It has come up in the past where a website was down for me, but not for the rest of the world, or vice versa.  I found a nice and super simple website that will check if it can view a page.  That’s all it does!  And that works for me.

http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/

Another somewhat similar website is a free resource that just pings your site every hour to make sure that it’s online.  It will send you e-mail notifications whenever your site goes down so you can bug tech support ASAP 🙂

http://siteuptime.com/

I recently found the Wimpy FLV player and downloaded it for Mac OSX.  I played my FLVs with no problem and all I needed to do was unpack it 🙂

I have a copy of VLC player which should play the FLVs, but it hasn’t been doing the trick 🙁  I’m probably just missing some codecs, but Wimpy FLV player was a bit easier to set-up.

http://www.wimpyplayer.com/products/wimpy_standalone_flv_player.html

I’ve been trying to get this to work for a while, and I’ve finally succeeded in mounting a virtual image of IE8 on mac for testing.  I ended up using the first half of:

http://bavotasan.com/tutorials/creating-an-internet-explorer-testing-environment-on-a-mac/

and the second half of:

http://zytzagoo.net/blog/2009/03/20/howto-running-ie6-ie7-and-ie8-on-ubuntu-intrepid-810-using-virtualbox/

to get the job done.

The whole process went like this, I just renamed the IE8 file to IE6 from the article to keep things simple.

1. Download these programs, and install the first three:

• Virtualbox
• Q
• Zipeg
• IE8-XPSP3.EXE

2. Change the extensions on IE8-XPSP3.exe from .exe to .zip.

3. Create a sub-folder in your Applications directory called “IE”.

4. Launch Zipeg and drag the IE8-XPSP3.zip file into it for extraction.
Extract the .vhd files into the IE sub-folder you created.

5. Open up your IE sub-folder and you will see a folder called “IE6-XPSP3″.
Open that folder and you should have a file called “XP SP3 with IE6 2009-Apr.vhd. Rename it to ie6-xpsp3.vhd.

5. Now launch Terminal (Applications => Utilities => Terminal) and type:
/Applications/Q.app/Contents/MacOS/qemu-img convert -O raw -f vpc /Applications/IE/IE6-XPSP3/ie6-xpsp3.vhd /Applications/IE/IE6-XPSP3/ie6-xpsp3.raw

6. Next, type:
VBoxManage convertdd /Applications/IE/IE6-XPSP3/ie6-xpsp3.raw /Applications/IE/IE6-XPSP3/ie6-xpsp3.vdi

7. Open VitrualBox and choose Windows XP as the OS

8. When you get to Virtual Hard Disk page add ie6-xpsp3.vdi as the disk

9. Click Start to boot up the drive

10. Cancel all the pop-ups and on the bar at the top of your computer click on Devices> Install Guest Additions
Just say yes to anything it asks in Windows

11. Restart

12. Go to start>run and type
D:\VBoxWindowsAdditions-x86.exe /extract /D=C:\Drivers

13. Now go to Start > Administrative Tools > Computer Management and select the Device Manager there.
Navigate to Network Adapters, Ethernet Controller. Right click it and choose “Update Driver…”. Select “Yes, now and every…” and click Next. Select “Install from a list or specific location”, click Next. In the Location box paste in “C:\Drivers\x86\Network\AMD” or navigate to it manually. Click Finish.

Then we’re all good! 😀

I did work is an application I found while trying to keep track of what I was spending my time doing at work.  It is very easy to use and does everything you would expect.  It allows you to put tasks in a todo list, add them to different categories, and specify how long they took to finish.  My favorite feature would have to be that after you’ve entered in some tasks it gives you a graphical chart so you can visualize exactly where your time is going.

After a while though, I stopped using it.  It’s not that it’s difficult to use, but it’s easy to forget to add in that you finished a task  – and how much time did you spend on that project?  I wish it had an API or any kind of a desktop widget/app – some kind of timer application could be very helpful.  I also wish it would handle the to-do list portion a bit better.  It would be nice if it wasn’t as squirreled away and would groups tasks by category.

In short it’s a very simple and easy to use application that does exactly what you’d expect, but it can be a pain to keep it updated.

http://www.ididwork.com/

Found this very handy app online, 100% free.  You upload an image and it will give you back all the copy from the image in plain text. Using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) technology.

Just the other day I needed to trans code an image from a mailer to create a “text-only” version and I tried putting it through this website.  It was only able to read about half the text on there, but it still saved me some time.  And for the low, low price of nothing – I can’t complain 🙂

http://www.free-ocr.com/