02 November 2008

Windows x64 and HP printer drivers


I have a HP PSC1410 all-in-one printer/scanner/copier and since upgrading to 64-bit windows I couldn't get it to work correctly. So I decided to go searching for suitable drivers and I stumbled onto this page. After browsing a bit (and skipping to the last page of the forum right away), I found this link. There I downloaded the 64 bit HP PSC 1100 Windows XP driver and it WORKED, YAY ;) (it worked with my PSC 1410).

So there you go, hp you suck.

01 November 2008

Most Useful Firefox addons

I was bored so I've compiled some useful firefox addons from multiple articles, here they are:

IE Tab- Extremely useful for those sites that require Internet Explorer and for testing purposes, this add-on loads any Web page as IE would display it, in the Firefox browser. A simple button in the Firefox status bar quickly and easily switches sites to IE and back. You also can specify some sites to always open with IE Tab.


Screengrab - Screengrab saves entire webpages as images.

It will save what you can see in the window, the entire page, just a selection, a particular frame... basically it saves webpages as images.


All-in-One Sidebar If you like Opera’s sidebar but prefer to stick with Firefox, this add-on gives you the best of both worlds. Once installed, it gives you a panel at the left or right of the browser window which you can use to switch between each browser’s features. It lets you quickly switch between sidebar panels, view dialog windows such as downloads, extensions, and more in the sidebar, or view source or websites in the sidebar.


StumbleUpon - allows you to discover and share great Web content matched to your personal preferences. Whether it’s a website, video, picture, game, blog, or wiki, StumbleUpon helps you find interesting pages recommended by like-minded people with a single click of the Stumble button. After installing the plug-in, click the Stumble button and you’re instantly delivered to a related site that others have given the thumbs-up. The more sites you rate, the better your Stumbles will match your tastes.



Cooliris Previews- Cooliris Previews gives you the power to browse and share Web links and rich media instantly. Just mouse over any link, and the Cooliris preview window immediately appears to show you the content. No more clicking back and forth or losing your search context. To send a link, just click.



Foxmarks A simple plug-in that keeps your bookmarks synchronized throughout multiple computers. these days, who has just one computer, anyway? Foxmarks works quietly in the background; the only thing you notice is that the bookmarks you keep are now consistent from your desktop machine to your laptop to your work machine and so on. Also copies your bookmarks to its home page, so you can also access them from a guest computer (such as your local espresso joint or library!).




Firefox Showcase -provides a new way to manage your Firefox tabs and windows by showing them as thumbnails in a single window, tab or sidebar. Includes a find bar that will filter the thumbnails, and the capability to select the thumbnails in the same way you would select files in your system.



FoxyTunes is a Firefox add-on which gives you the ability to integrate some of the most powerful media players around such as iTunes and Windows Media Player directly into your browser window. You are given the ability to control your media player of choice from Firefox’s status bar or toolbar section.



Answers - Ever run across a word or acronym that you weren’t familiar with? Instead of rushing to a new tab to look it up in an online dictionary, Answers gives you the definition right on the page in a pop-up. It uses Answers.com, Wikipedia, Dictionary.com, and many others. Very handy for following an article or discussion that bandies about terms you’ve never heard of.



GMail Manager -allows you to manage multiple Gmail accounts and receive new mail notifications. Displays your account details including unread messages, saved drafts, spam messages, labels with new mail, space used, and new mail snippets.



Yahoo Mail Notifier
-This extension notifies you when new messages arrive in your Yahoo mail account. It’ll display a little pop-up to catch your attention if you want it to. Clicking the icon takes you to Yahoo mail. Notification options include: customizable sound, notification alert, status bar and toolbar icon. Also allows the user to map different mouse buttons to open Yahoo Mail in different tabs, windows, etc.



GreaseMonkey- is other great addon designed for making forefox better. Greasemonkey extension (called ‘user scripts‘) can add more functionality or change the behavior of a web page. These scripts let you control any aspect of a web page’s design or interaction. For instance, you can add video download functionality to video sharing site like youtube, OR disable all ads on myspace OR change the appearance of gmail and lots lots more.




Firebug - Firebug is an essential tool for developers working on Web pages. It allows you to examine and tweak the HTML, CSS and JavaScript contained in a page, all on the fly. Firebug opens either as a panel at the bottom of the page you’re inspecting, or in a separate window.



