Argh! - How to force firefox to open new tabs in the background.

One of my favorite NewsBlur keyboard shortcuts is the 'o' key which opens the story in a new tab.

However, I would rather it open the story in a background tab and allow me to continue processing the story previews in the news feed.
In Chrome this works great by default, but with Firefox it took me a while to find out how to get this working. 

Thanks to a quick google search and a great lifehacker post I found the solution which worked great.
http://lifehacker.com/263940/force-links-to-open-in-the-background

The solution is to open about:config in the url bar.

Then double click the following setting: browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground

This should toggle the setting to true.

Enjoy!

Wordpress ecommerce-product-catalog colorbox - how to set the maxHeight property

In the template files, open the content-al_product.php file.
Edit line 22 from this: jQuery(".a-product-image").colorbox({transition: 'elastic', initialWidth: 200});

Change it to this: jQuery(".a-product-image").colorbox({transition: 'elastic', initialWidth: 200, scalePhotos: true, maxHeight: '95%'});

Really needed this and hope it will help someone else.

960 grid

Although I don't do a lot of web design, occasionally I work on a few pages, mostly non-public web pages and web apps. 

I have never used a grid for layout of a site, but found myself building a data entry form and attempting to build the css for a small grid from scratch. After taking a break I thought, hey why reinvent the wheel and searched the internet for css grids and found the 960.gs site. 

Which led me to this great tool: http://grids.heroku.com/

I ended up using a column width of 80, with 12 columns and a gutter width of 10 for the project. 

This site made it incredibly easy to download the css code and get the form up and running. 

Dahua IPC-HFW4300S setting up IPVision or IP Cam Viewer on IOS

After trying for way to long to get the IP Vision app on IOS to work with my new Dahua IPC-HFW4300S I finally gave up and went to bed knowing I had one last option.  (Blue Iris)
Well, I got it working with a couple of settings, but the bottom half of the video would "wig-out" every few seconds. It helped to change the video analysis setting to slow, but still not good enough to be happy about it. I also used IP Cam Viewer and selected the Dahua camera and it worked, but still it wasn't great either as it would sometimes time out or take a really long time to load compared to my other cameras (some of which are at remote locations).
Anyway, after spending the day at work and once the kids were in bed I got a chance to play with it again.
I am setting up a couple of these for a client soon and needed to get them working with IP Vision for iPhone viewing and with Blue Iris for video management and recording.
So I fired up Blue Iris, added a new camera and put the ip address into the settings. I clicked the "Inspect ONVIF etc" button. This is awesome, it discovered the settings and showed me the connection string which I used in IP Vision to connect successfully.

Here is a screenshot of the settings I used.

I also included this screenshot to show the settings after scrolling to the bottom of the page.
Sometimes the video resize "Aspect R" option is better than "Fit".

To use the main stream I used the following path which Blue Iris discovered:
/cam/realmonitor?channel=1&subtype=0&unicast=true&proto=Onvif
And just change the subtype=0 to "subtype=1" to get the Sub Stream instead.

In nearly complete darkness this is the image from the Main Stream.

And here is the Sub Stream Image.

Below are the camera settings I am using.
My intention is to use the Sub Stream for accessing the video from IOS devices for checking on general presence of the facility. And I will use the Main Stream for sending to Blue Iris.
Of course Blue Iris struggled with the 8K bit rate, so I dropped it down to 4K and even 2K and had great results.
I'm not sure how big of a difference the 3M Resolution setting has over the lower resolutions as I have not been able to test this yet in an area with good lighting, and as you can see from the images above at night it makes a difference, but the 384bps wasn't that far off from the 8Kbps image.
I imagine that during the day in good lighting conditions the 3Megapixel option will shine.

Adding a Code Box Area in blogger

http://www.ebloglive.com/2012/11/how-to-add-code-box-area-in-blogger.html

I was trying to recall how I added the syntax highlighting code to the blogger template and the above link no longer worked.
This link should help: http://alexgorbatchev.com/SyntaxHighlighter/

Responsive Video Plugin for Wordpress.

For a new web site i am building which needed a few video files included, I initially tried using the video.js plugin which I have used on lots of projects. And with a little searching I even found a wordpress plugin for it. 

But the videos would drift off the page on smaller viewport sizes and mobile devices. I fought with it to be responsive, but didn't have any luck. Anyway, I realized that Wordpress version 3.6 and up are supposed to have built in support for responsive video short codes using mediaelement.js so I switched over to that instead. 

However, the jednotka holobest theme I am using breaks the responsiveness of both of these plugins. However, I found a simpler plugin for using YouTube which ended up working great. 

Thanks a million wptuts! 

http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/plugins/creating-a-shortcode-for-responsive-video/

I have also used FitVids.js recently, but didn't realize there was a wordpress plugin for FitVids until I was writing this post and noticed the comments on the wptuts post.

This is even easier than the wptutsplus version.

1. Install FitVids for Wordpress Version 2.1
2. Activate it.
3. Under the Wordpress Appearance menu click the FitVids Options page.
4. Enter the jQuery selector that you will use for your videos. 
5. Create the html code for the page and embedded youtube / vimeo video. (see below)

<div class="FitVids" style="margin: auto; width: 80%;">
  <iframe width="420" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/O56p5nOYNHo" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
</div>

I grab the embed code from the share link on youtube.
Wow, that was easy. 

Google Calendar add recurring events for months that have 5 sundays.

I recall trying to do this a few years back and ended up with some very difficult method of doing this. 

So I figured I would write a post on how to do it, turns out that it is much easier now. 

Simply use the calendar quick add option and the following example text: 

Example Meeting every fifth sunday from 5pm to 6pm

 This will create the event on your calendar.

Arduino Gemma USB Drivers for Windows

So I decided to learn about the world of micro controllers, arduino and electronics for a project I am trying to build later this month. In the process of doing so I have learned a lot from the adafruit.com website.
I started with an Adafruit Gemma and struggled for a few hours to get the drivers to load.
I tried both my Windows 7 64bit computer as well as my Windows XP machine.
The win7 box really struggled to install the driver it would only recognize it as "Unknown Device".
I finally found some posts that suggested using the hdwwiz.exe to manually install the driver.
I'm not exactly sure what solved the problem, but I ended up manually installing three separate drivers.
I reboot a few times as well.
At this point it worked, then started failing again about every other time I would reboot the gemma.
I finally discovered by accident that the gemma seemed to be stable if I unplugged my microsoft USB mouse.
Maybe some sort of conflict there.
In the meantime, I also tried getting the WinXP machine to recognize the usb drivers, it would load it as a trinket, and after a reboot and again installing the driver a second time it installed the usbtinyisp device into device manager.
However this one refused to work with the Arduino IDE.
I would only get the avrdude expected 4, got -5 errors and the verification error mentioned in the gemma getting started tutorial.
I found this post: http://www.adafruit.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=52&t=45541
And after changing the avrdude.conf file chip_erase_delay setting from 9000000 to 4000000 and replacing the avrdude.exe file with the 11513 version from the above post it started working.
I get the TRINKET BOOTLOADER SELECTED message, but otherwise this works.
I hope this helps others out there.