To prepare my shipment, I removed every component from the computers and other devices. They only take the electronic circuit boards and processors so to maximize your profit it’s best to remove anything that doesn’t have value from the shipment to ensure it is as light as possible. The cost of the shipment is likely deducted from the value of the recycled materials so the less excess stuffed shipped the better. So I spent an afternoon removing all the motherboards and add-in cards from each computer and putting them in a box. Cash for electronic scrap requests that the components be separated by type so the CPUs I put in one box and the rest of the printed circuit boards when in another. I strip out the circuit boards from the hard drives, CD-ROMS and floppy drives. I also disassembled and removed the circuit boards from the printers and other electronics. The entire process took several hours.

After all was done I had 42 pounds of electronic scrap that I was able to fit into one box. Print a FedEx label from their site was straightforward. I tapped the label to the box and dropped it off at a local FedEx shipping location. About 2 weeks latter I received a check for $68.25. Much more than I was expecting for electronic scrap. As proof here’s a scan of the check:

It’s impossible to know exactly how much electronic scrap is worth until the actual work is done to extract the precious metals. The towers I sent in were from the Pentium I and II era. The 5 laptops were mostly Pentium 4′s and I doubt the scanners and printers really added any value. As a general rule of thumb the older the computer the more it’s worth and CPU’s are probably the most valuable component.

So if you got a lot of computer junk around I would highly recommend Cash for electronic scrap. Preparing the shipment does take some work but so would hauling the stuff off to the dump so Cash for electronic scrap is a great option if you actually want rewarded for cleaning out the garage. For one or two computer it’s probably not worth the effort. It’s also possible to get old computers for free by checking out the free section on craigslist or watching the postings on FreeCycle. I found a few useful computers this way as well as tons of junk computer that I later recycled for cache.

If you use Cash for electronic scrap please leave a comment and let people know what you sent in and how much it was worth.

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but with IE9 the event will never fire regardless of whether the image file is in the browser cache or not. To fix this you just need to set the img src after attaching the event or reset the img src after attaching the event like so:

img = new Image();
img.src = ‘some.jpeg’;
if(img.complete){
somefunc();
} else {
img.attachEvent( “onload”, somefunc );
img.src = img.src;
}

Hopefully this will help someone else out running into this same problem and encourage the IE team to fix it.

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If the below image has “webp” in the corner your browser can display WebP. If it has “jpeg” it is because your browser cannot show WebP images but the user experience remains the same. webp is a new image format pioneered by Google based on the VP8 video codec to reduce the download size of images on the web. What I am presenting is a way to offer WebP images to browsers that support them while falling back to jpegs so that visitors still have the same user experience.


This page uses javascript to tests if your browser supports webp and loads the appropriate format. Native browser support is limited to Chrome 9+ and Opera 11.10 but thanks to @antimatter15 and his work WebP images can be displayed in any browser that supports WebM. It creates a single frame WebM video and places it in a <video> tag to replace the <img> tag. I have modified his original code to add support for jpeg fallback when WebP isn’t supported. This allows WebP to be used right now without showing broken images to browser that don’t support WebP.

Get the Javascript Code for WebP support here.

Using it

Add <script src="weppy.js"></script> anywhere on the page but for the best performance add it add the end of your document right before the </body> tag. Then create your img tags like so:
<img alt="Baby Jesus and Mary" class="webp" data-src="baby-jesus-and-mary.jpg" />
data-* is a new html5 attribute is a completely valid way to provide arbitrary data accessible by Javascript. At first I tried setting the “src” to the jpeg and switching it to the WebP image after the javascript test to verify support for WebP. However doing this causes both image formats to be downloaded which means the page loads much slower. To prevent the jpeg from being loaded until needed the “src” must be empty and the “data-src” is used instead.

