I’ve been doing some updating to my site. First off, I’ve added support for some popular social bookmarking sites. At the bottom of each post you will see a “Share This” link. Clicking on this will give you options of bookmarking the post to your selected site. You can also email the post.

I’m now also using Google Analytics to track the flow of traffic on my site. It’s a pretty cool service, if you have a website check it out.

I’ve signed up for del.icio.us and Digg. I’ve also joined Technorati, check my Technorati Profile here.

One other thing I’ve signed up for is Feedburner.

All of these are very cool sites that help direct traffic and your web browsing experience in general. It’s worth checking these out if you’re building a blog.

Nordin

Finding good free software is not always easy. Also, finding out where all my hard drive space has gone and deleting stuff is a royal pain in the arse. I just found this free application that is as good as any commercial, pie charting, disk management utility I’ve used before (which is admittedly, not a ton).

Anyways, here’s the application, hopefully it helps you out, kudos to the developer for making it free.

Disktective

Here’s my quick review of the eVGA Geforce 7800GS CO 256MB that I picked up from Newegg. A great card if you still have an AGP system!

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A very useful stock blog, check it out. Seeking Alpha

So I added a few things to the website. For one, I’ve added the glory of favicons! Favicons are the little images that appear next the the URL of your browser. “Nordin, your favicon is perhaps the cutest one I’ve ever seen” you say? Well that’s because it’s a picture of our new baby girl, Freesia!

Freesia Aaliyah Rahhali

I found a few ways to make favicons, but nothing was simpler than using this site, simply select an image on your computer, and it creates a favicon you can download from that. Shweet. If you prefer to use Photoshop, then try this site.
The other thing I added was the ability to have an email sent to notify a user when a new comment is made on a post that they’ve commented on already. This should be handy to track threads.

And lastly (and what took the most flippin’ time) was I fixed an issue with Internet Explorer, links weren’t being respected at the top, image based links. But now all seems well. Of course I never use IE only Firefox, which never had any problems with my site.

Start Slide Show

Ok, sometimes you spend time on something that seems dumb, but you just have to figure it out! In my case it was how to make my thumbnails in my Coppermine Photo Gallery to look how I used to make them before Coppermine. They were square, with a black border. I liked the look, and lost it when I switched to cpg.

Anyways, to make a long boring story short, I wrangled with ImageMagick, discovered how to with the help of this site and modded a custom version of cpg to generate this. I’m posting this in case someone wants to know how, let me know and I’ll pass the modded files to you.

So this past year has been pretty horrible for me with anything tech related. After years of having virtually no problems with hardware, everything now seems to want to fail. Hard drives? Failing left and right. Camcorder? Decides to stop ejecting tapes. Computer? Bios chip failure, motherboard toast…

Or so I thought, after a bit of googling, I found out that you can have new Bios’s flashed for a fee, and then it’s up to you to swap chips (which was an interesting story of it’s own). I tried that instead of opting to buy a new motherboard and now my computer lives again! Muhuhahaha! If anyone cares where I bought my chip, I got it from a place in Italy, they were the cheapest and I had no problems. www.recoverybios.com. Ahem, I’m just glad it’s back up and running. Man what a pain.

Now about my camcorder, I have a slightly used, just under a year old Sony DCR-PC350. Beautiful little camcorder, takes great movies, picture is sweet. I’ve only put about 5-6 tapes through it, and just over Christmas I decide to put a new one in, but the damn thing won’t eject my freakin’ tape! Bloody hell… So I contact Sony, surely they’ll repair it, it hasn’t been a year yet. I explain my problem, to someone, try some trouble shooting steps, no luck. They then give me all the details of where to ship the unit, and explain that parts are still under warranty, but labour is only 3 months.. ok.. So I ask how much labour is, $315 USD!!! What the bumba! That’s more than 1/4 the purchase price, just to repair the tape eject? Man, I had no idea a big company like Sony won’t even back their products with a minimum 1 year complete warranty. I own Canon, and they cover it all. If I ever buy Sony again, it’ll be with an extended warranty.