It was easy to set up. Just change one of the web pages (in WordPress, that’s the header.php) to include a link to an icon file. I thought I’d have to generate the icon file by hand, but http://www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/ has a service that will create one for you. Just upload an image and then download a ZIP file with the icon in it. Easy as. Now I get that on-its-side smiley as the icon for my blog-site.
Why the on-its-side smiley? Well, that goes back years and years. In the old days it was cool to use emoticons in your emails and 8 – ) was one I used – I wore glasses. I found a sticker with a smiley on it and stuck it to my bike helmet (on its side of course). So my favicon is the same as that smiley sticker.
Even going further back, about 30 years ago, I put my knee through my trousers, playing on roller skates I think, and got my mum to fix my trousers with a smiley patch. See, there’s nothing new under the sun.
I had a go doing this a few months ago – before I had a web-site (well I had a web-site hosted on my server PC at home, but that’s not visible to the outside world). Finding software to capture a picture from my web cam on a frequent basis should be easy to come by, but I didn’t want to pay a fortune for something that didn’t do exactly what I wanted. I tried WebCam Spy at first and it’s OK, but when unregistered, it wil only work for an hour. So I junked that. Then I read about FWink and downloaded that. It’s just the job. It’s free, open source and not bloated with stuff I don’t want. Respect to Chris for this. FWink can be downloaded from http://lundie.ca/fwink/. I am tempted to download the source code and build it into a Windows Service so I can leave it running when I’m not logged on, but it works as is, so why worry?
Now my web-site has a view from our office, refreshed every hour. Unfortunately, that’s all the web-site has, but it’s a start. The web-site is Here
The next job is to get a better web cam. We have a Logitech orbit (or sphere depending where you live) and it’s a 1.3 megapixels device. the pictues I’ve uploaded are 640×480 and OK, but the resolution’s a bit low for anything of any quality. It looks like you have to go to serious suerveillance kit to get 4 megapixels even, and if you want a 10 megapixels camera be prepared to spend over 1000 bucks (in NZ)
I installed a new version of iTunes 7 (7.1.1.5) and plugged my iPod in to sync it with my PC – so I could get the latest music I’d listened to into iSproggler and then into Last.FM
iTunes said the iPod I had just connected was in recovery mode and had to be restored. This meant I’d have to reset it to factory settings and so lose all my music (about 3000 songs). The iPod is working fine however, so the “error” looks bogus.
I searched round on the net and found other people had had the same problem back in September last year with iTunes 7. A popular fix (which worked for me) involves remapping network drives.
For whatever reason, iTunes was trying to map my iPod to driver letter G:. I had recently (since I last synced my iPod) mapped that letter to a network drive and iTunes spat the dummy.
The solution: Just re-map that network drive to W: and reconnect my iPod.
It’s worrying that iTunes reports such a drastic error message. I could have followed the instructions, reset my iPod and reloaded all my music (which would probably have taken me overnight), then I wouldn’t be surprised if the same error got displayed a second time.
