bradgrier.com

Category: How to

  • Two resources for planning your lunar photography evening

    A friend poin­ted me to this BBC art­icle about tonight’s full moon. It seems that tonight’s full moon event will occur when the Moon is the closest it’s been to the earth (dur­ing a full moon) in 15 years. Well, methinks. A per­fect time to get out the pho­to­graphy and tele­scopy equip­ment and cap­ture this event. But…

  • What to know when changing website hosts

    A couple of weeks ago I found the fol­low­ing in an email from my webhost: Your web host­ing account for bradgrier.com has been deac­tiv­ated (reas­on: site caus­ing per­form­ance problems). Although your web site has been dis­abled, your data may still be avail­able for up to 15 days, after which it will be deleted. After a quick call…

  • Live election night coverage online (Canadian Election)

    Anoth­er Cana­dian elec­tion has come and gone. Pro­grammed main­stream media cov­er­age was again, less than inspir­ing. I found that to truly enjoy this nation­al exer­cise, you have to watch it in the com­pany of friends, as you would a Sat­urday after­noon hockey game. I spent elec­tion night online. Using a vari­ety of free sources, I…

  • 2 More Simple Home Backup Solutions

    photo cred­it: nick­wheel­eroz With the fin­an­cial crisis swirl­ing around this week, I took anoth­er look at ways I keep my data safe. To best achieve this, off­s­ite backups are a must. Should my com­puters become dam­aged or stolen, my data is still secure. I’ve writ­ten before about Mozy, an effect­ive auto­mated online backup sys­tem, but…

  • Telemarketing gains another enemy — the Canadian government

    Pre­vi­ously I’d writ­ten about iOp­tOut, a free ser­vice, set up by Cana­dian Law Pro­fess­or Michael Geist. Well today cit­izens of Canada are now able to register on anoth­er Do Not Call list, this one run by the government.  Mar­keters should real­ize that tele­market­ing is so 20th century. But, even with this double-double assault on tele­marketers,…

  • Google Chrome: a quick look and how to block ads with Privoxy

    photo cred­it: Randy Zhang Google Chrome is no Fire­fox (yet). For the last week and a bit, off and on,  I’ve been using Google Chrome (Google’s new entry into the browser wars). On the 3 XP-based sys­tems I’ve used it on, I’ve found it to be very fast, very effi­cient, and stable. Pretty good per­form­ance for…

  • I love mashing technology! (freebies)

    Moo + Linked­In = Free Busi­ness Cards I’ve writ­ten before about Moo (cards & stick­ers) and Linked­In (the busi­ness social net­work), but this is the first time I’ve writ­ten about both in the same post. Short story. Moo is let­ting you make 50 of their beau­ti­ful photo-enhanced busi­ness cards for free! It’s really mashup2 Moo itself is…

  • Fear. Uncertainty. Doubt. Hyped DNS Exploit reporting helping or hurting?

    photo cred­it: kevin­dooley Head­line: Research­ers unleash DNS attack code Head­line: Vul­ner­able to a DNS cache pois­on­ing at home? Head­line: Attack Code Released for New DNS Attack First off. This is a ser­i­ous issue, make no doubt about it. But is the report­ing hype sur­round­ing this exploit appro­pri­ate? Here’s some quotes of that hype: Yes­ter­day’s exploit, explained Storms,…

  • Bag Open. Cat Out. Internet in danger! OpenDNS to the rescue?

    Your ISP may be vulnurable to the Multi-Vendor DNS Issue. Here's how to tell, and a simple fix you can do to protect yourself.

  • Merging domains — important things to consider when you feel the urge to merge

    photo cred­it: Kev­in Steele A friend recently asked me for a bit of advice regard­ing mer­ging two cor­por­ate domains. Two organ­iz­a­tions, with sim­il­ar or com­pli­ment­ary lines of busi­ness are now one. What to do about the left-over web­sites. A quandary. Below I’ve out­lined 6 areas to con­sider, but I’m get­ting ahead of myself. I guess…

  • LinkedIn explained for the common folk!

    Every time someone asks me to explain why I use and pro­mote Linked­In, it seems I have a good 15 or 20 minute con­ver­sa­tion com­ing. Then they invari­ably want to check out my pro­file and see who I’m Linked­In to. Now I’ll just point them to this excel­lent Com­mon­Craft video. Simple, easy to under­stand, and enter­tain­ing. And…

  • Tweaking your FeedBurner / FeedSmith plugin to support WordPress 2.5+ tag feeds (easy!)

    photo cred­it: mag­bag Sorry for the über tech in this post, but I thought this was a simple fix that any­one run­ning a Word­Press 2.5+ blog could do if they wanted to enable ‘Tag Feeds’. Before I get into the how, let’s explore the why briefly. Some back­ground: Feed­burn­er is the ser­vice I (and many many…