I know. This is basically silly, but some system tray icons bug the hell out of me. Here part of my current setup. See the mushroom sticking out like a sore thumb? I love Cobian Backup, and have recently installed it as a service, but the tray icon is making me itch. Codenamed “Amanita”, version 9 of course needed a mushroom icon, but compared to the black moon icon of version 8 this is pretty bad. A slightly more sedate colour scheme would be nice, as well a proper anti-aliasing.

Unfortunately, I can find no option to change the icon under Vista Home Premium, so I guess I’ll have to live with it. Seen against the greater scheme of things this is of course only a minor gripe, but if anyone knows an easy fix, please drop me a comment.

I’ve been enjoying Suzero’s line of “incompetent companies” posts, so I thought I’d join in…

The internet is where you go to get a good deal, right? I order tons of stuff online, and have had only very few negative experiences. That’s why I felt quite confident ordering a cab to the airport (Schiphol, Amsterdam in my case) through taxi2airport.com. Big mistake.
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I haven’t been using this website as a personal blog for a while now, but I’m just too proud to not put this up :). During our visit to Mallorca, Iris decided that walking had become a priority, and after a couple of days of practice she’s now very keen to show of her new skills.

I haven’t been doing much Flash lately, but each time I needed to edit older projects I noticed how slow the Actionscript editor was since I moved to Vista. It was so sluggish I ended up making all sorts of typos. I googled for a fix, and eventually found one here.

Setting Flash.exe’s compatibility mode to “Windows XP” will restore the editor to its former speedy self. What a relief. Let’s hope this gets fixed altogether in future versions…

It’s been three months since I got my Nabaztag/tag internet bunny, so I thought I’d share my experiences so far.
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Imagine renting a big-ass car, with pretty much unlimited mileage. But when you get in the engine turns out to be too weak to actually move you forward. That’s how this feels. This site too has been hosted with Hosting Zoom for a while now, as are some of my other sites. Recently however, I’ve been getting 500 errors (internal server error). So was a friend of mine, and she eventually got HZ’s support department to fess up. WP is exceeding their memory limit for PHP scripts.
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I’ve updated my Youtuber plugin to include an options page. This allows you to much more easily adjust the display size of YouTube videos to match your blog’s layout. This required a bit of hacking in the previous version. Youtuber generates valid XHTML and is extremely easy to use. If you embed all you YouTube video’s using this plugin, changing a few values in the options page will allow you to adjust the display dimensions of all the videos on your blog. This might come in handy if you ever upgrade or change your theme.

More info (as well as a download link for the new version) in the original post.

A little while ago I posted a Flash based tag cloud frontend here that was hoping to convert into a plugin for WordPress. I had some time on my hands tonight, so I decided to finish it. The actionscript needed a major overhaul, and in order to allow decent integration into as many layouts as possible the plugin itself needed an options page. Thanks to WP’s brilliant documentation, and lots of helpful posts by people who’s PHP skills far exceed mine, it’s now done.
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I love it when business and pleasure coincide. I had to look into styling widgets today for an upcoming project, and decided to use my Paper Trail theme as test material. Turns out the markup of widgets gives you surprisingly (frustratingly) little to work with in terms of CSS. Still I managed to get the widgets to look like I wanted them to, thus completing the theme.

Paper Trail is a two column layout with fancy Flash post and blog titles.

• It requires Flash and Javascript (although it doesn’t break completely if these are missing). If your blog targets mobile users (for instance), this is not the theme for you.
• This is my first theme where I’ve paid any real attention to widget styling. Third party widgets may not look as intended. Chances are they will.
• Thanks to Geoff Stearns, the use of flash will not affect search engine ranking.
• The Flash titles contain complex algorithms that change things like line breaks and font size in order to best accommodate your post’s titles. Let me know if they act up. Using very long words in titles might render them unreadable.
• I’ll not be releasing the source code for the Flash movies. Mostly because I’m afraid you’ll laugh at me for my poor coding skills, but also because I fear you’ll ask me to explain how they work.
• Paper Trail was built for WordPress version 2.3, and will spend most if it’s time looking for missing things like tags on older versions (and not actually work).
• Because of limitations in the way Flash handles dynamic text the theme supports basic Latin characters only. Sorry about that.

If you want to give it a try, you can download it here.

It was time to renew my cell phone contract this month, and I the first phone that caught my attention was Sony-Ericsson’s new W890i. It’s really flat (10mm), has a 320*240 pixel screen, great network support and all the usual features. But what really made me want one was the design. Boy does it look good. Unfortunately it’s not yet been released, and while I was waiting for it to become available I met the Nokia E51.
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