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Saturday, July 25, 2009

Air safety - aircraft hardware screws

Air Safety

Air safety is a term encompassing the theory, investigation and categorization of flight failures, and the prevention of such failures through regulation, education and training. Wikipedia)

Through research, learning from investigations of aircraft crashes, regulations, etc., the aircraft industry has made air travel relatively safe as you can see from the records of death per billion kilometers below:

Death per billion kilometers
Air: 0.05
Bus: 0.4
Rail: 0.6
Van: 1.2
Water: 2.6
Car: 3.1
Bicycle: 44.6
Foot: 54.2
Motorcycle: 108.9


The safe operation of an aircraft is to a large extend dependent on using the proper aircraft hardware such as threaded fasteners, quick-release fasteners, rivets, aircraft screws which despite their small sizes are hugely important for holding the aircraft parts together. It is absolutely essential never to try to save money and cut corners but to spend money on high quality aircraft hardware to ensure the integrity of the aircraft.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

What gifts to give this coming holidays season

Buying gifts had always been a problem for me. See My first grandchild at his grandfather's 57th birthday gathering. I just received a message from Gift Card MallTM which gave me a good idea - give gift cards. That will solve my headache of trying to figure out what gift to buy. By giving gift cards, the gift recipient will choose his or her own gift and thus there will never be the problems of receiving duplicate or even triplicate gifts or gifts which the recipient has no use for.

However, there is still a problem. It seems there are rumours circulating that retailers are going out of business and thus not accepting gift cards. If true, this will be another gift headache. The message from Blackhawk Network is reassuring. According to Blackhawk Network, the rumour of a very long list of retailers not accepting gift cards is not true, being greatly overstated. This I take to be that there may be a small number of retailers closing business not accepting gift cards, but a vast network of retailers still do accept gift cards. Not only that, it seems that according to a holiday survey by NRF (National Retail Federation), more than half of consumers preferred gift cards.

So folks, if you have problems deciding on what gift to buy for your loved ones, get gift cards.

Wednesday, December 26, 2007

Prevent email harvesting by scrambling your email address

Frequently, one may want visitors to our website to email us and the conventional method is to use a mailto: HTML tag like

<a href="mailto:myemailaddress@gmail.com">Contact me</a>

which will be displayed by web browsers as

Contact me

However, robotic email harvester will roam the web to harvest email address from such mailto: HTML tags for spam.

There are various ways to prevent this, some more effective than others. One of them is to scramble your email address such that you get a scrambled code like

<script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">
<!--
// Email scramble script provided by http://bloggerbuster.com/tools/email/
{ coded = "wCUvvpdbUdRGKKTph@vKITC.AUK"
key = "sKnQ938wjUCOqGJfaxMZiHd2vANhe1ySWB0EmkY6ztbIol4TuRXVFP7pDrLgc5"
shift=coded.length
link=""
for (i=0; i<coded.length; i++) {
if (key.indexOf(coded.charAt(i))==-1) {
ltr = coded.charAt(i)
link += (ltr)
}
else {
ltr = (key.indexOf(coded.charAt(i))-shift+key.length) % key.length
link += (key.charAt(ltr))
}
}
document.write("<a href='mailto:"+link+"'>Click here to email me</a>")
}
//-->
</script><noscript>Sorry, you need Javascript on to email me.</noscript>


Pasting the scrambled script will cause web browsers to display a link as shown below:



Note: There is some problems. After publishing this post, the "Click here to email me" did not display in FireFox 2.0. It should work if Javascript is enabled, and it is enabled as if Javascript is disabled, you would not be able to see the Google advertisements in this blog.

Viewing this post in Internet Explorer 6 resulted in the following problem. Error message was displayed when trying to load the page in Internet Explorer 6:


Problems with this Web page might prevent it from being displayed properly or functioning properly. In the future, you can display this message by double-clicking the warning icon displayed in the status bar.

Line:600
Char:1
Error:Syntax Error
Code: 0
URL:http://good-tips-and-tricks.blogspot.com/



Clicking on the "no entry" Icon in the task bar resulted in this Privacy Report:

Based on your privacy settings, some cookies were restricted or blocked.

Web sites with content on the current page:

SiteCookies
http://www.google.com/logos/Logo_25wht.gifBlocked
http://www.blogger.com/navbar.g"targetBlogID=12..Blocked
http://www.blogger.com/img/navbar/1/corner.gifBlocked
http://www.blogger.com/img/navbar/1/flag.gifBlocked

Monday, December 24, 2007

Safety tip: place handle of hot pots, etc., inward

Here is a simple safety tip: when you have hot stuff in a pot, frying pan, etc., always place the handle inward, towards the table or other flat surfaces instead of sticking out. In this way, you can avoid scalding by hot stuff if someone accidentally knock on the handle and cause the hot stuff to pour out onto your body parts. Simple but effective. All you need to do is to remember to do it.

