Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on June 27, 2008 by CyberNet.

Fun Friday

You’ve seen that show MythBusters before, haven’t you? If you haven’t, you’re missing out. It’s a show on the Discovery Channel that focuses on “busting” myths. They take a variety of rumors, popular beliefs, and urban legends, and then put them to the test to see if they’re really facts, or just myths. Today we thought we’d pay tribute to one of our favorite shows and share some popular myths with you. We’ll also include a few quotes from Jamie and Adam (co-hosts of the show, in case you didn’t know).

For those of you that watch, you must have a favorite episode. Let us know which one it is in the comments below. For us, one of our favorites is the “Fingerprints Lock episode” – take a look:

Rumors, Popular Beliefs, and Urban Legends Put to the test…

Are these Fact or Myth?

1. Many churches have banned rice-throwing at weddings because the little white pellets expand in the stomachs of birds that eat it off the ground, causing them to explode. (Busted) – some churches ban throwing rice because of the threat it poses to humans walking on a littered surface.
2. A farmer thought he was just putting dinner on the table when he picked up an ax and beheaded one of his chickens. Turned out he had a legend on his hands after the now headless rooster bobbed and weaved back to the henhouse and lived for 18 more months without a head. (Confirmed) – according to the Guinness Book of World Records.
3. Eating turkey makes you sleepy (Busted) – it’s usually the big and heavy thanksgiving diner that causes one to become sleepy.
4. Hostess Twinkies never go bad. They have an indefinite shelf life. (Busted) – A twinkies’ actual shelf life is about 25 days, not years.
5. Coca-Cola originally contained cocaine. (Confirmed) – That’s how it got its name! By 1929, the popular beverage was completely cocaine-free though.
6. If you go swimming less than an hour after eating, you will get stomach cramps and drown. (Busted) – there are no reported cases of drowning after swimming with a full stomach.
7. Eating poppy seeds can cause you to fail a drug test – (Confirmed)
8. The poinsettia plant is highly toxic and can kill a person or pet that eats the leaves. (Busted) – this is just a rumor. The worst that could happen is you’d get an upset stomach from eating the plant.
9. In anticipation of an upcoming wedding, one bridesmaid circumvented time limits on tanning sessions by visiting multiple salons a day over a period of several weeks. When she began to feel unwell, she went to the doctor only to find out that she had cooked her internal organs. (Busted) – tanning lamps emit ultraviolet light waves, and ultraviolet radiation only penetrates one-sixteenth of an inch into your skin — not nearly enough to affect internal organs.
10. A few years ago, a young man was killed by his own pet python, who mistook his owner for food. (Confirmed) – In 1996, a New York man died after his pet python wrapped itself around him.
11. The $2 bill was taken out of circulation in 1976 (Busted) – $2 bills are still being printed – over 121 million of them were printed in 2004.
12. A penny placed on a train track can derail a train. (Busted) – there have been no documented cases of a trail being derailed due to a penny on the tracks.
13. If you sit too close to the TV, you will ruin your eyes. (Busted) – your eyes may get tired from sitting too close, but you won’t have permanent damage.
14. The actor who portrayed the “Marlboro Man” in TV and print ads for cigarettes died of lung cancer. (Confirmed) – to date, at least two men portrayed as the “Marlboro Man” have died from lung cancer.
15. Boiling a cup of water in a microwave can cause it to explode. (Confirmed) – Only under certain circumstances, but it happened enough that the FDA issued a warning regarding it.

Great quotes from Mythbusters…

• Adam – “I reject your reality, and substitute my own”
• Tory – “Holy air cannon, Grantman!” Grant: “How long’ve you been waiting to say that? Tory: All day.
• Adam (goldfish memory episode): “My fish are eating their own poo.”
• Adam and Jamie – “Remember, don’t try this at home. We’re what you call “experts.”
• Adam to Jamie – “Come, Silent Walrus, let us storm the castle!”
• Adam (after something explodes) – “THAT’S what I’m talking about!”
• Jamie – “Adam, go eat a cookie.”
• Adam – “So you may think that nothing’s going to happen and come close to the fire, and then BOOM, your head’s engulfed in a fireball, and the next thing you know you’re missing an eyebrow, and I know what that’s like.”

Please Note: All of the above information came from the Mythbusters section on the Discovery Channel website which can be found here.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryYour Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryCyberNotes: Sanyo Launches 42 Inch Weatherproof LCD MonitorWrapUp: Ubuntu 9.04 Codename, Customize IE8 Beta 2, and MoreYour Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary

This article was written on April 02, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

One of the things that I’ve always enjoyed in Safari 3 is the inline search interface, and just the other day I thought I would peruse around the Internet trying to find a way to do the same thing in Firefox. Why is searching special in Safari? Because it dims the background of the page that you’re on, and highlights the matching results as you type. The result that you currently have highlighted bounces up and down to catch your eye, and the whole experience is overall visually appealing.

