ExperiencedCreativity

by Ludwik C. Siadlak

Save Up to 24% on Skype Services Using One Simple Trick

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Lots of people all over the world use Skype. I was about to buy SkypeIn number yesterday, but it costs 50€ per year. As far as I remember it used to be cheaper than that last year. It was indeed, and you know what? It is still!

How to Save Up to 24% on Skype

First, let’s face what 24% in real world conditions mean. What you can read below is the method to buy SkypeIn number for 38€ instead of 50€ in one simple step. And you know what? It’s totally legal!.

The Deal

As you all well know, € is more valuable today than $. Yes, you know what is it all about already - the currency.

SkypeIn number costs 50€ per year. But after changing currency to US Dollars you’ll be charged for $60. Now let’s do simple math:

By using this one simple (as I promised, didn’t I?) step you may save nearly 12€ in one service. Other services are cheaper in USD than in EUR too, but savings aren’t so big anymore. E.g. while buying Skype Pro pack you can save up 9%.

To change your currency go to www.skype.com, login to your account, and on your ‘My account‘ page simply click on ‘Change‘ on the right.

So go now and save!

photo credit: PPDIGITAL

@iwish - twitter wishes agregator

Many blogger has been writing about twitter lately. Just to mention 3 of them:

• The Secret to Success on Twitter is the Same as Blogging by Michael Martine
• Twitter - A Teaching and Learning Tool by Tom Barrett
• Three Ways to Maximize Your Twitter Time for Networking, Marketing and Fun by Nathania Johnson

So you can use twitter for marketing or education but it’s still about fun!

Today I discovered iwish - “twitter wishes agregator”. Looks really fun. All you need to do to get listed is sending @iwish message. It would be even more fun when connected to tweetpeek to follow your friends dreams :)

So, keep tweetin’ and don’t be shy - just click ‘Follow’ button on my profile: twitter.com/ludwikc

How to Get Your Plugins Working in Firefox 3

Firefox 3 beta 4 has been already released. It has many improvements and new features. Here’s what developers says about this new release:

New features and changes in this milestone that require feedback include:

• Improvements to the user interface: better search support in the Download Manager, ability to zoom entire page or just the text, continuing look and feel improvements on Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X and Linux.
• Richer personalization through: location bar that uses an algorithm based on site visit recency and frequency (called “frecency”) to provide better matches against your history and bookmarks for URLs and page titles, as well as an adaptive learning algorithm which tunes itself to your browsing habits.
• Improved platform features such as: support for HTML5’s window.postMessage and window.messageEvent, JavaScript 1.8 improvements, and offline data storage for web applications.
• Performance improvements: changes to our JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimization resulted in significant gains over previous releases in the popular SunSpider test from Apple, web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office run much faster, and continued improvements to memory usage drastically reduce the amount of memory consumed over long web browsing sessions.

Unfortunately most Firefox Addons are designed for Firefox 2.0.0.*. Can you imagine Firefox without del.icio.us addon? I can’t. Fortunately because of the FLOSS nature of both Firefox and its Addons you can hack any addon and make it work for you.

Any incompatible Firefox addon

This is what you get if you’re trying to install del.icio.us addon in Firefox 3 beta:

Now, how to get it working? Here’s the solution:

1. Download latest version of your plugin: del.icio.us_bookmarks-1.5.44-fx.xpi.
2. Rename its extension from xpi to zip
3. Unpack archive
4. Find file Install.rdf in main directory of your unpacked archive.
5. Open it with your favorite editor. It’s XML file, should look like this one:

   <?xml version="1.0"?>
<RDF:RDF xmlns:em="http://www.mozilla.org/2004/em-rdf#"
   xmlns:NC="http://home.netscape.com/NC-rdf#"
   xmlns:RDF="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#">
  <RDF:Description RDF:about="rdf:#$ZUQlk2"
 em:id="{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}"
 em:minVersion="1.5"
 em:maxVersion=”2.0.0.*” />
  <RDF:Description RDF:about=”urn:mozilla:install-manifest”
 em:id=”{2fa4ed95-0317-4c6a-a74c-5f3e3912c1f9}”
 em:name=”del.icio.us Bookmarks”
 em:version=”1.5.44″
 em:creator=”Yahoo!”
 em:iconURL=”chrome://ybookmarks/skin/mydelicious32×32.png”
 em:description=”Access your bookmarks wherever
 you go and keep them organized no matter 
 how many you have.”
 em:homepageURL=”http://del.icio.us”>
 <em:targetApplication RDF:resource=”rdf:#$Zlk2″/>
  </RDF:Description>
</RDF:RDF>

6. Line with maxVersion attribute is the only one important to us. Change its value to 3.*
7. Save file.
8. Select all files in directory and save it as zip archive.
9. Rename it to your_plugin_name.xpi
10. Open newly created xpi file using Firefox (It’s unrecognized file extension by default. Choose Firefox as default app for opening such files)
11. Firefox will ask you if you really want to install this addon. You know what to do.

That’s all. Wasn’t that difficult, was it?

Here’s working copy of Del.icio.us Addon for Firefox 3.

Of course not all addons are compatible with Firefox 3 and you have to know that this solution my cause your browser crash. I do not take responsibility for any damages!

Add comment if your “hacked” addons work properly or digg it if you found this article useful. Thanks!

