Tech

My Small Issue With the Windows Live Sync Beta

June 30, 2010 by Screenbeard

Had a strange problem using the new Microsoft Windows Live Sync Beta. It’s working fine on one of my computers, but on the other one, it drops a letter when I set up a folder to sync.

See what I mean?

For example, if I want to sync a folder like D:\My Videos, the program accepts the folder I want as D:\y Videos and then creates this new folder for syncing. Or it might sync D:\Archives as D:\rchives. On my other computer — no issues.

Investigating a bit, I discovered it doesn’t happen on my other drives (C:, F:). My D drive is different, in that I’ve moved the location of my My Documents folder to D. In a quick test, I discovered that moving it again to a subfolder of D removes the issue. It’s not a permanent solution however, as a) I like having my documents folder in the root of my secondary drive, and b) I would have to move 220Gb of data to an external drive and back again as you can’t move the location to a subfolder of the current location.

So I’ve sent feedback to Microsoft using the inbuilt “report a problem” menu in the beta. I did it in two parts though, so this post is my way of putting it all in one place, and on the off chance that someone is having a similar issue, they might get some comfort knowing that it’s not their fault (well it is, but only ever so slightly).

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Bozo, the Clown Communications Minister

May 28, 2010 by Screenbeard

“This is probably the single greatest breach in the history of privacy.”

Steven Conroy on Google’s (accidental) collection of unsecured (and essentially public) wifi data from people who don’t know how to set a simple password on their wireless Internet connections.

Conroy I once caught a clue THIS BIG! Then I let it go.
By kjd.

Really, he needs to stop talking if he ever wants anyone to take him seriously in a technological capacity ever again. Can’t he just have a 13 year old check his speeches before he gives them so they sound at least vaguely knowledgable?

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Favicons

May 11, 2010 by Screenbeard

This entry is part 4 of 5 in the series Plugins I Use

Quick plugin plug

A bunch of favicons
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dantaylor/ / CC BY 2.0

Favicons are those little icons that websites display in the address bar (or in the open tab in Chrome). They’re usually about 16 pixels square (which is tiny) but it adds a bit of professionalism to your site, and lets people figure out which site is yours if they have dozens of tabs open. You can get plugins for photoshop that will let you save files as “.ico” files so you can create a favicon.ico file. Then you can upload your file to your website and link to it and… well it’s easy, but kind of annoying to get right.

Enter Shockingly Simple Favicon:

Shockingly Simple Favicon
A simple way to put a favicon on your site.matias s

Install and activate and follow the instructions on the configuration page. The page includes better information than I’ve provided here, and a whole bunch of ideas for creating your own favicon.

Go to it!

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Some Neat WordPress Plugins

April 29, 2010 by Screenbeard

This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Plugins I Use
Plug In!
image by Darren Hester

Previously I wrote about some plugins I love for making writing posts easier. This is a list of the little plugins I love that just do cool things around the place. They’re all useful, and most are ones I use on both sites I maintain. I would highly recommend them to anyone.

Read more »

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Bye Bye, Disqus

April 12, 2010 by Screenbeard

Tonight I disabled Disqus and tried to implement some of the same features manually. Rubenerd has been pushing his anti-disqus agenda for some time, and it ramped up when Taryn proclaimed it’s virtues and Zombie_Plan bleated and caved too.

See ya!
BYE by Taz etc.

So as an experiment (and due to my underlying desire to stop handing stuff over to third parties), I turned it off. Here’s what I installed in its place:

  • CommentLuv — puts a link to the commenter’s most recent post under their comment.
  • Gravatar Signup — if a user doesn’t have a Gravatar associated with their email, offers to sign them up for one.
  • Simple Facebook Connect — lets a commenter register using their Facebook account.
  • Simple Twitter Connect — lets a commenter register using their Twitter account.
  • OpenID — lets a commenter register using their OpenID account.
  • Subscribe to Comments — Adds a check-box so a commenter can have follow-up comments emailed to them.
  • Live Comment Preview — Shows a mockup of the comment being left as it’s written. Kinda neat.

So that’s seven plugins, plus an hour or two mucking around with site templates and CSS to get them looking vaguely acceptable (so many themes have very ugly comments). I had to style my comments separately, fix the threading, and alter the layout of the comment form. And I still have less functional comments than I did with Disqus. The only benefit I have is… I… don’t know. I can say I don’t use Disqus?

Read more »

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