I’ve been using WordPress for my site for just shy of two years now… and lots of sites in order to blatently generate renewed interest in older content post “year ago” type posts… and since I’ve been too busy to come up with something original lately (cept for a few things over at my formerfatdudes.com site), I figured I’ld jump on this bandwagon. But, I won’t be doing this weekly, likely towards the beginning of each month I’ll go back and look at what I did last year.
What Was Up A Year Ago
July 2nd, 2009 — ramblings
WLS: Whose Fault Is It Anyways?
January 27th, 2009 — wls
Just a rambling update… go ahead and skip it if you don’t care.
Since my last update about two weeks ago I’ve gotten down to 336, bout 10-11 pounds down in the last two weeks. It’s been nine weeks and I’ve knocked off bout 33 pounds. Had a bit of a flat spot there… along with some general ups and downs. But hey.. I’m almost down to where my license says I weigh.
Going to the gym is not a habit at all yet. The eating better is… getting better… but I’ve lapsed quite a bit in the last week. The fact I haven’t had a major gain back is kind of bugging me though. Dinner at Friday’s last week, lunch at Zantigo’s twice in the last week. Burger and Fries at Applebee’s for lunch today (first time I’ve had fries in over two months).
3 Ways to Have Fun With Photos
July 28th, 2008 — at play
Ok, being sick this weekend has ben a joy. But one good thing to come of it, I’ve been going through my pinned posts from Bloglines and cleaning things up a bit. During one brief period of consciousnous early this morning I came back across the following sites that let you play around with photos.
wanokoto – this Japanese site (with a bit of off kilter English translation) takes your photo and ages it to look like it was taken back in the 40′s or something. The interface is bout as simple as you can get, you browse for a local file or plug in the url of a picture that’s already online and click the “convert” button. Here I took a panoramic shot of the Capital from my recent DC trip, and here’s how it turned out. To save the converted photo you need to right-click and save the image.
Create your own favicon
March 16th, 2008 — geek effect
We’ve all seen them, even if you don’t realize what they are – favicon’s. They are the icon that replaces the generic document image in the address bar or on the tab title when viewing a site, and are used as the icon image when you save a bookmark or link to a site.
I wandered across a fairly new site, genfavicon.com that lets you create your own custom favicon file in minutes. I used the logo image from my site here and created the favicon.ico file in about three minutes. It is a pretty slick, very easy to use, straight-forward site. Just one page, that is all it needs and that is all it gives you.
You have two option to get your image in to their web-based editor – link to an existing image (that you have the right to use) online, or upload from your computer. In my case, I right-clicked on my logo image, selected Copy Image Location and posted it in the URL box under Step 1.
Gifts For Men
February 29th, 2008 — ramblings
I don’t take credit for this… and I won’t take the blame either.
Buying gifts for men is not nearly as complicated as it is for women. Follow these rules and you should have no problems.
Rule #1: When in doubt, buy him a cordless drill. It does not matter if he already has one. I have a friend who owns 17 and he has yet to complain. As a man, you can never have too many cordless drills. No one knows why.
Rule #2: If you cannot afford a cordless drill, buy him anything with the word ratchet or socket in it. Men love saying those two words. “Hey George, can I borrow your ratchet?” “Okay. By the way, are you through with my 3/8″ socket yet?” Again, no one knows why.
No More Jagged Edges
December 10th, 2007 — ramblings
I can’t remember where I first found this… maybe Lifehacker?
VectorMagic is an online utility that lets you upload a bitmap image and it will convert it to a vector image. In plain speak, bitmaps pictures made using dots, like a newspaper. Vector images are basically formulas that make a line, including curves, like we learned in high school match. Since the curves adjust no mater what size, you don’t get the jagged edges when you zoom in on an image.
Here’s a copy of the edubuntu logo, the original clipped from the website was 90pixels by 90pixels. See how it looks jagged when I scale it to be 250×250? The last image is what I got after running it through VectorMagic, a free, online utility that turns bitmaps to vector images. The final product was 90×90, but when scaled up to 250×250, it still looks the same.
On the left is the original logo – PNG format 90×90. It looks pretty good, right? But if I take that same image, and blow it up, either in my graphics program or by changing the HTML code, like I did with the image on the right, you get an image that is all blurry looking.
And here’s what it looks like after being run through VectorMagic. Now, this specific image is saved as a PNG, same as the others, but I also have it saved as an SVG type, which can be edited in my graphics program and made any size, without effecting the quality of it. I saved it as PNG because most browsers do not display SVG images properly.
This is handy for… well, lots of stuff. And while it is more geared towards things like logos, try it with a photograph, you may get some interesting results.
VectorMagic [Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory]
