SubscribeEver want to broadcast from your computer to the masses on the Internet? Chris Pirillo does it 24/7 using Ustream.tv. I’ve always thought about broadcasting live from my office a few times. I don’t know why I’m not already since it’s so easy. Maybe I’m scared I’ll broadcast me and my girlfriend in action accidentally, or I’l be caught picking my nose or something. Anyway, Chris posted a video all about how he does it here.
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I caught an article that featured 2 very useful features you get with a Gmail account and thought I’d share them.
The feature I found most useful was the spam deterrent. You can use username+websitename@gmail.com as your email address. Then when the times comes you can unsubscribe from those specific emails or track which sites are distributing your email address to other spammers.
I already knew the other tip, but it’s pretty cool. You receive Gmail messages even it it’s sent to a slightly wrong email address address. For example, your email address is John.Smith@gmail.com, you will still get email when email is sent to JohnSmith@gmail.com or J.ohnSmith@gmail.com, etc.
Check out the article at makeuseof.com for more examples.
So far I’ve gotta say I am very impressed with the new Mac OS, Leopard. The features in iChat are worth it alone. The many different ways you can collaborate and share files is just amazing. I know there are Windows alternatives, but Leopard just makes it so easy. The Time Machine and the easy ability to create desktop gadgets are also very impressive.
The only problem so far seems to be with the menu bar being hard to see. They have made the decision to go with a transparent effect that just doesn’t work for users running higher resolutions, or people with vision problems.
Chris Pirillo tested it out on his live webshow and stated that he will go 100% Mac after getting Leopard. I think many will follow, including myself. Yes! It’s that friggin’ impressive to me! Also check out this article: Leopard: Faster, Easier Than Vista
At 3 in the morning on Saturday, I sat at my desk, yawning looking for sites that provide free images. I came across a site in the UK that appeared to have some good images. It required me to register for the site to obtain the free images, which I did. Oh how I wish I could turn back time.
A half conscious person (which I wasn’t) would’ve avoided such a site. But less than 0.00001% of my brain was functioning, so I failed to check for a privacy policy.
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Best Buy, the store that sucks, has decided to stop selling analog televisions. Only flat panel and high definition televisions will be sold in Best Buy stores now. A plan to make analog TV owners feel inferior. Read more about it here.
Other than saving space, I don’t see a need to invest in a flat screen or high definition. In fact, I just bought an analog television 2 weeks ago. The cost difference just wasn’t worth it for me to invest in a higher end television. Maybe I’m blind or old fashioned, but the clear picture just doesn’t impress me all that much.
Migrating Data from One Drive to Another the Hard Way
Posted on Nov 26, 2007 under Blog | No CommentI migrated from my old 80GB EIDE hard drive over to my new 400GB SATA drive the long and hard way. I wasted many hours getting all of my old data, including the boot sector over to the new drive all because I made it more complex than it really turned out to be.
Since I worked at a helpdesk before, I became really familiar with Norton Ghost. I thought using Ghost was the only way I could get an image from a drive and put it on another one. I didn’t legally own a copy of Ghost though. So I scoured the web for another solution. I came across Partimage, a free alternative to Ghost. With hardly any knowledge about Linux, I struggled to simply create an image since I had to learn all about mounting NTFS drives and such. I finally worked that out and got the image copied. Finally I was able to image my new drive.
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I am currently in the process of migrating everything over to my Gmail account. I’ve had Yahoo Mail for so long that it’s been difficult to ensure I still get all the email I need. It’s a crime that I even have to move my email, because Yahoo just doesn’t get how to compete with Gmail or anybody for that matter.
Things have changed Yahoo! You know, Gmail has been offering free email services that include a pretty good spam detector, POP access, large file attachments, and no ads within my email.
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A friend of mine recently told me how he makes it look like he’s really busy doing his server administration duties. His boss is like many managers in the computer industry. They know little about how to do stuff technically. Many have been managers so long that they lack the understanding of the tools that are used to troubleshoot and maintain computers these days. They pretty much just focus their time on managing people and making sure they are doing what they are supposed to be doing.
This is why my friend and any other person working as an administrator can fake it and make it look like they are busy. He uses the NETSTAT command in a DOS window to achieve this. On the right side of his giant screen, he has NETSTAT running all the time. This command provides information about the network connections that are currently being used by the computer.
