New template! (and other things) at 11:49 AM

OK, so I've gotten lazy. I haven't posted in a week. Sue me.

...well, not really... getting sued would kinda stink :)

Anyway, The first thing you've noticed (I'm sure) is the new template! My old one was giving me issues, such as the header dissapearing, so I scrapped it and got a new one! I had it narrowed down to this one and another one that resembled the Mac OS sort of layout, style, dealeo thing, but I couldn't get it to work :P

So, I got this one from a place called InstantShift.com. They had a big long list of the top 120 blogger templates, so I took a look! If you're tired of the plain ol' blogger template you've got, check it out.

Unfortunately, getting a new template in the manner I tell you below WILL DELETE YOUR SIDEBAR ELEMENTS! Keep a record of the ones you want, or copy the nescessary code to your clip board or something, but be aware, they WILL be deleted!

After you pick out the template you want from InstantShift's list, jut hit the download button. Usually it comes in a ZIP folder, but all you have to do is extract it. No biggie.

After that, go on Blogger, click on the "Layout" tab, select the "edit HTML" sub-tab, and you see where it says "Upload a template from a file on your hard drive:", well just hit "browse" and then navigate to where you extracted your template file. After you select the template file, the file's address should show up in the white field to it's left:


Next, just hit upload, and after Blogger asks you (in scary red text) if you're sure you want to delete your sidebar elements, and you say yes, just save and view your blog!

That's how I did mine! If you've got any questions, feel free to leave a comment!

Another really cool thing I just got recently, was DropBox. It's a free, downloadable program that basically is just a folder that you get to place anywhere on your computer! Once downloaded, all you have to do is copy and paste a few files into your DropBox folder, and they're automatically uploaded to the DropBox site, available to you from any computer! Also, if you download the program on multiple computers and sign in to the same account on both programs, when one computer has a file placed in the DropBox folder the other computer sees them almost instantaniously!

As you can probably tell, this is a fantastic way to transfer files from computer to computer in a work group, online seminar, or just to replace those pesky email attachments!

As I said, the DropBox program is free, but it only comes with 2GB of space. This is fine for just transfering files from PC to PC (I actually shouldn't say that, it works on Mac and Linux as well), but if you want to juggle large files, or keep your entire hard drive on it, you will need to upgrade. Upgrades are $5/month for 10GB, $10/Month for 50GB, and $20/Month for 100GB space.

To learn more about DropBox and watch their video tour, click here.

Well, I hope this upadate has been helpful at least, I know I'm exited about my new template. If you have any questions about what I've mentioned in this post, feel free to comment, and I'll try to answer your comments as best I can.

-Graydon L

How to Download and Install Adblock Plus at 4:16 PM

OK, so I just got the idea for this video and I'd thought it might be fun. If you are not using Mozilla's Firefox browser you need to! There are a million-and-one awesome ad-ons that Mozilla offers as downloads that can really enhance your browsing experience. I used to like Google Chrome, but I've spruced up Firefox so much I can't stand Chrome now :)



Other ad-ons I use are:

Aviary (screen capture and image editing)
Colorful Tabs (makes your tabs different colors so they're easier to distinguish)
Fission (progress bar is inside the address bar Safari style)
Personas for Firefox (allows you to change the "skin" of your browser in only two clicks)

And there a thousands more that you can download! From asthetics to spyware-blocking, if you want it, there's an add-on for it! Check out the directory here.

-Graydon L

So This is what he does in his spare time... at 9:53 AM

Well, I don't know if you all saw, but Jonny, who is supposed to be doing responsible things at his internship in North Carolina, hacked into my blogger account and changed the colors of my blog. This is what it looked like BEFORE I figured out what happened:



You can even see the post he made right below this one. He didn't make the text pink in his post, but as a reminder to myself to be more careful in future, I changed to pink for him.

This particular prank was very frightening to me, because as you know, my background is a custom one that blogger does not offer so the colors are not the same as the blogger colors. Which means, I had to take a screen capture snapshot of my blog, open it in a picture editing software, use the eyedropper tool to find the HTML code of the color I needed, and then apply that to my blogger color settings.

If this hadn't worked, I would've had to make an entirely new background which would've deleted all my sidebar elements... and then I wouldn't be so forgiving.

btw, Jonny, THIS MEANS WAR!!!!!!!! I encourage you all to view Jonny's blog now, I'm sure after my few minor tweaks it's much more interesting: www.jonnysmeltingpot.blogspot.com

-Graydon L

An Unimportant Post (You Don't Have To Read It) at 10:03 AM

This is not an important post. I'm just posting a picture of my blog on my blog so that when I link to it in Facebook, I can make the link's thumbnail a picture of my blog. 

