All-You-Can-Eat Broadband Is Dead: Time Warner to Charge by the Byte

I’ve never tracked my download usage, but I know I don’t go anywhere near these limits.  Yet.  But that could change as IPTV comes on board.  I would kill to go to an IPTV option today.  Being able to drop my stupid cable subscription for a fiber optic bandwidth to one box will be nice in the near future.

However, this is a bit scary.  What do you do when you reach the end of the bytes on the 26th of the month?  Start rationing?  Start hopping on your neighbor’s unprotected wireless?

But, when we were in Romania over the Holidays, one of my wife’s friends is an expert in the telecom industry and said the Net will start having major bandwidth problems in the next three years.  Mostly due to increasing access by the growing number of people on the Net but exacerbated by the individuals who are downloading video and will be moving to downloading hi-def fairly soon.  Net Neutrality is great, but you can bet the ISPs will use this as a way to try to bypass any bans by the government.

Open Source Living

This might be the best open source catalog I’ve seen.  Certainly full of high-quality products.  Something sites like Sourceforge struggle with (just try a search for a specific type of software functionality if you don’t believe me).  In this case, the software is handpicked and makes for a very recommendable site for people looking for options for almost any computer function.

Apple: Leopard Disk Utility Format Issue Screws With Time Machine (But There’s An Easy Fix)

On my move towards using Time Machine, I was researching issues and ran into this.  Might not effect me, but I’m pretty certain the drive I’m using came formated for Windows.  Probably FAT32.  Hopefully this won’t be a real problem for me, but always good to know a solution up front if possible.

Create and Share Floorplans Online with Floorplanner.com

Now, this is a great site.  When we moved into our new house, we used it quite a bit.  Once you have a room set up, measure your furniture and start editing configurations.  I worked really well to give an idea of what didn’t work.  Didn’t always help find the perfect option, that takes hands on with the actual furniture, but it was very useful in ruling out some configurations early.

Free to create and edit one room.  For more than one room at a time, you have to pay.

Our Favorite Cheat Sheets - a definition from WhatIs.com

Cheat sheets.  Got to love the cheat sheets.  One problem with learning/doing things is the bottlenecks created when you hit the wall on remembering or not knowing (not remembering is, in my opinion, the worst of the two) something critical.  When learning, having access to information to keep your momentum is crucial to mental health.

I’ve made this one of the permanent links in my bookmarks.  Handy to access all of those HTML shortcuts to re-remember specific codes.

ThemBid.com » Blog Archive » Removing Backgrounds Quickly in Photoshop

When it comes to PhotoShop, every little bit helps.  I do wonder if this method would work in GimpShop.

Last night I “repaired” a bookmarklet allowing you to search for material in your local library from Amazon.com using John Udell’s code from his LibraryLookup bookmarklet generator. Here’s the code if you live in Toronto: Amazon > Toronto Public Library search. Just drag the link to your bookmark bar (the link bar below your address form in the browser in which you are currently reading this post).

How I “Repaired” the Javascript
Wish I could say I am a brilliant javascripter, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth. But, I am very stubborn and had to get this to work after having dinner with someone who’s brother wrote an Amazon bookmarklet for his local library. While most library’s do an excellent job of returning a specific search, Amazon has done a great job of enabling you to “browse” the collection in an “e-tail” environment in place of a “retail” location like Barnes and Noble or Indigo/Chapters.

I knew I had read about Amazon to local library search before but didn’t have much interest because neither Richmond city nor Henrico county had a great library system to search. Toronto has an excellent public library system. If you live here, you should read the Wikipedia entry. It is an impressive institution and, according to Wikipedia, has the largest circulation in North America and the second-highest number of visits per year, in the world, after the Hong Kong library system.

Anyway, on with the fix so you can try to build one for your local system as well.

1. Visit the LibraryLookup Project homepage.
2. Start by visiting the system software links in the 3rd paragraph (Innovative, Voyager, iPac, DRA, and Talis at the time of this post). Chances are your local library system already has a search tool. You can search for your city (or college or university) by using your browser’s page search function to locate the existing link by keyword.

