Firefox tip: Saving Sessions

Here's a little quick tip that interest you if you really want to increase your productivity. Since Firefox has the power of extensions a nifty little extension called Tab Mix Plus can save your previous session, it also does a lot more than that. However by default it's only set to restore your session when Firefox crashes (and yes Firefox, on windows, does crash) so here's a little tip that is going to restore your session everytime you close your browser. This can be helpful if you need to go somewhere, however you can't leave your browser open and Firefox browser has a lots of tabs open in it. So when you load the browser again it is going to restore to the stage where you left off...

Here's what you do to restore your sessions:

1. First get the Tab Mix Plus extension
2. After you install it click on Tools
3. Click on Session Manager
   
4. Click on Settings
5. Under 'When Browser Starts:' click on Restore

Now when your browser starts it's automatically going to restore to the stage when it was closed! Pretty cool isn't it?

firefox, Windows, XP, tips, sessions, tutorials

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The atom error starts again

Today when I opened up my Firefox window the first thing that I saw was the error above. What is the problem with blogger lately, their atom especially? Is it an extension problem (most likely not the extension) or a blogger problem, I'm not sure about that (because I can still seem to blog with ecto, and the review on ecto will be posted soon) but we'll see about that. You can never know what the error is until you dig deeper.

firefox, blogger, performancing, atom, error

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Lifehacker gets duped

Heh, okay so I'm know trying to run a blog like the 'Go flock yourself' guys (warning... they use harsh language), but sometimes things like this intrigue me, and somehow, I feel like blogging it today.
Lifehacker is a very good site to get all the latest information from, however sometimes you can also get wrong (totally wrong!) information from there... for example one of their editors thinks that the smileys added by the gmail skins extensions are a new feature in google and only a few 'special' accounts have them. Yeah right. Nothing wrong with that, except that they don't know the gmail skins extension. I mean I had blogged about this in February... so it's really old news.

The Googlified blog has posted several images of new features being rolled out in Gmail, specifically embedded HTML, images, and tables (okay, fine, smiley faces, too). Like Gmail Chat, it looks like Gmail is rolling out to small groups of users at a time.

And recently they also put up a post about how to use Gmail... it never ceases to amaze me that people actually didn't know that... common people, who don't you explore around a little bit more, I'm sure you'll know better than smileys for 'special' accounts.

gmail, Windows, lifehacker, rant, extensions, jokes

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List of Downloads

Since Beyond Tecknology has a few (2 right now) downloads to offer I decided that it is about time that I put all those downloads together so that you can help yourself to some great (hopefully) goodies!

Here are some downloads that you are most likely going to love:

• The Beyond Tecknology Sage Style- A really great sage style to make your sage reader look really great
  
• Search Plugin- Enables you to search through my site more quickly so that you don't have to visit my site to search every single time.
  

downloads, free, software, interesting, technology, firefox

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Beyond Tecknology Sage Style

Today I just opened up my Sage to view my rss feeds and I noticed that the Hicks skin was a bit boring and didn't look all that awesome, that's why I just made my own modifications to make this look better.
Now although this isn't probably the best skin/style ever for one of the best Firefox extensions, it's close enough. I got the idea from the 'spotlight' theme in NetNewsWire. And the header image is also something similar to that, which I also took from a screenshot in Jon Hicks's post (I hope this is allowed). So it's got the looks and the usability.
And since I'm a very good guy I decided to post the source code and the image up, so that others can also enjoy the modified hicks style!

How to Install:

1. Copy the code below and paste it in a text editor (like notepad or text edit) , or right click and click on save frame as then... save it as a .css file (for example 'style.css')
   

