Look. I don’t know where the rumor came from, but this blog is absolutely NOT ghost written by Wil Wheaton.

Yes, we both have brown hair.
Yes, we are essentially the same height.
Yes, we both have been known to have beards.
Yes, we are on the geeky end of the scale.
Yes, we both have blogs that were surprisingly close in Alexa traffic and rank last year.
No, we are not the same person.

Wil Wheaton is a TV star (Star Trek), movie star (Stand By Me), and author who lives on the West Coast. I am a blogger, beardsmith, and man of leisure who lives on the East Coast. I am not a character written by Wheaton to test something different on a new audience. I’m not a marketing scheme. I’m a real person and I exist. I don’t understand why people would think otherwise.

“That sounds exactly like something you’d say to throw us off. Point out the glaring similarities between actor and character before we do, and then convince us that they’re insignificant and coincidental. To be a good actor you have to create a detailed character, and if he has some of your personality traits, it just makes it easier for you to portray him.

Once you get the framework created, you just need to add a few quirks to make him more believable. Maybe you give his girlfriend a geeky enough moniker that it could be part of a secure password. Maybe you make him do something that everyone dreams of like quitting his job. Maybe you create a little conflict with stories of a mysteriously never ending house renovation. Hell, maybe you even make him grow a crazy beard every year just for fun.”

Whoa. Those are real things. I do have #1GF!, I did walk away from my job for no good reason, and I have been growing an annual beard for a decade.

“Uh huh.”

I’ve developed a few WordPress plugins and I love to hack WordPress, so there are times when I need to write and test PHP within the WordPress framework. Because my plugins are site-wide sidebar widgets, any errors I may introduce while testing have the potential to affect every page on my site.

Instead of testing my widgets live, I test the underlying PHP in a designated test area that his hidden from regular readers. That way, if PHP barks at me for missing an underscore, it’s more of a private message to me, and not a public broadcast to all of my readers.

Creating a WordPress test area is a simple addition of a page template and test page to your WordPress theme files. Any PHP that you put in the test template can be executed by refreshing a draft preview of the page assigned to it. Because the test page is never actually published, there’s no possibility of it reaching your readers and interrupting the flow of your site.

Want to set up your own Wordpress PHP test area?

While I stand by my original ending for last week’s CERN cartoon, I did have a few alternate endings that didn’t make the cut. Six of them are pictured below.

Now, a lot of these were a little too obvious, but I have to say that General Zod and the Yamato were closing in on the Sleestaks for the final cut.

I know there are better jokes out there though, so I thought I’d provide a template in case any of you can provide a geekier alternative. What do you think? Are you up for a little geekery?

Damnit, I can’t believe I forgot The Herculoids and Dr. Who. Gah. So many options…

Good luck.

#1GF! and I are sitting in Chachky’s or Flingers, and there are piles of seemingly random crap tacked up to the walls. Among the junk on the wall opposite me, there is a picture of the cast of Star Trek and a rubber Yoda mask…

Me: Hey, there’s a picture of Star Trek on that wall.
#1GF!: [turns] Yes, I agree.
Me: And there’s a Yoda head there, too.
#1GF!: [turns and turns back]
Me: You don’t know who Yoda is.
#1GF!: Uh… E.T.?
Me: [thumps head on table]

You know what happens if Vulcans don’t mate with in 8 days of going into heat? They die. It’s a little known fact that Spock would occasionally rely on his human side to sail through the pon farr by heating up The Enterprise with the wheels of steel. Don’t hate the playa. Spock might’ve been the biggest pimp in the known universe, but his life depended on it.

DJ Spock

When you want to include a photo retouch on your web site, displaying the before and after photos side by side makes it difficult for people to see the differences between the original and your work. A better way to showcase your fixes is to use a mouseover to display the original photo in place of the retouched version when someone hovers their mouse over it.

There are a lot of ways to do mouseovers, but I use a javascript one liner because its simple and portable between different blogging systems. I can’t really take credit for writing this code because similar ideas have been floating around the web for over a decade.

