It wouldn’t feel as much like Christmas if I didn’t update my desktop wallpaper and have a little falling snow. I found the wallpaper at New Evolution Designs. Here’s the original. And the fresh falling snow is thanks to DesktopSnowOK.

I fear blogging has fallen by the wayside thanks to a variety of other draws on my time. But I can still post my new Christmas desktop for the holiday season. Photograph from Pixabay.

As I’ve done in previous years, here’s my Christmas desktop for this year. I used DesktopSnowOK, which is nowhere near as good as Xsnow on Linux, but it’s something. The falling snow blends so much with the background it’s hard to even tell it’s there.

Every time I switch to a new cell phone I’ve had to disable 2-factor authentication on all my accounts in order to set them up on the new device. I just switched again and decided to make it easier. I had previously saved the secret keys for the various accounts in a secure location for […]

I noticed the old SnapMD5 screencast was out of date so I made a new one for version 1.0.4. I also discuss why it’s useful to check the MD5 or SHA-1 hash to verify file integrity.

I’m starting to get a little spare tire around the waist and I wanted to start deflating before it got out of hand. In order to set a weight goal, I used the Body Mass Index (BMI). My scale tells me what my BMI is, but initially I didn’t know what to aim for. The […]

A new version of Snap MD5 with support for Unicode characters in filenames is now available.

I’ve been searching for a Windows countdown timer that satisfied all my requirements for a long time. If you recall, I searched back in 2008 and posted my findings here. I’ve continued to search without success, so I decided to write my own. It’s called SnapTimer. While writing it I reviewed all the Lifehacker timer […]

I’ve released version 1.0.2 of Snap MD5. It supports drag and drop (thanks to Giorgio, author of Peazip, for telling me how), SHA-1 hashes, a menu and an about page. Enjoy! (and please let me know if you have any comments or questions)

After going all out last year, I’m reigning it in with a simple holiday desktop. I found it with a Bing image search for winter wallpaper. Here’s the image file.

It’s that time of the year again. Since I skipped my annual Christmas desktop showcase last year, I’m going all out for 2008. Not only is there a screenshot, but an animated GIF of the desktop, including a Christmas-themed browser (Firefox). To top it all off, I’ve linked to all the apps and images I […]

Cameron alerted me that my comics page was no longer working correctly. Comics.com has changed their site (again) and not only is it ugly, it’s dog slow. People are talking about the changes on twitter. For example: Comics.com done broke their own website. Idiots. Looks like comics.com is suffering from Monday morning server overload. I […]

I recently added my Twitter feed to the sidebar with Twitter’s Javascript badge. I was surprised to see the URLs weren’t hyperlinks. URLs are converted to hyperlinks on twitter, why can’t the badge use the same code? They obviously know how to do it, but for whatever reason, they haven’t. Nine months ago a guy […]

I’ve added a few new tools to my useful tools section that may be of use to some of you. Here’s a description of each of them. Escape HTML – If you want to post HTML code on a web site, you have to escape the HTML tags so they’re not interpreted. This tool automates […]

I’ve been happy with Akismet, the spam filtering plugin from Automattic. It has caught over 250,000 spam comments with minimal effort on my part. A handful of spam comments get through each week that I have to manually mark as spam, but that’s far better than the hundreds I used to deal with. I’ve often […]

I’ve made three new additions to the sidebar on this site. I’ll explain what they are. The first two sections come from del.icio.us and the third comes from LibraryThing. The first section, named “My comments elsewhere”, lists sites where I’ve made comments. I’ll be posting about the process I use in an upcoming blog entry. […]

I’ve created a new design for the site. The current one is old and stale and it’s high time for a change. Before it goes live though, I’d like your feedback. Do you like the color scheme? Is it an improvement over the current design? Is it easy on the eyes? Is it easier to […]

You might have noticed two new additions on the front page sidebar. The first one shows pictures of recent visitors who are registered users of MyBlogLog and the second one shows the most popular outgoing links of the day. MyBlogLog has provided a way to track outgoing links and ever since I heard about it […]

I was planning to do something that took about 45 seconds and I wanted to know how long it would take if I did it 15 times. In the past, I’ve also wanted to calculate other things that were time-related and found that a regular calculator wasn’t all that useful. So, I’ve created a time […]

I used to make your e-mail address optional when commenting because I never liked giving out my e-mail address but I’m now making it required. I promise not to reveal it anywhere, or to spam you, and if you still don’t trust me feel free to use a fake one, even something humorous. The reason […]

A while ago I toyed with the idea of sending out notifications of new blog entries and eventually began doing it. However, I have found that they have had an unanticipated impact on my daily blogging, apart from my original concern that people wouldn’t want to unsubscribe. I resolved that by switching to WordPress and […]

I’ve been meaning to upgrade to the latest version of WordPress for a while now, and now that I did it, I’m impressed. During my hiatus from blogging while I focused on school, the WordPress developers were busily adding features and improving the code. Nice work guys! I also updated my dashboard replacement so it […]

I realize it’s not December 1st yet, but I’ve already turned on xsnow on my desktop (like last year) and with some Christmas music playing, it certainly provided some welcome holiday cheer. Here’s what my desktop looks like this year: I’ve really missed blogging. I hope to be back in full force when my schedule […]

I feel I should explain why I haven’t posted at all this week. Towards the end of the summer I decided to return to school (BYU) to finish my undergraduate degree in Computer Science. I only had two semesters left, so the idea of finishing in eight months was appealing, but the set of classes […]

