ChiselledAtom
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How to Clean your Keyboard with the Dishwasher
Mar 25th
You have just dumped a whole soda or cup of coffee on your keyboard. Or you have a collection of dust and crumbs that is making your keys stick. Here is how you can clean your keyboard by throwing it into your dishwasher.
Difficulty: Moderately Easy
Instructions
Things You’ll Need: Dishwasher
- Disconnected the USB keyboard from the computer and dump out the spilled beverage.
- Securely bundle and cover up the USB connector with a plastic bag. Wrap tape around the bag to make sure it doesn’t come apart
- Place keyboard in dishwasher – normal cycle. Put in dishwasher soap.
- Run the dishwasher through it’s cycle BUT make sure you take the keyboard out before the heated dry cycle. Set your oven timer to remind you.
- Pop ALL the keys off to allow the keyboard to completely dry. Make sure you either draw, write down, or take a picture of the keyboard so that you know how to put them back in the right place.
- If you did not spill but just want to clean the crumbs and dust from your keyboard, you can take off the keys before and put the keys in the utensil basket. You can use a quarter to help you pop the keys off.
- Lean your keyboard vertically against a wall and allowed it to at least dry over night. There is different opinions on how long you should let your keyboard dry from 2 to 5 days. You can also set you keyboard outside to dry in the sun for a while, just don’t forget about it.
- Replaced all the keys, by following your notes and plug the keyboard back in.
Summer Holidays
Dec 15th
We are now almost officially closed for the holidays, we still are on standby support for all our clients, so don’t worry if something goes down, we will get it back up and running again. We are rooting for nothing goes down at all!!
The browser wars
Sep 6th
No Not the who has the best web browser on the planet, but rather a which browser works the best for me.
I have been a die hard Internet Explorer fan, since I bought my very first version of Windows that came bundled with IE. Then I started to design websites and realised there were more browsers out there than just IE.
Developing a site that worked on all the browsers was proving to be difficult for me. Due to my IE bad habits everything always looked great for me but hardly for anyone else. I truly beloved that IE was the only browser out there used but everyone. Sure I had heard of something called Firefox, but this would surly never add up to anything worthwhile… Ever!!
Well that was the philosophy until about 2 years ago. After the 4th format and re0install of Windows XP I had had enough. I was behind every firewall, anti-virus, root-kit protection that I could lay my hands on and yet still I managed to get myself bamboozled.
A good friend of mine suggested I install Ubuntu Linux (Yeah I ragged him to no end about Linux) but he patiently demonstrated the full power of what could be done. I just remember Linux as a text based terminal operating system used exclusively by super nerds that have never seen the light of day. Anyway I am getting off the topic here. I installed Linux and to my shock there was no IE at all. What was I supposed to do in this situation? Use this Firefox? How absurd!!
To my surprise I was dead wrong completely. What a powerful browser in which I now almost exclusively work. I have come to realise that it conforms to all the required standards, and if it works in Firefox it will work in Opera, Netscape, Safari & Google chrome. What a bonus!!! Oh yeah it will probably not work at all in IE 7 and below. Go figure!!!
First, a little history, for the benefit of those who weren’t around during the infamous “browser wars.” Believe it or not, there was a point, a long time ago, when Netscape Navigator dominated the market. At around version 3 the browser was, for the time, excellent. HTML was simple and relatively pure. Eyeing Netscape’s success in a field that they had previously shown no interest in (Bill Gates himself once dismissed the Internet as a passing fad), Microsoft released their own browser, Internet Explorer (IE), with the sole intention of dislodging Netscape.
IE quickly became popular. Then came a period of flurried activity, with the two browser manufacturers releasing updates to their browser on ever-decreasing time scales. New HTML tags and DHTML extensions were created and then loosely documented. A designer could use these elements, but at the cost of having them fail in the competitor’s browser. A split started to form as pages designed for one of the “big two” browsers would not work in the other.
Netscape released Navigator version 4 in 1997. It was a very poor browser, laced with bugs and new abilities that broke backwards-compatibility. What caused most pain among developers was that it happily blundered into advanced CSS and JavaScript code that it should have had the sense to ignore. Microsoft released the superior Internet Explorer 4, and the tide started to turn very quickly.
Eventually it became obvious that Netscape were fighting a losing battle. Because IE came pre-installed on every Windows machine, most users just used that instead of seeking out alternatives (this is the same problem that plagues any competing browser to this day). By the time Internet Explorer 6 was released, its market share had grown to a high of about 95%.
