What the Font?
Posted on May 29, 2008
If you’ve ever seen a logo and wanted to know the font What the Font is here to save your day. It’s not something that happens often but occasionally you’ll see one and want to use the same styling and it’s a pain to find. With What the Font It’s a simple 3 step process.
- Upload (From Disk or URL) an image containing the font you wish to identify.
- What the Font will identify the letters in the image and attempt to guess what letters they are.
- If any are incorrect (or in some cases not a letter) you simply need correct them and click Search.
That’s it!
You’ll get a list of matching fonts which you can click on to get more details including:
- Font Samples (at many sizes)
- Character Mini-Map
- List of Available Versions
- Option to Buy (in some cases)
Dynamic Periodic Table
Posted on March 11, 2008
For the geek in all of us, easily the best periodic table ever created is the Dynamic Periodic Table.
Syncing with FolderShare (part 2)
Posted on March 11, 2008
It’s taken me over a month to write this.
It should be awesome then!
Nah sorry, just more of the same old crap.
In Syncing with Foldershare part 1 I outlined what I was using FolderShare for. I’ll now outline my reactions after using the service for a while.
FolderShare advertises three main features. Sync My Folders, Share With Friends, Access My Files.
Share With Friends - This feature is completely unnecessary. There are literally thousands of ways out there to share a file with your friends. Having a directory synchronized with your friends seems like overkill. As far as the collaborative nature of the feature, collaboration itself belongs on the web. As such there are many online tools such as Google Documents or gliffy provide much better mechanisms for collaborating with others.
Access My Files - This feature scares the crap out of me and if if there is one reason I stop using FolderShare this will be it. It allows you to access every file on any of your computers that is currently connected to FolderShare. This means if someone gains access to your FolderShare account they can access everything from the web.
Surely you mean only the files or directories you’ve told FolderShare to share?
Nope sorry, Everything. A big downside to FolderShare in my mind is the fact everything is configured from their website. You can add a new computer to ’sync’ with and add sync points right from the website if you have access to the account.
Sync My Folders - This is the only feature I find useful and frankly the only feature I want FolderShare to provide. This allows you to pick (different) folders on two (or more) different computers and sync their contents over the web. They synchronization is recursive so if you have seperate partitions for data feel free to sync the entire partition.
Lessons Learned
FireFox profiles -Firefox keeps some files in your profile locked whenever it’s running. If you have the (synchronized) profile open on more than one computer you will start to get notices that FolderShare cannot copy a certain file. Your only options are ‘retry’ or ‘exit.’ If you choose retry it will obviously fail unless you close FireFox. Choosing to close firefox means you will need to wait several minutes before resuming your work. If you choose exit FolderShare itself exits and you lose your synchronization completely. This didn’t bother me to much I just got in the habit of making sure I closed FireFox on my laptop before attempting to use it on my PC.
After a few weeks however; my PC and Laptop started to get out of sync and at some point FireFox (or Windows I’m not sure which) decided it would be a good idea to reinitialize my entire profile and I lost everything on my laptop. At this time I determined the headaches FolderShare was giving me synchronizing FireFox profiles wasn’t going to work for me. I need a new solution so if someone has one please share. Note that I’m looking for a way to synchronize everything including plugins not just settings and history (what google can currently offer)
Itunes Music Library - As I don’t use iTunes all that often on my home pc this feature is working excellently. However; it suffers the same problems as the FireFox profile synchronization in that the two PCs cannot both run iTunes at the same time.
Security - FolderShare uses your normal Microsoft login. This means that if your MSN account is compromised it instantly exposes all of your personal files on your home computer. This is very scary to me. To make me a bit more at ease FolderShare needs to add some local security features.
- Only Files and Folders shared Locally (from the PC itself) should be exposed to FolderShare
- To add a PC should require some sort of authentication from one of the PCs already part of the synchronization
Usefulness - FolderShare seems to be incredibly useful to synchronize data. That being said it seems fundamentally flawed for synchronizing application data that needs to be used very often. The fact that FolderShare synchronizes over the internet as opposed to network connectivity is awesome. This means that even if I’m on the go, when I make a change to a file I’m synchronizing it gets backed up at home.
Save Money Flying With Yapta
Posted on January 23, 2008
Planning a trip? Yapta can in two big ways.
- While you’re looking for flights. Yapta has a firefox plugin which allows you to tag flights across multiple websites in order to compare prices and track their price changes before purchase.
- After you’ve purchased your tickets. This is the best feature in my mind. Much like what PriceProtectr does for common online retail stores, Yapta allows you to list tickets you’ve purchased and at what prices so that it can monitor price drops.
Something you probably didn’t know about most airlines is many offer reimbursements for price drops on air flights. The old saying that everyone on your flight paid a different price no longer applies. Everyone can pay the same price if you’re using Yapta!
Direct from Yapta’s FAQ here’s a list of some of the vouchers and refunds available:
| Each airline has a different set of rules and regulations. However, here is a quick look at the policies for each airline. Click each of the airlines for the specifics. |
| Airline | How much it will cost to get a travel voucher? | How much it will cost to get a “cash refund” for a non-refundable ticket? |
|---|---|---|
| AirTran | $75.00 | Not Offered |
| Alaska | Free | $50.00 |
| American | $100.00 | Not Offered |
| ATA | $60.00 Domestic $100.00 Hawaii |
Not Offered |
| Continental | $100.00 | Not Offered |
| Delta | $75.00 | Not Offered |
| Frontier | $100.00 | Not Offered |
| JetBlue | $40.00 | Not Offered |
| Midwest | Free within 7 days of purchase $100.00 after 7 days |
Not Offered |
| United | Free | $100.00 |
| US Airways / America West | $100.00 | Not Offered |
Fix Those Pesky Unread Shared Items
Posted on January 8, 2008
I’m a fan of Google Reader. I’ve written here before about their new improvements and how great it is to work in an iterative development area where improvements happen daily.
Even a great team has a failure once and a while. They recently added the ability to see your Google Talk Friend’s shared items within Google Reader. While this shows that Google has great plans for integrating their services, I’ve had problems with this feature right off the bat and from what I understand I’m not the only one.
My biggest problem was that the counter of unread items would go up but my ability to read said items was gone. I could no longer get updates of my friend’s shared items essentially rendering the feature useless. If you’re like me you’ve been plagued by the following screen since they introduced the feature:
Thanks to Graham the helpful Google Reader Guide we now have a solution and it’s easier than you think.
- Make sure you’re logged into Google Reader and goto Settings -> Friends.
- Scroll down until you see the user who’s items won’t update correctly.
- Click Hide. You should see a picture like so:
- Go back to the main page by either clicking ‘<< Back to Google Reader’ or the Google Reader logo.
- Your friend should no longer appear at all in the ‘Friends Shared Items’ list.
- Go back to Settings >> Friends.
- Find Him/Her again.
- Click ‘Show.’
- Go back to the main page again.
- It might take a second but they will appear in the list again. Once they do they’ll have a small red ‘new!’ next to their name. Click their username.
At this point you will have their new shared items displayed. From now on things will act normally and you can mark the items as read as you see fit.
These instructions are a complete interpretation of Graham the helpful Google Reader Guide’s original post.