Gavin’s thoughts – a few times per month
Here are some great classic Windows wallpapers – great if you’re trying to become a Windows Hipster.
Windows 95
See this screenshot of a Windows 95 desktop for some memories.
Windows 98
Windows Bliss on Wikipedia
Windows 2000
It is located at:
C:\Users\[your username]\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\[some id]\3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28.mddata (Windows 7)
- or -
C:\Documents and Settings\[Username]\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\[some ID]\3d0d7e5fb2ce288813306e4d4636395e047a3d28 (Windows XP)
Copy it to a safe location for your use.
This is open-source software. Download from Sourceforge.
First open the file. Then go to File > Export > Table as CSV. Save it as a CSV file, and now you can open this is Excel as a permanent backup.
Note that the date column is in UNIX POSIX time. You can do one-off coversions by copying the date number into UNIX Online Conversion or you can insert a column and put in a formula to convert the UNIX time into normal dates:
=CELL/(60*60*24)+"1/1/1970"
Be sure to “format cells” as “date” or “time.”
Yes that’s a complicated title, but I recently created this script that combines jQuery and Fancybox into a nice little component that will allow your website viewers to scroll through thumbnails of your YouTube videos and then click on it to view the video in a Fancybox viewer. The JavaScript, CSS, and HTML is all in an example on my Jsfiddle:
http://jsfiddle.net/gavinr/XhTfm/
Enjoy!
I was recently trying to sign up for an account on the website of one of my favorite podcast/radio shows, This American Life. As I was doing so, I used one of my “low security” passwords in the registration form. I decided to use one of my low security passwords because:
When I tried to click “Register” though, I got an error. Apparently, in addition to the numeral and random characters that are in my password, I have to also have both upper and lowercase letters, and also a symbol! Why are they enforcing these outrageous password requirements that, to be frank, many far-more-important internet commerce websites do not even enforce. This is a counterproductive practice that will require me to write down my password, which at the end of the day is less secure than the password that I tried to input in the first place!
This American Life, please fix your website.
I was recently working on a project in WordPress, and had to get the WP-nivo-slider plugin to show text other than the picture title. I personally feel that this should be the default behavior of this plugin, so I thought I’d post my solution to the problem to help others in the future.
In the wp-content/plugins/wp-nivo slider folder there is the main plugin file, wp-nivo-slider.php. Open that up, and around line 214 you’ll see this code:
<?php query_posts( 'cat='.$category.'&posts_per_page=$n_slices' );
if( have_posts() ) : while( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>
<?php if(has_post_thumbnail()) : ?>
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>" title="<?php the_title(); ?>">
<?php the_post_thumbnail(); ?>
</a>
<?php endif ?>
<?php endwhile; endif;?>
Because Nivo Slider shows the contents of the image ‘title’ attribute as the caption, we must change the code to send the custom caption to the image title attribute. To do this, we must send an array of attribute/value pairs to the_post_thumbnail.
Simply add a line of code to build this array. This example will send the post title as the caption:
$attr = array('title' => '<h2>' . get_the_title($post->ID) . '</h2>');
Then send that array to the_post_thumbnail:
the_post_thumbnail( 'large',$attr);
After changing that code, you should now be getting the post title as the caption. You can also access other post elements like get_the_excerpt for the post excerpt.
Twitter: @gavinr
