If you've never opened up a computer case in your life then you can pretty much just ignore this post.
I had been running an old WD 250gb SATA HD and an even older Seagate 200gb IDE HD and was starting to run out of room. WD and Seagate both recently came out with new 640gb drives containing two 320gb platters and I picked up the WD drive from Newegg. The higher density means these drives really move and the quick comparison I did with my old WD shows the new one to be almost twice as fast. Reads come in at 110MB/s and the old drive would average out at about 60MB/s. So far Windows seem a lot snappier with the new drive. One thing that surprised me was the old WD was idling 10°C higher than the new drive so it's even cooler on top of being faster.
I also replaced my burner with a Samsung SATA drive, finally eliminating IDE from my computer. This let me really clean up my cabling. My old Thermaltake PSU that has served me well for the past 4 years only had 2 SATA power connectors so I replaced it with a new Corsair 450w PSU I had picked up on eBay from a seller who didn't know what he had ($70 PSU for about $25, nice). I also put in an Audigy 2 ZS sound card I got from Creative on clearance for $20. Great card, less noise than the onboard and the mic input seems to handle my headset mic better.
All in all a pretty good upgrade. Brings my specs up to the following:
- Antec P180 case
- Corsair 450w PSU
- 2GB OCZ Reaper memory
- Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L mobo
- Intel Dual Core E2180
- ATI Radeon 3870
- WD 640gb and 250gb SATA hard drives
- Audigy 2 ZS
- Samsung SATA Burner
Tagged with: computers
Posted under: Geek Stuff
If you subscribe to my comments feed you probably see all the comments related to my plugins. Over the past 2 years I've had a thousand comments and probably at least another thousand emails exchanged with Wordpress users. I must have found a pretty good niche with my ordering plugins considering My Page order hit the second page in the list of Popular plugins on the Wordpress Extend site. There's about 2000 plugins on the site and I'm coming in at around #19. That's pretty sweet.
Tagged with: plugin, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Lifehacker has been publishing a Better Gmail Extension which does some nifty things like adding attachment icons and hiding various things. Just saw today that there is now a similar extension for Google Reader. Not as many features as the Gmail extension, but there are a couple I find pretty useful. "Auto Add to Reader" bypasses the iGoogle or Reader option screen when subscribing to feeds and the "Preview Item" opens up the actual webpage in an iframe inside Google Reader either automatically or by clicking a button. That's pretty nifty since it makes it easier to open a blog post and post a comment right there without having to juggle tabs or windows. The last thing I really liked is displaying favicons inside the list of subscriptions much like regular bookmarks.
Better GReader
Tagged with: firefox, gmail, google reader
Posted under: Geek Stuff
After trying one method of bringing my shared Google Reader items into Wordpress I'm not exactly thrilled with the results. Rather than creating a single post per shared item I think I'd be happier with rolling a week's worth of items into a single "roundup" post. The things I share aren't really meant to spark discussion, they're just good reads I want to share.
What I really want to be able to do is create a post with a list of links to the items that have been shared since my last update (much like Kurtis does occasionally with random links). Problem is I can't find a plugin that does this so it looks like I'll be putting my noob PHP skills to use to create another plugin. Naming it is going to be the hardest part, "Feed Link Extractor" or "Feed Link Aggregator" or something.
Tagged with: google reader, rss, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
You might be wondering what these "Shared" posts are. Most of my web surfing consists of reading my RSS subscriptions in Google Reader, all 146 of them. On a given day I might find one or two things that I think other people would want to read. Google Reader lets you share items with your "friends", but there's no way to have a discussion about the content.
A while back I was trying to figure out a way to share those "shared" items with a wider audience. I stuck a link in the sidebar to my shared item page, but I doubt anybody uses it. What I really wanted to do was have Wordpress automatically create posts with a link to the content I mark in Google Reader. The WP-o-matic plugin does exactly what I want.
Setting up the plugin involves creating a CRON job on the server and setting up a feed to check periodically. You can customize the content of the post that gets created; I opted for a little blurb and a link to the content. I wanted to modify the title that gets created which isn't an available option so I modified the plugin to do that for me. I also set it to save posts as drafts so I can assign a category and tags and maybe some of my thoughts before Google Reader gets a hold of it and caches it forever.
So these shared posts are really the cream of the crop of my subscriptions and I'd love to have people share things they find. I like the fact that whenever shared items show up in Google Reader from my friends they are of high quality and worth the read even though it might be outside my immediate area of interest.
Tagged with: blogging, google reader, internet, plugin, rss, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Just realized you don't have to subscribe to a feed in Google Reader to share something you find on the Internet. Under "Your Stuff" they added "Notes" a while back. On that page there's a bookmark you can drag to the bookmark toolbar, click it, add a note and share the note in your Shared items. Highlight text on the page and it will prepopulate the description field with it. If you can't see my shared items, send me a chat invitation in Gmail; pretty sure that's the only way to become "friends" in Google Reader. Added a test note of a chart from Ross Perot's perotcharts.com.
Tagged with: gmail, google reader, internet, rss
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Firefox 2 added spell checking in text areas, but I just found a little tweak that extends spell checking to inline text boxes. Big help for keeping blog titles and such spelled correctly. Here's how:
- Type about:config in the address bar, hit enter
- Filter on spellcheckDefault
- Double click the entry and change the value to 2
Also if you haven't upgraded to Firefox 3 go grab it right now. Lots of memory leaks have been fixed and overall things are much more responsive.
Tagged with: firefox, internet, software
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Finished moving myself, The Blarg and Mike over to the new host. We've got lots of space and bandwidth so just have to find something to do with it. If anyone is getting tired of their Blogger or Wordpress.com blogs and wants more flexibility I can hook you up. Blogger's commenting system sucks so I would be happy to help migrate any converts.
Tagged with: blogging, web hosting, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
I got fed up with the poor performance and stability of ResellerZoom's server so I'm jumping ship over to Lunarpages. $2 less a month for a much better environment. I'm transfering my domain registration over to them since they'll renew it for free for life. This might lead to some downtime but fear not I'll be back.
Tagged with: domain, web hosting, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
Tags have become a big part of Wordpress. Back in the day we had categories and that's it. A user could search the site for keywords, but categorizing a post couldn't be accomplished without a ton of categories. Recently I added a bunch of categories, reassigned my posts into them and ended up with a lot of categories with only a few posts in them. I had been resisting the movement towards tagging and wanted to hold onto my categories. In WP 2.5 tags have been integrated into the core and it is clear there is a role for tagging.
The main issue I was having with categories is that I was using them to say what a post is about. For example, if I had a post about our wedding, it went in the Wedding category. But once our wedding was over I had like 10 posts sitting in a category that would never be added to. With tags I can place those posts into "Life Stuff" and tag it with wedding. The category becomes a general bucket and the tags describe exactly what the post is about.
I've made some theme changes and added a list of tags on each post. I went back through all my posts, recategorized them into my core categories and added tags. Now I have 8 categories and over 100 tags which will be much easier to manage and will keep me from trying to stuff my posts into overly specific categories.
Tagged with: blogging, categories, tagging, wordpress
Posted under: Geek Stuff
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