Patrick Catanzariti

Zombie Wallpaper Collection

Patrick Catanzariti — Sat, 04 Sep 2010 03:42:49 +0000

Many who know me well will know of my strange fascination with zombies. Today I had the urge to go on a search for zombie themed wallpaper on DeviantART. Thought I’d share the best of the bunch that I found for other zombie enthusiasts

Zombie X-ing
Nice, simple and effective! It’s my current wallpaper.

http://nuked-whale.deviantart.com/art/Zombie-X-ing-119854207

Zombie Wallpaper
Much darker of a feel but really cool!

http://nintendorevolution.deviantart.com/art/Zombie-Wallpaper-95179629

Knock knock zombie apocalypse
Great concept!

http://sharpjet.deviantart.com/art/Knock-knock-zombie-apocalypse-141570547

Zombie Warning
Little disappointed it’s only available in 1024×768 but otherwise absolutely love it!

http://psylentnight.deviantart.com/art/Zombie-Warning-74882436

Survival Tracking Guide
Not totally zombie based but I thought it was hilarious.

http://beti-88.deviantart.com/art/Survival-Tracking-Guide-165350460

Dead is the New Alive
Love the colours and textures in this one.

http://asylumactas.deviantart.com/art/Dead-is-the-New-Alive-170303083

Zombie Apocalypse
Love the detail and textures in this one!

http://rubenz87.deviantart.com/art/Zombie-Apocalypse-156160207

Zombie Love
Zombies totally need love too.

http://lunaqueen333.deviantart.com/art/Zombie-Love-154134935

Firefox rendering colours incorrectly

Patrick Catanzariti — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 04:36:54 +0000

I’m sure i’m not the first to come across this issue but it had me confused for a little while! The background image on my music blog was not fading correctly into the background colour of the site. This issue only seemed to occur on Firefox (and not every Firefox either…).

The explanation is here! According to Firefox’s documentation, it appears there is a “color management” feature which renders these images differently. For some reason this has been set to be the default option from Firefox 3.5. So on Firefox, my background image and the background colour were not matching up.

To change this setting back in Firefox:

Type in about:config into the address bar
Find “gfx.color_management.mode”
Change the value from 2 to 0.
Restart Firefox

Before:

With the gfx.color_management.mode still set to 2 (click to see full image)

After:

With the gfx.color_management.mode set to 0 (click to see full image)

How do I fix images so that they display correctly in Firefox 3.5+?

It looks like it might be a PNG issue in Firefox. After a bit of Googling, I came across the following steps:

Download TweakPNG from here: http://entropymine.com/jason/tweakpng/
Run it and open your image
Delete the lines which start with gAMA, cHRM, iCCP and sRGB (these seem to be the chunks of colour profiles which mess up in Firefox)
Save and replace your image on your site.

How to disable Flash in various browsers

Patrick Catanzariti — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 05:10:16 +0000

Wondering where to go to disable Flash in your browser? I thought I’d put together this list as a bit of a reference both for myself and for anyone else who needs it

Firefox 3

Tools > Add-ons > Find Shockwave Flash and click Disable

IE6

Tools > Manage Add-ons > Find Shockwave Flash Object > Click the Disable radio button on the bottom left

Then refresh any pages you are viewing (Press Ctrl + F5 if it doesn’t appear to have disabled Flash).

IE7

Tools > Manage Add-ons > Enable or Disable Add-ons > Find Shockwave Flash Object > Click the Disable radio button on the bottom left

Then refresh any pages you are viewing if IE7 doesn’t do this for you (Press Ctrl + F5 if it still doesn’t appear to have disabled Flash).

IE8

Tools > Manage Add-ons > Make sure the “Toolbars and Extensions” button is selected on the left > Find Shockwave Flash Object > Click the Disable button on the bottom right

Then refresh any pages you are viewing (Press Ctrl + F5 if it doesn’t appear to have disabled Flash).

Chrome

Go to chrome://plugins/ in your address bar

Find Shockwave Flash and click the Disable link underneath it (the item should go grey).

After this it seems like you need to close any tabs you want flash to be disabled in and then go to the site again in a new tab.

Opera

It seems like in Opera if you’re wanting to keep things simple, you can only disable all plugins, not just one:

Tools > Quick Preferences > Untick “Enable Plugins”

Refresh the page if the effects don’t take effect straight away.

