Paul Stamatiou Paul is a 21 year old Computational Media student at Georgia Tech who loves Silicon Valley, technology and Apple. Learn more.
I’ve compiled a list of 10 things every first time Mac owner, particularly Mac Mini owner, should know about their new computer and operating system. This article should answer some burning questions, enlighten you about some features you did not know about OS X and just all around be helpful. Enjoy. Any questions can be directed towards me here. I wrote this for 123MacMini.
I recently came across a great website that allows you to easily embed Google Videos within your website. DownloadGoogleVideos.com utilizes the Google Video search engine to let you find the video you want, and gives you the code you need to display the same video. This website also allows you to post the video on your website via a link that fires up a popup window.
Continue Reading »
I know I’ve been pumping out OS X tips for a while now, but I’ve got something for you XP readers soon enough. This quickie will take a stab at fixing OS X’s built in firewall. The firewall may often get its settings changed my other programs which need some port configuration that may ultimately down the firewall. If OS X tells you the firewall is unavailable, this fix may be for you.
I am thankful for ridiculous Black Friday sales, Thanksgiving break (I couldn’t take one more Physics lecture), family, friends, finally getting some laundry done, my roommate that lets me play Mario Kart on his Nintendo DS, being able to bring my PS2 (for GT4) back up to school, Scrivs letting me in 9rules and finally putting an end to all these tech support calls from my mother and fixing that Dell for the last time.
Continue Reading »
Want to drive some traffic to your great articles that have already aged off your homepage? No worries, now you can feature articles with The Feature WordPress plugin from No One’s Listening. This plugin lets you specify articles you wish to feature as well as up to a 100 x 100 pixel picture to accompany the article title. This guide will show you the basics of getting The Feature up and running as well as adding some basic styling.
Continue Reading »
The latest release of Sun’s Java has finally been deemed good enough for OS X users. By default the JVM in OS X is J2SE 1.4.2. Wondering if an updated iTunes (to address some recent security issues) would be released, I clicked Apple > Software Update… tonight. No iTunes in sight, but a welcomed Java update was discovered. However, J2SE 5.0 R3 will apparently coexist with J2SE 1.4.2 as mentioned in the installer: Continue Reading »
Get your own WordPress.com-hosted blog for free.
You know that cool little loading icon on the top right in the Firefox browser? Apparently it’s called a throbber and you can change the link it goes to when you click on it.
Intel’s upcoming Pentium Mobile chip with a codename of Yonah may very well be the first Intel processor in a Mac. AppleInsider claims the Mac Mini will likely be the first production Apple computer with an Intel processor. This disputes MacPredict which believes the first Intel-based Apple will be the PowerBooks. Either way, I welcome Intel chips to Apples. At least from a Linux on Apple perspective, things will be a lot better. Macromedia Flash works on x86 processors (no PPC support) as do other various applications that do not have x86 varients, such as RealPlayer. I uncovered the downfall of Continue Reading »
View the change log. Check out the README. Enjoy.
Deviance is no longer for download.
Dig those flash Flickr slideshows? All that’s needed is a bit of code to embed them within your website to give your readers something dynamic.
I’m in Chattanooga, TN attending the cre824 international web design competition and festival. Here are some pics from earlier in the day. The hotel Wi-Fi is insanely slow from all these cre824-ers, it feels like 1994 all over again. The convention was a blast, I met so many big names in the web/tech industry. Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht from Diggnation are hilarious in person. I got to see the Diggnation camera guy Keith, that’s never been shown on camera. Shaun Inman is minty fresh and an all-around cool guy. The Adobe Workshops taught me that I should really get GoLive and I won a Photoshop CS2 shirt for answering some XHTML question. Click continue for pics. Continue Reading »
I wish I had not checked my email between classes. After finding out that I have been accepted into the prestigious 9rules Network, I couldn’t be bothered by the math quiz I had an hour later. I feel extremely honored at this privilege. I have been keeping my eye on the 9rules Network for a long time and being a part of it now is surreal to say the least. I have some big shoes to fill but I will definitely get cozy in my new online home. Stay tuned for some more excellent content, I need to show 9rules they made the right decision.
I personally want to extend my thanks to Paul Scrivens for inviting me into 9rules and selecting my website out of some 509 other Round 3 submissions! I also couldn’t have done it without the mentorship of Mr. Veloso from Avalonstar and the help of my Greek buddy Konstantinos at HiFiBlog. With them I was able to turn my sloppy tech blog into a professional and credible news, reviews and guides portal. Leave your comments at the door. I might not get back to you for a while, I’m heading off to cre824 tomorrow. Update: Read an interview with me over at BlogNetworkWatch.