html *{-moz-box-sizing:border-box;}html{background:#FFF;line-height:1.3;margin:0;}body{margin:0;color:#333333;font:12px/1.5em verdana,arial,sans-serif,helvetica;}a:link{text-decoration:none;color:#000;font-weight:none;border-bottom:1px dotted #666666;}a:visited{text-decoration:none;color:#537986;}a:hover{border-bottom:1px dotted #5895FF;}a:active{text-decoration:none;}p.item-desc a:link{color:#029;}#rss-header{background:#5898FF url(header.png) repeat-x left bottom;padding:10px 2%;;margin:0 0 10px 0;text-transform:capitalize;}#rss-title{margin:0;}#rss-link{font-size:18px;color:#fff;font-weight:bold;margin:0;}#rss-header h1 a{text-decoration:none;border-bottom:none;}#rss-header h1 a:hover{text-decoration:none;border-bottom:none;}#rss-desc{margin:2px 0 0 0;color:#fff;font-weight:none;padding:0;}#rss-desc a{color:#DFFFFF;}.odd{background-color:#F0F0F0;}div.item{margin:0 0 8px 0;padding:0;}h2.item-title{margin:0;}h2.item-title a{display:block;background-color:#EDF3FE;font-size:14px;font-weight:none;margin:0 0 4px 0;padding:3px 2%;}h2.item-title a:visited{display:block;color:#C2D7FC;background-color:#EDF3FE;font-size:14px;font-weight:none;margin:0 0 4px 0;padding:3px 2%;}h2.item-title a:hover{background-color:#4B7DF2;color:#fff;text-decoration:none;}span.item-ordinal{display:none;}div.item-desc{margin:0;padding:0 2% 10px 2%;width:80%;}div.item-desc img{display:block;}div.item-pubDate{display:none;font-size:x-small;padding:8px 10px;width:30%;float:right;text-align:right;}div.item-technorati{font-size:x-small;margin:0;padding:8px 10px;width:20%;float:right;text-align:right;display:none;}img{max-width:100%;height:auto;}

1. Right click on the image below, and then save it as sageheader.png in the same folder as the css file.
   
   
2. Change the settings in sage. Click Options > Settings... > Check 'Use custom CSS' > Click Browse and browse to the css file.
3. Enjoy your new style while using the ever wonderful sage!
   

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Interesting stuff of the day

Here are some interesting facts that you would have never known.

• If you commute in toronto, this live map might be bery helpful in predicting the traffic flow
• The people over a Google are so smart they deleted their own blog (okay may be it was an accident or a bug in the blogger system... but it is still interesting).
• Who needs the :hover feature in IE that I liked when you have the 'Suckerfish HoverLightbox'
• My post pages now have a sidebar as well, and soon you might be seeing 2 columns as opposed to 2.
  

google, toronto, web2.0, web_2.0, websites, ajax

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The different file formats

A while ago I had put up a post about how saving your pictures in different file formats can affect the overall quality and size of the picture. However that post was a little too advanced for a few people and I decided to make a simpler version. This one should be really easy since it only has the gist of things to make if easier for you to grasp certain key concepts. If you read through this you should have no problem in understanding the different file formats of how you can save pictures in and how they work.

Le'ts take a look at some most commonly use file formats here. Try to remember their full names might be handy in the future later on:

1. JPEG- Joint Photographic Experts Group
2. TIFF- Tagged Image File Format
3. PSD- Photoshop Document
4. GIF- Graphics Interchange Format
5. PNG- Portable Network Graphics

Now let's take a look at how each of the formats work:

Joint Photographic Experts Group format:

As you can see in the above pictures, the original has more colours than the image named 'JPEG'. That's because, the JPEG format gets rid of similar hex codes.
This way the JPEG image has less codes to remember, so although the quality might be less, the size is going to be lower! That's basically all it does... so just a little tip, every time you save something as a JPEG it's quality will reduce, so if you keep saving it, you will reduce the quality of the image!

Tagged Image File Format:

What this format does is saves it just like the original, this means that the computer has more hex codes to remember, hence it has a bigger file size. But this is good sometimes, for example if you are not sending it you can preserve the original picture.

Photoshop Document:

This also works like a tiff format, however this format can maintain the images in layers, so that you can open up a application like photoshop and edit each layer individually. This can be very helpful while designing photoshop projects.

Portable Network Graphics:

This also maintains the quality of the picture like a tiff, however it mixes some of the hex codes to keep a lower file size. Another important thing about PNG is interlacing, which means that when the picture loads it loads in layers so you don't need to load the whole picture at once.

