The Webernets has been running a bit slow lately, so I started looking at ways to speed things up. I stumbled on an article on WPMUDEV titled “How To Massively Reduce Your Images For A Faster WordPress Site“, and I thought I would put it to the test. I downloaded my entire images folder from my server, and here are the beginning stats.
As I am using a Mac, I downloaded the free app recommended in the article called ImageOptim (The article recommended Caesium as a free alternative for Windows users). I was impressed to read on the download page that “ImageOptim is lossless — it compresses image files without changing pixels.”
Opening the program shows a pretty familiar looking window.
I dropped the whole folder in using the default settings and away it went. It took about 50 minutes, and here is the summary it displayed when finished.
And this is the specs on the folder from the finder.
63.9 MB saving is nothing to sneeze at, but I was interested to see if I could push it any further. In the settings, I found a “Quality” slider for Jpegs. By default, it is set to 100% hence the claim to lossless, So sliding it down to 80% will obviously reduce the quality and void the lossless claim, but is the trade off for file size justifiable?
With the Jpeg Quality Slider set to 80, I ran the program again on a copy of the original folder I made before the first optimization run. It took about 60 minutes this time, and here is the summary from the window footer
And here is how the Finder views the folder
110.5 MB Saving on a 330.4 MB original file size is impressive. That’s 1/3! I went through a number of files to check the quality, and even though there is a slight difference if you look hard, for the most part the quality is good.
Iconic Guitars – The Most Iconic Of All Time, In My Opinion
I am NOT a guitar player…I wish I was. I would love to be able to play guitar, it fascinates me. I do have a small collection of guitars, and I love looking at them, and imagining all the possibilities they possess. I was in my late teens and early 20’s in the 80’s/90’s, and this era was magical to me.
I was VERY much a fan of HAIRBANDS!
Great songs, with larger than life personalities doing stuff on a piece of wood with six metal wires that I have never been able to comprehend. How the heck do they do it?
For example, the GREATEST guitar player to ever come out of Australia (And one of the best in the world) has to be Tommy Emmanuel. Tommy often plays on his own what usually needs two people to play. Check him out playing both the rhythm and melodies of The Beatles songs Day Tripper and then Lady Madonna.
I am always looking to expand my collection of iconic guitars. I have done some searches today for articles about the most iconic guitars, and I must say, most of these article miss quiet a few. The first article I read said the number one guitar of all time was Angus Young’s black Gibson, and Steve Vai’s Gem and Universe weren’t even mentioned.
This is when I began to realise this topic is subjective. Everybody will see it differently. We all have different opinions, and we are all entitled to our own opinions. This is my opinion, and I would really love to hear your opinions in the comments. Lets just do it with respect ok.
In my opinion, the most iconic guitar ever is easily, and with out doubt, Frankenstrat.
I really love the EVH Steinberger. It is actually the most recent addition to my collection. As a Lolcats fan, and a EVH fan, imagine my delight when I came across this pic today whilst researching this article.
Once again, here are the most iconic guitars in my opinion. The EVH Trio.
From here on, guitars appear in no particular order. They are just the most iconic guitars to me.
Steve Vai is Explosive. Brilliant. The Ibanez Gem and Universe are definitely on my wishlist. The 7 String Universe’s sound on the Passion and Warfare album (Particularly the song The Animal) was like nothing I had ever heard before.Whilst on the topic of Vai, the Heart guitar he played with David Lee Roth was pretty Cool too!
Next, is my most FAV guitar player of all time. I first heard him doing Mozart in the Bill and Ted movie, and he has continued to stun me ever since. I especially loved his efforts at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert. Nuno Bettencourt and the Washburn N4
The Girls were very well represented in the 80’s as well. Lita Ford’s B.C Rich was another classic for me.
Previously, on the other side of the world, Mark Knopfler’s National Acoustic was pretty iconic to me. I loved it on the cover of the Brothers In Arms album.
Before I got my Steinberger, my favorite guitar in my collection was my Paul Reed Smith Tremonti Blackbird. Mark’s Charcoal Burst PRS “Dimebag” Tribute Blackbird is one of my all time favs.
