How-To

The whole point of putting appointments in to a computer calendar is that when I’m sitting in front of it wasting my life away, a little window will pop up fifteen minutes before I have to be somewhere important, like heart surgery, and I can zip over in time to say I’m just fashionably late.

iCal, despite being awesome in many ways, doesn’t seem to understand this. I can put events in all I want, but unless I remember to set an alarm each and every time, it will happily sit there quietly, laughing at me as I miss appointment after appointment. There’s no way to set a default alarm.

…without iCalFix. Which is the best thing ever. This links to an archive page, so it would be good to check to see if there are newer versions of the program when you follow the link.

Thank you Robert Blum. You’ve made it possible for me to use iCal. You rock.

I noticed that the tutorials for doing this are all for the PC version of Firefox, which is wonderful and useful, but the file path doesn’t line up for the Mac.

Turns out, though, that everything else is correct. So if you use a mac and you accidentally added “desparate” to the dictionary, here’s how you clear it out. First, close Firefox. The changes won’t stick if FF is running.

The use spotlight to find “persdict.dat” - just type in persdict, hit show all results, then right click (ctrl-click) the file and hit “show in finder.”

Now open the .dat file using a text editor (TextEdit should work, I use Smultron whenever possible), and just delete the misspelled word. Save it. Exit. Re-open Firefox, and you’re good to go.

Last week I decided to start a series of posts explaining the obvious non-obvious fundamentals of blogging. It’s a series of ten tips, and if you follow them all you will win fame, money, and more importantly, traffic.

Last week’s tip can be found here.

Tip #2: Always include a picture

Blogs come in all shapes and sizes, some are really ugly, and some are really pretty. Back in the day, having a blog engine run your site was enough of a novelty to get things going. Now, everyone has a blog. Part of getting new readers is standing out, and including a picture in your posts can help do that.

When TechCrunch first started pumping the blogosphere full of tech news, they were one of the first blogs to consistently use images. You’ll notice that they still do, and it really helps make each post stand out a little bit more, and look a little bit prettier.

A picture makes a post a little bit friendlier to look at, and sometimes that’s just enough.

As I spend more time talking to people who are new to blogging, I’m realizing that there are a lot of basic concepts and questions that I tend to skip over just because they seem obvious to me. But obvious to someone who has been blogging in some form or another for five or so years is not necessarily obvious for everyone else.

So I’m going to do a series of ten basic blogging concepts. Ideas and practices that will make your blogging better and your blog more popular.

Tip #1: Keep it short

As a rule, people on the internet have shorter attention spans than Reese’s Monkeys, and can be distracted with similar ease. The average size for a really good blog post hovers somewhere around 250 words. Enough time to really hit what you’re going to say, but without too much messing around.

I like to compare blogging to television; it’s episodic, whereas magazine articles and books and papers are more like movies—you have to find a way to kill off at least three main characters in the space of a couple of hours if you want to be considered for an Oscar.

If you have something longer to say (like 10 blogging tips), break it up into different posts. People will find it easier to read, and you’ll find it easier to write. Everybody wins.

I’ve been dealing with a syncing problem between my phone and my Mac for about a month now, and I finally got tired of not having my contacts synced up. I mean…that’s the whole point in the first place.

For a while I’ve been getting the error message when syncing my Address Book with my phone contacts:

“Error on last syc. See log.” and then the log would have some weird memory error message.

So I did some googling and some playing around with my computer and the phone.

I found the solution, more or less on this forum thread.

Did you try overwriting your Q with the contacts?

Before you do anything, I’d backup your Address Book contacts to be safe. (File > Backup Address Book).

Then, set your Contacts plugin to overwrite and give it a try.

Oddly simple, but it worked. You can use the “settings” button in the main Missing Sync window to “reset sync history” and then simply select “Delete all contacts from [device name].” It deleted them all, then shoved ‘em back on there. Now I can sync.

Hope this makes the solution easier to find.

Although I’m really enjoying just about everything about the Wii right now, I have to admit the process of adding other friends to the address book is far from intuitive at the moment. I’ve had a couple of people, including my roommate who actually owns the Wii, ask me how to get this number. Who knows if Nintendo will change this process with an update at some point, but for now, I think it’s worth drawing up a little guide.

First thing to note is that in order to send messages between two Wiis, you need to have the “Wii number” for both consoles, not just one of them. My guess is that this is to prevent people from spamming or otherwise abusing the message service.

OK…so how do I get my Wii friend code?

From the Wii home menu (channel screen) you need to click on the little message icon in the bottom righthand corner. This takes you to the Wii message board, where you will find a daily pinup of what games you have played, plus messages that other people have left (or sent) you. This is where messages will show up when your friends send them to you.