When searching around for an extension I didn’t come up empty handed. I found one called XUL/Migemo that did exactly what I was looking for, but the problem was that the extension does a few other things that I don’t really need (nor wanted). After a little more searching I came across this post in the MozillaZine forums which talks about how you can set it up yourself. After testing it I can verify that it does work on both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3.

Note: There is a video demonstration at the end of the article that shows what the end result looks like.

–Setup–

The setup process consists of three pretty easy steps. You’ll have it done in just a minute or two:

1. Download this package that I’ve assembled which includes the four files you’ll need.
2. There are three JavaScript files (userChrome, SafariHighlight.uc, and ucjs_findbar.uc) that need to be placed in your profile’s chrome folder. Use this table to find your browser’s profile:
   

   Operating System	Profile folder location(s)
   Windows 95/98/Me	C:\Windows\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ C:\Windows\Profiles\<user name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
   Windows NT 4.x	C:\Winnt\Profiles\<user name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
   Windows 2000 and XP	C:\Documents and Settings\<user name>\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
   Windows Vista	C:\Users\<user name>\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\
   Unix	~/.mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/
   Mac OS X	~/Library/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/ ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/

   After you’ve found the profile folder just copy the three JavaScript files (userChrome, SafariHighlight.uc, and ucjs_findbar.uc) into the chrome folder located within your profile. If the UserChrome file already exists you may want to back it up before overwriting it.

3. Now you’ll need to install the extension which I’ve included in the download from the first step (here’s its homepage in case you’re curious). I’ve cleverly named the extension DragMeIntoFirefox because that’s exactly what you need to do… drag the file into the Firefox window. Then proceed with installing it, and restart the browser when it’s done. If you don’t want to drag the extension into the Firefox window just go to File -> Open File and browse for the extension.

–Using the New Search Feature–

When you go to perform a search for the first time you may not think that it’s working, but I’m confident that you’ve followed the three steps accurately. The reason why you may not be seeing the dimmed background and nice highlighting is that you need to click the Highlight All button on the Find bar. Immediately after doing that you’ll see the effects go into play.

Alternatively you can just hit the Next button (or the keyboard shortcut Control+G) to go to the next result. After pressing that the Highlight All feature will automatically be enabled. Those of you with the automatic find-as-you-type enabled will want to use the Control+G keyboard shortcut to move on to the next result if you want to see the special effects.

–Demonstration–

Is it worth the work? I think it’s a really nice feature to have, but you be the judge:

–Overview–

So that’s how you can get a Safari-styled search interface in Firefox 2 or Firefox 3. After setting this up I have fallen in love with it, but it would be nice if this was bundled into its own extension.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryCyberNotes: Make Firefox 3 More Like SafariSafari’s Inquisitor Comes to FirefoxYahoo Acquires Inquisitor for SafariSafari 3.0.4 for Windows – Spelling and Grammar Check

This article was written on November 16, 2006 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Back in July (my how the time flies) we demonstrated a way that would keep your Spam folder clear in Gmail. Every time Google labeled an email as “Spam” it would be sent straight to your trash. That is a good solution for some people but sometimes it is nice to go flip through the messages before you dump them to make sure you haven’t missed the $1,000,000 you’ve inherited from your second cousin’s aunt’s nephew-in-law who lives in Norway. Yes, you know those emails.

Firefox users can optionally hide the Spam count by installing the CustomizeGoogle extension but there isn’t anything else that I really use in that extension so it isn’t worth me installing it. This fix can easily be applied to both Opera and Firefox though without installing a single thing.

Firefox users:

1. Locate and open the userContent.css in your Firefox profile directory. The file is in the  Chrome folder inside your profile. If the file does not exist you will have to make it (see here for more details). Another alternative would be to download and use the Stylish Firefox extension which makes it easy to add custom CSS for websites.
2. Copy the following text and paste it into the userContent.css file:
   @-moz-document url-prefix(http://mail.google.com),url-prefix(https://mail.google.com)
{#ds_spam b {visibility: hidden;}
#ds_spam b::before {content: "Spam"font-weight: normal;visibility: visible;}}
3. Save that file and pull up Gmail in Firefox…the Spam counter is all gone!

Opera users:

1. Right-click and save this file to your computer.
2. Press F12 and choose “Edit site preferences” from the context menu.
3. Select the Display tab and in the “My style sheet” section choose the file that you just saved.
4. Press OK to save your changes and reload Gmail to see that your Spam counter is all gone!

