TechnowledgeBase

Perhaps changing the icon that appears next to your website’s address in the address bar isn’t your top priority when you set up a new site… but its definitely on the list. If not, it should be. If you spend ANY amount of time customizing your site, then the default “folded paper” icon just won’t cut it. Here’s how to change it.

Old and Busted

First, you’ll need an icon. This is simply a graphic image like a jpg or a gif… unfortunately, whatever graphics application you use may not be able to handle it. I’ve done this lots of times, and I’ve always used some kind of special icon-making software to produce these images. And by “special”, I mean “free”.

One such software is the Favicon Editor that allows you to create the icon right in your web browser… and, more importantly, it allows you to convert an existing image into an icon. The restriction here is that the image has to be a PNG image that is 16×16 in size. These icons have to fit in your browser’s address bar, remember…. so they have to be tiny. Other icon creator tools can read other formats besides PNG, so if you have some problem with PNGs… wtf is wrong with you? use another tool. A google search for “Favicon Generator” or something similar will return plenty for you to choose from. Not all of them are free, however.
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Popularity: 25% [?]

You’ve downloaded a CD image of… whatever… only to discover that it has a weird .BIN extension that your software won’t recognize. When you try opening it, you just get error messages, or the file open window won’t even recognize it as a valid CD image format.

The Problem:
Your computer doesn’t know what the hell a .BIN file is. And neither do you.

The Cause
Actually, the REAL problem is that you only downloaded part of what you need. CD images come in a lot of different formats. You find them with the ever-popular .ISO extension, but also with .NRG extensions and several others. .BIN files are just part of the crowd. But unlike ISO’s, they not complete images all by themselves. Sure, the BIN file contains all the data, but you need ANOTHER file… a CUE file… to tell your software just what data is in that BIN. Think of a BIN file as a book. The CUE file is the table of contents. In this case, however, the table of contents is stored separately from the actual…umm… content. So you should have downloaded TWO files… a CUE and a BIN… instead of just the BIN.

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Popularity: 8% [?]