Nick DeMarco deserves Zedomax Eco-friendly award of the year.

[via make demarconia]

Here’s another good reason to not use your bluetooth headset or at least set your bluetooth code to something other than “0000″.

Need to grow some plants and save some power using USB power?

Here’s a quick solution for that.

With “going green” such a big trend right now you might find yourself wanting to put a little green in your workspace - and no, I don’t mean that green. The following is a video USB tutorial on taking some supplies from around your office or home, LED lights and some USB power to create your very own USB LED Greenhouse.

via GetUSB.info

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

Here’s a great close-up of laser tatoo removal in about 5 minutes!

60% of people with tattoos would like to have at least one removed. South Coast MedSpa uses the most advanced lasers in the industry. For more information or to book an… More» appointment go to www.southcoastmedspa.com or call 949-650-7267. individual patient results may vary

via metacafe

Click Here to View in Full Screen Mode

Since I have been playing with green lasers for about a year, I never saw any good use for them except to point them to the sky or buildings.

Since the green laser has a lot of power, especially the one DragonLasers sent me recently, I decided it was time to make a simple green laser projector without me spending days to build one.

This simpler green laser projector was made so I could use it for my next party and I always wanted to make this. Although this laser projector only does one animation, 2 whirpools, I planned to improve upon after making this very basic version.

For complete DIY HOWTO, click here

When the motor is stopped, it also displays a bunch of green laser stars like this:

Lol, here’s a cute robot that learns handmovements very fast and can make an Omelette!

By manipulating HOAP-3’s hands, its trainers can show it how to whip eggs, cut ham and toss it in a bowl, and grate cheese. Instead of simply memorizing the movements, the ‘bot generalizes the actions and is able to identify when to properly use them. It’ll also speak as it learns, and let researchers know what it’s doing. If HOAP-3 has any questions, the team uses a remote (or in this case, a Wii remote) to answer them.

[via] dvice

Continue reading ‘The Chief Cook Robot Knows how to make an Omelette!’

Well, here’s how to make your Window XP genuine if you’ve recently re-installed your Windows XP and can’t find your original Product ID (and installed an illegal version).  Windows has no online solution but this method works good if you are having trouble validating your Windows XP.  (and you’ve paid for it!!!)

Step 1: Download the license.reg file.

Step 2: Double click the file, choose yes when prompted.

Step 3: Go to Genuine Microsoft Software and click on “Validate Windows” over on the right to check whether it worked.

via Zhenyi

*Note: This is for people who have purchased a legal copy of Windows but have to resort to installing a cracked copy because either they lost their original disc or product ID.  We don’t condone any illegal copying.

Well, if you are like me, an early adaptor, you probably are already using Firefox 3 Beta. As many of you know, a lot of your Firefox plugins do not work or is not compatible with the new FF3.

Here’s a simple way to make it work: (Thanks to Lifehacker)

1. Type About:config in your FF3 Browser address bar.
2. Right click->New->Boolean then, type in extensions.checkCompatibility, select false.
3. Right click->New->Boolean then, type in extensions.checkUpdateSecurity, select false.

This pretty much disables your compatibility and update security check for all the plugins. Now, some of your plugins may not work and you might not be able to re-start your browser.

Well, if this happens, it’s pretty easy to fix. (for PCs)

Go to G:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\bwso99u0.default\extensions where Administrator is your Windows username and bwso99u0.default can be different. (It will be something along the lines of xxxxxxx.default)

Note: Make sure to set your File browser to view “hidden files and folders” as the Application Data folder is actually hidden as default. Make sure that the folder you are in matches above, otherwise you are probably in the wrong folder

Once you are in your extensions directory, you can move any of the folders to a temporary folder until your Firefox 3 works. Or simply move all of them to a temporary folder then move them back to the extensions directory one by one until you get a handful of plugins that work.

I’ve also found out that Google Toolbar doesn’t work with Firefox 3 so, above steps will most likely be necessary in your hacking without completely disabling your precious foxy animal.

Well, since I’ve upgraded to Wordpress 2.5, I’ve had to let go of Ultimate Tag Warrior. Actually, I thought Ultimate Tag Warrior was working until today, when I found out every URL such as http://zedomax.com/tag/lasers, was giving me a 404 error.

Well, being an old school I am, I did even try to downgrade back to my favorite Wordpress 2.2.3, which results in catastrophic failure with the wp-categories… Damn it!