In the years that followed, lazy or ill-equipped web designers began to design their sites to work only in IE, as making a site look the same in other browsers required a lot of knowledge and effort. This only encouraged users to stick with IE, no matter how many advances were made in other browsers. Even when Netscape belatedly released the vastly improved Navigator 6 in the year 2000, it barely made a dent in the market.
And so, the war ended. Lying in its wake was a web of incompatibilities and sites that only worked in a certain version of one browser. HTML had been blown off course as a structural markup language and was now bloated with presentational elements like the much-maligned font tag. It took years to even begin to undo the damage that had been done.
Happily, things have finally started moving back towards a level playing field. Internet Explorer’s dominance is no longer absolute, and web surfers now have lots of choice when deciding which browser they should use.
Firefox
Any browser that was to successfully challenge IE6’s market dominance would have to be far and away the best browser on offer. Netscape 6 was decent, but didn’t cut it. The Mozilla suite, on which Navigator 6 was based, is excellent but aimed at developers and unwieldy for most user’s needs. The web needed a browser that was fast, lightweight, and did everything IE does, but better. That browser is Firefox.
Firefox is a browser designed from scratch to be secure, fast and customisable. It is the safest browser available, as it doesn’t contain many of the more obvious vulnerabilities that IE has, such as ActiveX components so often used to install spyware on IE-users’ machines. Firefox is still under very active development by a huge community of volunteer coders, many of whom worked at Netscape in its heyday. If a vulnerability is found, it is corrected and an update made available in days, sometimes hours. This means Firefox cannot fall into the same trap that IE did — receiving no updates for years and having its various security holes get exploited by thousands of hackers and virus writers.
Firefox uses the same powerful rendering engine (code named “Gecko”) which is found in all Mozilla products. This means it has superb support for all those things we web developers love. Its rendering is accurate and fast, and it has advanced stylesheet support up the proverbial ‘wazoo’. DOM support is present and accounted for.
Firefox has an open architecture which allows the installation of themes and extensions. Themes, like ‘skins’ in many other applications, give the browser a whole new look. Extensions are even better — anyone can write one to make the browser do something special, like check your Gmail account when you open the browser, or block all ads. Head to » Mozilla update to load up on extensions. Of particular use to any webmaster is the » web developer toolbar, which is essential.
All that is obviously really great, but the things that you’ll notice first about Firefox are features like tabbed browsing which reduces your desktop clutter by keeping all of your open web-pages within one Firefox window. Firefox was also the first browser to offer pop-up blocking by default. Once you’ve used either of these features, you will not ever want to go back.
Safari
Safari is Apple’s own web browser, and for its first few years was only available to lucky Mac owners, coming pre-installed on all new Macs since 2003. A Windows version was released in June 2007. Safari is a clean, very fast browser based on the WebKit rendering engine that also powers the Linux browser Konqueror.
Safari comes with all the features you would expect in a modern browser, like tabbed browsing, popup blocking and built-in search functionality. It also has the best RSS-reading feature available to date, which makes keeping track of a number of websites much easier than using bookmarks.
Because it’s designed by Apple, it feels right at home on the OS X operating system, and in general performs faster than the Mac version of Firefox, or the Firefox variant Camino. It can also tie into other programs on the OS, so web forms can be spell-checked through OSX’s built-in dictionary and the Keychain program can keep track of your logins.
Safari also forms the core of the browser installed on Apple’s iPhone, so checking how your site renders in the desktop version is a must.
Internet Explorer 6
In early 2000 Internet Explorer 5 was the best browser on the market. It rendered pages pretty well, had a nice interface and was fast. IE6 was released soon afterwards with a few relatively minor fixes and cemented IE’s stranglehold on the web browser market.
Fast-forward to today and Internet Explorer has become the bane of any forward-thinking web designer’s existance. With the onset of advanced CSS layout techniques, IE6’s rendering engine has been exposed as buggy and unreliable. IE is years behind the times — CSS properties that are well supported in Gecko-based browsers, like Firefox, aren’t even on the radar for IE, and probably won’t be for another few years, when the long-delayed next version of Windows appears.
To get down to brass tacks, IE6 supports most of each of the standards: HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0, JavaScript, the DOM Level 1 and CSS-1. A genuine attempt at CSS-2 support is sadly lacking, especially since IE5 on the Mac has excellent support for it.
