Silence, Please!

Open windows and more time outdoors can also mean noisy neighbors, barking dogs and the din of speeding cars. Some people have been masking the noise with these methods:

Use your PC with Atmosphere Deluxe, you customize your own nature sound mix. Then, fed through your PC speakers, you'll hear the ocean or tropical frog pond instead of the mower across the street.

Tune it out iSplash waterproof speakers play music from an iPod or any source with a headphone jack.

Consider storm windows An outer laminated window can cut outside noise by up to 10 decibels - perceived as half the amount of sound, says one sound engineer. » Continue reading

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How to exclude your own visits from StatCounter when you have a dynamic IP address

Vic Grace would like to exclude her visits from the StatCounter reports of her blog but does not have a static IP address. What can she do?

StatCounter provides facility to exclude visitors from reports based on a single IP address and now also by giving a range of IP addresses. This feature blocks the IP address or the whole range of IP addresses from all the projects with just one click. However, it is sometimes difficult to find out the range of IP addresses that your Internet Service Provider has been allotted. So what does one do in such a situation?

You can use a blocking cookie provided by StatCounter itself. However, you will need to have cookies enabled in your browser and also have the new StatCounter code (as of the 1st Nov 2003) installed on your website for this to work. Once you've ensured that cookies are enabled for your browser and the latest code installed on your website/blog, follow the procedure below:

1. Sign in to StatCounter
   
2. Click the spanner/wrench icon () beside one of your projects
   
3. Click Create blocking cookie
   
4. Click Stop Logging My Visits. You're done!
   

Follow the above procedure for each of the browsers that you use to view your blog/website.

You also need to follow this procedure for each of the projects individually. » Continue reading

Read more on Blogging, Webmastering