The “Funnest” guitar player I have ever seen live is The Clown Prince, Rick Nielsen from Cheap Trick. Now this guy knows how to put on a show! Here is Ricks Hamer 5-neck. My guess is that the 5 necks are from top to bottom, a 12 string, a regular tuned fixed bridge, and regular tuned with tremolo, another fixed bridge with alternate tuning (maybe drop d) and a fretless.
Jason Becker is an incredible musician who I most remember being referred to as “Beyond Prodigy”. His playing on David Lee Roth’s album A Little Aint Enough was brilliant. Carvin have recently released Jason’s Numbers Guitar.
Jimmy Hendrix and The Flying V – what more can I say
One of the loudest and most “In Your Face” guitar players would have to be Zakk Wylde. I absolutely LOVED his work on the movie Rockstar, and he is a perfect fit for Ozzy Osbourne as well. This is Zakk’s Gibson Bullseye.If you are reading this article, you will be familiar with Stevie Ray Vaughan’s SRV Fender Strat. A truly Iconic guitar in so many ways. I saw this guitar first hand in San Francisco a number of years ago, and the photos really don’t do it justice. The wear and tear on this axe is astonishing, Stevie must have notched up thousands and thousands of hours playing it.
Defining cool, here is Bo Diddley with his Gretsch
Brian Setzer has become one of my favs over the years. I love the 50’s Rockabilly sound and image. Gotta love those Gretsch guitars! If you haven’t already heard it, do your ears a favour and check out his Brian Setzer Orchestra Live In Montreal album. You won’t regret it!
Brian May’s Red Special is a interesting guitar. Brian built it himself in 1963. I read recently that when Brian travels by air, he also buys the first class seat next to him for this guitar.
No list on iconic guitars is complete without Michael Anthony’s Jack Daniels Bass
Prince had some interesting looking guitars over the years. Here is his Cloud Guitar
Prince had another super interesting axe, the Symbol guitar
Bon Jovi has had a few iconic guitars over the years. Here is Jon’s New Jersey Kramer
And this is Richie Sambora’s Kramer Double Neck. I remember this one most from the beginning of the “Lay Your Hands On Me” video clip.
And on the topic of Bon Jovi, James Hetfield from Metallica had the “Kill Bon Jovi” guitar, which I have been unable to find a picture of. If anybody has a pic, please sent it in and I will add it to the list. In its abscense, here is James’s “Eet Fuk” Explorer.
**UPDATE MARCH 2023** – 8 Years after writing this article, I was finally contacted by a reader who found a photo of James Hetfield’s “Kill Bon Jovi” guitar from the April 1989 edition of guitar player. Thanks so much Mike for sending this!
One of the most iconic pairings in guitar history would have to be Slash and Gibson.
B.B. King and Lucille are another iconic duo for Gibson.
Vivian Campbell’s Kramer Nightswan was all the rage for a while in the 80’s. Still a cool looking guitar.
John Lennon and Rickenbacker made a pretty iconic pairingAnd rounding out the list, is again, Tommy Emmanuel and his Maton Acoustic
I hope you enjoyed this trip down memory lane, looking at some of the great guitars the made music what it is today. Please let me know in the comments if there is anything you think should be added.
The quickest and easiest way I have found to keep my video library under control is by using an automatic file naming tool called Filebot. You can view the website HERE.
From the creators website:
FileBot makes organizing your movies and TV shows a breeze! We’ll automatically match your files with information from various online databases. How you want your media files to be named and organized is completely up to you. Our groovy format engine supports pretty much anything!
What I like best about it is being able to customize the output in anyway you please. I arrange my files in folders, so I have no need for the show title to be in the filename, I just like the season and episode number, as well as the episode title. But you can make your filenames include pretty much anything you want by adjusting the output formula.
Heres My Filebot Formula {s00e00} - {t.replacePart(' Part $1').replaceAll("&", replacement = "And").replaceAll("'", replacement = "").replaceAll("!", replacement = "").replaceAll(",", replacement = "")}
Also from the Filebot website, here are some sample naming options:
{n} [{y}] {vf}{af}The Man from Earth [2007] 720p 6ch
Filebot is free to download and use from their website HERE. MAC USERS – If you try to download Filebot through the app store it is not free – It costs $4.99US, but you can get the latest version for free from Filebots Sourceforge file repository HERE. Just open the folder for the latest version and download the app.tar.gz version of the file.
