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Sylvania Light Flute – LED task light

February 3, 2010 By 21 Comments

Sylvania light fluteOsram Sylvania Products Inc 72261 Led Light Flute – SilverWhile strolling the aisles of BJ’s the other day, I discovered this great LED task light called the Light Flute. It’s made by Sylvania and it is just one of the coolest LED lights I”ve seen. What makes it so great is its overall design and functionality.

The case of the light is made of anodized aluminum which is light and strong. It feels very sturdy and the end-cap unscrews to reveal the 3-AAA batteries that power 4-white LED lights. The innovative mounting base allows for several different mounting options… magnetic, adhesive and screw mounting.

The slender light is 8.5″ long and about the diameter of your little finger. It can be mounted just about anywhere and is great for mounting under your desk when trying to re-route cables. It could also be used as emergency lighting, as an under-counter light, closet lighting… the list could go on and on.

The Light Flutes were sold as packs of 2 for about $17 at BJ’s and are also available from Amazon.com.

I haven’t had them long enough to comment on how long the batteries will last, but LED lights are generally pretty efficient so I would expect a minimum of 10-12 hours of continuous light and perhaps much more. I’ll update this post once I have a better idea of battery life.

Filed Under: Featured, Gadgets, Product Reviews, Video Reviews Tagged With: , , , ,

Quix app packs a lot of tools into a small footprint

January 19, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Quix logoQuix, authored by Joost de Valk, is a huge productivity enhancer for webdevelopers, and anyone wishing to have easy access to a plethora of handy tools.

Quix is am extensible bookmarklet that you simply drag into your bookmarks toolbar in Safari, Firefox and several other browsers. Then by invoking Quix, a command line opens up in a small window into which you can enter easy to remember default commands to perform a variety of functions. Since it is extensible, you can create your own custom commands as well.

Quix command-line window

For instance, say you want to quickly check what your ip address is… you would invoke Quix, type in “myip” in the command line and hit enter and you’ve instantly got your ip displayed in your browser window. Another example is if you want to measure the size of an element on a webpage, you’d invoke Quix, type in “ruler” and a cross-hair appears on your screen with a dimensions palette next to it and you can easily measure a graphic or any area on the current webpage you are on.

I haven’t counted all the functions available in Quix but there are surely over 60 of them and most are easy to remember… “ruler” for the aforementioned ruler tool, “gs” for Google search, “a” for Amazon search, “bitly” for bit.ly URL shortening, you get the idea. The complete list is located on the Quixapp website

It’s a real time-saver and obviates the need to have lots of add-ons since so many functions are taken care of by Quix. Joost admits that the inspiration for Quix came from another similar app called Shortwave which was created by Shaun Inman.

Check Quix out. It may be one of the handiest tools you have at your disposal. You can get it from quixapp.com

Update: I’ve also created a quick tutorial on the installation and usage of Quix.

Filed Under: Featured, Web Development

HP dm3-1030us touchpad freeze and unresponsive after waking from sleep

December 12, 2009 By 25 Comments

hp-dm3-1030usWhat to do about the HP dm3 touchpad that freezes and becomes unresponsive after waking from sleep. I purchased a HP dm3-1030us laptop from Staples recently. For the inquiring minds, I paid $499 after rebates, a price that I am quite content with. All things considered, this is a very nice laptop for the money and I plan to give it a full review soon.

One problem I immediately encountered however had to do with the touchpad becoming unresponsive once the computer awakens from sleep. No matter how much force was applied to the touchpad or whether the left or right buttons were depressed, the on-screen pointer wouldn’t budge, or would only move a slight amount. And in some cases it would change to a magnifying glass icon and be stuck in the upper left hand corner of the screen. Even more strange was that this issue would sort of resolve itself after 5-10 minutes. After that period of time, the touchpad would simply begin working normally. This was really aggravating behavior and I was just about ready to return the laptop for a refund. But I have since spent some time Googling this issue and discovered some good conversation about it in the HP Support Forum.

What my experiences have unearthed are several ways to work around this problem. I’m not a big fan of workarounds as I’d much rather have a solution that is not a workaround, whether that means a driver update or whatever. But in the meantime these suggestions may help resolve your touchpad issues.

