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Recently, a friend asked me how to automatically load a Powerpoint presentation when you open an email in Outlook. While I have never tried it with any other mail program, apparently in Microsoft Windows in Outlook, if you take your Powerpoint and save it as a pps file (Powerpoint Slideshow) and attach it in the email, then whenever the recipient opens the email, Powerpoint will magically load the file.

Well, okay. It’s not magic. But still. Also, another point of reference. If you do not embed the pictures, or audio files, or even some fonts, then the recipient’s system will not play them. Another reason why I tend to stay away from Powerpoint if at all possible.

Tags: Tips and Tricks, Windows by darkmoon
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If there’s one thing that I despise, it’s when sites move slowly. Like they drag. And when it comes to blogging software, these usually are hella draggers. But fortunately there are a few ways to speed things up without actually giving up as much. The biggest one that you can ever focus on is caching.

Caching basically means that instead of telling the server to dynamically process something, it has a statically saved copy somewhere that it basically reads off. That shaves ticks off the seconds when you don’t have to ask the CPU to figure out what some variable is saying. And with most database driven applications, there are two methods to do this.

DB Cache: This is less well known but is actually an entirely brilliant design. Basically, it makes the assumption that you’re going to be querying your database a lot, and thus it saves those queries statically and can shave off seconds for you if you have large queries to make. This basically means that it’ll be slow the first time around, but not so much the next if you happen to repeat things a lot. Very useful in that sense.

WP Super Cache: WP-Super Cache is one of the most well-known in the WordPress community. It allows you to cache the pages themselves after the first time they’re built into static calls. This means that instead of reading directly from the database and generating the page, it creates the page the first time and doesn’t change out that copy until there’s a new one to change with. This basically allows the first person to read it to have a bit of slowness, but after that the page is already kept around.

As you can see, there are at least two different caching methods that you can implement to improve the quality and decrease the time latency. And in the web world, time latency is everything.

Tags: Blogging, Internet, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
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Google came out with their social network tool called Google Buzz just a day or so ago.

While it’s actually a fascinating tool and definitely could give Facebook and Twitter a run for their money, it really is a little too noisy for me. Mainly because of the integration with Gmail. When I logged in, I expect to see my emails since I have to respond to many of them and they’re usually something important even though they’re of personal nature. But with Buzz, it’s really just a noise floor to keep up with what’s going on in the world. I usually have another tab open for those types of things so I don’t have to pay attention to them unless I want to pay attention.

In any case, this isn’t a well-known thing so to turn off Google Buzz:

• Scroll to the bottom of the Gmail screen
• Click “turn off buzz” in the footer.

And that’s it. It’s pretty easy and straight forward, although you’d never think to do it in the footer since there’s a Settings tab for your account. In any case, there have been some other friends that have been seeking this information since it got too noisy in their lives too so obviously it’s not just a personal occurrence. Either way, if you’re looking to turn off Buzz, there ya go.

Tags: Google, Internet, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
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If you do a lot of online banking and you happen to use Bank of America, you probably have SafePass activated.

Unfortunately for you, there isn’t a very published method on how to fix your SafePass and gain entry back into your online banking if you have recently switched cellular carriers but have kept the same number. If you’ve changed numbers completely, you’ll have to call customer service to deactivate your old number and sign up your new one. But with an existing number that has been ported from another carrier? Seems like you’re up a creek since the SafePass won’t send to the phone.

What you do is, you take the mobile, and text to: 73981. In the body of the text, just text “help” without the quotes and hit send.

Then you wait about 24 hours because their systems don’t update but once a day I suppose. In any case, if you come back and try your SafePass again, it seems to actually work. Now, there apparently has been this issue on and off with iPhones and the like, but with my Droid, that seemed to do the trick in changing out the carriers.

Tags: Cellular, Internet, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
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As a system administrator, have you ever gone through the annoyance of having to fresh install every single application and have hell trying to download each and every latest versioning? With Ninite, you won’t have to do that anymore.

Free for personal use, this creates a special installer that grabs all of the latest and greatest versions of the applications that you check on their website, and it’ll create a special installer for those. Basically allowing you the freedom of one-stop-shopping for the applications. While this isn’t perfect since there are always things out there that you need that might be special case, this does provide a solution as an in-between to those that install everything from scratch, and those that just start fresh from a cloned image.

