Layered Thoughts

Here’s a quick little tip for if you’re running your computer in a dual boot setup with Ubuntu and Vista. I was doing just this because I was programming Ruby and Ruby on Rails apps from Ubuntu but the lack of Photoshop was killing me.  So I did some research and eventually discovered andLinux (the topic of a future post one day), which lets you run Ubuntu Linux as a Windows service.  So that so far has solved all of my problems when it comes to being able to both do design and programming on the same operating system (What I really need to do is buy a Mac, but who has that kind of money?). So I haven’t booted into Linux in about 3 months now.  That isn’t a big deal because it’s nice to know that there is a partition there if I need it. But the problem is that I recently started running somewhat low on hard drive space.  I found that kind of weird because I only have about 2,000 songs on my computer right now and very few movies. But I do have that 40GB Linux partition just sitting there. So I set out to delete that partition and recover some space.  What is important though is that you make sure to replace the Linux bootloader that is installed when you install Ubuntu, or else you’ll lose the ability to boot into Vista once you delete Ubuntu.  So we’ll start off by replacing the bootloader first in order to avoid any problems.  The process is pretty simple:

1. You first need to download Super Grub Disc and burn the ISO image to a CD.
2. Next, pop the disc in and reboot your computer.
3. The Super Grub Disc screens are kind of cryptic in the sense that a lot of the choices look just like gibberish, but the important one you want for deleting Linux so you only have Vista is: WIN => MBR & !WIN!  :(((((((((((((((((
4. That option restores the original Vista bootloader to the Master Boot Record, forcing your computer to automatically boot into Vista next time it starts up.
5. Now, reboot your computer, click “Start”, right-click “Computer”, and select “Manage”
6. On the left hand side (in the menu tree), click “Disk Management”
7. Find your old Linux partition, right click it, and select “Delete Volume”
8. Once deleted, right click your existing Windows partition, and click “Expand Volume”

Now you should have recovered the space from your old Ubuntu install.  If you had a swap partition for Linux, you can delete that as well. Now just remember to only do this after you have backed up everything in your Linux install!

I just finished up a 4 hour late night work blitz and feel much better about my progress on the project now than before I started. I was slowly slipping behind little by little with making the right amount of progress so I decided to just buckle down and catch myself back up. So here I am at 3:18 AM finishing up the night. I’ve really gotten hooked on listening to mellow, ambient music through my headphones as I work.  Letting music play through your speakers is OK but it still leaves you vulnerable to audible distractions from the area around you.  But if you instead throw on your headphones and play some mellow tunes, you’ll be distraction free and ready to kick some virtual ass. So nerdy.

Anyways, I’ve been listening to Groove Salad over at Somafm.com as I’ve been working.  It’s really mellow and slow, most likely just a few beats and melodies, never anything fancy.  But it’s great for keeping you focused while also not stealing your attention away, like most popular songs do whether you like it or not. I’m also downloading some ambient tracks so I don’t have to suck up whatever bandwidth I have with streaming tunes.  I found a great plugin for Winamp as well that let’s you record each track of a streaming radio station on the web and save them to your computer.  I did it earlier and captured about 15 of the songs I had heard on Groove Salad.  Pretty Sweet.  I’ll explain how to use that tool in another post. Til next time, good night.

I’ve been busy working on a few projects lately but have been keeping pretty good notes about a bunch of stuff I figured out a long the way so get ready for a barrage of tech/programming/geeky oriented posts coming into this weekend…there’s going to be some good info though about stuff that I figured out from relatively sparse, scattered information on the internet so I’m hoping I’ll be able to help someone out if they had any of the same problems that I did while trying to do something similar. That was a long sentence.

Drove up to Simi Valley today for the Thanksgiving weekend so before I left, I emptied out my trunk and found my old PSP in it.  I haven’t used it in forever so I grabbed it and charged it up and have been playing with it a bit over the last two days.

I’ve decided that I’m going to install some hacked firmware onto it. Why? Because it allows me to install emulators for old game systems, which means, yes, that I can play NBA Jam wherever and I whenever I damn well feel like it.  So awesome.

The hacked firmware will also allow me to play downloaded game ISO files from the memory stick (Going to need a bigger memory stick).  Pretty nice since I do not play video games enough to warrant spending what little money I have on new ones.

I’m also going to use it hopefully for watching some movies on it.  I’ve downloaded a Windows app that makes it really easy to convert .avi files to psp formatted files so all of that will be simple once I get to that point.

Finding this thing has provided me a few good article topics for this blog that I’m hoping to publish in the next two weeks or so.  I’m thinking about writing these articles so far:

1. How to install the latest hacked firmware onto a PSP
2. How to play ISO files on a PSP
3. How to convert movies to watch on a PSP

I’m also thinking about writing about whether or not great graphics makes a video game actually better.  I mean, I generally only play old school games that I grew up with, so I’m under the impression that it’s not the visual quality but the immersive quality that makes a game great.  I’m hoping I can explore this idea in a post soon. I think it’s funny that I have these 4 posts lined up to write and I’m not even that into video games.  Oh well, good hacking stories at least.

