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YouTube URL hack lets you access a precise point of a video

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I just learned of a neat little hack with YouTube URL’s that enables you to begin viewing a video at a specific timeframe of the video.

Let’s say that you have a video you’d like to share with someone but you don’t want that person to have to watch the beginning of the video. Using this hack you can specify an exact timeframe simply by adding this to the end of the URL. Begin with a hashtag and a “t”, “#t”, then add an equal sign “=” then the number of minutes into the video you want to begin followed by an “m” then the number of seconds followed by an “s” so, “1m36s.” Put it all together and you get:

#t=1m36s

So if the YouTube URL were http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ but you wanted the viewer to join the video a 1 minute and 36 seconds in you would append the URL so that it looks like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_b7RDuLwcI#t=1m36s

Happy rickrolling.

CablesToGo USB 2.0 to IDE or SATA Drive Adapter

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cablestogo usb ide sata drive adapter>The Cables To Go 30504 USB 2.0 to IDE or Serial ATA Drive Adapter (Black)Electronics Cable Adapters) is a new tool in my arsenal and it’s made a huge difference in productivity when needing to work with bare drives or do diagnostics/maintenance on hard drives.

Not having to install a hard drive into an enclosure before being able to access the drive is a very convenient thing to be able to do. Previously I would have to use a Firewire/USB/USB 2.0 enclosure that I purchased from OWC in order to access a drive. But now all I have to do is hook up two cables to the drive (a power cable and the actual IDE or SATA output cable) and then hook the USB to my computer. When I’m done, I just unhook everything. It is just that easy.

You really can’t go wrong with this kit from CablesToGo and the price is right.

The CablesToGo kit is available from Amazon.

Automatically update the copyright year in your footer

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If you work on many websites it doesn’t take long before you realize how many of them have out of date copyright dates in the footer. Back in the good old days when sites were hand-coded and php was seldom used, copyright dates were hard-coded along with just about everything else.

It’s so easy to fix that problem and I”m going to show you how simple it is. You don’t need to know anything about php either. All you have to do is drop this little piece of php code into your footer and it will take care of the annual updating of the year for you. No more batch search and replace operations to replace 82 pages of out of date copyright years. Yay!

So let’s say your current footer looks something like this…

<p id="footer">copyright © 1998 by My Big Old Company, Inc</p>

To put that copyright year on auto-pilot, simply drop this bit of code in there and sit back and relax.

<p id="footer">copyright © <?php echo date('Y'); ?> by My Big Old Company Inc</p>

If your copyright is a range of years, like 2001-2011, just add the snippet after the dash of the first year like this…

<p id="footer">copyright © 2001-<?php echo date('Y'); ?> by My Big Old Company, Inc</p>

I don’t know much about PHP but I do know how to add that little bit of code and it takes away a big nuisance that used to occur every year. You can learn more about PHP and the date function by visiting PHP.net