This works on Windows XP, Vista, and Windows 7, and installs all of the applications on default configurations without toolbars and other extraneous things. Definitely worthwhile to take a look at for your one click install needs.

Tags: Tips and Tricks, Windows by darkmoon
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If you have set up your SPF (Sender Policy Framework) record but you haven’t tested it, then here’s an easy method of checking if it works. Send off an email to:

spf-test@openspf.org

If you get a response where it says that it has passed, then you’re good to go. Otherwise, you’ll have to do some more testing to see why it’s not working. OpenSPF is a great place to start as far as finding the right tools and how to do setups for SPF records.

Tags: Email, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
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Annoyingly, email from Google Apps will fail to some recipients if you do not set up the SPF (Send Policy Framework) record for your domain. And while Google Apps tells you how to do it with a TXT record, the way GoDaddy does it is a little bit different:

• Go to Total DNS Control Panel.
  
• Under the TXT section: click Add SPF Record.
  
• Select An ISP or other mail provider: click OK.
  
• Select Outsourced tab: put “aspmx.googlemail.com” (no quotes) in the field and click OK.
  
• Click OK again when GoDaddy sets up a SPF record.

And then you can wait a little bit for that to propagate to all of the DNS servers. Once that’s done? You’ll have your SPF Record set.

Tags: Email, Google, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
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Ever wonder how to get rid of the spammers on Twitter? TwitBlock is a great way to find the ones that have followed you and whether or not they could be the same spammers.

Using a special algorithm, it calculates out whether or not a person is potentially a spammer and gives them a score. Based on whether or not TwitBlock users have marked the user as a spammer, the effect of the scoring goes up or down. It’s actually a pretty interesting method since most of the ways of detection are common sense things.

I would probably say that most people that have more than a thousand followers probably have quite a few bots and such on there, but at least there’s a way to somewhat detect these now instead of going through your followers one by one.

If you’re curious about it, definitely run this every so often on your account. It uses OAUTH so you actually never give it your password and such which is a great thing from a security standpoint of a third party application. Give it a whirl.

Tags: Tips and Tricks, Twitter, spam by darkmoon
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If you have never signed up for a Dreamhost hosting account (use promo code: LUX00001), perhaps its time you tried their services out such as their Dreamhost PS. The Private Servers are a cost on top of your current shared hosting bill based on usage of cpu and memory. It’s still not bad when you consider it’s dedicated for your use only.

Here is one part of it that’s bad though. On the Dreamhost PS, if you have any sort of web services that you usually run, the mail doesn’t send. Ever.

Which is surprising when you’re coming off shared hosting that has everything configured for you to just go nuts with. Never fear though. There are several ways to get around it, and this is just one of them.

1. Create a root user: you need one of these to use sudo to install packages on your PS.
2. sudo apt-get install postfix postfix-pcre
3. dpkg-reconfigure postfix

And that’s it. You could have a lot of mail there already and you can flush the queue and send it all by using the command postqueue -f. Otherwise, mail should start working and you’ll breath a sigh of relief knowing that it finally actually works. Again.

Tags: Deals, Internet, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
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If you’re going to install Adobe Air on linux, you have to really do 4 things to get it done. I performed this on Ubuntu 9.04, but these commands are basic for any distribution as long as you have wget and sudo. If you don’t have them, then you’ll have to add them first or get the binary via your browser and install it through your root user:

1. Open a Terminal

2. wget http://airdownload.adobe.com/air/lin/download/1.5/AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
3. chmod +x AdobeAIRInstaller.bin
4. sudo ./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

That should actually get Adobe Air installed on any sort of linux distribution as long as you have wget and sudo installed. I haven’t really looked at the memory issue on the linux side, but Adobe Air does have some memory leaking issues on Windows and MacOSX so I assume that it’s not too different here. Regardless, there are a lot of social networking tools that are now using Adobe Air as their platform and it’s useful to know how to get it up in your favorite linux distribution.

Tags: Linux, Tips and Tricks by darkmoon
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