Like most apartment dwellers, I get the occasional visits from roaches. After a couple of weeks of trying ineffective do-it-yourself measures like keeping things extra clean and plugging up any possible entrances, I decided to invest in a tube of roach gel.

After Googling around for the best way to kill roaches, I found NoMoreCockroaches.com explaining the Combat Roach Killing Gel that comes in a syringe is the best at dealing with the pests. How does the gel work? Roaches eat the gel and then retreat back to their nest where they die and other roaches eat the poisoned carcasses, thus eliminating the nest.

The best place to get this stuff is at Walgreens but since there are no Walgreens within a reasonable distance from my apartment, I had to order it online and wait for the mailman to bring it to my door.

I applied it to as many cracks and crevices in the kitchen before my week-long Montana vacation. Since I got back, I haven’t seen a single roach. They used to come out and scurry at night, but now they seem to be non-existent.

The only cons of the gel is it is a dark brown color (which looks like poo) which can clash with your room and it can be a little messy when applying. But aside from that, this stuff is well worth the price of $5.99 per tube which should be enough for a three bedroom apartment.

So forget the sprays, powders, and traps, Combat Roach Gel is all you need.

Buying an engagement ring for your significant other can be both exciting and nerve-wrecking at the same time. Thankfully I survived the process and can now offer these tips I picked up along the way.

Note: These tips are aimed at guys from the perspective of a guy.

1. Unless you’re the ballsy type, don’t try to pick out a ring on your own!

   I thought picking out an engagement ring would be a straightforward task. But after seeing the thousands of different minute details to pick and choose from I quickly reconsidered. Just take a gander at BlueNile.com, a good starting point for ring shopping. Can you guess which diamond type your lover would like? White gold, yellow gold, or platinum? Solitaire, side-stone, or three-stone? Four-prong, six-prong, comfort fit, knife edge, intertwined, cathedral? These things matter.

2. Talk to your partner about the ring.

   Keep in mind this ring will be with the two of you for the rest of your lives so the recipient better be happy with it. Besides, open communication is a good trait for marriage.

3. Set a budget before browsing

   Engagement rings are the ultimate intersection between emotion and money. You run the risk of setting yourself up for disappointment if you dive in without setting any ground rules. It is easy to raise expectations when shopping around but damn near impossible to lower them. Coming to an understanding about budget and quality between the two of you beforehand will make things sail smoothly.

   And it doesn’t make sense to go into debt before the wedding as there will be other things that require money after the two of you tie the knot (like a down payment on a house!). In other words don’t get more ring than you can afford.

4. Talk to other family members about your plans.

   Not only does this fall under the category of the more communication the better, but you could also save a lot of money. You never know if a close relative has a diamond ring sitting in a security deposit box just collecting dust. Now you shouldn’t go around demanding old jewelry, but if your family doesn’t know that you are thinking about getting married they won’t know to offer their old gems.

   The diamonds in Kristina’s ring were from my grandmother’s ring passed down to my mother. They were certainly better diamonds then I could afford and the sentimental value of the family history made the engagement ring unique and extra special i.e. more romantic.

5. If possible, record the proposal on video.

   This is one of the biggest moments of your life. Capture it on video so you can show it to future generations and re-live the day in your later years. With the rise of online video, passing a video around to friends via social networks will bring you in contact with people you haven’t heard from in ages. People love seeing exactly how your proposal went down.

It all might seem daunting at first but take everything one step at a time. Try not to let the stress get to you while seeking out the perfect ring to satisfy the needs of both you. Keep your eye on the prize which should be to show your companion how much you care about them and that you want to be with them forever.

For more engagement ring shopping tips check out the guides at Mahalo.com and About.com

It’s hard to imagine being somewhere that locks down the web browser so much that you have to resort this nifty trick I read on DownloadSquad.com, but desperate times call for desperate measures. If you can’t reach the web through Internet Explorer due settings beyond your control and forgot your portable Firefox thumbdrive then simply open up the calculator or MS Paint and click “Help”. From there go to “Help Topics,” which will bring up a help window. Now all that is left is to right click on the title bar and select “Jump To URL.” Type in any web address you like, but make sure to include “http://” at the beginning and you should be good to go.

