Graystatic Tech

Social Networking Sites You can Clone with Drupal

graystatic — Thu, 07 May 2009 05:16:44 +0000

There is an interesting article over at Web Jackalope called “16 Different Clones You Can Build with Drupal”. I love drupal and have used it with various projects and this article lists several very popular sites that can easily recreated with Drupal, including Twitter, Flickr, Blogger and more.

Drupal is an excellent choice for a content management system (CMS). However, many people only see it as a simple CMS, a site to build a landing page or two. But Drupal is much more than that. Not only is Drupal easy to theme, it’s got a wide range of built in functionality and a large community powering the popular CMS. ( Web Jackalope )

The author also makes a good point that it’s not a good idea to make exact clones of sites, but this is a starting point to make some awesome drupal sites with just a few (if any) modules.

Picasa 3 Released

graystatic — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 01:14:11 +0000

So Picasa 3 was realesed a few weeks back. Picasa is Google’s photo organizing and editing program that they offer for free. I’ve used it for quite a while and love it. With this new release it’s better than ever. So in version 3 there is more tools for editing photos, like the new retouch tool for correcting blemishes in photos. They have also greatly expanded the collage tool, now the user has complete control over the placement of pictures and more templates have been added. One of the best features in this new version is the ability to take photos and videos and make movies out of them. In true Google fashion integration with their online services has been added, like the ability to sync folders or albums to your Google Web Album or to upload videos to YouTube.

Now the features offered for editing photos is not nearly as much as something like photoshop and the movie making abilities aren’t quite the level of other dedicated movie making programs. However that’s not what Picasa is for, it allow you to edit lots of photos quickly and for this purpose I think it does a spectacular job.

Vimeo: HD Video Sharing

graystatic — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 03:04:07 +0000

Recently I made some videos that I wanted to share, so I decided to finally try out some of the different sites out there, namely youtube and vimeo. For my purposes the quality of youtube videos just wasn’t cutting it. So next comes Vimeo. I was amazed by its features. For free you could upload videos up to 500mb a week and 1 hd (720p). For a little extra you can get more hd uploads and higher limits. Even the non hd uploads look really good. From my experience the upload speed was much better than that of what youtube gave me. They also allow you to select what screenshot to show before play. They give you several screenshots from your video to choose from or you can upload your own picture to use. Besides that they have pretty much all the standard features comment’s, channels and such. So in my opinion vimeo is an awesome choice when it comes to video sharing.

Blurb: Make Your Own Book

graystatic — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 03:37:34 +0000

Blurb.com is a site where you can make your own book. So if you like me you have like a billion pictures and rarely print them. This is an awesome way to get them off your hard drive and printed. They have several differentt book combinations. You can get varying sizes of books with hard or soft covers. For a little extra you can even use a picture for the cover. So the way it works is you download some software. Load your pictures and use their layouts or create your own. They have a bunch of premaid that give great results. Once your done you can order your book, even if you just want one copy. So, go create a book and have fun!

How to Write a Good Password

graystatic — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 04:37:23 +0000

Making passwords is something everybody on the web does. The art is in making good, secure passwords that you can also remember easily. There are two methods I have found really effective. There are tons of passwords I use that I have to be able to recall at any time. Most people would resort to making short passwords, writing passwords down, or using the same password for multiple things, these methods are horribly insecure.

The first way I have found very effective is to use phrases or sentences. The phrase should be something rememberable and contain numbers too. One example of this would be something like, “ilovemy1995thunderbird”, (I love my 1995 thunderbird). This is 22 characters long, and pretty easy to remember. The phrase should be something that makes sense to you. So maybe if you were born in 1942, instead of resorting a typical password, which would just use your birthday and are guessable, turn it into a phrase like, “iwasbornin1942″, now you have a hard to guess, long, and easy to remember password. This method is also very effective for passwords that have to be shared with others, using phrases will make it fairly easy for even forgetful people to remember.

My second method I commonly use for passwords is good to use on websites that you might not use a lot, and therefore are prone to forget the password. What I will typically do with such a site is use a combination of the site name in a phrase. So with a site such as yahoo you could have a password such as “ilikeyahooalot”, or for google maybe something like, “googleisreallygreat”. Using this method you can also use it as a pattern so for attackr.com, using the previous pattern it would be “attackrisreallygreat”. It is good to note that if you use such a pattern it would be potentially possible if someone discovered one of your passwords to guess the others. However, this is fairly unlikely and better than reusing the same password over and over again, but not quite as secure as the first method.

Well I’ve used these methods fairly successfully for a while now and they have been a big help to me. I hope they are of use to you too, enjoy.

reCAPTCHA

graystatic — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 03:21:08 +0000

So I was on a site the other day and was prompted with a not so uncommon captcha prompt. A major 3rd party supplier of these (including on the comments here) is reCAPTCHA. They actually have an interesting twist of it. reCAPTCHA’s motto is “Stop Spam, Read Books”. So apparently what they do is use the millions of captchas served daily to convert scanned books into text. Computers don’t always do the greatest translating scanned images into text. So they use feedback from all the different captchas to translate these captchas into text. Supplying one known distorted text and an unknown text thus stopping spam and reading books!

Youtube Adds “Audio Preview” to Comments

graystatic — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 03:30:46 +0000

Youtube has now added an “Audio Preview” button to it’s comments form. Apparently this was inspired by a the mention of such a thing in the comic “xkcd” check out the comic here.

Google Advertises G1 on Front Page

graystatic — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 02:23:07 +0000

It’s rare that Google changes the standard links they have on their front page. I guess it not unusual they would use such a highly visited page to promote their new G1 phone. It looks like a pretty good phone from the pictures I’ve seen and the reviews I’ve heard. They did a good job on the G1 site with an interactive demonstration of the phone, you can see it here. You can check out some reviews on cnet and twit.

Russix Wireless Auditing

graystatic — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 06:16:20 +0000

According to the site “Russix is a Slax based Wireless Live Linux.” It can be used for wardriving or other wireless auditing tasks like that. It’s not very big at only about 230mb. For now at least, it only supports the Etheros chipset. It’s a focused, light solution for a wireless linux live auditing distro. Check it out here.

Plasma Pong

graystatic — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 06:00:52 +0000

Plasma Pong is awesome. It is really fun to play and looks beautiful. So here are some screen shots.

It’s free, but to find it you’ll have to do some googling.