Un-gay your Wordpress Blog’s dashboard

If you’re anything like me, you spend a lot of time on Wordpress’ Admin pages. Again, if you’re anything like me, you’ve always thought of Wordpress’ dashboard as a User Interface/Information Architecture disaster.

(Also, if you’re anything like me, you have a penis the size of a wine cork and you cry about it at night. Let’s not go there. Thanks.)

Well, Clear Skys came up with a wonderful plug-in for Wordpress that helps make the dashboard a little more bearable and actually useful at the same time.

The myDashboard plug-in takes the “Start Page” look from services Netvibes, Page Flakes and iGoogle and takes it to your Wordpress Dashboard.

It organizes information displayed on your dashboard into Widgets (which they call “Gadgets”). These gadgets can display the usual stuff on your Dashboard like latest comments, latest posts, statistics and Technorati incoming links.

The neat thing about myDashboard is that it’s open source to some extent and developers can create their own Gadgets to be used with the plugin. Check out this Subscriber widget for myDashboard which displays the numbers of subscribers you have on your posts.

And because myDashboard is filled with sweet AJAX goodness, you can easily rearrange gadgets by dragging and dropping them like you would on your favorite start page-type service.

You can download myDashboard from Wordpress Extend and Google Code.

Make (free) International Phone Calls Using Your Mobile Phone With Zoo.Tok

Startup Zoo.Tok allows you to make international phone calls from your mobile to anywhere in the world–The price? 50 pence a call or a little over $1.00.

Now aside from the fact that Zoo.Tok allows you to make phone calls using your mobile phone, you might be asking yourself what the value is in using Zoo.tok when VOIP services like Skype allows you to make calls for as low as $0.03 per minute? Well, at its per-call price, Zoo.tok allows you to make one call and talk AS LONG AS YOU WANT.

Zoo.Tok also passes the “Mom Test” and can’t be any easier to use. All you need to do is register your mobile phone number (using what they claim is The World’s Shortest Form^tm), send an SMS containing the number of the party you wish to call to +447800000319 and zoo.tok automatically connects you.

Alternatively, you can login to your zoo.tok account and make phone calls from there.

You get two free calls upon registration and after you’ve used those up, you have the option to top up your account with £1.00, £5.00, £10.00, or £20.00 values.

A tip to Filipino readers: What can you do with Zoo.tok, disposable email addresses, and cheap, 30-Peso Sim Cards?

Cheap ass.

Update: Looks like you can embed video recorded using Jing Afterall

Dave McCollom from TechSmith emailed me regarding yesterday’s post about Jing. According to Dave, you can embed screen shots and videos recorded via Jing on your website after all. All you need to do is login to ScreenCast, another TechSmith service Jing automatically signs you up for to store your captures:

Hi Mike - I work for TechSmith (makers of Jing) and would like to thank you for
your nice post about Jing. I also wanted to let you know that you can embed
video. Check out the following screencast to see how and let me know if you
have any other questions or feedback.

As a proof of concept, I recorded a video you could watch that should show you how to go about doing exactly that.

Thanks for the info Dave.

Capture and share everything that goes on in your desktop with Jing

If you spend enough time on the internet, chances are you are no stranger to the sometimes elaborately complex task of taking screen captures, cropping/enhancing them using your photo editing software, and uploading them to a photo hosting service before you can finally share them.

Now, I know a lot of you have your own ways to shorten this process. Personally, I use a combination of OSX’s grab, Adobe Photoshop and this handy ImageShack Image Upload Dashboard widget for the Mac.

I’ve been pretty much happy with the aforementioned combination until I found something that does the job in a more convenient, more streamlined fashion. Techsmith, a company specializing in screen capture and recording software has a service that does exactly that. And more.

The concept behind The Jing project is an always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video from your computer to anywhere. Aside from providing a simple yet functional desktop interface which allows you to take screen shots, Jing also also allows users to make simple annotations to screen captures before storing and allowing users to share them using Techsmith’s ScreenCast service.

How to: Free up Disk Space on your Mac by removing retarded non-English languages with Monolingual

As a recent Mac convert, I’ve been all about optimizing my sexy 2.0Ghz Core 2 Duo Macbook into a machine of pure molten productivity. I’ve been doing a good job at it too if I do say so myself. (In fact my work productivity exhibited a marked improvement since I got my Mac. For instance, I now only spend 3 hours at work making personal phone calls and dicking around internet forums from my usual 5.Also, I now only steal an average of 2 reams of bond paper a month from my usual 5)

Anyway, my biggest gripe with my Macbook is its limited hard disk space. Now, for most people, 80GB of disk space is more than enough but if you’re anything like me, you’d have gigabytes and gigabytes worth of bestiality, bondage and clown porn so 80GB would be nowhere enough. I stumbled upon a nifty little app called Monolingual which strips out language localizations you never use on your Mac.

You see, Apple is very considerations in installing language localization packs for a LOT of languages. This way, whether you work in English, German or Afrikaans, you can use your machine.

However, I do not work in Afrikaans so this particular localization is pretty useless to me.And face it, chances are you’re not going to learn any new languages in the near future (the last time I actually tried to learn a new language was 2 years ago. I tried to learn French to impress ladies–you know so I could say to them “Listen to the elegant language I speak, look at how cultured I am. I belong to a rich country like Monaco while you, obviously, belong in the slums of Tondo. Come now, make haste, suck my bird.”) let alone be fluent enough in them to want a localization pack for it on your computer.

The interface is pretty straight-forward to, just check the retarded languages you want to remove from your system and click the “remove” button and you’re done. When I ran monolingual on my machine, I ended up freeing up 125MB of hard disk space–space which would be put to better use by downloading more interracial porn for my collection.

Download Monolingual via SourceForge.

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