How to fly in minecraft
Written on September 7, 2011 at 4:02 pm, by Al
It took me a few minutes to work this one out, so I thought I’d post the link: http://www.xboxmb.com/forum/100-minecraft/27675-zombe-mod-installer-minecraft-flying-mod-installer-update-1-7-3-a.html
Simply download the installer and run it (make sure you run as an administrator on Vista & 7). Select your options and you’re done!
You’ll need to run Minecraft from the downloadable .exe file (available on the Minecraft website) rather than from your browser.
Don’t forget, this only works with 1.7.3!
Simple, free shopping with OpenCart
Written on February 12, 2011 at 6:04 pm, by Al
Choosing an online shopping solution is often a tricky thing. There are literally thousands of carts, stores, plugins and systems for e-commerce.
There are plenty of high-end systems ideal for large-scale e-commerce, but if you’re just starting, your budget is often limited or sometimes non-existent.
ZenCart and it's somewhat clunky admin interface
Cheap or Open Source systems have a reputation (not always unfairly) for being a little hard to use. Anyone who’s used ZenCart will be familiar with the feature overload when navigating the back end. When you’re setting up for the first time, the last thing you really need is to spend months trying to convince a system to do what you want it to.
OpenCart is a neat, efficient system. Whilst not overflowing with features, it’s a breeze to navigate, and does contain all the core features you’d look for when setting up a shop:
- Unlimited Categories
- Unlimited Products
- Unlimited Manufacturers
- Multi Currency
- Multi Language
- Product Reviews
- Product Ratings
- Open Source
- Free Documentation
- Templatable
- Automatic Image Resize
- 20+ Payment Gateways
- 8+ Shipping Methods
If you have Installatron or a similar set up on your server, you can install OpenCart with a click of a button. OpenCart itself has a beautifully clean interface, meaning that you can start using it immediately without having to customise it to look clean or modern.
The default OpenCart template
A custom OpenCart template
OpenCart plugs cleanly into PayPal and other commonly-used systems for instant payment setup.
You can have a play with OpenCart on the website’s demo area at: http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route=demonstration/demonstration
OpenCart is open source and free and you should download it from http://www.opencart.com
Firefox goes into overdrive
Written on February 12, 2011 at 10:26 am, by Al
Firefox 4 has just gone into beta 11, hopefully the last beta to be released before a release candidate. This release, like the 4 before it is for bugs, as Firefox 4 has been feature complete since beta 6.
A recent draft of the continued development of Firefox has shown plans (still in the planning stages) for Firefox to release another 3 versions in 2011, taking it to version 7 before the end of the year.
These developments follow criticism that Mozilla was too slow in releasing new features through 2010, with version 3 only upgrading to 3.5 despite a wealth of new features that many argued would easily constitute a big enough improvement to merit version 4 status.
Firefox beta 11 sports a new minimalist-inspired launch page
Each new browser release will contain major improvements, but focus on them in a more linear progression, so that one milestone can be achieved at a time, so that releases aren’t held back by trying to hit too many targets at once.
Google Chrome already follows a similar pattern, being on version 9 at time of writing, despite being younger than its Mozilla counterpart.
You can download the latest Firefox beta at: http://www.mozilla.com/en-GB/firefox/beta/
RocketDock – a Mac-like dock for Windows
Written on February 8, 2011 at 4:48 pm, by Al
A handly little doo-hickey for Windows users: RocketDock gives Windows desktops a dock, just like on OSX.
You can minimise Windows to it, as well as selecting themes. On Windows, many program icons can tend to be a little ugly, but you can add new icons to RocketDock by adding PNGs to the ‘icons’ folder in your RocketDock folder in ‘Program Files’, usually on your C: drive.
Download RocketDock: http://rocketdock.com/
Adobe software hurts
Written on February 6, 2011 at 10:02 pm, by Al
Sigh. Adobe software is expensive. Adobe make Photoshop (the program so prolific it’s been verb-ified), Illustrator, InDesign, Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Premiere, Soundbooth and After Effects to name just the well-known ones.