You can disable a certain plugin using the plugin ignore file if it’s something you want to make permanent. To do that go to opera:config#Network|PluginIgnoreFile in your address bar. Find the file on your filesystem that it shows you and open it in notepad or something along those lines to edit it.

Safari for Windows

It seems like in Safari (just like Opera) if you’re wanting to keep things simple, you can only disable all plugins, not just one:

Edit > Preferences > Security tab > Untick “Enable Plugins”

Restyling the web your way in Firefox

Patrick Catanzariti — Sat, 21 Aug 2010 04:43:03 +0000

Ever wanted to change the way your favourite website looked? Sick of Facebook being blue? Sick of the one part of a site you use being so small on the page while all that other stuff you never look at takes up all your window space? Want to play hilarious pranks on your friends by changing the way sites appear to them? If so, read on.

What you’ll need

To change styles on websites using Firefox, you’ll need the following:

Firefox (duh.)
Stylish – The Firefox extension which makes all of this possible
Either a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS
A basic knowledge of finding elements on a website (do you know what a div is?). I use the Firebug extension for Firefox to find which styles are on different elements I want to change.

Once you have the above prerequisites you can move onto the steps below. If you don’t know HTML or CSS and can’t be bothered learning, you can always use other people’s ready made styles.

How to restyle a website your way!

In my example, we’re going to be changing the boring blue bar on the top of Facebook.

Go to the website you’d like to change in Firefox.
Get to the page on the site with the element you’d like to change (e.g. if you’re looking to change the blue bar in facebook, login first so that you can see the blue bar).
Find the icon at the bottom right of your Firefox window.
Click on it, go to “Write New Style”, then to “For thesiteyouwanttochange.com”. Click that.
A new window will open which is where you can put your CSS styles. You insert them in the space between @-moz-document domain(“facebook.com”) { and } as i’ve highlighted in the screenshot below:
So basically, you find what you want to change on the site and put those styles in there. You can click the “Preview” button to see the results. If styles aren’t appearing, try using !important after them to ensure they override the website’s styles. The styles I used for my Facebook example will be at the end of this post
When you’re done. Click Save.
You might need to make your own images (if you’re that dedicated to your changes), for example I had to create my own Facebook coloured images so that they’d match the new coloured background:
From this point on, as long as you have Stylish enabled on your Firefox, you’ll have your new style in use instead:
Click for the full image

My sample Facebook bar change code

With my styling changes, I basically went through the elements in Facebook’s top bar and changed the background colours, border colours and link colours. I also had to change the images used in things like the Facebook logo and buttons. The code I used to change the Facebook top bar’s colour was:
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml); @-moz-document domain("facebook.com") { #blueBar {background-color: #ff6600 !important;} #pageLogo a {background: url('http://www.patrickcatanzariti.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/facebookicons.png') no-repeat -21px 0 #ff6600 !important;} #jewelCase .jewel {border: none !important;} .jewelToggler {background-image: url('http://www.patrickcatanzariti.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/facebookicons.png') !important;} #jewelRequest:hover, #jewelRequest:focus, #jewelRequest:active, #jewelMail:hover, #jewelMail:focus, #jewelMail:active, #jewelNotif:hover, #jewelNotif:focus, #jewelNotif:active {background-color: #ff6600 !important;} #headNavOut {background-color: #eeeeee !important; border-color: #b3b3b3 !important;} #pageNav a {color: #aaaaaa !important;} .uiSearchInput, #navSearch .uiTypeahead, #navSearch .uiTypeahead .wrap {border-color: #b3b3b3 !important;} #pageNav a:hover, #pageNav a:focus, #pageNav a:active {background-color: #ccc !important;} }

Using other people’s styles instead
You don’t need to make your own styles if you don’t want to. You can also go to http://userstyles.org/ and download styles other people have made.

Well then Mr Patrick, have you made any styles for userstyles.org yet?
Funny you should mention that. I’ve made a simplified style for Omegle (the bulky interface annoys me). You can find that here: http://userstyles.org/styles/35854.

My user page on userstyles.org is here – http://userstyles.org/users/59925, if I make any future styles, they’ll appear here

Apologies for the slightly lousy quality of my images, I was using Paint Shop Pro for the screenshots and I think the compression settings were a bit lousy…

The What and How of Lucid Dreaming

Patrick Catanzariti — Sat, 07 Aug 2010 07:55:25 +0000

About five years ago I found a pretty interesting and different interest – lucid dreaming. After watching Inception, my friends and I got onto the topic of lucid dreaming. After a pretty interesting discussion, they were quite interested in trying it out. I thought that while I could just send them a few links to various sources I used, it would be a lot more useful if I wrote up a summary for them as a bit of a beginners’ run down on the basics. Then I thought it would be a lot more useful if I put it on my blog so that others might also find use out of it. I’m also hoping that writing about it might get me back into it as well so I can start to do it again too! Also, if you haven’t seen Inception – you really need to… it was amazing.

