• More emphasis is given to the photos rather than everything else. Based on my stats, the majority of the hits I receive are photo related. People visit this site to check out my photos so I provided bigger thumbnails in the frontpage
• Only the latest blog post is displayed in the frontpage. In case you need to get more posts, you can check the ‘Archives‘ section on the top
• More jQuery Love. I really love jQuery so I’ve added some nice effects/enhancements all over the place. Most of you won’t even notice them but they are there (:
• Photos are now cached (and resized) on my server and only a fraction of photos are retrieved from flickr. This is due to flickr’s recent outage that made my website inaccessible. Let me see you try now flickr! :P
• On the ‘Photography’ section, when viewing a single photo, you get a bigger resolution that before. It takes up the whole viewing space of the page and they look good especially on landscape photos. Example here
• I’ve added a nice little feature that ‘turns the lights off’ when you hover you mouse on a single photo. This helps you concentrate on the photo and fades out the surrounding ‘distractions’. Test it out by hovering your mouse over this photo!
• I’ve completely removed all the ads I had because they didn’t serve anything and they ‘slowing’ down the site.

So there you have it. The most important updates that you might encounter on the new design. Let me know how the new design works for you and of course if you found any bugs.

The photo that I submitted was taken a while ago when my friend Ahmad wanted a profile photo for his social networks. He wanted one with his Palestinian scarf and I thought it would look nice to take something different.

Mesmerizing

It came really good and apparently this is my most interesting photo in flickr. Yesterday I was talking to some other club members and they informed me that my photo was printed in the DSRL User Magazine which is quite famous here in the UK. I rushed out today and bought myself a copy and there it was.

Mesmerizing Published

I consider this as a huge success since it’s printed in a national scale magazine. I had published photos before in a Swedish newspaper/magazine and fair amount of features in the University of Surrey’s student newspaper. I think I had my share in published photos but this tops it all. After all photography is just a hobby for me. For more technical info regarding lighting (strobist info) and whatnot check the description of the photo and drop me a comment on flickr.

You can do this by right clicking on the toolbar and then selecting ‘Customize Toolbar…’. You can then rearrange as you please! The only potential drawback is that it can take a while to get used to. Once you do though you will be wondering why you didn’t do it earlier! I hope this helps.

Alot happened over the last couple of months. I’ll try to list just a few of them that you could find interesting. More on this after the break.

As for my updates, here’s the short story:

I got reviewed over the UXBooth. The guys did an amazing job and really helped to get some constructive feedback. I highly recommend their site and make sure to check the other reviews these guys did. I already fixed some issues that they mentioned on their review and hope the site got more usable and friendly now. Let me know what you think!

I printed a photobook over at blurb and I am really satisfied with the results. I sold quite a few copies and planning to order some more in the next couple of weeks. So if you want to save up on shipping, just drop me a line to post it to you more cheep.

I got some new side projects to work on until June-July and I’m really excited about them. I just hope to find time to update my blog as well.

If you haven’t noticed the big notice on top, I registered the www.marios.in domain to help people who have problem spelling my name.

Well that’s all for now.Don’t forget to add me on twitter for more regular updates.

So here is the list I put up:

Elephants never forget!

10. Evernote: Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

Fugu: Japanese word for pufferfish

9. Fugu: Fugu is a graphical frontend to the commandline Secure File Transfer application (SFTP).

Rubber Ducks are timeless

8. Cyberduck: Cyberduck is an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV and Amazon S3 browser for the Mac. It features an easy to use interface that allows to toggle between bookmarks and the browser outline view. For editing files, it provides a seamless integration with several external editors.

A paw that grabs your attention!

7. Growl: Growl is a notification system for Mac OS X – it allows applications that support Growl to send you notifications.

Azurues/Vuze: Poisonous tree frog

6. Azureus/Vuze: Azureus is a BitTorrent client written in Java. The BitTorrent protocol is a new way of exchanging or distributing data over the Internet. Downloading also means uploading, and the amounts of each are linked, to ensure fairness and rapidity in the spread of the file at hand.

A blue bird that 'tweets'

5. Twitterific: Twitterrific is a fun application that lets you both read and publish posts or “tweets” to the Twitter community website. The application’s user interface is clean, concise and designed to take up a minimum of real estate on your Mac’s desktop.

Weird Green Duck

4. Adium: Adium is a free instant messaging application for Mac OS X, released under the GNU GPL and developed by the Adium team. With Adium, you can connect to any number of messaging accounts on any combination of supported messaging services and then chat with other people using those services.

