Category Archives: Cool Links

Photo Printing

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I printed a few photos from the Ghana trip at the kiosk in the local CVS. The pictures came out great.

QOOP.com is partnered with Flickr, where I upload all my photos. Oddly, it seems you must be logged into an account at one of their ‘partner’ sites to even see their offerings, so I can’t link you to anything. (And, infuriatingly, site navigation is accomplished via something other than standard HTTP, so hitting “Back” takes you to wacky places. Plus, clicking just on whitespace, which I apparently do fairly often, takes you random places.)

But anyway! I’m tempted to try out some of their products with some of the photos I’ve taken. I think this would make a really cool print, for example. $15.99 buys a 16×20 print. They go up to 30×40 for for $39.99. (The goal is to merge lots of photos, but you can do it with a single one too.) Oh, you can apparently just get prints in the same sizes for the same price.

You can also do a “Photo Book,” 20 double-sided pages. (It sounds to me like it’s 10 sheets of paper, double-sided for “20 pages.”) $12.99. They offer up to 20 pictures to a page, although they come out as small thumbnails. I’d rather go for something like 2. (It’s 40 cents a page extra, and they mention that you can go up to 400 pages…) They have mini-books, too; $5.33 buys a 20-page 5.25 x 3.5″ book. (You must buy in multiples of 3, though.)

Ooh, and canvas prints! Those are super-cool. $29.99 for an 11×14, though, and up from there. A 16×20 is $49.99, and they go all the way up to 30×40, for $229.99.

They also make stuff like greeting cards (neat), calendars (yes!), mousepads (odd), shirts (more odd), and luggage tags (most odd).

I think I want to try a 16×20 print of the Boston Skyline. (Maybe that’s the Charles River and not Boston Harbor?) I think I’ll wait for my eBay auctions to complete first, though, since I feel like I’ve been burning through money lately.

Mint

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Kyle was raving about Mint this morning. I just came across it on Digg and looked into a bit.

It’s got a very attractive website, and PC World raves about it. It’s sort like Quicken, only Web 2.0 based, and very, very spiffy. And free.

It’ll keep up to date for you and everything. All you have to do is put in all your bank account numbers.

I’m very eager to try this service. Except that I steadfastly refuse to put all of my bank account information into a website. Especially a startup one. If Paypal provided it, I might trust it. If my bank provided it, I’d definitely trust it. But a startup? Honestly, I think it’s safe and secure. It’s got some big names behind it, and it looks too ‘big’ for it to be one scammer. But that doesn’t mean I’m in a hurry to give them all my financial data.

OSWD

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Many moons ago, I loved the site OSWD. Basically, people submitted really nice web designs, and they were free. The site had some issues, and forked a few years ago, into OSWD.org and OpenWebDesign.org. I came to prefer OpenWebDesign.org. These days, neither is updated that often. OpenWebDesign has a forum on their main page, and it’s usually full of spam links.

So I bit, and posted on the forum asking if they’d allow someone like me to volunteer to help a bit, even if it’s just moderating comments. It was rapidly going to down the road OSWD went, I told them, and I didn’t want that.

I just remembered, so I went, excitedly, to see what response I got. Had I spurred others into action, causing lots of people to say, “This site sucks right now. Let us help!” Did the site admin apologize and take us up on our offers, or at least pledge to do better?

Nope. One guy, whose username is an obscenity, posted saying that the only people left are those there to ‘[expletive] things up’ because they have some issues with the site administration. And that was all.

But he mentioned another site: OpenDesigns.org. And it’s just become the place I go when I want to find some good design. It’s a nice, clean site. It’s not overrun by spam links to porn sites. It’s supposed to be community-driven. Check it out!

UBCD: It’s Magic

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I’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: the Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) is worth its weight in gold. (Err, I guess that’s not a grand compliment given the weight of a CD. Let’s instead say that, had I paid $200 for it, I don’t think I’d regret it.)

Least year I accidentally hosed the bootloader on my laptop. All my data was, in theory, intact, but all I got when turning my computer on was “OS not found,” which is very scary on a live system with important data on it. I tried all sorts of complex stuff, before I remembered that I had the UBCD. I booted it up, selected “Partition Tools,” and found a program that automagically restored my bootloader.

Monday night, one of my professors explained that he was just given a used laptop, and that it was all well and good except that he didn’t know the password. (And it was a WinXP machine where you need one.) I volunteered to help because he’s a really nice guy and, well, it can never hurt to be on a professor’s good side.

It took me about two minutes, and most of that was waiting for things to load. It includes a utility that let me just blank the password in the registry. It was kind of unceremonious, but I rebooted, ejected the CD, and then got the windows login screen. I just hit enter, logging in with no password, and it worked!

Of course then I spent an hour uninstalling old junk and downloading updates. As I sat there, he asked if I’d come help out a friend at his office–who would pay me–who was having similar problems. I agreed, and he called them, telling them that the FBI might be looking for me, but as long as I wasn’t caught beforehand, we’d be coming by another day to help him.

It’s got all of those utilities that come in handy when you’re absolutely desperate. I think I could make serious money on the side helping people with problems like this. And best of all, it just works. Oh, and it’s free.

Mailserver – Funambol?

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I still have no mailserver running here. (I’m now forwarding all my other accounts through GMail.) I’ve wanted for a while to set one up, but it has to be good.

I just came across Funambol, which is apparently an enterprise-grade server package for syncing mail, PIM data, etc. with mobile clients after installing a client-side package on your mobile device (Palm, Blackberry, and Windows Mobile devices, as well as generic Java ones, are all supported.)

And then, of course, you’d want Roundcube for webmail. It looks good, lets you search your messages, and doesn’t log you out after you finish composing a lengthy e-mail. (Are you listening, OWA?)

Oh, and DSpam for Bayesian spam filtering with a good web interface.

What caused this whole thought process was someone asking if there existed a service that basically offered what I’ve just described. He stated he wouldn’t want to pay more than $10 per mailbox. (Hosting six mailboxes at that rate, I’d be making a profit!)

Two-Dollar Bills

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First sobriety checkpoints, now something else I’ve wondered about for a while and finally got around to researching: Why are there so few $2 bills?

The Wikipedia article is particularly informative, but the short version is that there was a lull in production decades ago, but they now produce the $2 actively. They’re not at all scarce: they minted 61 million in 2005, for example. There are a few reasons they’re not in wide circulation:

  • Everyone thinks they’re rare, so when they come across one, they save it.
  • Not everyone seems to think that $2 bills are even legal tender
  • A big catch 22, but cash drawers don’t have a slot for $2’s, so stores don’t use them in any great volume.
  • Also a big catch 22, but banks, although they usually carry $2’s, don’t usually hand them out unless you ask.

So basically, there are hundreds of millions of two-dollar bills in circulation, but no one’s actually circulating them. They’re not at all rare, they’re just in everyone’s sock drawers.

Copper Prices

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Am I the only one amused by the ongoing stories about people breaking into buildings to steal the pipes, because scrap metal prices have skyrocketed? The whole thing is just bizarre: I’d expect thieves to be stealing TVs or cash, not copper pipes. Like this guy in Chester.

Will someone let me know if the scrap value of pennies exceeds their face value? I have a lot.