- "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded" [Yogi Bera]

Avatars are the little annoying images that are used to represent you if you post a comment on a blog or a forum or an online helpdesk or whatever. These little images show up right next to what ever you put down on the website. Some are static. (they don’t move around at all. Just an image like a picture or something.) The sad part of this story is that some creepfest started letting people use GIFS as avatars on his lil' creepfest website. Gifs are images that have several different layers, but are represented as ‘frames’ so you can make gifs move like a video.

Moving avatars like these have to be the most annoying thing invented besides Smileys. :lol: :wink: . It gets really annoying if you are trying to concentrate on what the guy is saying.

But, for the sake of interest, here is a way to make an avatar that looks like it is hand drawn.

You need a scanner for this.

1. Download and install gimp.

2. Open up inkscape or some other application that you can draw precise squares with. If you don’t have one of these, you better go ahead and download inkscape too. :grr:

3. Now make a few squares. (one for every frame in the image). These squares have to be the exact same size. You don’t have to align them perfectly. The important part is that they are the same size.

4. Print it out and draw a picture with a pencil or a pen or something in what you want to be the first frame. The image cannot go outside of the square.

5. Draw something in the second frame that goes in continuation to the first frame. Keep drawing new frames until the object is in the same position as he started in. (an example would be a person climbing a ladder. The first image you show him with both hands holding one shaft on the ladder. The next one you show him reaching up with one hand. The third one you show him with one hand holding one shaft and the other one holding the one above it. The fourth image it shows him reaching up with the other hand. The fifth one shows him with both hands on the same shaft just like the first one!)

6. Once you have a loop like the example above, scan in the entire piece of paper and save it somewhere. Save two copies of the same one for a backup copy just in case.

7. Ok, now here are a few optional steps that would make your image smaller and look a little better maybe. On your big image screen, navigate through the menus:Colors>Desaturate.

This opens up a dialog box. Just hit ‘OK’.

Now go:

Colors>Curves.

Modify the black-white color curve until the black pencil line is really black and the white is dead white. If you want to take the ‘pencil effect’ away, or you just want a two color image (black and white) , you can do this by navigating through the menus again: Image>Mode>Indexed

This opens up a relatively large dialog box with a few radio buttons to select from at the top half. Find the ‘Use black and white (1 bit) palette. Select that radio button and hit ok. Your image should be just blackandwhite now.

1. Open up one of the images you saved with gimp. Crop it so that only the first frame shows. To crop click on the little rectangle in that separate window that doesn’t have your image in it. Now go to your image window and click and drag around the area you want to select. In this case it’s the first frame. Zoom in and perfect it so that no little white border is showing. Crop it by navigating through the menu: Image > Crop.

2. SAVE AS it don’t just save it. Give it a new file name. Like Frame_01.png

3. Set the compression level to zero and click ok.

4. Repeat steps 7-9 with all of the frames, giving each one a new file name. (the second one in the name I defined would be Frame_02.png, Frame_03.png, and so on)

1. Now that you have all of your frames, you can glue them together to make one big ‘video’: Open up all of your little separate frames. Get frame 1 onto the top. Now go to frame 2.

2. Push Ctrl+C to copy it.

3. Go back to frame one and push Ctrl+V to paste it.

4. That should have pasted frame 2 ontop of frame one. Push Ctrl+L. That opens up a ‘layers’ dialog.

5. You should two layers. one says pasted layer, and the other says background. Click on the little page button.

6. Go to frame 3 and copy it. Paste it ontop of frame two which is ontop of frame one.

7. Go to the layers dialog and make it a new layer.

8. Repeat this until you have all of your layers on top of frame one in the order you want them to appear. You can edit where a particular frame is in the Layer dialog if you messed up.

9. Click save as. Make sure that the file name is .GIF (ex. AnimatedAvatar.gif)

10. Click save. This pops something up. Select ‘Save as animation’ as opposed to ‘flatten image’.

11. Check the ‘use the delay i entered above for all frames box. There is also this little ‘number box’ that displays how many seconds until the transition from one frame to the other lasts in milliseconds. You want it to be not to slow that it doesn’t create an effect, but not so fast that it is illegible.

