I have been quite specific as I haven’t tested in earlier versions of OSX but I find locating that little mouse pointer in OSX really difficult at times. especially when you have 3 monitors you are using you mac with (21″ external, HD macbookpro panel & an Imac via teleport) It is easy to loose your mouse and in the process look an idiot trying to find the dam thing by wiggling the mouse like mad.
Well Fear not, I have a solution!

Steps:

• press cmd+space to get spotlight up
• type system and click on system preferences
• once system preferences opens, click on ‘Universal Access’ (top rightish)
• click on the ‘mouse & trackpad tab
• Near the bottom of this page is a ‘CursorSize’ slider.
• Drag that to the right and hey presto, bigger mouse pointer.

and here is it:

The adverts in question here are those ones that overlay a video during play back. Sometimes these ads take up 50% of the video playback size wich is frankyl really irritiating. I am not a fan of having advert shoved down my throat and as such I have for years used the most excellent Ad-Block+ on all browsers possible. It doesnt seem to catch these ones though, so I did a little digging and have found out a method of blocking them system wide, no matter what browser you use.

To start of with I will demonstrate how this is done on OSX (Lion) as this is what I was running .

1. Fire up Terminal – to do this quickly press cmd+space to get Spotlight up and simply type terminal
2. In the terminal window type: sudo nano /private/etc/hosts
3. This should open your hosts file. There will be a whole bunch of numbers in there (or maybe not)
4. At the end of the list paste in this:
   255.255.255.255 pagead2.googlesyndication.com
255.255.255.255 googleads.g.doubleclick.net 
5. Then press the ctrl key + x
6. This will ask you if you want to save, say ‘y’ for yes
7. One last thing to do now
8. In terminal type this:
   dscacheutil -flushcache
9. (this flushes the cache and re reads the hosts file)

This is a post and a half, Nettuts have a really handy guide for doing some cool stuff in WordPress including how to get alternating background colours in WordPress comments. This is something I have been looking to do for ages and now it’s should be pretty straight forward.

Linky

Well the Headway theme developer kit is.

It is a really clever framework that takes the hardwork out of theme development. I am using Headway on this site currently and playing around with it. I hope to use it properly on a biggish project soon but as with all these frameworks for WordPress there are limitations. At least limitations of what the Visual Editor can do anyway as it looks like I am going to have to get my hands dirty on the css and image from ront, but that’s ok.

It is clever stuff none the less! I am even tempted to buy it as it is soo handy

http://headwaythemes.com/Подаръци

While using the handy tool whats my ip to find out my external address I saw info about a new feature on the handy site http://www.whatsmyip.org. It is a clever jump point to a random site on the internet. I am not quite sure how handy http://www.whatsmyip.org/random_websites/ will be but it generates a link to a random site from a list of 4 million.

Quite mad really  

Подаръциикони

I recently found myself need to find a way of generating a list of files to a text file and I knew you could do this in DOS quite easily, but you have to type it in every time, so I did a bit of searching around on the web and found 2 useful pages and updated for Windows 7 and combined them.

Firstly, over at Renegade minds there is a useful script for older versions of windows that does the whole list of files thing, open it up in notepad and the delete the file once you are done.

The problem I found with this is that it wanted to write to the root of the C: drive and on Windows 7 this might have some permissons issues (cmd needs to run as admin). Simple solution was to just write to the folder you are in (the one below the one you are trying to get a file list of.

I also removed a load of echo text stuff as it's not needed.

This is my version of the Renegade Minds script:(cut'n'paste minus the start and end)

Start

@echo Dumping directory listing to dirListing.txt
@REM the /A switch lists all hidden and system files as well.
@REM the /S switch lists all subdirectories and their contents.
@dir %1 /A /S > dirListing.txt
@echo Opening dirListing.txt in Notepad (Close notepad to delete file)
@notepad dirListing.txt
@echo Deleting dirListing.txt
@del dirListing.txt
@pause

End

The other thing I did was change the file name to 'Notepad File List.bat' but you could call it anything you want.

The next clever thing is to add it to your 'Send To' right button mouse menu.

The result of a quick search for this found the answer down at ThinkGeek and it was a simple case of opening a new explorer window and pasting:

%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\SendTo

then pressing return.

This opens your own personal Send To folder and you can save you Notepad File List.bat in here.

Now if you right click on any folder and send to notepad file list it will quickly pop up a dos cmd prompt and a notepad window, then a few seconds later the notepad should have a list of all the file and files in subdirectories of that folder you sent to the batch file.

when you close notepad it will delete the temporary file it creates but if you want to keep the listing the you can jsut save it off under a different filename.

I hope this makes sense and you find it useful

So you have downloaded a shed load of mp3 albums and they are all sitting in a folder waiting for you to extract each and every rar or zip file by hand. How tedious!