Explorer is an average browser. The interface is still good and it’s relatively speedy when rendering web pages, but its lack of support for CSS specifications that were standardised in 1998 is a huge problem. It is prone to crashing, and has hundreds of security holes which allow spyware to get onto your system, to the point where I can’t recommend it to anyone anymore. Upgrade to another browser listed on this page, and encourage others to do likewise.
Internet Explorer 8
After a long hiatus since Internet Explorer 6 was released, Microsoft finally got shunted out of complacence in the browser market by the threat posed by new upstart browsers like Firefox and Safari. IE7, and then IE8 were great improvements over their predecessor, with much improved standards support. Internet Explorer has also caught up on the other browsers in terms of crucial features like tabbed browsing and intelligent popup blocking. It still lags behind on many interesting HTML 5, CSS and JavaScript abilities, so I wouldn’t recommend that any web developer use it as their main browser.
The Mozilla Suite
The Mozilla suite is a collection of software — a browser, a mail and newsgroup client, a chat client and a HTML editor. This was Mozilla’s flagship product until the constituent parts were split up, reworked and developed separately into standalone products — Firefox for browsing and the excellent » Thunderbird for mail.
There was also a product known as Netscape Navigator 8 originally based on the Mozilla suite, with some Netscape branding and extra unnecessary interface options thrown in on top. Most of the good things said about Firefox also apply to the suite, but I would still recommend the standalone Mozilla products for speed and ease of use. If you’re looking for one download to do the whole lot, the suite does exactly what you want.
Opera
Opera Software’s browser is a really good piece of work. Billing itself as “The fastest browser on Earth!”, it is a free browser with excellent standards support.
The amount of ideas and helpful features that they’ve managed to cram into opera is really something else. Your desktop is kept tidy through its tabbed browsing features, which opens all webpages in dockable windows inside a single instance of the application. There are a range of tools to help you find information on the net easily, from integrated search-enabled toolbars to instantaneous looking-up of selected words.
Two very helpful features are the page-zoom feature, which allows you to zoom in the entire document, instead of just the text; and the developer shortcuts to turn off stylesheets and images. In other browsers you have to go through multiple menus or use bookmarklets for this functionality.
The interface is clean and sleek, though a bit crowded. Whereas the interface in browsers like Firefox is strictly controlled, in that nothing gets added to it without it being absolutely necessary, Opera’s designers don’t seem to have been so discerning. As a consequence, the menus and toolbars can be overwhelmingly filled with options that you generally won’t need to change.
The browser built into Nintendo’s wonderful Wii is based on Opera, so if you want Wii owners to be able to surf your site in between bouts of Wii Tennis, you should test in Opera first.
All in all, Opera is definitely worth a try in place of the more established browsers. It may not have a large following, but it is a very promising offering, and is pioneering features you will undoubtedly see appearing in other browsers down the line. I like it.
Netscape Navigator 4
Netscape 4 was just plain bad, but the web designers of the world had to struggle on bravely for many years, supporting its bug-ridden rendering engine. The interface is horrible and dull, the rendering engine is terrible, glitching up on simple HTML, not to mention even basic CSS and HTML 4 stuff. Worse still, when a page is rendered wrong, hitting refresh a couple of times will sometimes correct the problem, prompting the question, “What the hell is going on?”
For many years, while Internet Explorer was at the height of its dominancy, Netscape 4.7 was the only other browser most designers would try to support. Supporting this browser though, was well-known to be one of the most difficult tasks to get right, due to its inscrutable rendering problems and dreadful support for CSS and JavaScript.
Designing sites that work in this archaic browser is easier than it used to be. Simply hide your stylesheets from it by importing them. Navigator 4 users are used to seeing unstyled content at this stage. In the vast majority of cases, you don’t even need to test in this browser anymore. All Netscape browsers were discontinued in 2008.
What we do
Jul 20th
For a while now I feel there has been a great deal of confusion about what we do. Hopefully in the next couple of lines we will get that all cleared up.
We are the web guys in Centurion South Africa. Our primary goal is in web development, web hosting and connectivity solutions. We are a small company, but wow we can pack a punch.
ChiselledAtom started out in 2006 doing graphic and web design, a couple of ad campaigns, the usual design agency sort of work. We quickly got fed up with doing business the same old way. So we descided to go tech. and learnt a couple of hard lessons along he way. Not all teh lessons were bad though, and some of these lessons we will pass on to our valued customers. Now even though we seem to be extremely young in teh market, we have been around since 1999, yup thats ten years already!