12. Hit ok and you have an animated gif! Open it up with a web browser and watch it go!

A variation of this if one thing stays in the same place throughout the animation loop:

You can draw the thing that moves and the thing that doesn’t move and scan them in. Now save the thing that doesn’t move in a whole lot of images. In each one paste in the thing that does move, but in a slightly different place every time. Glue them all into one and you get something like this:

1. *whew* First you have to get Ultr@vnc and install it.
2. Next, you have to set up an internal static Ip address. Luckily for us the INTERNAL version of static Ip addresses are free. You can find out how to do quite easily here. A directlink to the windows xp instruction page is here. The page explains everything you are doing, so its not like going down a black slide. This isn't AbSoLuTeLy necessary, especially if you don't have lots of computers in your network.My network has a windowsbox and a linuxbox along with the occasional wireless laptop that comes along. Don't worry about putting your info into the little boxes, is nothing to worry about since nobody is recording it.
3. Get a free noip account.
4. Add a host. Make it a DNS host (a) and enter in whatever hostname you would like.
5. Download the Dynamic update client. Set it up and log in with your username. Check the little box with the hostname you entered in the little box that comes up.
6. Now every time you EXTERNAL ip address is changed, it will be uploaded onto the 'hosts' page on noip. You can change the settings for how often it checks and whether or not it runs on startup.
7. Find your modem on this page. If your modem isn't there, google it. I found a guide for my netopia, and used the one on portforward.com for my zoom X6. If you still can't find it, it's bound to be added soon. Send them a request or use their modemrequest program.
8. Before you start following the instructions, turn on the ultravnc HOST so that there is a little eye icon on the system tray. Go to the setup page and set the 'Main' port to some random number like 3182 or whatever and set it so that it accepts socket connections. Set the password to something with numbers in it. Please, make it safe.
9. Follow through the guide you found. For other vnc progs, find out how to edit the ports that it uses. Usually they are 5800-5900, so that is where hackers go immediately to get at your computer. Don't do any of those. It's dangerous.
10. You can find out if you forwarded the ports correctly @ canyouseeme.org
11. Now on your laptop that you will be connecting through it, get Ultravnc. Or whatever vnc client you wanna use.
12. Run the viewer, connect to the interntet outside of your home wireless connection, and enter your external Ip address and the 'MAIN' port in a box like this: yourexternalipaddress::MAINportthatyouforwardedandenteredintoultravnc
13. If your external Ip address should change, log into noip.com to get it. The port will always stay the same. Also, this is one of the programs that automatically sets itself up with firewall, so you shouldn't have to fool around with that unless you have something other than windows firewall. You know more about your firewall than I do.

Many popular netopia modems are not listed in portforward.com. I ran into this problem and switched over to an old X6 that I also owned. It was only after that was all fixed up and vnc was running that I realized that I had 2 layers of modems, (the wall goes to a modem which goes to another modem which goes to a computer) and had needed to double port forward with my old, 2 layer connection. Double port forwarding is like the village I explained in my vnc howto, but with 2 walls. Anyhow, I found a guide for one of the unlisted modems elsewhere:Here is the guide and here is something else you might wanna know.

How to Make Firefox Load Pages Faster

Steps

1. Type "about:config" into the address bar and hit return. Scroll down and look for the following entries:network.http.pipelining,network.http.proxy.pipelining,network.http.pipelining.maxrequests
2. Normally the browser will make one request to a web page at a time. When you enable pipelining it will make several at once, which really speeds up page loading.
3. Alter the entries as follows:
4. Set "network.http.pipelining" to "true"
5. Set "network.http.proxy.pipelining" to "true"
6. Set "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" to 8. This means it will make 8 requests at once. There is no point setting it higher then 8 as it is capped at 8 max. [The default value for this setting is 4]
7. Lastly right-click anywhere and select New-> Integer. Name it "nglayout.initialpaint.delay" and set its value to "0". This value is the amount of time the browser waits before it acts on information it receives.
8. If you're using a broadband connection you'll load pages MUCH faster now!