I love Adobe
Before I go on, I should stress that I think Adobe’s software is fantastic, it’s the industry standard, they gobbled up Macromedia a few years ago, who represented their last serious competitor. There’s open-source software, like The Gimp and Inkscape as well as more affordable software such as Corel Draw, but none of it can fully take Adobe’s place in the workflow. It has excellent features, far ahead of its competitors, but more importantly, when working with others, it’s too risky to use other software to access files. Sending a 10,000 copy document to print using Inkscape is just plain foolish.
Adobe doesn’t seem so keen on me…
But Adobe’s programs are very, very expensive. There’s nothing wrong with this, good products should be priced according to their quality. However, Photoshop alone is £595 on Amazon. Ouch.
I don’t have Adobes sales figures, but I guess relatively few Photoshop users have paid that price. The majority of people seem to have an illegal download of Photoshop. That’s their problem (or their gain, however you see it) but Adobe doesn’t seem especially motivated to track these people down.
At the other end of the scale are people who have purchased it or been given a license as part of a company. These company workers don’t pay for it, their employer does, and they pay at a vastly reduced rate. Companies get software cheaper buy buying multiple licences, and often users will have a copy even after they’ve left their job or they have a friend-of-a-friend copy. These people either get it bough for them (cheaply) or they buy a licence from their company at cost (cheaper).
After the big companies and the Torrenters…
This leaves small companies and freelancers. They don’t have the financial muscle to buy loads of licences and they can’t risk violating the law. In small companies, there are fewer staff members and hence less speciality, everyone has to be able to do more than one job, you can’t just be an illustrator [and use Illustrator], you need to be able to do layout and photo work when the work is here. This means you need more than one program, possibly, the whole Master Collection or at least the Design Premium package.
Wouldn’t it be nice..
I’m not suggesting that small companies get special treatment, but I think there needs to be another kind of licence, beyond the student one (which only lets you install on one machine, is not to be used for profit and is not upgradable). I don’t want to illegally download the software, I want to be law-abiding and I realise that people stealing it drives up the price. I want to be part of the solution, but as I see it, Adobe are more a part of the problem with their current stance.
Log me in: free remote computer access
Written on February 5, 2011 at 3:36 pm, by Al
Log Me In lets you access your PC or Mac for free. Sign up at: https://secure.logmein.com/UK/
Having a tool like this is an essential must-have for any computer user, simply access their website and you gain access to your computer from anywhere in the world.
F.lux – save your eyes, feel happy
Written on February 5, 2011 at 8:13 am, by Al
F.lux does something very simple. It adjusts your screen throughout the day based on the time. It gives you lots of blue light in the morning and warmer colours at night. You no longer need to squint every time you look away from the screen. Best of all it runs on Windows, Macs and Linux-based systems!
You can deactivate it temporarily for colour-sensitive work, but for most other tasks, you won’t even notice it running.
There’s plenty more info on the F.lux website: http://www.stereopsis.com/flux/
Become a better web developer in 5 minutes
Written on August 8, 2010 at 8:41 pm, by Al
Firebug
If you’re not using Firefox for web design, you really – really – should be. Besides being standards-compliant and supporting thousands of useful plugins, it also supports Firebug. Firebug lets you dig into your coed in real time and try out edits and changes as well as giving you a whole range of debugging tools. What’s more, Firebug also supports Yslow a Firebug plugin from Yahoo! thyat’s pure gold. It gives you accurate readouts of your page download time and has built in tools for getting more code and minifying images by using All Smush It to reduce image size without degrading quality.
Filezilla
FileZilla is an open-source FTP client which supports sFTP. FileZilla is stable, easy to use and fast. Don’t pay for an FTP client when FileZilla is available.
Snippets
Every time you write a clever line of code, discover a unique new tool or find an elegant way to write something you should save it. In the future this will save you more and more time as you go on. You should try and keep your snippets up to date and replace them as you find better alternatives. At the very least, consult a site like CSS Tricks which has a massive, ever-growing collection of freely available web design snippets.
Frameworks
Consider looking at using a framework. In CSS BluePrint is a fairly well-known standard for preventing yourself from writing repetitive code. Perhaps you’d rather use something simper? There’s plenty out there. I use a modified version of WhiteBoard CSS for WordPress, a framework which I add to with snippets I collect.
What does the client need?