All you have to do is paste the following code into your web page, taking care to replace the one instance of original.png and two instances of retouch.png with the locations of your own photos. If you want the mouseover to link somewhere, be sure to replace the # with a valid link.

Simple Code For A Javascript Mouseover

<a href="#" onMouseOver="document.the_image.src='original.png';" onMouseOut="document.the_image.src='retouch.png';"> <img src="retouch.png" name="the_image" /></a>

The code above uses the_image as the image name, which works fine for a single image, but if you want to use show multiple mouseovers on the same page, copying and pasting the code above several times won’t work without a quick modification. Because each image needs to be named independently, you would need to change the three instances of the_image in the second copy of the code to something like the_image2. The third would have to be changed to the_image3, and so on.

Multiple Javascript Mouseovers On A Sigle Page

<a href="#" onMouseOver="document.the_image.src=original1.png';" onMouseOut="document.the_image.src='retouch1.png';"> <img src="retouch1.png" name="the_image" /></a>

<a href="#" onMouseOver="document.the_image2.src='original2.png';" onMouseOut="document.the_image2.src='retouch2.png';"> <img src="retouch2.png" name="the_image2" /></a>

Javascript Mouseover In Action

Hold your mouse over the “Geekantium” image to change it.

If you’ve ever encountered my lack of fashion sense in the real world, you know that I don’t think that there’s anything wrong with not looking like you stepped out of a magazine, but in order to learn how to retouch photos with the GIMP, I’ve had to pick someone to practice on. Because they are really easy to find, I figured that I’d try to enhance some of those pictures of celebrities when they get caught looking like the rest of us.

Here’s a picture of Alicia Silverstone that I retouched. To see the original from Top Socialite’s Celebrities Without Makeup Page, hover your mouse over the picture

I’m no pro and Ms. Silverstone can afford way better retouchers, so I gave up with a “good enough” before I wasted too many hours on it. I’m trying to learn how to retouch things while preserving natural skin texture, but the original photo was a little too pixelated to get any real detail out of even if I had the skill. You can see where I gave up near the hairline, but I think the eyes, eyebrow, and that little bit of hair over the ear show that I’m making progress.

Can You Help Me Out?

Retouching celebrity pictures feels pointless because it’s unlikely that they would ever see the results or care if they did. If I know that someone is going to see the result, I’m more likely to spend time on it, so I’d like to ask a little favor:

If you have a photo that you would let me take a shot at retouching, I would really appreciate the practice.

This is free, and the worse the photo, the better the practice. I know it might be embarrassing for some of you to send me bad pictures of yourself, but I wouldn’t think of putting the results on my site without your permission because I respect your privacy and recognize you as the owner of your pictures. You would be doing me a big favor by helping me to learn how to enhance photos, and hopefully you’ll end up with a picture that you really like.

If you’re game, drop me a comment or use my contact page. The best photos to send are the ones where you think, “This would be a great picture if only [insert issue here].”

And you know that I think your fine just the way you are.

Thanks for your help.

If you can hear the Super Mario theme and feel like you’re home, then two things are true: you’re old and you’re a geek. Yesterday, while watching Attack of the Show, I saw a video of a radio controlled car playing the Super Mario Brothers Theme and thought it was awesome enough to add to my list of 44 Ways to Enjoy the Super Mario Theme.

After watching it a few times, I’m not so sure that I should’ve included it. The tones of the bottles during the test runs at the beginning of the video really don’t match with the tones when the theme is playing, making it seem like it might be a hoax.

What do you think? Is this a fake?

I usually don’t post about things that I stumble, but this was too geeky not to share. It’s a flow chart of what happens to people who are exposed to D&D early in life. You’ll probably have to view the full-sized version to see that “No” leads to “Sunlight” and ultimately to “Girls”, and that both the TRS-80 and Khaaan! are mentioned.

found via BoingBoing

A friend of mine has dedicated his working life to speech recognition and synthesis, and sometimes he gives me phone numbers or websites to see what I think of their speech systems from a user’s perspective. As a friend, I should say something like, “Hey that’s really good”, but most of the time, I just try to trip up the application so that it responds positively to something foul. It’s a bad habit that I’ve been carrying since the days when we’d sit around a monochrome screen and snicker over the plethora of disgusting things that we could make ZORK tell us that it didn’t know how to do.

