Software

I love my EEE, it’s fantastic - I’ll be taking it on holiday instead of the Philips X53 for the first time this year.

It does everything, bar one thing….. Manage my iPod. I used to be able to switch albums on the iPod at the end of every day, a quick sync and new music or podcasts for tomorrow - holidays are a great time for catching up on podcasts!

Alright I know that with the EEE the hard drive probably couldn’t hold all my music, but I’d be willing to invest in a light external USB hard drive (as recommended by), as I only have a 2GB Nano.

I’ve read about getting iTunes working under Crossover, or Wine. Both of these solutions seem to be frought with a problems trying to get something to run on a box that it was never designed for!

Whilst looking at possible random solutions this week, I stumbled across Songbird based on the Mozilla platform (like all things at Mozilla developers). As Mark O’Neill says, it’s always worth being interested in anything based on this platform that the Mozilla guys thing is worth linking to!

One of the major advantages I noted (apart from it being open source and having all the tabs and whistles you’d expect from Mozilla), is that you can choose to buy music from iTunes, Amazon’s MP3 store and eMusic.

Mark notes another problem:

One problem I have found is that you cannot run iTunes music files on both iTunes and Songbird at the same time. So if you want to run iTunes music on Songbird, you must first de-authorize and uninstall iTunes from your computer. This is the hated DRM copy protection at work, not the fault of Songbird.

Mark says it’s not an iTunes killer yet, but it does hold the same kind of promise that Firefox did when you started looking at it alongside Internet Explorer. This is a project I’ll be watching!

If/when I do get round to do thing, I’d definitely be following the guide that Ross wrote - “How to use Songbird to manage your iPod“

I’ve installed CommentLuv here today, to reward my comment authors more (particularly now the comment policy is in force and I feel perfectly happy about blowing away any comments that are spammy or I don’t like! )

We all love comments, but CommentLuv takes this one step further and places a direct link to the comment authors latest post - underneath the comment.

They promote both their site (using the URL field of the comment), and their latest post - now that is quite a reward for engaging with you!

It will automatically fetch your latest post from your feed to display it and in the latest version the comment author can specify their feed by putting their feed url in between [feed] and [/feed] at the end of their comment.

What are you waiting for? Try it now!

A colleague asked me if this was possible the other day, to take photo stills from say a film  (in his case of diving) and have them to put on say Facebook.

I couldn’t find what I used last time I did it, but did find this and have been reliably informed that it works, it produced an image of about 1MB (I didn’t check the resolution) - I’ve got a few that I’d like to extract so will give it a go when I get a chance!

Jake Luddington’s Guide to extract still images from DVD video.

photo credit: ¥§•ªˆ¨ˇ© LOVE © ˇ¨ˆª•§¥

A while back Michael Gray posted some suggestions about how to improve the Yahoo Shortcuts Wordpress Plugin, I’ve been posting about some tools I liked for getting Flickr images into Wordpress - and how I’d love a plugin to do this (and discussing it with Anne).

I was overjoyed today to see a post by Michael about Photo Dropper. This plugin does exactly what I need I think! I would make a few minor improvements - but they are few and far between. The image at the top was inserted via a quik search for “celebration”.

And just because I can, let’s have a picture of a hamster!

photo credit: annia316 ღ

Photo by jimmyroq

My blog posts used to look a little boring, or at least in some people’s eyes - in my eyes they were a thing of glory, a product of my creativity, a……. bunch of text in web browser I guess!

I needed some pictures to illustrate the posts, and I wasn’t about to (in the previous post) rush out and buy a hamster just for a blog post!

Then I read a post over at SkellieWag, about using Flickr images licensed under the Creative Commons license to find great images to illustrate my posts. Check it out before going any further as it will make a great deal more sense if you do…

I started out with a few posts where I’d download the image, upload it into Wordpress and then link to it, along with a link back to the photographer (almost all images have at the bare minimum an attribution license). This is both tedious time consuming, and I’m not sure I necessarily need all of these peoples images in my hosting all the time?

I’ve since gone on the hunt for a Wordpress plugin that will do this job for me, unfortunately almost everything I’ve found so far is for adding your own photo’s to your own blog - and no - I’m still not going to go out and buy a hamster!!! Now whilst these plugins are quite useful, you’ll also find that if it’s your own image a HTML box appears under the image in Flickr (when you view it at different sizes!) with the code in it to link it back, I need this piece of code for images I’ve searched for under the Creative Commons Licenses….

I’m going to have to resort to:

• Messing with the code for one of these other plugins,
• Talking very nicely to J @ The Glass is Too Big, to get his prototype converted into a plugin - how about it J?
• Or talking nicely to the guys at EmoRate to see if they can convert their photo-comment-tool to do something similar.

Does anyone have any better ideas?

Do you read them? Be honest with me now…. Or do you hit that next button, just as fast as I do?

Well now you need never wonder what was really in the EULA (End User License Agreement) with EULAlyzer.

Simply run the program whenever you’re installing a new software, point it at the license agreement, and EULAlyzer will analyze and flag the most questionable sections of the agreement.

See, now you can be honest and tell me exactly how many of them you do read?!

I’ve held off from this for a while but I’ve got a few blogs I need to do it with so I’m writing this guide more for myself than anything.

• Install the “Maintenance Mode” plugin - it really is quite good, activate it and put the blog into maintenance mode.
• As my database is probably quite large I’m not going to use PHPMyAdmin to back it up, I shall use SSH.mysqldump –add-drop-table -h mysqlhostserver -u mysqlusername -p databasename

  And then entering my MySQL password, I was correct my database is almost 13MB.

• Wordpress always recommend you deactivate plugins, as they may not be compatible after the upgrade. I’ve never done this for a single upgrade, but it appears there is a first time for everything with the upgrade to Wordpress 2.3+ Universal Tag Warrior isn’t compatible (Wordpress 2.3 has built in tag support), so be sure to deactivate UTW first - I didn’t and had to work around it!
• Download the latest and greatest Wordpress, I’ve downloaded it using wget, directly to a folder on the server and unpacked it.
• I’ve then moved the wp-content folder out of that folder purely because I know it needs special care, before copying the rest of the unpacked files straight over my original installation (making sure it doesn’t overwrite wp-config.php).
• I’m not particularly interested in the themes, but I do know that akismet is slightly different so I’ve also copied the akismet.php over the top of my original one.
• Visit your upgrade page http://domain.com/folder/wp-admin/upgrade.php, and step through the upgrade.
• If you deactivated Ultimate Tag Warrior earlier then you’ll probably want to import your tags now, do this following this tutorial.
• Deactivate maintenance mode and tinker with your theme as necessary (you’ll probably want to read this tutorial on adding Wordpress 2.3 tags to your theme) - Enjoy!