It’s downloadable from the above link in excel (60Mb) or flat txt form and it has the full 1m sites, in order.

And I’m in the list…

As you’d probably guess, google.com is #1 and Facebook, Adobe, Twitter, Microsoft, Yahoo, etc. all feature highly. Apple, interestingly doesn’t make the top 10, but only just.

I’m not sure If I should adopt an Alan Freeman voice and announce the following as, “This year’s smash new entry, pop pickers”. But the great news is that my puzzle site made it to 286,244th spot. That’s 286,224th place, in the entire WORLD.

In case you missed that, bimbogami.co.uk is the 286,224th most popular site on the freakin’ planet.

OK, maybe that’s going a bit far. I guess those guys aren’t the ultimate arbitrator, but given I don’t really put much effort into the whole SEO thing much, I can live with that.

I should really do a 3rd season of puzzles and attract some more traffic. Gotta break into that top 1/4m.

Thanks to my good friend for the heads-up.

So, today we’re learning about spurious screen-dimming, screen savers and an emergency exit…

Auto-Dim Screen

If you move about a bit with your MacBook, like me you may have been annoyed by the screen randomly dimming and brightening.

Turns out this is because your MacBook buddy is trying to be clever by sensing the ambient light and automatically adjusting the screen brightness. Moving around and variable lighting can confuse the wee soul.

Easily fixed through by switching off the cleverness:  Go to System Preferences > Displays > uncheck “Automatically adjust brightness as ambient light changes”

Screen Savers

Next up, screensavers. I downloaded one, unzipped it and then went looking for the ‘install my screensaver’ option in the ‘Desktop and Screensaver’ section of System Preferences. But there is none! I spent longer than I really should have looking for one.

Then I realised I had reverted to Windows expectation mode. Installer? Pah! I tried the obvious – just double-clicking the file, et viola, installed and working. D’oh.

Force Force-Quit

Finally, for now, we have an escape route. In the couple of years I’ve since moving to Mac I’ve had occasion where an app (often MS Word) will stall or go into a tailspin.

Symptom: Spinning CD cursor and you can’t get anything to react, not even get the Apple Menu to open to get to Force Quit, which you know holds the key to your frustration.

Previously, I’d have resorted to a force-shutdown (hold down the power button for 5 seconds), but not anymore.

Keyboard shortcut Option(Alt)-Command-esc – brings up the Force Quit menu.

I’ve often sung the praises of WordPress as a blogging platform. Particularly its functionality, flexibility and ease of use.

My blog’s been running for a couple of years without as much as a hitch. Adding themes and plugins, and upgrading to new versions were always a 1-click breeze.

But complacency sets in, and perhaps you don’t back up for a while. And, as everyone knows, that’s generally when disaster strikes.

The upgrade to 3.1.4 reminder popped up and, as usual, I clicked ‘upgrade automatically’. Yes, it reminded me to backup my database. Yes, I knew I hadn’t done that for quite a while. But hey, it’s never gone wrong before. So I clicked ‘proceed’. #fail

I did get the ‘upgraded successfully’ message but on returning to the dashboard, I got nothing but a white screen. “Strange”, I thought and tried a few things but nothing; completely blank, no errors, no spinning icon, nada. I tried the site itself, equally blank. “Now, that’s most definitely not good”, I reckoned.

Google had nothing. So I left it for a couple of days to see if it would heal itself, but surprisingly not. It was well and truly gubbed.

So I had a dig about behind the scenes and backed up the bust instance of the WordPress install. Then I deleted and reinstalled WordPress and went for a trial and error approach to getting it all back up and running.

I seem to have managed to get most of it back, the only missing bit being the categories, tags and view-counts on the individual posts.

I’d always thought my ‘Shame of Shamu‘ and ‘Is Disney Eco-Friendly?‘ posts were doing pretty well, beaten only by older posts. But they’ve been overtaken by one particular, more recent, post…

Well, it looks like it’s the whole branding thing that’s getting the hits and that Pepsi, beats Disney (or SeaWorld) in the search engine stakes.

Out of 76 posts in total, my top 20 (below) make up 50% of my total hits to date.