-Graydon L

Animator VS Animation at 2:52 PM

Check out these great videos Jonny found on Youtube a few weeks ago made by a genius with a very witty mind.

The first one is called Animator vs. Animation.

The second one's title on Youtube is Funny Virus, but I think it's made by the same guy as a sequel.

-Graydon L

A Little more 3D Modeling at 10:20 PM

Here’s some pics of a 3D model I made for Jonny a while ago. it’s a small wooden box with a special mechanism that makes it so you can’t open it unless you slide a secret panel sideways. He was going to make this out of wood and wanted to see if I could make it in my computer first just to see if it would work.

 

Here it is closed.

 

 

Open.

 

 

Open, looking down into the mechanism.

 

 

 

 

Closer in on the mechanism. I actually made that third panel from the front slightly transperant so things would be a little easier to understand.

 

 

Same deal here, except the almost the whole thing is transperent.

 

  It’s a little confusing at first, but just concentrate and I think you’ll be able to figure out how it works.

 

 

 

Well, that’s it! I’m still getting used to my 3D modeling software, but I think I’m catching on pretty well! If you want to get started with 3D modeling, I highly recommend Google SketchUp. There are loads of touturial videos and also a gallery of completed models to check out and even change!

 

-Graydon

 

P.S. I’m compiling all my favorite HTML tricks for you, Sam. That way my last post will have a little competition as “Nerdiest Post of the Year”. Just kidding :-D

Another Computer Update at 6:01 PM

Today was another computer setup kind of day; I moved my computer’s tower below my desk so the “fall-off-the-desk-and-get-smashed” risk was reduced. I also attempted to set up a network so I could print stuff without actually buying a printer.

 

At first I thought that setting up a network would be pretty straightforward, a couple of boxes to check, a couple to un-check, a few areas of my computer to explore, you know, basic stuff.

 

boy was I wrong.

 

Getting our three computers “network compatible” was pretty easy, and of course, the file sharing features came with that. But had no idea how hard it is to set up a network printer when the computer with the printer has XP and the computer trying to use the printer has Vista!

 

My problem wasn’t with establishing the network, as I said, that was easy. Basically, my Vista computer wasn’t being allowed to install the drivers for the network printer, which was plugged into Jonny’s computer. Every time I went to install the driver for the printer I got an error message that said “Windows cannot connect to the printer. Access is denied”. So, I did what everyone does when they have a computer problem… I hit the internet.

 

Several forums, help sites, and temper tantrums later, I finally figured out that I was doing the logical thing and telling the computer that I wanted to set up a network printer. Turns out, with the Vista/XP clash of systems, I needed to tell my computer that I wanted to set up local printer. Local meaning it’s plugged my computer… even though I don’t have a printer plugged into my computer.

 

If all  this sounds really confusing, don’t feel bad, it is.

 

-Graydon :-)

 

PS I've gotten to know Windows Live Writer really well and I am really liking it. I highly recommend it. you can download it here.

My Acer Aspire AM3100! at 3:54 PM

As I said in my earlier post, my new computer (which I have name Percy) arrived last night, and I gotta thank that UPS guy for braving the floods to get it here a whole day early!!!! I’m extremely happy with it, and Vista even it’s all that bad.

There actually a few things that are pretty cool about Vista. the side bar where you can display various gadgets it very cool, I’ve got mine set to display time/date etc., as well as a currency converter (set to the difference between the Canadian dollar and the American) and a Weather Bug local weather gadget. But my favorite gadget is the Notepad:

 

 

                                   

You can have multiple notes at once and they can be as long as you want! NO MORE STICKY TABS ALL OVER THE MONITER!!!! WHOOOHOOOOOOO!!! sorry, I just had to do that.

anyway, on with the pictures:

 

 

Here’s Percy parked right next to my (puny) Dell monitor and Acer mouse.

 

 

Acer really thought this one through, most people put their towers on the floor, so they put the USB 2.0 and headphone jacks on the top of the unit! Smart! I don’t have Percy on the floor right now, but that’s just because I’m using a camp table as a desk until I can find one on Craigslist for cheap, even even then, the ports on top are kinda handy.