So I did look through the internet and basically Wordpress 2.5 has a built-in function to let you import Ultimate Tag Warrior tags.

Even though it should have gone smoothly, I did encounter LOTS of problems as the built-in function was very basic and did not support importing of 47,000 tags, which is what this site has.

The first problem I had was that I keep getting the following message:

Done! 13331 tags were read.
Reading UTW Post Tags…
Done! 45824 tags to post relationships were read.
Adding Tags to Posts…
Done! 0 tags were added!

Now, as you can see everything worked until the last line, “Done! 0 tags were added!”. I was so furious to know why it wasn’t working, so I even downgraded to Wordpress 2.3.1-RC, which others were saying that it worked.

Now when I tried to import, I did get this error message:

WordPress database error: [Got a packet bigger than 'max_allowed_packet' bytes]

This one is easy, this simply means your MySQL server is not set to handle large amount of data.

So I did change the max_allowed_packet size to 1 gigabyte like this by add this line:

set-variable = max_allowed_packet=1024M

(Yes, 1 gig should do the job I thought…)

Well, it turns out that after this change, I don’t get the “0 tags were added” message, but the screen “hangs” at the last step of the import screen…

As a more of a good hacker than a developer I am, I finally decided it was time to hack the Wordpress itself.

When I looked into the import php file, utw.php which is under wp-admin/import directory of your Wordpress blog.

It turns out that the import program is very basic at most and the programmer didn’t even consider large chunks of data.

So instead of doing 1 MySQL query, I changed it so it only fetches 100 data bits at a time.

If you are having problems like me with a large tag database, you can change the following function in utw.php like this:

function tag2post ( ) {

// get the tags and posts we imported in the last 2 steps
$tags = get_option(’utwimp_tags’);
$posts = get_option(’utwimp_posts’);

global $wpdb;
$startvalue=0;
$endvalue=1000;
$ct=$startvalue;

$tags_added = 0;
while($ct<$endvalue) {

$posts_query = “SELECT tag_id, post_id FROM ” . $wpdb->prefix . “post2tag”.” LIMIT “.$ct.”,100″;
$posts = $wpdb->get_results($posts_query);

if($posts) {
// null out our results

// loop through each post and add its tags to the db
foreach ( $posts as $this_post ) {

$the_post = (int) $this_post->post_id;
$the_tag = (int) $this_post->tag_id;

// what’s the tag name for that id?
$the_tag = $tags[$the_tag];

// screw it, just try to add the tag
wp_add_post_tags($the_post, $the_tag);
$tags_added++;
echo “Num: “.$tags_added.” - “.$the_tag.”<br />”;

}

}
$ct=$ct+100;
sleep(0.1);
}
echo “HACKED by Max Lee from http://zedomax.com yey!”;

// that’s it, all posts should be linked to their tags properly, pending any errors we just spit out!
return $tags_added;

}

Download my UTW.php here (rename utw.txt as utw.php)

Now, my recommendation is to run the Step 3 of the UTW import by taking 2000 tags at a time. You can change the value of $startvalue and $endvalue to control the range of your imports.

FInally, I did get all my precious tags imported, now you can install the Tag Suggest Thing and some other cool stuff from the UTW.

Phew, that was a long 4 hours of hacking Wordpress. Although I am very impressed at the new Wordpress 2.5, functions like the Ultimate Tag Warrior import could be improved dramatically through use of smarter programming and AJAX.

What I do recommend that Wordpress developers do is use AJAX to fetch at most 1000 tags at a time and then update the screen and the database to protect again freezing or users having to re-configure their MySQL server.

I also found out that if your PHP setttings for max_execution_time is low, (mine was at 10 seconds), this can be a problem as the import process takes longer than 10 seconds for big databases.

So change it like this in your /etc/php.ini file:

max_execution_time = 90 ; Maximum execution time of each script, in seconds
max_input_time = 95 ; Maximum amount of time each script may spend parsing request data
memory_limit = 128M

Then you can change it back after import.

Now, I’ve outlined all the possible problems you can have while importing your “large” number of tags.

For blogs with little or less than 2000 tags, the default Wordpress importer shouldn’t be a problem but for people like me with over 10,000 tags, this is a big problem but I am sure Wordpress developers will update it in the future. Check me out as I tried to get help from Wordpress Forum, but I did figure it out eventually myself.