Category: Tips + Tricks

Digital Photo Prints

Costco has probably the cheapest printing service for digital photo. But instead of going to Costco, upload pictures there, and then possibly having to make a second trip to pick the pictures up, they offer an online upload option for pickup later.

Costco Mac plugin

It’s nice to see that Costco (via Snapfish) has a Mac compatible browser plugin for batch upload (beats manual one-by-one upload any day). Sony’s very own ImageStation also has similar features for Mac.

Speaking of pictures, I tried using PictureSync to see if it can make photo sharing any easier on a Mac. Unfortunately, the application is not free among its supported services. So I didn’t bother.

Too bad iPhoto has a really poor “export to web” feature. As of now, my favorite photo export app is PhotoSite TimeSaviour. Not only is it free, the software is also packed with feature that puts iPhoto’s export feature to shame. The only downside is that its GUI can be a bit complicated to figure out. And it seems like the author has stopped developing it. The upside is, once you get the settings figured out, you can save the settings for future use. Excellent~~ (in the tone of George Burns).

UPDATE: I wrote the author of PhotoSite TimeSaviour about future developments of the software. He replied and said:

…I’ve been short of time lately, but I have plans on updating it (with among other things proper CSS-based styling). – Karl B

Sweet. I like the app so much that I even made a Paypal donation. I could really use that css-based styling.

MythTV-Like App for Wintel?

I didn’t think something like this would exist for Wintel, but it does. After sending back the video capture card to Buy.com, I gave up on MythTV (for now). But knowing something like MediaPortal exists for Windows is comforting (for Windows users). But the whole me doing MythTV was so that I could do away Windows altogether.

WordPress “Official Comment” Plugin

I thought it’d be cool and be even more egomaniac to make my own comments become stand out a little more from everyone else’s with this plugin.

1. Download Official Comments plugin in.
2. Place and unzip the file in /wp-contents/plugins/ directory
3. Edited /wp-contents/themes/_theme_of_choice/comments.php and added the following to line 29 (adds a nice css style to the comment box):

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< li class="comment <?php echo (is_wpuser_comment() ? ' commentOfficialUser' : ''); ?>" id="comment-&lt?php comment_ID() ?>">

4. On the same file, also added the following to line 30:

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<?php if(is_wpuser_comment() != 0) {echo "Official comment from ";} ?>

5. Complete the set up by adding the following css code to /wp-contents/themes/_theme_of_choice/style.css

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.commentOfficialUser {
        border: 1px solid #bbb;
        background-color: #ddd;  
        }

WordPress “Comment Preview” Plugin

Added a preview window in the “comments” section:

1. Download Comment Live Preview plugin.
2. Place and unzip the file in /wp-contents/plugins/
3. Edited /wp-contents/themes/_theme_of_choice/comments.php and added the following to line 98:

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<?php live_preview() ?>

Not that you guys don’t already know what you are typing, it’s just nice to see everything pre-formatted right in front of your eyes before it’s submitted.

Online Registries

When Grace and I were getting married, we wanted to have the option for our Asian friends to give us cash instead of a registry of gifts. Besides, we’d already got almost everything we need. A registry would be redundant. After some research, I was surprised that Felicite is the only place online that offers cash as well as product registry.

I am sure there are other services available nowadays. But Felicite was the only option at the time.

On this, Murdza mentioned an idea to help finance a new house for a couple: An interactive illustration of the house with clickable items available for donation. In other words, if I wanted to donate an entire door, I can click on the door and add that to my donation cart. Once it’s done, my name would appear on the door as the donor (just on the illustration, of course). Pretty cool idea.

Switcher’s Friend

Outlook2Mac image If you or know anyone who’s considered switching to the Mac but was held back because they couldn’t figure out what to do with their gazillion emails and attachments, Outlook2Mac is the answer.

A while ago at my last job, I had to look for a solution to easily transfer everything from the CEO’s dying Sony Viao laptop to her spanking new 12″ PowerBook. It took me a while to exhaust all solutions on the Outlook (and the attachments) issue. Finally I broke down and bought Outlook2Mac. It’s one of those life-saving specialty softwares you think you’d never use.

All that work, though, went to waste. She soon switched back to an IBM Thinkpad and just didn’t see the usefulness in her PowerBook. She claimed that it was an unreliable piece of metal. But I think its unreliability may have something to do with her knocking it against walls/tables/grounds a few times.

WordPress Post Made Easy

I finally got around to do this hack. In order for me to post a new entry, I have to login, go to “Site Admin” panel and then click on “Write” to post. I have hacked the site to have a “Post New” link under “Meta” when I am logged in.

1. Open and edit “/wp-includes/template-functions-general.php”
2. On line 50, I added

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    $link = $before . 'a href="' . get_settings('siteurl') . '/wp-admin/post.php">' . __('Post New') . '' . $after;

NOTE: Don’t forget to add the < sign before "a href". I had to take it out becuase WordPress thinks that line of code is an active http link. Also, the dot on the first line should not be omitted.

Now I can post new entries with just one click.

More Safari Extensions

Came across this while reading old blogs from Gizmodo. Saft is an app that bundles a good collection of features that are currently missing in Safari. Just to name one I can’t live without — crash protection. Safari has serious issues with performance when opened for an extended period of time, and sometimes it crashes without warning. What crash protection in Saft does is it saves the current tabs and their URLs at the time Safari crashes and gives user the ability to retrieve those URLs upon relaunch.

Another cool feature is the ability to manually shuffle the tabs and rearrange the order; something that’s in existence in Firefox already.

Pimp My Safari has more stuff on improving features that Safari currently lacks.

Also, OpenDarwin keeps a webkit blog (the core technology in Safari) with interesting updates from time to time. This particular entry deals with memory leaks, which Safari is notoriously known for.

via [Gizmodo]

Hiccups

I didn’t even realize it’s been a couple of days since I last blogged. Time flies when there’s a baby around.

Murdza, now I understand why it took you so long to install that bad ass new PowerBook hard drive around the time when Savannah was born. I can’t imagine adding house renovation projects to the mix….

Bryan has been having hiccups since he was in Grace’s tummy. It’s really funny to feel the tummy tremor in an interval. And now that he’s here, almost every other meal he hiccups for a few minutes (despite gentle pats on his back). Sometimes I give him some water, and that seemed to have helped. But other times it doesn’t.

It’s worthy to note that scientists still don’t know exactly why hiccups happen though there are some interesting theories involving the diaphragm.

I do have a couple of home remedies that usually stop the hiccups immediately.

1. Take a deep breathe and hold it. Wait 30 seconds and exhale. (Usually this takes care of the hiccups.

2. Take a deep breathe and hold it. Drink a big glass of water while holding the breathe. Usually it is followed by a slight burp and the hiccup stops.