Graphics Interchange Format:

This is sort of like the older version of PNG, which takes away a lot of hex codes and doesn't have lot of transparency like PNG's. And although the quality might not be as bad as in the example, it does loose a little bit of hex codes and that's why they are used in web images and animations.

That's it... that's the basics of the file formats. If you really want to know more, then you can read this post. In that post I also talk about lossy and lossless formats, so you might want to know that as well!

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Firefox Quick Tip: Disable Java

Many times Java appletts that are used in many web pages can cause a lot of problems and that's why I decided that it might be worth it to disable Java on browsers such as Firefox, so that the page loads quickly and more efficently. Yes although it might stop you from viewing the page clearly at least you can load the page without waiting for a long time (depending on your internet connection).

Here's how to turn it of:

1. Click on Tools in the menubar
   
2. Click on Options...
3. Click on the Content tab
4. Uncheck 'Enable Java'
   

Now you can happy browse the net without worrying about crazy Java applets slowing you down or causing problems!

firefox, tips, tutorial, java, website, browsers

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Smaller font

Chances are that if you've been visiting my blog lately, you might notice that I now have some smaller font on my blog (11px as opposed to 12px that I had before). Why is this you ask? Because I can get more content in less space, and it looks much more neater and condensed to me. And it matches the sidebar text as well perfectly. And if you have 'ClearType' fonts enabled then you won't have a problem with this.

If you think that this might not be the perfect font size for you or other regular readers then fell free to drop me a note. I'll change it back to a bigger font size so that you don't need to strain to read text... people, including me, hate it when that happens.

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IE 7 is good

I was recently reading about the new Internet Explorer 7 and it's features and it has come to my attention that IE 7 is definitely catching up with it's numerous features. Although it might not be the best browser out there, it still definitely has some cool features that the other don't. However there's only one single problem here: Will people actually upgrade their Internet Explorer to IE 7?

When people are too worried to use Firefox itself then why would people upgrade to IE 7. Now, I realize that Microsoft is a 'trusted' company and people like Microsoft things, and they prefer Microsoft over another company. But the question still remains... Perhaps the only way to get out of this is forcing people to upgrade like MSN Messenger (or WLM) and so on (or Automatic Updates). However, that might only make people more angry that Microsoft is starting to bundle applications (not literally, but somewhat similarly) like Apple does with Quicktime and iTunes (not for the Mac version though).
And... what about the people that don't have XP. If you ask me I'd say that the number of people who don't have Windows XP is a large one, and if you are a web designer you want to make sure that every visitor has the best. So unless Microsoft find out a way for that, it's just boring to be the people who have NT or 2000 or ME (heh... if you happen to be having Windows ME, then I suggest you upgrade).

ie, Windows, XP, Microsoft, Apple, web_2.0, css, browsers

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Almost done widgets

I've been working on the widgets and getting the screenshots (a lot of screenshots!) as per my list. I'm almost done the Dashboard widget, but I've still got debugging (debugging bugs me!) to do, so I'll probably be done later on. Until then, perhaps you just have to use your normal RSS reader. If you don't have one yet then I recommend using something like Sage, or live bookmarks in Firefox or perhaps RSS bandit. If you are using a Mac, then you'll probably be using (or are going to use) NetNewsWire (or you can use the light version for free, however the paid one is worth every penny!).
Than all you do is subscribe and enjoy, until the widgets are created of course.

rss, dashboard, OS X, widgets, downloads

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Using the Find tool in Firefox

Firefox has many great things stored in it, and is by far one of the greatest browsers ever created. However not all people are familiar with all of it's hidded (you just need to play around with it) features. So right now I would like to accquaint you with one of those features.
The find tool, or the 'Find in this page' bar is really great and I use it all the time. All it does is basically helps you find the text you want in the page.
To use it all you do is press Ctrl+F!
This is especially useful when you are looking for something in the page. For example you do a search on the net, and then when you come to the page you find that it is impossible to find what Google showed you. Then you can use this feature and easliy find whatever it was that you were looking for!

mozilla, firefox, XP, internet, tips, find

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Does my site need more pics?

