Websawin.com Blog

We got a dog, say hello to Kuma

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 19:06:22 GMT

This past Saturday we adopted Kuma (previously Willie) from the local Keeshond rescue. He's a 5 year old male Keeshond. His former owner turned him over to the rescue after being forced to move because her landlord lost the house to foreclosure.

Kuma has been remarkably well behaved these first few days. He largely ignores the cats who are still getting used to him though they now get close enough to pass in the hallway. It looks likely that in another week they'll be playful together. Kuma likes to run around and play with toys just like our cats do, yet respects their personal space.

According to the books and information we've been given, Kuma will likely take a month or two before he fully settles in. He spent over 2 months with his foster family and here's what they said about him (and we agree!):

We've setup a photo album for Kuma and will be adding more pictures in the future.

--Update 1/29/10
Kuma appears to be fully settled in now, he even has his own daily routine. The strangest part of his daily routine is that he likes to curl up behind the bathroom toilet when he's tired and doesn't want to be disturbed. A knock at the door or the doorbell quickly wakes him up and he runs down the stairs but for some reason he keeps running right past the front door and goes to the garage door, barking the whole way. Other than the bathroom his next favorite spot is under my desk when I'm working.

While the cats don't seem to mind him when he's in some of his less active moods they run and hide when he gets playful and starts to jump and run around. Mieko will occasionally sleep within a foot or two of Kuma and for the most part is not afraid of him. On a few occasions Mieko's even swatted at Kuma but I don't think Kuma's ever noticed or he just ignores it. Tora will get within about 5 feet, as long as she has an easy escape. She has made great improvements. In the beginning she used to run past Kuma which got him excited and he'd chase her. Now she's learned to walk by him in slow motion which causes Kuma to pretty much ignore her. I think she learned it from Mieko as he was fostered with dogs and has done this around Kuma all along.

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Websawin Videos on YouTube!

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 18:39:07 GMT

All videos have been migrated over to YouTube which offers far more flexibility since YouTube added the following features over the past year:

High Quality mode (HQ button on bottom right)
Wide screen format and 720p HD streaming (HD button on the bottom right, when applicable)
Stereo sound
Streaming videos to mobile phones (if you have a capable cell phone and a data plan that allows it)

With these changes, YouTube videos now far exceeds the quality of my prior streaming service, even beating my HQ downloads. You can actually watch full screen, streaming 720p HD content that is nearly indistinguishable from the original video. If anyone's interested in the technical specs, check out the Format and Quality Comparison Table on the YouTube wikipedia page.

For most videos, the changes were minor, such as:

Adding a banner at the end of the video
Re-editting to be more YouTube friendly, like reducing the length of the "Mieko vs the Water" and "Symphony of Light" videos
Title changed to be more attention grabbing or descriptive

In the past, videos were only available to family/friends. Most family/friends don't login to the site, so for many this may be the first time seeing some videos. If you're featured in a video and don't want to be, let me know and I'll see what I can do. On a typical day, my YouTube videos get more views than a typical month on websawin.com. I'll be posting more HD videos in the near future; check the homepage or subscribe to the RSS Feed to know when they've been posted.

If anyone wants to post their own videos on YouTube and hear more about what I learned in the process, let me know. It took me 4 iterations before I found a process I liked.

My user/channel on YouTube is Websawin. One benefit of creating a free Google/YouTube account is that you can set your viewing preferences to always show YouTube videos in High Quality mode, regardless of the website they're hosted on. Plus you can rate and comment on other's videos, so don't rule out creating an account just because you don't plan to post videos.

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Camping at Yosemite

Sun, 7 Jun 2009 16:58:56 GMT

We went camping at Yosemite over the Memorial Day weekend. I’d highly recommend a visit to Yosemite if you haven’t been in awhile. No hiking is required, most things are visible from the road and the major attractions that you walk to have short paved trails. I heard someone describe Yosemite as the Disneyland of National Parks and I’d have to say that’s spot on, especially considering Memorial Day crowds. They have numerous food courts/restaurants and free buses/trams that will take you to most destinations. I’d suggest going when less busy though and bring a mountain bike if you have one. They rent single speed bikes but they aren’t that comfortable. We were there from approx 8am to 7pm on Saturday and Sunday yet would have liked an extra day or two to see everything.

