Blog-o-Goodness
Google thinks the web should be fast, and that’s kinda the final word. Here’s some (older but still useful) info on site speed as a ranking factor.
I recently found a useful website for testing your website’s speed – it checks the website by accessing it from multiple locations (in multiple countries) and thus gives a better test than just checking the speed in your own browser.
I was looking for some tool to measure distances in pixels on screen so that I’d know the width of various columns in the themes of some of my WordPress sites (so that I could size advertising to the proper dimensions). A quick search came up with PicPick as the best. It seems pretty powerful – you can measure horizontal or vertical distances as well as do screen captures and color picking. It seems to play nice and just sit as a little toolbar icon when not being used.
I’ve been looking at WordPress shopping cart plugins and other ways to create an online shopping cart and I came across a link to a feature I didn’t even know PayPal has. Paypal can create random temporary security keys (an additional password for your account that is only good for a short time) to help ensure that only you can log into your account (since you’re the only one who can access this security key).
Some time between 8 and 10 years ago, I remember getting voice recognition software with the intent that it would make writing faster.
This was running on a machine with Windows 98 on it — and even with training it didn’t work very well.
I recently saw an iPhone app doing voice dictation and it worked great for recording me without training. It’s amazing how much power new computing devices have (even the tiny ones).
But seeing this video completely blew me away. Not to pick on Tyrone, but his combination of accents (I think it is Australian English combbined with whatever his native asian language is???) makes him difficult for me to understand, yet the software can understand him! That’s amazing! If it can understand him, I’m pretty sure it will be able to understand me.
I don’t know how people ever survived without the internet to answer those simple yet nagging questions…
Sure there are big questions that we manage to survive despite not having answers, but it’s these little questions that build up and bounce around and create little tiny stress puddles that never go away. For instance, what do people mean by “dining out?”
Let that fizzle around a brain for 30 years or so. It must be something dirty… but how dirty?
This changes EVERYTHING!
Gameplay video of Preppie from 1982 on the Atari 800