BadTomatoes » asides

Three months later…

tonyandrewmeyer — Sat, 02 May 2009 08:31:33 +0000

…and it’s Debbie here – a little bit bored of reading about Tony’s birthday celebrations

So, for a little bit of an update (no doubt one of the Meyer’s will be shamed into updating soon…) – Sam is growing taller and smarter every day. Last time I saw him he was spouting off words, letters and numbers faster than you could put them in front of him. Yes, I mean actually reading them, not just rambling or anything. For those of you that would like to see, a video of him reading can be downloaded here.

Dancing to Gwen Stefani and Pink also seems to be a favourite – and of course you get pulled in to dancing too (or in my case, you get the guilts when he looks at you and says “come on guys, dance!”)

Playcentre is one more thing thats new in Sams life – he’s all properly enrolled at one of the local Matakana playcentres and loving it (btw, if anyone wants to buy a raffle ticket for a Mother’s Day hamper , let Olyvia or Tony know! Fundraising for playcentre is all good)

Anyway, that’s about it for now – sorry I don’t have much for you but hey, hopefully Olyvia or Tony will notice that I’ve updated their site soon and maybe they’ll give you some proper news

Have fun wherever you are!

- Debbie

Subscription

tonyandrewmeyer — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 01:46:49 +0000

If any of you are regularly checking this page for changes, and would like an easier way to do that, you could consider learning how to subscribe.

If you are using Firefox, you’ll see a little orange icon at the far right of the address bar at the top of the screen (the next version of Internet Explorer, IE7, due out soon, will also have this, and Safari already does). If you click this icon, you can add a “live bookmark” (to the Bookmarks Toolbar, or just to the Bookmarks menu). Every 30 minutes, Firefox will check if there is any new material on the site, and if there is, it will be added to the bookmark. So, rather than loading the site, you can just check the bookmark.

You can do the same thing with just the photos from flickr (quite often we upload photos, which is a pretty automatic process, and don’t have a chance to write anything). If you go to the flickr page (click on any of the six thumbnails and then “olyvia.meyer’s photostream” on the right), you’ll see the same little orange icon in the address bar. Follow the same process (click on the icon), and you’ll have a “live bookmark” for the photos. The one catch with the photos is that often we don’t change the filename of the photo, so you’ll see things like “P9290115.jpg”, which doesn’t tell you much (but hopefully you can notice when there’s something new).

Quite a lot of websites have these feeds now, so you might want to use this technique elsewhere as well. If you find that you have a lot of “live bookmarks”, you might want to consider using something other than Firefox to manage them. You can download “newsreaders”, which are designed to work with these feeds (the process is much smoother than in Firefox), for example FeedReader, SharpReader or NewsFire.

An alternative for the really brave is to try out Flock, a Firefox-based web browser that provides a really good built-in news reader and image browser (I use it as my main browser). ScreenCastsOnline has a good introduction to Flock for those with good connections (it’s a 59MB movie, which will take forever to download with dial-up), or you can ask me if you want any help with it

Help! The videos won't play!

tonyandrewmeyer — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 09:40:52 +0000

It has been brought to my attention that putting “H.264” next to the links to the scan videos doesn’t necessarily explain how to play them. (The first one will just play in Windows Media Player, but this applies to the others, and any future videos). So here is what you need to do:

H.264 is a good video codec, heavily used by Apple. If you have a modern version of iTunes (and why wouldn’t you? ), then you already have everything you need to play the scan videos. If you have a Mac with an up-to-date version of OS X, then you also already have everything you need.

If you can’t play them, then you have two choices: (a) install iTunes, or (b) install Quicktime 7 by itself. Both options are free, both are fairly small downloads, and both are easily done. If you don’t want email from Apple, just untick the boxes on the download pages. Both work fine with Windows.

Please let us know if you have any problems!

Starting

tonyandrewmeyer — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 04:42:37 +0000

So Olyvia finally chose a domain name, and we have the site to plonk all the family stuff. I expect that this will be predominately baby things (work things go on my work site), but there might be something else.

I chose to go with GoDaddy (thanks to promo codes from podshow, specifically 101 Uses for Baby Wipes) and with WordPress (partly since I’m familiar with it). Installation was very simple – the hardest thing is picking a theme. Liv liked this one the most out of those that I demo’d, so it’ll do for the moment. Note the AJAX’y goodness (e.g. click the navigation button at the top).