The best of the photos we took are now on the website: Camping at Yosemite. Check out the new slideshow feature that was added to all the photo albums. The statistics from past photo albums showed that most visitors were too lazy to view more than a handful of pictures if they had to click extra buttons to see them. After a week with the slideshow feature it turns out almost every visitor that views a photo album looks at every picture in that album. If you have any suggestions on how else to improve the experience, please leave a comment below.

Contrary to what I said in the last blog post I created and posted a new video: Yosemite - May 2009. It's been almost 3 years since the last video and I had no plans to make more until Yosemite. The view and especially the waterfalls inspired me. Unfortunately I didn't realize the video potential of Yosemite until I got there so I only had the digital camera to take video and not the real video camera. I'll know for next time. In the last 3 years a lot has changed in the world of online video so I plan to look into Youtube and other similar services in the near future to host my videos. They'll be able to provide a much better experience that won't be limited by my internet connection. In the meantime you can still use the link on each video page to download a high quality version. The Yosemite download is actually an HD 1280x720 video, all prior videos only have DVD quality as that's all the camera I had supported at the time.

For those that are interested in going camping with us, our next trip is next weekend. From Friday June 12th through that Sunday we're going to Humboldt Redwoods State Park and staying in the Hidden Springs Campground. We already have reservations for a site that allows 8, so we have room for 6 more. Leave a comment below if interest, you can mark it private if you want.

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New RSS Feeds

Mon, 18 May 2009 03:39:10 GMT

I've added RSS feeds for the Videos and Photo Albums. If you're using Internet Explorer make sure to click the down arrow next to the orange RSS button. Firefox will show all options by default so no change for Firefox users. While I have no immediate plans to upload new videos I do expect to be posting Europe and camping pictures with some frequency.

UPDATE 5/31/09: I updated the main/original RSS Feed to include all 3 content types. There's no need to subscribe to all 3 anymore though the individual feeds still exist for those that want them separate. My apologies to people subscribed to this original feed already as you'll get a bunch of old content after the next sync. It's a one time thing though.

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Europe 2008 - Contiki European Discovery

Sun, 19 Oct 2008 19:32:18 GMT

We rocked Europe for three weeks and now are recovering from our fabulous vacation. It's amazing how jet lag can last for days! Talk about needing a vacation from your vacation!

So we came home with 7000+ pictures and 7 hours of video. We're still going through and picking the best to post, and will be posting pics over the next several weeks and videos over the next few months. Videos are so much more time consuming to edit, and we don't want to post random junk either. Only the best for families and friends!

BTW, for those new to our site, you can create an account and we'll notify when new things are posted. Don't worry, we won't sell your info or ask you anything personal! Plus, those with accounts will have access to some of the more personal stuff not on the public site. So have patience and check back here often for the latest and greatest.

If you have pictures that you want to share, you can upload them by clicking here.

--Update: Here's the Contiki website for the trip we took.

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Nutrition Facts Website

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 18:06:11 GMT

I found an interesting website today that lists an amazing amount of information for a particular food. Complete with numerous charts and graphs showing things like level of nutrition, fullness factor, protein quality, caloric ratio, and many others. The website is NutritionData. Here's a few examples: Bananas, Krispy Kreme doughnut, and Scrambled Eggs.

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New software added to the Links page

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 17:30:26 GMT

I got a new computer last month and had to go through the process of installing all the software I use. I took this opportunity to find free alternatives for all the software I no longer had valid licenses for. See the Links page for a list with links to the useful free programs I found. My computer is running Windows Vista but they should all work on earlier versions of Windows.

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IE7Pro - The must have add-on for IE

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 01:12:20 GMT

One complaint I've always had with IE is that it won't save your tabs for you. A common scenario for me is having numerous tabs open to specific websites, perhaps news stories I'm interested in reading but haven't yet. These aren't really something I want to bookmark, I've got too many of those already, but I don't have time to read and close them at that moment. Then the real problem is I install or update something that requires shutting down IE and/or rebooting the computer. I'd like a way to save my browser tabs without having to manually bookmark and later delete each of these pages. In searching for a solution I found IE7Pro. It can prompt you when you shut down IE if you want it to remember all of your tabs and automatically restore them the next start IE. It will also preserve your tabs in case IE crashes, similar to how Outlook and other MS Office programs save your documents automatically to restore after a crash or unexpected shutdown.

