Actually, the first time I plugged it in it did show up, but then something unrelated happened, something crashed and the drive refused to ever mount again.

I opened up the Device Manager (Start -> Control Panel -> Hardware and Sound -> Device Manager) and then expanded the Disk drives section. It looked like this:

I guessed the one marked USB was my external drive, right-clicked and hit Uninstall

I then unplugged me external drive, waited a couple seconds and plugged it back in. Windows automatically reinstalled this driver and now everything works properly.

Hello all. Just last night I decided to reformat my parent’s/sister’s machine and install a new copy of Windows 7. It was just slow and corrupted in a variety of ways and needed to be done.

Anyways, I thought “Hey, maybe I should partition away 10-20 gigs and install Ubuntu on there too”. I know they’ll never use it and I wouldn’t recommend they do (they’ll get confused…) but I thought I’d like to fool around with it a bit. Plus, if Windows gets bunged up I can tell them to boot up Ubuntu and at least they’ll have Firefox and OpenOffice to use without any issues.

Well, so far I’m pretty impressed with Ubuntu. Although I’m pretty impressed with Windows 7 too. Actually, I like MacOs too. I’m not really a fanatic about OS’s in general. I plan on eventually transcending the OS by connecting my brain directly to the motherboard and communicating to it using telepathic musical tones. My productivity should then increase by at least 15%.

Now, on to the point…. Although Ubuntu installed very nicely and easily and configured it’s boot loader to allow me to choose Windows 7 on startup, it – naturally – made itself default. It seems the way to change this may have recently changed in Ubuntu (I’m using 9.10). Here’s how I did it:

1. Go Application -> Accessories -> Terminal
2. Type this (it may ask you for your admin password):

sudo gedit /etc/default/grub

3. Find this:

GRUB_DEFAULT=0

4. Change the number to correspond to the placement of your desired OS in the boot menu that comes up at start up. Mine was 7 because I was messing around and Windows 7 happened to come up 7th in the list. Most likely yours will be 4.
5. Save and close.
6. Go have a poptart.
7. Type this:

SUDO UPDATE-GRUB

8. Restart and you’ll find the boot menu will highlight your choice as default.

I recently just wrapped up a project setting up an online store for a client. I knew that building a custom e-commerce solution (or even tinkering with an open-source one) would be far too much work and require way too much maintenance. For this project, an established online service was definitely the way to go. After doing some poking around, I decided on Shopify.

Shopify – which I believe is built on Ruby on Rails – seemed to have a nice, clean, modern appeal to it. Pricing seemed inline with other popular solutions. It also seemed there were virtually no limits on the amount of design customization that could be done. This turned out to be true and we’ve been very pleased with Shopify. They’re Vision app (which basically sets up a quick temporary rails server) allows you to edit your theme locally and that’s just awesome. The HTML templates start off nice and clean and semantic. Their custom templating engine called Liquid works nicely and let’s you easily get what you need done.

The store is now live at www.iandmelectric.com. I&M sells solar/wind energy products as well as automotive and industrial products (batteries, starters, heaters, and more).

I&M has been already receiving many inquiries regarding their SolarSheat 1500g. It’s basically a solar heater for you’re home. It requires no electricity and uses a small solar panel to power the fan which vents the heat inside your home. Pretty cool. Good luck guys!

Straight to the point: The app is called FlickrDown

I recently returned from a four month trip in South America. During that time we would upload pictures to a Flickr Pro account I registered before leaving. The pro account has a yearly fee but allows you to store and download the original unaltered image size. This was great because my friends and family could view our trip through my photostream as I went, but at the same time I was constantly keeping a back-up of my photos.

However, when I got home I had wanted to download hundreds of original size photos that we had deleted from our cameras. I had assumed someone would have made a app to do this in bulk, but I couldn’t find anything! I resorted to downloading the pictures manually.

Today (after an hour of right-click and save), I decide to look again. The first thing I find is FlickrDown. This is exactly what I had wanted… and it seems to have been released in 2005. I don’t know what happened there.

It’s no piece of art. Just something a .NET developer probably whipped in his spare time. But it works like a charm. You can download photos on an individual basis, or select a whole set or collection or by tags, etc. I’m currently downloading an entire set of 1280 photos which must be at least 8 or 9 gigs. I half expected something to crash or be slow, but I’m almost at 75% complete as I type this.

FlickrDown seems to have automatically made the choice to download the original sized images. I’m not sure how to set it differently, or what it chooses to do if you have a standard Flickr account with no support for original size. I’m just happy it’s working and saving me a bunch of time and though it deserved a shout out.

Update: Looks like you can only download 500 pictures at a time. Still awesome though.

I just discovered how great the browser Flock is for blogging! I managed to set it up to work with my Wordpress blog (the one your reading). Now I can simply right-click on any page, and select “blog this“. A nice, fast, GUI editor pops up within Flock and I can write my post, format the text how I’d like and even drag images off of web pages in Flock right into my post. I had been meaning to try this out for a few months now, and I’m glad I finally did.

Flock uses the Gecko rendering engine, and is set-up to work a lot like Firefox. If you’re a Firefox fan, give Flock a try.

Note: As I’m writing this post I just discovered that this editor doesn’t use very good XHTML. When making the text italic it used a span tag with an inline style instead of an em. Oh well.. it’s still cool.