So, a few days ago, I sporadically decided to install the Windows 8 Consumer Preview on my laptop. I just wanted to get a good look at what’s coming in the next version of Windows. Now, all commenting about Windows 8 aside, I had one pretty serious issue. You see, I’ve become incredibly reliant on the Programmer Dvorak Keyboard Layout. I switched layouts just over a year ago, but it’s put me in a relatively small group of people. While Windows includes three versions of Dvorak by default, Programmer Dvorak isn’t one of them.

I tried installing Programmer Dvorak on Windows 8, but it never showed up in the list of available layouts. While I’m sure this issue will be resolved when Windows 8 is officially released, I figured a decent number of people would like to use custom keyboard layouts. All it takes to get it working is a bit of registry hacking (which, admittedly, can be a bit risky).

First, install your layout. This will depend on your layout, but in the case of Programmer Dvorak, it’s a simple executable.

Next, in the Registry Editor (press the start button and enter ‘regedit‘ to access it, in case you didn’t know), find your layout. It’ll be under the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Keyboard Layouts, and will likely be the sub-key. Each keyboard layout has its own numeric key, and you’ll need to write it down for later. Alternatively, you can search the entire registry for the name of your desired keyboard layout. In my case, Programmer Dvorak’s code is 19360409.

Next, still in the Registry Editor, navigate to the key HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Keyboard Layout\Preload. There, simply change value of the string that says 1 to match your layout’s code.

Finally, log out and back in, and you’re good to go!

My second post of the day – and month – is all about Google. This may seem familiar, because it just so happens that my previous post also dealt with Google.

Google recently released, as is their custom, their Zeitgeist (which, defined, is the spirit characteristic of an age or generation).

This report details searches from the past year, including geographic distribution and a timeline. It’s interesting to look at and ponder over, though the most interesting part is the accompanying video:

Anyway, I thought it was a surprisingly touching video, entirely worth the 2 minutes and 54 seconds you’ll put into it.

A video of an Android tablet running Android version 3 (otherwise known as Honeycomb) is out. It’s incredible! First, Google has updated Google Maps to be totally vector-based (meaning it uses mathematical formulas to create the graphics, rather than downloading pictures), which makes downloading map information much faster. Second, it’s a tablet… Running a version of Android made for tablets…

What does this mean? We’ll soon be able to get tablets free from Apple’s walled garden — where good ‘ole Steve Jobs decides what’s best for everyone — and get truly customizable tablets. I’m excited.

Truthfully, I don’t know how much I’d use a tablet, as I nearly always have access to a computer, but it might be nice for reading or things like that.

Maybe one of these days I’ll give one a try. Especially if it’s running Android.

I’ve been exclusively using Google’s Chrome web browser for a while now, (for several reasons, about which I will post later) but I just recently discovered an amazing feature. And when I say amazing, I really do mean it.

How often do you want to specifically look something up on Wikipedia? Youtube? CNN? For me, it happens quite often. I’ll want something more specific than a simple Google search. That’s why I was super ridiculously happy to discover that Chrome allows you to quickly search those specific sites. All you need to do is visit a major site with search once, and Google will let you quickly search that in the future.

For example, if I want to search YouTube, I can simply begin typing a ‘y’ in my address bar, then Chrome pops up a little ‘Press Tab to search YouTube Video Search’. It’s pretty darn amazing. So then, I press ‘Tab’, enter my query, and I’m on my way to watching my video!

So far, I’ve discovered quite a few sites on which this works, including (but most certainly not limited to):

• YouTube
• Wikipedia
• CNN
• Google News
• Amazon
• Flickr
• Bing (Yeah, that’s right… You can search using Google’s competitor right from the address bar)

So anyway, I hope you find that to be useful. I sure did.

Diet & Exercise… Imagine that!

What’s most exciting is that I’ve been able to maintain a healthy, slow, steady pattern of weight loss. And guess how I achieved it? You guessed it… The time-proven “diet and exercise” that we’ve all heard so much about. You see, in my high-school health class I learned something that’s helped me a lot. I’m not 100 percent sure that it’s totally accurate, but it sure seems to make sense. It was this:

The only way to really lose weight is to consume fewer calories than you burn.