That is one thing I have always loved about Opera and that is how you can easily add custom stylesheets for websites without having to install anything. There is so much that you can do with creating your own stylesheets to make your web browsing experience a lot better. Hopefully this will just tip the iceberg for you and maybe you’ll start to think up some of your own stylesheets that you can create or maybe you’ll find some nifty ones at userstyles.org.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

CyberNotes: Your Week In Review With Sunday’s SummaryHide Spam Counter In GmailHelpful Tip: Automatically Delete or Mark Spam as Read in GmailYour Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryYour Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary

This article was written on May 07, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

One of my favorite additions to the Firefox 3 browser (currently in Beta) are Smart Bookmarks. There’s a good chance that you’ve played with things in other applications that are similar to Smart Bookmarks. For example, iTunes (and many other media players) have what are referred to as Smart Playlists. These are playlists that automatically assemble themselves based on specific criteria, such as the “most played” and “recently added” media. Smart Bookmarks are very similar since they can show you things like your most visited bookmarks or your recently added bookmarks:

Just a few weeks ago we showed you how to quickly restore the default Smart Bookmarks that come with the browser, but did you know that it’s also possible to make your own? Thanks to the new bookmarks backend that Mozilla has implemented it’s actually pretty easy for you to create your own Smart Bookmarks once you understand how they work. An extension will inevitably come along that makes this a no-brainer, but it will take you no time to catch on to manually creating them.

The first thing we’re going to do is show you the steps needed to create a new Smart Bookmark, and then we’re going to give you an overview of the query syntax you’ll want to use to take things up a notch.

–Creating a Smart Bookmark–

There are a few different ways that you can create a Smart Bookmark, but I’m going to show you the one that I believe is the easiest.

1. Open up the Bookmarks Organizer by going to the Bookmarks Menu, and click the Organize Bookmarks option.
   
2. Click the Organize Menu and choose the New Bookmark option:
   
3. Now you need to type in whatever name you would like for the Smart Bookmark. In the location field, however, is where you will insert the specialized “URL” which we’ll cover in the next section. This screenshot shows an example location that will return the top 10 bookmarks you visit the most:
   
4. The Smart Bookmark that you just created should now be visible in the Bookmark Organizer, and you can place it wherever you would like. The content will dynamically change based on the criteria that you specified in the previous step.
   

–Smart Bookmarks Queries–

In Step 3 above you were told to insert a specialized URL into the location field of the bookmark. This is really the thing that differentiates a Smart Bookmark from a regular bookmark. Each location field for a Smart Bookmark will start with “place:” followed by a few parameters that tell the bookmark what its contents should contain. You’ll also notice that each parameter is separated by an ampersand (&).

Want some examples? Here are a few to get your creative juices flowing:

• 10 Most Visited Sites:
  place:queryType=0&sort=8&maxResults=10
• 10 Most Recent Bookmarks:
  place:queryType=1&sort=12&maxResults=10
• 15 Most Visited Bookmarks:
  place:queryType=1&sort=8&maxResults=15
• 10 Most Visited Sites with “CyberNet” in them:
  place:queryType=0&sort=8&maxResults=10&terms=cybernet
• 5 Most Visited Sites at the cybernetnews.com Domain:
  place:queryType=0&sort=8&maxResults=5&domain=cybernetnews.com

Looking at some of those examples there is a good chance that you picked up on how the queries work. Over at the Mozilla forum they have begun assembling a rather comprehensive list of parameters that you can use with the queries, but there are quite a few that most of you won’t use when creating these manually. Here are some of the more useful ones that I used in the examples above, along with a brief description of the values that go with them:

• sort – This is used in all of the examples above, and this is what determines the order in which the bookmarks are sorted. A majority of the examples I gave use a sort value of “8″, which organizes the results according to the largest visit count first. Here are all the values that you can use with it:
  • 0 – Natural bookmark order
  • 1 – Sort by title, A-Z
  • 2 – Sort by title, Z-A
  • 3 – Sort by visit date, most recent last
  • 4 – Sort by visit date, most recent first
  • 5 – Sort by uri, A-Z
  • 6 – Sort by uri, Z-A
  • 7 – Sort by visit count, ascending
  • 8 – Sort by visit count, descending
  • 9 – Sort by keyword, A-Z
  • 10 – Sort by keyword, Z-A
  • 11 – Sort by date added, most recent last
  • 12 – Sort by date added, most recent first
  • 13 – Sort by last modified date, most recent last
  • 14 – Sort by last modified date, most recent first
  • 17 – Sort by tags, ascending
  • 18 – Sort by tags, descending
  • 19 – Sort by annotation, ascending
  • 20 – Sort by annotation, descending
• queryType – This is also used in all of the examples above. It’s used to specify whether you want to search the History (a.k.a. sites you’ve visited), Bookmarks, or both.
  • 0 – Searches only your History
  • 1 – Searches only your Bookmarks
  • 2 – Searches both your History and Bookmarks
• maxResults – Use this to specify how many results you want returned.
  • 0 – Return all results
  • 1 to ?? – Any number besides “0″ will indicate the number of results you want returned
• domain – Specify the domain of a site, such as “cybernetnews.com” as seen in the example above.
• terms – Word(s) that you want to search for. From what I gather it searches most areas of your sites/bookmarks including the title.