 

 

Another look at my camp table festooned with $700 plus worth of equipment :-)

 

I’ve been on the computer practically all day now, transferring over files, downloading my favorite software, uninstalling all the junk programs Percy came with, and figuring out how Vista works. I found this AWSOME program that Windows has out called Windows Live Writer. It’s like a word processing program, but it’s liked to your blog! you can do waaaaay more stuff with your posts that Blogger lets you do, and it doesn’t have weird layout errors either. Bonus: a real spell/grammar checker!!!!! you can download it here.

 

Well that’s all for now, I have some more school work to get to, see y’all on Sunday!

My New Computer Is Here!!! at 10:17 PM

After a long period of waiting, it's finaly here! I've scraped and scratched and I pulled up enought money to buy my own computer and it's finally here. I'll be transfering over all my files from my old computer tommorrow as well as posting pictures! 

Unfortunately it came with Windows Vista, so I'll have a bit of a learning curve :-P

-Graydon L

My New Layout and it's Issues at 3:52 PM

As you may have noticed, I have a new blog background! I think it's pretty cool but it has a few problems: first, when I got it, the Blogger.com Navbar at the top wasn't there. Second, the little blog menu underneath the header doesn't go all the way across; there's a gap on the right hand side that just drives me crazy!

As for the first problem, I have solved it with a little help from the almighty Internet. Here's how to toggle the Blogger Navbar:

Before we do anything, we have to enter in what I have named a "Toggling Widget". After logging in to blogger, go the the "edit HTML" tab by going through the "Layout" button on your dashboard. Simply enter in the following code anywhere in between the beginning and ending tags of the document:

#navbar-iframe {

height:30px;

visibility:show;

display:yes

}

(don't worry about the red text, it wont do anything or even show up in the HTML)

Now the Navbar will now be displayed! If you want it to stop being displayed, simply change the three variables (the text in red) to "0" (that's a zero, by the way), "hide" and "no".

That's It!

Enjoy having (or not having) a Blogger.com Navbar!

-Graydon L

P.S. As for the second problem, I fixed with a little HTML tweaking. It took me about 1 minute 30 seconds :-)

of Blogs and Backgrounds at 4:06 PM

Recently all of my friends have been getting backgrounds from www.thecutestblogontheblock.com (with the exception of a few). I have done this as well and I have a little technical wisdom to offer on the subject.

Basically, I liked my background, but I didn't like the little blue box in the upper left hand corner. So, I checked out the HTML source code and it's actually pretty easy to remove.

Alrighty, when you copy the source code from www.thecutestblogontheblock.com, you get something like this:

So here's what you do; just remove everything that's inside this red rectangle that I've added to this picture:

once it's done, your code should look like this:

Just save the gadget it's in and you're in business!

Hope this was helpful! :-)

-Graydon L

Our Computers... Have Issues at 7:10 PM

In our home, we have several computers. Jonny and I share one in the office, it used to be Mom's but she got a new one (that computer #2). Mom has one, it's in the dining room/kitchen area thingy. Dad has 3... a personal laptop, a work laptop, and a formerly work laptop gone personal.

Anyway, Jonny and I had to install a new CD drive in Mom's computer but in the process somehow killed the keyboard and mouse. To make matters worse, none of our other old keyboards would work! We did however find a USB mouse that worked.

So there we were, with two computers and only a single mouse between them. Ouch.

Well, at first we didn't have a clue what to do and I figured we'd just have to buy two new keyboards and a new mouse. But eventually my incredibly amazing oversized brain came up with an idea: "what if they're not working because you have to plug them in when the computer is turned off?" So we try it... and it works! I almost leaped for joy! I thought I'd have to share a mouse with Mom and use the stupid "on-screen keyboard" that comes with windows for the rest of my life!

Alright, so that's my little update, I still can't wait to get my braces off!

Hope y'all like the background!

-Graydon L

Google ScetchUp at 10:12 PM

Well, I've checked out Google ScetchUp, and I must say, It's a lot of fun! you can do sooooo much with it! Here's a couple screen shots I took of some models I made:

This was a test to do with creating objects with transparency, I think it turned out quite nicely. I call this model "the hologram thingy"

This is my very first "serious" model. I actually had the idea in my head and I put it on the screen. since then I've learned more about the tools and I think I would have done this differently, but I still think it's pretty cool! I call this one "the Grand Cannon Defense Turret"

And then I made this scale model of a Boeing 747... you, uh... don't believe me huh? Oh, Phooey. No, I didn't make this one, I downloaded it from Google's Vast array of user-created models. If you can think of it, Google has a 3D model!

