How to: Make an animated GIF from a video
by Dave Johnson
February
22
2009
Making an animated gif is not as hard as it looks to do this you’re going to need a few things. The first thing you’re going to need is Photoshop. In my tutorial I’ll be using Photoshop CS4. Next you’re going to need a video of some sort and you’re going to need QuickTime player for testing purposes. Also some Photoshop knoledge would be helpful.
1. You’re going to need to find out if your video will play in QuickTime. Why you ask? Well Photoshop uses QuickTime as its video player if your video won’t play in QuickTime then you may need a codec for it or the file might be a proprietary format (i.e., avi, wmp). In that case you will most likely need to convert the video to a .mov. I’ll explain how to do that in a later post. (more…)
Do you have USB 2.0?
by Dave Johnson
February
20
2009
Do you have USB 2.0? There is a few ways to find out. If you plug in a new USB device and a message pops up saying “this device can perform faster” then you probably have USB 1.1, but that doesn’t mean all your USB ports are 1.1. To find out for sure if you have USB 2.0 fallow these steps
Select Start >> Control Panel >> System >> Hardware tab >> Device Manager
Backing up your blog
by Dave Johnson
February
17
2009
Just over a month ago a very popular website called JournalSpace hit rock bottom and then some. Taking with it was all of the blogs that were hosted on it. JournalSpace has since been sold off and looks to be starting up again. There is a lesson to be learned here and that is always backup your blog in other words back up your database which holds all your blogs information. I don’t know if JournalSpace made it accessible for their members to do this or not. My guess is they didn’t, but to be perfectly honest I’ve never heard of JournalSpace before they crashed. how ever this post isn’t about how JournalSpace messed up a good thing. It’s a public service announcement about backing up your data frequently.
So here we go. First I’ll show you how to make a backup in WordPress and then I’ll show you how to make a backup in Phpmyadmin.
WordPress (2.7) backup
With the Admin account login to your blogs backend. Once you’re logged in go to Tools -> Export. From this page you can chose a specific author or everything. Then just download the file and save on your computer. The downside to this is it doesn’t backup everything in the database just the posts on the blog. So plug-ins that use the database too will not be backed up
Phpmyadmin backup
Login to your web host provider, and find a link to your Mysql database. Once you login to Phpmyadmin, (provided it uses Phpmyadmin) click on Export just above the logout button in the center of the page. By default everything should be setup. All you have to do is push go.
Once you back your data up, make copies and put it in a different places (e.g., a disk, external hard drive, or another computer.) The more you post the more often you should backup your data.
One other thing, don’t trust your web host. Yes it’s true that they probably are backing things up, but I think it’s your own responsibility to make sure your data is safe. If you lose it, it’s your own damn fault. Years and years of blogging could be lost in a second if you don’t back it up now.
First monster fish of the year.
by Dave Johnson
February
2
2009
I wen’t fishing at the Lower Tawa Pond today, and cought this big rainbow. It’s kind of hard to judge scale in the photo, but it was about 18″ 6 lbs. This is how it happend. I showed up and just made a nice long cast out. Joe, a friend of mine showed up just seconds after I did, so I stood there talking to him not paying any attention to my foam strike indicator. Finally when I did look back I couldn’t find it so I yanked on it thinking it was just a normal 1/2 to 1 pounder and that is when I saw it come right up to the surface. I finaly caught a monster fish that i’ve been wanting for. it took me a few minutes to land him so I had Joe help hold the rod while I went down to grab him. That is when I noticed I hooked him in the top of the mouth with my small size 18 BH Dark Green Brassie (homemade).