Do Know Evil - Tyler Mulligan’s Tips and Tricks

Yesterday the much anticipated 2.4 release of Nexuiz was had. This is a great milestone for the team as it includes many new features such as better graphics, smoother game play, newer and updated maps, better weapon balancing and new game types. The game now boasts over 10 game types both official and unofficial as one of the diggers describes, Nexuiz is like “Quake 3 on crack”.

Give it a whirl, it’s free!

And if you like the game, please Digg it!

Firefox 3 Beta 3 is looking pretty nice, I decided to give it a test run because Portable Apps released it yesterday.

The UI was a little strange to me a first but it started to make more and more sense. Here’s an opening shot for first impressions.

The navigation buttons have been streamlined a bit, putting more emphasize on the back button, combining the history into one drop down and moving the Home button to the bookmarks toolbar.

One of the first things I noticed (and love) is the google suggest style address bar that queries your history based off titles and URLs.

They’ve also added a star that signifies whether you have bookmarked the page or not and it allows for a quick uninvasive way to edit your bookmark for the page.

While I find this a nice feature, I don’t believe it solves the problem of organizing your bookmarks… but rather encourages sloppiness by requiring a second click to pick a folder. I’m not sure how this will fair on the ‘mom test’.

Something I ~love~ though, is the ability to search addons without going to the mozilla site.

In conclusion, FF3 is a vast improvement that certainly increasing my web browsing efficiency. Great work guys, I look forward to the final release.

A majority of my readers use Firefox to browse the web. I myself happen to be a big fan of Firefox, as some of my previous posts have indicated. Always striving for efficiency, I have made a few tweaks to lower my frustration and increase the enjoyment of my web browsing experience. Amongst these changes, one of the first things I do on a new install is to change the way the download dialog (ctrl+j) behaves.

To clarify, I don’t like the downloads box to pop-up when I start a download and I want to choose where to save my file. To achieve this, I go to Firefox options:

and select your options as noted below:

To access the infamous download box in the future, use the ctrl+j hotkey combination:

When I do group projects at school, I like to keep the team in check with a project management system to keep a centralized collection of work, including conversation and various files about said work. In the past I had been a big fan of the (once open-source) Base Camp clone, activeCollab. However, as many of you reading this may know, activeCollab is no longer free.

Fear not my friends! There exists a fork called Project Pier, which picks up where the the free version left off.

In my opinion, the default theme shies away from the clean cut web 2.0 freshness that was activeCollab but the folks at Project Pier were friendly enough to bundle some slick themes for those who are as nitpicky as I.

Merry Christmas Eve and Happy Holidays to all. I hope you are enjoying time with loved ones and family. On my time off I’ve been doing a little research. I’m trying to learn more about 3d modeling so I can create more than just maps for the great game, Nexuiz. I’ve been dabbling in Blender 3d, which I came across some some awesome video tutorials. You can check out those Awesome Blender 3d Video Tutorials Here. This kid is really good at breaking down the tools and usage of the program.

I’ve also just finished writing a basic tutorial on map making for Nexuiz. I’ll be back post Christmas with some more application how-tos and such. Happy Holidays!

I’ve mentioned this software before but I feel compelled to show you all why this software has made my list of software I install on a fresh format. This software is MWSnap, a program for taking and manipulating screenshots. When you first open the program, you’re greeted with this:

On the left, you have your main options for screenshots and on your right, you have a preview. Each of the screenshots have hotkeys that you can learn by click ‘Capture’ on the menu bar. All of the options are pretty self-explanatory except the ‘Window/menu’ option, which you’ll learn to love fast.

When you select this option, the screen freezes and you have a dotted box that selects whatever menu or window you’re cursor is hovering on.

This assures for a clean cut every time, quickly and easily.

And if you’re feeling fancy, you can garnish it by adding a cursor from the ‘edit’ menu:

MWSnap has some interesting tools that come in handy at random times:

I’d say the ruler is the one I use most often.

It’s floats above all other windows and lets you measures them by pixels. Don’t worry, it goes vertically as well.

And while I chose to use ColorPic for my color picking software. MWSnap’s color picker isn’t half bad.

There are only two downsides that I’ve found to this application. First being the lack of ability to crop… that to me is odd but I just open it up in IrfanView and take care of it that way. The other issue is multiple monitors. Unfortunately, MWSnap only recognizes the primary monitor. I don’t really have a work around for this, I just deal with it and drag windows I need to take screenshots of over to my primary monitor.

This software has saved me tons of time, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do!

Bookmarks are something most of us don’t really keep up to par. Sometimes you just ctrl+d on a whim, losing that page in your lack of a hierarchy forever. Well, at least that’s how it’s been for me. However, once in a while I give myself a kick in the ass and try to shape up. Based upon the patterns I’ve learned in the past and the general direction I wish to go, I reevaluate my mess and decide the proper way forward. In this case it was the standard, “Make general categories and add sub-folders if they need more organization” route… with a little extra spice.

