Cool Stuff – Jeffc.me

The L33t News Podcast

May 11, 2008 By Jeffro Leave a Comment

Elite Tech News Podcast Logo For you tech bloggers out their who consider themselves to be on the “B-List” or maybe even the “Z-List” you’ll appreciate this podcast. Hosted by Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins who is a writer for Mashable.com, the Elite Tech News podcast serves up the best in tech news collected throughout the week by Mark and his panel of guests which include but are not limited to, Steven Hodson of WinExtra.com, Adam Ostrow and Sean P. Aune also of Mashable.com, Art Lindsey of ArtLindsey.com, Louis Gray of LouisGray.com, Frederic of the Lastpodcast.com and Jason Kaneshiro of Webomatica.com

So far, the show has been a blast to listen to, especially once Steven gets on a topic he can rant about. Hearing the *BEEP* when he is on a rant is priceless and downright hilarious. Probably not as funny for Art who acts as the producer of the show and ends up having to edit those parts out.

I’ve really enjoyed their conversation in regards to making money blogging, how Twitter can become a profitable company, and how all of these guys express their independent opinions on various subject matter. I only wish I could call in and participate but my work schedule won’t allow it.

The Elite Tech News podcast has varied on start times but for the past few weeks, the show has aired live at 8:30 PM EST on Sundays. So if you’re looking for an intelligent group of guys that don’t mind having fun while speaking their mind, tune in live to the Elite Tech News podcast. If at all else, I highly suggest subscribing via Itunes as I have done.

If you would like to sample the show, click on the play button to hear their episode from last week.

Filed Under: Cool Stuff Tagged With: l337, leet, podcast, talkcast, talkshoe

Where We Do What We Do

May 10, 2008 By Jeffro Leave a Comment

I don’t know what it is about work spaces that intrigue me so much but I find them to be visually entertaining. Every work space that I have seen is unique in it’s own right. It’s where people end up creating, working, communicating ect. I strongly believe that the workspace can be a good indication into the makeup of a person. Then again, I might be crazy. I have an idea as to what my ideal work space would be like, but because of the constraints of not owning my own home, I really can’t create my ideal workspace and have to deal with the cards that have been dealt.

As I was monitoring my Twitter stream the other day, Steve Rubel passed along a link to WhereWeDoWhatWeDo.com This is a site dedicated to workspaces that have been submitted by user’s across the globe. WWDWWD is a project created by the Subata Corporation which is worked on within their spare time. Honestly, I really like the site’s design as I feel it places plenty of emphasis on the photos located on the front page. Upon clicking on one of the photos, the left hand sidebar gives you photo information with a link to digg the article. Below the photo information box is the comment section, followed by the comment form.

I thought it was a bit goofy that you have to approve an email that is sent to you before your comment can be displayed on the website, but I suppose that is a good way to deal with spam, considering if the emails are not confirmed, the comment will never make it to the site.

I love checking out every one else’s workspaces. I posted mine back in an archived article entitield What Is Your Blogging WorkSpace? My layout has slightly changed as I now have a new tower for my desktop PC as well as a black HP all in one printer, that sits in the bottom drawer of the notebook desk. Other than that, the workspace has remained the same.

Personally, I think the best workspace showcased on WWDWWD is THIS ONE. What work spaces have you come across that you wish you had? Link to them in the comments section and let’s talk it over.

Filed Under: Cool Stuff Tagged With: community, photos, wherewedowhatwedo, workspaces

WordPress Group Projects

February 10, 2008 By Jeffro 2 Comments

WordPress Group Projects

Thanks to Utahcon who sort of started the train, I’ve decided to create a forum for WordPress based group projects. As you can see from the image above, we have already started working on developing a way for the Codex to be printer friendly or at least provide a PRINT link on Codex articles. We have also begun to work on creating a Recent Posts hack that displays posts that are not on the front page. For example, my recent posts plugin shows the last 5 posts I’ve published on this blog. However, this is a moot point as those 5 blog posts can be seen by scrolling down the front page. The plugin hack we are working on would display posts that were on the second page of WordPress, not the first. So far, we are making progress, but we are still short of having a working solution.