It sounds a lot like financial advice about which I’ve heard so much – all you need do is spend less money than you earn. And you’re set.

The exact same thing applies to losing weight. So, my solution has been simple – eat fewer calories in a day than I burn in that day. Now, of course, doing this requires some guesswork. It’s impossible to know exactly how many calories we burn or consume in a day… But we can get a pretty good idea. My method has been tracking what I eat and do.

Start a Diet – A Simple, Basic Diet

With dieting, I’ve been greatly helped by technology. Livestrong.com – a site centered on health – provides a powerful, free calorie tracker on their site. It’s easy enough to use, and once you’re in the habit of tracking your calories, weight loss becomes something rather straightforward, if not entirely easy.

The important thing is to watch nutrition facts and track everything you eat. I know, it seems extreme… But otherwise you’ll never know how many calories you take in. Really. But if you get in the habit of tracking everything – whether on paper or by using technology- you’ll know exactly how much you’re eating and how much more you can eat in any one day.

Exercise

Setting up an exercise routine (and having someone with whom I can exercise) has been very helpful as well. Though it is still definitely possible to lose weight without exercise, it’s certainly more difficult. Exercise helps burn more calories (which in turn allows you to eat more), build muscle, burn fat, etc. But you already knew that.

Now, I admit, exercising all the time can be difficult. But setting up a routine and sticking to it (use technology to help with that, too… Like having your phone remind you when to exercise) can prove incredibly helpful. I personally find that early in the morning helps me out all day. I work out first thing, then shower and get on with the day.

All Together Now!

To get started, you need to calculate approx. how many calories you need to eat in a given day. Many online resources can help with this. They’ll all give slightly different answers, but as long as it’s a trusted source, you should be okay. Then, track what you eat and what you do, and eat the appropriate number of calories. It’s that simple. Now, it takes some time and effort to get into the groove, but once you’re there, it’s great. And entirely feasible.

Now, at least, I’ve said what works for me. It won’t work for everyone. But I’ve found it to be simple and straightforward enough to follow, and it’s sure worked. Plus, it feels great.

I know I’m not the only one who has some potential security loopholes in my devices. For example, I leave my laptop signed in to gmail all the time. It makes life easier for me. But, it also opens me up to some potential problems.

Now, I’ve never lost my laptop or phone. But if I did, thanks to an awesome open-source project, we can improve both our security and our ability to reclaim our lost possessions, should we lose track of them.

This project is called Prey. The idea is rather simple: you install prey. If you lose your computer or phone, you simply tell Prey. Then, your computer (or phone) begins reporting its position, erasing files, or basically whatever you want it to do when it’s lost (or stolen). You can even have it periodically take pictures using a built-in camera, and send those photos to you, thus helping you identify either its location or the person who took it.

It’s pretty sweet, overall, and has helped me improve my peace of mind regarding my computer and whatnot. All-in-all, it’s pretty sweet.

myemail+topic@something.com

Now, this still sends the email to you. Actually, at first, it doesn’t do anything spectacular. However, when coupled with simple filtering in your email, you can have any email sent to that address (with the +whatever) always do specific things.

Now, let’s say that I have a lots of different accounts with various financial institutions. Each account will send me emails periodically. You know, monthly statements and the like. But when those emails get to my inbox, I want them to be automatically ‘labeled’ (in gmail) or sent to a specific folder (in most other email clients).

With the trick above, it’s surprisingly easy. All you need do is enter your email address for all financial institutions as youremail+finance@something.com instead of your normal youremail@something.com. Then, from within your email client (I’ll give specific instructions for gmail, but other clients should be similar), go into ‘Settings’, then ‘Filters’, and ‘Create a New Filter’. Then, in your filter, simply enter youremail+finance@something.com, and tell it what to do with it.

