I’m going to go out on a limb a little bit and pick a Cool Site that is just getting started; however, I think the blog has potential to become a very interesting blog and a useful resource as long as it continues on the path that it has chosen to take.
This week’s Cool Site is: A Brighter Shade of Green, an environmental blog.
I’ve been working on a not-for-profit environmental site via a client of mine, The Innovolve Group. After a series of revisions, the site is now ready for prime time. I’m the code warrior, and the graphics were supplied from others.
It’s called Concentrate on the Future (or en franà ais, Le Futur Concentré), and it’s a non-partisan site designed to promote the use of concentrated laundry detergents. For those unfamiliar with concentrated laundry detergents and why they can benefit users, concentrated laundry detergents use both less product (as concentrated detergents only require 1/3 to 2/3 as much detergent) and less packaging.
Anyway, I don’t want to give away too many details, and since there’s more to come with this site, I figured you guys could have a look, give feedback, and see if it merges with the future direction of the site.
So if you could please take a look (especially if any of you speak French…I can’t understand most of the section) and give feedback, that’d be great. It would be especially cool if you guys checked out the Supporters page, since without the supporting partners this site doesn’t come into existence.
Merci!
I have seen a wide variety of unsolicited commercial emails, from penis enlargers to porn to gambling to starving Russian brides to SEO to link exchange and just about all points in between. In the past few months, I have noticed a series of unwritten rules emerging among unsolicited commercial emails which apparently allow them to send any unsolicited, yet completely legitimate message that they want to anyone that they want.
For the first time ever, I have typed out these rules so that we may all obey them and send out millions of additional unsolicited, yet perfectly legitimate emails about how small our Johnsons are and how we can make millions overnight without any effort. Thanks to these important rules, you too can be a mass-emailing piece of crap, just like the others.
A client of mine purchased a Hewlett-Packard CP-3505n color LaserJet printer a few days ago for his office network, and he asked me to hook it up to his network yesterday. After having spent a few hours becoming more intimately acquainted with the CP-3505n, I’ve come up with enough information to post a detailed review of the product.
After covering the key specifications, I’m going to split the review itself into pros and cons.
Read the rest of this entry »
This week’s Search Query Info covers quite a few different topics, and for the first time ever I’m going to cover buildings on a Mississauge street not once, but twice.
I’ve also got information on computer desk stores in Toronto, as well as the answer to a rather obscure English language question.
To top it all off, I’ve got a Peter Patera query that people have entered in 10 times this week (it could be one person under different IPs as well, I suppose…but it’s still weird behavior.)
For some reason, this week has been one of those weeks where the stuff that I see around me is even more bizarre than usual. I’m one of those people who has a way of going through life as if I’m walking through a three-ring circus, but even this week has been a bit much.
I have been able to capture some of it in cell phone photographic form. By my own admission, the quality isn’t professional-grade by any stretch (strictly amateur, caught on the fly and with a few seconds to take the photograph before the people around me wonder what I’m doing). But nevertheless, they’re “good enough” for blog purposes.
I should also explain that my intent is not to offend any specific culture, but simply to illustrate strangeness.
At least once a day, I come across a situation whereby someone sells A YouTube clone script or a combined YouTube/MySpace clone so that webmasters can quickly and easily create a knockoff version of a popular site concept (it’s only a matter of time until Facebook is cloned, if it hasn’t been already.)
Here’s an entire list of scripts that allow purchasers to create clones of some of the most popular sites online.
The success of the sites that spawned these clone scripts (such as YouTube, MySpace, and RapidShare) is something that we would all like to duplicate. However, this tends to create an effect whereby both the copies of these sites and their originals become diluted in terms of user experience. This is what I have termed “The Internet Photocopy Effect”; as a site gets copied, recopied and copied again, each successive copy decreases in quality when compared to the original. This effect is similar to the effect created when one photocopies a document; the copy is never quite of the same quality as the original, and if the copy should get copied, the quality of the second copy will decrease again.
The original itself also loses a slight bit of value, as a very small percentage of users will prefer the photocopy to the original. Fortunately, I will both explain the nature of The Internet Photocopy Effect, its flaws, and how to avoid it.
This week’s cool site isn’t as much a cool site as it is a cool product: NatureMill indoor organic waste composters. The idea is rather simple: dump your organic waste into the upper chamber of a NatureMill composter, and the NatureMill proceeds to mix, heat and aerate the waste, thereby turning it into compost. The resulting compost is then transferred to a lower chamber so that fresh organic waste can be deposited into the upper chamber.
Every two weeks (when the red light comes on), you take your resulting compost and use it on your garden or lawn as fertilizer. It is odorless (so no worry about compost stink), so it’s easy to keep the compost in your kitchen for a week or two. However, if you’re really concerned about the smell, it can be kept outside as long as it’s hooked up to a weather-rated power bar (the NatureMill is an electric device).
I have a confession to make as far as today’s post is concerned: even though this post may help others, I primarily am writing it for myself. I have run into a specific situation involving Aureate Group Mail installed on Windows XP computers on two separate occasions, and that’s enough for me to write a post about it so that I have documented instructions for myself and others on how to remove this piece of crap if it happens a third time. I needed to remove the program in both cases, since it was causing problems and it created a giant white area in “Add/Remove Programs”.
The good news is that removing Aureate Group Mail can be done without an anti-spyware or anti-virus or similar program. The bad news is that it takes some tech-savvy, about 3 minutes’ worth of time, and the ability to edit the registry.
DISCLAIMER: this advice, while intended to help, is provided on an as-is basis and is highly unorthodox. I’ve found it works for me personally, but you may not. If you are not technically savvy and aware of the ramifications of editing a registry properly, please seek the help of someone who does.
Welcome to Part 2 of a very special “Search Query Info”. I recently saw a referral for the phrase “stupid ideas in Toronto” and I realized that there’s a lot of potential to talk about some of the stupid ideas that Toronto has come up with. Some of these ideas have been rejected, and some continue to be bandied about as if there is some hope for them, and some of them are in place.
Let’s review some of the recent boneheaded schemes that Toronto (aka The Unofficial Self-Proclaimed Capital of Canada) and its governing bodies have thought up over the last few years.