I thought this would be an awesome idea. Instead of one person putting together a plugin or coming up with a solution, we can have multiple people participate until the project is completed. I consider a project completed as being one that has a working, tested solution.

I do have a few guidelines setup in the forum which describe how I want the group projects section to be managed:

The Group Projects Section of the forums will house all of the various group projects that are created by you and myself. If you are going to start a group project, please use a very descriptive thread title so that we can understand at a glance what the group project is.

Each forum thread within this section of the forums will be a single group project. Anyone and everyone is encouraged to participate in the project until that project has been completed.

Do not post anything in this forum that will not be a group project, if you do, the thread will either be moved or deleted.

Please register an account on the forums and participate in the various projects and also, let me know what you think of the idea.

Filed Under: Cool Stuff, News Tagged With: forums, group projects, hacks, plugins, projects, Wordpress

Free C2C AM StreamLink Week

February 2, 2008 By Jeffro 3 Comments

CoastToCoastAM

For those of you who do not have access to the Coast To Coast AM Streamlink service already, or for those who can not catch the program when it airs live, your in luck. Coast To Coast AM is doing a free streamlink week. Usually these promotions only last a weekend, but this time its seven days. For those of you who don’t know, Coast To Coast AM is a live talk show radio program that airs every night between the hours of 1 A.M. EST to 5 A.M. EST that is broadcast across the world. Topics that the show covers include: aliens, ufos, abductions, dreams, alternative medicine, bigfoot, cryptozoology, lochness, astronomy, time travel, physics, ect. If it’s interesting and requires intelligence, these guys talk about it. You won’t find anything mainstream here. Sure, the guests and their theories can be nutty at times, even down right hilarious. But the information that is presented on this show is generally not covered or discussed anywhere else within the magnitude of Coast To Coast.

To Mike, Mark, and anyone else interested in this sort of thing, I highly encourage you to take full advantage of the free streamlink service this week. I would be very interested in knowing what you guys think!

We’re happy to announce an upcoming Free Streamlink ‘Week’ running from Wed. Feb. 6th through Sun. Feb. 10th. Participants will have a chance to test drive our subscriber package, including podcasting current shows, and downloading recent favorites. Join us here at 7pm PT on Wed. to start experiencing the excitement and convenience that Streamlink offers!

Filed Under: Cool Stuff, News Tagged With: aliens, artbell, bigfoot, c2c, c2cam, coasttocoast, coasttocoastam, georgenoory, talkradio, ufos

Drowning In Icons

January 30, 2008 By Jeffro 5 Comments

NerdBusinessLogo

NerdBusiness has created quite the link bait post which I have fallen for which contains 5,798 high quality icons for use on the web, within applications or RSS. This is by far, one of the biggest, most organized icon posts I have seen to date. All of the icons within this post are free. However, all of the icons listed within this article are the largest size within the pack and are of .jpg format. That means that if you use the jpg image on a white background, it will probably look ok. But if you want to use these icons on a different colored background, make sure you visit the authors home page and download the respective .PNG icons.

Filed Under: Cool Stuff Tagged With: iconpacks, Icons, iconsets, largeiconset, nerdbusiness

Move Over Gratavar Its Ravatars Turn

January 30, 2008 By Jeffro 3 Comments

Ever wanted to add some flare to the commenting section of your WordPress blog? Grok-Code has coded up a nifty little plugin called Ravatars. Ravatars displays a random avatar for each visitor that is generated at random. The icons are based on email so if a user uses the same email address for each comment, the same Ravatar image will display. You can choose to customize the plugin to display Ravatars that are related to your theme or visitors can opt to configure their own avatar via Gravatar.

Ravatar comes with a default set of images, or you can remove those and upload your own. It works by creating a hash of the email address, and then using the hash to choose an image and the place where the image should be cropped. Uploading your own images gives you the power to customize avatars for your site. A backpacking site might use use nature scenes. Or you might pick images that match your blog’s color scheme.

In order to customize the plugin, you should upload photos to the plugins/ravatars/parts directory. As of this writing, the only two image formats supported are .jpg and .png. Grok-Code recommends keeping the amount of avatar images within the directory to around 40 although if your blog contains a lot of unique comments, you will most likely need to increase the amount of images if you want each commenter to have their own image.

