Category Archives: how to

How To: Annoying Webpage

Posted on by
2

This post is a revival of a webpage I made over 4 years ago, and I was recently reminded of it, so, I decided to bring it out again.  The problems demonstrated with this page are not as prevalent on the web today as they were several years ago, but I think it’s still relevant. Follow the link provided below for your viewing pleasure.

Annoying Webpage

Oh, as far as the “How To” part goes, just follow these simple steps when building a webpage:

  1. Use ugly, clashing colors
  2. Integrate pop-ups as much as possible
  3. Includes sounds that play automatically
  4. Be sure to include some sort of animated text
  5. Create a MySpace page in lieu of steps 1-4

How To: Suspended Shelving

Posted on by
3

suspended shelvesI don’t know if I’ve ever talked to someone who said they really had more storage space than they could use. Closets often bulge to the seams until the garage inevitably ends up sacrificing its vehicular storage capacity for our ever increasing collection of stuff. If the garage is the only storage option, it can be used much more efficiently than just stacking stuff in the corner. One solution I have found, especially for items not accessed on a regular basis, is to use overhead storage. This gets things up and out of the way allowing the precious floor space to be reclaimed.

Continue reading →

3D Computer Modeling

Posted on by
Reply

Render Small

In the Kitchen Workstation – Part II post I did a 3d rendering of the proposed addition to our kitchen cabinets. Renderings attempt to accurately represent reality using 3d shapes along with varying textures and lighting. In order to better explain what it takes to make one of those models and why it can be so incredibily time consuming I will spend some time going into a little more detail. Continue reading →

Kitchen Workstation – Part I

Posted on by
Reply

Amy and I have decided on a new project for the house and I thought it would be a good one to document so here goes. We currently do not have a good place to pay bills, stash the mail, write messages, etc and we’ve been trying to come up with an easy, economical solution. After thinking about buying or building (a lot of work on my part) a secretary desk which would have to take up space in the living room, we came up with an idea for the kitchen. There is currently an unused space at the end of our kichen cabinets next to our dining table so we decided to make use of it by Continue reading →

How To: Go Iconless on Your Desktop

Posted on by
1

Iconless DesktopIn the spirit of David Allen’s Getting Things Done I have, in the last year or so, been essentially iconless on my desktop. I have come to think of my desktop as a sort of inbox where any icons piling up are just unprocessed or not-dealt-with information (a.k.a. clutter) that decreases my productivity. Besides all this efficiency stuff, a desktop full of seldom used icons just bugs me.

Besides the handful of shortcuts most people used daily, the desktop tends to act as a graveyard for the useless triple or quad icon installs that are common with many programs. Whenever I use someone else’s computer and I see a Free AOL icon from their latest AIM upgrade it makes my skin crawl. Why are these icons installed and, even worse, why don’t people delete them?!

In addition to installed shortcuts, an unattended desktop tends to collect many downloaded or created files that either need to be moved to an appropriate folder or, in most instances, just deleted. I often use my desktop as a place to temporarily house files while I’m working with them (i.e. inbox), but I try to always clean it out before I leave the computer. Many times I have found old files on my desktop and I can’t remember where they came from or if I need them any more.

How To Do It

I have long since stopped using my desktop as a place to keep shortcuts to frequently used programs. There are few people who commonly use more programs than can be easily housed in the Quick Launch toolbar on the Windows XP taskbar. If you can see in the image above I have 6 icons as shortcuts on my taskbar, and I could easily house more without encroaching too much on the rest of my taskbar. I think the Quick Launch toolbar is one the of the most underused features of Windows along the Show Desktop button which is included in the toolbar.

By default, the lone icon that comes installed on the XP desktop is the Recycle Bin. The only way I have found to remove this is by using the TweakUI utility. It is part of a suite of PowerToys distributed by Microsoft which also includes other very useful utilties such as Image Resizer and Power Calculator. TweakUI has an easy way, under the Desktop section, to turn on and off all the common Windows desktop icons including the Recycle Bin. One thing to note, before you remove the icon from the desktop it is necessary to make a shortcut in the Quick Launch bar or from wherever you are planning to access it.

Besides getting rid of the standard Windows icons it is just a matter of looking through your icons and deciding which shortcuts are really needed and, if they are, then make a shortcut in the Quick Launch toolbar. As far as the random files go: file the ones you need to keep in an appropriately labeled folder and delete the ones you don’t need.

Follow all of these steps and you will realize why the default Windows XP background is appropriately named Bliss.

Building a Server – Part II

Posted on by
Reply

I received all of the parts and assembled the server without much trouble. One note to anyone looking to build a computer in the near future: Check that the motherboard and power supply connections match up, especially if you are using server type motherboard. A change I did make to the hardware since the last post was to add a third hard drive that is identical to the other two. I still set up two in a RAID 1 arrangement, but I used the third alone for the operating system. This allows me to reinstall or remove the operating system without disturbing the data on the server. Also, it has disc space for a daily backup of the RAID data. This provides protection from accidental deletion or overwriting of data. Continue reading →

Building a Server – Part I

Posted on by
2

Due to anticipated expansion at Walnut Creek of Thomasville, they have recently requested a server, primarily for data storage. Although the current network is peer-to-peer this will be a dedicated server. Upgrading the peer-to-peer to a true client/server network would be a huge and expensive undertaking considering nearly all the machines on the current network are running Windows XP Home Edition, which is unable to join a network domain. Given that fact, I’ll leave the client/server network for some time in the distant future, or never.

Continue reading →