Hello heightstodepths blog!

It’s been since September!?! Time flies. I’ve been telling myself to just post more often, especially when I run across a new hack that works well. Well here’s the latest hack.

Who uses RSS out there? It’s “Really Simple Syndication,” but I guess it’s not so simple since not so many people use it. But I use it and it’s fun.

The idea is that when you see the orange rss thing you can hit it and then you’ll stay up-to-date on that site’s new information. It’s a bit like my “subscribe by email to h2d” on the right, but it’s more user-friendly because you manage all your “feeds” in one spot. Confused yet?

How do I keep up-to-date on various RSS feeds?

I use FeedBlitz.com. It emails me once a day with a report of all the content of the posts from the websites to which I’m subscribed (currently 94 total, geesh). You can sign-up for free. That would be step 1.

Step 2 would be to set-up your browser (Firefox, of course) to show you a little orange rss thing in the address bar at the top whenever you’re browsing a site to which you could subscribe. You just hit that whenever you want to add the current site to your list. Here’s where the hack-part comes in:

1. In the Tools:Options… menu, you’ll find a tab called “Feeds.” Click that.
2. Then choose “Subscribe to the feed using…” and just choose Google for now. Hit OK.
3. Put “about:config” in the address bar of the browser, hit enter.
4. In the Filter: line put “browser.feeds.handlers.webservice” and hit enter.
5. You should see under “Value” on the right “http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=%”
6. Double click that and replace it with “http://www.feedblitz.com/f?Track=%s&email=your-email@dot.com” replacing “your-email@dot.com” with your email address. Hit OK.
7. Test it out on your favorite website by clicking the in the address bar at the top.

The hack part is that I added &email=your-email@dot.com to the line above… and whatnot. I couldn’t find out how to do this with Feedblitz anywhere out there, so I had to invent a hack. That’s a digression on the definition of a hack, though.

Maybe the instructions over here achieve the same thing, but there you go… http://www.feedblitz.com/downloads.asp

Around 9/28/06 Bekah asked:

Best Buy wanted to charge me $200 for recovering my lost password to login to XP home. Is there an easy way to fix this?

Hi Bekah,

The situation: Windows XP Home does not let you log in with the Administrator account normally. That’s good. To access it so that we can use it to change your regular user password, you must restart the computer in safe mode, a special ‘minimal’ mode used to correct errors caused by third-party software, among other things. Sounds fun, no?
Here are the instructions:
1. Turn on the computer.
2. Immediately after the POST screen, or the first black screen, or whatever, press F8 a few times to bring up the XP advanced options menu.
3. Select the “Start Windows XP in safe mode” option. Hit enter.
4. If you are prompted to select the operating system to start, select Microsoft Windows XP Home and then press ENTER.
5. Once safe mode has loaded, on the “To begin, click your user name” screen, click Administrator. The password is blank by default in XP Home, we hope…
6. If that worked, then click Yes to acknowledge that Windows is running in safe mode.
7. Click Start, and then click Control Panel (or point to Settings, and then click Control Panel).
8. Click User Accounts.
9. Click the user account whose password you want to change.
10. Click “Change the Password”
11. Type the new password for the user, and then click Change Password.
12. Quit the User Accounts tool.
13. Reboot the computer normally (use Start Menu:Shut Down:Restart).

I hope this works!

I’m having deja vu right now really bad because I feel like I’ve emailed this exact info out before… I even put “I hope this works” at the end of emails just like this before. Fun.

Peace,
-Brian