So, here’s my top 20 posts, by number of hits.

At that time, I had passed what I thought was a significant milestone. I had blocked just over 25,000 potential spammers from posting on the forum. Automatically.

I thought 25k in a single year was a lot. That’s about 68 attempted registrations a day.

Now, while I’d love to think bimbogami is quite popular, the reality of the situation is it’s very niche and therefore not that busy. Even when I’m running with a new season, there’s maybe 50-100 players a day on the main site on a busy day.

Well, I’ve realised recently that wasn’t even a teeny little milestone. Today, I passed a proper milestone – 200,000 thwarted spammers. Yes, 200k of these objectionable people have tried and failed to post their little morsels of crap promoting their wares on my site.

That’s an average of 685 attempted registrations a day. And that’s when the site itself  is quiet. Where are these people coming from? Are there really rooms full of people, paid buttons to search all day for phpbb sites and post spam on them?

This really annoys me, as I can’t see the point in it. Are people actually making money out of it and I just don’t understand? It’s a bit like virus-writers – what do they get out of it?

Maybe it’s just me. Get a life freaks!

A while ago when I plugged my iPhone into my MacBook all was seamless, syncs downloads etc.

Then I got my ‘proper’ camera and installed the EOS utilities on the Mac. All was working fine, but the next time I plugged the iPhone in, I got a little popup dialogue saying there was no camera found.

Everything else still synced OK, but I couldn’t see any way to get pics off the phone. Tonight I wanted one of the pics off the phone, so decided I’d better have a look about.

Turns out there’s a handy app on the Mac called “Image Capture” you can utilise to do just this.

Just search for it using the spyglass search on the top right of the Mac toolbar. Start this app and you can download the pics from the iPhone. You can create a folder on your drive and download them all to there.

Short and sweet, but there you go!

A pet-hate of mine is that annoying noise that plays when your machine starts up. Whether it’s a PC or a Mac, I have no idea why someone would think it was a good idea to by default play a sound at startup, or shutdown for that matter.

What is the benefit of that? No, I can’t think of it either.

Strange thing is, on the Mac it’s not something you can easily get rid of. So, other than remembering to mute the sound before shutdown, you’re was stuck with it. Grrrr.

However, after a little bit of digging about, I’ve found a method to stop the startup sound on the Mac without the rest of the sound being muted.

Unfortunately it’s an add-in as opposed to a hack, but it does the job.

Just go to the Arcana Research site and download their little add-in – StartupSound.prefPane – and follow the instructions.

Once you install, an extra icon, called “Startup Sound”, appears in your System Preferences app. Just click it and check the ‘mute’ checkbox: Job done. No more annoying startup noise.

(although for some strange reason it also lets you set a specific volume for it should you so wish; more craziness!)

I’ve not had the Mac long in the big scheme of things, but up till now, pretty much everything ‘just worked’ which was a welcome relief from Microsoft-land that I know and love.

That was until today, and it was a kinda strange one.

The much hyped Snow Leopard OS came out recently and I decided in my nice shiny world of Mac-iness I’d give it a go to try and keep up with the trends. So I got my nice shrink wrapped package with the nice picture of a… Snow Leopard on it at the weekend.

The documentation that comes with it is the usual simple Mac stuff I’d come to expect; stick it in and double click it. So, in full expectation of an easy ride, slapped the disc into the drive.

It was indeed really easy to install. It took about an hour, which I suppose is not bad for an OS re-install. The ‘time remaining’ dialogue throughout the install was even pretty accurate (compared to Windows, but then a random number generator is closer to reality than the Windows progress bar). It rebooted at the end and then automatically pulled a couple of updates down. All looked to have worked fine…

Until I started up Firefox. Some webpages were rendered using some sort of scripty handwriting style font. Particularly noticeable in, but not limited to, the Google search page. Not an unpleasant font, but not the kind of thins you want entire pages rendered in. On checking, the same problem existed in Safari, so not solely a Firefox problem.

Time for my first proper Inspector Clouseau-style Mac problem hunt.