What you are basically looking at is a stripped-down, basic version of Internet Explorer which is built into Windows and used to display CHM files, or Microsoft Compiled HTML Help files. Sure there are no niceties like bookmarks or your comfy, cozy Firefox extensions, but if you need to check your e-mail or Twitter account and this is your only resort, you will put up with a little cruft in order to get your stuff. Besides there are back and forward buttons, what else do you need in a browser?

CoinCalc.com is a simple and straight forward site aiming to estimate how much moola you have stashed away in your change jar. All you need to do is weigh your jar of coins, grab a handful as a sample and enter the quantity of each coin you pulled out into the CoinCalc form. The site does a little math and guesses how much money is in the jar based on your sample.

I just happened to have a jar full of coins that needed to be tallied and wrapped up so I though I would give CoinCalc.com a run for it’s money (pun intended). I took 5 samples of various sizes from the same cup of coins. After counting the number of coins I would put them all back in the cup and shake them around to keep it as fair of a test as possible. I happen to have a small postal scale at hand so calculating the weight of the coins was a snap. My first weighing included the weight of the cup which came to a total of 3.375 pounds. After running all of the numbers through CoinCalc.com, I realized the weight of the cup was inflating the estimate. I weighed the empty cup and subtracted that weight from the previous weight resulting in 2.8625 pounds of pure coinage. The results are summarized in the table below:

The total value of my coin-collection was $28.91 which came out to the following:

CoinCalc.com came within $10 at most of the actual value after correcting for the weight of the cup. CoinCalc’s estimation was more accurate than I thought it would be. The site gives you a good ballpark range of the value of your coins without having to dump them all over the floor and count them out one by one or paying a fee to have Coinstar count them for you.

Speaking of counting, I like to wrap my own coins and I use this little device pictured below to tally them up before wrapping.

You simply dump your sorted coins into their respective slot and the plastic container will keep them stacked until they reach the top. At that point there is a slit where surplus coins fall out leaving you with the exact quantity for the roll. I think I got this from my parents a couple of Christmas’ ago.

(via BoingBoing)

I have a heap of respect for the icon designers out there. These people start with a blank page and after several hours they end with a tiny graphic that communicates a heck of a lot of information. It takes a lot of talent and clever thinking to simplify an idea or concept into an understandable graphic.

Von. R. Glitschka created a step by step walk through detailing the process he uses to design an icon. The zipped download (1.8 Mb) has a set of images from each step with related notes in a separate text file. You can learn a lot about design by studying the processes of others.

More about the Tango icon library can be found at http://tango.freedesktop.org/Tango_Desktop_Project

It is officially fall and football games can be found taking place all over the country. Action photography can be a real challenge to capture in tack-sharp clarity due to the split-second timing and cat-like reactions necessary to freeze motion. Last year I photographed my girlfriends annual Turkey Bowl intramural flag football tournament. Coming home with a full gig and a half of photos was a thrill but there were quite a few technical problems I ran into.

For one, I only had one battery. The tournament goes all day from morning to night and I need all of the juice I can get. It also didn’t help that the battery was having trouble holding a charge on that cold, brisk day. I would constantly have to take the battery out and hold it in my pocket for a while before continuing to shoot. This year that problem will be solved since I bought two batteries in addition to the original battery which I keep in my bag for an absolute last resort, emergency type of shot.

My second problem was my beginner telephoto lens. Don’t get me wrong it got me some good shots, but it is a very soft lens with a slow aperture of f/5.6. No surprise I got this lens at a great price of $120. For this year’s game I upgraded to a Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8. The faster aperture will allow me to bump up the shutter speeds during the day and at night I will probably have to go with a 1600 ISO speed.

Finally, last year was the first time shooting team sports. I had no clue as to what I was doing and just went with my instincts. Recently I have been digging through resources on the Internet about shooting football which is how I ran into this great thread on DP Review.com.

How To Shoot Football 101

Get low…. Not only does this go a long way in cleaning up the background but it makes the players (the younger the better) look bigger the life.

No matter what lens you are using shoot tight. Tight action shots give the viewer a feeling of being in the game.

