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Category: Blog News
News about me, my family and anything I comment on from the global news fronts.
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Flex update is coming
I’ve not been posting a lot on my blog lately, as I have been busy on several things at the same time. But I’m still programming in Flex (and in Python) and have been trying out ways to get them to work together. More details later on, including on my pet flex project that uses converted xml.
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MacHeist 7 Days Left
There’s still 7 days left over to sign up for the Macheist software package. For 39$ you get 600$ worth of software ! For me, it was worth it. Just hoping we can get ‘espresso’ as well…
Btw, using the link provided lets me earn some more software too.
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Extreme Sheep Hearding
I’ve added a howto on my iPhone page that’s been very usefull to me (source from TUAW) : sometimes the syncing between iPhone and iPhoto goes a bit haywire and you don’t see all the pictures on your iPhone that you need to download.
The above howto shows you how to solve that.
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Loewe commercial
This one really made me laugh !
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Skankiness levels…
The Onion Network…
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Now I Lay Myself Down To Sleep
Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep is a organization of benevolent photographers that are on-call for when the magic moment of giving life turns tragic and a new-born baby dies. When parents loose their child in the very early days, often there are practically no images or pictures.
Often they would have wished to have more than just those few pictures to remember him or her by, shot at a time when the panic and stress levels were very high.
Via this organization, these photographers can be called up in the middle of the night and come and assist the grieving parents in taking professional quality pictures of their beloved deceased baby.
NILMDTS is already active in several countries, but at this moment not yet in Belgium – there are no photographers listed.
Seems to me that we could use some of this care and attention here as well. I’m not a really good photographer, nor, being the father of two children myself, am I certain I could contain my emotions, so I’ll be trying to spread the worth of this organization to others who are.
I’ve been looking for a free solution to see where all the diskspace on my iMac has recently gone to, and so far I found only a few apps. All are to be purchased, and for what wanted this was overkill. I just wanted a quick check on where the source of biggest disk space consumption lay : was it the music collection ? or the movie collection ?
So here’s a quick tip on how to solve this for free, no new tools needed, on a Mac or Unix machine : I introduce to you the ‘du’ command.
DU stands for Disk Usage, and in combination with some switches, it’ll let you quickly and (fairly) easely find out where all those mega- and gigabytes have gone to.
Here’s the line you can use all ready for you – I executed the command in my user directory :
du -d1 -kc | sort -nr
Written out it gives the following command : show me the Disk Usage only to the first Directory level (or Depth) and give (pipe) the results to the sort program and show the reverse output from big to small. If you just use du without sorting, you can add the -h flag to it : this will show you the size in Kilobytes, Megabytes or Gigabytes.
Which gives the following output :
334265428 total
334265428 .
168926644 ./Movies
46947780 ./Library
38262372 ./Music
21862824 ./Documents
17618688 ./Software
16472220 ./Archive
14429940 ./Pictures
This means that there’s 161 GB in my movie collection !! Obviously I need to check what’s going on in there. I can now perform the same command in the movies directory and have the information there to see which directory in there is the largest..
[Update] I just remembered a program I used to use on Windows, and lo and behold, it’s still active, and is multi-platform as it is written in Java. If you need more than that or want something more graphical or extensive, you can also try JDISKREPORT, which is is free to boot!
Yesterday I stumbled across a Google Advert (funnily enough, on my own website) advertising a Windows-only program called Artisteer, made by Extensoft. It’s a WordPress theme creator that promises no-fuss, no-muss theme creation, and after downloading the demo and playing with it on my Windows XP laptop for about 30 minutes, I have to agree wholeheartedly that it delivers.
Usually I don’t bother with Windows software, but for this I bought a licence (the standard edition, less than 50 bucks, suited me just fine) and downloaded it to my laptop, which is XP.
I dug up a vacation shot of our turkish holidays, and selected it. It immediately showed me a preview. The title was in the center and clashed. Click and then drag’n change the title, solved. Then I made the page a 1000 pixels wide by clicking and selecting an option. Then I set the color scheme, the gradients, the buttons, the shadow on the buttons, the gradient background, the shadow on the page, changed the layout to a 3-column theme, set the search bar on top and it all came down to selecting a tab in the menu bar and selecting the relevant option.
The simplicity of theme creation that Artisteer offers is really astonishing – at last anybody can whip up a theme without knowing all the php code, without having to search through reams of code to change just that line. So far I have not encountered any bugs, the application is really well made, and the pdf help file was helpful for as much that I needed it.
Future expansions seem to be aimed on providing theme exports for Joomla and Drupal.
All in all, this is one piece of software I can recommend !