Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

I was working on optimizing my site a little again and I had been told by a couple of people that inactive WordPress Plugins tend to slow the site loading time slightly. I had a chance last night to go to some website load time testing pages (such as http://www.websitegoodies.com/tools/speed-test.php) and on average it was taking ~14 seconds to completelty load the page. Now this is pretty aweful if you look at the number itself but the majority of the website is loaded much faster than that. There are certainly things still loading but most are plugins that are accessing external sources.

So off I went and started to review what plugins I might want to keep and which were just a test to see if I liked it. After looking at my list with the intention of deleting the dead weight I was amazed that all of the plugins that I wasn’t actually running live were garbage. So a select-all and delete it was! A quick check back with the speed testing sites and now I am averaging a load time in the neighbourhood of 11 seconds. Still not optimal but a definate part of the problem.

Happy blogging lads!

After already having 2 kids with my wife I am a little jealous that I did not see this before she was pregnant. Too funny – even better for the geek girl than for the geek’s wife though :)

ThinkGeek :: Loading… Please Wait Maternity Shirt.

It is very common today for companies to create a 1-800 sales or support phone number that includes their name or a catchy phrase. For instance the major satelite provider here in Canada (Bell ExpressVu) has 1-800-SKY-DISH as their sales/support line.

Recently I wanted to dial a number like this from my Blackberry and low and behold there are no phone letters on the Blackberry keyboard. This isn’t something that you have to do everyday but it is something that will frusstrate you when you need it. If you have enough patience and you remember that A starts on the number 2 then you might be able to figure out the corresponding numbers. Put that into a real world situation and most of us are going to be cheesed off that we need to bother with this and just won’t bother.

After some searching I have found the solution! It is so simple that it is almost embarrasing how easy it is. When you dial your number and want to enter letters simply hold down the ALT key. The phone number must start with a digit so 1-800-LETTERS would work but CALL-897 would not.

Great feature, too bad it was a hard one to locate! Happy Crackberry people!

I have a couple of buddies at work that are traveling in the near future. They are both into photography and their compromise to portability is with their camera equipment. Both of them have a back pack full with cameras, lenses, flashes, etc. which can be heavy enough on it’s own; you don’t want to add a laptop to the mixture. Can you imagine carrying this and then throwing a laptop in there just to copy pictures?

What happens when you run out of space on your camera to take pictures because you are a shutter freak? Clickety Clickety Click!

Well for some the solution is simple – If you have enough money, just buy more memory cards. They are really quite inexpensive at the moment and they are very portable. An expensive alternative would be something like the Digital Foci which is a hard drive that allows you to copy straight from your camera without the need for the computer.

But what if you already have space? What if you have one of the iPod classics with a bunch of room on it? Well then you need the iPod Camera Connector. Thanks to these two guys mentioning a need by way of the classic geek dialect “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”, I went looking. This adapter will allow you to connect a 4th or 5th generation iPod classic directly to your camera to offload your pictures.

The iPod Camera Connector provides a fast, easy way to transfer images from your digital camera to your iPod with color display or iPod with video. To use with iPod with color display requires iPod photo software v1.1 or later.

There you are boys! I am not sure that people deep enough into the hobby and even less sure that people who make a living through photography will be into this but it turns out that the everyday user that takes a ton of point and shoot pictures on vacation has a low cost way to store them to a big space.

Happy pictures everyone!

I just wanted to appologize to all those that are dedicated readers to my blog. This month has been absolutely crazy for me. The first thing that happened to me was a trip to PEI, Canada. A great trip but it was for my 9-5 so I was quite busy while away. I also didn’t have any planning time as it was an emergency coverage.

After that I was away on a planned trip with my brother and a buddy for Golf. Computers were a no-no, partially a rule I wanted to follow as a way to unplug. So all that being said??? I am back baby :)

On my way home from work and all of a sudden I start getting text messages from a familiar provider, 21212. It took me a couple of minutes but I realized it was Twitter sending me SMS updates all of a sudden. I haven’t gotten SMS updates from Twitter since they took down that service last year. From what it sounded like at the time it was due to the cost, which leads me to believe that they have worked out a deal with the major Canadian cell companies.

I took a trip to the twitter.com website as soon as I got home – low and behold; the service has been re-instated. I was able to find this blurb on the page where you register your cell phone number in their system:

Note: In Canada we currently support SMS notifications for Bell Mobility, Rogers, Fido, Telus, Koodo and Virgin Mobile Canada subscribers

So congrads to Twitter. The only issue I have now is SMS subscription management. It seems like many of the people whom I added as freinds are listed to update through SMS. Time to search for a tool to mass switch it off so I can add the people I want. Which won’t be many for SMS udpates due to the number of posts I will get…. I just can see it going all night.

My wife would kill me!

The world’s biggest chipmaker paid computer makers to postpone or scrap plans to launch products using AMD chips, paid illegal rebates to encourage them to use Intel chips and paid a retailer to stock computers with its chips, the Commission said.

via Intel hit with record $1.45 billion antitrust fine.

Here’s one that is just plain entertaining. If you are on Facebook like 98% of the people I know are, then this is for you. A friend of mine posted a status message letting us all know about a beta feature on Facebook, a new language called English (Pirate).

That’s correct folks – now you can Facebook like a pirate. Simply scroll down to the bottom of the page and click on your current language (in this case it is English US for me).

A pop up window will show up with all the possible languages you can choose, just click on English (Pirate) and you’re set!

Arrrr! Tis time to shoot ye all a note. Be it time to go now!

On a side note – I have to say that Facebook’s list of available languages is awesome, no? Kudos to them!