Canon and the NFL have teamed up to produce a video series of football shooting tips with Sports Illustrated photographer Peter Read Miller. There is also a behind the scenes clip where Peter talks about the equipment he uses as well as events leading up to the game.

The New York Institute of Photography has a lengthy write up on football tips with several visual examples to drive their points home.

If you are in need of some inspiration there is a weekly sports thread in the DP Review.com Canon SLR Lens Forum full of all kinds of football shots. This one from BryanP particularly stand out. Bryan is the same guy who posted the excellent How To Shoot Football 101 thread.

I hope with the new gear and the reading I have been doing will pay off come game day on November 17th. I still have plenty of time to get some practice shots in and read up about more techniques.

Do you have any tips for shooting football?

Ok so it is really a time lapse crunched down to 7 minutes but you still get the gist. Looks like this photo realistic sketch of the Radiohead front man is all done in Photoshop and some of the brush work is amazing. Hopefully it will inspire some of the artists who follow my blog.

See more speed paintings at Nexx’s YouTube profile.

Insects make for an interesting photographic subject, not because they are rare, but because of their abundance. Finding bugs is not a hard challenge but releasing your shutter in the nick of time before they buzz off can be like herding cats. PopPhoto.com has some good tips to take into consideration while you are out on a critter chase. Some of my favorite include:

• There is not just one bee or fly out there. Remember, you are surrounded by millions of insects every day and if the first one you see gets away, there’ll be another soon enough.
• Most insects are very sensitive to carbon dioxide, and will run or fly away if you breathe directly on them; however, certain beetles will freeze when breathed on — experiment!

These tips would have come in handy back when I was shooting the spider in my bathroom. Well, a macro lens would have helped too.

(via Boing Boing)

Staying on top of your finances takes organization. Credit cards, banks, retirement accounts, pretty much anything related to your money comes with a statement that you need to keep track of until your taxes are accounted for at the very least. Here is how I go about tackling this dreaded task.

The only tools my method requires is a 3-ring binder, a hole puncher, and a stapler. Whenever I use my credit card or withdraw money from the ATM I keep the receipt so I can archive it later. First, they collect in my wallet and after a while the extra bulge becomes a real pain in my butt (literally). Their next holding bin is a small, manila envelope which I call receipts in transit.

This envelope sits in the pocket of my finance binder until the relevant statement comes in the mail. I punch holes in the statement so it can fit snuggly in my white binder and at the same time I go through the receipts in transit, picking out the relevant receipts. Comparing the amounts on the receipts to the amounts on the statement isn’t a bad idea. It is important to double check what your bank or credit card company is telling you since any mistake on their end can cost you money. Besides there is no law stating financial institutions are always right.

Next I staple the receipts to the statement so they will never be lost or misplaced. Now if for whatever reason I need to dig up a past receipt I can easily flip to the right statement and search through a handful of receipts instead of a whole shoe box full.

Once in my binder, the statements are filed in reverse chronological order or the latest statement is the first page I see. Most bills and bank statements get filed together including credit card bills, my cell phone bill, the cable bill, and my bank statements, all based on their closing date.

The hardest, and probably most important part, of making a system like this work is to keep up with it and organize your statements right when they come in. A little work every week can save a lot of headaches and hassle at the end of the year come tax time.

For the past week I have been fiddling with Postie, a Wordpress plugin that allows posting via e-mail or a mobile phone. The following instructions are specific to Wordpress 2.2, Postie 1.1.1, and a DreamHost server. Most information in this walk through can be applied to other configurations but, as a disclaimer, your mileage may vary. I will assume you have a stable Wordpress installation already up and running.

First we need to download and install the Postie plugin. To get the files, go to http://www.economysizegeek.com/?page_id=395 and download Postie version 1.1.1 for Wordpress 2.1 or higher or get Postie version 1.0.1 for Wordpress 2.0. If you’re running an older version of Wordpress you will need to look around for an earlier version of Postie.

Unpack the Postie plugin and upload it to your plugins directory at wp-content/plugins/postie. Login to your Wordpress Admin interface and click on the Plugins section. Postie should now be a listed plugin; simply click Activate to turn it on. If you go to Options and then the Configure Postie subsection you will see the many configuration options to tweak Postie just the way you want it. There are too many options to explain here, besides most of them need no explanation.