What is lucid dreaming?

Lucid dreaming is dreaming while knowing that you are dreaming.

What is the point of it?

If you can learn to identify when you are dreaming, you can learn to gain a greater sense of clarity and control in your dreams. Imagine a world where everything is completely under your control, you can do whatever you want with no limits and no worries about consequences in real life. You can fly, fight a tiger, eat your favourite foods while gaining no weight, relax on a beach in the sun, meet the girl/guy of your dreams (literally), live out your favourite movie/TV show/book, blow up a mountain using your thoughts, make it rain chocolate, travel back in time, float around space – you can do almost anything. Not only can you do anything but it will feel totally real. Sometimes emotions and senses can even be more vivid in a dream than in reality. It is an amazing experience.

It can help with nightmares (realise you’re in a dream, take control and there’s no nightmare anymore) and you can even use lucid dreams to practice something you’re not so good at (try public speaking, try mentally preparing yourself for a stressful moment by living it out first in your dreams).

How do I do it?
For people who don’t become lucid in their dreams naturally, it takes a lot of practice and focus. When I started lucid dreaming, it took me a few weeks before I finally had one. Even then, they were very short and took time to learn to control. After a few months I lost focus with it all and stopped having them altogether. It takes a lot of work but it’s worth it!

Start a dream journal – Write down and record details your dreams somewhere, get in the habit of remembering as many dreams as you can (what’s the point of lucid dreaming if you don’t remember it in the morning?).

Find yourself some dream signs – Look through your dream journal, are there any common themes? Do you find yourself in the same place in many dreams? Do you see the same person? A common object? These are good dream signs. Keep a record of these and start to focus on whenever these things appear in your life.

Learn to do reality checks – A reality check is something you can do to find out whether you are dreaming or not. Any time you see your dream sign or for any reason think you might be dreaming, you do this reality check. My favourites are:

Holding your nose and trying to breathe – if you can still breathe through your nose, you’re dreaming!
Look at technology – have a look at your computer, your phone, your alarm clock, are they working like they usually would? Technology often doesn’t work as it does in reality when you’re dreaming.
Reread something – look at your alarm clock or a book, look away and then reread it. Has the time/text on the page changed? If so, you’re dreaming!

Stay focused – keep thinking about lucid dreaming, remember to do reality checks, keep reading about it and studying it – keep the idea of lucid dreaming in your mind.

Be prepared – when you do have a lucid dream, what do you plan to do? Have an idea in mind so you’re focused and ready to give it a go.

Learn to stabilise your dreams – it’s likely that in your first few dreams, you’ll be so excited or surprised when you find out you’re dreaming that you wake up. You’ve got to learn to stay in the dream and get things clearer. A few techniques for this are:

Spin around – not sure how this works but it does! Spin around on the spot and the dream can get clearer. You can use this technique to go somewhere else as well.
Rub your hands together – focus on the feeling of your hands rubbing together and you’ll be drawn back into the dream

There’s so much to learn and so much to say on this topic but I’ll leave it there for now to keep things simple! A few good sites to read if you are interested are:

Dream Views – http://www.dreamviews.com/ (has a great forum)
The Lucidity Institute – http://lucidity.com/ (great articles here!)
Lucid Dreaming FAQ by the Lucidity Institute – http://lucidity.com/LucidDreamingFAQ2.html
LD4all – http://www.ld4all.com/guide.html (not a huge fan of the site but it could be helpful)

This is why I love basketball.

Patrick Catanzariti — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 23:40:14 +0000

Loved this highlights reel… especially Grant Hill’s shot from over halfway!!!

Softpedia, control your ads?

Patrick Catanzariti — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 02:54:31 +0000

I was on Softpedia.com, a software download website, to get an ISO image burner so I could burn a Linux (Ubuntu for those interested) DVD. When I went to download this program I was completely amazed by the awful ads surrounding the download pages. They all seemed to decide to also have a big “Download” button within them to fool you into clicking them instead of your actual download.

