Category: technology

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Moving…

So I’ve decided that I want to keep my personal site and my professional site more separate, as well as give everyone in the family a matching email address and allow for growth within the family website, so I’ve created welkerfam.net.

Anything that is of a personal nature will be found over there, and all of my more professional/programming things will remain here at the iohelix.

Feel free to head on over and check it out. It’s pretty fresh, and I’m still getting things moved over properly, so I’ll keep a copy here as well for about a month or so until everything has been ported over properly, but it’s up and running.

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hacking iTunes paths

so unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that we’ve moved to Slovakia.  during the move, I was unable and unwilling to pack my computer up to bring with us. it was just too large to be feasible. the next best thing was to backup my digital life onto an external hard drive–which chelsea so conveniently gave me for christmas–and bring that with us instead. one problem with this is that, as with every other time that I had to wipe my hard drive, I would be forced to re-import my entire iTunes library into iTunes, and if you’ve ever tried to import an iTunes library, it’s better than starting from scratch, but it sucks. playlists don’t sync properly, especially if they are based on other playlists. and the add date for all your songs becomes the same date, which I use in many of my playlists (recently added, etc.) but I think I found a solution to my problems…

Continue reading “hacking iTunes paths”

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leap second added at end of 2008

for everybody who will be celebrating the coming new year, make sure you don’t start (or end) your new year’s countdown early.

the international earth rotation and reference systems service (IERS) has announced that a leap second will be added at the end of 2008, making 2008 one second longer than it should be.

so either start your countdown at 11, or end your countdown at -1, either way…

enjoy the extra long year!  (it has both a leap day, and a leap second)

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thoughts on proprietary file formats

so we got a new camcorder for christmas (mrs. claus was nice enough to bring one by for us), and I broke it out, started using it, got it home, and tried to hook it up to the computer…  well, that failed with a cryptic error message, but no big deal, the memory card is easily removed, and the camcorder conveniently came with a USB card reader. so i plugged that in, attached it to the comp, and tried to open the files with my favorite in-a-hurry audio/video player, VLC…

nope. try again.

Continue reading “thoughts on proprietary file formats”

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“i told you so” just doesn’t sound strong enough…

Microsoft Internet Explorer is about to ruin your day.  Read the story for more info:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7784908.stm

Done reading?

Now, do yourself a favor and grab one of these:

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Linking to specific moments in a YouTube video

A co-worker of mine pointed me towards this entry in a blog.

It talks about linking to a specific time in a YouTube video. I’ll repeat here in case you don’t want to link offsite.

Have you ever recieved links to videos that say something like “It gets really good around 1:47”, or something similar?

Now you can link to a specific moment in that video by putting the time as follows in your link: #t=1m47s

What this does, is when somebody goes to that link, it not only starts at the given time, but it doesn’t buffer all the stuff that comes before it, so you don’t have to wait for the part you’re interested in.

For instance, try the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP1-5uxZffE#t=5m45s (SFW)

That’s just awesome.

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site backups

Since my wife and I started using a blog again, I was thinking it would be cool to go back in my archives and grab the old posts I had on here years ago, and try to find a way to import them back into the blog.

So I started looking in my backups folder for a database dump that would have the blog posts in it, and I searched and searched, but could not find the most recent version of it.  I have a coupe older ones, and some really old ones, but not any that were from right before I deleted the blogs.

I don’t know why I didn’t make a backup of them, or if I did, I don’t know why I didn’t keep it in a safe place, but I didn’t.

So I jumped on the wayback machine, and found one more post that I didn’t have in my backup.  I imported the backup into my database at home, installed the version of WordPress I had when the posts were made (also via the wayback machine), and posted that last one that was missing.  Then I installed the latest version of WordPress, made an export file, and imported them into this incarnation.

So now I have posts that go back about 5 years (albeit very sporadically), with the possibility of a few missing that are probably gone for good, unless I happen to find an old dump somewhere that I didn’t know about, but I doubt it…   oh well.

I’m off to make a backup of my site right now, and I’ll label it ‘Keep’, because obviously, the method I have now doesn’t work.

Maybe I should start putting my site backups in Subversion…

Anywho… enjoy the old posts.

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broken site

so my webhosting company was recently bought out and decided in all thier wisdom to follow the old adage of “if it’s not broke, break it, then don’t fix it”.  ok, maybe it’s not an old adage, but it sure does fit the situation.

the new company decided to move all the websites to new servers and in the process broke just about every one of the thousands of sites hosted on those servers, mine included.  and it doesn’t stop there.  in the past couple of weeks, my site has been off and on more than a newbie dj mixing with cassette tapes.

it seems like every couple of hours the site goes down, only to be back up again (but with limited functionality) the next time i see it.  it’s getting really annoying.  and the support people are not really helping, but it’s not entirely thier fault, because it seems that the errors are not happening everywhere in the country.
anywho…  the whole point of the post is to let everybody know why the site has been being stupid lately.

…and don’t host your site with WebHostPlus.

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rss feeds update

since writing ‘rss feeds in your inbox‘, the post letting people know how to get my blog in their inbox, i have upgraded the blogging software.
this has changed the rss feed url.  the new rss feed url is:

http://www.iohelix.com/wordpress/?feed=rss2
http:/iohelix.net/blog/feed

so there ya go, all fixed.

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anonymity is hard to keep

so i’m sitting here, at work, playing on the interent, and come across a page that has really cool stuff to download for “free”. and because there is no such thing as “free”, they make you register for their site (for what reason, i have no idea) and give out your precious information, just to download this “free” app that they are offering.

well, i say poo to that. and apparently, others have, too.

that’s when i stumbled upon a couple of sites that help people keep thier anonymity while browsing sites that require a login or registration.

the first is bugmenot.com. this site is awesome. when you come accross a site that requires you to log in, go to bugmenot.com and enter the base url into the field and click ‘Show Logins’ and it will give you a list of logins for the site. that way, you never have to register for another site again.

but if you really must register for a site and it’s one of the sites that will be sending you a confirmation e-mail so that they know it’s really you, just use mintemail.com.
what this site does is pretty cool as well. when you go to sign up for that annoying site that is forcing you to register, just go to mintemail.com, it will automatically store a fresh email address in your clipboard, then enter that email address into the site you are visiting. the mail will be automatically updated and kept for 24 hours, then deleted. you never have to give out your address again, but you still get those important first few emails to the site you’re trying to access.

and for the sites where you may want to come back and be recognized as yourself, but don’t want to use that same password you’ve been using forever, check out the Secure Password Generator. just set your specs and hit the button and a crytographically strong password is generated at random for you.

so there ya go, no more worries.