In order for Postie to post the e-mails you send it, you need to authorize your e-mail address. Any e-mail not listed here will be rejected with the option for you to be notified so you can see who is trying to mess with your system.

Defining the directories where Postie will save your images to is pretty important. The default location is within your blog installation root, but this was causing some problems when I ran the configuration test later on. I ended up setting the directories in the Postie folder, or /wp-content/plugins/postie/wp-photos/ and /wp-content/plugins/postie/wp-filez/. These seemed to fix the issues running the tests and when I finally posted images on my blog but I don’t know how important it is to change this.

The banned files list lets you strip out the unnecessary clutter mobile carriers tack on when you send an e-mail or removing signatures. It’s best to send an e-mail to yourself just to see what kind fluff gets added to your message.

Image settings and 3GP settings can be set to taste, leaving us at the most important configuration — the Mailserver Settings. Postie supports Pop3, Pop3 SSL, IMAP, and IMAP SSL. However Dreamhost doesn’t have IMAP support in their out-of-the-box PHP installation. If you really want these features you can always compile your own PHP installation but for our purposes we will just stick with basic Pop3.

You need a mail server that will let you authenticate over a non secure connection. This means Gmail is out because you need Pop3 with SSL in order to authenticate your account. DreamHost users can use their own mail server usually at mail.yourdomain.com with the default port of 110. Your mail ID needs to include the domain name at the end like something@domain.com. This step really hung me up since it was never made clear. If you want a super hard to guess mail ID use GRC’s Ultra High Security Password Generator. Nothing like a bunch of random characters to ease the mind of the super paranoid. Click Update Options to save your changes.

Now we should have everything set-up so we can begin to post from the field. To make sure things are working ok, run the Configuration Test. This will let you know if your mail settings are correct and if Postie can find and write to your image and filez directories. Hopefully everything checked out ok here. If they didn’t go back and double check your settings.

Now we can go back and run Postie manually. Before doing this we need to have a message on the mail server for Postie to grab. Hit the Run Postie button and watch in amazement. You’ll know if Postie pulled your message down otherwise you will most likely get the vague message There does not seem to be any new mail. If you do get that message, check your e-mail account to verify there is an unread message sitting there. If that’s not the problem it is most likely an authentication or mail ID issue.

Check your blog to see what Postie did with your current settings. If it is outputting something different than you expected, go back and tweak the settings, send a new message to your e-mail account and run Postie again. I didn’t like the markup coming from Postie so I went into the /wp-content/plugins/postie/postie-functions.php file and cleaned up a little bit.

We are almost done setting up Postie. All that is left is to set-up a CRON Job in order to run Postie at a specified interval. As it is now we would have to login to Wordpress and manually run Postie whenever we wanted to make a post via e-mail. Normally you would have to shell in and type a bunch of archaic commands into a Unix prompt to set this up, but DreamHost makes this easy with their Cron Jobs tool. Login to your DreamHost Panel at https://panel.dreamhost.com and click on Goodies -> Cron Jobs. Click Add New Cron Job and copy and paste the following command, replacing the domain info with your own.

curl http://www.yourdomain.com/your-WP-Directory/wp-content/plugins/postie/get_mail.php

When this CRON Job is run, the server will go to the URL, triggering Postie and publishing your post. Be careful when determining the interval for running the CRON Job because running it too frequently uses CPU cycles and shared hosting companies don’t really like that. Running once an hour should be fine for most needs.

A major drawback of this approach is any special formatting options like DIV containers and special markup will not be included. This is because when you actually login to your Wordpress blog it sets a cookie which then allows the special markup to be included. A way to do this would be to use code like this :

Unfortunately Postie meets my needs thus far and I haven’t figured out how to set up the CRON Job in the previous way. You are on your own now.

I hope this guide has given you some clarity about setting up Postie and if I missed anything please let me know in the comments and I shall update this guide.

Further Reading

• Dave Sabol’s Experience
• Postie Comments on Economy Size Geek