I’ve recently picked up a nice big TV and doing quite a bit of streaming from my laptop through the TV. However one this that has annoyed me is that the display on my Macbook Pro stays on all the time even when the primary display is the TV. After searching around for a little bit I found this work-around. It only really works well however if you have a remote.
Basically you hook up the TV using a DVI adapter and go into display preferences. Go into the ‘Arrangement’ tab and you’ll see two blue boxes. One of those boxes will have a narrow white rectangle on the top of it. Drag this rectangle over to the TV(i.e. the opposite to the one it is on already) and close the preferences pane. Start up FrontRow and it will automatically turn off the secondary display (now the MBP screen) and you can watch TV without having the secondary display annoying you.
After moving my site over to my new host I did a couple of little jobs on it. The first thing I did was to sort out some of the 404s that I’ve been getting. One of those is that my site is missing a favicon. A favicon is the little icon that is displayed on Firefox tabs or next to the URL in Firefox. IE also supports it. It is a 16×16 image that needs to be saved as a ‘.ico’ file. Photoshop doesn’t export to this format natively but there is a free plugin available for it at the Telegraphics site. Once I created a simple image I exported it and FTP’ed it into the webroot of my site. I then edited my skin header and within the head tags I added the following lines of html:
[code lang="html"]
[/code]
The extra couple of lines are to satisfy IE’s oddities.
You can also use png or even gifs for this but if you don’t use the ico format IE doesn’t play nice.
Once thats been done you should be ready to go. Most browsers won’t show the icon unless you clear your cache and restart your browser, IE6 won’t display it unless you actually add the site to your favourites.
Safari also has some problems. Emptying the cache in the regular fashion won’t clear the favicons. You need to go to the ‘Edit’ menu and select Reset Safari. Check Remove all website icons. If this doesn’t work, quit safari and you’ll have to manually clear them by going to User/Library/Safari/Icons and in Windows C:\Documents and Settings\YourUserName\Local Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari\WebpageIcons.db.
You may see the little grey ‘EL’ icon that II now have on my site, that’s it!
For anyone following a feed of the site, sorry about all the new posts!
I’ve had to repost a lot of older archived posts as I completely lost my wordpress database and have been trawling through the Google cache and entering them again.
I’ve recently upgraded to Google Apps for my site. It allows me to use Google Mail for my own personal site and I can use all the Google Documents, Spreadsheets and the rest of their free applications. I just had to modify my MX records for my site to point at Googles MX server(which takes a while to go through). Check it out if you’re a webmaster, I was previously using SquirrelMail so using Gmail is a massive improvement!
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/admins/editions.html
Recently when I booted up into the Windows XP partition using bootcamp of the Intel Mac I’m using I needed to access the files on the Leopard OSX partition of the hard-drive. After looking around for a bit I found HFSExplorer which can read from a HFS partition(i.e. Mac OS filesystem) and copy from it if needed. It is read-only though which is a bit of a bummer but is open-source and worked pretty well when I used it.
I see that bots have cracked both Gmail and Hotmail Live’s captcha methods. Not only that but did it in 60 seconds, very impressive. Read about it here and more in depth here.
I’ve also been playing around with some Ajax stuff recently. I had to make a modal window that contains a form, the form set a session variable that is set just once for a user’s session. I looked around for a bit, tried a few samples and found Control Modal which is a pretty lightweight, easy to use Modal window Ajax API built on top of Prototype. Check out the demos and grab a version at the Control Modal site. Below is some code I wrote to place the form in the Modal window.
