jrsmith.net is home to JR Smith, a rambling mess of a person who occasionally produces creative things that humans like, and quite often produces horrible things that humans dislike.
The magic that is the internet will allow you to read more about him and the history of this site, if you feel so inclined, or venture into the duldrums. For the less curious, there are galleries containing art and web design (still being stocked).
If, after all that, you actually wish to speak with this poor creature, a number of communication mediums are at your disposal, but use them at your own risk.
Removing the hinge cover on an Acer AL2216W 22″ Widescreen LCD Monitor
1 year, 1 month old
A few tech-related tidbits:
First: I nearly destroyed my spiffy new 22" widescreen LCD last a week or two ago. I became obsessed with the idea that mounting it on the wall above my desk was an awesome idea. I picked up an overpriced wall-mount kit at Best Buy and began pestering my father to come install it for me, since I have no business using tools. He claimed to be washing all of his undergarments at that exact moment, and, thus, could not drive to Virginia Beach to assist, being sans drawers.
Fine. I'll install it myself.
Finding a stud became a topic of much debate. He wanted me to rap upon the wall with a knuckle and discern the difference between thuds. I tried. I tried hard. However, my ears proved to be more concerned with producing wax than with scrying subtle differences in resonance from one inch of drywall to the next. Fortunately I found an old stud finder that I'd bought during a similar adventure years ago, located a stud forthwith, and set about screwing the long screws into the stud by hand.
That's right. By hand. I am devoid of a working electric drill. I own one, actually, but I lost the charger and the battery has been dead for years. Now that I think about it, I bought it and the stud finder for the same purpose.
Anyway, long story short, I got it mounted and it's mostly level. But then the hard part began; I could not remove the monitor's stand. It was attached via a heavy metal hinge, seemingly embedded underneath the monitor's plastic case. I unscrewed everything I saw that was unscrewable. I even began to crack open the case. Fortunately, my lack of balls and patience prevented me from following through.
I eventually found a PDF for another model of Acer monitor that showed the following:
A swift pull with a pair of pliers later, the hinge cover was off, the hinge was unscrewed, and the monitor was in place. It only took 3 hours.
I'm posting this because during my searching for help, everything I read for this particular model said that removing the stand was impossible. When Google picks this up, I'll be famous for accomplishing the impossible, and the dough will start rolling in.
Second: Twitter. Twitter is an interesting service. It's basically a "What am I doing right now?" service. It has SMS and IM interfaces, so it's easy to use, but sort of pointless. It's enjoying some typical web 2.0 hype right now, so, of course, I've been using it. The problem, though, is that its increasing popularity has seemingly destroyed its servers. I had a little javascript "badge" going on the sidebar here. It killed the shoutbox in IE, but I don't care about IE users or their problems. It's been stalling the pageloads anywhere from 15-30 seconds lately, though, and that's not good.
Today I dropped by eightface and noticed they'd made a quick and dirty twitter RSS plugin. I was actually going to whip one up myself this weekend, but St. Patrick's Day disagreed with that plan.
It avoids the slow javascript issues that currently plague twitter. On the down side, it's not very user friendly right now (all configuration is done in the PHP file itself), and relies on Wordpress's RSS functions which update every hour, so if you're a heavy twitter user, it might not suit your needs. For me, it's great.
Side note: I had to temporarily override the default Magpie timeout to get it to read the twitter RSS feed. It's 2 seconds by default, which seems terribly short to me. Since the twitter site is excruciatingly slow right now, it was timing out. This may have to be a permanent change if the slowness continues to be a problem, which kind of defeats the purpose of using the RSS feed instead of the javascript badge. The only advantage is that the page doesn't hang when loading... The code to change in /wp-includes/rss-functions.php is
PHP:
Change it to:
PHP:
-
// if ( !defined('MAGPIE_FETCH_TIME_OUT') ) {
-
// }
Update: I've updated the twitterRSS plugin to show the date and wrap the description and date in the same span tags that the javascript version produced, so that any CSS definitions for the javascript version would still work. I'm using a plugin called Dunstan's Time Since to handle the delta calculation between the current date and the twitter date. If that plugin isn't present, it just shows the date time string as it appears in the RSS feed. Here are the changes:
PHP:
-
$rss_url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/5155.rss';
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$username = "Dave Kellam";
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$num_items = 5;
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$before = "<li>";
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$after = "</li>";
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$hide_links = "true";
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$hide_username = "false";
becomes
PHP:
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$rss_url = 'http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/117733.rss';
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$username = "JR";
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$num_items = 1;
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$twitter_before = '<span id="my_twitter_status">';
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$twitter_after = "</span>";
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$date_before = '<span id="my_twitter_status_time">';
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$date_after = "</span>";
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$hide_links = true;
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$hide_username = true;
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$hide_dates = false;
and
PHP:
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foreach ( $items as $item ) {
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$description = $item['description'];
-
-
if ($hide_username) {
-
}
-
-
-
if (!$hide_links) { $url = $item['link']; print $before . "<a href=\"$url\" title=\"Permanent link\">$twitters</a>" . $after; }
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} // end foreach
becomes
PHP:
-
foreach ( $items as $item ) {
-
-
$description = $item['description'];
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$date = $item['pubdate'];
-
-
if ($hide_username) {
-
}
-
-
-
if (!$hide_links) {
-
$url = $item['link'];
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$twitter = "<a href=\"$url\" title=\"Permanent link\">$twitter</a>";
-
}
-
-
-
if (!$hide_dates) {
-
-
date_default_timezone_set('UTC');
-
-
}
-
-
}
-
-
} // end foreach
Third: This isn't tech-related. St. Patrick's Day. I was supposed to go to Matt Burchfield's house and play some drunken Wii tennis, but that didn't quite happen. I feel kind of guilty about that. As for what actually did happen, well, all I can really say is...
...yeah. It was that kind of night.
Just a quick note to say thanks - I took the hinge off my AL2216W today (to mount a better, desktop stand - one that rotates) and reading this gave me confidence that it was possible.