Lately been thinking about a recumbent trike

… not that I’d have as much fun as this.

Bitterwallet - ride a bike, get laid
(this picture seen at BitterWallet).

Bookmark and Share

The most popular FREE WordPress Plugins according to ProBlogger users.

Over at ProBlogger, Darren Rowse asked his community, “What are your favourite FREE WordPress Plugins?”

With more time than sense on my hands, I compiled a list of the 183 unique WordPress Plugins which commenters mentioned:

The Top 10

Plugin name Number of mentions
Akismet 39
All in One SEO Pack 31
Google XML Sitemaps 26
CommentLuv 16
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YAFPP) 16
WPtouch iPhone Theme 12
Broken Link Checker 11
SexyBookmarks 11
WP Super Cache 10
Contact Form 7 9

How I totaled it up.
Pasted the comments into an Excel spreadsheet, and removed all the non-recommendations.
Then I matched the plugin name to the plugin home page (mostly the WordPress plugin sites).
Next I tidied up the various spellings people used.
Finally, I did a pivot table in Excel, and here we are.

The other 173

(Click here to continue reading The most popular FREE WordPress Plugins according to ProBlogger users.)

Bulk EFS decryption & encryption

Short story version: use the CIPHER command.

I had a 3-2-1 backup fail on me recently."

“21,684 files could not be copied”.

The original files were EFS encrypted.  Here’s a picture of what was going wrong:

In technical terms, the second computer did not have the EFS decryption key.  The easy fix was [...]

Installing VLC Media Player in a corporate environment

Queue the Madness song “Baggy Trousers” – “Oh what fun we had …” (Not a lot of fun WAS had actually).

A lot of our customers use VLC Media Player.  I’d put it down to the fact that it plays DVD movies.  Windows Media Player doesn’t*  And our customers do like being able to [...]

Echo commenting chases the corporate dollar – I’m out

I’ve been dissatisfied with the Echo commenting plug-in for WordPress for a while now.

The latest-but-last gripe has been with Echo performance.  It adds up to 3 seconds to the blog page load time.  And it can’t be fixed by any tweaks on Wisefaq.com.  Tweaks such as enabling Gzip compression. which I can’t [...]

A tale of three SIMs (iPad, iPhone 4 & “Normal”)

The iPhone 4 SIM card is the not the same as the others.  It’s missing the AUX1 & AUX2 pin-outs.  Which are the contacts for use with USB devices.  Such as connecting your mobile phone to your car, via USB. (AUX1 is the USB D+ pin, and AUX2 is the USB D- pin).

[...]

Disk Wiping Test: What I’d recommend

A single pass wipe, with verify.  The product I’d recommend?

Personal use  Active@KillDisk Free.  The free version only does one pass, so there’s not much to configure.  It was a close tie between this product, and my second choice, Darik’s Boot & Nuke.

The feature which won me over?  The utility to create [...]

Disk Wiping Test: Testing and other FAQs

How did you test?

Restored a Ghost image of Windows XP to laptop with a 120GB hard drive. Copied 24919 files onto the laptop C: drive. (1955MB in total) Shutdown laptop Booted with the ““KillDisk”” and run the utility.

And the restore test? Booted the laptop with TestDisk & PhotoRec, and ran those [...]

Disk Wiping Test: BCWipe Total WipeOut v2.3

BCWipe was the very first disk wipe program I ever used.  So I have some fondness for it.  Having said that, the create “Bootable USB disk” wizard had some strange “No Disk” errors.  I got it to create a bootable USB, but I was disappointed with the error.

Regardless, if you needed to [...]

"Do you want to buy these Gillette Disposable Razors, 70% off?"

said the rubenesque lass, on the train station platform.

"I use a safety razor."

‘What’s that?’

I was un-successful in my explanation.  If only I could have shared a picture:

It’s said that when Gillette started selling the safety razor, they were sold at a loss.  The money was in [...]