At the same time that I bought the Garmin, I grabbed a TomTom XL 330S as well. It’s funny, you’d think one would completely win over the other.
It just doesn’t work that way though. They’ve each got pros and cons which I’ll be getting to in another post. In any case, a site has been created for the TomTom as well. Content’s done, but it’ll be slowly added to the site over the next while (just like the Garmin which is also done but pages will be added over time).
A quick list of some pros and cons: Read more…
I recently bought a Garmin Nüvi 255W GPS. It’s a pretty impressive unit - it almost reminds me of a Mac in it’s ease of use. I’ve already used it a bit, and plan to do some testing with it over the next few days. I’ll sum things up with a few pros and cons: Read more…
A minor issue I ran into. My brother got a copy of Spore for Christmas and didn’t have time to play it, so he’s loaned it to me for the time being. I thought I’d give it a try on the hackintosh (using an iDeneb OSX86 installation).
It installed fine. Problem was that when running it, the screen was black. There was sound, but that was it. Did a little searching… and not a lot of luck. I found that alt-enter (or applekey-enter) sometimes worked for people having full screen issues. I tried it, and noticed the monitor continually bouncing to power-saving mode, then normal again. I decided to do a little guessing and deductive reasoning, and the solution was……
Solution: Plug your monitor into the other output on your video card! Read more…
Check out Part 1 before going any further.
Tiny issue - after you do it, you may find that your wrapped version is full of “noindex” on all the pages. Well actually, it’ll have Joomla’s “index,follow”, but keep reading down the meta tags and you’ll find a “nofollow”. This is assuming you’ve told SJSB to pass the META tags to Joomla.
Anyway, you can fix it.
Edit your index.template.php file, and add the following: Read more…
A small shocker using Maya on a Quad-Core Intel processor was that CPU usage by default was about 50%. Yes that’s right FIFTY PERCENT. It looked similar to this:
Maya using only 50% CPU usage.
This was a little disappointing - Maya 2009 basically caused another dual-core machine to grind to a halt, and was only using about half the potential of the Quad-Core.
This was my first time actually using/seeing Maya (I was helping out someone else who needed some rendering distributed), so I searched around. It took forever, but I finally came across the fix.
If you’re using the default Maya Software renderer, there’s an option in the Render Settings menu, but I wont go into that here. The individual I was helping needed MENTAL RAY to be used (instead of Maya Software Renderer), and there wasn’t an equivilent option in that menu.
If you’re using Mental Ray, this is where you make the change: Read more…
I use a wrapper (SJSB) to show my SMF forums on my Joomla site.
Tiny issue is that the text shows up quite small on the Joomla site. It’s alright for me, but if anyone’s got poor eyes, a tiny screen, or a high resolution, it’d be brutal. I could have changed the CSS to simply make it bigger, but the smaller size actually suits the site.
To compromise, I decided I’d give a link to go to the “full” forums (which has a normal, larger size). Now, both sites share the same code, which means that link would normally show up on both. “click here to go to [exact same site] if the text is too small” would be a little silly.
Luckily, I came up with a simple php solution. It goes like this: Read more…
Here’s the issue. For the EGRR site, I have forums.eyeglassretailerreviews.com . I decided to install SJSB (Simple Joomla! 1.5.x / SMF 2.x Bridge) so that I could display the forums in-line (wrapped) on the www.eyeglassretailerreviews.com site as well. It works very well aside from the initial broken CSS, but I’ll give tips for formatting the CSS in another post.
In any case, one issue was.. duplicate content! Since all the pages were available at both “sites”, Googlebot would undoubtedly see them as separate sites with the same content - not good! There are 3 options:
- Leave it be, let google figure it out (not ideal)
- Use the noindex and nofollow meta tags on one of the sites
- Use the canonical meta tag to tell the bots which site is the preferred one
Option 1 was obviously not much of an option. Option 2 I really considered. The downside though is that if somebody LINKS to the site with the noindex, the potential pagerank will be killed. I decided to get Option 3 to work, since there are 0 downsides to it. Read more…
I’ve been going through phpmyadmin doing a little database optimization throughout my sites. One big surprise was massive overhead in the “wp_comments” table for this blog.
“Overhead” usually comes into play when you’ve deleted something, whether it’s a Wordpress post/comments, Joomla articles, etc. It’s space that’s basically empty in the database (since the stuff’s been deleted), but is still taking up room.
In any case, I was shocked at how much was removed the first time - quite a few megabytes. Then again, this blog’s been going on for 3 years now. To give an idea as to how much can be cleaned up, after the first clear, I emptied the spam left by Akismet, and took a screenshot: Read more…
Writing my last post got me thinking about link directories. I’ve used them in the past. I don’t anymore.
See… They’re legitimate.
But they’re not very useful. At least not in the way most people try to use them. Website Traffic.
Read more…
A huge concern I had back when I first started my sites a few years ago was getting my sites indexed quickly. Really, I had spent hours making an excellent Eyeglass Review site, digging up piles of information and providing it to others. I went so far as to later buy glasses to review for the site. I spent yet more hours putting together a free warcraft map download site. One thing I hated about all the other sites was that it really didn’t give information about each map… The site owner had probably never even PLAYED most of the maps they provided. Mine was to be different. All the maps I provided had detailed info on how each custom map/game worked, how many players it supported, etc, with a tiny image of the loading screen. It didn’t take 10 clicks of ads to get to the download page either. I made it to be something I would love. It incidently now has more traffic than any of my other sites.
I believed in my sites. I put hours and hours making them into something that would provide for others what I wanted myself. I really wanted to get indexed quickly so people could start finding my site. Read more…