Well I thought about this for a second and realized that good old 7zip has a command line interface and must be able to do this.

Low and behold you can, and really easily as well. I will show you how.

Windows 7 instructions (others may differ slightly but aren’t difficult to work out)

• Firstly install 7zip if you haven’t already
• It might not set itself up as an application is your system path, so unless you want to sort that out it is just as easy to drop the exe into the cmd prompt window.
• Ok run the command prompt by clicking on the start button and typing in cmd followed by return.
• Locate using explorer your 7zip installation and keep that window open
• Navigate in your cmd dos prompt to the location of all of your files. (some dos experience might be needed here but remember that ‘cd’ is change directory. ‘cd..’ goes up a directory.
• The other method for lazy people is to find the dir in another explorer window and drag the folder you want to change to into your dos window after you have typed the words ‘cd ‘ into the window. Pressing return should take you to the desired folder in dos.
• If all is good then go back to the 7zip installed folder and drag the 7zip.exe file into you cmd dos window that has the directory with all the files you want to extract located in it. (remember to ‘dir’ if you aren’t sure it’s got all the files first)
• This might look a bit garbeled but that’s ok.
• To test the program is going to run just press ‘return’ and it should print out a long list of switches. This is good.
• Now to save all that dragging and stuff just press up once on the arrow keys and you should have your command waiting for you to add the all important switches.
• The switch to extract each zip into its own folder (assuming the archive files were zipped as folders) is as follows:
• C:\The folder with my files>”C:\Program Files\7-Zip\7z.exe” x *.rar
• The first bit depends on where your files are of course and the second program files bit is the default locations for 7zip so that will probably be the same.
• ‘x’ is the extract with folder structure command
• ‘*.rar’ is the file archive type, it may be zips or other but 7zip does most of them

There you go, that should be it. My explanation is a little long winded to make more sense for everyone. The actual process is very simple.

You will then need to delete all the rar files as that simple command doesn’t remove the archive after successful extraction.

There are more advanced switches and I will add a few extra bits here when I have had time to try them out.

There is a quite useful guide to some of the 7zip switches here at dotnetperls

I often try to run a program that requires ownership of a port to work properly. One of these apps is the superb open source web based newsgroup download tool called SABnzbd. Without fiddling with settings SAB requires port 8080 open and available to work.

On the odd occasion I have started up SAB to find the error message that says 8080 is in use.

Finding what app is using what port can be a little difficult at times but i founda relativly simple way of doing it with just command prompt and task manager.

Firstly fire up the command prompt

The type 'netstat -aon' and press return

You should get a nice long list of ports and process id's. Look through this list till you find the offending port number and then find the process is for that port. This is reall the process id of the application using that port.

Next start up task manager and click on the processes tab. You should see a process id section but if not add it by selecting 'select columns from the view menu. It will be the top tick box item.

Now you will be able to find the application or process using that id (it's easier to sort but the process id column here) and once found you can kill the process in the usual manor.

Nifty trick

Often I find myself needing to know what is running on a web site, you know what CMS or server platform.
Luckily there are several good tools to help you find this out.
In Firefox there are 2 really handy plugins that show you most of the details you would need.
These are ServerSpy & Ghostery.

Server Spy adds some details in the bottom right corner of your browser and tells you what server,CMS and otherthings like jquery it is running.
Ghostery show in the top right of page (on load) the jquery type plugins the site is using.

There are also a few other good sites for digging a bit deeper to find out more.
WebMaswterCoffee.com digs really deep and analyses the struture of the site giving good results.
QuarkBase.com does similar things but also shows a wider range of info like what is happening in the social world.
Both very handy sites

Firefox is great we all know it, but there are a few little irritations that arise from everyday use.

Luckily most can be fixed easily! My favorite fix is for one of the most handy feature of Firefox, namely the 'search from URL box' option.
By default in Firefox entering some text in the URL bar will search Google.com and this is great but I would always want it to search Google.co.uk by default.
This can be relatively easily achieved through editing a few simple configs in Firefox.
Firstly you need to edit the config of Firefox. to get this enter 'about:config' without the '' in the URL box (of a new tab).
You will get  a funny warning (there will be dragons) but just click ok to continue.

Next you will see a long list of option a bit like the registry (if you have ever looked through it), and you need to narrow this down a bit to find the bit you need to edit. To do this type 'search' in the filter box, and the list will instantly shrink to items with search in them.

The option you need to edit is the one with the Google URL in it. (keyword URL) Double click on the URL to edit the search string and if you just want to change to the UK search simply change the .com to .co.UK Hey presto.

This wont add UK as the default search but will search Google.co.UK.

This is the UK Google URL: http://www.Google.co.UK/search?btnG=Google+Search&q=