It’s a surprisingly simple way to easily filter things out, and get things to organize themselves when they hit your inbox. This trick is especially useful if you have a variety of people emailing you about one specific topic (students, for example), and don’t want to bother organizing all your messages.

And that’s it! I hope you find it useful.

The past two weeks, I was struggling. With a horribly uncomfortable chair and a desk measuring only slightly larger than most textbooks, I was having trouble getting work done. Of course, the fact that I tried fitting two 21-inch monitors onto that size of a desk didn’t help much… But either way, I was lacking space.

I spent several hours last week pondering the size of my room, comparing it to the size of my desk back home… After vising Ikea’s site several times to find the measurements of my desk (very lonely, sitting at home) and using a spare cable as a measuring tape, I decided that it would be possible — if only barely — to fit my desk (and wonderfully comfortable chair) into my room.

Today, I backed the car into the parking spot nearest the stairs to my apartment and carried the parts of the desk (including the massive slab making the largest part of the desk) into my bedroom, where I spent a couple of hours assembling it.

And wow. Wow. With a comfy chair and spacious desk, I’ve worked so efficiently — almost beautifully. It’s been awfully fulfilling, uninterrupted work. And now I’ve finished — free to focus on something other than school assignments… Mmmm… Happiness…

As part of one of my projects, I’ve been working on creating (or, rather, patching together) an image tagging system. The web application for which I am building it is meant archive some of my family’s genealogical records. It will allow members of my family (both close and distant) to access records and information about our families. This includes photos, documents, and stories.

As such, I decided it would be beneficial to have a system in place that would allow for Facebook-style tagging of people. While I’m sure it is impossible to find the names of all the people in the photos, it would at least enable us to find images of specific people and help archive those photos for future generations.

It’s proved quite a challenge, but, using a simple JavaScript plugin to annotate images, I’ve been able to create a way to allow people to annotate the images with information about the people in them.

It should be quite useful in the end. I mean, what use is a photo of people if you won’t know who they are?

Oh, also, the man in the photo is not actually named ‘Bob’. I just called him that for fun.

While giving blood, it is customary to squeeze a stress-relieving ball with the hand located at the end of the arm that is donating. When I was ready to give blood (after some miscommunication between the staff members), I received the spud shown above.

I thought it very appropriate that a spud be emblazoned with BYU-Idaho’s logo, so I thought I would share.

This summer, I’ve made the decision to enter more deeply into the freelance design business. Because I enjoy designing, this seemed a logical choice. Additionally, it provides me more flexibility in doing my work, because I’m not tied to a specific location or time to work.

As part of that decision, I decided that my site needs to focus more on that part of my work. Thus, this particular part of the site can truly become my personal blog, where I can post thoughts, experiences, and the like.

However, I’d also enjoy hearing your feedback on the changes on the site. I’ll also be working (as much as I am able) at refining the blog part of my site. There are several things that I’d like to change, starting with the typography.

So, drop me a line in the comments about what you think.

Web Application Development

I’m going to write this new blog about my efforts to create a custom web application. I know most of you that read this won’t be super-interested in that, but I realized that it could provide an interesting amount of insight to others who may be interested in similar things.

For the past year or so, I’ve been slowly working on developing a new web-based application for swim teams. You see, I’m a coach for a swim team, and the software that’s out there right now for team and meet management really isn’t so good.

Because I know that there are many people out there interested in developing their own web applications (once again, probably not most of you…) I realized that documenting my experiences may be helpful to others who pursue the same path. At least, I’m hoping they will be.

And so, pending the termination of finals, I will be starting work on the new site.

Lately, pretty much every second of my productive time has been logged. Now, this may seem a bit strange to many of you, but it’s been awfully good for me.

It started with freelancing

You see, I started tracking my time working on freelance projects, because on a freelance project, I need to know exactly how much time I spent in order to receive the correct amount of money for it. When I realized how effective it was, I started tracking my time on everything.

Then I started wanting to know exactly where all my time went. As a college student, with various projects across my classes, it was hard to know how much of my time was spent doing productive things and how much was lost — whether through video gaming or other pursuits.