The following conversation took place with computer generated virtual assistant for Alaska Airlines. Although some of the responses seem human, they are all pre-programmed.

Sometimes I wish that there was an catless offshoot of LOLCats for geeks like…

LOLWars

or

LOLTrek

Don’t you?

As I was looking for songs for the upcoming PSI PHI edition of FineTune Friday, I ran across a song that I haven’t heard in a thousand years called, “I am Chewbacca”. It’s by a band called DVDA, which is made up of Trey Parker, Matt Stone, and some of the other guys from South Park.

Over the last two days, I’ve gotten the song so lodged in my head, that my brain hasn’t been able to stop my mouth from blurting out the lyrics at inappropriate moments. Most people think it’s funny “uh oh” rather than funny “haha” when a crazy looking dude with a beard randomly mutters, “Don’t Fucking Cross Me! I am Chewbacca!” in the checkout line at the supermarket.

Because there’s no fun in having an earworm if you don’t spread it, I’m spreading this song to you. If you find the song oddly familiar, you might’ve heard it in a little cult classic called Clerks.

Here’s the “I am Chewbacca” Audio and Lyrics to get you started.

Enjoy!

Catch the Brainwaves of Jon Dyer
Hey this is pretty cool for me. Mark, the guy behind Broadcasting Brain interviewed me as part of his series on bloggers and social media (Thanks, Mark!). So far, the series has included a number of new media celebrities (Shana Albert, Chris Brogan, Patrick Bisaillon, and more), so I was pleasantly surprised to be included.

My answers included references to porn, beards, DJ’s, the Kobra Kai, LARPing, and Mr. T, so I probably came off a tad on the geeky side, but then, I’ve never claimed to be cool.

Be sure to let me know what you think.

While researching my own Holiday Gift Guide, I found that the web is littered with holiday gift guides trying to wrangle my dollars from me. I couldn’t get more than two clicks in without hitting a “guide” that wasn’t worth the 1’s and 0’s that it was printed on. Of the 100+ guides that I went through, I only came across 15 or so that were worth sharing.

If you’re like me and still haven’t started your shopping yet, maybe these will get the gift ideas flowing. I hope they help!

The holidays are fast approaching, and as predicted, I haven’t done a bit of Christmas shopping. If you’re in the same boat as me, I compiled this list of holiday gift ideas to get you going.

1. Satisfy Their Gadget Needs

Mug Boss ($4.99)
Got a handy-man or handy-man wannabe on your list? Give them a way to keep their workbench tidy while showing off their manly side with the Mug Boss.

Super Mario Sound FX Keychain ($5.99)
If you spend any amount of time with game geeks, this is the gadget to have. The device will play six sound effects from Super Mario (Coin, Start Music, Extra Life, Jump, Grow, and Death Music) so that you can properly accentuate your conversations.

THE RTFM Mug ($7.99)
Have a tech support grunt on your list? Well there’s nothing that support folks hate more than N00bs who interrupt perfectly good days with their refusal to take basic steps to solving their own problems. The only thing worse is when other techies follow suit. Let your tech support grunt express his frustrations with the Read The Manual Mug.

Humping USB Dog ($9.99)
I don’t know if there’s anything more distracting than a tiny USB dog that humps your computer as you work. Do you?

The Better Blogroll is a Wordpress widget that I wrote to replace the default “Links’ widget. It works by displaying a random subset of links from your blogroll which change each time the page is refreshed. To provide a reader some better insight into what they might be clicking, the category of each link is displayed to its right (you can see this widget in action in my sidebar under the heading “Rolling Blogroll”).

Displaying link categories doesn’t really make sense for bloggers who only use one category, so I updated the plugin to make the visibility of the link categories optional in this release.