In no particular order since they all seem to work for me…

  1. Before putting your laptop to sleep, depress the button between the space bar and the touchpad to disengage the touchpad altogether. This essentially turns off the touchpad. You’ll know it is turned off because the indicator light will change to an amber color. Once the touchpad is turned off, you may safely put your computer to sleep. When you wake your computer from sleep, enter your password if necessary and then depress the button again to turn the touchpad back on. The color of the indicator light will change from amber to white and you should be good to go. This method has worked for me consistently.
  2. In lieu of turning the touchpad off before putting your computer to sleep, you can try this instead. Open up the control panel and navigate to the Devices and Printers menu, right click on it and choose Mouse Settings. When the Mouse Properties window opens, click on the Multitouch Gestures tab and deselect all three checkboxes. Apply the changes and close the window. This method also stopped the freezing problem for me, but this method disables multitouch gestures so that may be reason enough for you not to choose this method if you plan on using gestures on the touchpad.
  3. The simplest fix and one that has also worked for me is to simply have a bit of patience. When you wake your computer up from sleep, just chill for about 10-15 seconds before you touch the touchpad. It seems that just waiting for 10-15 seconds may be enough time for the touchpad to resume normal operation upon waking from sleep.

I hope one of these three methods will work for you and if it does, let me know.

By the way, I did notice that there is a new BIOS update for the dm3-1030us available on the HP site. It is the bios version F0A.

UPDATE: In the HP forum, there has been another suggestion for fixing the touchpad freeze issue, although it makes no sense to me, but the fix is this…
Go to Start menu > Control Panel > System and Security > System > Device Manager > System Devices. Find “ACPI Lid” and right click on it. Select “Update Driver Software” and in the next window select “Search automatically for updated driver software”. It will search for a moment then report that the best driver software for your device is already installed. Doing that will supposedly also fix the touchpad freezing issue. Does it make any sense? No it does not. But people are reporting that it has fixed their freeze issue… go figure.

UPDATE: I have to conclude that the ACPI Lid “fix” is pure rubbish. I turned multi-gestures back on and did the suggested “fix” of searching for a non-existent ACPI driver update and after my computer woke from sleep my touchpad returned to its problematic state of freezing and displaying magnifying glass icon and being generally unresponsive.

UPDATE: There has just been another BIOS update for the dm3-1030us which brings the BIOS version up to F.22 A. This new update is reputed to fix the touchpad issues. I have installed the update and am waiting for a while before concluding that the problems have been fixed.

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Filed Under: Featured, Troubleshooting, Video Tutorials

What’s the big whoop about Woopra?

November 23, 2009 By 5 Comments

woopraHaving the ability to collect statistics on how many visitors come to your website is crucial knowledge. Ever since Google released its free Google Analytics service, the ability for website owners to access this invaluable information has been made that much easier.

Since then there have been a bevy of other companies releasing similar and at the same time more graphically rich and interactive solutions for the savvy webmaster. One of the new kids on the block is Woopra, a powerful, full-featured, statistics and analysis tool. One of Woopra’s most compelling features is its Real-time Tracking. This one feature alone will give you valuable insight to how people move through your website, how long they linger on each page, what geographical region they are from and a slew of additional informamtion. Yes, much of this type of information is available from the standard web stats that most web hosts provide. But Woopra is doing this in real-time. You can actually see people entering and leaving your site and watch them as they click and move from page to page. Yes, big brother is watching and the information to be gained is invaluable.

Woopra is actually a client-based application. You download and install the Woopra application to your computer. The application then is configured to follow the sites that you add to it. In order for a website to be tracked, you also need to install a chunk of javascript, similar to how you would install Google Analytics code. This is a small chunk of code that gets inserted at the bottom of each of your website’s pages, just above the closing body tag. Once installed, Woopra can begin collecting data and providing the real-time analysis that is so powerful.

Woopra chat invitation

Woopra chat invitation

An additional and perhaps even controversial feature is the ability to initiate basically an instant messaging session with a visitor that is currently on your website. You select the visitor you want to target and then click on the “Start a Conversation” button in your Woopra app. The visitor will see a pop-up appear on their screen that says “Webmaster wants to chat with you”, along with an Accept or Decline button. This seems pretty cool until you mis-use it. Many people could easily be put off by such an intrusion into their “private” browsing. Worse, people might suspect this is some kind of attempt to install malicious software onto their computer. Tread very cautiously here.

Woopra has a variety of different plans ranging from free to $179.95/month. Many people will be quite satisified with the free version as long as your site is not generating more than 30,000 pageviews per month. In any case, the free version is certainly the way to go if you want to check out Woopra, which I’d encourage you to do. Once you start viewing the real-time tracking, you just may get addicted.

