Anyone that’s worked with me in a development capacity knows that I’m a huge fan of SlideShowPro for beautiful image galleries and video/image slideshows.  It’s cost effective too (about $30).  Note that I’m not affiliated with them in any way, I’m just a fan of the component.

So I was recently presented with a planned, very large and very temporary increase in traffic to a website I maintain.  On the homepage of this site is a high quality, professionally produced video and a handful of images displayed with SlideShowPro.  The video is somewhere in the 8MB range, h.264 encoded with a high quality AAC audio track.  This impressive but bandwidth intensive element posed a problem if hit by a large number of users.  Fortunately I had the benefit of advance warning and I know when it’s time to look beyond my own resources. Continued…

A couple days ago I hooked my laptop up to my now old (but still bulletproof) HP Deskjet 6122 to print out a new insurance card before I ran out the door. In a world of smartphones that can hold any list, display driving directions and instantly store or retrieve just about anything else you’d want, I just don’t print much anymore. So what I got was an unreadable streaky mess… a sure sign of dried ink cartridge heads. Continued…