Posts tagged as:

How To’s

WordPress How To: Change Your Blog’s Permalinks

June 22, 2009 · 33 comments

I recently did the unthinkable. I changed the URL structure of my blog’s URLs. Long considered a scary territory, along with moving domains, due to the SEO implications and potential for losing traffic, I was convinced by Bruce Keener to give it a shot. Ever since my blog launched I have been using the domain/year/month/day/post-name URL structure. I thought it was quite handy to know when the post was written before even loading it, but I ended up dealing with very long URLs that got quite annoying. In addition, [click to continue…]

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Photoshop Quickie: Perspective Crop

May 28, 2009 · 13 comments

I take a lot of pictures for reviews on this blog, most with a Nikon D90 DSLR camera. A good chunk of my time on larger reviews is actually spent reviewing hundreds of images, then fine-tuning the best ones in Photoshop (case in point, my upcoming car review is taking forever). I’ve been using some version of Photoshop since the Mac OS 8 days. However, I mainly used it for the same basic image manipulation techniques — cutting people out of backgrounds while I was on my high school’s yearbook staff, and lots of cropping, levels tweaks [click to continue…]

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How To: Optimize Your Apache Site with Mod Deflate

April 23, 2009 · 44 comments

The title of this post might be a little cryptic to those not familiar with the Apache webserver, but this post is a sort of followup to Paul Buchheit’s recent post “Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step” as well as a response to a recent Skribit suggestion. The step he’s referring to is getting your web server to utilize gzip encoding. [click to continue…]

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How To: Getting Started with Amazon CloudFront

December 8, 2008 · 26 comments

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, S3, is quite wonderful. It’s cheap, secure and virtually infinite in storage capacity. Some people have begun utilizing S3 to host files for their website that would otherwise be expensive in bandwidth costs to serve from their own server. I actually used to host all static template images on this blog from Amazon S3 as I was under the impression that it would decrease load time considerably. [click to continue…]

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How To: Create an OS X Icon from a Vector Graphic

November 19, 2008 · 6 comments

Back in 2005 I wrote an very basic article on how to change icons in OS X with ones you find online at sites like Interface Lift. Unfortunately, that method of icon swapping only works with actual embedded icon files. I quickly discovered this when I wanted to make my laptop more work-oriented and use the Skribit logo for my drive icon. This post shows the [click to continue…]

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Flickr How To: Auto Geotag iPhone Photos

November 14, 2008

I use Flickr a lot. I have over 12,000 photos on my Flickr account, with over 500 coming from my iPhone alone (with over 2,000 on my iPhone as mentioned in this post). I was enamored when the GPS-toting iPhone 3G came out as I assumed my photos would automatically be geotagged when I uploaded [...]

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How I Learned to Code

October 6, 2008

When you talk to accomplished programmers, it’s no shock to hear they began programming at a very young age. Unfortunately, I was not the same way and did not grow up programming. I was much more into hardware during my childhood. I learned how to solder, read and write circuit schematics and build small projects. [...]

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How To: Upgrade to Studio Monitor Speakers

September 13, 2008

For the past 5 years I have owned the same set of Logitech 2.1 Z-2200 speakers. They have served me well in college and the large subwoofer made for an excellent footrest. However, they are typical “computer speakers” in the sense that they don’t accurately reproduce each frequency and provide too much bass, even with [...]

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How To: Live the Cloud Life

August 21, 2008

There’s no doubt about it, I’m in love with the cloud. Some people might not share my fascination with storage-in-the-cloud and compute-in-the-cloud models but I can’t wait to have the same computing experience regardless of the computer or device I’m using to connect to the Internet. I’ve taken it upon myself to

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How To Quickie: Swipe in Firefox

June 16, 2008

If you have a MacBook Air or recent MacBook Pro with a multitouch trackpad, you have probably already fallen in love with the “swipe” gesture. Three fingers swiped across the trackpad to the left or right take you back or forward a page, respectively, in your browsing history. Only native apps like Finder and Safari [...]

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How To: Surf Securely with an SSH Tunnel

May 16, 2008

By the time most people read this post I will have stayed in three different hotels in New York, New Jersey and Maryland while trekking along with Challenge X teams for their final competition. That means I have had a chance to glance through several terms of service agreements for various hotel internet

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How To: Getting Started with Amazon EC2

April 5, 2008

Amazon EC2 is among the more potent items in Amazon’s web services arsenal. You’ve probably heard of many of the other services such as S3 for storage and FPS for payments. EC2 is all about the “elastic compute cloud.” In layman’s terms, it’s a server. In slightly less layman’s terms, EC2 lets you easily run [...]

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Startup 101: Tools for the Job

March 3, 2008

After working on Skribit for the last 4 months, I have gotten a grip on my workflow and the tools I as well as the other co-founders use. The scope of this post is to give potential starter-uppers an idea of how to get work done collaboratively with others

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How To: Take Better Pictures in 1 Step

February 16, 2008

It has been almost a year that I have been shooting with a Nikon D80 DSLR camera. After taking many product review photos and dealing with uneven and blurry pictures, I finally came to my senses and purchased a cheap tripod on Amazon. It happened to

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How To: Download with Newsgroups

February 12, 2008

So you’ve built a nifty file server running Linux after following your favorite blogger’s series of DIY 200 Dollar PC articles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Now what? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could turn that server into a speedy downloading machine?

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