kremalicious

Since Wordpress 2.5 it was nearly impossible for me to log into Wordpress and quickly head over to the write tab. The Dashboard always wants to load a bunch of things in it but this always seemed to fail in my setup and slow things down. And not enough the Dashboard just locks everything up while loading which can take more than one minute.

I’ve searched for a simple way of disabling those feeds, plugins etc. stuff the Wordpress Dashboard tries to fill but it seems you can’t disable these from the backend. But there’s a quick way for doing this which involves editing your /wp-admin/index-extra.php and uncomment some lines there. This will leave your Dashboard intact while it stops Wordpress from connecting to various sources to screw your blog up when you just want to quickly write something.
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For quite some time I use my Ubuntu machine as a file and backup server for all Macs in my network which is perfectly accessible from the Finder in Mac OS X. There are some instructions available in the web for this task but all failed in my case so I wrote my own tutorial with all the steps needed for it to work properly.

So here’s my little Tutorial for connecting Mac OS X Leopard with Ubuntu and using your Ubuntu machine as a backup volume for Time Machine but all steps can be reproduced on every Linux box and they work with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger too. At the end of this tutorial you will have a server which shows up in the Finder sidebar and behaves just like a Mac server when accessing it from your Macs. To be perfectly integrated with Mac OS X we’re going to use Apple’s Filing Protocol (AFP) for network and file sharing.

Although this Tutorial involves using the Terminal in Ubuntu and looks a bit geeky it’s very easy even for beginners. I have tried to explain all steps and Terminal commands so you may learn a bit about the Terminal too. At the end of the article you can download my Server Displays icon pack quickly made by me with custom icons for a Mac, Ubuntu and Windows server.

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These two desktop icons show the Camera Obscura as it was used by Nicéphore Niépce in an Aperture and iPhoto style and are intended as an homage to him. Nicéphore Niépce made it first possible to preserve an image taken with a camera obscura in 1826 or 1827 by using a special mixture of bitumen on a pewter plate, naming it Heliography. This first preserved photograph “View from the Window at Le Gras” is the one you can see in the iPhoto icon contained in this package. The third icon is the folder icon I have created for this icon package.

Either just download the icons or read the exciting story about the First Photograph.

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Since version 1.0 Aperture is able to render images on export with a graphic overlay on top of them called watermark. This feature of Apple’s Aperture can give you a chance to make stealing your web-published pictures a bit harder.

So let’s see how we can make Aperture automatically render watermarks on our images during export. In this article we will make a watermark with a transparent background and add some text on top of it. The steps for this magic involves 4 simple steps:

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Wouldn’t that be great? Hook up your scanner, fire up Aperture, click on Import and the images coming directly from your scanner plate? Although my scanner is shown as a source in the import dialogue you can’t import images with it directly from Aperture. But using Preview/Image Capture and Automator you can bypass this limitation.

In the Image Capture scan window you can define an automatic task which will follow the scan process. It defaults to Preview meaning that the scanned image will open as a new Preview document after the scan. But we can make the images import to Aperture after the scan just with tools which are build into Mac OS X and come with every Mac (besides Aperture). So here’s what you can do to scan directly into Aperture in 3 simple steps.

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A while ago I wrote about my problems finding a universal scanner driver from Canon for my CanoScan LiDE 500F to use it under Mac OS X. The solution was the Canon Asia website where a universal driver version was available.

But since then Apple released Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard in october 2007 and the Canon driver with the version 11.2.4.0X stopped working on this new operating system.

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The aim of this article is to give you a quick introduction of a css property named text-shadow which was first included in CSS2 (but it’s not implemented in all browsers yet). Nevertheless you can make some cool effects with it, which could only be done before by photoshopping text and rendering it as an image.

Because it’s included in Safari since version 1.1(!) Mac users should be aware of various effects done by this property. In fact, most companys and persons with mac users as their main target audience use this effect on their websites.

This article describes how text-shadow works, what you can do with it and which browsers currently support it. At the end of this article I’ve made up some examples and provide a list of useful resources.

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After i released my Aperture File Types icon set many of you asked how they can really use these icons for displaying the icons of images on your Mac system. Sadly this isn’t as easy as dropping them in Candybar into a well for image icons cause there isn’t any well for them. So using other icons as standard file type icons for images is a bit tricky. I discovered two ways of doing it, which involves overwriting resources of Preview.app and Photoshop. So before doing anything I mention in this post, you should make a backup copy of them.
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As you may know you can easily password protect your website or parts of it using an htaccess file with special instructions on an Apache-based server. For using this method you just have to put a file named .htaccess (which includes the instructions for the webserver) and a file named .htpasswd (which includes the login-accounts) in the directory you want to have password protected. But you have to encrypt the passwords of the login data for yourself, which is a quick task on a Mac.
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UPDATE: I wrote a follow up article describing how to use this scanner with the newest Mac operating system Leopard. Feel free to head over to this article to get the freshest facts about using this scanner with Mac OS X:
Using the CanoScan LiDE 500F scanner with Mac OS X Leopard

At the end of last year I watched out for a new scanner and the CanoScan LiDE 500f from Canon was the choice. But finding a suitable driver wasn’t that simple cause everywhere around was only the horribly old PowerPC-driver. As long as I had my old G4 in the house it wasn’t that problem. But at this time all Macs were already Intel-powered and also my new MacBook which replaced the G4 was Intel-Powered and i had a problem.

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