Technology

Don’t know if my site is down or not but I damn sure can’t get to it right now. My connection went out completely but after a couple of refreshes and a reboot of my router I seem to be able to get back on, but can’t access my site. What a pisser.

Still having some issues with it, but I seem to be able to get to my site now. It may be a problem with my DNS server.

Yeah, I know. Booorrrinnggg.

One thing I did install in the kitchen a couple of years ago was some temporary lighting on the top of my kitchen cabinets and hooked them to an X10 appliance module that would turn them on whenever it was dark and motion was detected in the kitchen. I know…pretty geeky stuff.

I do want to install some decent quality under cabinet lighting now though. I normally get up at 4:30 in the morning, and even with the accent lighting on top of my cabinets, that isn’t enough and I generally have to turn on all of the lights in the kitchen just to make coffee. Some decent lighting underneath the cabinet (where the coffee maker is) should solve that.

I haven’t had much of an opportunity lately to work on any of my home automation projects, but the next thing I want to do is start looking at Chandeliers for the dining room. I already have a bit of the kitchen/dining are wired up and right now I have a ceiling fan in there, but I am seriously considering replacing it with something I can control with my HA software. It may just have to wait until we get a new house, since the kitchen area and dining room are one big room and it gets pretty hot in there occasionally when we cook so I really need the fan some evenings.

With the Boy leaving for boot camp in a few weeks, the wife has laid claim on his laptop while he is away. That was quick. I guess I shouldn’t complain as I am going to temporarily snag his 19″ LCD. I say temporarily because he worked very hard for it a couple of years ago and bought it with the proceeds of a summer’s work.

Anyway, I will have to get to the laptop at least once or twice. I have some software to install, including a tracking package, and I also want to pop some extra Dell Memory in as well.

I found directions over at Lifehacker about how to make your own airhorn in about five minutes. Cool. I could have used one of those last night at the graduation. I was the one hooting and hollering when my son’s name was called. The don’t call me a dumbass redneck for nothing.

There is apparently a new variant of a Skype worm that is targeting just about anyone on an infected user’s contact list in AIM,ICQ,Messenger,Miranda,MSN,Trillian (which uses all of the above) and Yahoo.

Be very careful when clicking on links that anyone has sent you via IM. I use Trillian as well as Skype, but not very often.

I have used a few color picker programs over the years, and downloaded Ades Design Color Picker 2.0 the other day to try it out. There are a few different reasons that I have used color pickers before. One is for web pages. When I designed my template for this site, I purchased a banner and a basic template for a web page, but then I had to convert it to a movabletype template and create a few pages that of course never existed in the original template. I used my banner header to set the basic color screen and had to use a color picker to get just the right shades so that it would all piece together well.

I have also used color pickers when making new skins for Windowblinds and DesktopX. I always want to make sure that the various elements fit together properly just like I do when working on my web site.

Color Picker 2.0 is pretty cool. It is small and lightweight. It runs in the system tray, and while just sitting there it was only using 2560k of memory. Pretty minuscule with the amounts of memory in today’s computers. There are several options that you can set in color picker as shown in the shot below.

While in Demo mode only RGB is available, but the program is available for purchase for $9.90 and get the rest of the features unlocked, such as getting HTML color codes.

Here is a shot of the actual program at work.

To activate the program you can right-click the icon, or use the ctrl-shift-a hotkey at which point the little viewfinder with color codes pops up. To get it to go away you just have to right-click the desktop.

Overall the program does exactly what it is supposed to and does it well. Although there are plenty of free color-pickers out there this one offers a few more options than most and is well worth the $9.90 that it costs. You can find out more information about Color Picker as well as some other cool programs at AdesBlog.com