More information about the widget and the download link can be found on my Better Blogroll Widget for Wordpress Page.

Take it for a spin and help your readers to get more out of your blogroll.

Unless you read a lot about web marketing and SEO, you may not have heard of Sphinn, a Digg-like community where people go to share and vote on web marketing articles.

Because I’ve gotten spoiled by the simplicity of adding bookmarks to StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us through buttons on my Firefox tool bar, submitting good articles to Sphinn seemed like too many steps. It’s certainly not a big deal to copy a url, open Sphinn, find the submit page, and so on, but it’s not as easy as clicking a button.

Well, now it is.

If you’re a Sphinn user, I created a Firefox extension which will allow you to quickly add the current page you’re reading to Sphinn. When you find a page that you want to add, clicking the Sphinn It! toolbar button will open a new tab and submit the url for you.

If you want it, head over to my Sphinn Toolbar Button For Firefox page.

Enjoy!

On Monday, Wordpress 2.3 was released, and it contains some major changes that are making people nervous about upgrading. After making the jump to WordPress 2.3 on my own site and upgrading my Better Blogroll Widget for WordPress, I thought I should share some of the information that helped me survive the upgrade with minimal damage.

Things You Need To Know Before Upgrading To WordPress 2.3

• The Basics
  What’s New In WordPress 2.3
  How to Install WordPress 2.3
  How to Upgrade to WordPress 2.3
  WordPress 2.3 Download
• You Might Not Be Able To Log In
  Some users are experiencing “ERROR: WordPress requires Cookies but your browser does not support them or they are blocked.” when trying to login after a WordPress 2.3 upgrade. It happened to me, and there’s nothing worse than feeling like you’re in the clear and then being locked out of your own site. Do yourself a favor and solve the issue before it happens by downloading an updated version of wp-login.php.
  Update: This was written for upgrading to 2.3 and has been shown by some people to not be effective with a 2.3.1 upgrade. There may be more information available in this Wordpress support thread.
  
  Continue Reading…

Two things that I love to do are writing, fixing problems, and helping people out. After quitting my job of 13 years in the PC and Server Support field, I have plenty of time to write, but not a lot of problems to fix.

This week, I tackled Mo-licous’s virus issues and took on explaining drive fragmentation to the non-computer wizard, and in the past, I’ve tackled social bookmarking, social networking, instant messangers, why you should be using RSS, and even how to fix your PS2. These are topics are sometimes missing from the radar of people who don’t live and breathe by the PC, but many find them beneficial once they understand them.

So, I’m going to make an offer to my readers: If you have a PC or tech related problem, or a topic that you’d like explained in regular terms, drop me a note with my contact form and I’ll pick one submission and try to fix or explain it to you in a post.

It’s free tech support from a qualified geek who wants to help you. How can you go wrong?

If you signed up for Facebook after reading my last Facebook post, you probably spent more time than you expected poking around and kicking the tires. Once you get through that stage, you’ll begin to wonder just how to make Facebook work for you. These 10 articles should help to get you on your way.

1. The Smartass Guide to Using Facebook (SugarRae)
2. The Ultimate Guide to Facebook (College V2)
3. Is Facebook Good For the Workplace? (News.com.au)
4. 12 Ways to Use Facebook Professionally (Web Worker Daily)
5. How To Use Facebook Without Getting Fired (Internet Duct Tape)
6. How Nonprofits Can Use Facebook (Emily’s World)
7. How to Find Coworkers on Facebook (eHow)
8. The 10 Best Facebook Apps for Students (The Student Help Forum)
9. Facebook Powertools: 150+ Apps, Scripts and Add-ons for Facebook (Mashable)
10. How to Create a Facebook Network Badge (eHow)

Have other tips for getting started with Facebook? Still have reservations? Let me know in the comments.

While #1GF! and I were sitting around the table talking to her friends and their seventeen year old daughter, the following conversation took place…

Me: …right. You can put that one on your Myspace page.
17YO: [eyes narrowed] Ew. You don’t have a Myspace page do you?
Me: Uh, no.
17YO: Good because Myspace is for like horny twelve year olds and dirty old men.
Me: [laughing] No. No Myspace. I do have a Facebook page though.
17YO: Oh well that’s Ok.

