Enter the R2 Fish Training School Kit, the answer to fish owners’ dreams. With this training kit, you can teach your fish to do ultra cool tricks like play football, soccer, limbo, and a host of other things. This is no trick – well at least the guys at Think Geek say so. The video they show is awesome, and apparently everything was done using the trainer.

This is what you get with the kit:

• Instructional DVD
• R2 Fish School training platform
• Over 20 compatible training accessories
• Feeding wand
• Instruction manual with over 100 photos
• Compact, weighted base for bowls or small tanks – measures 10.25″ x 6.25″

This will set you back $29.99 but hey, if it can teach MY fish to do all that, it is very much worth the price!

I am sure you are beside yourself with excitement now but a word of caution – I think that you need some patience for this to work. Now that’s the hard part!

Compared to his old MP3 player, which simply allowed you to drag-and-drop files, this was quite cumbersome for him. And since the Nano’s capacity was considerably small, considering the number of musics he liked to carry, copying copies of the files to the free memory wasn’t an option.

Although you can already find some tools to get your music out of your iPod, most people, including myself, would rather use iTunes itself to the music management for me. Thankfully, someone discovered a method to do so. The bad thing about it, is that it only works on Windows. But given that 95% of all users have it, that shouldn’t be a problem for most.

To take the music out, just go to the original article and follow their steps. But be warned that this method probably doesn’t work with the newest iPods, unless someone can confirm it.

First of all, this article won’t include anything “homebrewed” so if you dumb enough to update your PSP to v2.7+ (me included) you’re very lucky to find this, there is one downside, for most of the tricks listed here, you’re going to want a big memory stick, there’s a few counterfeits on eBay (2GB for $89 – actually works, I bought one, fills up to 2GB), or you can take out the cash and buy one from Circuit City or Best Buy.

BTW, there is a post here on FG with lots of great promo codes in it for a great deal on Dreamhost.

Admin Panel
The Admin panel is where “all the magic happens”. You control pretty much everything about your site from this set of tools. One complaint that I have seen a lot in the support forums is that the panel takes a long time to load. This is actually only true if you leave the panel from one of a few pages. The slowest page, by far, is the rewards page. More than likely this is because of all of the reporting that is going on, showing your rewards for the current month, as well as a history of who has signed up for dreamhost with you as a referrer.

One key to making sure the Admin Panel loads quickly is to not leave the panel from the Rewards page. The Panel sets a cookie to remember the last page that you were on when you leave it so that it can return you to that location. So before you decide to get out of your admin panel, just switch back over to the overview page and you will be able to get back in without delay.

Multiple Domains
Another feature that I have just recently discovered was the ability to host multiple domains on a single account. With the amount of storage and bandwidth you get with even the L1 account (20GB/1TB), you can easily host 2 or 3 sites (or more depending on traffic) from a single account. When you add a domain to your control panel, it will create a seperate folder structure for that domain in your shared server space. You can then upload completely seperate components to each site, even do one-click installs to the seperate domains.

Stats and Permalinks
The permalink has become a bloggers best friend, and this is usually accomlished by activating mod_rewrite in the htaccess file. However on Dreamhost, activating permalinks in WordPress or Textpattern will break the path to your stat reporting. The easy way around this is a quick entry in your .htaccess file.

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/stats/(.*)$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/failed_auth.html$
RewriteRule ^.*$ – [L]

Hopefully some of these tips will help someone out. If you have any more, add them to the comments.

Notifications like this appear in the top right of your screen using Growl

1. Find Out When Macs Log onto your Network

Using a combination of the open-source FTP client Cyberduck and Growl you can find out when other computers running Mac OS X log onto your computer. I use this when I’m in public areas, it’s just fun to see when someone is opening or starting up their computer.

Step 1. Download Cyberduck
Step 2. Open Cyberduck, and keep it running.
Step 3. Wait for someone to open their Mac and a Growl notification to appear in the top right corner.

2. Become notified when a new iTunes song Plays

Using GrowlTunes and iTunes, Growl will notify you of when the song changes and what song that it is changing to.

Step 1. Install GrowlTunes from the Growl Disk image (it’s bundled)
Step 2. Open iTunes and listen to music.

I think in the future, more developers will begin building Growl into their applications, or maybe Apple will incorporate a similar feature in Mac OS X: Leopard.

Digg this Story

Currently the games that are supported (and confirmed) that had the 2.0 perquisite are:

• The Hustle: Detroit Streets
• Harvest Moon
• Pro Evolution Soccer 5

For the original article, updated compatibility list and instructions click on “Visit Site” below.

There are plenty of tools with which you can check your disk space. However, Linux already has a built in function to show you just what you need to know. Open a terminal window or push (ctrl+alt+F1 to go to console) and type:

# df

You will see something like this(your output may be different, depending on how many partitions/harddrives/cdroms you have mounted):

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 78012484 17606992 56442660 24% /
/dev/hda1 101086 16400 79467 18% /boot
none 516808 0 516808 0% /dev/shm
/tmp 247919 7339 227780 4% /tmp

This one looks a bit unreadable, because size is represented in 1K-blocks, lets try to make it clean and more readable:

# df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 75G 17G 54G 24% /
/dev/hda1 99M 17M 78M 18% /boot
none 505M 0 505M 0% /dev/shm
/tmp 243M 7.2M 223M 4% /tmp

Now the size is represented by megabytes and gigabytes … better? :) Now let’s create an executable file to show the disk sizes:

