Solving technology problems, one at a time
Today I found that a Menalto Gallery v.2.3 site I run had simply stopped working. I had made no changes in weeks, so this was peculiar. Browsing to the front page brought up only the
Continue readingIf you want your linux-hosted site to be accessible by anyone coming from a particular IP address, as say from within a corporate firewall, but also accessible from anywhere else as long as they authenticate with username and password, use this formula in the .htaccess file for the directory:
#this section may need to be modified to suit your password authentication setup: AuthUserFile "/home/pathTo/.htpasswds/directory_name/passwd" AuthType Basic AuthName "webroot" require valid-user # allow users from inside firewall Allow from 111.222.33 Satisfy AnyContinue reading
After upgrading to SnowLeopard a new bug in Mail.app has appeared. About once a week, one or more emails will decide to reproduce themselves hundreds of times in a folder called “Recovered Messages”. If that email has a large attachment, it can quickly fill up the limited space allotted to my email account.
Continue readingIf you need to sync Powerpoint slides to a lengthy pre-recorded audio file in Presenter, the choice of format for the audio file is important. Save audio files intended for import into Presenter in mp3
Continue readingI’ve been experimenting with enhancing some of my photos in Photoshop to create more interesting images. I use a Canon PowerShot SD 990IS point-and-shoot camera that does a good job on the whole, but because the lens isn’t very high quality, images sometimes come out somewhat hazy. The camera actually captures a lot of detail but it takes some processing to bring it out. I’m not against using some tricks to emphasize what’s good about the picture, even to the point where it crosses the line into illustration.
For this project, I started with a fairly unexciting picture of my dining room. Its one strong point was the sunlight streaming in the windows which brought out the colors in the wood chair and tablecloth. This picture was one of several shots of the same scene with different exposure settings.
This was the lightest one, chosen for the detail visible through the windows. However in choosing the lightest exposure, the tablecloth lost a lot of its color. However I thought it had potential.
Original image
A while back, I worked on a flash game that teaches medical professionals how to find objects in a cardiac cart. A cart with 6 drawers isshown at left. When a drawer is clicked, it slides in from the top of the screen so that all the objects inside can be seen. The object of the game is to drag whichever object has been selected at random to a target at bottom right.
The original design allowed plenty of room for the drawers to move down to their open position without obscuring the target area.
But as time went on and more requirements came to light, the dimensions of the game had to be shortened so that the drawer overlapped the hand target when it was in its “open” position.
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In the last year or so, I got used to being able to export to just about any format from Quicktime Pro using Quicktime Conversions. When I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I installed Flip4Mac’s Snow
Continue readingBack in the 90’s, a woman named Dixie Lawrence made a splash on the internet by describing how her daughter with Down Syndrome experienced improved growth, health and cognition after starting a regimen of nutritional supplements and piracetam. I recall reading that she noticed that her infant daughter was not actually retarded – at least not yet.
Dixie’s routine for changing diapers always ended with a playful rub of Madison’s stomach. One morning, when Madison was eight months old, a fatigued Dixie said to her, “Well, honey, I’m tired, you’re going to have to rub your stomach yourself.” And Madison did just that.
It hit Dixie like a ton of bricks. She realized that her daughter was not retarded, and that if she wasn’t retarded, she would develop retardation. If this was the case, there had to be something that could slow it down or stop it! In a modest bedroom in rural Louisiana, Dixie Tafoya “looked through the telescope,” and in spite of what everyone “knew,” she saw perfectly round planets. With that insight, she jumped light years ahead of all the “experts.”
from Looking Through A Telescope, by Julian Whitaker M.D., Whitaker Wellness Institute
In other words, this was a view of Down Syndrome as a developmental problem, where the cognitive deficits increase with age.
Recently I’ve been using the Photoshop Filter Gallery filters more than usual, and experienced a few apparent problems, particularly with the grayscale filters. First all the grayscale filters suddenly seemed to stop working. All of them showed nothing but a completely blank screen, no matter what settings were tried.
I really thought this was some sort of bug with CS4. But a search of the Adobe forums turned up nothing. Clearing the plugin cache and Filter Gallery preferences reverted the filters to their defaults, and fixed the problem.
Continue reading<= Back to previous section “Part 7 of 8”