Thunderbird is a Mythical creature

3. Thunderbird: Mozilla’s Thunderbird email application is more powerful than ever. It’s now even easier to organize, secure and customize your mail.

Firefox aka "Red Panda"

2. Firefox: The award-winning Web browser is now faster, more secure, and fully customizable to your online life. With Firefox 3, we’ve added powerful new features that make your online experience even better.

Box artwork for Mac OS X. Left to right: Cheetah/Puma (1), Jaguar (2), Panther (3), Tiger (4), and Leopard (5). - Source: Wikipedia

1. OS X: The root of all ‘evil’. Where everything started. Since OS X, all the upcomming versions of this OS where named after animals and especially big cats. The most recent one, planned to be released in 2009, will also be named after another big cat called ‘Snow Leopard’.

If I missed something that you thing it can make this list, drop a comment below.

So after some research I found out that Shenkar (or Shankar) is an Indian vocalists and composer, very well known apparently, that does the vocals on the theme and many other Heroes related songs. Yeah the theme song’s vocals are his! The Heroes wiki has some background history for this artists but the video below worth more than that.

So first here’s the Heroes’ theme song (Just listen the first 20 seconds to get the idea)

Now here’s Shenkar performing live on of his songs called ‘Hey you’

Pretty amazing huh? Well for Heroes fans I’m sure it is :P
Post your thoughts below and check the artists website here.

• If you do lots of blogging, you might want to switch to a blog publishing app. I found MarsEdit which can handle multiple blogging platforms, such as WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, MovableType and even more. It’s pretty simple and has all the functionality of your web based blogging software. You can even work offline and when you get online, sync your changes back to your host.
• If you want by any chance to load up Finder through the Terminal app you can do it by issuing:
  open -a finder /path/to/open
• You can make a simple ‘program’ to perform often used basic tasks using the Terminal. So let’s say you want to have an app that will copy all the files from ‘/path/dir1′ to ‘/path/dir2′. To do so, create a file called whatever you want eg. ‘myApp’ and paste the following:#/bin/bash
cp /path/dir1/* /path/dir2/

  Once you have your file, you must make it executable by issuing:
  chmod +x myAppAnd that’s it. Just fire up Spotlight and type ‘myApp’

• Previously I mentioned that Transmission didn’t have proxy support thus I recommended Azureus. Well, Transmission does have proxy support, at least on the latest version, which makes it ideally if your ISP is blocking up torrent downloads.
• For proxy tunneling there is ‘Your-Feedom‘ app which works great with Transmission
• If you are a twitter freak, Twitterific is for you! Works great with Growl and has lot’s of configurations. If you are leaving outside the ‘SMS-allowed-countries’ then you Twitterific gets you, your friends updates straight to your Mac.
• To back up your flickr photos to your local disk use ‘flickrEdit‘. Works great if you want to make sure your photos will also be available locally or even if you want to sync them with your iPhone (or any type of handheld device)
• Skype has a client for Mac already. If you are on another SIP server though you will want to use the free app called ‘X-Lite‘. Works great with SIP servers/providers such as VoipBuster and LowRateVoip.
• The best DC++ client out there for Mac, is ‘ShakesPeer‘.
• You can control you iTunes with a lighter interface called ‘You Control Tunes‘. This iTunes engine runs on your taskbar so it takes less space and it is always available to you.
• For all the RSS junkies out there, a great alternative to a web based RSS Reader, is the app called ‘Times‘. It has a great UI that renders your RSS entries into a nice newspaper-like interface.
• Macs don’t need antivirus software. If you are on a University campus though or even on a weird LAN that needs to verify that you have an antivirus software running, then download the Virex demo. Once installed it makes your Mac ‘safe from viruses’. Once you are done with it, you will need this uninstaller that will complete wipe Virex out of your Mac.

Well here you have it. Some more tips to make your Mac life easier. If you have any more tips or idea, post them below.

In case you are reading this from your RSS reader, here’s a sneak preview of the site.

Now for the rest of you, here are some facts about the new design.

• It took me one day to design it and code it into XHTML and CSS.
• It took me another day to make sure all browsers play nicely and render it as I wanted (except IE6).
• It took me two days to make it work on IE6.
• IE6 uses heavily modified CSS and PNG fixes.
• I added a really cool search feature. It searches both photos and posts.
• I use extensively the flickr API
• I added some google ads since I noticed some increase in the page hits/visits

Anyhoo, let me know what you think about the new design and if you find any bugs, please let me know!