Lee.org

I am very fond of the WP Lightbox plugin I have on my blog. I’ve always wanted it to automatically scale images that were too large for the page. that way, I could happily upload full resolution images without worrying that my viewers would only get to see a tiny corner of the full image. I’ve found some new Lightbox-like plugins that do what I’m looking for, Shutter Reloaded and Lightbox JS. I want to like Lightbox 2.5 but it doesn’t have the auto-scaling and it takes forever (read: almost 2 seconds) for each image to finally appear on the screen given all it’s fancy window slides. :-(

What I want in a lightbox plugin:

• Opens image box smoothly (a quick fade would be nice
• Auto-scaling if the image is larger than the screen
• Very light footprint on my WordPress code… IE, don’t add code to each image tag in the database. Can be uninstalled seamlessly
• Multi-image gallery possible but not required
• When showing gallery images, the “next” and “previous” buttons don’t move when you hit the first or last image (IE, when the icons change from “[close] [next]” to “[previous] [close] [next]”

Here is an excellent site to print out whatever graph paper you need. Incompetech graph paper. He’s got ALL kinds of graphpaper there. Regular, mult-width (Engineering), dots, hex, semi-bisected trapezoid, iso-dots, octagonal, hexagonal, variable triangle… yowza!

This is what I created out for sketching out solar installations. To the right is a png of it.

My very good friend Travis has been running a few independent businesses very successfully for the last 4 years or so. He’s been growing at a tremendous but consistent pace. He started with Smartflix.com. It’s now the world’s largest how-to video rental store. He then expanded to Heavyink.com which is poised to become the Amazon.com of comic books (and then some). Both of these companies are functioning and doing well. At last count, I think he’s got 8 employees or so. HeavyInk is new. He’d like to expand it. To do this, he needs to add stock and man-power to get it rolling. He’s looking to borrow money. I personally think this is an excellent opportunity. I’ve been wanting to invest in this business for a while and I’m going to try now. I’ll let him tell you about it:

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Speaking of growth: we’d love to borrow somewhere between $100,000 and $500,000. We pay a nice interest rate. If you or someone you know is interested in loaning us funds (min amount is probably $20k or so; minimum term is probably 2+ years), get in touch. References, spreadsheets, accountant-verified books, etc. would, of course, be displayed.

If you’re not interested in loaning funds, but are looking to invest, that’s not our first choice, but we can talk. Minimum amount is probably $100-200k.
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Email me directly at for more information.

Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennet – I swear, I’ll never get through this book

The New How Things Work by David Macaulay – Fun bedtime reading

Farm Show Magazine – I love it!

Listening to lots of podcasts… The Sound of Young America from PRI is surprisingly good. It took a little bit to get past the knee-jerk reaction that it’s trying too hard to be the sound of young America.

A 2 ton 45 foot animatronic humpback whale

update: it’s not really for sale, just a prank :-(

While FastCGI has been running, calls to WordPress have gone from about 4 seconds to 2 seconds. Calls to Mediawiki have gone from 8 seconds to 5 seconds. :-)

I installed PHP_FastCGI on the blog and the (private) Flaming Lotus Girls wiki. I had tried installing it a year ago but it proved unstable. New instructions were put on the Dreamhost wiki and it’s been running well for the last few days. Here’s how I installed it:

in my root WordPress folder, I created a file called php5-wrapper.fcgi. In it, I wrote:

#!/bin/sh
export PHP_FCGI_CHILDREN=2
exec /usr/local/dh/cgi-system/php5.cgi

and then set the file to be executable like so

chmod u+x php5-wrapper.fcgi

Then I added the following to the .htaccess file:

AddHandler fastcgi-script fcg fcgi fpl
AddHandler php5-fastcgi .php
Action php5-fastcgi /php5-wrapper.fcgi

Done!

Now 3 PHP sessions stays active, waiting for people to call on my server instead of PHP starting up every time I get a hit. When I run ‘ps aux’, I see the processes just sitting there, waiting. Sometimes there’s up to 6 processes temporarily.

I just got an HP Color Laserjet 2605dn printer. Wow, the color images come out like photographs. HP is selling them on their website for $250 after a rebate.

As I was recommending to my sister recently…

Don’t buy an inkjet printer, the cost of the ink will kill you over time.

HP has the guts to tell us how expensive it really is.

With the good HP 99 ink, they says you’ll get 130 4″x6″ photos out of a $25 cartridge. That’s $0.20 per photo for the ink. Multiply that by 4 if you’re printing 8 1/2″ x 11″ = $0.80 per sheet.

For the laser printer, I recently printed 400 8 1/2″x11″ full-color brochures and the toner monitor tells me I’ve used up 20% of the capacity… IE I’ll get 2,000 full-size-full-color copies out of my $250 in color cartridges. That’s $0.12 per sheet.

But wait, there’s more! I can refill my color toner twice before the drum wears out for $80 per refill (I’ve refilled toner before and it takes < 15 minutes) That makes the cost per page for 6,000 full-size-full color pages $0.07 per page.

And if you’re not into refilling cartridges, then listen to this: the HP 2605dn comes with full toner cartridges… That means you get $0.12/sheet color printing out of the box. when the toner is empty, throw the whole printer away and get a new one for the price of toner cartridges. (that isn’t very ecologically minded, is it? No!)

More benefits to color laser printing:

• Laser toner doesn’t dry out on you like inkjet does. If you don’t use your inkjet printer for a few months, it’ll dry out and you need a new cartridge. It’s happened to me :-(
• Laser color usually looks better than color ink
• You can use more types of paper in a laser printer
• Laser printers tend to jam much less

Oh and did I mention that the HP 2605dn has automatic duplex printing (IE, double sided printing)? Oh and it has ethernet built in too if you wanted a network printer.

Go buy a color laser printer. Tell ’em I sent you.

I have copied my old Flying Journal (and) out of it’s original flat-file HTML and into WordPress. You can now find all my old and new entries by looking in the “RC” (IE Radio Controlled) tag in my blog.

Right now, there’s 52 entries, going all the way back to May 2003.

I just got update:returned a new laptop. It has Windows Vista, mostly because getting Windows XP via Dell would have cost $200 EXTRA. Though I heard last night from Rick L that if you call them on the phone and tell them, “I’m not buying a computer from you if it has Vista”, you can get XP at no additional charge.

I’ve been using Vista for about 1 hr and I’m just about ready to go back to XP. Vista is very pretty. Performance-wise, it makes my 1.9 Ghz dual core processor feel like a 400Mhz PII. It’ll often show you a screen but actually it’s not ready for you to click on it for 3 or 5 or 8 seconds. It’s very frustrating.

And for the security… this is how I feel:

local version:

2-12-08 Followup: I returned the Vista Laptop. Here’s another humorous video on the subject:

“I switched back to XP 3 weeks ago. …So much happier.”

local version:

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2-14-08 Followup: Derek points us to this one (original)

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Ok, this is pretty fun…

I got this in an email from Smartflix.com today

The Top Ten Wackiest DVDs at Smartflix.com

Continue reading ‘The Top Ten Wackiest DVDs at Smartflix.com’ »