Ben Hovinga

New year is almost here. I just wanted to say good luck in 2010 and I wanted to know what your new year resolution is. Leave a comment.

My new year resolution is to lose about 100lbs of fat to get into that healthy BMI area and also before I join the navy.

If you need a countdown clock for your new year party I made one for you. Just go to this page and put your browser in full screen (pressing F11 or view->fullscreen). You can adjust the font size using the dark menu in the top left corner.

OK I’m off to the party.

As you may have noticed the website looks completely different from before and you may be trying to access the blog at the old address. Well some things have happened in the past few days.

One I have closed the doors on Durham Networks. There just was not enough demand for something like that right now. Maybe when things start to look good that I will start it again and this time it will be full time. For now I still see some of the customers that need my help and I still offer in home computer help, I just wont be using the Durham Networks name.

Another thing, I am getting away from blogger and using a fully hosted solution now. This way I have full control over what is on the site and how it looks. And with me getting rid of blogger I am also getting rid of that extra blog domain and moving everything from blogs to photos onto the main site here at http://ben.hovinga.me/.  Another reason why im moving away from blogger is so my templates between sites look the same.

That’s about it from me, I will stop talking now and let you get back to whatever it is that you were doing.

So many people know that I am going green. For a while now I have been very good with shutting off the lights and keeping the door closed when the A/C is on. Now I have two new green items that will help a little bit more. First is the metal water bottle, I can keep refiling this instead of buying plastic water bottles. I got it at school last year so its not that new but I am starting to use it more. The second item is the Tim Hortons Coffee Mug, I picked this up last night when I realized that I always go to Timmies after work. That’s a lot of cups that just get thrown out and Tim Hortons gives you $0.10 off whenever you use it. Odd enough not only are both items green but also the colour green. Cool! The total cost for these items is around $10, but that is a huge savings in about a month or two. Go out and get similar items and save some green in then end.

I just made a quick program to help me find colours of things that are on my screen. What it dose is when I press the hot key it gets the colour of the current pixel that my mouse is over. It pops up saying the colour code in the HEX format then copies it to the systems clipboard. I needed something that for a while then I decided to create one as I could not find one. I use the hex code for making webpages. It has saved me a lot of time because now I don’t need to look back into code to find out what the exact colour is of areas on the site. Very handy if you are creating a page add-ins, like google ads.

In the end I decided to share it with all of the developers out there that need something like this. I used AutoHotKeys and included both the source and compiled version in the download.

Here is the description that I used on my site.
The HEX Color Getter is a program that I made in auto hot keys that allows programers or website developers to figure out what the colour is of the current pixle that the mouse is over. To use it just start the program, you will see a little H with a green background in your taskbar. When you want to figure out what the colour is of a specific pixle on your computer screen (works on multi monitor setups) press Ctrl + Alt + Z. You will see a dialog box pop up and once you close the box it is automaticly sent to the computers clipboard. Now just paste it into your program. Note that you may need to append a # or 0x infront of it as its just the hex numbers on its own. This program includes both the source and a compiled version. The program lisenced under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Canada License.

You can download it now from my project page.
HEX Color Getter

I am setting up the new server and I also got a new domain to play with. hovinga.me. I am going to be moving the blog to blog.ben.hovinga.me if I can if not then just blog-ben.hovinga.me will do. I plan to make ben.hovinga.me my homepage for all of my online profiles. I will be putting twitter, facebook, xbox, zune and other site addon’s there. I will also start working on a bio which i will also add.
I plan to make hovinga.me the homepage for our family. I still don’t know exactly what I am going to put there but I have a few ideas.

It should take about 24 hours for all of the domains to setup and be in working order, then I can start programing away.