from last year’s batch? Who can remember?). Now, a study has concluded what lots of us have long suspected: Many of these irritating security measures are a waste of time. The study, by a top researcher at Microsoft, found that instructions intended to spare us from costly computer attacks often exact a much steeper price in the
  • Start selling in 60 seconds
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-04-14

  • I love messing with settings and geeky file-sharing programs. My spouse doesn't, but digs Hulu and appreciates free. So I set up a media center that satisfies my geek cravings but is actually easy-to-use for non-nerds. Here's what I pieced together. Photo remixed from 96dpi. The Goal (and Geeky History) For more than a year now, I've been messing with computers connected to TVs, trying to make it just as easy to watch last night's shows on Hulu as it would be with a DVR. I wanted my wife to be just as enthused about this kind of Living-in-the-Future project, but, until recently, none of what I'd set up could be called actually "easy to use"—unless you happened to write about computers and software tweaks for a living.
  • I love a good DVD as much as the next guy, but the whole optical media world has been on my shitlist lately. I'm sick of renting or Netflix-ing a DVD, getting an hour into it, then hitting the scratchety-skip zone that freezes up my DVD player and leaves me unable to finish my stories. My solution to this problem is to rip every DVD I rent to my hard drive as soon as I get it. In my experience, a rip smooths over those un-renderable sections of the DVD without issue, so when I'm ready to watch the ripped DVD, it's certain to be scratch and skip-free. Since I've got no time to sit around clicking through dialogs to rip my DVDs, I've put together my very own one-click DVD ripping solution.
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-04-13

  • CSSDesk – Dynamic CSS Sandbox
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-04-12

  • This DNS utility is provided by ZoneEdit.Com, the industry leader in DNS and domain mangement solutions. Click here to sign up for a free, no obligation trial of our dns services. Click here to use our SMTP test utility. Click here to use our global whois utility (domain ownership info).
  • The use of patterns in art and design projects are varied and well known. There are many sources from where you can find free raster or bitmap patterns, but there are not much when it comes to good high quality free vector patterns. So, in this post, we have listed a compilation of good quality and useful free illustrator vector patterns for download. To edit the patterns in Adobe Illustrator, you can access the Patterns in the Swatches panel.You can customize existing patterns and design patterns from scratch with any of the Illustrator tools. There are many advantages of using seamless vector patterns. It is scalable to any sizes without any loss of resolution and you can change the colors, fill, stroke to suit your project. Thus, making it completely editable, modifiable and flexible.
  • When it comes to typography on the web, there seens to be very little proper use or variation of particular glyphs and punctuation marks. For example, an abundant use of three periods (…) for an ellipsis instead of … (…), or – in place of — (—). As such I have decided to devise a table of glyphs, their uses and common misuses and their HTML entities to allow web developers to add some style and correctness to their typography.
  • Is having a dedicated IP address critical for achieving great Google rankings and if an IP address is shared among many sites, is the PageRank for each site diluted? This is, believe it or not, still a very common question in the SEO world, despite the search engines addressing these concerns. Over at DigitalPoint a reader asks: Does anyone have any current knowledge and or real life experience with the importance or lack of, having a dedicated IP address for your hosting account as far as Google Page Rank and other search engines are concerned? If you have 1 IP address and you add on domains, does that dilute page rank or trust? If it is shared and someone else’s website that shares the IP address gets Google slapped, does that impact my website or blog? One reader refers to the 2006 post on the Matt Cutts blog which references a statement by Google’s Craig Silverstein in 2003 :
  • Sometimes I find things on the internet that leave me speechless with their awesomeness. And considering it’s my job to find crazy stuff all day long, that’s actually saying something. But today I am bowing down to “The A-Z of Awesomeness,” a series of illustrations by Neill Cameron, where he takes each letter of the alphabet, crafts an absurd sentence around it, then brings it to life with an excellent drawing as you can see above. There are 25 more epic letters to go, and you must check them all out below:
  • ]]>

    Categories
    Delicious

    links for 2010-03-31

  • Typical non-programmer question: Why are there so many programming languages? Why doesn’t everyone just pick the best one and use that? Fair enough. The definition of the term “computer language” can be really nebulous if you encounter someone who is in the mood to engage in social griefing through pedantry. Instructions for a machine to follow? Does that include 19th century player pianos? Machine code? Flipping switches and wiring on those first-gen electric computer-type contraptions? Considering over half the “language” consists of dragging and dropping icons, does Scratch count? Let’s just sweep that all aside and assume languages began with the idea of stuff like COBOL and FORTRAN and we don’t care to refine the definition further. Humor me.
  • ]]>