For those that want to try out macro photography but don’t have a dedicated lens, here’s a great tip to enable you to try it out with lens you probably already own:

Having tack sharp photos is even more important in macro photography because it’s much more obvious when something is in focus.  This means that both the subject and the camera have to remain completely still.   So if the trick shown in the video is something you want to pursue more seriously, but still want to save coin on buying a dedicated macro lens, you should really invest in the “reverse adapter” that is mentioned in the video.

Here’s a link to B&H Photo where you can find the perfect reverse adapter for your needs:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=search&A=search&Q=&ci=0&sb=ps&sq=desc&sortDrop=Relevance&ac=&bsi=&bhs=t&ci=3065&basicSubmit=Submit+Query

After I upgraded my last wordpress installation on my blog and on Green Is Sexy, strange characters were appearing in our content throughout the site. There seemed to have been encoding problems with apostrophes (’), quotation marks (”) and hyphens (-). They’d be displayed as question marks or ’.

Turns out that the fix is really simple. By default, the Wordpress config files now set your character encoding to UTF-8. The solution is to open up wp-config.php file and located these lines:

define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);

and either remove the “utf8″ string so the first line becomes:

define(’DB_CHARSET’,'');
define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);

or you can just comment the lines out completely by prefixing each line with “//”:

//define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
//define(’DB_COLLATE’, ”);

Problem solved!

Since moving to the Windows Marketplace team last November, I’ve been on the receiving end of 7 door dings to my car, 4 of them in the last 3 weeks.  Every time I take my car in for servicing at the dealer, they always offer “paintless dent repair” for nearly $100 a dent. 

Coincidentally, I just saw this on YouTube and couldn’t believe my eyes.  This guy uses a hairdryer and the CO2 from a compressed air can to remove dents himself.  Make sure you have your speakers turned on, because you can hear the door panel “pop” as the dents magically repair themselves.

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The NoFollow attribute for all user generated content was originally intended to combat blog spam.   The theory was that a spammer could increase their page rank very easily on search engines by spam commenting hundreds of blogs.  By adding a NoFollow attribute automatically to user contributed content, we would enable search engines like Google and Live Search to know which links to not follow and thus not count towards page rank calculations.

However, today there are so many great anti-spam tools for blogs such as Akimset or the even better Spam Karma 2.2 (which I use).  These tools are  making blog spam a thing of the past.  Spam Karma is catching 10-15 spam comments a day for my blog which is pretty telling since I have relatively low traffic site.  These types of anti-spam tools are making the NoFollow attribute unnecessary; Real commenters should get recognized for their contribution, have their links crawled and positively affect their page rank.

After doing some digging, I found 2 Wordpress plugins that will prevent the addition of the Nofollow attribute:

1. Remove NoFollow - Strips Nofollow from the author URL but leaves in for any URLs appearing within the comment itself.  Exactly what I needed and what I’m using.
2. Link Love - Removes Nofollow from comments after a commentor has made a configurable number of comments.  Cool idea if you need this type of power, which I personally don’t.

I’m sure there are many more plugins out there that will strip Nofollow, some of which will give you much more control. The point is that everyone should be using an anti-spam plugin and abolish the addition of the Nofollow attribute. Share the crawlable love!

Even though I got Vista to work with my Sony SZ notebook (VGN-SZ381p), my machine has still unstable due to the beta drivers I was using. 

Thankfully, Sony finally released non-beta versions of all their utilities and drivers.  Since some of the Sony utilities depend on others to be install beforehand, the install order is critical.  I just wish sony would include a setup wrapper to do the installation in the correct order. 

But since we don’t have that list, I thought it was worth giving the installation order that worked for me and direct links to all the installers.

1. Sony Utilities DLL Update
2. Sony Shared Library Update
3. REBOOT
4. VAIO Event Services Update
5. SigmaTel High Def Audio Codec Update
6. VAIO Camera & Camera Utility Update
   1. I’ve been told that this driver is only for the US models. For non-US models, go to the Sony support site and specifically search for your model to make sure you’re getting the right driver.
7. VAIO Control Center
8. Sony Utility Series
9. VAIO Power Management
10. Wireless Switching Utility
11. Texas Instruments® PCI7411 Integrated FlashMedia Controller Driver (Sony support told me this is the XP driver but works for Vista)
12. Sony® Visual Communication Camera VGP-VCC2 Driver (XP driver)
13. ALPS Pointing Device (Touchpad) Driver and and Control Utility (Updated 3/2. Previously had the XP version, which worked, but this is the ‘official’ Vista version)
14. UPek TouchStrip Driver (for your fingerprint reader)
15. GeForce Go7400 Drivers
    1. Optionally you can use the updated driver direct from NVidia which is version 100.40.  You can snag it from our friends at LaptopVideo2Go.com from this link.
16. Intel GMA950 driver
17. REBOOT
18. Sony Utility Series update (updated 3/14)
19. REBOOT
20. Power Management v2.0 update patch (Added 2/21)
21. REBOOT
22. Infineon Trusted Platform Module (TPM) driver+software (Added 3/1)

Other:

• Intel Pro Wireless Drivers
  • These are available from Microsoft Update.
• Bluetooth
  • Don’t need any special drivers since the Microosft Bluetooth stack works so well. 

Notes:

• I still can’t get the FN+brightness keys to work. I’m continuing to work on this to see why this is the case.  When I was at CES, I saw SZ series notebooks at the Sony Booth where this did work so clearly I’m missing something.
  • However, the brightness can still be controlled via the Vista Mobility Center.

Hope this helps someone!