‘Geek Squad’ Archives
Unix: How to Automate Thumbnails
Use a shell script to automate the creation and uploading of thumbnails. [Read More]
Wordpress: How to Disable Post Revisions
By disabling post revisions in Wordpress, it reduced the database size and allowed the wordpress MySQL database backups to complete. [Read More]
Wordpress: How to Target Ads for Different Categories
Display different ads in each categories in your Wordpress blog. [Read More]
LBB Webserver Status Bulletin
LBB was offline due to corrupted mySQL database. The tables were repaired and the blog is back online [Read More]
Wordpress: How To Get A Random Post On Front Page
I thought I would post this tip since it might be of interest to to anyone running a wordpress blog. Wordpress has become the most popular blogging software. Normally a blog displays the posts on the front in normal blog order, which is reverse chronological order. Kind of [Read More]
Measuring Website Speed with WebPagetest
Photo courtesy of Standard Travel Photos click for larger image I have been tasked with optimizing the web pages at LBB for speedy page loads. Well you can’t optimize something unless you can measure it. So here is a free tool at webpagetest.org for webmasters to [Read More]
Search Engine Optimization: Speed Counts
Let me say right up front that I know very little about Search Engine Optimization. What is Search Engine Optimization? From my limited understanding, Search Engine Optimization, or SEO in geek-speak, means optimizing your website so that it gets into the search engines and [Read More]
How To Save Flash Movies with Mac OS X
Many websites, such as youtube and daily motion, show videos using Flash. If you like a video enough to want to watch it later, you will find that you can’t just right-click to save the movie. One thing you can do is bookmark the page. But sometimes the video might [Read More]
Fixing OS X Font Errors In ImageMagick
We installed ImageMagick on Mac OS X 10.4.11 using MacPorts. Everything worked great except for the text. If you run the convert command and try to draw text you get this message: convert: unable to read font `/Library/Fonts/Arial' @ annotate.c/RenderFreetype/1044. Open up [Read More]
Installing ImageMagick on Mac OSX
We have a need to quickly resize JPEGs. There are tons of programs for Mac OS X that can do this, freeware and payware. We tried a few of them. Most of them are either drag and drop or you browse for a folder. In general they work pretty well. But they never quite seems [Read More]
How To Restore A Wordpress Database
Recently our wordpress database got corrupted and needed to be repaired. In another article, What To Do When Your Wordpress Blog Vanishes, I wrote about how to using phpMyAdmin to repair tables that were corrupted . But sometimes repairing tables does not fix the problem. [Read More]
How To Disable All Comments in Wordpress
Yesterday we had some problems with the database getting corrupted. As mentioned in a previous article What To Do When Your Wordpress Blog Vanishes, some of the database tables have been getting Overhead which can be fixed with repair table command in phpMyAdmin. One of the [Read More]
What To Do When Your Wordpress Blog Vanishes
Last night around 9:30pm, I received an urgent call from the editor of launabeachbikini.org. Their website, which is powered by Wordpress, had completely vanished. Just like on the cover of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the first thing is: Don’t Panic. I [Read More]
New Webcam Camera for Christmas
The original webcam we had was a Logitech E1000 that was purchased at Tesco department store in Prague for about 500 crowns. It almost immediately started acting flaky like it had a bad connection. Finally today I hooked up a high-end video camera to use as the webcam. This [Read More]
Apple Introduces New 27-inch iMac
Last week Apple announced new iMacs, a 21.5-inch and a 27-inch. Here is what Apple said about the new displays: The 21.5-inch, 1920-by-1080 display has 17 percent more pixels than the previous 20-inch iMac. The 27-inch, 2560-by-1440 display has a whopping 78 percent more [Read More]
Performance Guide for Macintosh
Buying a computer for digital photography can be confusing, to say the least. Which model is optimum and how do you get the best performance out of it? Here is an invaluable resource for anybody looking to purchase a Macintosh computer. This report will help you: 1. Choose [Read More]
Limits of Digital Photography
Here is an article about the limits of digital photography using current technology. I was going to post this in the Camera Corner, but this has some major geek stuff going on like quantum physics. The author is both a photographer and a physicist. Check out this [Read More]
Remote Stripping of EXIF Meta Data
In a previous article, I wrote about stripping EXIF meta data from jpeg image files to speed up downloads. We used ExifTool by Phil Harvey which runs from the unix command shell. Well suppose you have thousands of jpeg files already on a webserver and you would like to [Read More]
How We Added Live WebCam
There is a live StudioCam feature on Laguna Beach Bikini. Here are a few technical notes on how we added this feature to the website and how you can easily do the same thing. The StudioCam is just another name for a webcam. I suppose if it was set up on the beach it word [Read More]