Filed Under: Featured, Website Analytics

iMac slowing down? It’s time to visit the Console

November 10, 2009 By 4 Comments

Console-MessagesWhen your computer was brand new, it seemed so fast. Remember? And now, a couple years later you find yourself mumbling and grumbling because everything just seems so slow. Switching apps seems slow, launching apps takes forever, you are constantly seeing the spinning beach ball.

There are many reasons why a computer can begin to slow down. Looking in the Console is an oft overlooked tool in diagnosing these issues but there are more steps to be taken and in a future post, I’ll delve into that subject in greater depth. For now, one of the first things to do is to check permissions by using Disk Utility. When you launch Disk Utility, you will want to select your boot drive and then click on Repair Disk Permissions. This is a good habit to get in to… you cannot get into trouble by checking permissions every few weeks or so. This periodic task can resolve many quirky issues.

If you are still experiencing sluggish performance another place to check for leads as to what may be contributing to the slowness is your Console app. You’ll find this helpful app in your Applications > Utilities folder. This is where you will find all the logs pertaining to system errors and such.

Frequently you will find a particular error repeating itself hundreds of times a minute. You can literally have thousands of repeating errors occurring for a variety of reasons. This continual logging of repeating errors will consume a lot of processing time and can really slow down your computer. As an example, for the last couple weeks my computer was so slow I was just about ready to take the drastic measure of reformatting my drive, reinstalling Snow Leopard and then migrating all my apps, docs and settings from my backup back over, just to clean things up. But I visited my Console and noticed a repeating error. The error was: “11/10/09 10:23:07 PM – Tue, Nov 10    kernel    USBF:    140949.261    << _mouseParameter.button[1]=0×0″ and it was repeating over and over again.

Here is what the console log looked like.

console-error

After a bit of investigation and Googling, I concluded it was caused by my Logitech Marble Mouse. I had deinstalled the Logitech Control Center a few weeks ago to resolve another issue I was having and by doing so, the mouse was causing repeating errors that were being logged by the thousands in Console. I reinstalled the Logitech Control Center software and after a restart noticed an immediate improvement in computer response. And the errors stopped completely.

So, before taking drastic steps, do a few basic steps first and make sure checking the logs in Console is one of those first steps.

Filed Under: Featured, iMac Troubleshooting, Troubleshooting

Was I hacked? “kosa-target-image” issue

November 7, 2009 By 3 Comments

One of my client websites was built using CMSmadesimple. It’s a robust content management system that I enjoy using for the most part. While editing a page on my client site, I discovered some odd code that I did not knowingly insert. The code was as follows… [Read more...]

Filed Under: Featured, Troubleshooting Tagged With: ,

TinyGrab review, bare bones screen grabs

November 6, 2009 By Leave a Comment

tinygrab-screen-captureTinyGrab is a new screen grab app that harnesses the power of the MacOS’s native screen capture utility and adds the ability to instantly have that screen grab uploaded to a server, either the tinygrab server or ftp’d to your own server. If you choose to use tinygrab’s server, you also have access to shortened URL’s to that image and the ability to store or delete the images from their server.

I first learned about TinyGrab from MacHeist. MacHeist is best know for offering amazing bundles of Macintosh shareware at ridiculously low prices. Over the last couple  years, I have obtained some great deals beacuse of their bundles. Well,  MacHeist currently has what they call a  “nanoBundle” available that includes 6 apps and they are offering this software bundle for free, but only for a few more days. Check out their website to learn more.

So back to TinyGrab… it’s cool because it only requires that you use the standard MacOS keyboard shortcut for screen capture namely “command-shift-4″ which gives you a crosshair cursor with image dimensions to enable you to click and drag the precise size of screen area you want to capture. Once captured, TinyGrab saves the image to your desktop and instantly uploads (or ftp’s) the image to the server. Once the upload is complete, the menubar icon for TinyGrab flashes and a notification sound chimes (this notification sound can be changed or disabled in the TinyGrab preferences).

TinyGrab is a young  product and has some issues. Currently there is no way to batch delete screen captures that have been uploaded to their servers. You have to go through a 5-click process to delete a single image. This is clearly not efficient and they have already indicated that a new improved method will be in place soon. Another issue, at least right now, is that as a result of the deluge of people obtaining  and using the app because of the MacHeist promotion, the tinygrab.com server has been overwhelmed and I’ve been experiencing frequent page errors when accessing the control panel of their website.