The most important thing in my experience is to balance a client’s needs with your desires and their intentions. What I mean by this is that if a client needs a website selling microwaves they need it to sell, you’ll naturally want it to look fantastic and so will they, but you will be doing a better job by making a website that works rather than one that lives up the imaginary ideals of what a ‘good website’ is in your head. A good-looking, well-coded website that sells nothing is a bad website.
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Categories: Advice, Firefox, Internet, Reviews, Software, Technology, Web browsers, WordPress
Alternatives to Microsoft Office
Written on August 8, 2010 at 2:15 pm, by Al
You won’t hear any disagreement from me if you say Microsoft Office is good. It’s great, it has a vast amount of features and once upon-a-time most people seemed to have a copy of it. Not often legal ones, but you either had it or you didn’t.
Today Microsoft office is expensive. Amazon.co.uk has the Standard edition at £283.27 at time of writing. That’s a lot of money, especially if you don’t use it every day.
Here I have some credible alternatives to Microsoft office that are hassle-free and cost-free:
Open office org
Open Office.org (the ‘.org’ is included for legal reasons) is my personal favourite. Developed with help from Sun Microsystems, but still open source and completely free, Open Office.org offers you a seamless switch over from Microsoft Office. With alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access, you’ll still be able to open regular Office documents, work on them save them and read and edit them again in Microsoft Office. Open Office hasn’t always been the quickest application, but it is becoming faster and more streamlined with each release.
IBM Lotus Symphony
Lotus is based on an earlier version of Open Office, but branched off in a slightly different direction. It’s not as intuitive as Open Office but it’s free and again works with Word documents.
Google Docs
Google is becoming a contender in many fields, but the one benefit to using Google Docs is the ability to keep your work in the cloud. Just sign up for a free account and you can write and edit documents and spreadsheets from any computer in the world.
The interface is more spartan, the options fewer – to get more, you’ll need to upgrade to a paid version – but it’s utterly usable.
You can also work live with other users on documents, making real-time revisions and updates by selecting which documents to share with which users.
In today’s varied internet ecology, paying for expensive products when you can get free, legal equivalents is just unnecessary.
Best iPhone apps for work
Written on April 17, 2010 at 8:38 pm, by Al
The iPhone is undoubtedly a polarising device. It probably has more fans than detractors (or at least I like to think so), but it is primarily seen as an entertainment oriented phone, pretty much the polar opposite to the Blackberry.
So I thought I’d highlight some of the most useful tools it can provide for business.
Scheduling with Calendar and Google Calendar
I use Google Calendar not because it’s incredibly good-looking, but because it has great methods for subscribing to other applications and systems. The iPhone can subscribe to Google Calendar and sync dates and events back and forth. The magic part is being able to sync Google calendar to other apps, meaning that you can make a date on your iPhone and see it appear across your workflow (mine appear in Lighting in Thunderbird). You can add as many calendars as you like.
http://www.google.com/calendar/
Syncing files with Dropbox
Dropbox is a file-sharing program that uses peer-to-peer technology to synchronise the contents of folders across different systems. You can use Dropbox to sync files between your own PCs (or Macs) as well as choosing to share folders within your Dropbox folder with other people. The iPhone part comes into play when you download the Dropbox app and are able to view copies of your files on your iPhone. Handy, no? You can also view, download and restore files from the Dropbox website.
Dropbox is free for a starter account and gives you a whopping 2gb. If you invite friends to Dropbox you’ll get an additional 250Mb per person.
The Google App offers a quick portal into it’s services. It’s by means revolutionary and there are more complete apps for accessing Google services, but it has killer speech recognition (ie. It actually works) and a pretty icon.
The Google App links in to many of its services and can prevent a tiresome login each time you need to access a service.
2do
My favourite todo list app, mainly because you can link it without having to subscribe to an expensive system. Version 2 is on it’s way soon, with even more features. Add tasks, lists (collections of tasks), multiple sections for different types of task and sync free with Toodledo.
The interface is not only extremely good-looking, but allows for drag-and-drop, sorting, sharing and different views.
Tabs are used to great effect to separate sections and the application icon can display the number of tasks falling into a category you select.
The official website lists far more features than I can here: http://www.2doapp.com/en/2Do/tips.html
