The Download Munkey : Tracking the Treasure Down …

Nice!

I recently installed the LinkWithin widget for thoo2 who always wanted a more pictorial way of presenting links to related content below each post over at her blog. LinkWithin just happens to be one such free(!) service which fits her needs admirably and comes without any annoying ads (yet )

Heck, the cool people at LinkWithin don’t even require you to register an account to get the widget (currently available for Blogger, WordPress and Typepad blogs). Installation for these blogs is a breeze – simply download the widget, follow the instructions at linkwithin.com and you’re done.

For people on other blogging platforms or are using older WordPress themes, don’t fret as you can still use LinkWithin with a wee bit of tinkering with code to insert some Javascript for the widget.

Of course, there’s a catch to LinkWithin being freely available – whenever anyone clicks on a link via the widget, it redirects to LinkWithin’s servers before navigating to the original link. While the redirection is very quick and unobstrusive, those concerned with privacy and data-tracking might want to take note of this little issue before installing it on their blogs. I personally assume it’s for statistics tracking at Linkwithin’s end but don’t take my word for it

Nice!

For most bloggers, the LinkWithin widget is definitely a quick and very attractive way to add a related content section to each post automatically. I’m very sure that the automated selection of related links for each post will never be as relevant as manually handpicked links but there’s a price to pay for laziness, you know

Check out LinkWithin.

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thoo2‘s free Bejewelled Deluxe from last year’s Popcap Mother Day giveaway has somehow expired and I have to find a similar clone to fuel her matching puzzle game addiction. And thanks to her, I’m now hooked on Zookeeper that I found for her.

© Kiteretsu
Even the title screen is so cute

Created by Japanese developer(s) Kiteretsu, Zookeeper is a cuter Flash variant of Bejewelled with brightly coloured cartoon animal faces instead of the classic gems. Personally, I find the graphics in Zookeeper much more appealing and a refreshing change over Bejewelled’s boring gems.

Gameplay is akin to that of Bejewelled with a slight twist to the level up process. Instead of matching a set number of gems in Bejewelled, you need to clear a specific number of each animal in the playing field in order to advance to the next level.

© Kiteretsu

While this variation in gameplay makes the levelling up process much faster if the position of the pieces is favourable, you sometimes find yourself continually clearing animals of already completed sets in the hope that new animals of uncompleted sets come into play. Due to the inherently random nature of not being able to forecast or control the type of new animals entering the playfield, a player not only needs to be pretty quick on matching pieces but suffficiently lucky to advance to the higher levels.

© Kiteretsu

There’s also a quest mode, but I’m stuck at Quest 4 (above) where I’m supposed to clear exactly one set of each animal which is nigh-impossible all thanks to the entry of random animals into the playing area. The instructions for the 10 quest levels have been helpfully translated from Japanese by the wonderful guys at JayIsGames.

While occassionally frustrating due to the randomness, I still recommend it as a game for quick breaks due to the cuteness and the funky background music and sound effects

I originally learnt about Zookeeper from 4 color rebellion’s list of 33 cool games but only the version linked to by JayIsGames has the Quest mode.

Play Zookeeper.

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She was asking me to help merge a collection of single page PDFs into a single PDF. I found pdftk, a set of commandline utilities to manipulate PDFs like joining, splitting or even watermarking PDFs.

Being the lazy monkey that I am, I went to look for a frontend for pdftk so that she could merge the PDFs on her own.

I downloaded PDFTKBuilder, an GPL graphical interface for pdftk which also comes with the current version of pdftk (version 1.41) in a single installer. Installation is a snap and using it is equally simple.

Just choose the files to merge, change the merge order using the Move Up and Move Down buttons, click Save As and all selected PDFs are then combined into a single document.

Here I’m combining Mongoose Publishing’s Battlefield Evolution unit cards into a single PDF.

NOTE: The pages textbox allows you to specify which pages of a PDF to ignore when processing a particular PDF for merging. Handy for those ebooks which comprise several PDFs with an additional cover page for each PDF.

Splitting a PDF with PDFTKBuilder will create a set of single page PDFs using pdftk’s “burst” command so if you’re looking to extract selected pages from a PDF, you might want to use another tool instead.

As a side note, reverse engineers might recognize that Angus Johnson, the creator of PDFTKBuilder, happens to be the guy who programmed the freeware resource editor Resource Hacker

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A brand new series of technical tips over here @ The Download Munkey, based on her requests

She asked for a favicon for her blog hosted on Blogger so here’s the steps if you’re interested in doing the same for your site.

Although the favicon can be of ICO, GIF or PNG format, Internet Explorer 7.0 seems to occassionally have some issues with formats other than ICO so we’ll use ICOs here.

Create a 16×16 ICO file from your image by going to FavIcon from Pics or using your favourite image editor.

Choose an image from your computer and click Generate Favicon.ico to preview and save your favicon.

After previewing, click Download Favicon to get a zip containing your favicon.

Extract the zip file and upload your Favicon.ico to somewhere like Google Pages since Blogger doesn’t allow uploading of ICO files. Remember to rename your file to something like Favicon1.ico or else you’ll end up displaying Google Pages’s favicon instead

Now you’ll need to login to Blogger and edit the Blogger XHTML template under Template > Edit Html. Remember to backup and save your template via Download my Template first!

Search for the <head> tag in your template and insert the following line after it:

<link rel=’shortcut icon’ href=’XXX‘ type=’image/x-icon’ />

where XXX will be the URL of your favicon. The edited template should look something like the screenshot below.

Save the template and it’s done! Internet Explorer users might need to clear their cache and/or restart Internet Explorer first.

Hooray!

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