So I started tracking all my time

I started keeping track of all the time I spent in classes or on coursework. Within a week, I knew that much of my time was simply wasted. I spent hours just sitting on the computer surfing the web. And yet, I was surprised just how much time I did actually spend on schoolwork. Combining the time that I worked with all my coursework and my freelancing, I was racking up quite a few hours in worthwhile things. Just not enough.

Why this was helpful

What really surprised me, though, was how much more I could focus when I knew that what I was doing was being recorded. I wanted to be able, at the end of the week, to see where I had spent my time. To know that I was, in fact, doing the equivalent amount of work that I would with an actual career.

Each day, I’m eager to get started. I want to be doing something that will contribute to those hours for the day. On days that I have more things that will keep me from work, like a doctor’s appointment, and extra-long drive, or time to hang out with friends, I find myself starting earlier to make sure that I can still log enough hours to feel like I’ve been useful.

What’s more, I can tell if I’m working too much. If I log over 60 hours in a week, I’m pretty sure that the next week I need to spend a bit more time in recreational pursuits. Life has to be balanced, you know. Therefore, I can know if I’m spending too much or too little time with something.

Streamlining my workflow

In addition to knowing how much time I spend, I track it according to my projects, classes, or other pursuits. For example, I know that last week I spent over 12 hours either in or working on homework for my calculus class (yeah, I’m not the biggest math whiz).

When I know where my time goes, I can decide where I can improve. For awhile, I was spending at least 30 minutes each day preparing workout plans for the swim team I coach. Then I realized that if I planned the whole week at once, it took much less time.

I love it

Knowing where my time goes is priceless. I’m so much more productive now, and I’m not so backed-up on school projects, because I’m focusing on spreading them out over the course of several days. When I finish one task, I’m immediately onto the next one, trying to keep the clock ticking, rather than stopping to play video games for a couple of hours. Procrastination isn’t a problem anymore. Really.

My tools

There are many systems out there that allow you to track your time free of cost, but I personally use Toggl. At times it has some problems synchronizing, but it lets me have a little program open on my desktop that shows me how long I’ve been working on a specific task. Plus, there’s an iPhone app that has proved to be awfully useful.

The end

All in all, time management is important for all of us. This is what’s worked for me. Incredibly well, actually.

People tend to enjoy things more when they’re fun to do. Have you ever noticed that? Well, just in case you hadn’t, it’s true. For example, if I think climbing a tree is fun, I’m more likely to climb it than I would otherwise be.

And that applies to all things. I remember that when I was younger, and didn’t enjoy doing chores, my parents counseled me to ‘turn it into a game.’ While it was, at times, difficult to be creative enough to turn anything and everything into a game, when I succeeded, those things did truly become much more entertaining.

And thus it is in this video – by transforming these stairs into something fun, many more people elected to take the stairs. And thus, kudos to Volkswagen for the idea of the fun theory. The idea is that socially beneficial activities, such as recycling bottles, throwing things away, etc, can be encouraged by making these activities fun for people.

Check out thefuntheory.com to learn more. (And see more videos like trashcans that make noises, a bottle recycling arcade game, etc.)

Economics is a fascinating subject. I don’t know if it’s just me, but I am entranced. Now, before you go off thinking that I’ve totally lost my mind, let me explain.

Learning about what best serves everyone’s economic interests is ever so interesting. For example, learning why it may, in many situations, be more beneficial to invest money than to donate it hit me like a cannon. And I don’t mean beneficial for me — I mean for the man who stands on the corner, begging.

Now, for those of you who think that I am simply losing my mind, I’ll explain:

Let’s say you have $1,000 with which you have absolutely nothing to do. Not likely to begin with, but for the purpose of this demonstration, it’ll work. Now, with this money, you could:

1. Choose to walk up to a man standing on the corner and give it to him outright — no strings attached.
2. Donate it through a charitable organization. Let’s say, the Salvation Army.
3. Invest it in a start-up business that provides, let’s say, handcrafted wheat bread.

