John P.

One Mans Blog

Specialization is for Insects.

Linksys WRT54gGreg, this one’s for you!

Ok, so months ago I was talking to my buddy Greg about wireless routers, and I mentioned that you can get this upgraded firmware which will drastically improve your range and add features. Then, I totally forgot to send that information to him. But don’t worry, it’s not the only thing he’s waiting on. I still haven’t delivered a piece of art he ordered like a year ago! (Sorry Kim!)

Anyway, now that I’m done admitting my inadequacies, it’s time to redeem myself - at least partially. So, if you are the owner of a Linksys WRT54G series router (only like THE most popular router ever sold), then follow along to change it into something almost unrecognizably better than what you currently have!
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7 Unusual Wonders of the World

Our buddy WebUrbanist has tirelessly researched and assembled four different articles to compliment the traditional 7 Wonders of the World that we’re already familiar with. Now we’ve also got:

I highly recommend checking them out, and if you’ve got 30 seconds please show some support by Digging this one (I did!).

Awesome New Thoof Videos

Thoof vs. DiggI previously mentioned the new news site Thoof, and I know several folks checked it out. So I just had to share these new videos done in the Apple vs. PC style, but this time comparing Digg and Thoof.

The degree of flexibility and customization - not to mention simplicity of use - between traditional sites like Digg, Reddit and others as compared to Thoof is astonishing. Thoof is just plain simple to use while the others require you to dig through a bunch of crap to find things that interest you.
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Topix - ALWAYS Local News

TopixThere are plenty of national and international news sites, but the cool thing about Topix is that after you tell it your location, every time you visit you only see the news that is local to YOU!

This makes the site a must on everyone’s reading list because you don’t want to just be well informed about what is going on elsewhere, you need to know what’s happening at home.
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This week’s Links of the Week theme is… pictures.

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America by the NumbersI come across so many good articles online, but simply don’t have the time to share them all as regular posts. So I’m trying an experiment here.

I’m going to post a few links at the end of the week to other interesting articles. I may make it a fairly regular thing, but the jury is out at the moment. Feel free to give me feedback as to whether you’d like me to continue, or not bother.

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Performancing Metrics Blog StatisticsSeveral people have been asking me lately what I use to measure traffic statistics here on One Man’s Blog. Well, in addition to occasionally downloading my server logs and running some software on them to see the official stats, I use Performancing P-Metrics whenever I want to get a quick glance.

Frankly P-Metrics has the most comprehensive feature set around and will allow you to learn more about a site’s visitors than any other package that I am aware of. This includes everything from stats by page, referrer, search words, and even a wickedly cool real time monitor! So I whipped up a demo video to give you a glimpse behind the scenes here at OMB.
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Advice from Inappropriatesville

Idiotic AdviceI was perusing some of your blogs and when I was checking out Peter’s blog I came across this classic post.

This picture is worth two thousand words! It’s not exactly inappropriate advice, but I don’t think the car is the real problem the columnist should be focusing on.

Great find Peter! I’m guessing this came from some Australian newspaper or something?

I know there are quite a few regular HTMLHelp.com users that frequent the blog here, so I just wanted to provide an update on the unbelievably pathetic service we are currently receiving from ValueWeb, aka Hostway.

We were notified about a month ago via e-mail that ValueWeb intended to physically take our two servers and move them to another data center about two hours away. But they claimed:

“We plan to have the back up service back online by 8pm EDT on July 28th.”

As worrisome as this sounded, we decided to stick it out with them because they estimated that the outage would be 12-15 hours. The amount of time it would take to migrate to another provider would have been more than this, so I suppose it basically just wasn’t going to be a big enough deal to change.

Flash forward to this weekend, and it’s looking like maybe we should have jumped ship. HTMLHelp.com has been down for more than two days - going on three.
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The PayPal Fee Calculator

This is just a quick tip… If you ever find that you need to transfer money to someone and wonder what it would cost to do it via PayPal then you definitely need to check out the PayPal Fee Calculator.

Two very useful things I can come up with for this site are:

  1. You want to send money to a foreign country, but you aren’t sure what all of the fees are going to be.
  2. You want to sell something on EBay and would like to set pricing based on how much you will receive after PayPal fees.

Enjoy!

The New Thoof - Smartest Site On The Web

ThoofMost people surf the Web unaware that an army of Artificial Intelligence engines are watching your every move in an effort to match interests with commercial messaging. Well, the bad news is… they are. The good news is that a brand new Web site called Thoof is going to use an even better version of this technology to entertain you instead!

Thoof’s founder and CEO, Ian Clarke, arrived at the conclusion that news aggregation sites such as Digg, Google News, Reddit and others provided volumes of articles, but left it to the readers to search endlessly for ones that appeal specifically to you. Being the uber-genius he is, he decided that someone needed to apply some Artificial Intelligence to the process and allow the system to learn and predict user preferences in order to present only articles with the highest probability of appealing to each individual.
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Bust A NameMy buddy Jamie Harrop found this awesome new little site that helps choose a domain name by automatically trying every possible combination of whatever words you want in the domain name.

The original post comes from our HTMLHelp.com Blog.

The site is called Bust A Name and it has some truly excellent features and will really save a ton of time when it comes to choosing a name for your next new Web site.
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