When I was browsing around the net today I just realized that all the other sites are quite colourful because they seem to have a lot of pictures in them that's why I decided that it's about time I do the same as well.
So I went around the net seeing if I could steal some icons or something like that for myself. And I was very tempted to steal icons from Foood, a icon guru. However I restrained myself from stealing other people's work, even though he allowed you to do that. Instead I created my own set of icons. I call them BCons (if you have a better name tell me). So I'll try to use these as well to help you identify my posts, and add some more colour over all to this blog.
And as another feature, I am also going to add the Lightbox.js effect for all the pictures in my tutorials so that it might help you out better!

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How to: Lower the size of pics

When sending e-mails it is always important to lower the size and the quality of the picture so that the person at the receiving end doesn't get too big of a picture or too large picture file. As we all know saving pictures in the JPEG format can lower the size however here are a few other things you can do:

1. When saving the picture do this:

1. File
2. Save For Web
3. Pick a format
4. Click 'Save'

This way you will save the picture in a lower quality at a lower resolution with loess colours so the picture size is going to be considerably small. You can look at the picture below if you aren't sure:

If you click on 'Save As'... and save it in a JPEG format you will get a screen like this:

Just set the quality to medium... and you'r picture will be optimized for e-mail!

Another thing you can do is change the quality of the resolution and the size. Or change the quality of the file while you are saving it in JPEG format. This will also reduce the size considerablyTo change the image size or resolution just do the following:

1. Click on Image
   
2. Click 'Resize'
3. Then click on 'Image Size'
   
4. There you can change the settings around. Make sure to keep an eye on the image size and so you can estimate the speed that it will download at.

If you follow these instructions properly then you will definately keep your friends happy because they will be able to view their photos without any problems!

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Simplifying posts

Posts aren't always the easiest things to create, and sometimes it is really hard to channel your thoughts into something that people can actually understand. And since my teacher has been telling me threatening me (telling me that he will fail me...) to simplify my posts, I think it's about time I do so. That's why I've launced a new format of writing posts- having one line instructions. I know that this might be hard to do, and I might not be able to cover everything I intended to, but it might be easy to understand never the less.
Do tell me your thoughts about it... and suggest ideas as well. I don't wan't to write posts all over again that are still hard to understand.

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Moving to Miramar

I think it's about time for me to move somewhere near Miramar High School. Why not? At least this school has about 3000 Apple iBooks, with the latest Mac OS X versions and so on. And looks like their library is pretty big too.

Miramar High School had the largest number of iBooks in this 1 to 1 installation. We configured, installed and delivered close to 3,000 systems in less than 3 days. Not sure if it is a new Apple record, but we're pretty confident it is.

Okay may be not, because I like it here in Toronto, if not the school at least the teachers are good. So I won't complain much... for now.

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New Feature: Email this post

I've just added another exiting feature to this blog. It's the 'Email this post' feature that might be very helpful for some of your, or some of your friends rather. This feature is there for every single post on this blog, below it's heading on the Item Page (that's the page with the full posts).
All you do is click on the link, and fill in the details, and then you can rejoice and feel good about yourself since you've helped somebody (hopefully)!

And another quick note, I've now re-published the 'How to enhance your photographs' post, so enjoy that as well!

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Blogger is down

A few blogs on blogger.com are down today (including mine) so I guess I'll have to continue working with the template some time later. However, the blogger guys have kindly put up my disclaimer and my RSS feed links so that my beloved blog reader, can still access all my posts through their favourite aggregator... so thanks to them.
On a completely different note, I'm now going to put up the posts that weren't published properly, on how to enhance your digital images (using Photoshop and the rules of photograply) and a few other posts that somehow mysteriously went missing (I'm sure it was my fault, probably due to my absentmindedness). That's it for today, now it's time to go enjoy my wonderful March/Spring break, which is sadly coming to an end this weekend. Oh yeah and happy St. Patricks day.

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Behold My Latest Creation

Today I finished adding a lot of new features to my brand new template! This template, is by far the most advanced site design I've ever built, and has so much Javascript (no AJAX yet :( ) that it's definately going to take a while to load... untill I get my blog Ajaxed (which is going to be pretty soon). I'm not done adding complete functionality to the site design yet, and my sidebar is still lacking some basic funcitons (such as drag and drop :D ) but that will be implitemted soon, and as soon as I can dive into the Rico code, this site will most likely become the most advanced blogger.com site you've ever seen (untill somebody does something to better my design)!
If you are curious about what I've done so far then read on...