My question is – why wouldn’t Softpedia control what advertisements appear on these pages? Wouldn’t these ads negatively affect the user experience on the site? I clicked on one at first while not really paying much attention. I didn’t start the download because I saw the filename and knew it wasn’t right but other less careful or less tech savvy users would be totally confused by this.

Nice and confusingly, the advertisement's download button is bigger than Softpedia's actual download button

Even more confusingly, there are now two download buttons which aren't related to Softpedia at all surrounding the text links the user is supposed to click on.

Surely as a download website, you’d ensure these sorts of advertisements aren’t on your site. I just felt like I had to rant about that. Rant finished

My new music blog

Patrick Catanzariti — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:18:52 +0000

Just to avoid cramming absolutely everything in this one blog (which already seems to jump from topic to topic each post), I’ve made a new music blog for the musical journey I’m embarking on. I’ve decided to start a bit of an experiment and listen to as many random albums and bands that I can. Just to get a bit of a break from mainstream music and broaden my musical horizons. I also thought it would be fun to blog about what I listen to and share the random thoughts that go through my mind!

It did also gave me a chance to put together a new blog design and play around a bit . Not totally happy with the design at the moment but hopefully I’ll find a way to adjust it a bit over time.

The blog is here: http://www.patrickcatanzariti.com/musicvacancy/

Any music suggestions (and I mean ANYTHING) are totally welcome. Send me an email or tweet at me.

My first photos now online

Patrick Catanzariti — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 08:57:37 +0000

After getting a new DSLR camera for my 21st birthday and finally being able to let the inner photographer in me roam free, I’ve spent some time taking photos around Sydney.

First was the Vivid light show/festival where they light up various buildings around Sydney with various designs. I’ve got about two photos up online from that first outing (the rest… aren’t likely to be different from what anyone else took really). The next set of photos were from my own little adventure around Sydney on Sunday.

Anyway, if you are interested, the photos are up at:
http://patrickcatanzariti.deviantart.com

I might put them up on Flickr at some point too. Or make my own gallery on this site.

Soon i’ll be talking fluent photographer and shall have a wonderful collection of photos to display

TV studios – think global

Patrick Catanzariti — Mon, 31 May 2010 22:25:05 +0000

After the recent complaints over Australia’s delayed broadcast of the Lost finale along with my own experience as a follower of Supernatural still behind in the storyline (see my other unhappy blog posts about that), I’ve been left to one conclusion – TV networks need to embrace globalisation rather than fight it for their own gains.

With the internet and social media now allowing the entire world to be connected instantaneously to each other, the delaying of broadcasting television shows overseas seems to have no valid purpose outside of marketing and profit. I can see no difficulties in the digital age involved in sending a new episode of a TV show to networks all around the world in an instant, digital pirates manage it straight after a show has gone to air.

From my understanding, the real reason studios delay each premiere is for marketing purposes. The idea seems to be that while the show can be broadcast globally, the crew behind the show can’t be sent globally to promote it all at once. Understandable but surely unnecessary in the digital age. Promotional campaigns through digital media outlets like Facebook and Twitter can lead to huge success for a show, just look at the amazing success of Glee. Not only does it hit twitter’s trending list quite often but songs from the show appear regularly in iTunes top 10 downloads. Compare this to the negative effects of ignoring social media or working against it – fans of Lost in Australia had to avoid social media and carefully choose what websites they visited to avoid having the ending spoilt before it aired in Australia. Forcing viewers to wait several days just because Channel Seven decided Wednesday would give them the best ratings is disrespectful to all the fans by putting ratings before its loyal viewers.

After the season 4 finale of Dexter in America (which aired before the season had even begun to air in Australia), I almost found out the major twist at the end on Facebook without meaning to. I won’t say how much was revealed but it definitely ruined part of the surprise. After all the work that goes into planning and scripting a series, surely the last thing networks want is to have the ending ruined for international viewers?

It is here which lies a huge part of the problem. Networks want to build buzz, they want people to talk about the show over social media – it builds up a show in amazing ways. However it builds up the show internationally not just locally. They want to do this while at the same time restricting when other viewers around the world can watch the show. It just doesn’t make sense and leads to people getting the shows online rather than through the methods the studio gets paid for. Will there be a need for national copyright restrictions on services like Hulu and American TV network websites if all viewers are seeing your show within about a day or so of its initial broadcast?

Why not open up these restrictive broadcasting borders, allow your shows to be marketed to the world as the internet and social media are already doing and make things easier for everyone?