Tool Tip: resizing an image with least pixelation and jaggies

Posted by Abdu in Tip | Software | Productivity

This is a quick tip. If you experience too much jaggies or pixelation when scaling a bitmap image up or down, try Perfect Resize from OnOneSoftware. It comes either as a stand alone program or as a plugin for Photoshop and other graphics software. In some instances, it does a much better job than Photoshop’s resizing feature. The company offers a 30 day fully functional download.

You can buy a Tesla model S car with a single website template

Posted by Abdu in Software | Productivity | Tip

I was researching some commercial Magento themes (templates) this week. Magento is a PHP based e-commerce (shopping cart) solution. My favorite site for providing templates is Themeforest. They have affordable high quality mostly web 2.0 style themes. The site itself is very clean, high quality, simple yet very usable. I sorted the Magento themes by number of sales. This usually means the first themes in the result listing are of polished high quality themes and that’s why they sell well. One statistic Themeforest provides for each theme is the number of sales. I looked at the first theme, Fortis and quickly determined the revenue:

Price $80 x # sold 1639 (as of now) = $131,120. Wow! That’s a lot of money from selling a single digital product. The template was added to Themeforest on March 6th, 2012. Not bad for less than a year display and more to come.

minus Themeforest’s average commission, say 35%, what’s left is $85,228 (rates schedule)

minus taxes, pure profit is at least $50,000.

What do I do to reward myself from a side job which put $50,000 in my pocket?

A brand new exciting Tesla model S car!

So if you want to make some extra money and you’re a good web designer, consider selling templates. Not just html templates but a full theme for a CMS or shopping cart or platform. These templates sell for more and have less competition.

Tools to Unbend Pins on a LGA 2011 Motherboard Socket

Posted by Abdu in Tip | Hardware

In this post I will describe how to unbend those tiny hard to see pins on an LGA 2011 motherboard socket. I accidently pressed down a few pins on a LGA 2011 socket. When looking at all pins, I noticed a group of pins had a slightly different color from the rest of the pins. This is due to the different position of the pins and how they reflect light.I noticed this and but went ahead placing the CPU in the socket hoping everything would still go fine and the computer start up as normal. Sadly, this didn’t happen.

The computer kept rebooting every 10 seconds after startup. I figured this had to do with socket's pins being not in full contact with the contacts on the CPU. The pins on the sockets are very small and hard to see with the naked eye. I decided I needed a magnifier and a tool to work on each tiny pin individually.

Tools for the job:

1- 30x magnifier. The pins are so small that your typical 3-5x magnifier won't be enough to see them. I got the ‘SE 10X 20X 30X 21mm Chrome Loupes Pocket Magnifier New 3Pc’ from Amazon for $6.99. Great price!

I used the magnifier and tweezers to raise and unbend each of those pins. I put the CPU back and started the computer.

The computer never rebooted by itself and I was happy my first troubleshooting fixed it. I was worried I had to get another motherboard.

Manually allow Internet access to any app & be more secure

Posted by Abdu in Productivity | Software | Tip

I use a firewall which is set up to allow Internet access by any app on my system manually. Unless the app has been granted trusted access previously by me, I get a prompt whenever an app is trying to access the Internet. It displays the ip address it’s  trying to connect to plus the port number. I download and install a lot of software and I need to know when & why a software is trying to connect to the outside. If the software is from a trusted application and I know it needs access, I give it a permanent permission. I can revoke it later if needed. When a piece of software wants access, my initial reaction is to deny it and see what happens. If it runs fine without the access, I know access was optional. The software vendor is probably collection some information for statistical purposes. Hopefully nothing more! And they do know that some users run software behind firewalls or on systems which physically have no Internet access.

Some software need to need have Internet connectivity for activation or registration purposes which is fine. I let the firewall remember their access on a case by case basis. If there’s software which has no business demanding Internet access, I most probably refuse it and uninstall it.

Here’s a little tip when trying software from untrusted sources. Install the software in a virtual operation system like VMware or Virtual PC or use a sandbox like SandBoxie which I have been using for years. I can right click on an .exe file and tell Windows to run the app inside Sandboxie. Sandboxie can show the registry keys the app tried to use. Sandboxie uses a virtual file system and you can view the contents of the system.

Play it safe.

Use SSL for ANY form with sensitive information. Plus a way to get a cheap SSL certificate

Posted by Abdu in Productivity | Web Usability | Tip

Use SSL for any web page which has a form that captures sensitive information.  The other day I was filling a survey which captured some sensitive information and I noticed the page wasn't secured. It was not using https. SSL is not for banking or credit care capture only. If there's any slight hint the captured information, if leaked, could do any kind of damage to the information owner, you as a web page owner, should secure the page by using an SSL certificate. An SSL certificate can be purchased cheaply for about $10 a year. A secured page gives more confidence to the web page user.

Here's a trick to get a cheaper GoDaddy cert than their advertised cert on their site. Google for 'cheap SSL cert' or Google for some of their cheap competitors certs and you might see a GoDaddy sponsored ad popping for cheaper than any of their competitors. I don't guarantee this is true every time. Last time I shopped for a cert I noticed GoDaddy's ads trying to get me as a customer. Try different keyword combinations. Something will trigger a GoDaddy cheap cert ad. Use the link in the ad as it will go to a special page for the lower price.