Browser support and issues

Native Webp support is currently available in Chrome 9+ and Opera 11.10. Support for WebP using a WebM video tag is available in
Chrome 7.0+, Opera 10.62+, Firefox 4.0 and even IE 9 with the WebM MF Components or IE6+ with Chrome Frame. I would estimate about 25% of internet users will be able take advantage of the WebP with weppy.js. In the next few months it will probably increase dramatically as more people adopt Chrome or upgrade to Firefox 4.. The major downside is that images will not work when javascript is turned off or web bots that don’t support javascript and won’t know about the image unless the “src” is valud. Since we are using the data-src attribute and dynamically changing it with javascript it’s difficult for any web spider to actually find the images. Depending on whether you want your website to show up in online image searches it could be a real downside to using WebP images. One workaround would be to duplicate each image in <noscript> tags like so:


<img data-src="image.jpg" class="webp" alt="an image" width="100" height="100" />
<noscript>
<img src="image.jpg" alt="an image" width="100" height="100" />
</noscript>


The major disadvantage with doing this is that it clutters up the html but it will ensure give everyone and everything can access your images.

Limitations of WebP images as WebM video

Since it creates a video tag from an img tag it’ll behave much differently. Naturally any css applied to img tags will have to be modified to apply to video tags as well. With an img tag the browser scales it to fit whatever width and height are set, but with video tags it will be scaled but the aspect ratio will always be the same as the native size of the image; it won’t be stretched to fit. since you should be setting the width and height to the image’s natural width and height this shouldn’t be an issue.

XmlHttpRequest is used to load the WebP image and create the WebM video and there may be a bit of a performance penalty because the image has to be loaded as binary data which has a little overhead. Also the WebP images have to be downloaded from same domain unless Cross-Origin Resource Sharing is used. Which basically means that the WebP file has to be served with the HTTP header:
Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

WebP in CSS

There is currently no way to use WebP images in css backgrounds without native support and I havn’t found a good method of falling back to jpegs with pure css. weppy.js does add a “webp” class to the html element similar to how modernizer works. However this happens too late in the document loading process to prevent loading any jpeg images specified in the CSS. The only way I’ve seen to use WebP images in CSS is with server side browser detection to serve a special css file to browsers that support WebP. A similar method could also be done to create the src attributes for img tag eliminating the need for javascript. The downside to these methods is that they are based on the User-Agent header which is not always predictable and the User-Agent detection rules would have to be updated when new browsers add support for WebP.

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To patch run the command:

patch -p1 < authaim.patch

Within the eshop directory. The patch file will have to be located in the directory as well.

If you don't have unix or can't use patch here's a prepatched version:
Prepatched eshop.6.2.2-aim

I make no promises that it will actually work properly so test it before installing it on a live site.

Leave comments if you have any problems and I'll see what I can do.

I try to get a patched version for 6.2.8 soon.

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1. Install X11 on OS X 10.4 Tiger Without the Install DVD

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There’s all kinds of fun things broken computers are good for. Below is what I would consider the top 10:

1. Throw the computer off of a high point. At least 3 or 4 stories high would be good. I’ve done this before and it tends to be anti-climatic. If you choose on doing this be sure you’re the one throwing it, it’s more fun that way.
2. Sell you computer on ebay. If you have a recent computer this might be viable option. There are several people that sell their computers “as-is” and make a small amount of change.
3. Plug your computer’s power connector in backwards and let the sparks fly. This is much easier to do with older computers like 386′s than the new models. With old atx style motherboards you can switch the two power connectors on the motherboard and let the system fry itself. Some 486′s even let you plug the CPU in incorrectly which made a fun amount of smoke. With new computer’s one can try overclocking them to extreme levels and then removing the heatsink to provide a similar effect.
4. Burn it’s body, throw the bones through a wood chipper, mix it with cement and throw it in the ocean or a nearby lake.
5. Leave it in your unlocked car and hope someone takes it. Better yet, find someone else’s unlocked car and leave it there.
6. Do your civic duty and take it to a computer recycling center. Really, they do exist try looking in the phone book.
7. Decorate your apartment with it’s dead parts or better yet use them for body piercings.
8. Just take it out back and shoot it. Or go lethal on it Office Space style.
9. Donate it to a charity. You’ll have a better chance of them accepting it if you just leave it at their doorstep. Don’t even think about taking it off your taxes.
10. Have a white elephant party.
11. Keep it on your desk and use it as a perpetual excuse why you can’t do things like, your homework, the dishes and paying bills.

