Web design, web development Print 3D Internet Mac and Design

New .tel domains

20 June 2009

I decided to jump aboard and grab myself one of the new .tel domain names that were not aloud to the general public until march 6th 09. This is not an ordinary domain but is a place to store contact details and allow its users to use this to pass out their contact details.
Reading the website of the .tel creator, Telnic (www.telnic.org). They show lots of promise for more future usage options. I bought into this and got one. I tried Jason, jayce, jas, jay, jace. Unfortunately all gone. I didn’t want jasoneyermann.tel as I wanted to forgo spelling my name if I were to pass out my contact details. I ended up choosing jason123.tel (www.jason123.tel). The telnic site said that .tel sites were SEO proficient but has yet to rate my name or jason123 in the google search engine.

BMW ad

25 May 2009

I came across this great BMW ad on the net. I hope it’s real.

AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi Install - Mac Pro 2009

20 April 2009

My recent Mac Pro purchase didn’t come with a AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi Card. So I ordered the part and installed it myself. Apple said this should not be attempted by customers and an Apple authorised worker should carry this out. The part came with no instructions and I found very little info on the internet. However my installation was successful and I thought I would shares the instructions here.
I found the image above on the internet of an installed airport card, but please take note that I have found that this card had been installed incorrectly as the image shows the user attaching wire 1 to the top and wire 2 to the bottom. The correct way is to attach wire 1 to the top and wire 3 to bottom leaving wire two covered. The installation took me about 30-45 minutes as the the parts are so small, fiddley and on the mother board.
The location is on the bottom section, so you need to take out the bottom shelf. The AirPort Extreme Wi-Fi Card need to be placed in the mother board to the far left. There will be text there saying mother board.
I found the most easy way is the first clip on the wires and then insert the card and then insert the screws.
Then put back the bottom shelf and turn on your Mac. The airport sign should be in the top right part of the screen strait away without have to do anything. Click on it and accept what it has to say (I can’t remember) and voila. I’ll start working.

The purchase of a new 2009 8 core Mac pro

19 April 2009

In March Apple released their newly configured Mac pro. I decided last year that when the new version came out it would be time to upgrade my old 2.1 G5 iMac. Which I have done.
I purchased the Mac Pro 8 core 2.66 with 6Gigs of Ram. I also purchased the 24 inch apple display and for a second screen the 22 inch samsung T220-HD, Which was one of the things that I was unable to do on my G5 iMac. This now leaves me lots of screen space to open panels up in when using final cut pro and adobe programes in.
My first thought was that it wasn’t as fast as I thought it was going to be. Although apps seem to open twice as fast compared to my G5 iMac, I half expected photoshop for example to open in about 2 seconds. And complex custom brushes in photoshop are still slugish.
I also had all my apps upgraded I now own the adobe CS4 master collection along with along with the updated final cut pro apps. I’ve still not had much time to play around with the new apps but the adobe CS4 collection seems much improved espesically photoshop with its now rotating canvas.

Amazon.co.uk and online retail sales

1 March 2009

Launched in 1995, Amazon has become one of the largest stores in the world if not the biggest. I started using Amazon around 2000 – 2001 and have since bought around 50-80 products easily spending several thousand pounds. The majority of these products consisting of books. Currently retail sales are falling and online sales raising. According to Computing.com the UK retail market fell by 3.3% from last year and Online rose by about 30%. Although the total amount spent on the internet is only 4% of the total market this seems to be following an upward curve. A number of things could be helping this. More people have the internet than ever before, online confidence, much better value, convenience and open all hours.
Amazon’s site has some great features. The wish list and product comments are two of them. Even if I intend to buy elsewhere I will use Amazon’s product comments to get some honest information about a product. There are a couple of rules I follow when reading comments. I always skip the first comment. It’s clear to me that many of Amazon’s products contain reviews by the author (disguised). Thankfully Amazon has recently added a new feature by where you can click the reviewer’s names and view their other reviews. If there are none I also skip.
I have reviewed a few books on Amazon. Apart from one I have given all the books I’ve reviewed 5 stars. I gave the other book just 1 star and was annoyed that this review (which was the only review of the book) had seemed to be removed some months later.
I also use Amazon Associates feature and have included a book store on one of my sites.
I’m currently involved in creating an online store with my employer and I am learning a whole new number of things through this.

Related links
www.amazon.co.uk/

www.computing.co.uk – related link

Removing Firefox outline with CSS

8 February 2009

By using the Firefox browser you will get an outline on image links once clicked (as shown on the apple website above) or if you click on a linked then change your mind, the outline will stay. If you want to create an image map then this can ruin the effect. This happens even on many large sites like Apple and Firefox’s homepage. I’ve found an easy way to remove this outline. Just use the below CSS code near the beginning of your CSS file.

The CSS outline effect works only on a few browsers and is not supported by IE6.

a {outline: none;}

Alternative Stylesheet

20 December 2008

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/alternate/

Today I found an article on the alistapart web-site talking about alternative stylesheets, They provide some Javascript. With some time spare I added some alternative stylesheets and used the javascript provided by Paul Sowden on alistapart. There are now four colour square buttons on the left side of the screen. Press these in order to change the stylesheet. I had used a different stylesheet swapper about 3 years ago on the Mintinit.com, but this stylesheet swapper seems easier to implement.

Command + 'F'

20 December 2008

I have recently discovered the Command + F keys (to find on the Mac). I knew of a few applications that made use of this function. However, I now realised this function exists in almost every application I know. I now use it all the time. One application is the Safari Browser. when I search for a term in Google and then I get a page consisting of lots of articles I used to have trouble finding the information that I was seeking. The find function solves the problem.
The most useful situation is using the find function in Dreamweaver (or probably any other web creation tool). Instead of searching down a long list of CSS names in a style sheet I now can use the magic find tool. I’m now saving lots of time using this method. Although I still believe it’s important to keep structure to the stylesheet as keeping similar CSS rules together helps deal with design issues