If it isn’t there, then you can do the following:
3. Visit your library’s website and do a quick search for a book you know they have in circulation. Look at the URL. For example, from Toronto:

http://hip.tpl.toronto.on.ca/ipac20/ipac.jsp?session=E18H87367I106.731071&profile=
rs&source=~!rs&view=subscriptionsummary&uri=full=1100021~!3135138~!3&ri=
1&aspect=subtab37&menu=search&ipp=20&spp=20&staffonly=&term=steven+brust&index=
GW&uindex=&aspect=subtab37&menu=search&ri=1

Please note the bold text where it says ‘ipac’ as this is rather important. Your library’s may say something different.

4. Go to the LibraryLookup Generator page. Enter your library’s base URL. That actually didn’t work for the TPL as the search page results have a different parameter. I couldn’t use ‘http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca’ and had to do a search and replace that with the beginning of the search result page ‘http://hip.tpl.toronto.on.ca’.  Simply putting that in the Base URL page might work (and does with the TPL system).

I didn’t catch the simple fix and ended up replacing the ‘index’ text to ’session’ to match the TPL system’s search URL text. I only mention this because there could be some recent changes by your library system from an existing bookmarklet and a quick comparison between the two existing URLs might show you the answer.

5. Visit Amazon.com (or Amazon.ca if you’re in Canada) and dig down to an individual book (or dvd, cd or whatever) entry and click on the bookmarklet link in your browser. The only requirement for the bookmarklet to work is the Amazon page must list an ISBN number. If there is no ISBN number, the script won’t respond even to give a failed response. If the material isn’t available in the library sytem, the bookmarklet, through the library, will generate a page saying the search failed to generate any matches.

6. The current javascript in the bookmarklet (in Firefox on a Mac) will open a pop-up page in the background. So, you might have to move the main browser window aside to see your results.

Anyway, enjoy. Hopefully you can use this to help yourself. But, do buy something from Amazon now and then. They do have a great site for perusing and we should support their endeavor so they don’t eventually get bought out by Walmart and we know how that would end.  Nothing, ever, with questionable language.
If anything is missing from this, tell me in the comments and I’ll get an email letting me know to add info.

The Best 80 Photoshop Text Effects on the Web

Nice selection of Pshop tutorials.  Always something to learn/reference.

Canadian PM vows to defend Arctic - CNN.com

The story is interesting, especially if you, like myself, just relocated to one of the two countries in question.  The part of the story I find most meaningful about how the ‘Net has began to impact all forms of communication and relationships is summed up in this brief statement, “Denmark sent a letter of protest to Ottawa, while Canadians and Danes took out competing Google ads, each proclaiming sovereignty over the rock 680 miles south of the North Pole.”

Who knows, maybe one day soon, the U.N. will go virtual and build a new center in Second Life.

FixMyXP.com - Your One Stop Windows XP Fix It Site - Run Programs Secretly by Setting them To Open Minimized

Yesterday was a productive day.  Slowly getting all of my computers set up so I have a very centralized system for backup, access and control.  Started turning my HTPC  into a full data server.  One nice feature was setting up iTunes for access on the network by sharing the iTunes media on the server to our laptops.

To do so, I set the following parameters:

1.  Turn shared libraries on in iTunes:
Windows: Sharing your iTunes library across computers
Mac OS X: Sharing your iTunes library across computers

2.  Start iTunes on system startup (in Windows).  Pretty simple, create a shortcut to the iTunes executable and drag the shortcut into the Startup folder.  You can also have iTunes appear in the system tray instead of as a minimized window.  Go to iTunes preferences, Advanced tab, General tab.  Near the bottom, select “Minimize iTunes window to system tray.”
3.  Use these steps to start iTunes minimized.

Now iTunes is pretty much a Windows service in the background in place of a program taking up valuable visual space.