On the bottom left of this new screen are a couple of options. The one you want is the “create message” button, pictured here. Once you click on this, it will take you to a screen with three options. The one on the right, which says “address book,” is the one you want to click.

On the front of your address book is your Wii friend code. You must give this code to anyone you wish to add as your friend, since as I said above the process has to be reciprocal.

Adding Wii friends is pretty simple, although they’ve used the word “Register,” which I think is a little counter-intuitive. In the bottom right, just click the “Register” button, then click “Wii,” and follow the rest of the options for adding your friend.

Don’t worry about adding a Mii yet; you can only add Miis that are already available on your console, so you should wait until your friend sends over their Mii (via message) before you assign it to their console.

That’s it. Enjoy.

I’ve complained before about how Firefox 2.0, while better in almost every way than its previous versions, took out the default for one of my favorite features: anything you type into the search bar that isn’t a web address used to get plugged into Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” search.

It turns out that this feature isn’t gone per-se, but disabled. By default, Firefox 2 will do its best to turn anything typed into the address bar into a valid address. If it can’t, it pops up an error.

If that suits you, no worries. If you want the Google search back, the fix is simple.

Open a new tab in firefox and type “about:config” into the address bar. This brings up a page of properties and a “filter” box.

In the filter box, type “keyword.” This should get you down to two entires. Make sure the the “keyword.enabled” one says, respectively, “default / boolean / true.”

Then, double click on the “keyword.URL” entry, and replace the default string with this one:

http://www.google.com/search?btnI=I’m Feeling Lucky&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=

Now you’re all done. Close the tab and get lucky.

PS. If you’ve been getting the error “This URL is not valid and cannot be loaded” whenever you type in anything with a space in it, as I was, you probably have the Tabbrowser Preferences add-on enabled. Disabling it should let you go back to the feeling lucky search - don’t know why.

This is a pretty simple trick, but it’s probably one that most basic Wordpress users might not know. The only reason I know how to do it is that I’ve done it accidentally before, and it confused the hell out of me until I figured it out.

In your posting section in Wordpress, down on the right sidebar, there’s a little box titled “Post Timestamp.” If you expand this box, it’s basically a little timestamp setup.

So if you want to schedule a post for future publication, (almost) all you have to do is set the timestamp to a future date by typing the date and time into the available boxes.

Now I said that’s almost all you have to do. There’s one more step: make sure you check the “Edit timestamp” box. If you don’t check that box, it will post normally.

That’s it, you just scheduled a post in Wordpress.

As far as I know, there’s no automated process for getting the short, numeric-based permalink for your Wordpress entries, however, since it is both short and numeric, it’s really easy to come up with it yourself.

Why do you want it? Well, a lot of the human-friendly (and search-engine friendly) permalinks are really looooooooooong. So if you want to paste a link into an e-mail (or a comment) without wrapping, it’s handy to have a little tinyurl built into your blog (so you get Google juice).

So here’s how it works. All of your entries in Wordpress have a unique numerical ID. You can get to this through your back-end, under “Manage” -> “Posts”

Next to each post, on the far left, there’s a column called “ID.” This is the number you’re after. And guess what? They’re sequential - so if you can remember what your last post number was, you can skip this step.

Now the short URL follows a particular form, always. And this link is always valid (no matter how you set your long permalinks). It is like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/?p=[number]

So I can take this long URL (notice how it runs into my sidebar):

http://www.jason-preston.com/index.php/2006/10/27/what-is-rss-good-for-musings-at-the-blog-business-summit/

And make it this url:

http://www.jason-preston.com/?p=874

Voila!

As I explained in my previous post, I recently purchased an album on iTunes but didn’t manage to download all the tracks before iTunes crashed.

When I restarted iTunes, I had the tracks I’d already gotten, but nothing more. If I went back to the store, all it offered was to let me buy the album again. Now some kind folks pointed out that Apple is in the habit of offering a one-time-only re-download all your music for no reason deal.

That’s a sweet deal, but I’m wary of using up one-time deals if I don’t have to. All I want is four songs I never got in the first place.

Turns out that iTunes 7 (at least, maybe others) has got this little menu item: Check for Purchases. On the PC at least, you can find it under “Store.”

I thought it might take me to my purchase history, where I’d be able to file an error report or something. Turns out it just checks your purchase history against what you downloaded (I assume) and resumes downloading anything you didn’t actually get.

I got my four songs before finishing this post. Awesome.

This is partly here for my own benefit and partly here because it took me about 10 minutes of googling to come up with this link, which, unlike the PhpMyAdmin help page, tells you how to do it.