While that feature alone was worth the free download I found several other features that are just as useful. For example, you can have it automatically open any search, favorite, or manually typed address in a new tab instead of re-using the one that's already open. That saves me from having to open a new tab, wait for it to load my homepage and then do my search, favorite, manually entered url.

Another useful feature is the super drag and drop. Before when I was reading a web page and found links that I was interested in I would right click and pick open in a new tab or Ctrl + Click the link to do the same. Now all I do is click and hold the link and give a simple flick and release to have it open in a new tab. This also works for those annoying sites that have a url but don't link it. You can just highlight the text and do the same click + flick movement. There are other mouse navigation options which they call mouse gestures. For example holding the right mouse button and flicking to the left is the mouse gesture for going back one page and flicking right is the same as the forward button. There are others for scrolling, closing/navigating tabs, refreshing, etc.

The third feature I use most is the search within a web page feature; Ctrl+F. It's basically the same as Firefox, it has a little bar on the bottom and allows you to find next/previous or highlight all within the page. It's real time so as you start typing you can see it matching words. Unlike the normal IE search it doesn't get in the way and it's much more intuitive. I've been able to stop relying so much on the Google cached page feature, which I like because it highlights your searched terms in the web page.

There are many other features, like automated & real time spell checking within text boxes. It underlines the misspelled words in red, similar to other MS Office programs. As I said before it has ad blocking. One nice feature is a tab history and ability to re-open tabs you've closed. It also adds a built-in save ability for YouTube and other videos sites. You can even save a web page as an image. There are probably hundreds of features in this add-on, I strongly suggest you try it out and read more on the IE7Pro website.

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Free Online Image Editing

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 16:44:22 GMT

A frequent question I get is how to make minor changes to images without needing some expensive software like Photoshop. The most common request is how to resize images. If that's all you need to do and your computer has WindowsXP I suggest Microsoft's free Image Resizing "PowerToy". Go here and click the download link for the Image Resizer in the right column. After it's installed you can just right click on one or more images and pick "Resize Pictures". There are other PowerToys on that webpage that you may find useful. If your images are in RAW format as opposed to the standard JPG format then you may like the "RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer" powertoy.

If you want to do more than just resize photos or you don't want to install a program I found an alternative. This website: www.picresize.com, will allow you to upload an image to do one of many operations. You can Resize, Crop, Rotate, adjust the Brightness and/or Contrast, Add Text, Sharpen or Blur the image, make it Grayscale or look like an Oil Painting, add a Frame, etc. The main downside of this website is that you have to upload the image which may be slow depending on your internet connection and the file size of your pictures. There is some file size limit somewhere between 4mb and 8mb but if your pictures are that large this probably isn't the best tool for you. If anyone happens to find out what the limit is, please reply to this post.

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Just got back from NYC - See the pictures

Mon, 7 May 2007 02:52:23 GMT

I was in NYC last week on business. It was some of the best weather I've experienced. It's also the first time I've been there in the spring, so perhaps that had something to do with it. I was able to get away from work for a few hours to take some pictures. I went to Central Park around lunch time and ended up in the area called Sheep Meadow. That night I went down to Times Square, one of my favorite night spots in the city. On my last day I walked through Madison Square Park (different from Madison Square Garden). The pictures are online, click here to jump directly to them.

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Burn almost any video file to a playable DVD

Wed, 31 Jan 2007 00:47:21 GMT

I came across this really cool (and free) program that will take almost any kind of video file on your computer and produce a DVD video that will play in a standard DVD player. Only this one program "DVD Flick" is needed. You drag your video files onto this program and hit burn. It'll do the rest. There are some aspects you can configure, see this blog posting for more info and screenshots of the process.

Here's the link to the DVD Flick program if you don't want view the guide.

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IE7's RSS Capability

Sat, 9 Dec 2006 18:26:46 GMT

If you have Windows XP or Windows 2003 and haven't already upgraded to Internet Explorer 7 then I suggest you do so (go ahead I'll wait). You can get it through Windows Update or you can just go to the Internet Explorer site. If you're unsure if you have IE7, click on that link in the last sentence and if the upper right corner of the page says "you are using Internet Explorer 7", then have it.

How to use RSS in IE7:
You should read both steps completely before begin.

Click on the RSS/Feed icon , it's between the Home and Print icons.
Click on the link that says 'subscribe' or look for this icon . This page is the standard look for a 'Feed' in IE7.

