Peter's Useful Crap

Normally I don’t post blog updates for any of my scripts. Instead, the updates go directly on those pages. However, because I am releasing the first translated version of anything of mine, here’s a special announcement.

Rui Cruz has kindly translated my Math Anti-Spam Image for WordPress into European Portuguese.

This plugin is a spin-off of my original Custom Anti-Spam plugin with a math twist. In an effort to curb blog spam, before commenting on posts visitors have to answer a simple math addition equation shown in an image. Visually impaired users can click on the image to hear an audio file of the equation. And since math is considered a universal language, it’s quite appropriate that this was the first one of my scripts to get translated! Rui translated all of the text strings and audio files for the math plugin (thanks a bunch!).

You can download the official Peter’s Math Anti-Spam Image European Portuguese version on the plugin page itself:

http://www.theblog.ca/?page_id=151

Ever need a free photo that’s better than clip art? Contrary to what Adobe keeps trying to say in their spam to me, you don’t need to pay $130 for a stock photo to use in your blog post, article, presentation, artwork, or other creative outlets.

I found Vivien’s list of 8 Finest Bits Of Free Stock Photo Sites and was instantly pleased with the quality of photos available on the sites she listed. Now I don’t have to wade through all those crappy sites that come up on Google that offer nothing good and just link to each other in circles. I was able to quickly find this cool tennis photo for an article I drafted about eZ Publish:

Tap water in Canada is so clean (unlike what a certain Brita ad might suggest) that there is no reason for us to buy bottled water. In an effort to wean myself off plastic water bottles (David Suzuki is right), I’ve purchased a stainless steel water bottle from Superstore for $9.99 plus tax.

This bottle holds 500mL, just like the standard plastic bottles that contain, most of the time, tap water. It has a large spout like a thermos, which makes it easy to clean. Now I have an easy way to carry water around that saves the resources required to manufacture the bottles and to transport them to the store (it gets even worse if people just throw out the bottles). I can refill the bottle an infinite number of times with… tap water!

I’ve stopped buying music for two main reasons:

• I have a cheapo mp3 player (which rocks) and simply don’t need or want to create waste by buying a CD, then converting the tracks, then letting the physical CD sit idly (it’s better if they never produced the CD in the first place).
  
• Existing online music stores in Canada either sell restrictive .wma files or even more restrictive iTunes stuff (which you can strip of restrictions if you do some Google searching, but that’s a hassle too). Just give me the mp3s!

I was very happy to hear that Universal (which is the record label for a ton of artists) announced a business model trial where they are finally letting their music sell as mp3s free of DRM (Digital Rights Management) restrictions. What does this mean? You can put your music on any mp3 player! Yes, back in the day with CDs and tapes, you could play them in any CD or tape player, but somehow that logic changed.

Of course, the major providers such as Wal-Mart and gBox only work in the US. For Canadians, the only option is Puretracks.

I took the plunge with Puretracks and my experience was very positive, so much so that I might start buying the occasional album or single again. And this doesn’t mean that I’m suddenly going to start pirating the mp3s I purchase to everybody.

I wanted to download the new Feist album — gotta support Canadian talent, or something. Notice the new mp3 option on the Puretracks website:

The checkout process is simple, and the album is cheaper than I would get at a retail store:

The message below scared me, because it made me believe for a second that I was still downloading the restrictive .wma format… I simply assumed that Puretracks hasn’t properly updated its website yet to reflect the fact that it offers mp3s now (luckily that assumption was correct)!

Because I was using Firefox, I had to use the “alternative” method for downloading, which meant that I downloaded an .exe specifically for downloading my purchase. This was a very simple and fast program:

The tracks are encoded at 192kbps, which is the standard good mp3 encoding rate:

Thank you, Universal for seeing the light.

Now when are we going to see a similar business model for movies? Unfortunately, movies are 7 times the file size of albums…

Sometimes I’ll be editing a database and need to change a date. However, since dates are often stored as timestamps (January 1, 2000 is represented by 946684800), I cannot simply enter the date — the timestamp needs to be calculator. I found a generator here, but it forces a page reload after each submission, and if I want to calculate a bunch of similar dates, the form doesn’t remember what I’ve entered.

Here’s my Ajax-supported timestamp generator, which provides the necessary information on the same page and is more user-friendly for calculating similar dates.

Here’s a reverse date generator based on a timestamp:

Thanks to this Ajax tutorial for providing the basis for my first Ajax application (if you can call it that).