I searched for the problem, but there wasn’t much out there on it yet, maybe too new, or unusual? But there were a couple of clues around, suggesting font problems. Looking in the ‘Font Book’ app, turns out there were a number of duplicated fonts, indicated with a little yellow triangle. Don’t know if they were duplicated before the Snow Leopard install as I’d not looked for that before. Anyhoo, there’s an item in the Font Book menu called ‘Resolve Duplicates’ which did what it said on the tin; all my little yellow triangles disappeared from the font list. But it didn’t resolve the problem.

I dug around a little more and concluded it was the Arial font that was the problem here. So I tried the ‘Validate Font’ from the Font Book menu for Arial. it showed me I had a font in the Arial family called “Laurent_HW_by_oOo_n3o_oOo.ttf”. Hmmm, something purporting to be in the Arial family that wasn’t called Arial? Gotcha. The HW was a bit of a giveaway too. Viewing it, I could see it was indeed the offending scripty font appearing in Firefox and Safari (and I suspect any other app using Arial).

A quick delete of the offending font and restart to be on the safe side and bingo, all sorted.

No idea how it got there but it wasn’t there before the install…

So, as if you needed any more reasons to buy yourself a MacBook, or other Mac model for that matter, here’s another couple for free…

Thing 1: Printing

I typed up a letter last night and it was pretty late when I finished and realised I hadn’t ever printed anything from the Mac since I got it. So with heavy heart, I took it out to the Bothy where my printer resides, previously attached to my PC but now standing alone.

I switched the printer on and gingerly plugged the USB into the Mac. Nothing.

I was half expecting a printer dialogue to come up saying it had detected a printer and wanted a driver disk or somesuch. You know the kind of thing Windows looks for. But no, nothing. Had a look in Finder, then Settings and finally Applications; no mention of printers or anything.

A quick search on the Apple site told me the Mac will likely know about the printer, so just press ‘Print’ in the application.

Guess what? It just works.

Thing 2: Backups

Like probably 99% of the PC using community, I am at best sporadic in my backup regime. I do copy docs and sheets and stuff onto my pen-drive, for security and transfer between machines. I know I have a recovery disk somewhere, I think, from a while ago and I’m sure I have the installer disks and drivers and stuff I’ve put on since then, probably, maybe.

I just bought FreeAgent 320Gb drive, on offer. It’s nice and small, and silver. It has both FireWire and USB connection, which is nice.

Plugged it in to the Mac, using the FireWire connection for speed and the Mac pops up a dialogue saying it’s spotted a drive it can use as a Time Machine backup disk and do I want to use it. Well, I think I do, so “Yes”.

It then scheduled the first backup for 30 minutes time and also sets up a backup regime. The first backup took a while; just over an hour in fact, but that was to be expected.

Not bad for one click.

First, I had a CD that wouldn’t eject from my MacBook drive.

It was really stuck; the drive was spinning up and down but nothing in Finder, not even an icon. I was getting an occasional colourful spinning CD mousepointer, but nothing else. Pressing the eject button showed the eject icon on the screen but didn’t actually have any effect.

Not only that, it pretty much ate up the resources preventing starting of other apps etc. or even get to display the dock.

I searched around, and while there were a number of suggestions, none of them worked for this particular disk, but the following did…

My more forceful way of getting the machine to eject the little blighter:

• Switch the MacBook off.
  Do a nice shutdown if you can. If you can’t, hold the power button down for a few seconds to force an immediate shutdown.
• Switch it back on again, and hold down the ‘opt’ key (marked ‘alt’ on my keyboard), the one with the line-style menu on it.
  The Mac will boot up to a ‘Hard Disk’ icon.
• Let go the ‘Opt’ key and press the ‘Eject’ key.
  You should hear the magic sound of the disk ejecting.

Second tip:

If, like me, you spent ages scanning your MacBook keyboard for a hash (#) only to arrive at the conclusion it’s just not there, let me reassure you; it’s not.

But fear not, help is at hand. It’s easy really; just Alt 3. Not much of a tip I suppose, but hey.

While I was looking around, I came across this handy reference for a whole myriad of the less frequently used characters and symbols.