I’ve been using version 1.2 of WordPress while the rest of the world forged on without me, so I finally made the plunge and upgraded. The reason I had been holding back was because I had made oodles of changes to the actual code, meaning when I upgraded I would have to either merge my […]

This entry marks a milestone in my blogging career – my one thousandth post. For bloggers who post more than once a day, it may not sound like much, but I typically post once a day (Monday through Friday). Since my first post about Smartstocks and some gadgets at Altavista way back in December of […]

I’ve been getting hit with several comment spam attempts today but so far none have gotten through. Fahim, the author of WPBlacklist e-mailed me and helped me get it configured correctly and now it’s working like a charm. I’m currently running WPBlacklist 2.6, the latest release that I know of, which automatically deletes comments that […]

I had over 1,000 posts in Movable Type that were archived individually, by month and by category. When I switched to WordPress I changed the format of the permanent links to include the date and title instead of the non-portable post ID (which, by the way, MT does not include when you export your blog […]

I just switched from Movable Type to WordPress. I’ve been thinking about doing it for quite a while, and the last straw was when it started taking 10-15 seconds to post a comment. I had a little over 4,000 comments and that seemed to be too much for MT to handle. It’s going to take […]

I’ve been using Atomz search for over two and a half years and I had no complaints. Then I got an e-mail from them where they explained that were going to start displaying Google Ads with my search results. To keep me happy they said I could now index 750 pages instead of the 500 […]

I currently have 84 drafts of posts in Movable Type right now. There’s also another entry that is a draft that has over 100 ideas for entries that weren’t developed enough to create a draft from them. Does anyone else do this or am I alone in my draft-happy state? My basic method is this; […]

I’ve moved my site to a faster server with more features (the same provider), but there may be a few glitches during the transition. Please bear with me as I work them out, and let me know in the comments if you notice anything that isn’t working correctly.

You’ve probably noticed that I haven’t made any posts recently. I’m on a vacation and won’t have regular internet access until this Saturday so I won’t be very talkative until then.

Two sites were linking directly to photos of my motorcycle, so I swapped the image with one that said, “Please don’t link directly to my images. You’re stealing my bandwidth” I left it for a few days but they didn’t change it. I considered writing rude things about them, thinking it would be fun to […]

I have dispensed with all images that used to be on each page. There weren’t that many, but they didn’t add much value to the site. The page loads faster now, and the function of the images have been replaced by text. I realize that the images would have been cached in the browser after […]

From a MetaTalk post I learned that a user was artificially inflating his MeFi contribution index. I was going to remove him from the list, but Matt took care of the problem by banning him from MeFi. Since I was already looking at the code, I made three minor improvements. The first is that the […]

I’ve rewritten some of the navigation code for the site in order to make it more usable. If you notice something that doesn’t seem to be right, please let me know in a comment. There’s still some more work to do, but I believe it’s headed in the right direction.

I have been making infrequent entries this week because of vacation and the absence of internet access at home. I’ll be back to work on Monday though, and my roommate has resolved one of the two problems with the connection at home. The other problem is with the wireless access point that refuses to work. […]

After seeing Jason’s guest map I’ve decided to add one to my site as well. I’m curious to see who (if anyone) signs up on it. If there are any foreigners reading, now is your time to declare your nationality. I modified the link in the sidebar to be a target link instead of using […]

I used to add new submissions automatically to my funny lists but some people began to abuse it. It must have been too stimulating for them. I mean, they could post whatever they wanted and have it appear on the page, like magic. I remember two guys in particular who started a rather crude conversation […]

I usually don’t succumb to trendy things, but I saw a link to blog hot or not on daypop and figured I could get some traffic. So, as I join the herd of followers, I have only one thing to say. Moo. Is my Blog hot or not? By the way, what does temperature have […]

Paul is doing a trackback test and since I haven’t done anything with it yet I figured I’d give it a try. Let’s see if it works.

I took a nap at about 7:30 Thursday night but ended up sleeping until 3am Friday morning. I wasn’t tired so I decided to use the time to work on my site. One of the things I did was remove all the comment links to the entries I imported from my other posting system. I […]

I’ve been having a bit of trouble with the archive layout and I haven’t figured out exactly how to make the comments pages be wrapped within my header and footer because they’re CGI’s instead of normal HTML files. The comments will work, they just don’t look pretty. The last thing I know of is redirecting […]

This may be the last time I make an entry with my home-grown posting solution that I could call lovable type. I’m now using Movable Type. I wrote a PHP script that converted my old format to the import format MT requires. It would have been really simple, except the MT parser didn’t allow a […]

I’ve added JavaScript to validate the fields in the email form instead of having the server do it. I also have a snazzy little regular expression to make sure the email address is valid. I have received a few emails with invalid email addresses and it’s annoying because I can’t reply to them. This should […]

I don’t know how long Yahoo has offered this service, but it looks like they don’t want to be left out of the answering game. Google recently announced their own answering service. This is a change for them to be competing directly. In the search engine arena, Google and Yahoo play nicely together. Yahoo uses […]

I was perusing the files on the server and discovered that I have the old polls that used to be here, but they’re not linked anywhere. They are now linked. I am considering adding the poll again. The reason I stopped was because it’s hard to think up good questions to ask. If I just […]

I spent a fair portion of this weekend changing the navigation of this site around. My aim was to make it easier to use and for it to give you more information about where you are within the site. Hopefully I have succeeded. I have thought about putting up a page about how I did […]

I went for a ride on my CBR and the idle is behaving itself. I think the carburetor cleaner is doing the trick. It’s still a little touchy, but hopefully by the end of the tank it will be all cleared out. Since I wrote my own blogging tool in PHP (not very elaborate) I […]