Come Play in Our Sandbox

I’m back ‘round full circle on WordPress.com.

I’ve been on a Linux host and I’ve been on a Windows host, but this is just easier/cheaper. If I had a little more spare cash to throw around I probably wouldn’t care about paying for shared hosting. It’s just hard to justify $10-15 monthly to publicly yap.

I miss the control of having direct file access. But I get it. WordPress.com is a sandbox, and I’m just a guest who should be grateful to play in it. This becomes obvious when you try to replace the favicon, edit the theme, or incorporate HTML into a post. WordPress MU is designed with the mindset that you are dangerous and bound to screw things up for others.

Pros:
$8 domain registration + $10 name server fee for a custom domain = $18 annually. It would be $15, but I’ve learned over time that you don’t want your host as your registrar. If things go down the domain needs to be yours. $10 seems hefty for just adding your domain to their DNS. It’s not as bad as the $15, ‘I would like to change the font please’, custom CSS fee.

A shared environment means largely that security issues are not my problem. They install the updates and get to be responsible for backups. Not that either of these were hard, but it’s one less thing.

Free custom image headers. I’m half-surprised this isn’t a paid feature. Thanks.

3GB of image storage without bandwidth concerns.

Cons:
No more access to the metal. When WordPress was ‘just a script’ you could pick away at it however you pleased. Don’t like the word ‘Blogroll’? It’s as good as gone.

No more little favicons. People have been apparently requesting these for years without a response. I asked WordPress support and it was ignored.

No more custom themes. I’ll miss you…

TinyMenu Recovers Firefox Real Estate

I don’t load many extensions on my install of Firefox. I think of them as little dependencies that are going to break with each release. This one however, was pretty sweet:

Tiny Menu consolidates the File menu and cuts down a good deal of space used by the Firefox Toolbars.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1455

Make sure to pay attention to the developer’s directions or you may initially be confused:

To get your Firefox to look like the screensthot:
- Install this extension
- Right click and customize the toolbar
- Drag the buttons UP into the menu bar
- Right click, remove “navigation” toolbar if it is now empty

Right Click Image Resizing (Thumbnails)

I get really annoyed when I go hunting for a particular application and it isn’t there.

Today’s thought was “I would like to right click on an image in Windows Explorer, click and option that says ‘Resize’, and be done with it. I don’t want to click through an interface choosing the same stupid options each time.”

I tried doing this with Irfanview but the options weren’t robust enough. I resorted to ImageMagick, which is a collection of command line utilities. To play along, head to the ImageMagick website and download the latest windows-static.exe.

http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php#windows

I excluded the version number and installed it to C:\Program Files\ImageMagick. You may want to use the same path to play along.

Once you have it installed create a registry file with the following code. Note that the 480×480 is the largest I wanted to allow the resized pictures to grow. You could use 600×600 etc for a larger thumbnail. Thumb.jpg is the name of the resized image that is generated.

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\jpegfile\shell\Resize]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\jpegfile\shell\Resize\command]
@="C:\\Program Files\\ImageMagick\\convert.exe -geometry 480x480 -sharpen 0.5x30 %1 thumb.jpg"


Now import the reg file and you should be all set.

Ipod Video Converter

God speed to you Mr. “I’m looking for something to convert video for my iPod.” Heck, I don’t even own an iPod with video capabilities. I have a little Sony Walkman that uses the same format. Before you waste your time going nuts infesting your PC with spyware do yourself a favor and check out “Any Video Converter.”

It uses MPlayer/MEncoder (Linux/XBMC) as a backend so you know that it’s going to be infinitely more capable than any of the other available klutz-ware. It was the only app I tried that could handle VOB (DVD) files like a champ. I’m surprised that they can actually release a commercial application bundled with MPlayer, but I’m not here to dispute GPL violations.

They still offer a free version, albeit stripped of some of its functionality. I recommend you get the older build that has an iPod profile as an option.

http://www.aplusfreeware.com/categories/Audio-Video/AnyVideoConverter.html

It took in my legally ripped episode of the Simpson’s and spit out a 100MB mp4 after doing its thing. I would consider a donation if it wasn’t commercial software. Ah well.

http://www.any-video-converter.com/products/

IT Guy Vs Dumb Employees

This is the epitome of my job, minus the Halo.