While I will admit that I was surprised by this young woman’s opinion of Myspace, I wouldn’t say that it’s limited to her age group. To a lot of people, Myspace is a wasteland of people who want to be watched, and balding musicians who help them reach their goals. It might serve a purpose for exhibitionists and creeps,

It took me a couple of days, but I wrote my first plugin for Wordpress last week to fix the default way Wordpress displays your blogroll.

The default Links Widget in Wordpress works by pulling your entire blogroll into an unconfigurable list. This is fine if your blogroll only contains five or ten very descriptive links, but it doesn’t scale well if your blogroll contains a ton of obscurely named blogs. The longer the list gets, the less your readers will be able to see the individual links in it. The more obscure the link titles are, the less they’ll trust them.

If your readers don’t see a it, or they don’t trust it, they’re not going to click it.

So how do you fix that?

I know Stormtrooper week is over, but I found these under a folding table while I was sweeping up.

Troops

Troops is a parody of the “Cops” reality TV show.

Stormtrooper Clerks

Parody of the movie, “Clerks”.

Stabbing at Leia’s 22nd Birthday

If they had only invited a Stormtrooper in the first place, none of this would’ve ever happened.

It’s Fridays are usually music posts, so you might have been expecting another round of the Shotgun CD reviews. Because we’ve been churning through Stormtrooper posts all week, I couldn’t let the final day pass without one last post.

So here it is: the Grand Finale to Stormtrooper Week. Watch it while we break down the elaborate sets and tip the caterers.

Shatner Sings “My Way” to George Lucas

Stormtrooper Week happened largely by accident, but did you enjoy it? Are you sad to see it go or did it just go way too far? Let me know in the comments…

Yesterday, I mentioned that Stormtroopers were way more awesome than ninjas, yet some of you refused to believe it. Since it has somehow turned into Stormtrooper week here at dyers.org, we’re going to have a little 10 point showdown to prove once and for all who reigns supreme: Stormtroopers or Ninjas.

Put your weapons aside and let’s get this showdown started…

Sole Purpose for Existence

Stormtroopers:
To serve the Emperor.

Ninjas:
To cause social chaos in enemy territory to benefit their feudal ruler.

Conclusion:
The Imperial Emperor can shoot lightening from his fingers and you think it’s a better life goal to serve some feudal lord who can do nothing cooler than thoughtfully stroke his bad 70’s mustache? Are you kidding? Do you know what kind of awesome it takes to get lightening to shoot from your fingertips? No? Well, it’s a lot more than just losing your razor, that’s for sure.

Winner: Stormtroopers

Governing Effects

Stormtrooper Effect:
The bad guys are always lousy shots in the movies.

Inverse Ninja Law:
The strength of any one ninja is inversely proportional to the number of Ninjas assisting. One ninja is deadly, but 100 can be easily defeated by one man.

Conclusion
Whether the rule implies that you are a notoriously lousy shot or that you are less powerful in a group, having rules like these named after you is never a good thing.

Winner: Tie

Training

Stormtroopers:
Clones are removed from the hatchery and delivered to their trainers when they reach five years old. There they are trained as professional soldiers to obey their officers without question or regard to their personal safety.

Ninjas:
Ninjas are not trained as full-time professional soldiers, but they are trained from an early age in martial arts, assassination, and guerrilla warfare. Ninja training is tailored to the individual.

Conclusion
Touchy, feely, sneaky assassination training or genetically engineered, full-time killing machine training? Hmm. Let’s see. That’s a tough choice.

Winner: Stormtroopers

Easily Pwned By

Stormtroopers:
Easily defeated by Ewoks.

Ninjas:
Easily defeated by pirates.

Conclusion:
Getting defeated by someone in a puffy shirt, tight pants, and thigh-high boots is pretty shameful, but if you get defeated by a bunch of two foot tall, jungle teddy bears, you automatically and deservedly lose this category. Jub jub.