Tips

• Alternately, you could install Fasterfox, an extension which does some of this automatically, and makes tuning easier.
• To alter the entries, double-click on the one you wish to alter
• For more information on Firefox Tuning see the Firefox Tuning sticky thread at the independent MozillaZine forums.
• Also the MozillaZine Knowledge Base on Network entries in about:config and what they do.
• You can also run Firefox in your RAM (no reading from the HD means faster Firefox) by following this article.
• If you have problems like slow down, pages not loading or images loading weird, just undo the tweaks in about:config

Warnings

• Take note that doing this can actually make certain pages run SLOWER.

Related wikiHows

• How to Change the Language of Pages in Mozilla Firefox

Some typical greasemonkey scripts include:

• Auto fill forms.
• Alter the formatting of text, borders, graphics, etc. (For example, highlight first-run programs in a TV listing.)
• Remove specific content, such as advertising, popups, even whole sections of a page. (For example, filter specific posters from a message board site.)
• Alter page content and layout beyond what the author considered. (For example, add table headers, floating elements, etc.)
• Add links, buttons, or any other type of HTML element anywhere on the page. (For example, embed Google Reader into Gmail, thus providing an RSS feed option.)
• Enhance the content of pages by correlating information from related pages on the same site, and/or other sites. (For example, show a list of competing retailers' prices for the same product.)
• Add extended JavaScript behavior to pages. (For example, discover RSS feeds on the current page, displaying them in a floating panel. Let the user save an FLV file from popular video streaming sites such as Google Video, YouTube, and Facebook.)

Quoted from Wikipedia.

sudo apt-get install gparted

USB-Ubuntu Gparted steps

mkdir hardy-usb

sudo mkdir /mnt/iso

sudo mount -o loop ubuntu-8.04-desktop-i386.iso /mnt/iso

cd /mnt/iso

cd /home/*username*/hardy-usb/

mv isolinux.cfg syslinux.cfg

DEFAULT usblive GFXBOOT bootlogo APPEND file=/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper initrd=initrd.gz quiet splash -- LABEL usblive menu label ^Start Ubuntu and save changes to USB kernel vmlinuz append file=/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper persistent initrd=initrd.gz quiet splash -- LABEL live menu label ^Try Ubuntu without any change to your computer kernel vmlinuz append file=/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper initrd=initrd.gz quiet splash -- LABEL live-install menu label ^Install Ubuntu kernel vmlinuz append file=/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper only-ubiquity initrd=initrd.gz quiet splash -- LABEL memtest menu label Test ^memory kernel mt86plus append - LABEL hd menu label ^Boot from first hard disk localboot 0x80 append - DISPLAY isolinux.txt TIMEOUT 300 PROMPT 1 F1 f1.txt F2 f2.txt F3 f3.txt F4 f4.txt F5 f5.txt F6 f6.txt F7 f7.txt F8 f8.txt F9 f9.txt F0 f10.txt

-= ~(O_o)***-=THIS GUIDE WAS MADE OBSOLETE BY THE LINKED POST. IT HAS BEEN LEFT UP FOR REFERENCE AND ARCHIVING. GO AWAY.***(o_O)~  =-

sudo mkdir /mnt/recovery

sudo fdisk -l

ubuntu@ubuntu:~$ sudo fdisk -l

Disk /dev/hda: 200.0 GB, 200049647616 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 24321 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x48654865

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1               1       15210   122174293+  83  Linux
/dev/hda2           15211       16242     8289540   82  Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/hda3   *       16243       24321    64894567+  83  Linux

sudo mount *string*  /mnt/recovery

gksudo nautilus /mnt/recovery

• Earworms are very slightly related to obsessive compulsive disorder.
• Listening to the whole song through will make it go away if you can't just ignore it.
• Poll results say that the most earworms occur in the 'other' catagory of music, meaning that any song can get stuck in anyones head . Maybe I should stop listening to 'other' music. (;
• Women musicians are hit the hardest by earworms
• Tetris effects can happen on any game that is repetitive.
• The tetris effect happens very fast if you play the game a lot.
• Playing games that give you the tetris effect will stimulate only your most efficient gray matter. ( Kind of a deduction from several articles. Don't quote me. )
• I am very bored right now for writing this.

- "Nobody goes there anymore. It's too crowded" [Yogi Bera]