At this point you are subscribed to my website's RSS feed. IE7 will now automatically check my site at specified intervals to get any new content. To view the content at a later time and/or see if anything is new click on the Favorites button and select the Feeds tab. You will see a list of all RSS feeds you are subscribed to. Feeds with new items will be in bold. You can hover over any of them to see when they were last checked and how many new items there are.

Why:
If you don't see the point in using Feeds then let me give you some reasons.

You can see the content you want in one place and not have to navigate the normal website. Most sites have differing and complex layouts that only show the top 5 or 10 newest entries and make you click around to see more stories.
You'll be able, in one glance, to see the status of all feeds you're subscribed to and not have to browse site to site to see who has new content.
You can read the entries when your machine is not connected to the internet, good for the laptop users.
It doesn't use an email address so you don't have the problem of spam, viruses, and phishing that you might have with an email newsletter.
And finally, why not? It only takes a few seconds to add or remove a feed from you list.

Extra tips:

If you have never clicked on the Feed button for a particular site it'll look like this to denote a new feed.
The feed button will be grey and disabled if IE7 does not detect a feed. A grey icon doesn't mean the page doesn't have a feed, but you will have to find it manually. You'd want to look for the terms "Feed", "RSS", or "XML". If you get to the right page IE then recognizes it you'll see the same type of page as when you subscribed to my Feed.
You can adjust how frequently IE will check for new feed content by right clicking any entry in the Favorites section and picking properties.
You may notice some RSS feeds only give the article headline and not the full content. There is nothing you can do about this, it's just how the website set it up.

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Alcatraz Pictures

Sat, 9 Dec 2006 18:02:30 GMT

The pictures from our trip to Alcatraz over the Thanksgiving weekend are now online. Click here to see them.

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Photo Album Changes

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 20:13:51 GMT

I've restructured the photo albums section to allow filtering by Category and Year. This should improve the user experience as the number of albums increase. I'll be posting several albums in the near future though many will only be viewable by registered family and friends.

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Deck Rebuild

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 04:21:52 GMT

The pictures of the deck; some new, some old, and some work in progress. Click here

For the first time I put captions on the pictures, though I ran out of things to say at the end. Let me know if it worth the few minutes it took me to add them.

I'm also trying out something new with this photo album; the slideshow feature. Try it out and let me know what you think. I'm curious how this would fit in with a normal visit. I would hope it doesn't take the place of actually viewing the real images and instead more of a complimentary feature.

For those who didn't know here's a little background on this project:

When we bought the house back in 2004 the first thing I wanted to do was replace the deck. It looked terrible, felt squishy in some places and obviously wasn't going to last much longer. The plan was the rip off one of the boards the day we moved in and use it to pick replacement boards down at home depot. We already had a big moving truck so using it to haul deck boards was going to work out perfect; two birds, one stone. Well when that day came I went over to pry one of the boards off and ended up breaking my hammer. The head just ripped right off, it's made of metal but I guess it wasn't strong enough to be used like a pry bar. That was just the start of the days troubles and it turned out there was no time that day to go to Home Depot.

After moving in there were too many other projects. Most were alot more urgent than replacing a deck that still functioned. We painted it so at least it looked better. For awhile the plan was we wouldn't mess with it until one of the boards broke. Surprisingly it lasted a few years with no issues, though we did avoid stepping on the problem spots. Many of you may not have even noticed since we always arranged a table or chairs over these areas so no one could step on the weakest boards. Finally this summer, after we had already done most everything we had set out to do with the house, we decided it was time to replace the deck.

The original plan was that I would do everything so I needed to keep the plan as simple as possible. My original idea was to just remove all the boards and supports and just replace them all building the exact same method as before. I was hoping to use a composite wood like Trex but the price was too high to justify. Plus the design would have been much more complicated since the support structure would have to be improved since Trex is much more flexible than wood. We ended up going with Cedar and staining it with a Semi-Transparent redwood color. My uncle and his son in law who are deck building gurus, among other things, came down to help along with my brother and father. The idea for the 'picture box' design was originally thought of to more efficiently use the wood. We were only able to get 14 foot boards and the deck is 15ft by 18ft. The plan was to use 2 sections of board to get the 18ft that we needed. By re-orienting the boards in the other direction and framing it with the box around the outside we were able to use the boards at close to their original length. I think 1/8 of an inch had to be cut off each deck board so virtually no waste at all.