Intel has recently announced that their latest batch of Pentium 4 offerings, formerly code-named Vanderpool, features an astonishing Virtualization Technology. Not to be confused with HT, or Hyperthreading Technology, VT allows multiple operating systems to run simultaneously on one physical system. Virtualization Technology initially loads a program called Hypervisor, which can be considered a virtual OS boot loader. This seems like very promising technology. Continue Reading »
The widely used feed publishing service, FeedBurner, has just introduced the social-bookmarking website, Digg, into its Link Splicing options. Digg joins del.icio.us, Furl, Bloglines and My Web 2.0 for Link Splicing. FeedBurner users are given the option of posting links as they appear or once-a-day. I doubt that I will use this service in my FeedBurner-powered feed; I like to keep mine clean, which is why you don’t seen any new-fangled YPN RSS ads or AdSense for RSS as I talked about over on Performancing.com. If you are wondering what the point of adding your daily social bookmarks is, take a look at Steve Rubel’s Ten Blogging Hacks.
Continue Reading »
Everytime I open up my browser, I always find some amazing new web-application that just makes me wonder what else can be done. Riveting new programming technologies are paving the way for a more user-friendly and pain-free online experience. Here are my picks for most promising programming technologies.
Episode 22 of commandN was released today and I’m in it! If you go to the commandN page here you can view the episode. Amber talks about PaulStamatiou.com around 11 minutes, 20 seconds into the episode.
RSS has become a valuable technology for everything from casual web users to webmasters. According to a recent Yahoo survey only 12% of internet users are aware of RSS and a mere 4% have knowingly used RSS. RSS exists as a means to gather and display information quickly and easily. By the end of this article, you should know what RSS is and how to use it to make your life easier.
Heading off to college soon, or already in college? There are a few things you should know so that your PC is not the victim of harmful pranks, malicious attacks and other incidents that will happen during college. This guide will briefly describe a few things you can easily do to prevent many of these real-life events.
The PaulStamatiou.com RSS widget has reached v1.1. Updates are mainly aesthetic, however, the feed was switched to the FeedBurner feed, so load times are slightly improved. Visit the widget page here to download it. This is for Mac OS X Tiger users only.
There are times when I would love to have a widget or two on my desktop, for those frequent activities. I’m always looking up words in the dictionary or just spell checking blog posts before submitting them, so having my dictionary widget on the desktop would save time. I am sure you have a widget you constantly use, so this will benefit you.
I’ve received great news from her majesty Amber Mac that this blog will be featured on a future episode of the highly popular video podcast, commandN. CommandN is a fantastic tech and web news videocast hosted by Amber Mac and Mike Lazazzera, current TechTV Canada Call for Help hosts. I’ll give you an update when it actually airs and likely host the episode on my server as well. I recommend getting up to speed and watching a few of their episodes.
By default, Apple’s Safari browser has an Initial Timed Layout Delay of 1 second before any data is parsed and then rendered in the browser. Apple made that a little conservative to say the least. So what you can do is decrease that time to say one fourth of a second. The actual setting is stored in Safari’s preference file, which you will need to edit. Make sure Safari is closed and exited, and then Continue Reading »
It seems as though phpMyAdmin will have competition for the first time. TurboDbAdmin is a breakthrough web application providing online database administration utilizing a single page interface. AJAX powers TurbuDbAdmin so things you do are instant, no need to press submit and wait for the next page to load to see if it was a success/failure. However, it is currently a beta, so I’m not sure how much I could trust such an application with my precious databases. Continue Reading »
That’s right! Some great people at Media Temple, the LA-based super webhost, have recognized the usefulness and potential of my blog by sponsoring PaulStamatiou.com full time. I would really like to thank Demian Sellfors and Jason McVearry at (mt) for finding this website and extending their generosity. It was perfect timing as well. My skyrocketing growth in traffic almost put me over my allotted bandwidth for last month. If you are looking for a great web hosting provider with excellent support read my spiel about (mt) here. Of course, this means that I will still be providing great articles, guides and reviews. This will be the first of many great things to come.
Right now is a great time to start a blog. The powerful K2 interface with the sleek Deviance mod will guarantee you readers that do not just glance and leave. Intrigued readers will be lured in from the get-go; the way it should be.