So Far I've implememted these great features:
1. Better 'Continue Reading' link, i.e. if you click on the link then you will be taken to the portion that completes the post, not the begenning of the post.
2. If you've seen my front page you will realize that this blog now has 'Collapsable Sidebar Panels'. Which means that you can close the sidebar panels if you wish to. And if you have cookies enabled, your settings will stay that way.

3. Better blog layout and design (at least that's what I think). I've just added a better header graphic and so on, just to keep in touch with my graphics skills as well. And I've added more images over all to make the site look better (hopefully).
4. Better E-mail post link- I've taken the idea from this template and implemented it into my template, since it makes more sense to have the e-mail post link on the post page...
5. There are also other minor changes, such as favicon updates (I've changed it into a .ico file now and added some 'outer glow' to it.
Even though there are only 4 features that are listed here, more are on their way. And if you take a look at my source code, you will realize that there is a lot more coming...

design, web_2.0, ajax, javascript

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AJAX here I come

Today when I was browsing on digg.com I came across this excellent JavaScript library called Rico (which I wouldn't have stumbled upon other wise, it if weren't for digg). Apparently, this is perfect for ajaxing things (like my blog!). And implementing it is also a piece of cake. Even XmlHttpRequest is taken care of when Rico is use, so I don't need to worry about that part either. And effects like the Accordion effect will make my already Javascripted sidebar look even better! So all I can say is this...

Ajax here I come!

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Can this blog be Ajaxified?

Update: I have devised a way to AJAX this blog... which might be a unique feature to only this blogger.com blog. I will implement it later because I do believe that it is lacking some IE compatibility.
While working on my new template (yes I know I spelt the title wrong... it's a preview anyways) for this blog, I realised that apart from just having a plain old blog, how about adding some javascript to make it more pleasant... instead, how about ajaxifying this blog?

Now I know it is going to be real hard, but I do believe it is possible, because as you can see this blog... has Ajax (well sort of, in the 'Filed Under' section) in it. I realize that this (maintained by a fellow Indian ;) ) uses the Prototype.js javascript library, which will be very hard for me to code... but it doesn't hurt to try.
Hold on people... let's see if I can make wonders happen :D !

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Cleaning up the code!

Today, I started work on this blog's template again, to add some more interesting features to it... (like one important feature is the 'no javascript errors' feature ). Plus I want to host the CSS somewhere else, so that I can may be make the site a little more faster. And the graphics on this site need an update as well (a big update actually) so I'll be working on that today.

On a completely different note... hey blogger, where are all the posts I put up last week? The story goes something like this... I used the Performancing extension to do my posts and published it, but for some reason the posts aren't here right now. I guess I'll have to republish them.

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Google hires 15 year old

Update: Apparently the 15 old kid was just playing a practical joke... and he wasn't hired by google or anything like that. I did sort of think that this could be a lie... (mainly because he didn't find out the flaw in the first place, because the flaw was found on this blog of a 14 year old). But oh well, he has to face the consequences now. But that can mean only one thing- Google, here I come :D !
Google recently hired a 15 year old... why? Apparently that kid is a JavaScript and AJAX guru! And he was the first one who discovered about the Gmail flaw in which any code placed in an e-mail is executed automatically by Gmail. And Google came to know about this through his blog.
What a lucky kid... working for Google when he is 15 years old must be quite an achievement. I say they should have hired me instead... I could help in ... uh... improving and enhancing Google's site search to give more specific results and to potentially increase the Ad-sense revenue (because more search results = more page visits = potential revenue through ad-sense).
Oh well, I wish I could get hired as well, even though I might just be 14, age doesn't matter, right? And now since it was a practicle joke, I could be the younges employee after all...

google, gmail, email, interesting

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How to: Enhance your photographs

Not everyone is a professional and not everyone know the rules in photography. However just because the pictures we take don't weren't all that good, it doesn't mean that we can't make it look cool!
Thanks to Adobe Photoshop, you can now make your pictures look more presentable (and professional for that matter) before you print them out, or just keep it with you to remember about those memories! Here's how you can make your pictures look more professional...