So, for future reference, to import a dump, you have to go to your database by selecting it in the sidebar, click on the “SQL” tab, and then (if your dump is under 3 megs) go ahead and use the “browse” button to find and upload the file automatically.

Simple, right? Well. Call me a dumbass, but I coudln’t find it. Watch. This will actually help someone.

Like so many people, after upgrading to Wordpress 2.0, which is phenominal in almost every other way, I was suddenly unable to use the prepackaged code from sites like Google Video, YouTube, and iFilm to embed streaming video in my blog.

I don’t end up needing to use it that often, so I didn’t bother figuring it out until yesterday. The problem seems to be that the new WYSIWYG editor in WP 2.0 prevents certain html tags from getting properly processed, and the [embed] tag happens to be one of them.

The answer is surprisingly simple: Turn off the WYSIWYG editor.

As explained here, the option to switch the editor on and off can be found in the Users -> Profile section (which is not where I would look, but OK).

Turn that off, and paste the embed code directly into the editing window. Want it back on? Turn it back on when you’re done.

Also, if you use Audioblog for videoblogging and have problems embedding the Audioblog code into your WP 2.0 posts, it appears to be because the new WP doesn’t like [iframe] tags. Eric Rice, the mind behind Audioblog, has posted a quick fix for those who have access to WP-Config.php:

One fix is to add the following code to the bottom of your wp-config.php:

// BEGIN FIX TO ENABLE IFRAME POSTING FROM AUDIOBLOG.COM
$allowedposttags["iframe"] = array("src" => array(),
"height" => array(), "width" => array(), "frameborder" => array(),
"scroll" => array(), "scrolling" => array());
// END FIX TO ENABLE IFRAME POSTING FROM AUDIOBLOG.COM
If you don’t have access to this file, contact your site’s administrator.

I finally, FINALLY figured out how to round the edges of an image using Photoshop (well, ok, imageready). Ironically, I figured this out just as I stopped using an actual “banner” image with actual “edges” on my own site.

But for the record, here’s the simples solution that skips the whole “moving the image to MS Paint and using horrible compression to make your image looks more grainy” bit.

When you have your image cropped to the size you like it in Photoshop (CS or CS2, I’m not sure about the older ones), go to File -> Edit in Imageready.

Imageready will then come up with the file you were working on. Now, in your little toolbox, select the “Rounded Rectangle Marquee Tool” (i.e. exactly the shape we’ve always wanted but that photoshop is retarted not for having), and frame your banner so that it’s edges are rounded the way you’d like.

Then go to the Select Menu -> Inverse

Hit delete.

Voila! A banner with rounded edges. Just go File -> Edit it Photoshop to send everything back to your orignial program, and you’re done. Remarkably simple, but annoying that you have to use a second program.

But at least you can keep your images high-quality this way.

I’m fairly American. Until a few months ago, when someone asked “do you want tea?” my response would have been “what kind?”

This is not the right response. Tea is tea. Tea, in this case, is English breakfast tea (black tea), and there are also improper ways to make it.

This was all news to me when I got to Brighton in September. After one first, disastrous embarrassment of an attempt at making a cup of tea myself, I decided to sit back and watch all the British people do their thing for a few months.

So now I’m going to break the process down to the most simple rules which will, theoretically, help any crass American break the tea-barrier in any situation:

1. Use British tea, like Tetley.You can find it in grocery stores.
2. BOIL the water. Boil it first, and use a kettle, not a microwave.
3. When you pour the water into a mug, make sure the teabag is already in there. For some reason, it tastes better this way (true).
4. Add milk. This also makes the tea taste better. If you really want to sweeten it, add some sugar.

Simple? You bet. Taste good? Absolutely.

As far as I can tell, this is more or less the daily layman’s tea ritual in England. There are all sorts of fantabulous methods that are also, apparently, part of the tea-making thing, but this is what I saw day after day.

If you want to serve tea in tea-time style, I’d recommend using Douglas Adams’ Method, which uses Earl Grey instead of regular breakfast tea:

Boil a kettle of water. While it is coming to the boil, open the sealet packet [of tea] and sniff. Careful—you may feel a bit dizzy, but this is in fact perfectly legal. When the ketle has boiled, pour a little of it into a teapot,swirl it around, and tip it out again. Put a couple (or three, depending on the size of the pot) of tea bags into the pot…Bring the kettle back up to the boil, and then pour the boiling water as quickly as you can into the pot. Let it stand for two or three minutes, and then pour it into a cup…if you think you will like it with milk, then it’s probably best to put some milk into the bottom of the cup before you pour in the tea.

- Tea, The Salmon of Doubt

However you make your tea, I suggest drinking it to a background of a crisp winter evening, or in any other situation whatsoever.