Daily Cup of Tech

One of the annoying things about web design is the fact that you are really quite limited in the number of fonts that you can use on your website.  Unless you’re really into rendering your text to graphics and adding a pile of alt tags so that search engines can see your content, there really is little that you can do.

Well, it appears that your prayers have been answered.  typeface.js is a javascript library that will render your text in real time so that your website looks the way it should without all of the advanced work.  Check out some examples of how this works.

You also aren’t just limited to the fonts that the authors of typeface.js produce.  You can upload any TrueType font that you may have in your library (i.e. c:\windows\fonts folder) and it will prepare it for the script.

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Very funny and very informative!

So, who’s up for DVORAK?

[What You Ought To Know]

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What is the one thing that every IT guys keeps harping on?  Backups!  You have got to do your backups. Regularly. Consistently. Accurately.

In fact, go and do a backup this very second.

Seriously.

Stop reading.

Go and do a backup right now!  Your documents, your websites, your e-mail, your pictures.  Everything!

Go!

Don’t worry.  I’ll wait.

Now that you’re back and you’re not worrying about backups, I can let you in on a little secret.  If you didn’t just perform a backup of your website and suddenly it disappeared, there may still be hope.  And this hope’s name is Warrick.

The purpose of Warrick is to attempt to rebuild your website from different sources on the Internet that make cached copies of your website.

From the Warrick site:

Warrick is a utility for reconstructing or recovering a website when a back-up is not available. Warrick will search the Internet Archive, Google, Live Search, and Yahoo for stored pages and images and will save them to your filesystem. Warrick can be ran through our website or as a command-line utility (directions for downloading, installing, and running are given below).

Warrick is most effective at finding cached content in search engines in the first several days after losing the website since the cached versions of pages tend to disappear once the search engine re-crawls your site and can no longer find the pages. Running Warrick multiple times over a period of several days or weeks can increase the number of recovered files because the caches fluctuate daily (especially Yahoo’s). Internet Archive’s repository is at least 6-12 months out of date, and therefore you will only find content from them if your website has been around at least that long. If they don’t have your website archived, you might want to run Warrick again in 6-12 months.

I don’t know if I would be willing to leave the entire security of my website in the hands of Warrick.  But, if everything is gone anyway, what have you got to lose?

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Wireless security is always something that I am concerned about.  I have written about this before and I continue to come up with new and better ways to protect my network.

Recently, I have taken to completely turning off my wireless access point.  I figure, if there is no wireless signal to access, then there is nothing to hack into.  I got myself another digital timer just like the one I wrote about in How To Get a 2 Year Old To Wake Up When You Want.  Then, I analyzed then I needed to have the wireless on and when it was not being used and I programmed it to be off during those times!

Some of the times that I discovered the wireless could be turned off include:

• When I’m working at the office
• When I’m sleeping
• When I have other things planned

This seems to work well for me about 95% of the time.  But, I did find that the on/off button on the timer was very important. It was also very inconvenient because the timer was in the back of my wiring closet which is always a pain to get into.

So, my future plans are to built a Y power splitter for the access point.  I will then purchase a switch with a remote contol.  I can then plug the timer into one outlet, the remote switch into the other, the Y cord into each device.  I would then plug the wireless access point into the Y cord.

Theoretically, I should be able to then have the access point powered by either the timer or the remote control.

Please remember, I am not an electrical engineer and this is only an idea.  Don’t go out an electrocute yourself!

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My youngest daughter is having an issue determining when it is appropriate for her to get out of bed in the morning.  It is not uncommon for her to emerge from her bedroom at 2:00 AM and again at 5:00 AM.  At 2 years old, she has no way of knowing when she should or should not get up for the morning.

So, I came up with what I think is a neat idea.  I went out and bought a timer that I could plug into a very low wattage night light.  I then programmed the timer to turn on the light at 7:00 AM each morning as this is when my wife and I start our day.

We then taught our daughter that if she wakes up, she needs to look for the light.  If the light is off, she should go back to sleep or play quietly in her room.  If the light is on, she can get out of bed and come find mommy or daddy!

It only took a couple of days to train her to watch the light and it sure is nice to get a good night’s sleep for a change!

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