First, you need to understand the concepts that professionals use while they take their pictures. Then you can go ahead and use what photoshop has to offer. I am going to take this picture picture that my friend took and transform it into a work of art! You can do the same thing with your picture as well!

1. The First thing you should always to is follow the rule of thirds in any picture so that you don't have a boring picture!

So in the following picture I've tried to implement the rule of thirds alongside with a few other rules, of course it's not perfect because the picture wasn't taken properly. However according to my teacher, you can only have 4x6 or 5x7 or 8x10 images and there is no actual widescreen format, so I can't capture the whole horizon..

Here we see the rule of thirds in action (sort of since the picture isn't so good...) along with that some other things that I've considered while cropping the picture.

2. The next thing that I am going to do is change the colour of th picture using the levels tool (Image > Adjustments > Levels if you are using CS 2). You can also use the Auto levels tool (Image >Adjustments > Auto Levels in CS 2) to do this, but the results are not really as good as doing it manually. I will soon write up another post on how to use this magnificent tool... In Photoshop elements you can find the options here:

Here you can see that I've used the levels tool and reduced the jitter and lighting... sorry for wierd pic, I'll upload a better one later.

3. Now since my picture has a lot of light. The only thing it is missing is a little bit of colour. The main colour that I think that this picture is missing is blue, especially in the sky.

The blue is clearly more right now so that you can see the actual colour of the water...

3. Finally I am going to increase the resolution a little bit, since it still looks a little bit jittery.


Now the picture is ready to print and it looks more cleaner!
BEFORE

AFTER

So here we can see how photoshop can help us in making out photos better than what they actually were! Now you can have fun editing all your picture from your latest
photoshop, adobe, photography, enhancing, tips, digital camera

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Exploring Photoshop

"I'll take you to the photoshop, I accquaint you with a tool name 'crop' ", opps you caught me singing again ! Today I am going to talk about something more interesing such as... Adobe Photoshop! Well it might be interesting to some but boring to others, but in class we are doing Photoshop, so I decided that why not make a post about it?

Here are the basic things that every single 'Photoshopist' must know about:
1) The Well: The well is where you keep all the windows that you don't want on the screen. These windows help you while you are using photoshop.

2) The tools: Clicking on each icon enables the tool so that you can do something with that tool

Tip: If you right click on tools with the little triangle, you can access similar tools as well. Like shown in this screenshot!
3) The menubar: Pretty much the same as any other application. Except it has more features than normal image editing programs such as MS Paint.

Let's get more deeper into photoshop shall we?

The good thing about photoshop is that you can use layers. So you can put one layer over the other one without harming the previous later. It's also good for adding effects, and of course experimenting! It also has something called chanels which makes a prefessionals perfect tool. It won't get into channels here, but you can read more about it here.

The Tools:
Tools are key while creating editing graphics, so here's a little (okay may be not little) picture that tells you about each tool in Photoshop. (I haven't included all tools though, so that you don't get confused... I'll talk about them later on!)

Okay, so I've tried to make this as simple as possible for my fellow classmates. However, if this is a bit too hard (or too easy) for you then why not tell me, so that I could change it around.

Have fun using Photoshop!

photography, photos, pictures, photoshop, adobe, graphics, tutorial

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T.O. to become wireless hotspot

Awesome News! Toronto is going to become the biggest city to have the biggest wi-fi network in the whole universe/galaxy country! And for those who don't know I am a proud Torontonian... now, if I can only get my grubby hands on a laptop to start using wireless fidility once Toronto is wi-fied. And then I can do a lot of bit torrenting (is that even a word?) to preserve my country's title as 'The country with the highest online music piracy rate per capita in the world'...

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Windows XP boots on a Macbook Pro

Okay... this is something very interesting that you absolutely need to take a look at...
This what the person claims:

It's Official: Windows XP boots on a Macbook Pro

Apprently the person is right (well sort of!)..

macbook pro, Windows, XP, Microsoft, Apple, jokes

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