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]]> http://nnucomputerwhiz.com/cursed-computer.html/feed 1 http://nnucomputerwhiz.com/virtual-box.html http://nnucomputerwhiz.com/virtual-box.html#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:53:53 +0000 admin http://dtc.fastcomputerdoctors.com/www.nnucomputerwhiz.com/?p=29 Virtual box – fast emulation for Linux

Having tried qemu, vmware and virtual box I have found virtual box to be the easiest virtual machine for Ubuntu to use without sacrificing any performance.

Installation

Virtual box can be obtained from Innotek. Apparently it is based on Qemu and so is partly open source. They have two versions on their download page both are free but only one is open source. Since I’m not as much as a free software purist I downloaded the binary for Ubuntu Edgy Eft. Installation went well using the command:
sudo dpkg -i VirtualBox_1.3.6_Ubuntu_edgy_i386.deb
It even created an icon in the system tools application menu.

Running

At first I tried using it to run Windows 98. I figured that 98 would use less resources than XP and would run faster. To make a long story short, it didn’t work. I could never get the installation to finish without crashing. Later I find in the documentation that only Windows 2000 and later are supported by Virtual Box.

Well no worries. I added a Windows XP iso and started it installing. It worked beautifully.

Performance

Starting up the VM seams to take a very long time on my P 4 2.6 GHz 512 Mb Ram laptop. I’m guess that my RAM is the limiting factor. 512 has always been sufficient for running Gnome and OpenOffice, leave it up to Windows XP to suck all my RAM. Working with the VM is enjoyable. It is very responsive for the most part, although switching between WinXP and the rest of my Linux programs brings the system to a craw because of all the page swapping it is doing.

USB support

Probably the coolest thing that VirtualBox can do is emulate the host’s usb ports on the Guest OS. This means your USB device that don’t work in Linux can still be used in Windows within Linux. I wanted to use it to do seem edits on my Verizon Razr Cell phone. When I first tried enabling USB support I got a few permission errors.

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]]> http://nnucomputerwhiz.com/virtual-box.html/feed 0 http://nnucomputerwhiz.com/linux-introduction.html http://nnucomputerwhiz.com/linux-introduction.html#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:52:12 +0000 admin http://dtc.fastcomputerdoctors.com/www.nnucomputerwhiz.com/?p=27 Introduction to Linux

I first started using Linux back in the days when Red Hat 7 was the latest and greatest. I started using it because I wanted to be able to tweak my operating system more than windows would let me do. I wanted to be proficient using regedit but there was like no documentation at all about the windows registry. Compared to Linux windows is like a book with two pretty covers but all the pages are white with the contents of the book written in white ink. You can’t do anything with the stuff inside of windows.

Let me be perfectly honest with you, Linux is not for everyone. You may think that Linux is not for beginners or new computer users, but that is not the case. If setup right, Linux can be much easier to use than Windows. Linux is not for those who want to be able to play their windows games without problems, use their webcams without problems, or run Microsoft Office and other windows only programs. Let’s look at a short list of pros and cons and then you can decide what you think is best.

Pros	Cons
Many free programs come with Linux that makes it possible to do things you’ve never thought imaginable	Some software only works on Windows
Great stability and reliability, one program cannot bring down the system	Some poorly written open source programs will crash occasionally (but when they do you can actually submit a bug report.)
Drivers for almost every piece of hardware ever made is included with the operating system	Some really new pieces of hardware don’t have drivers yet
Tons of programming resources for every computer language written	Some programs can be difficult to install since they need to be compiled from source
Virus/spyware immunity
Unlimited flexibility and customization since the source code is available
Free!

History of Linux

Linux was written by Linus Torvalds, Linus started out by just enjoying programming an operating system for the x86 processors. Linus was very familiar with the 386′s internal workings and had been using an operating called Minix for most of his computing needs. Minix was written a university professor who wanted an operating system that his students could learn from. The source code was provided but it was not freely redistributable. When Linus started working Linux some other Minix users were interested and started contributing to the project. The rest, as they say, is history. Many different programmers hopped on the band wagon and started developing Linux.