The title says it all.  When I decided to start up this blog, I took some time to go through the plugins section on the Wordpress site to see if there were any plugins that would really make my blog great.  Obviously this was just a blind shot in the air because I had never used Wordpress nor did I have a reason to need anything more than what comes with the default install.  But here we are anyways.  So these are the plugins that I picked to add to Wordpress install in the last few days: Broken Link Checker

Automatically checks broken links in your Wordpress blog and notifies you of any that it finds.  Broken links don’t help anyone, so I figured this was a good little maintenance tool

Google Analyticator

Makes embedding the Google Analytics tracking code really easy.  Granted, copying and pasting the tracking code is something a preschool kid can do so long as he eyes and an index finger. But still, it makes it trivial.  It also adds some settings that would require at least two fingers to change manually so that makes it totally worth it.

SEO Smart Links

SEO is pretty dull.  But it’s necessary if you want your site’s traffic to grow organically.  So any plugins that do this stuff for me gets an A in my book.  This plugin automatically searches through all of your posts and identifies tags and categories and parts of the body that are shared with other posts and pages on your site and turns them into links.

Since Search Engines crawl your site using your sites internal links, it helps to have a good web of links set up to make the crawling go as easily as possible.  Plus, I don’t have to do it.

Sociable

Sociable adds icons to the bottom of every post that makes adding that post to the popular social news sites a single click operation.  After setting up the plugin, I was presented with a list of news sites I had never heard of, but after a minute I found the ones I use pretty frequently (except for Hackers News unfortunately).  I added this plugin in the hopes that one day someone will submit me to Reddit or Digg.  I’ll probably end up doing it myself in desperation but still, it’s there if someone feels so inclined.

Video Quicktags

I set up this plugin because of my second post.  I had embedded the video, which was from Blip.tv, but then discovered that it was set to autoplay. I fucking hate autoplay.  So I set out to stop it.

I couldn’t figure it out from the Blip website.  Usually I’m good at that stuff, but that day I was failing pretty hard.  So I found some other video plugin and used that to embed the video and it worked great.  Then last night I went to my blog to check things out and discovered the video wasn’t working.  After a few minutes I just decided to toss that previous plugin and subsequently found Video Quicktags.

This plugin adds links to the top of the posting box for all of the major video sites that make posting a video a cut and past operation.

Plus there’s no autoplay.

WP-Spamfree

As I wrote in my previous post about WP-Spamfree, I chose this plugin over Akismet simply because it required less effort to setup.  That’s it.  I just didn’t want to put in the effort.  As long as it doesn’t block real comments, I will consider it a success.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Kind of like SEO Smart Links, this plugin attempts to create a list of 3 links at the bottom of every post that point to other posts that are the most similar on your blog.  Some more SEO link building basically.  It’s supposed to run through every part of your posts, from the titles to the body to the tags and categories and use a special algorithm to choose the most relevant posts to link to.  This is all great, but you just need to make sure you have enough posts for this plugin to run through to really see success with this one.

XML-Sitemap

This is supposed to create a sitemap for your site after every post you make and then submit that to all the major search engines.  I know Sitemaps are important but I’m not sure if sending one after every post is really a best practice.  Plus, from what I’ve read, Sitemaps are only necessary if your site is hard to crawl for search engines.  If I find out this plugin screws anything up I’ll toss it but until then, I think it’s fine.

So that’s the list.  Not too many plugins there, and I feel like they all serve a specific purpose that should help me in some way down the line.  I’m sure I’ll be deleting some and adding some as time goes on, so I’ll write about that when it happens. Hopefully someone can use this list when they’re setting up their own Wordpress blog one day.

Decided against Akismet for now basically because I’m lazy and installing it requires going to a page and filling something out then getting a key and yada yada yada so I just blew it off and found a different plugin to block spam. Supposedly it blocks 99% of all automated spam.

WP-Spamfree

I’ve actually installed a shitload of plugins that I decided would make me the greatest blogger the world has ever seen so I’m planning on putting together a post that lists them all and their function and why I justified installing them.  Probably throw that up here this weekend.

WP-Spamfree is easy, just download it from the link above, upload the zip file into your Wordpress plugins folder, uncompress it, go to the plugins page in your Wordpress blog, click activate next to WP-Spamfree, and it supposedly just works.

We’ll see if those Canadien web hosting bastards can get to me now.

It has happened.  Getting spammed on day 3.  Here am I, waking up to an email saying I have a new comment, stoked like no other because people like me, and it’s an ad for Canadian Web Hosting.  While they might have gotten me if I lived in Canada, I instead live in one of farthest American cities from Canada.  Good try you web hosting Canuck. So how am I going to stop this spamminess?  Well I am going to install Akismet.  It’s a spam blocker for this here Wordpress thing.  I don’t have the time to install it right now, but tonight I will so I will do it and take some screenshots and write up a little tutorial on how to do it. In the meantime, if you’re in the mood for any web hosting north of the border, go ahead and get clicky on that link in the comments of my first post. Seriously though, don’t click it. Seriously.