In spite of these early issues, TinyGrab might be worth a look if  what you need is a really quick way to do a screen grab and then be able to provide a URL to someone else to view or obtain that image.

It’s one of many screen grab choices. What do you think of TinyGrab?

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Filed Under: Featured, Mac Software Tagged With: ,

Skitch review: powerful screen capture and sharing software

November 6, 2009 By Leave a Comment

skitchI’ve been amazed at the usefulness of Skitch, a screen capture and sharing app that I’ve been using for quite some time. It just can’t be beat.

Skich is innovative, fun to use and absolutely fantastic. It’s from the same guys (plasq) who developed Comic Life, a truly amazing app that has far more functionality than meets the eye.

There is certainly no lack of screen capture apps; why the MacOS even has a basic screen capture utility built right in which is accessed by command-shift-3 or command-shift-4. But if you want more flexibility in what you want to capture with the additional capability to share it easily, you must use one of the other alternatives.

Many of you have probably heard of Jing, a free screen and video capture program from the same folks who produce Camtasia, the awesome full-featured screen capture program. I’ve been happily using Jing for about a year but it is a bit cumbersome to use for quick screen capture and I dislike the constant plugs for TechSmith products that you are forced to see when using the product. Oh, the price we pay for using freeware.

Skitch on the other hand is way more useful as a screen capture utility because it has so many additional features. You can easily grab a portion of a website for instance, then use tools to draw a circle around something, add text to point something out then in a flash, upload it to Skitch.com on your personal space, or send it away in an IM or email. Truly powerful, flexible and feature rich. It’s been in “beta” for a long time and I’m not really sure why. All I know for sure is that once you spend a few mintes with Skitch, you’ll end up wondering how you managed so long without it.

I’d love to hear your opinions of Skitch. Do you have a favorite screen capture app that you use? Let me know.

Filed Under: Featured, Mac Software

Wibiya toolbar width CSS hack

November 5, 2009 By 19 Comments

CSS_hack

If you’ve used Wibiya, you will have undoubtedly discovered that the toolbar extends the full-width of the browser window. Although it will dynamically resize if you re-size the browser window, it cannot by itself be set to a fixed width. This means that if the content area of your website is 800px wide, the Wibiya toolbar will be wider than your content area and will actually be as wide as your browser window.

Clearly this presents a design dilemma because your beautiful website now has an ungainly toolbar at the bottom of the page that doesn’t fit in with the design of your site.

Although the developers will certainly address this in an upcoming revision, right now the only way to adjust the width is by using a simple CSS hack.

You just need to determine the width that you’d like your Wibiya toolbar to be and insert that width into this little chunk of CSS which you will place in your styles.css file for your website.

#wibiyaToolbar_tbl{
width: 800px !important;
margin-left:auto !important;
margin-right:auto !important;
}

As you can see, in my code, the width has been set to 800px. If you need the toolbar width to be any other value, just replace the 800px with the value you need.

Here is an example of how a site looked with the default Wibiya toolbar and then after applying the CSS hack.

Default toolbar width

Default toolbar width

Toolbar width with CSS hack applied

Toolbar width with CSS hack applied

Filed Under: Featured, WordPress Plugins

Wibiya review, an interesting toolbar plugin for WordPress

November 4, 2009 By 4 Comments

wibiya-toolbarI’ve been beta-testing a new plugin for WordPress, Wibiya. It adds numerous interactive features to your blog or website. At first glance you might be inclined to think that Wibiya doesn’t do anything new or replicates functions that may already be present via other plugins you may have installed. But looking a little deeper it becomes obvious that Wibiya is definitely more than a re-hash and collection of already available tools. It is being agressively developed and new features are already in the pipeline. And to realize that all the functions provided by Wibiya are discretely present in a concise toolbar anchored to the very bottom of your browser window makes it constantly available yet not in the way.

Among some of the features are…

  • Search function
  • Translate page to another language
  • Recent Posts
  • Random Post
  • Subscribe to RSS feed
  • Share this post
  • facebook Community
  • Twitter Dashboard
  • Notification panel

wibiya-toolbar

It’s in beta mode right now but it only took several hours for me to be “accepted” into the beta cycle so I’m not sure how difficult it is to get into the program. From my experience it was not very difficult at all.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Filed Under: Featured, WordPress Plugins
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