Session Manager is a handy utility to help you manage your Firefox tabs. If you’re a Web surfer who habitually visits the same sites every morning, all you need do is open the sites in separate tabs and/or windows, and then use Session Manager to save the session under a name of your choosing. After that, every morning start up Firefox and go to Tools > Session Manager, pick your session and voila, all the windows and tabs open up just as you saved them.



Download Statusbar - Manage your Internet downloads from a tidy toolbar, without the download window getting in the way of your Web browsing. Despite its compact size, Download Statusbar packs in more useful features than the standard download window. The fully customizable interface auto-hides when not in use, allowing full control without interruption.



Scrapbook -Collects web scraps of entire pages, snippets, images, media, embeds, etc. Also has a powerful notes feature that allows hand-entered data including javascript and HTML - so is a mini-development IDE. This is great for testing widgets and javascript code. There is also an “Edit before capture” mode that shows a toolbar for for interactive DOM object removal, entering of sticky annotation, remove selection and highlighting. The full power of this add-on is not well known by Firefox users.



Tab Mix Plus is a Firefox add-on which greatly enhances the application’s tabbed browsing features. Included are dozens of options involving tab duplication, merging, focus, and much more. In addition to improving the browser’s tab capabilities, this extension also features its own robust session manager.



Sage - turns Firefox into an RSS feed aggregator that makes getting the latest news easy. Using the left sidebar, Sage displays your available feeds, lists your feed history, and then shows stories with summaries and images in the main window.


Sources:
http://lifehacker.biz/articles/most-useful-firefox-addons/
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/09/29/12-extremely-useful-firefox-addons/

18 October 2008

Automobile manufactorer logos / icons


I've found a lot of cool automobile manufacturer icons so I've decided to upload them here for you. They are all compressed into one rar file (5.5 MB). You can download them here.

12 October 2008

jQuery, The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library


So what exactly is jQuery?
jquery.com says:
jQuery is a fast and concise JavaScript Library that simplifies HTML document traversing, event handling, animating, and Ajax interactions for rapid web development. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.


But let's take a look at this from a dumb man's perspective:

- it helps you make cool website interfaces like this one:
http://visionmasterdesigns.com/demo/ajaxinterface

- it can help you make cool galleries without stupid flash:
http://www.detacheddesigns.com/blog/samples/jQueryImageGallery/gallery.htm

- you can make nice handy menus with it:
http://query7.com/demos/jquerymenu.html#

- nice little image loader:
http://www.chazzuka.com/experiments/jquery-image-loader/jquery-image-loader-3.html

- nice little slide effect:
http://query7.com/demos/jquerybasicsslide.html

There are a lot of sites with tutorials for jQuery, here are some of them:
- jQuery tutorials for designers
- 15 days of jQuery
- 51 best tutorials for jQuery
- another 8 jQuery tutorials
- 35 essential jQuery tutorials
- Beginner jQuery tutorials

Cool Icons, do you need them?


If your answer is YES, then you can take a look @ IconLook (http://www.iconlook.com). IconLook is a icon search engine that can locate you tons of nice looking icons. It also has links to the licenses and the original authors. It's also quite fast and has a nice clean look.

11 October 2008

Does anyone use iGoogle?


If not, you should. iGoogle simplifies many things. You can add many many gadgets and quickly take a look at important things for which you usually have to open multiple tabs or windows to see. For instance, you open a tab for the latest digg stories, you open another tab for your (g)mail, you open yet another tab for the weather forecast, etc etc. All that can be put in one page with iGoogle. You see what's up, then you can focus on one thing at a time. Well that's at least my 2 cents.

09 October 2008

4Q - find out what your visitors think of your website




Their website says:
4Q, an Avinash Kaushik and iPerceptions collaboration is a simple, free survey solution that lets you ask these all-important questions to your website visitors, and gives you real-time, complete access to the results.


It looks like a nice and clean(non bloated) service that's easy to implement and use. Avinash Kaushik is a web analytics genius so I guess I can't go wrong on this one.

I' have registered an account there and will try using their service on this blog. I'm just curious ;)

Oh yeah, I forgot to post a link, so here it is.

