Brian @ Wongside » Technology

Permanently Rotate Pages in Adobe Acrobat

Brian — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 20:54:08 +0000

If you ever open an Acrobat document and the orientation is all wrong, here’s how you fix it:Permanently Rotate Pages in Adobe Acrobat.

Restore Firefox default Smart Bookmarks Folders

Brian — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 20:48:44 +0000

If your Firefox Smart Bookmarks Folders ever appear to become corrrupted, or don’t work, try the recommendations on this page in order to Restore the default Smart Bookmarks Folders.

Thoughts on your new TV

Brian — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 15:16:59 +0000

According to “Your New TV Ruins Movies“, we should all buy plasma TVs and for our LCD/LED displays, we need to turn off the motion smoothing function. We have a Samsung LCD/LED TV. And to be quite honest, I never liked the look of motion smoothing to begin with. I’m not sure how the pro’s describe it, but to me, the picture “looks so real, you can tell it’s fake.” What I mean is that the lighting, makeup, CGI, etc. all seem to become more apparent. Not sure how else to describe it, but perhaps the article accurately captures the reason: it ruins movies.

I do have to say that the color on the sample Inception screenshots looks pretty awful. Leonardo DiCaprio looks more like Hellboy than Jack Dawson. However, I really do like the sharpening and brightness. The buildings in the background are significantly sharper, and the columns in the mid ground are more 3 dimensional to me.

Dropbox Etiquette

Brian — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 04:48:52 +0000

If you use Dropbox and share folders, you need to read this article on Dropbox Etiquette. Great article, great recommendations.

Super Secret Operating Systems

Brian — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 07:01:51 +0000

A fascinating look at non-Windows, non-Linux, non-OS X operating systems from PC World. I had no idea there were so many alternative Operating Systems out there. I think the one that interests me the most is SkyOS, mostly because the developer went so far against the grain of tradition.

WordPress Tips

Brian — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 23:00:46 +0000

I’ve been working on WordPress sites a lot lately. The other day, it was Charlene’s blog. Today, it was the CCF Alumni Foundation website, of which I’m the Chairman.

Since the early days of the web, I’ve often used the JavaScript Enkoder form by Hivelogic to obfuscate my e-mail address in order to protect it from spammers. The problem is that because it’s based on JavaScript, it’s not super-compatible with WordPress pages and posts.

Fortuitously, I ran across a PHP plugin version written specifically for WordPress. It’s called PHPEnkoder. So now, any plaintext e-mail addresses as well as any mailto: links on the website are now automatically encoded using the Javascript Enkoder. Fantastic!

This is what my e-mail address looks like when it’s been “enkoded.”

The other problem I solved this afternoon was the implementation of a prayer requests form for the CCFAF. It’s built on Google Docs technology, which I then embedded using an into the WordPress post. The problem wasn’t creating the form, that’s easy enough. The problem was figuring out how to get notified each time the form was filled out. But I ran across this article, and now we should be good to go.

Go try it out! When someone fills out the form, I automatically get an e-mail notification. Then I can either pray for it directly, or have someone from the Board pray for them. Excellent! Technology at its finest: serving the Kingdom of God.

LinkedIn IPO Did Awesome Today

Brian — Fri, 20 May 2011 03:20:10 +0000

Business social network LinkedIn (LNKD) had its IPO today. The IPO price was $45, shares soared to $122, and finally closed at $94.25. Good for Reid Hoffman, et al.

The WSJ had some great coverage. And here’s the Yahoo! Finance chart for the day:

Why Lightroom is Better than Bridge and Camera Raw

Brian — Tue, 17 May 2011 05:38:38 +0000

Scott Kelby and Matt Kloskowski have a great series of 100 videos on why they recommend Lightroom over Bridge and Camera Raw.

Check it out! I was sold after watching the first video.

Microsoft goes public – 1986

Brian — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 03:45:16 +0000

A fascinating look at the behind-the-scenes story of how Microsoft went public:

http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.heaton/teaching/35000/msft.htm

Goodbye Mozy

Brian — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 07:10:52 +0000

As any good IT professional will tell you, it’s extremely important to perform backups on a regular basis. Until this point, I’ve used a combination of network backup to Charlene’s computer and online backup with Mozy. Until this point.

On Monday, Mozy announced the discontinuation of their $4.95/month unlimited backup plan. It’s being replaced with a new set of backup plans that will make it significantly more expensive for me to do business with them. I’m talking a price increase of nearly 900%. This is simply unacceptable to me.

Needless to say, I’m on the hunt for a new backup provider. At this point, I’m seriously considering either Backblaze or CrashPlan.

I don’t know either company personally, but I do know the persona Backblaze portrays on their blog, and I like what I see. They seem like a very genuine and sincere company. I like the fact that they’re very open about a lot of things, including their infrastructure and a bit about their encryption strategy for keeping data safe. They were even community-oriented enough to ask their users/readers for input on their new offices. I like it!

CrashPlan is a bit more of an enigma to me. They do have a blog, but it’s nothing special. They do seem to be getting rave reviews on Twitter, so that’s a good sign.

PC Magazine points out that neither company is very old, though CrashPlan is more established than BackBlaze.

I guess we’ll see what happens. I’ve gotta do some more digging before I make a decision. I really hope this is the last time I have to re-backup my files. Backing up 400+GB over the internet isn’t very fun.