#!/bin/sh

DISC=$1
PARTITION=`df -h |grep $DISC |awk ‘{print $1}’`
SIZE=`df -h|grep $DISC|awk ‘{print $2}’`
USED=`df -h|grep $DISC|awk ‘{print $3}’`
FREE=`df -h|grep $DISC|awk ‘{print $4}’`

echo “Partition: $PARTITION”
echo “Total size: $SIZE”
echo “Used space: $USED”
echo “Free space: $FREE”

Simply copy & paste this script into for example into a file named info.sh(create it with VI or JOE or even PICO). Next, you’ll need to make it executable. To do this, use the following command:

# chmod +x info.sh

Now, to execute the file, you need to run it, and pass it the correct argument. For our example, we are going to use hda3. So, to execute the file, type in the command as below….

# ./info.sh hda3

Tadaaa :)

PDF 2 PSP is a simple tool for converting PDF documents and print outs into JPEG images suitable for displaying on the Sony PSP handheld game console. This allows you to download e-books, game manuals, album liners, etcetera to your PSP. Once they’re on your PSP, you can read them anywhere – on the bus, at your desk, or on your couch.

Sorry, only available for OS X at the moment.

• Disable the autoupdate feature in switchproxy (Note: This will cause you to lose the update link to pull from)
• Disable check for notification of switchproxy updates.

Also disabling User Agent switcher should improve performance slightly if you have that extension installed.

This site shows you how to use a couple of inputs and XML files to get Google Maps on your own webpages. Not sure how legal this is, but it sure is fun to see people figure these things out.

Even cooler is that you can display custom HTML in the info popup window. Checkout the sample map to see it in action.

I don’t know what CDs come with it or if the drivers are compiled with the OS one but I think I’ll be allright.

If there are any tips, or good programs for laptops like battery management and such you can give I’ll be thankful for them.

Link prefetching is a browser mechanism, which utilizes browser idle time to download or prefetch documents that the user might visit in the near future. A web page provides a set of prefetching hints to the browser, and after the browser is finished loading the page, it begins silently prefetching specified documents and stores them in its cache. When the user visits one of the prefetched documents, it can be served up quickly out of the browser’s cache.

Google makes use of this technology when you search. On some searches, Google tells your browser to start downloading the top result as soon as the results page is finished loading. If you happen to click on the top result, it is already preloaded in the browsers cache, and will load quicker.

The way that Google accomplishes the prefetching is by using a link element that Firefox and Mozilla support.

<link rel=”prefetch” href=”http://www.forevergeek.com”>

Apparently Google only uses this when it is most likely that the user will click on the first result. For instance, if you search for “Stanford”, the website for that university will be the first result, and probably the one you are most likely to click on.

Of course the drawback is that you could end up with files in your cache that you did not actually visit, so it would mean cleaning out your cache more often.

You can also disable the prefetch function in Firefox using the following commands:

1. Type “about:config” the address bar.
2. Scroll down to the setting “network.prefetch-next” and set the value to “False”.

It looks like the folks at GoogleLabs have added an RSS/Atom feed to Gmail. Very cool. It’s even SSL to keep things nice and safe. Now, where can I get one of these to install for my regular pop/imap accounts? I’m hooked!

Thanks, Netaku!

Update: Just to clarify… the “visit site” link below is the gmail atom feed link. If you want to subscribe to it in your RSS reader, though, you’ll probably need to use a URL in the following format:
https://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom
That’ll plug your username and password into the request, since your RSS reader probably can’t prompt you for one. Also, this is mostly just to let you know you have mail.. it only displays what you’d see on the gmail inbox screen. This is probably what they’re using for the Gmail Notifier, behind the scenes.

Well, in most languages there’s a way to dump out some of the bits and pieces from the headers, but getting both request and response can be a bit of a pain. But you don’t need to worry about that, now… just use LiveHTTPHeaders.

It’s a pretty simple tool. You set it up as a sidebar or have it open in a new tab in FireFox or Mozilla, and when you hit a page, it gives you your request and the server’s response headers. You can leave images, css, etc in or filter them out via regex.

Here’s an example:

GET http://forevergeek.com/ HTTP/1.1
Host: forevergeek.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
Accept: text/xml, application/xml, application/xhtml+xml, text/html;q=0.9, text/plain;q=0.8, image/png, */*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 17:01:15 GMT
Server: Apache
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 31837
Age: 16759

Here’s another one with a post request:

POST http://forevergeek.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi HTTP/1.1
Host: forevergeek.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040913 Firefox/0.10
Accept: text/xml, application/xml, application/xhtml+xml, text/html;q=0.9, text/plain;q=0.8, image/png, */*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive: 300
Proxy-Connection: keep-alive
Referer: http://forevergeek.com/
Cookie: user=JC(rest removed)
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 26
search=freeflatscreens.com

HTTP/1.x 200 OK
Date: Tue, 28 Sep 2004 21:44:38 GMT
Server: Apache
Pragma: No-Cache
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
Content-Length: 3919
Age: 2

So, grab it, make your life easier. Oh, I should note there’s a plugin for IE that’s supposed to do about the same thing, but I didn’t have much luck with it, which sucks, because I use IE more than I do firefox, though between LiveHTTPHeaders and the Web Developer Toolbar, that’s changing.

I’m curious… did this solve a problem for you? Do you already use this, or something else? What do you guys use?