Like many others, recently I have found I am unable to Add Media and Add Tags to my WordPress posts. The first thing I did was disable all of my plugins to make sure there wasn’t a conflict. In my cases there wasn’t, but its well worth trying this first. The next thing I did was switch my theme to the built in 2015 theme, and this fixed the problem. So I went to my normal theme creators web page and found that the theme had an update available, so I have downloaded and installed it this morning and everything is working fine again.
So in short, if you are having the same problem, try switching to another theme!
There are plenty of articles on the internet that provide you with many ways you can attempt to reclaim data from a dead or dying hard drive. Everything from putting the platters in a new drive casing to bagging the drive up and placing it in the freezer for 20 minutes. These all seem to be fairly extreme measures to me, so here’s a quick tip I have discovered recently by accident which may help.
I have a number of old drives I have been using as storage, and I recently needed to access a file on one, and when I plugged the drive into my USB dock it spun up but would not mount. I re-tried several times and it refused to load. Needless to say I was pretty unhappy. I kept coming back to it over the next few days, trying again and again, hoping it would mount so I could “just get that one file”. A few weeks later, whilst having a clean up, I decided to give it one more try and if it didn’t work, I was going to throw it away.
I plugged the drive in, it spun up, and again it refused to mount. At this point I was called away quiet urgently, and I left with the drive plugged in and turn on. After about 4-5 hrs I returned, and found the drive had some heat in it. Wondering if this might yield a result I switched off the drive, then switched it on again, and it mounted, and I was able to get the file!
I seized the opportunity to copy off all the other data on the drive, and then I started to wonder…
I had two other drives that I had deemed dead in the past, so I plugged those in and left them to warm for a few hours. After restarting them, both of them mounted as well. One mounted and appeared to work well, but the other mounted just long enough for me to drag a few files off, and then it ejected itself again. In the week or so since, I have been able to reconnect and use two of the three drives normally.
I’m wondering if tarnish might have built up on the read/write head over the period when it was not in use, and a little bit of heat might have been all it took to break it down enough for it to be able to read again? Either way, if your drive spins up but wont initialize, this method might be well worth trying before you take extreme action.
Between July 16 and July 18, iSkysoft will be GIVING AWAY FREE their iSkySoft PDF Converter, which normally sells for $59.95!
With iSkysoft PDF Converter you can:
Convert PDF to Word, Excel, PowerPoint, HTML, EPUB, images and plain text.
Convert up to 200 PDF files at once.
Convert a 100-page PDF within 1 minute, super fast.
Supports password-protected PDF files.
Some words from iSkysoft:
“From July 16th to July 18th, we will giveaway our excellent product – iSkysoft PDF Converter for Windows (Original Price: $59.95), which is an awesome utility that makes working with PDF files in Windows a breeze. It lets you convert normal and password protected PDF files to various Office document including Word, PowerPoint, Excel, EPUB, HTML, images and plain text, it also supports batch conversion that can convert up to 200 PDF documents with fast speed.”
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The Webernets has been running a bit slow lately, so I started looking at ways to speed things up. I stumbled on an article on WPMUDEV titled “How To Massively Reduce Your Images For A Faster WordPress Site“, and I thought I would put it to the test. I downloaded my entire images folder from my server, and here are the beginning stats.
As I am using a Mac, I downloaded the free app recommended in the article called ImageOptim (The article recommended Caesium as a free alternative for Windows users). I was impressed to read on the download page that “ImageOptim is lossless — it compresses image files without changing pixels.”
I dropped the whole folder in using the default settings and away it went. It took about 50 minutes, and here is the summary it displayed when finished.
And this is the specs on the folder from the finder.
63.9 MB saving is nothing to sneeze at, but I was interested to see if I could push it any further. In the settings, I found a “Quality” slider for Jpegs. By default, it is set to 100% hence the claim to lossless, So sliding it down to 80% will obviously reduce the quality and void the lossless claim, but is the trade off for file size justifiable?
With the Jpeg Quality Slider set to 80, I ran the program again on a copy of the original folder I made before the first optimization run. It took about 60 minutes this time, and here is the summary from the window footer
And here is how the Finder views the folder
110.5 MB Saving on a 330.4 MB original file size is impressive. That’s 1/3! I went through a number of files to check the quality, and even though there is a slight difference if you look hard, for the most part the quality is good.
