Thanks to all the users who helped me test out the 1.3.testing version of postie, the wordpress plugin which allows you to post by e-mail. I now feel that it is stable enough to call it 1.3.alpha. There are probably still some bugs, but I think that the new features probably warrant giving it a try for most users. Here is a summary of the new features and fixes: Now using default wordpress image and upload handling, which means: No […] (Read more)

A few weeks ago I tried making posole, from a recipe I found in The Very Vegetarian. The key ingredient is hominy, which is whole corn kernels which have been left to dry on the cob, then processed with lye. Processing it with lye makes it much easier to digest. The American Indians figured this out a long time ago. Thanks! I was pretty satisfied with the posole over all, though I think I might have used a bit too […] (Read more)

WordPress 2.8 should be released any day now (it was supposed to be released in April, but I am fine with waiting a few more days). Frequently there are some changes from version to version which affect plugin developers. I decided to try out the development version a few weeks ago, and found that they had drastically changed the widgets API. If you were using the suggested functions such as register_sidebar_widget instead of wp_register_sidebar_widget, you should be fine. However, under […] (Read more)

Last Christmas my parents got me a Canon FS100 video camera. I had asked for a video camera to take videos of my son. I honed my video editing skills a bit before he arrived, but am still working on it. The camera uses flash memory, and records videos in .mod files, which are basically just .mpg files. Although the camera is not HD (the HD version was more than twice as expensive), it does have the option of recording […] (Read more)

I recently learned that there are basically two different types of png images – indexed and truecolor. Most pngs you find on the internet are probably the truecolor type. The truecolor type uses an rgb format, so each pixel is represented by either 24 bits (8 bit channel depth * 3 channels), or 48 bits (16 bit channel depth). In contrast, indexed images map each pixel onto a 256 (or less) color palette. Wikipedia has a nice graph on this. […] (Read more)