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Honeymoon Pictures & Video

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 23:23:12 GMT

I just put up the pictures from the honeymoon in the Photo Albums section. Click here to go to see them now. During our honeymoon I tried out the Bungee Trampoline. They put you in a harness attached to bungee cords floating over a standard trampoline. Lisa shot a short video of that using the digital camera. You can see that in the Videos section. Click here to go see that now.

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Videos Back Online

Fri, 14 Jul 2006 17:56:04 GMT

The videos are back online. When the new site was launched last month I forgot to point the videos to the new server. My apologies if you had tried to view them and got an error. In the future feel free to use the Talkback feature below or on any of the blog entries to tell me about any site problems.

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Preliminary Wedding Pictures

Mon, 10 Jul 2006 02:53:39 GMT

Lisa & I just came back from our honeymoon a few days ago and the first thing people ask us is when the pictures will be on the website. Tonight we took a little time and sifted through the thousands of pictures and picked a few to put on the website. You can see them by clicking here. This is just a preliminary batch, all are unedited. We plan to re-release this album in 2-4 weeks after we've gone through all of the pictures and had a chance to add a little Photoshop magic. If you took pictures and haven't uploaded them yet, please take a moment to do so by clicking here.

We'll put pictures from the Honeymoon, Tea Ceremony, and the Rehearsal Dinner on the website in the next week or two. We'll also plan to put every picture we've received in a private photo album viewable only to Family and Friends that have created an account on this website. If you don't have an account yet, you can create one by clicking here.

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Best Review Site

Sat, 3 Jun 2006 19:30:00 GMT

I've found a really good review website that's helped a lot with the registry shopping. It's a site that basically reviews all the other review sites and comes up with the lists of the best products: http://www.consumersearch.com/

For the first several product types I checked what they said against other reviews both profession and user submitted and came to the same conclusion. I also tried the reverse, picking a product without looking at their site, in this case digital cameras, and then went to their site and found out my pick is the same as their pick. So now that I trust what they say it only takes me a few minute per product to pick what I need. The frustrating thing is when none of the registry stores carry and of the suggested picks.

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Downloading TV Shows

Sat, 3 Jun 2006 19:28:12 GMT

I download using a system called bittorrent in which you download a small meta file (torrent) which contains all the information a bittorrent program needs to get the files. Here's the wiki entry on bittorrent if you want to know more about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit_torrent

I suggest using this bittorrent program though any will be fine: http://www.bitcomet.com/

After you have a bittorrent program then you can use any number of websites to find the files you want. Here's one that specializes in TV programs: http://eztvefnet.org/

Some networks, in particular HBO are trying to find, stop and/or sue people downloading shows so I'd use this to protect yourself if you want anything from a cable or pay network: http://phoenixlabs.org/pg2/

If you've never downloaded video from the internet you probably don't have the video codec required to play it. So when you try to play the video and it give an error, go download the free divx codec here: http://www.divx.com.

Use this info at your own risk. If you do get caught you'll most likely get a notice from your ISP telling you they received a complaint regarding a certain file. So basically you'll be asked to remove the file and stop doing whatever it was that you got caught doing. You're information normally won't be released to the RIAA or copyright holder on the first offense and normally the copyright holder won't go after you unless you keep doing it.

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New Website

Sat, 3 Jun 2006 19:26:12 GMT

Hey, welcome to the new site. The old site was not very user friendly and hadn't really changed in many years. So with the newly released .Net 2.0 I decided to take a crack at redoing the website and learn some new languages in the process. The site is far from complete, there will be many more changes and additions over the next few months.

As you can see I now have what most people would call a Blog. This isn't going to be one of those blogs where I tell you what I ate for breakfast or how my weekend was. Instead my goal is to put here the information that people keep asking about, like how to download a TV show, as well as useful information I'd like to share. In the past I've answered the questions and shared this info through email but people keep losing it. Later on I'll add a search feature. Any useful websites I'll also put in the Links section.

By the way, all the content types (videos, photos, blog entries) have non-public content that is only viewable to friends and family that have registered with the site. So hopefully that gives you enough incentive to register.

That's it for now, let me know if you have any ideas how to make the site better. I'll add a few more blog entries now for some of the recent info I've emailed people.

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