This time around, I decided to utilize folders in the bookmarks toolbar. Maybe I’m blind to this but I feel like most people don’t utilize this helpful feature, I know I didn’t until now. After spending a few days using folders on my toolbar, I’ve come to the conclusion that it is both effective and efficient.

I spend a lot of time developing locally and often do rounds on my live sites and rather than waste 4 seconds typing in a 32 character URL, I’d rather waste 0.4 making two clicks. Yes, that’s right, I’m shaving off seconds to increase my efficiency. It might not seem like a lot but it adds up to minutes a day and hours a year.

Now, because I’m going to be spending a lot of time on my laptop, I needed a global solution to my bookmarks. The path I chose to get is syncing them with the Firefox extension, Bookmark Sync and Sort. If you don’t have your own server, there are some hosted alternatives such as Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer. Those trendy bookmark sites aren’t really the solution for me for a few reasons.

1) I like to control my data.
2) Those sites are usually distracting to me
3) While the Firefox bookmarks manager isn’t the ideal solution, the GUI is far more advanced than something you’ll find on a social bookmarking site.

Admittedly, there is an advantage to these sites, and that’s the fact that I can get to my bookmarks quickly no matter what computer I’m on. But again, I can argue that I can find a link just as fast (if not faster) with SSH by greping the xml file Bookmark Sync and Sort generates.

Back on track, once you have the extension installed, click ‘Bookmarks’ > ‘Synchronize Bookmarks’ and fill in the dialog with your information as such:

What kind of man would I be if I didn’t take advantage of this moment to sort my bookmarks?

Mmm, alphabetical order.

Now I just need to upkeep as best I can… I’ll let you know when I come up with a better solution for that. Right now, I just force myself to take the time to find the correct folder in the hierarchy. It’s a good habit but a hard one to keep. If you have any advice, please share. Good luck and happy bookmarking.

P.S. I edited the file wp-admin/admin-functions.php, line 2126 to increase the generated thumbnail size in wordpress. Just replace ‘128′ with the max you wish. Thought maybe some of you could use that information.

I’ve tried many different batch renamers for all sorts of reasons. More often than not, it’s for sorting images. The other day I came across a directory of images that I had (stupidly) prefixed and I needed to change that back. With a few simple clicks using Rename Master I was able to restore them quickly and easily.

Rename master has a very simple but intuitive gui with powerful options behind it. With some obvious wants and needs of a renamer such as a live preview of the rename and variables… Rename Master takes it a step further with their support for full regular expressions and thumbnail views.

Check this out:

Breaking down the screenshot above, we can see that I’ve chosen to do two things (as denoted by the underlined tabs), I’m using the “Add To” and the “Replace” options to formulate the name “Lemonade Stand ##.jpg” and remove those ugly S########.JPG names.

Also, you’ll see I’ve brought up the thumbnail preview that I mentioned above. This is not necessary in this process as I’ve already moved all the “Lemon Stand” to their appropriate folder but I just wanted to let you see how it could come in handy.

The ?n02? code wasn’t something I knew by heart when I first starting using this program, these variables can be generated by the program if you click the blue arrow button next to the text field.

There is so much for me to mention about this program… but I don’t want to waste your time, do yourself a favor and download it. It’s a single file, coded in delphi so it doesn’t need to be installed.

This program all works with mp3 id3 tags.

I tried Konfabulator a while ago (emphasis on the while) and I wasn’t too pleased. It seemed laggy, buggy and more trouble than it was worth. However, recently I was on the lookout for a good desktop todo list, nothing too fancy but it seemed to achieve this, I would have to put my qualms aside and get some sort of widget program.

I decided to give Konfabulator another shot (now know as Yahoo Widgets. And I must say, I’m quite pleased! Everything runs smoothly, it integrates well with the OS and I haven’t had any crashes.

So if you haven’t tried out Yahoo Widgets, I definitely recommend it.

By the way, here is the todo list that I’m using.

Over the past few days, I’ve been creating some rather large and confusing SQL queries, so I went on a hunt to see if maybe there was a visual aid that would make the selects, joins and sub queries easier. I was a bit disappointed to find that MySQL offered a Query Browser that wasn’t available for download… or was it?

After a little more research I came about a link to a slightly thinner client in the developer zone under the Generally Available (GA) license. I’ve played around with it a bit and while it wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, it’s helped me during those times I don’t feel like waiting on phpMyAdmin.

Check out this screencast to get a better idea of how this tool works. I’m sure I’ll grow to like this tool a lot more in the future, I just need to learn more about it’s functionality. I thought I’d pass this tip onto you.