Posts tagged computer tips
How to make a quick transparent image for your website using Photoshop – A quick How-To for beginners
Mar 13th
Hey Kiddies,
Commodore 64 here with a quick how-to for Photoshop. Have you ever downloaded an image you’d like to use on your website but it was sandwiched on top of some ghastly color which totally doesn’t fit with your “flow”? Well here is a quick, no-frills, way to a transparent image that you can set to a background of your choosing.
First we start with simple image of a leaf:
Double click the “Background” and then hit enter when the dialog pops up. You should now have a transparency capable layer which is ready to have it’s fat trimmed, the layer name should change from “Background” to “Layer 0″:
We then take out our trusty magic wand tool and select the white around the leaf by clicking the white part around the leaf. In this cased I’ve used a tolerance of 80 to produce a decent result. You can play around with the tolerance depending on the image you choose to work with to get the selection border where you need it. In this case, our subject image has a dark shadow. Our tolerance of 80 has allowed the selection form to come in closer to the leaf, eliminating most of the shadow from the inside of the selection border as shown in the following image:
Hit delete to produce the following:
Hit the save button, name your file and give it a home. That’s It. Now this isn’t the most professional or precise way of doing this, but if you need a quick easy design flow control with image backgrounds, this is the 5-step, 5-minute move to get you on your way.
Enjoy!
Commodore64 (The one you used to play Bruce Lee on)
Can I add random quotes to my blog or website for FREE?
Apr 26th
The title of this question here is a little misleading because you can use this little web app to serve lots of stuff besides quotes, like random ads or words of wisdom.
Get your geek on and swap out scripts and images galore!
Originally we used the free RandomQuote ASP generator to feed our geeky quotes in our sub header above. Have you seen it before?Pretty cool stuff huh? Now what if I told you the Busted Tee Shirt Ads on the right bar were also served up by this generator?
Result: Different ad and quote ,out of our database, on every refresh!
After tweaking, pushing, prodding (our coder not the program) this proved to work very well and we have been very happy with the results. But after a while we realized that this handy little random generator, complete with a very aesthetically pleasing back-end editing system, (pictured to the bottom) would be perfect to randomly feed out anything our geeky little hearts desired.
You’ll see a different quote, different ad on every page load, and all the same geeky love in front and behind it. You’ll need an .ASP compatible web hosting plan at the very least to get started. Don’t get scared – all this means is that you need a web hosting plan on the side but it doesn’t necessarily have to point to your site. Just a server that supports ASP. This is because the files need to live somewhere on a server with Microsoft extensions. It also needs to give you a few MySQL Databases to make this easier but you can also pull it off with a connection to an Access Database, and with some basic ASP knowledge you can probably modify it to work with an Excel file as a data source as well.
The first thing you need to do is go to here and snatch this free package called RandomQ from Expirion.Net:
The directions are fairly simple. Here’s the skinny:
- First copy the files/folders to your (ASP Compatible) web server.
- Then modify the config.asp file to point to your database and give it the correct credentials to do so. Refer to your web hosting control panel to see various details about your DB – you’ll need that info to put into the config.asp file.
- The package comes with a convenient little script that creates all the necessary tables/columns when run against your database. Your DB will need this structure to properly communicate with the application.
- Now open the index.asp file in the /admin folder in your RandomQ directory to see if any errors arise. If they do arise, the problem is most likely with your config.asp file. Be sure it points to the correct place and that the credentials are correct. Next be sure the tables were created properly by browsing thru the database using the web interface usually provided by your web hosting service. If it’s not provided you’ll need to get into some of the graphical database management proggies, provided at MySQL.com, to connect to and be able to view your DB data.
- Once you get the inc_random.asp file to display properly and you can login successfully to the /admin/index.asp file, your in business. All in all, barring any technical issues, this whole process should take no more than 10 minutes.
- Now you have to get the inc_random.asp file to display on your blog, so the only way to accomplish getting information to be displayed cross-domain is with the use of an html iframe as follows (we’ve removed the html open and close brackets so the code won’t get munched by blogger’s server and you’d still be able to copy and paste the code for your own evil doing):
iframe src=”http://www.YOURWEBHOST.com/RandomQ/inc_random.asp” vspace=”0″ marginheight=”0″ marginwidth=”0″ hspace=”0″ frameborder=”0″ height=”40″scrolling=”no” width=”100%”.
Make sure you close your open Iframe tag with a /iframe
Now the fun part – put in your data by logging into the RandomQ admin console and get to steppin!
Which of our quotes do you like the best? Got any ideas?
Damn son!! Let us know in the comments! Why are you all quiet and shit?
Oh and thanks to Mike aka Commodore64 for his assistance on this article and a great find on the application as well as implementation of it.
What Does it Mean When My Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music?
Nov 27th
This is not a joke, I repeat, this is serious business! I found this while surfing around on Digg, and thought this was one of the most interesting “features” I have ever seen.
According to Microsoft’s Support website, if your computer starts playing classical music such as “Fur Elise”, or even more modern hits like “It’s a Small, Small World” this is cause for concern.
From Microsoft Support:
During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play “Fur Elise” or “It’s a Small, Small World” seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer’s BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on.
They go on to say that if you encounter this problem, it is time to get your computer into the PC Doctor to have it checked out. Though it may seem like a virus, it could very well be a serious hardware problem.
Recover Windows XP, 2000, 2003 and NT passwords in a breeze for free… YES FREE!
Jun 19th
I was able to use the cd image below to reset an administrators password to blank and then log in to a machine whose owner recently died.
Offline NT Password & Registry Editor (v060213 – February 2006)
Petter Nordahl-Hagen has written a Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista offline password editor:
http://home.eunet.no/~pnordahl/ntpasswd
This is a utility to (re)set the password of any user that has a valid (local) account on your Windows NT/2000/XP/2003/Vista system, by modifying the encrypted password in the registry’s SAM file.
You do not need to know the old password to set a new one.
It works offline, that is, you have to shutdown your computer and boot off a floppy disk or CD. The boot-disk includes stuff to access NTFS partitions and scripts to glue the whole thing together.
Works with syskey (no need to turn it off, but you can if you have lost the key)
Will detect and offer to unlock locked or disabled user accounts!
Caution: If used on users that have EFS encrypted files, and the system is XP or later service packs on W2K, all encrypted files for that user will be UNREADABLE! and cannot be recovered unless you remember the old password again!
Download links:
cd070409.zip (~3MB) – Bootable CD image with newer drivers
bd050303.zip (~1.1MB) – Bootdisk image, date 050303.
sc050303.zip(~1.4MB) – SCSI-drivers (050303) (only use newest drivers with newest bootdisk, this one works with bd050303)
To write these images to a floppy disk you’ll need RawWrite2 which is included in the Bootdisk image download. To create the CD you just need to use your favorite CD burning program and burn the .ISO file to CD.
_TheOnAndOffLineAdmin_
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