Let me clarify something here. Linux refers to the kernel or core of the operating system, this is what Linus developed. When most people say Linux they are not just talking about the kernel but the kernel combined with the graphical user interface and all the other programs that go along with it. When you’re talking about this it would be proper to so GNU/Linux. GNU is an organization that developed all the free tools that make Linux able to do stuff. Before Linux came along the GNU tools were used in commercial Unix, when Linux came along it was possible to offer a completely free operating system.

Installing Linux

So by this time you probably just want to know how to get Linux so you can pass your own judgement on it. There are many ways to install Linux and may places you can get it. In the early days it was very difficult to install Linux but in recent years it has gotten much easier. To install Linux you first need to download what is known as a distribution. A distribution is a collecting of Linux and all the related software on one CD (or several Cd’s or DVDs). The best Distribution I have ever used is known as Ubuntu. You can download CD images of the latest distribution from the Download page. Ubuntu is the only distribution that I know of that offers free Cd’s. They will actually ship you the operating system absolutely free, no shipping charge either. You can place your order at Ship it.

If you download the ISO’s then you will need to burn them to a CD. You can do so using a CD burning program such as Nero. Windows does not have ISO burning support so third party software is necessary.

Linux Myths

Linux is hard to install

The truth is Linux is not any harder to install than any other operating system. It is true that Linux used to be very difficult to install but for the last couple years Linux has progressed so that it is possible to effortlessly install Linux alongside windows in a dual boot configuration.

Linux is only for programmers and hackers

While it may be true that many hackers and programmers use Linux. The truth is anyone can use Linux. I believe that Linux can be much easier to use than windows or other operating systems.

There is no support for Linux

Some people think that because Linux is not “owned” by anybody that it is impossible to get support for it when it doesn’t work. This is as far from the truth as you can get. Using Windows it is impossible to even send in a bug report to Microsoft let alone get help when something doesn’t work. With Linux I have been able to directly e-mail the developers of the application I have been having problems with and get a reply in a few days. This not possible with any closed source program.

There are no games available for Linux

Unfortunately there is some truth to this claim. Many games do not work with Linux unless they specifically ported to the Operating System. However, there are many games that have been ported. Id software is the main company that ports they commercial games to Linux but there are many more. It is also possible to get many windows games to run on Linux using wine which is an application compatibility layer that include good DirectX support. I have installed Warcraft III, World of Warcraft, Command and Conquer and many other games to run on Linux using wine. There is also hundreds of open source games available for Linux, they are not quite as large as their commercial counterparts but many of them are fun and unique. See the Linux game tome for a database of all the open source games available for Linux.

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]]> http://nnucomputerwhiz.com/linux-introduction.html/feed 0 http://nnucomputerwhiz.com/linux-yahoo-webcam.html http://nnucomputerwhiz.com/linux-yahoo-webcam.html#comments Tue, 23 Feb 2010 17:51:23 +0000 admin http://dtc.fastcomputerdoctors.com/www.nnucomputerwhiz.com/?p=25 Webcam support for Yahoo Chat in Linux

I searched for countless hours to find a way to connect to Yahoo webcams reliably from Linux. Finally I found GyachEi. Which stands for Gyach Enhanced Improved. Gyach was originally created as a yahoo only chat client. It was rather incomplete until someone came along and created Gyach Enhanced adding webcam support including broadcasting and viewing as well as voice chat. At first I tried GyachE but found it to be rather unstable and continued my search for a full featured Yahoo! client. I found GyachE Improved which was created by the GyachE community after the developer of GyachE stopped work on it.

GyachEi which can be found at the GyachEi website is a Yahoo! client that supports most of the features of the official client. It was created with the philosophy that multi-protocol clients were slower to develop and implement new features because they had to insure compatibility with all the protocols. As far as I know it is the only client that supports voice chat and webcam broadcasting in Linux.

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