Matt Refghi

When a friend of my mine started blogging, I found myself offering him tips by e-mail. I realized that with 2+ years of blogging experience came some new knowledge, so I decided I should probably share what I’d accumulated. I normally avoid blogging about blogging at all costs – but I felt this would be a good moment to make an exception. The tips I’m sharing below are not meant to be seen as the true, all-powerful top 10 laws that a blogger must abide by. They are merely guidelines that I have deemed important for my own blog, and felt might be useful to others as well. 10 Avoid Bandwidth Theft It is important to remember that anything found … Read more

You will need: Scissors Paper towel roll Tape Pencil or Pen Ruler Calculator Step 1 Using the ruler, measure the length of the paper towel roll. In my case, it turned out to be 11 inches long. Remember this number – it will help you make additional binoculars in the future, without requiring that you measure each time. Step 2 Using the calculator, divide the length of the paper towel roll by two (2). In my case, 11 divided by 2 resulted in 5.5, which is exactly half the length of the roll. Using the pen (or pencil), make a marking on the roll at this measurement. Step 3 With the scissors, carefully cut the roll in half using the … Read more

Since I began using Twitter actively, I’ve been looking for a reliable way to ensure my tweets will be forever accessible. In my experience, Twitter never offered an easy way to locate old tweets. From a profile page, a user can keep loading tweets by simply scrolling down the page. That scroll-to-load approach works, but it takes a lot of time, and there’s no guarantee that Twitter will allow this mechanism to load thousands of additional tweets. As far as I can tell, there’s no simple way to find a tweet from June 2010, for example – even if you try to search by text, it won’t necessarily be found. It seems to me that Twitter prioritizes recent tweets, and … Read more

Here’s an amusing post I encountered over at Amazon.ca, while looking for a cheap headset. At first glance, I was glad to see it was selling for less than the list price, but then I noticed exactly how much was being saved. I’m not sure whether this is a mistake, now that I think about it. I can see why it would be beneficial to show that all their items have savings applied, regardless of the amount. After all, it made me react positively, that is, until I noticed the amount saved. Either way, it appears the Americans get a better deal… blame Canada? Update January 8, 2023: Amusingly, since this post was originally written, the Canadian Amazon posting has … Read more

At my day job, I spend a good deal of time working with virtual machines, whether with Virtual PC 2007, Virtual Server 2005, or Hyper-V. All three seem to work fairly well when I’m logged into my machine locally. However, when I use Remote Desktop to connect to my work machine from home, I recently noticed that my Virtual PC machines suffered from some serious mouse lag. Moving the mouse would make the cursor teleport, rather than smoothly moving across the Virtual PC desktop. The faster I tried to move the mouse, the worse the effect became. Hyper-V  had no such problems, so I began to wonder if I could do anything to solve the stuttering. Solution Thanks to a forum post, … Read more

As a guy who makes a good number of online purchases, I’ve grown familiar with the concept of coupon codes. Like their physical equivalents, coupon codes can be applied while checking out of certain stores, allowing customers to benefit from reduced prices. Unfortunately, online coupons are similar to physical coupons in that you must know about them to exploit their benefits. Thankfully, I discovered a solution to that a few years ago, greatly increasing my ability to take advantage of these coupons. Meet RetailMeNot, a site that encourages users to share coupon codes with the world. In the past, I was rarely able to partake in the coupon code mechanisms offered by retailers. RetailMeNot changed the game by introducing the … Read more

It took me a while to warm up to the idea of microblogging, as popularized by Twitter. At first glance, I felt it encouraged the accumulation of mundane status updates, shared publicly, and communicated between accounts in an indirect, awkward way. Given that I spend a lot of time writing, I was practically insulted when I saw that they limited status updates to 140 characters. I didn’t understand how something of quality could be produced, given such limitations. I also feared that SMS abbreviations and slang would become prevalent, further taking away from the quality of such short messages. So, when I eventually decided to create a Twitter account, it was merely to announce my new blog posts to a large community, to … Read more

When I originally bought Windows Vista, I was really excited about the DreamScene feature. It allowed videos to be used as wallpapers in Windows, something that I had never seen before. To use it, you had to buy Windows Vista Ultimate, the most expensive edition. I was happy to do this, given that Windows was the foundation of all the work I did in my career. Unfortunately, the extras included with Ultimate weren’t really worth the extra money, in the end. I’m sure they had their applications, but they really didn’t enrich my life, personally. DreamScene, in particular, turned out to be a disappointment. It was an interesting idea, but I found that if I played a game, and returned … Read more