Continue Reading »
I am writing this a little early, but tomorrow the second issue of Particletree’s amazing web development magazine, TreeHouse, will be released. This is also when the 6 issues at $15 deal ends. After tomorrow you can purchase each issue at $3 dollars a piece. I purchased my subscription yesterday and can’t wait to download the latest issue. If you haven’t heard too much about TreeHouse, read my previous spiel here.
Microsoft’s next-gen browser, Internet Explorer 7, will apparently only support well-formed XML-based RSS feeds. This may seem like a good step towards valid code usage on the net but if Microsoft’s going to be the one deciding what is “well-formed XML,” we are going to be in for a wild ride. If Microsoft has their way, I’m pretty sure not even FeedBurner feeds will validate as well-formed. Overall, I think the move to usher in an RSS standard is a good thing, I’m just a little skeptical when Microsoft tries to start the standard. I mean, they made Windows Anti-Spyware, recently named “Windows Defender” that would erroneously delete software it thought was bad.
You can read the original article on the Microsoft Team RSS Blog. I also recommend taking a look at Roger Johansson’s take on this tidbit.
Our years of experience in with HTML in Internet Explorer have taught us the long-term pain that results from being too liberal with what you accept from others. Hence, we’ve adopted the following overriding principle for IE 7 and RSS platform in Windows Vista:
We will only support feeds that are well-formed XML.
This one’s a quick & dirty guide for the people that asked me how I created my header graphics. Header graphics mark a blog as unique and can lure a reader in from the get-go. Create several of them, make them rotate and your blog will give off a dynamic appearance.
I randomly stumbled upon Joe Tan’s website from a reader’s blog and discovered his amazing new WordPress plugin, Flickr Post Bar. The plugin adds a bar similar to Flock’s Flickr topbar and allows you to add your Flickr images to WordPress posts. As you have probably noticed, my articles and guides feature many screenshots and images so Flickr Post Bar is just about my best friend.
Update: I emailed the Mr. Tan to see if it would be possible to get the a href text to link to the original image size instead of the flickr page. Here’s his reply:
To link to the original static file instead,
you need to open up the file post-bar-form.html, and then on line 43,
change< ?=$photo['photoUrl'];?>
to this…
< ?=$photo['photoSizes']['Original']['source'];?>
Many first time bloggers automatically assume that once their blog is setup and they put a few posts on it, they will get some hits and regular readers. This is quite untrue. You won’t get any traffic if no one knows about your website. In this article I hope to tackle these problems and discuss some of the common ways bloggers and webmasters drive more traffic to their site by understanding the user. I have received many emails from aspiring bloggers asking me what they can do to get more traffic, so hopefully this will help out at least those people. Continue Reading »
The day Flickr released printing capability for photos, I selected my favorite ten photos and ordered 4 by 6 prints. I ordered them with the economy mail option which estimated an arrival date of November 11th. It was a nice surprise that the Yahoo! Flickr printers are located in Norcross, GA as delivery was more than a week faster than expected. I was somewhat disappointed, though, as the email I got from my post office said from “Yahoo” and I was expecting my first check from the Yahoo Publisher Network (the contextual ads). Regardless, I ripped open the firm, bend-proof packaging to find a nice envelope with my photos and a flickr sticker! That sticker now adorns the top of my laptop. As to the quality of the pictures, I am not much of a photographer but from what I can tell the pictures turned out excellent (I ordered the glossy finish). I think this is partly due to the smart flickr system that won’t let you print a low resolution picture at a large size; it detects the picture’s dimesions and only displays the print options that would look best.
Continue Reading »
My day was totally ruined yesterday. There is about a 6 inch gap between the head of my bed frame and the wall due to the ethernet/cable jacks being right in the corner. My pillow frequently gets sucked into this blackhole every night. However, last night was quite different. My pillow fell into that gap with so much force that it knocked out two plugs from the wall socket also on that side of the wall. One of the plugged in items was my Airport Express which I use to wirelessly print to a LaserJet under the bed, and the other being the alarm clock. Thus, my alarm didn’t go off and I woke up at 5:30PM missing the Tech vs. Wake football game (we won 30 - 17), breakfast, lunch, and was late to a burger cookout my friends were having for two of my friends’ birthdays. Anyways, the night turned out well as we saw Jarhead, a fantastic movie that you should go see right now.
I always thought 760px was a bit narrow, so I created a new, wider CSS set at 820px. Hopefully long articles will be easier to read now. Let me know what you think. I still have to remake all of the header images, so there is a static one for now.