Well, That's my quick update of what I've been doing lately!

Oh, and one more thing! I get my braces off in 3 weeks! WOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

:-D (that's me... braces-less)

-Graydon L

Google's Latest Cool Stuff at 7:35 PM

Here's a little project I put together about Google's new Earth program, Enjoy!

Thank you Google for writing this absolutely amazing program!

I've also just downloaded another new Google program for designing 3D objects, but I have yet to try it out. Maybe on Monday... ;-)

-Graydon L

SRM - Google Chrome at 10:21 PM

Well, I know It's supposed to be movie review Monday, but this week I'm doing something a bit differently: Software Review Monday.

Google Chrome Beta

Created by: Google

Features: Multiple tabs, startup page showing your most visited pages, simplistic and "Vista-like" design, user friendly interface, open source code, fully customizable.

Overview: In this fast new Browser from Google has, in my mind, created something beautiful. A simple, easy to learn, and stylish design let you see more of the web page you're visiting, and less of the browser you using to see it. It is in the Google designers terms, the "invisible browser".

Genre: Browser, Beta test, free download

My Take: While no where near Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox when it comes to task bars, search fields, and little buttons with cool icons, Chrome allows you to do everything that IE and Firefox allows and even more. 

At first, I saw it as weak and small, but over time, I have come to know the true potential of this powerful browser. Lets take a look at some features:

Tabs: sure, you may not think that tabs are a big deal, but with Chrome, they are a very important part of your Internet browsing. In IE for example, if you are surfing the web with several tabs open, and you run across a corrupted file on the web page you are visiting and IE crashes, you lose everything you had open, not only the tabs in the instance of IE you are running, but all other instances as well. With chrome, each tab is in it's own little world completely separate from the other tabs, so if for some reason it has to shut down, you only lose that one tab. Also, if you are loading a video in one tab, that loading isn't going to be slowed down if all-of-a-sudden, you have 23 new monsters to kill in the game you are playing in a different tab.

The Search Field: Not only does this bad boy let you search, and type in addresses, but you can chose which search engine you want it to be powered by! Also, when you start typing, it shows you search suggestions, already visited web pages, the most popular searches matching what you have typed so far, and what web pages are in your favorites!

Unrivaled Speed: As you know, IE has been released and re-released over and over again; there are more versions than I can count on both hands! Because of this, it just keeps getting clunkier and clunkier. Also, when the first version was created it was designed for just looking at web pages... people in today's Internet aren't just looking at web pages; they're watching videos, playing games, listening to music, and downloading files. Google Chrome was designed from the bottom up for these purposes in particular, while IE still has code in it written years ago. Because of it's In-The-Now "construction" it features speed unrivaled by any other browser I've seen. It's also a very small, lightweight program that doesn't take a lot of juice to run, making it even faster still.

These three features are only part of the many things you get with chrome, others include the ability to view the source code and even modify it, and HTML and JavaScript editor, and many easy to understand options menus. for example, in IE, the options window has several tabs labeled "General", "security", "privacy", "content", "connections", "programs" and "advanced". In Chrome they are "basic", "minor tweaks" and "under-the-hood". Now which list would you rather have?

Overall, Chrome is better for the average Joe, the techno-peasant, and the computer programmer. I would chose it over Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox any day.

Overall: 10 out of 10

__________________________________________________

One more thing, I've been really cluttering the sidebar recently, and I'm getting rid of my "Free Software I Recommend" element, But I want you all to be able to still see the links and short descriptions. Here, in this post, they shall live on in infamy :-)

GTK's GIMP 2.4
This amazing photo editing software, is really quite powerful, and compared to other photo editing softwares, is pretty easy to use as well.

Wisdom-Soft's ScreenHunter
Fast, Easy, and powerful screen capture program offering great quality and 3 modes of capture. Upgradable to "Paid" and "Pro" versions for $20 and $30.

YoYo Games' Game Maker
Although a little hard to get used to at first, this fantastic GML (game maker language) editing software. YoYoGames.com also offers several easy-to-use tutorials!

Google's Google Earth 4.3
If you have used Google Earth before, you will absolutely adore the latest version of it. all new 3d buildings, and you can click on some landmarks for more info! Upgradable to "Plus" and "Pro" versions for $20 and $400.

If you have any cool software for me to try out, shoot me an email or leave a comment with a link!
(it's OK if the link doesn't work, I'll just copy and paste it into my browser)

-Graydon L