Run Your Home Business Using OpenSource - part I

Many of us, webworkers and professional consultants, work form home. Here’s what geeky-webworker have in their workplace (optimal, more-or-less casual point of view) :

1. Desktop computer
2. Laptop
3. Webserver
4. MediaCenter/AP-Router/HomeBackupServer

Now, in this example I assume that webserver is shared hosting account in some fine company (bought with good promocode) so we don’t need to care about it.

1. Desktop computer

Used to day-to-day work & play. You keep there all your work, invoices, projects, family photos, music, movies, bookmarks - everything.

2. Laptop

Used less frequently, just when you go to conferences, meetings, presentations or lectures. It has to be more secured than your Desktop.

3. Webserver

As long as you don’t live in neighborhood of huge and cheap Data Center and you have shared hosting account - you don’t need to care about it.

4. MediaCenter/ AccessPoint / Router / HomeBackupServer

Here I assume you have one additional machine that will serve you in one (or more) ways to improve your in-house communication. Possible functions such machine can perform can be

Media Center

to keep your multimedia files on it. Movies, music and photos available for everyone in one place - your coworkers or kids.

HomeBackupServer

Your data is sensitive. Your data needs to be well secured. You can’t take the liberty of loosing it. That’s why you need backups. There are many ways to backup or synchronize your data, but in this point I just assume you have special space on your MediaCenter / Router machine to backup your files.

AccessPoint / Router

such function won’t require all your machine capacity, but if you have MediaCenter or HBS set up already - why couldn’t you combine these together and turn your old router off?

That’s what I have. And that’s what I’ll write about in next post: Costs of such solution using Restricted Software. Stay tuned! :)

Did I miss something? Point it out in comments!

10+ Plugins You Need for Your Business Blog

Starting a business blog? All of us do. If you choose one-of-the-best-out-there Wordpress engine you’ll have opportunity to build quite complex CMS in less than hours. Here’s comprehensive list of first 10 plugins you really need to boost up traffic and cut down time on managing your blog.

1. Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not.
2. Extended Comment Options allows you to switch comments and/or pings on or off for batches of existing posts.
3. FeedBurner FeedSmith detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber.
4. Google XML Sitemaps will generate a sitemaps.org compatible sitemap of your WordPress blog which is supported by Ask.com, Google, MSN Search and YAHOO.
5. Page Link Manager adds admin panel to choose which pages appear in the site navigation.
6. Photo Dropper lets you add Creative commons licensed Photos to Your Posts from Flickr.
7. ShareThis lets your visitors share a post/page with others (supports e-mail and posting to social bookmarking sites).
8. Sideblog Wordpress Plugin is a simple aside plugin.
9. Subscribe To Comments allows readers to receive notifications of new comments that are posted to an entry.
10. What Would Seth Godin Do displays a custom welcome message to new visitors.
11. WP-Stats displays basic blog statistics.
12. WP Related Posts generates a related posts list via tags of WorPdress 2.3 and adds it to feed.

Did I miss something? Point it out in comments!

10+ Free Software for Fresh Windows XP

Yesterday I destroyed partition table on one of my HDDs. University assignments, not-yet-FTPed websites etc.

Let’s assume your disks are already formatted, Windows XP has been installed (No, I won’t tell you why Vista is worse choice. And no, I won’t tell you why Linux is better. Not this time, but be prepared!). Here’s a list of basic software you need to start your freelance work. And almost all of them are free!

1. Firefox - no need to comment :)
2. Thunderbird - If you have more accounts than Gmail
3. AVG Antivirus - Best choice for free antivirus software
4. Skype - It’s still more popular than Gizmo
5. Foxit Reader - Get rid of slow Acrobat Reader
6. Psi - Jabber client, so you stay in touch with MSN, AIM, YIM (and many more) contacts
7. VLC - Cross-platform OpenSource Video Player
8. Last.fm - If you live outside US and can’t get Pandora
9. Total Commander - Shareware, but still one of the best file managers
10. putty - Easy and secure SSH client
11. Cobain backup 8 - Automated backup software (version 8 is released under MPL license and works great!)
12. TrueCrypt - Cross-platform data encryption software.. Read more @ Lifehacker
13. Notepad++ - it’s just better. :)

Did I miss something? Point it out in comments!

Hello World + Promo Code for Good Start!

Hi there!

ExperiencedCreativity hasn’t been launched yet (or maybe it was, if you’re reading it? :) ), but here it is - I’d like to give away new Dreamhost promo code VD5Y98J.
On start it’ll give you 500GB (yes, five hundreds gigabytes) of disk storage in one of greatest hosting companies an it will be increasing by 2GB each week. Plus 5TB (yes, five terabytes) of bandwidth (and it’ll be increasing too! 40GB a week!). Plus unlimited domains, unlimited e-mails, unlimited jabber IDs, unlimited MySQL, unlimited… (and so on).

Sounds expensive, isn’t it?

That’s what Promo Codes are for :) Using one I gave you you’ll get all above plus free domain for lifetime (com/net/org).

And all that for eighty dollars for yearly plan (yes, $80, no $79⁹⁹ bullshit). If you want to pay for more years at once you’re still getting free domain!

I hope you’ll take it for a little gift to bring me a good luck :)

Hope to hear from you soon in comments!

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