Popularity Contest Plugin From Alex King Triggers Fatal Error

My blog uses a couple of plug-ins and one of them is Popularity Contest by Alex King. This allows me to display which are my more popular posts (it’s in the sidebar to the right). However, I recently upgraded my Wordpress installation, and when I tried to re-activate the Popularity Contest plugin, I was faced with an error message that shows: “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.”

Turns out that there’s a problem (even with the updated version of the plugin). You’ll need to go to your plugins folder, and look for the Popularity Contest plugin folder. Once inside you should see 3 files. Open popularity-contest.php and scroll down to line 59. Replace require(’../../wp-blog-header.php’); with require(’../wp-blog-header.php’); and reactivate your plugin. All should work fine

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iPhone MAC Address / Physical Address

The new wireless network that I’m on is using a wireless MAC filter, so I had to add my iPhone’s MAC address to the white-list. And after some poking around I finally discovered where to get the MAC address on the iPhone: just go to Settings > General > About to get your iPhone’s MAC address.

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How To Insert a Tick in Excel, Word, Etc

Sometimes in programs like Excel when you can’t find a shape that you want, a possible workaround is to use a font. Webdings and Wingdings offer shape-based fonts, so you get shapes instead of the usual characters. For instance, if you want to get a tick in Excel, you can use the “a” character of the Webdings font. To do so, just select the Webdings font (as opposed to Arial or some other conventional font), and type “a” like how you’d normally do so, and you should see a tick appear

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Bloated SnagIt Screencapture Utility

I hate it when I want to do something but have to wait for it. I know, I know, it just goes to show how impatient I am, but don’t we live in the age of instant gratification where everything must be done in the snap of your fingers.

Screen capturing is something that I (probably) do on a daily basis, so imagine my annoyance when something like screen capturing can’t be done in a quick, painless process. My basic requirements are simple: I want an area of my screen quickly captured and saved in a JPG format on my desktop so that I can do whatever I want with it.

With that requirements in mind, I downloaded SnagIt, tried it out, and after a few days realised that I cannot live with software as slow as it was. While it fulfilled my requirements perfectly, it went too far above and beyond, because with the SnagIt software came the ability to capture text, to capture a window or region, to save as a multitude of file-types, to browse your screen captures, etcetc. It was too much for me, though I could imagine how other people could benefit from these features.

Perhaps software should come in a few flavours. In my SnagIt example, the software in its entirety made me a dissatisifed user. If, however, it came in a “lite” version that did basic screencapturing quickly and easily, I would be sold.

In any case, I switched to a C# freeware called Cropper, which does what I want perfectly. That’s the screenshot of how it works: a simple and elegant solution that allows you to:

• Takes over the default PrtScrn (Print Screen) key
• Capture the region under the mouse
• Capture the active window
• Capture a selection

Awesome stuff. Download it free here:

http://www.codeplex.com/cropper

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M1 3G / 3.5G Mobile Broadband Manual APN Configuration Settings

I now know the manual APN settings for M1 Singapore using the Huawei USB modem - after much pain. Great if you’re on Linux, Unix, Mac, or configuring a 3G router / access point (when the automatic installer won’t work). Here are the settings:

Dial Number: *99#
Username: ppp@aplus.at
Password: ppp
PDP Type: IP
APN Name: sunsurf

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The Best Windows Right-Click Image Resizer Application (Free!)

I think digital cameras are great, especially since they removed film out of the equation, making photography convenient and easy. It does become too good of a good thing though, as digital photos tend to pile up rather quickly.

One of the annoying things that I constantly face is the need to resize my photographs or pictures. The way I used to do it was to fire up my editor, wait for it to load, resize the photograph, then save it. The whole process felt clunky and annoying.

So I went looking around for a better way to do things, and I discovered Image Resizer, a free software provided by Microsoft!

Basically, Image Resizer integrates into your Windows right-click menu so all you have to do is to right-click on any number of photographs to resize them. It even helps you save the resized images as a copy, so you don’t have to worry that you might accidentally overwrite the originals.

You can imagine that this software will come in handy for anyone who needs to resize photos to share with friends, to upload on the net, or to fit on a compatible cell phone, personal digital assistant (PDA), or Portable Media Center so you can enjoy your photos while on the go.

This little app gets 2 thumbs up from me! Best of all, it’s free! Download Image Resizer from this page.

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