We web does not have to be that mystical, unsolvable enigma that costs a fotune. Sure, internet in South Africa is by no means cheap, but its a whole lot cheaper than you are led to belive. Sure we dont have expensive advert budgets like some of the bigger service providers, and we dont sponsor millions to some welfar organisation, which then also means that we dont pass those costs on to you either. We have one siomple belief about the web. EASIER. its even in our slogan – It’s the web | Only Easier. (hopefully with less spelling mistakes than this post currently is.)
OK now all of that hype and we still have not told you what we do. Ok in short bullet form styles here we go:
• Graphic Design
• Web Site Design
• PHP Programming
• Website Hosting
• Internet Access (Analogue and ADSL, with more to follow soon)
• Brand Development
• Corporate Identity
Phew, that was the short, short version. Pop on over to ChiselledAtom‘s website to read more. Dont forget to check out our specials page!
Greatest Messaging systems
Mar 19th
So I finally descided to get that office cleaned up, its done and dusted, and just need to get some pics onto teh blog.
Today another story though, freebie software, I descided to install Thunderbird today as oposed to Outlook Express.
Its labled as an Outlook alternate, wow I have been pretty amazed, years ago I had worked in outlook, but never like the way Thuderbird works.
I love the Lightnig plugin, I just wish I could print out teh tasks, that woudl make thunderbrd teh ultimate software app ever built, well thats in my opinion.
Download thunderbird here:
http://www.mozillamessaging.com/en-US/thunderbird/
Some of the best add ons ever made for Thunderbird all in onme roof:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/10-must-have-thunderbird-addons-25-more/
I initially thought I have found a major Thunderbird quirk in the fact of multiple message windows, but guess what, its possible to have many message windows open, just need to check the option that will open in a new window, instead of the same window.
Really guys, the best software ever!! try it
Well getting that office cleaned up
Sep 25th
After I tooks those pics teh other night, we descided to start oeration clean up! said with tongue in cheek!!
Its still a mess but hopefull by the weekend I will have it cleaned up to my satisfaction.
We have hung some pics, thrown away so much junk it scary (still too much junk lying around)
Funny thing is, I though a great Idea would be to put everything on my outside lawn and see if there would be some affermative shopping, well all the stuff that was broken went and all the stuff that still woked stayed - wierd huh he he he
k so later this weekend, when all is finished (well hopefully finished) I will post teh same shots as before, etxcept this time teh shot will be hopefull neater, tidier, nicer and a few “er” ending words to go with that string
later everyone
Eeeuwwww, yuck, I mean, how could you!
Sep 22nd
Well its the last straw!! I just cannot carry one working like this. Finally descided to post some pic of what teh office looks like, what we are hopeing to do about it, and maybe even keep you updated every now and then.
Well I am goin to start on the before piece of the office, hugely embarrasing, entertaining, and everything else.
Well here are some pics of teh office, all are before shot, the office is going to be a work in progress s rime and money allow.
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- Image of the rear Enterance
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- Viewing the reception desk
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- View of the appleMac Station
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- View of the waiting area
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- Server area
Lets start
Hello World
Sep 22nd
Well its really is… “Hello World”.
we are very new to the whole blogging concept, but hope to intriduce ourselves, our company, wacky concepts and everything else inbetween.
Hope fully we wil share our office or staff (the the whole me, myself and I). Prove that we really cant spell even in our lives depended on it.
Also something that will really become evindet that that insanity truly is normal
till next time
What’s the difference is between 32bit and 64bit?
Mar 25th
Posted by selwynorren in Social Commentry
The main difference between 32bit and 64bit has to do how the CPU handles large amounts of information. Since 64bit handles such data more efficiently than 32bit, it is ideal for gaming and for using processor-intensive programs such as Photoshop, Dreamweaver and 3D design programs.
Another advantage of 64bit is that, while you are limited to 4 GiB RAM on 32bit, with 64bit you are able to use more, if it’s available on your system. A lot of programs will also have 64bit versions to take advantage of the increased performance capabilities.
The main potential problem with 64bit though is the fact that you might encounter issues with drivers; not necessarily only drivers for your motherboard to do with audio, networking or graphics, but also applications that might not have 64bit versions yet and will need to be run in compatibility or 32bit mode.
If you’re planning on buying a new PC, take these points into consideration when you’re deciding on which system to go for, especially if you don’t wish to have to buy a new one again in a year’s time.