He goes to a command prompt and types netstat -o 3
This makes the netstat command run every 3 seconds. It generates a nice, busy looking DOS window. Your manager will most likely not understand what’s on the screen, but he will definitely think you have an eye on things whenever he walks by your desk.
Find your own variation on using a method like this to fake working. Use some script that runs commands over and over again. Run software that is very active on the screen. Looking busy is half the workplace battle.
A company has unveiled a flash memory hard drive that can store 640GB of data.
As soon as next year, these drives will be available. This 640GB drive however will initially cost $20,000. I guess we’re still very far off from using these drives in our homes. Still, the day is coming where we will be able to turn on our computers and just have it work without having to wait through a long boot process.
Check out video of this drive in action here.
Ever been on a long flight across the country and your iPhone runs out of power?
I found a device that uses the audio jack on your seat to power your iPhone. I am shocked that a significant amount of power even comes out of the audio jacks. The device also powers iPod Nano, regular iPods and iPod Video.
They also seperate chargers also for many USB devices.
You absolutely must CONFORM to these rules when building a web site.
- Make your logo with a basic font. Don’t use capital letters.
- Be sure to use tons of three dimensional icons.
- Use rounded corners. There are no square boxes allowed at all.
- Don’t make your own tools at all, grab widgets from other sites and just cut and paste the code into your site. Be sure to also use the buzzword “widget” a lot.
- Speaking of buzzwords, use the words “web 2.0″ and “blog” a lot even though your site may have nothing to do with either.
- Have somebody do a caricature of your face or entire body. Put this caricature next to your site name.
- If you are posting a picture in your article, make it look like it was torn out of a book.
- Navigation menu’s go on the right now. Alternately you may have a menu along the top but you must use tabs.
- Use Ajax, and lots of it, even where it’s unnecessary.
- All your link names must reflect the name of the page. (example: Title is “How to Buy a Car”, link would be http://sitename.com/how_to_buy_a_car.html)
- Articles and posts must be in a straight row on the main page.
- Don’t have a Link List page at all. God forbid you share the links you like on a regular page. If you must share links, you have to share them within your posts.
- Don’t be creative or give your web site your own flavor at all. Just do what everybody else is doing and make a boring site just like the rest of them. Then you can sit back and be glad you’re part of the web 2.0 buzz.
For those of you that haven’t caught on, yes, I am using sarcasm to tell the story about how every web site these days are alike. Even I have fallen victim to following the same rules everybody else is following. How about not conforming for once? How about doing your own thing and making a site for yourself and not just doing what everybody else is doing?
This weekend I added a television to my office. I had to split the cable signal to go to my new TV and the cable modem. 15 minutes into using the Internet, the connection started intermittently dying.
I tried another splitter. Same problem. I even tried another, and that didn’t work either. So now I thought it had to be the cable I was using. So I purchased some really high quality cable.
Still the problems persist.
To my amazement, it turns out that all of the splitters I owned were cheap in quality. I managed to find a high quality splitter at a local Radio Shack. This worked like a charm.
I used a splitter that supported frequencies of 5 to 1500MHz. The others only supported up to 1000MHz. I’m not sure if this matters at all. My recommendation would be to just not cheap out like I did when choosing a splitter.
I feel so out of the loop since somebody turned me onto Rifftrax since the site has been online for over a year now. For those of you geeks that were fans to the old MST3K shows, this is a delightful return for Mike Nelson and company.
On Rifftrax they make audio files available that you can download for very cheap prices and you can play them along with the movies they make fun of. Nelson is working with newer movies now such as Star Wars and Glitter, which I think is much better than the old crap they used to work with on the MST3K shows.
One viewing of Daredevil with thier rifftrack will show you what I mean. Give it a try and laugh your ass off.
A friend of mine had a job offer to go over to Iraq and be a Helpdesk Tech. He recently showed me the offer sheet. I was blown away. He would’ve made a killing and been able to retire when you add up what he would’ve made. Here is the offer sheet. Naturally, I removed names and phone numbers, but that’s all I changed.
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KompoZer is a great tool that is comparable to proprietary HTML editors such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver, only it’s better and it’s free.
I was skeptical at first about this completely free HTML editor. I figured since it was free that it couldn’t possibly have all the features I need to build a web page. I gave it a try and started building pages with it, and I have yet to find a feature in it that I couldn’t easily find.
This application is great for novices and professional web developers. It’s available for Linux, Windows, MacOS and even OS/2.