SmugMug - A good photo sharing alternative




I was looking for a good photo sharing service and even though there are numerous websites out there, nothing impressed me like smugmug. They offer unlimited storage/traffic, you friends don't have to register to view your photos, no banners/ads, cropping, enhancing, ordering prints, private groups, sending photos to email, posting photos to forums or blogs, and much much more. It costs about $40/year and in 5 minutes I found tons of great photos. Congrats to guys @ smugmug, they have created a cool & enjoyable service.

Amazon S3 loweres prices, I love Amazon


As I said a couple of post before, amazon is great, and now they have lowered their prices dramatically, this will drive down my backup costs significantly.

Current storage price (through Oct 31, 2008)
US: $0.150 per GB
EU: $0.180 per GB

New storage price (effective Nov 1, 2008)
US
$0.150 First 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.140 Next 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.130 Next 400 TB / month of storage used
$0.120 Storage used / month over 500 TB

EU
$0.180 First 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.170 Next 50 TB / month of storage used
$0.160 Next 400 TB / month of storage used
$0.150 Storage used / month over 500 TB

In my last post about Amazon S3 I wrote about automating backups, here are some backup solutions that will make your life easier:

- s3sync.rb (A cool script written in Ruby).
- S3 Backup (Windows client).
- duplicity (A not so mature Python script).
- Brackup (A Perl script written by Brad Fitzpatrick).
- Jungle Disk (Windows, Linux, Mac client and also a local WebDAV server).

Chestnuts @ Velenje Castle

Yesterday we decided it's time to make some chestnuts, so where else to go then to the Castle ;)
As you can see we had fun and there's always more of us. I guess the next time we decide to make something like this we're gonna start selling tickets.


The one that made all this possible

Roberto closeup

The cook, he made allmost all the food

The clown

Chinese guy

Clown #2

The godfathers

The Bambulić brothers

don't know these 2

Security

Chocolate milk commercial

Rough rider

Chestnuts, the stars of the night

Hahahahaha aahahah

Norwegian working force

08 October 2008

Backing stuff up on Amazon's S3


Amazon Simple Storage Service can in one word be described as great, but that's still an understatement. You pay for what you use and it's still cheap.
I needed a good place to backup stuff from my new servers. Finding a good backup solution can be:
- hard
- costly
- time consuming
- frustrating

When considering the cost of a decent backup hard drive like 300GB WD VelociRaptor (282,15 Euros = 384,767955 U.S. dollars at the moment), power consumption, noise, unpredictable home electricity shortages and the fact that you have to buy at least four of those to be an effective backup solution, you realize that S3 is much much cheaper. My current backup costs at S3 are less than $13 a month. Now that's cheap.

That's where S3 shines. You register an account within minutes and you're ready to go. All you have to do now is to get some software (windows,mac,Linux) or write a simple Perl/Ruby script that automates your backups(Linux/Unix servers). There are also a lot of good existing scripts out there so you only need to modify them to suit your needs.

I've decided for a mixed method. Since there are a lot of files on the servers, I would pay more then necessary because of the $0.01 per 1,000 PUT, POST, or LIST requests. My servers use cPanel control panel and it has a good method of backing stuff up on the server. Every user account is packed and compressed in one file, so at the end of the day I don't have millions of files (PUT, POST, or LIST queries) but only let's say 100 - and that saves valuable money. cPanel makes backups and sends them over to my home server. Backups go into a folder which is configured to be shared with SAMBA throughout the windows network. What I did next was that I used Jungle Disk - a windows S3 client to automate my backups to S3.

The reason why I went through all these jumps are next:

- I saved my servers from bandwidth outside my country/continent
- Servers don't have to encrypt anything, so that's saved server CPU time
- My customers don't feel a thing, since the backups are done fast
- Everything I send to S3 from my home computers is encrypted

To be on the safe side I also save backups on my home servers throughout multiple hard drives, you never know...

Barbecue @ Velenje Castle






Me and a couple of my friends got together to celebrate a couple of things. For me it was the end of Ramadan, another friend bought a car and another one was just along for the ride :)
Ramadan was great, I got to know who my friends were and how backstabbing someone you think is your friend can be. Aaanyywaay.....

So we went and bought some food and drinks (and a portable barbecue) & went to Velenje castle. It was one of those days when you can relax and have fun and not worry about anything else. Here are some photos.

03 October 2008

Some more SCARY and WEIRD trucks

I've been looking around and came up with these trucks. Some are pretty scary, especially the one with the spikes everywhere.