Winner: Ninjas

Transportation

Stormtroopers:
AT-AT, speeder bike, Dewback, and any laser toting, light speed capable vehicle the Imperial Empire has at it’s disposal.

Ninjas:
Horses, walking, short distance flying

Conclusion
I will admit that flying onto the rooftops is pretty cool, but its relatively useless when compared to the sheer variety of heavily armed transportation available to the average Stormtrooper. I mean, sure, Ninjas can fly up to the rooftop… assuming a Stormtrooper doesn’t blow it up before they land.

Winner: Stormtroopers

Headgear

Stormtroopers:
The Comtech Series IV Helmet has night vision, polarizing lenses, three phase sonic filtering, a multi-frequency targeting system, a comlink for instant communication with other units, and it filters chemical and biological agents from the air.

Ninjas:
Two three-foot cloths are tied around the head.

Conclusion
Wait did that just say two pieces of cloth? I was on the fence because I thought it said one piece. That extra piece of cotton can make all the difference when your enemies nail you in the squash. The clear winner is nin…

Winner: Stormtroopers

Clothing

Stormtroopers:
Full body metallic battle armor designed to disperse the energy of a blaster bolt over an insulating, temperature-controlled body suit. The armor contains a built in resonator to open secure doors and the backplate contains twenty minutes of emergency oxygen.

Ninjas:
Black cotton pants, split-toed tabi boots, and a jacket with overlapping lapels and a secret inside pocket.

Conclusion:
Whoa! Secret inside pocket? That’s awesome! I wonder if they can fit their little ninja purses in there.

Winner: Stormtroopers

Stealth

Stormtroopers:
Noisy enough that your deaf grandma can hear their clanking armor from four clicks away.

Ninjas:
Quick! Look behind you! Did you miss him? That’s how silent ninjas are.

Conclusion:
Look, we just got through telling you how awesome all that Stormtrooper armor is, and that awesomeness comes with small price called stealth. So, Ninjas win a category because they’re sneaky little babies. So, what?

Winner: Ninjas

Weapon of Choice

Stormtroopers:
The E-11 blaster is a liquid cooled, 1.4 ft long laser rifle capable of shooting a tightly focused particle beam a maximum of 383 yards. It fires 100 shots without reloading.

Ninjas:
The ninja’s primary weapon is the ninjaken, or short sword. It’s about 20 inches long and so sharp that you can cut tin cans in half and still slice through a tomato. Or so they say.

Conclusion:
So, my choice is a 20 inch range with a knife or almost four football fields with some sort of laser beam? Oh, that’s a tough one.

Winner: Stormtroopers

Secondary Equipment

Stormtroopers:
High-tension wire, two grappling hooks, four blaster power packs, three ion flares, a concentrated ration bar, a spare comlink, three water packs, two medpacks, two blast energy sinks, a glow rod, and a cylindrical thermal detonator.

Ninjas:
Smoke bombs, firecrackers, nunchucks, throwing stars, hand claws, foot spikes, hidden daggers, grappling hooks, throwing knives, bow and arrow, poison darts, iron spikes, and tridents.

Conclusion:
While I’m certainly a fan of both firecrackers and nunchucks, can they really compare to a Stormtrooper pack? Say you get lucky one day and capture a ninja. Know what he’ll do? He’ll stick his sword in his gut so you can’t question him. Pretty dramatic stuff, right? And you get all his firecrackers. Know what a Stormtrooper does when you capture him? He clicks that button on his personal thermal detonator and blows up everyone and everything within a few yards… including you. Captor neutralized. It’s all about effective secondary equipment.

Winner: Stormtroopers

And The Winner is… Stormtroopers

What a blowout! The Stormtroopers dominated the contest, showing themselves to be far superior to the average Ninja. Maybe it’s time that G4 drops Ninja Warrior and starts up a far superior program called “Stormtrooper Warrior”.

If you find you have points that I may have missed, kick up the debate in the comments.