Sunday, December 23, 2007

Resize or crop photo without photo editor or download any program

I have always used the very good and free (donation welcomed but not compulsory) Irfanview photo editor to resize photos, screenshots, other images. I have even used it as an aid to resize Youtube video to fit into the width of blog posts (main column), and also for sidebar.

But you don't want to download programs, but still want to resize photos. Go to Online Image Resizer. Nothing to download. All done online. Just click BROWSE and locate the image saved in your computer you want to resize.

online photo resizer entry form

There are various alternatives to resize the image. You can enter the width (in pixels) you want your image to be resized to. Leave the height alone to preserve the aspect ration constant (keep image undistorted). Other alternative to to enter the height and leave the width alone. If you enter both, you will get exactly what you input, but if you entered the wrong figures, your image will be distorted (aspect ratio changed). You can also rotate the image if necessary. Once you are ready, just click OKAY and your resized image will appear with a dotted box.

resized image with Online Image Resizer

If you are satisfied with the image as it is, just right-click on the mouse outside the dotted box (for cropping) and select "Save" and save the resized image into your computer.

You may also crop the image if you want to. Hover your mouse over the dotted box and drag it to the part you want to crop. If you want to change the size of the dotted box, press the shift key and the left button of the mouse simultaneously, and the cursor will change to a double arrow head (see image at the left). Just drag the mouse until you get the size you want to crop and click the "Crop it" button at the top of the image. (note: I had no success as when I did that, I got the error message "404 not found!. Error file does not exist!. Select an image 1st. Please go back and try again!". Reason: "Please note that the crop option only works with DHTML enabled browsers!" So looks like my browser is not DHTML enabled)

Looks like I will stick to my trusty old Irfanview photo editor. This Online Image Resizer offers no real advantage and is not interesting to me.

Saturday, June 23, 2007

Clean leather shoes with banana peel. Environmentally friendly

Use the inside of the banana peel to clean your leather shoes. Then wipe and buff off with a piece of cloth. An environmentally way of cleaning leather shoes.

Sunday, April 29, 2007

How to do mass mailing without revealing the email addresses of recepients

I have a blog Blogger Tips and Tricks which is pretty popular with bloggers using the Google Blogger platform and which they found indicated by the comments and the emails I received. For example, this comment left by a reader: "Your text is very well explained and leaves no doubts about the use. I'm finding your site very useful and easy to follow. Thanks for your help!". Further, today, to my suprise and delight, I received an email from a DMOZ (Open Directory Project) editor, saying he found my blog informative and have listed it in the directory, and I didn't even submit my blog to DMOZ! You can read about it here: DMOZ, the most important and most difficult directory to get listed - Blogger Tips and Tricks got listed even without submiting.

Anyway, this blog gets lots of request for help in the comments as well as by a special email meant for blog visitors to contact me. I use gmail for blog readers to contact me, and with gmail, email addresses of people who contacted me via that email address are automatically added to the contact list. I have a long list of email addresses in the contact list, the great majority of which were obtained from emails requesting for help with Blogger. Anyway, I make all links to external sites open in new windows, and there are views that it is back practice as it irritates visitors and may discourage return visits. Anyway, I set up a poll to get the blog visitors views and if you are interested in voting (I hope you would do that) or if you are just interested in viewing the result, visit Real Poll: Should links to external sites open in new windows?. It is also a post to show how a poll can be set up.

I was genuinely interested in the result and was hoping for a wide participation. I though it a good idea to mass mail those in the contact list as the majority had received help from me and I thought a request to participate in the poll is not too much to ask in return for the favour. I realise too late that by doing so, I am exposing the email address of all those in the list. Some complained, and one apparently replied to all, which caused further upset. One demanded I sent out an email to all those receipients apologising for my mistake, asking them not to reply to all, delete the original mail and delete all the email addresses from their contact list. Well, I am the type who are willing to be corrected and to apologise if I make a mistake, but don't want to repeat the same "wrong" by mass mailing and exposing the email addresses again. He taught me to us put the email address via the "Add BCC". I had to copy-paste the email addresses of all those in the list into Notepad and tried to send out the mail that way. Unfortuantely, it returned an error message saying some email addresses in the BCC was not well formed (or something to that effect). I did some testing and found out that it would work if you add a comma to the end of each email address. I did that and successfully sent out the apology without the email address being revealed. So I think this is a good tip for you if you ever want to mass mail people in your contact list, but don't want to expose their email address.