Now let’s go through what might happen — hypothetically, of course — in each of these situations.

Situation 1 – The man on the street corner uses this $1,000 to buy a new jacket, pay a month’s rent, buy food, ride the bus, repair his bike tire, and maybe stop at a fast-food restaurant several times. And that’s a wrap. Overall, he’s had a nice month, thanks to your kindness and generosity. But what about next month? He’ll likely be relying on someone else’s donation to carry him along. So where is he at the end of the month? Not far from where he started.

Situation 2 – In 2004, the Salvation Army reported an overhead of 17%, meaning 83% of funds donated were actually spent to assist those in need. Assuming there were no other costs along the way, (which seems quite doubtful to me), that means $830 of your hard-earned money made it to those who needed it. And, like in the situation above, much of it will go to pay for food and other amenities. Perhaps a few will have the chance to take part in a class to improve their well-being and self-sufficiency. Well done. In the end, what’s happened? You’ve supported an employee of the Salvation Army, bought food, and maybe helped one person along the way to self-dependence. Not bad, altogether.

Situation 3 – The business in which you invested, Bread Co. Incorporated, uses your thousand dollars to purchase ingredients to make 300 loaves of bread. They also use part of it to pay their employees’ wages. With the revenue generated from the bread they sold (using ingredients supplied through your contribution), they generate revenue to purchase ingredients for 400 loaves of bread for the next month – and still pay their employees’ wages. This perpetuates as the business grows, allowing the business to employ more people, generate more bread (which is also quite useful to the community), and overall, make a profit. Not only that, but your $1,000 has increased drastically, and you can pull some of that money out (part of the profits) and use it to help start another business. Or, if you feel so inclined, donate it as in situations 1 and 2.

And thus you can see, though very few of us would imagine that investing in a business could possibly be helpful to those who are needy. But it most certainly can be. Now, I’m not saying that’s in all situations.

It certainly depends on the specific circumstance in each situation. But at least now we know it’s a possibility. And it’s one that I had never really considered — mostly because it’s something I never would have initially expected. But upon further examination, it makes sense. So, what do you think?

New and revised categories will soon appear, including design, photography, and life sections. I’d like to be able to focus on displaying my talents with graphic and web design as well as photography, but I’d like to avoid completely shutting the personal nature of my site. Thus, I’ll include ‘life’ section to provide information about what’s going on in my day-to-day life.

I will, at some point, be launching a special-interest blog, though that will come at a later date, when I’ve narrowed down the topic for the site and have some appropriate content.

Also, I will be adding a portfolio section to the site to showcase my work. I’d like to focus more on freelance design and development, and therefore will be implementing changes regarding that, so that I can direct potential clients to my site for previews of my work.

This will help me streamline the process and focus more on posts, my portfolio, and doing work for other people. In all things, keeping well-organized is conducive to productivity. Thus, having a well-designed site will direct me toward that end.

Let me know what you think in the comments. It’s still a work in progress, but with your help, it will be much better than it would be with only me.

I don’t know how many of you know about this, but Microsoft recently released a brand new version of Internet Explorer. It’s Internet Explorer 8.

Now, being a nerd, this is of great interest to me. Especially with the fact that I’m a web-designing nerd. And I’ll tell ya why: Internet Explorer 8 (and its predecessor, Internet Explorer 7) embraces long sought-after web standards.

Internet Explorer 6 was, until very recently, used by a whopping 40% of the web-browsing public, which was absolutely ridiculous. It’s a web-developer’s nightmare, really. It’s not compliant with standards for web design, which meant that things that looked absolutely incredible in other browsers, such as Firefox, Google Chrome, and the newer versions of Internet Explorer, looked absolutely horrid in Internet Explorer 6. As a matter of fact, they still do.

Truthfully, the reason I write this is to encourage any of you who still may be using Internet Explorer 6 (that’s 25% of people that visit my site!) to please, please upgrade. Not only will you do a favor for yourself and all web developers, but you will also do a favor for starving people, because Microsoft is donating money for food for each copy of Internet Explorer 8 downloaded from this site.

