I recently upgraded to Winamp 5.52, and while it looks all very shiny and nice, I was disappointed to find that its startup speed had slowed to a crawl. This really bugs me, as I'm often opening and closing winamp, to check out single music files or podcasts etc, so I need my media player to load instantly.

After a few searches, and some options tweaking and testing, I discovered that by uninstalling the Nullsoft plugin for Ripping and Burning, the startup of Winamp no longer has several seconds of lockup every time its loaded. Sweeeet.

Heres where to find it...

Options > Preferences > Plugins > Media Library

Uninstall the plugin:
Nullsoft Rip & Burn v1.1 [ml_disc.dll]

Of course, presumably this disables ripping and burning music files with Winamp, but I've never used this feature (or indeed many of the others in Winamp).... I simply want a decent music player, without unused bells and whistles which ruin the day to day usability of the program.

Enjoy.

Alright alright, I'll admit it, I don't own an iPod! In actual fact I haven't bothered upgrading from my old Sony NetMD Minidisc MZ-N1 player that I bought probably around 2002.

There are a lot of different programs around these days which claim to be able to turn your webcam or other video source into a cutting edge PC based security system on the cheap.

Most are terrible.

If its not a time limited trial, then its severely buggy, or just plain useless. Motion detection is one of the big issues here - on some of the software its very poorly coded, so will constantly give you false positives, from sunlight glare etc.

Thankfully I've finally found a totally freeware solution which although still in Beta, seems to work really well.

I'm pretty sure everyone involved with the interweb can find some useful generators amongst this list of 100!

100 web 2.0 generators

I'm trying to setup working playlists of audio nodes on one of my websites running Drupal 5. The playlist module has been abandoned, and replacement components are being worked on at the moment - playlists and other such features are now going to be subcomponents of the audio module, as small contrib modules.

I'll post a guide once I have it working, but for the meantime these are some of the important pages:

Audio Module
http://drupal.org/project/audio

Migrating playlist module to audio contrib modules
http://drupal.org/node/113750

Unsure whether these have become part of core module yet, but they are patches to enable different mp3 players:
http://drupal.org/node/102912

I'll post more as I get to it.

UPDATE YOUR BOOKMARKS! New address is http://www.strangeprogress.com/keywordtool/

It's been many years since 1993, though it's only now that my handy free PPC Keyword Tool has a design that reflects this fact ;)

While currently the functional aspects of the PPC Keyword Tool are more or less unchanged, gone is the plain dreary page layout, replaced with something far more stylish.

This is an excellent tutorial (with complete download JS code) that allows us to create a hidden DIV of whatever we'd like (for example a help section) on our webpage, which slides into view when the trigger link is clicked. It can then be closed with a click on a secondary trigger link.

It looks very stylish and smoothly animated in both Firefox2+ and IE6+ (I haven't tested any other browsers with it yet).

The Animated Javascript Sliding DIV tutorial is here.

There is also a single link toggle modification to the script here

Very nice little script, and super simple to use.

For a new project I have been working on, I wanted to alter the default Drupal forum topic list, so that instead of displaying the following columns:

TOPIC - REPLIES - CREATED - LAST REPLY

I wanted it to simply display:

TOPIC - REPLIES

I soon found out that I would need to customize Drupal forum at the theme level, by creating a forum_topic_list.tpl.php file in my theme directory, and adding a snippet of code to template.php, which was also in my theme directory.

For those wondering how to do this, here goes.

Well we all need to take a break from our online work, and what better way to relax than hurling yourself into an online battlefield with 64 other human players?! It's great fun, except when your computer has a heart attack every time you turn around in-game.

Everybody loves free stuff, and webmasters are no exception. Here are some collections of free snazzy vector clipart and icons: