VITALBODIES BLOG

Open Source Logo Work-Around for RocketTheme:
How to make your own logos without Fireworks for RocketTheme templates.

VitalBodies bought a RocketTheme template for a job for a customer web site, only later to find out that you need to buy a special program (Adobe Fireworks) just to edit the graphics. VitalBodies uses all open source software so that did not sit all that well. In order to edit the logo and other graphics we needed a work around so we wrote this guide for us and all RocketTheme users. RocketTheme produces very nice templates for open source Joomla!.

CSS:
The first step is to find the logo and the basic things that relate to the logo like the CSS.

NOTE: If you right click on the logo on your new RT site you will not be able to access the logo as there is a blank image in front of that logo.

Instead log into the Joomla panel and go to EXTENSIONS > TEMPLATE MANAGER.
Click on your template.
The click on the EDIT CSS button.
On most RT templates there will be a CSS for the main document.
On Mynxx for example that is template.css.
Click the radio button and choose EDIT.

On most templates, right at the top you can see the size of the logo.
So for example in Mynxx:
/* This is the Main template logo, Edit this to match the width and height of your new logo image */
#logo {width: 260px;height: 44px;}

Remember that size.
It is easiest to make your logo the same size and not mess with the CSS.
If you create your own logo and make it a bit larger or smaller you will need to change this size.
If you change the height you might even need to change the height of the HEADER. That is advanced to some degree so you might want to avoid that if you are not sure.

And if you scroll down a bit farther looking for the word logo:
#logo {float: left;margin-left: 10px;position: relative;}
#logo:hover {text-decoration: none;}
.logo-text {position: absolute;right: 3px;top: 15px;text-transform: uppercase;font-size: 13px;}

Click CANCEL.
And then CANCEL again.

LOGO:
Next let’s find the actual logo itself using FTP.
FTP into Joomla on your site and navigate to the TEMPLATES directory.
Double click your template (in my case it was rt_mynxx_j15)
From here on out, your on your own, as it depends on the template where they store the logo and how many there actually are.
In Mynxx for example I found logo.png in a directory called IMAGES in subdirectories called LIGHT and DARK.
Download the the logo graphic(s) and remember where you got them from and where you downloaded them to.

FONTS:
If you downloaded the RT sources for your template, you received a font or fonts.
If you want to use them, you will need to load them into your Operating System.
For Ubuntu Heron, Ibex and Jackalope check out this blog post I wrote:
http://www.vitalbodies.com/blog/2008/07/01/installing-fonts-in-ubuntu/

EDITING THE LOGO:
Open the logo.png (or what ever yours is called) in GIMP, INKSCAPE or both or your favorite open source program for creating graphics.

In Ubuntu Heron, Ibex and Jackalope, these programs are free and super easy to install.
See this blog post I wrote for how to install literally hundreds of free programs that come with Ubuntu and many that do not:
http://www.vitalbodies.com/blog/2008/07/18/how-to-install-programs-in-ubuntu-hardy-heron/

You can also just start with a new document in your favorite open source graphic program and simply make the graphic the same size and your set to go.

I like to open the original graphic and study it:
Does it have a transparent background?
Are the letters light or dark of in the middle range somewhere?
Is the text centered or way off to one side?
High or low, bold or subtle?
Etc.
This gives a nice starting point.

In GIMP I like to check the IMAGE > MODE and see if the image is Indexed, or RGB or Grayscale.
If you want to change the original image you might want to change the mode to RGB if you want more or different colors.

As the creative types we are, we do not have to do what the RT people did, but you at least know they did the math (so to say) and worked out the bugs as far as what works for the template.

UPLOAD THE LOGO:
Once you have created and saved your new master piece logo you just need to FTP in to Joomla again (rename the original) and upload your new logo.
Some of you might need to change the CSS if you made the image larger or smaller than the original.

DISCLAIMER:
This is a brief tutorial (not exhaustive), use at your own risk and yes, there are likely to be typos…
Back up and all that other safety stuff and have fun!

FUN:
Did you use this guide to make a new logo? Show it off here, by adding it to a reply.

Here is what we created:

How To: Email Blogging Is Fun And Easy:

Blogging is fun. But for some, to go through the trouble of logging in, and learning another new interface is more than they might want to do or have time to do.

Having others write posts for your blog is also fun and this too is where Email Blogging can really help. To blog while your traveling might also be a great time to make use of the convenience of Email Blogging.

Email Blogging is where you simply send compose an email as a blog post and then send that email to a secret email address (for your blog) and the blog either automatically posts the email as a blog post or adds it to the queue of posts as a draft (ready for the final edit before posting) that you can publish at your leasure.

Here is a quick HOW TO on Email Blogging:

First you compose an email…

Click for a larger version

Next you send the email to your secret email address.

Click here to see how the published post looks after having been emailed.

VitalBodies wants to thank the team that created Postie for creating a great plug in for WordPress!

Canon PowerShot G10 Custom Hemp Camera Bag

A fresh eco bag that does not look like the ordinary camera bag. Designed for small point and shoot digital cameras, this bag has been been padded throughout with a thick layer of recycled fleece. The cover flap secures with a lobster clasp which seconds as a clip for holding things while you are shooting. Under the flap you will find a zipper pocket. On the back there is a slip pocket.

Click image for a larger view

Inside there is a padded flap which divides the interior compartment, for storage of a small charger, batteries, etc in the bottom. We wanted a bag that we could carry the charger if and when we need to. The G10 can rest in the bag standing up or laying on it back or front. There is also a small, padded slip pocket on the inside.

Click image for a larger view

_

A beautiful custom hemp bag designed around the Canon G10 that can easily be used for other cameras.

Special Features:

This bag also makes a great little hiking satchel or compact purse. The bag was designed to be suitable for males and females.

The outer fabric is 100% hemp. Lined with unbleached cotton. If you would like a different lining color, feel free to ask.

Dimensions:
5.5″ wide x 4.5″ tall x 3″ deep
Strap adjustable from about 20″ at the shortest setting to 36″ fully extended.

Hand made and currently sold on Etsy by InfusionFibers.  Visit her web site InfusionFibers.com

Where we bought our G10 Camera:

Canon Powershot G10

Sometime back, VitalBodoes started blogging on a free Wordpress.com blog.

At around 50,000 page views we decided to to celebrate and make the big shift to our own blog. We installed Wordpress.org software on the VitalBodies.com domain and imported all our posts and all your comments. When the new blog was finished we announced the new blog on the old blog.

Today we are celebrating 10,000 page views on the new blog!  At nearly 75,000 (72,256) Page Views on the old blog, we set all the old posts in to PENDING REWIEW mode. We left one post announcing the new blog.

It is interesting to note that for quite some time we had duplicate posts on both blogs. The posts that got the most traffic were the posts that we pubilished FIRST on what ever blog they were on.

So if we published the same post on both blogs, which ever blog we published the post on first would get the most traffic.

If later we removed the first post, the second post would get the most traffic.

We would like the new blog to get the traffic plus we would like to maintain only one blog.

How To Choose A GREEN Smoke Detector:

How To Recycle A Smoke Detector? Send them to the manufacturer. Do NOT throw them in the garbage as they are radioactive. For more information see below…

Choose A Green Smoke Detector: Choose OPTICAL PhotoElectric non-ionizing smoke detectors rather than the IONIZING kind (as in ionizing radiation) that contain radioactive Americium which is more potent than Plutonium. The ionizing smoke detectors are so toxic that most small towns like Florence Oregon will not even take them on Hazardous Waste Collection Day. Most places will not take them as they have to be processed as radioactive waste. The EPA suggest that you send your discarded smoke detectors to the manufacturer so they can deal with them. When choosing a smoke alarm watch out for “dual sensor” alarms as they have both the Radioactive and Photo sensors in them. You can choose battery operated or hard wired. If your detector uses batteries use rechargeable batteries.

What To Buy: Photoelectric Sensor Smoke Alarms

RECYCLING:

Find the name of the manufacturer and look them up on line to find their address. Package and mail the device by ground mail only. Mark the package and make sure that the outside of the package is properly marked.

Marking The Package:
(According to USPS Postal Document 347.4)
The outside of the inner receptacle or the outside of the secondary packaging must be marked “Radioactive.” The address side of the mailpiece must clearly and prominently display the following markings, as applicable:
Mailable Instruments and Articles: “This package conforms to the conditions and limitations specified in 49 CFR 173.424 for radioactive material, excepted package-instruments or articles, UN2910 and is within Postal Service activity limits for mailing.”

Hand letter or Copy and Paste and Print:

RADIOACTIVE (Smoke Detector For Recycling)

This package conforms to the conditions and limitations specified in 49 CFR 173.424 for radioactive material, excepted package-instruments or articles, UN2910 and is within Postal Service activity limits for mailing.

Send by Ground Mail Only.

NOTES: Check with your mail person to make sure that your package is fine to ship under the current ever changing rules of the postal service.

According the Wikipedia:

Americium can be produced in kilogram amounts and has some uses, mostly involving ²⁴¹Am since it is easiest to produce relatively pure samples of this isotope. Americium is the only synthetic element to have found its way into the household, where one common type of smoke detector contains a tiny amount (about 0.2 microgram) of ²⁴¹Am as a source of ionizing radiation.^[2] This amount emits about 1 microcurie of nuclear radiation when new, with the amount declining slowly as the americium decays into neptunium, a different transuranic element, with a much longer half-life (about 2.14 million years). With its half-life of 432 years, the americium-241 in a smoke detector includes about 5% neptunium after 22 years, and about 10% after 43 years. After the 432-year americium-241 half-life, a smoke detector’s original americium would, by definition, be more than half neptunium.

Using File Exchange and Turbo Lister With Ebay Listings In Ubuntu

FILE EXCHANGE:

VitalBodies spent far more time than we would have liked, trying to get our listings out of ebay and into a spreadsheet for editing.

To help save other people some grief this blog post has been, or is being written.

We want to use File Exchange from now on rather than listing items one by one using the ever changing forms on ebay.

Oddly, you can edit and add listings with File Exchange, but you can not download your existing listings.

You can download REPORTS and get TEMPLATES but that is different.

You can even grab data from your Ebay stores RSS feeds or LISTING FEEDS but you still will not get all the data and the descriptions will be limited to 500 characters with no html .

Is that counter intuitive or what? SO how do you get your listings?

TURBO LISTER:

You have to use Turbo Lister to get your listings and then export the listings to File Exchange (CSV).

From all that we can tell, Turbo Lister for Ebay does not work “out of the box easy” in Ubuntu even with WINE.

We think that it can work. Some have done it in earlier versions of WINE and Ubuntu: http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-336264.html

But that is a lot of work for a one time download of ones listings. The work might be worth doing if you plan to use Turbo Lister a lot though.

We were able to download and install Turbo Lister into WINE but the program would not run.

You might use a Windows machine to download and install Turbo Lister and then download your Active listings.
Once you have your listings you can edit them in OpenOffice Calc/Spreadsheet. We suggest you export to FILE EXCHANGE (CSV) format.
Once you have your listings in CSV/File Exchange Format (or OpenOffice), you can email or transfer the file to your Ubuntu or Linux machine.

And, once we had the listings in OpenOffice in Ubuntu we did not need use Turbo Lister any longer, but will be using FILE EXCHANGE from now on.

Download Turbo Lister: http://ebay.com/turbo_lister/index.html
Quick Start Guide: http://pages.ebay.com/turbolister/Turbo_Lister_ListingActivity_QSG1.pdf

Once you have downloaded and installed Turbo Lister you are ready to begin.

IMPORT: File > Import Items > From Ebay Listings > Active Listings > Import

Click for a larger image

Once items are imported to Turbo Lister you then:

Select All The Listings: Click on the top item in the ACTIVE LISTING TABS then hold the SHIFT key down and click the last listing (To select all the listings) .

Export The Listing: File >  Export Selected Items > File Exchange Format (CSV file) > Export

Click for a full sized image

At one point in trying to export our listings we ran into the problem of the Export Selected Items being grayed out.We went onto the forums and got this explanation:

“The export from Turbo Lister won’t work if you are trying to export synchronized listings. You have to export the listings from the Inventory section, after importing from eBay or copying and pasting the synchronized listings.”

Just by chance and shifting to a different computer, we got the listings downloaded before we received the explanation.

OPENOFFICE:

To import the data VitalBodies used these settings: (Note: The text delimiter is only a quotation mark.)

UPDATE: We now use TAB and no text delimiter. Be sure to see our other crucial  post called Getting OpenOffice To Play Nice With Ebay File Exchange as this post could save you weeks of frustration.

Click image for a larger view.

OTHER RESOURCES:

http://pages.ebay.com/help/sell/turbo-lister-troubleshooting.html

OpenOffice Basics:

If you’re TOTALLY new to OpenOffice then here are a few small tips:
You can reduce the size of the VIEW of the spread sheet by double clicking the 100% on the status bar. This can be essential for getting the spreadsheet to be more manageable at first so it is not totally overwhelming.

You can resize the columns width and rows height also under FORMAT to make it easier to see your data.

You can hide huge columns, like the description, to work on everything else and you will not lose that data by doing so. Format > Column > Hide. Then format > column > Show to make it visible again.
I would not do any sorting with this hidden though.

Be REALLY careful with DATA > SORT…. You need to make sure everything is selected except the header row. Select ALL (ctrl a) and then ctrl click on the top header row to de-select it. Otherwise you can mistakenly sort one or more columns ONLY and the others will stay the same. That can mess up all your data big time! For example, if you leave the item numbers unselected and sort only the titles, then titles will no longer match the items!

Back up the original down load and make a copy of it. ONLY work on the copy, never on the original. You may need to original to make sure everything matches up correctly on the copy that you changed or to bring your listing back to the way they were if you mess them up.

VitalBodies would like to thank keiths-online-sales-uk for helping us in the forums!

…And friends and family!

Open Source SVG Distribution Board Electrical Panel

VitalBodies.net has created an Open Source Drawing of a “Distribution Board” (as the Wikipedia would call it) or an Electrical Panel as we would call it. Some times called a breaker box, fuse box, breaker panel, electric panel or other names.

This Open Source SVG is intended to be a generic electrical panel and not a photo realistic drawing or an exacting drawing of a specific panel, opps box, um, I mean board, yes board, that’s it!

Useful to map out your breakers or as a starting point for a more specific panel/box/board drawing of your own – you know.

Created in Inkscape – Font is Bitstream Vera Sans.

Distribution Box - Click for a larger image

Visit VitalBodies.net for the latest SVG and to learn more…

“Internet Explorer Needs to Shut Down”

The other day while trying to get onto the Internet with Internet Explorer 7 (while using Windows XP Professional), IE would start to come up and then a gray box would appear that says “Internet Explorer needs to shut down.”  It would give me the option of reporting this to Microsoft or not but did not tell me what was the problem.
The other computer in the room was able to get on the Internet with the same connection with no problem so I figured it was my machine and not the Internet provider.  After a few times of this, I tried to make a “new connection” which did not work either.  I did some investigating in the help section of the Internet Options (found in the Control panel) and found that sometimes when this happens, it is because of “add-ons” which are usually ActiveX add ons that you may or may not have allowed to be put on to your machine.
The suggestion (in the help file) was to try to bring up Internet Explores without the add-ons.  If this worked then you had a place to start to find the problem.

To be able to do this I needed to right click on the desktop Icon for Internet Explorer and find the option to start Internet Explorer with out the add-ons.  (This option was not on my quick launch bar icon, only on the icon on my desktop, which was put there when I first installed the program.)

I decided to try this and it worked.  It came up with a bar across the top under the links bar, that stated it was running without the add-ons.

So I invested further and found that I could go to Tools > Options > Programs tab, and click on the “manage add-ons” button.

This brings up a long list of things that have been added on to my machine, most were for ActiveX.

The list tells you what it is called and who put it there.  I had some from Microsoft and Lenovo, which is the maker of my machine.  There were also a few names I didn’t recognized.  I had the option to disable them also.  There is also the option in enable them if you decide you want them to work again.  After experimenting with the ones that were not labeled from MS or Lenovo, I found the one that would let me bring up the Internet with it disabled.  It was used by an old program (Pricechecker) I had downloaded some time ago and rarely used so I uninstalled the old program.  I checked back then and the add-on had been removed also. Internet Explorer has worked fine since.

Written by a guest writer…

Panasonic DCM-LX3 Custom Hemp Silk Camera Strap Cover

If you have ever used the stock Panasonic camera strap on a cold or hot day, you might remember wishing that strap was somehow different than it is. Putting an ice cold strap on your neck on a cold day, or having your strap cause your neck to sweat on a hot day is not everyone’s favorite. Rather than create a whole new strap we created a strap cover in luxurious hemp silk herringbone.

Click images for larger views

We wanted a strap for all day travel or shooting assignments.

Panasonic DCM-LX3 Custom Hemp Silk Camera Strap

The strap cover is available in the same hemp as the custom Camera Bag, or the hemp silk herringbone shown.

Hemp Silk Herringbone

Hand made and sold on Etsy. If you do not see one, just send her a “conversation” thru her Etsy shop.  Also available for the Canon G10. Visit her web site InfusionFibers.com

Canon G10 and Panasonic DCM-LX3 Custom Hemp Camera Bag

A stylish eco bag that does not look like an ordinary camera bag. Designed for small point and shoot digital cameras, this bag has been been padded throughout with a thick layer of recycled fleece. The cover flap secures with a lobster clasp. Under the flap you will find a zipper pocket. In back there is a slip pocket.

Click image for a larger view

Inside there is a padded flap which divides the interior compartment, for storage of a small charger, batteries, etc in the bottom. We wanted a bag that we could carry the charger if we need to. The Lx3 can rest in the bag standing up or laying on it back or front.

Click image for a larger view

There is also a small, padded slip pocket on the inside (not shown in the images).

A beautiful custom hemp bag designed around the Canon G10 and Panasonic DCM-LX3 that can easily be used for other cameras.

Special Features:

In the bottom of the camera bag is a special compartment, just take your camera out flip up the padded cloth flap and there’s your charger.

This bag also makes a great little hiking satchel or compact purse. The bag was designed to be suitable for males and females.

The outer fabric is 100% hemp. Lined with unbleached cotton. If you would like a different lining color, feel free to ask.

Dimensions:
5.5″ wide x 4.5″ tall x 3″ deep
Strap adjustable from about 20″ at the shortest setting to 36″ fully extended.

Hand made and currently sold on Etsy by InfusionFibers.  Visit her web site InfusionFibers.com