It will make your life better. I promise you that.

]]> http://russ-taylor.com/blog/2009/the-new-internet-explorer/feed/ 0 http://russ-taylor.com/blog/2009/the-new-internet-explorer/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/russ-taylor/ZmgI/~3/TrqJxVEgqCA/ http://russ-taylor.com/blog/2009/building-a-quality-blog/#comments Tue, 01 Sep 2009 21:04:13 +0000 r.taylor http://russ-taylor.com/?p=414 Lately, I’ve been reading a lot about building an effective blog – and I’ve been realizing how right all that I’ve been reading is. It’s mostly stuff that I’ve mentioned before, things that help draw people to your blog. And really, the key is specialization.

Different Types of Blogs

In the blogosphere, there are multiple types of blogs. The first, and most common type, are simple personal blogs. These are, as the title suggests, personal in nature, run by a person or family to serve as an informative portal to those who have a personal interest in the individual or family running the blog. For example, if my mother ran a blog, I may be interested in reading what she had to say, for the simple fact that she was my mother. However, a personal blog run by a person I’ve never met, have no close connection to, who lives in the outskirts of Toronto, probably holds no interest to me.

There are also special-interest blogs. These specialize in informing members of a specific community of advances in that community, and therefore providing info that is valuable to those members of the community. These serve a role very similar to that of special interest magazines, though they do have some important advantages – as they’re normally free.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. There are also corporate blogs and news blogs. As you might imagine, corporate blogs apply mainly to shareholders and others who hold a vested interest in specific corporations or companies. News blogs apply to any person who has an interest in the type of news provided, though they are almost always run by large news corporations.

Building a Successful Blog

Before building a site, it’s important to consider what type of blog you want it to be. Personal blogs are easy to build and maintain, because they rely on little more than some relatively interesting personal stories.

Since I know nothing of either news blogs or corporate blogs, I’ll instead focus on special-interest blogs. These, in particular, require frequent posts, in-depth study, and high-quality content. But, of course, these blogs also provide valuable business opportunities.

What Does this Mean for Me?

It’s for that reason that I’ve decided to focus more on building a special-interest blog. I’ve decided that building a special-interest blog could help me in many ways to be able to improve myself. Up to this point, my site has been somewhere in-between. I’ll still maintain a personal blog, for those of you who enjoy reading about my life.

But, in the meantime, while I’m building new layouts for both blogs and figuring out exactly how I’m going to arrange it, I doubt that I will be posting much. And, hopefully, when I’ve got it all organized, some of you will find the information on my other blog to be interesting.

Oh, and by the way, this post was meant to be a sort of test to see how I could do in formatting a more detailed, interest-based post. How do you think I did? Let me know in the comments, if you would be so kind.

Sometimes I’m awfully lucky. For example, with this photo, I didn’t even plan to get out of the car to capture it. But, at the insistence of my girlfriend’s parents, I strolled down into the meadow off the side of the road and captured this shot – which turned into one of the best shots of the whole day. Gotta love it.

I had to write something about this movie, since it was pretty much amazing. But first, I’ll give you a bit of background.

I am, officially or unofficially (it really matters not), one of Pixar’s greatest fans. I once doubted them — at the release of Cars — due to my incredulity that a good movie could be made based on Nascar, though soon thereafter I realized the error of my ways, and have since repented.

And therefore, when I saw, about one year ago when I watched the classic Wall-E, that Pixar would release their next movie on the very anniversary of my birth, I knew that I simply had to see it — on that day. Not only that, later on I realized that one of the characters, the cute little scout guy, shares my first name. At that point, I knew that Pixar was simply paying tribute to one of their greatest fans.

Overall, it was quite a stellar movie. I sincerely believe that I am going to have to see it again shortly, because it is such a great movie. While I have to say that it likely isn’t the best movie ever created, it most certainly was very enjoyable, and definitely worth multiple watchings.

And therefore, it’s amazing.