You can download the Ravatar plugin from their release page by clicking here. The release page also contains installation instructions as well. If you happen to download and install this plugin, let us know what you think of it. I think it will be a nice way of spicing up the commenting section so it doesn’t appear so bland.

Filed Under: Blogging, Cool Stuff Tagged With: avatar, gravatar, plugins, ravatar, Wordpress

Secret Life Of A Blog Post

January 30, 2008 By Jeffro 2 Comments

LifeOfABlogPost

The folks over at Wired.com sure know how to come up with interesting InfoGraphics which turn complicated datasets into beautiful visual aids. This is no exception. Wired.com has put together a nifty InfoGraphic of how a blog post travels the interweb. The graphic starts off with a post being written and then published on a blog. The blogging service then pings servers letting the search engines know you have provided new content to crawl. Next, your post is crawled by search engines, data miners and the obligatory text scrapers. Then, the post content makes it’s way towards ad servers that serve ads based on the keywords that are found within the post.

Aggregators then take your blog post and send it out to human reader. Once your post is out on the web, social bookmarking takes over. At this point, people who find your blog post may comment or write their own post about the first post and the entire process starts over again.

The blogosphere explained in an elegant fashion. Does anyone know if Wired sells posters of their infographics?

Filed Under: Blogging, Cool Stuff Tagged With: Blogging, blogpost, lifeofablogpost, travels, wired

Human Mind Vs Google Searcher

January 20, 2008 By Jeffro 2 Comments

Brad Williams, no not the Brad of Strangework.com but a different Brad Williams is known for having a superior memory. Brad can somehow recall events in uncanny detail. In fact, he can recall any event or anything he has experienced to the point of knowing what the weather was like that day.

Williams’ type of detailed, exhaustive memory is called hyperthymesia and few known cases exist. Brad’s brain scans are now being studied by neuroscientists at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory at the Univeristy of California, Irvine.

Wow. That hyperthysmesia is something I wouldn’t MIND being diagnosed with. An incredible gift if you ask me. In a future film that has yet to be released, Brad goes up against a Google search user in a challenge to answer 20 questions. Brad ended up answering 18 of them correctly and turned out to be 11 minutes faster than the Googler.

There is still hope for us yet! Check out the video interview done by ABC.

Filed Under: Cool Stuff Tagged With: google, googler, humangoogle, hyperthymesia, memory

D-LINK Goes Custom

January 3, 2008 By Jeffro Leave a Comment

Dlink Router With Skin

D-Link and Skinit now offer customers the option to customize their routers with some 3000 designs, including fashion designs, sports teams, colleges, tattoo art, initials, symbols, and corporate logos, as well as the ability to import a personal photo using the Skinit custom design tool.

Skinit’s skins are personalized, high-quality vinyl covers specially designed to fit a broad variety of consumer electronic devices. Initially, D-Link and Skinit are providing personalization solutions for the following routers:

D-Link® DIR-655 Xtreme N™ Gigabit Router, DIR-625 RangeBooster N™ Router, DIR-615 Wireless N Router DGL-4500 Xtreme N Gaming Router, DGL-4300 Wireless Gaming Router, DGL-4100 Gaming Router and the DI-624 802.11g Wireless Router.

Click here for more info

Filed Under: Cool Stuff, News Tagged With: dlink, hardware_skin, networking equipment, skinit, skins

5 Emoticons You Have Never Seen

December 20, 2007 By Jeffro 2 Comments

Ever get sick and tired of seeing the same old emoticons, over and over again? Wouldn’t it be nice to see some fresh, creative emoticons instead? In this post, I highlight 5 emoticons you may never have seen before. DeviantArt is awesome!

:Factory: by *Jtcgh

Error guys… by ~Big-E

The Legion of emoticons by *Lorna36

Juicy by ~iTop-edition Juicy Top

Dangling by =synconi

What are some of the best emoticons you have ever seen?

Filed Under: Cool Stuff Tagged With: art, deviantart, emoticons, graphicart, graphics