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:
At this point you have a choice of filling in your own background color, in Photoshop and saving for web as a jpeg, or you can save for web as a transparent gif and apply matting in the intended target’s background color of your choice. In the following example I want to put the leaf on a blue background on my intended destination for this graphic. I do this buy removing the selection I already have by clicking anywhere in the work window with a marquee tool, or pressing ctrl-D for “deselect.” I then go to File menu, Save For Web and save with the following options:
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_
100% Fix for the Svchost.exe “99%” Issue
May 30th
So it looks like Microsoft has heard us belly aching and now has released a fix. I will not be applying it until I either see more issues or read otherwise. Here is the information – you decide:
You receive an access violation error and the system may appear to become unresponsive when you try to install an update from Windows Update or from Microsoft Update
View products that this article applies to.
Article ID : 927891
Last Review : May 24, 2007
Revision : 10.0
Technical update: May 22, 2007
Microsoft has released a Microsoft Security Advisory on this problem for IT professionals. The security advisory contains additional security-related information about this problem. To view the security advisory, visit the following Microsoft Web site:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/927891.mspx (http://www.microsoft.com/technet/security/advisory/927891.mspx)Note This article discusses the MSI component fixes only. This fix is one component of a two-part fix that includes a Windows Update client software update. These updates will be deployed automatically using Windows Update in May 2007 and June 2007. However, some customers may select to manually install these updates. To fully address the unresponsive system issue, both this fix for MSI must be installed and the Windows Update client must be updated to version 3.0. When you install the MSI fix and the new client, process-monitoring tools may still show CPU usage at near 100 percent. However, the system should still be responsive and should not lock up. If another task requires CPU cycles, they will be shared. However, if the system is idle, MSI will use the full cycles that are available to complete in the shortest time. If another task is running at the same time as MSI, the system may run slightly more slowly. However, the computer should still be responsive. Remember that you must install the MSI fix and the new client to address unresponsive or locked systems. It is expected that process-monitoring tools may still show CPU usage at near 100 percent, but computer unresponsiveness is not expected. If you watch the process monitor, you may still see CPU usage at near 100 percent during some scans if the computer is otherwise idle. This is expected behavior.
Important Many instances of the Svchost.exe process may be running on a Windows-based computer. These Svchost.exe processes control certain tasks. The software update that is described in this article is only designed to address the problem that is mentioned in the “Symptoms” section. Other problems that you experience with Svchost.exe may require alternative resolutions or troubleshooting steps.
_TheResolvingAdmin_
Windows Update Broke My Machine (svchost.exe — application error), and How to Fix It Kinda…
May 30th
One of my Windows XP SP 2 machines on my domain started spitting the following message at me after logon. Any choice this dialog gives me that I choose, the machine becomes unusable. If I move the box out of the way the machines operation continues normally. The dialog just hangs there
svchost.exe — application error the instruction at “0x745f2780″ reference memory at “0×00000000″. the memory could not be ‘read’
Looking into the event log yielded the following:
Faulting application svchost.exe, version 5.1.2600.2180, faulting module msi.dll, version 3.1.4000.2435, fault address 0×00012780
I Googled it and searched around some other sources and found others with similar issues. Now, how I fixed it and why it broke in the first place are two very separate things.
First I read alot about it having to do with WSUS and Office updates which we are doing. So this is what I did:
- Reboot into safemode
- Rename the directory SoftwareDistribution to SdistOLD (In your \windows directory)
- Delete the files in your prefetch folder also in windows.
- Turn off auto update service (disable)
- If you are using WSUS turn off classifications for Office products.
- Reboot normally and if the error does not show up do a windows update from the website.
- If the error came back reboot and try again.
- Turn auto updates back on… Leave off office updates.
This has solved my problems but I now do my office updates via script or manually.
If I figure anything else out I will post it. But at least now the problem is gone.
Questions? Comments? Hit em up in the comments kiddies!
_ThesvchostAdmiN_