The different parameters that I just covered are only a small amount of what’s actually available, but they are the ones that have proven to be the most useful to me. If you get overly ambitious you can checkout the full selection.

–Overview–

It’s inevitable that there will be an extension that makes it easier to configure these Smart Bookmarks, but it’s actually not that hard to manually create them. Although it could get tedious if you wanted to make a bunch of them.

Now we would like to turn things over to you. Let us know in the comments what kind of concoctions you come up with so that more of us can benefit from your infinite wisdom!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Restore Firefox 3 Smart BookmarksYour Week in Review with Sunday’s SummarySpace Saving Extension for Firefox Bookmark Toolbar UsersYour Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryHelpful Tip: Recover Lost Bookmarks in Firefox 3

This article was written on September 20, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tutorial Thursday

Seam carving (also known as content aware image resizing) has been the hit lately when it comes to photo editing. It all started with the presentation by Ariel Shamir who put together a nearly breathtaking demo. In it he showed how scaling images could be done without losing or distorting the important aspects of photos.

Just three weeks ago we got a glimpse of what an implemented version of such a technology could actually do, and as expected, applications and plugins are popping up all over that make use of the technology. This article will focus on one free application called Liquid Resize that has made huge progress over the last few weeks. Below we’ll highlight some of the features, and you can watch a video we put together on how to use the program.

–Liquid Resize (Free Windows/Linux Application)–

The primary way that you’ll want to use seam carving is with the free program called Liquid Resize. It has almost everything that the original demonstration included, and it produced decent results from the few photos I tried. It’s available for both Windows and Linux, and doesn’t require any installation to begin using it!

Here are some of the features it has:

• Increase or decrease the size of the image using the seam carving algorithm.
• Animate the process of scaling the images (as seen in the video demonstration below).
• Mark areas of the photo that you want to be removed first, and other areas that you want to be removed last. This is actually pretty easy to do because the program offers a resizable brush to designate the respective areas (called masks).
  • You can temporarily store and recall masks, which is important because the masks are removed once you begin resizing the image.
  • You can also save and load masks which is meant for more long term storage.
• Zooming capabilities are a nice touch if you’re working with a large photo.
• A “Reset” option to restore the original image.

I would say that this works pretty well, and it’s actually not a bad way to quickly crop someone out of a photo (by marking the person as an area to be removed first). Sometimes you get unexpected results, but it’s normally only if you try to resize a photo more than 50% of the original size. And be careful when trying to use this on large images because the process can take quite awhile, and in cases like that I would disable the animation.

Here is a video that I put together to show the Liquid Resizer in action:

–Other Alternatives–

Liquid Resizer is the best seam carving app that I’ve come across, and it’s especially nice since it’s free! There are a few less-detailed alternatives available, and so I thought I would present those as well:

• GIMP Liquid Rescale plugin – This just gives you input options for the desired width and height, and then makes the appropriate changes. Definitely not as extravagant as the standalone program I mentioned above.
• Picutel Photoshop plugin – I didn’t actually try this one out because the free version only works with images up to a resolution of 640×480. Beyond that you’ll have to pay a whopping $95 for the plugin!
• Web-based Flash version – This is a nice way to quickly try out the seam carving, but you’ll have to pick a photo that is already online. This is also extremely limited in what you can do.

–Overview–

There are still some things that I would like to see Liquid Resizer do, such as “blur” the seams that it adds/removes to the photos. That way the edges wouldn’t always look so jagged. Other than that I would say that this technique definitely has a good future in image resizing, and I can’t wait to see where it is taken.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Rsizr – Online Image Scaling Done Right!Your Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryDaily Downloads: Ubuntu, nLite, DC++, and MoreDaily Downloads: Notepad++, ReNamer, Songbird, and MoreCyberNotes: Options For Resizing Your Images