Where is a good Starbucks in Fairfield, CA? Google Maps to the rescue! Now, how to email that 125-character link to my friend? Tinyurl.com you say? I never liked how pranksters hide links behind tinyurls; you don't know where you'll land when you click one. So I created a web service that yields informative links, like: http://lookleap.com/maps.google.com/a5. I named this service LookLeap.com. Kick it around and tell me what you think.

After scratching my head about the best way to create a favicon.ico file, I made a happy discovery: a free Photoshop plug-in that allows Photoshop to read and write ICO files. Following this short tutorial, I took a 64x64 iPod icon PNG from the Nuvola theme, resized it to 16x16 in Photoshop, then saved it as favicon.ico. That's all. I uploaded it to www.askdex.com to see how it behaved, and it looks great; even the transparency was preserved. You can download this iPod icon from: http://askdex.com/favicon.ico. Ole!

Some pdftk users process hundreds of files. Performing this work on a Windows machine can yield unexpected results. The problem arises from the Windows command-prompt shell, not pdftk. The problem arises because for every long filename, Windows creates a short, DOS-compatible (8.3) alias filename. This short alias filename might end up matching a wildcard expression, even when the long filename does not. When using pdftk, the result is that you end up with more input files than you wanted.

This article offers a couple workarounds and then describes the case where this problem arose.