Category
Geekery
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01.12.10My RokuI really love my Roku. I am getting a lot more out of my Netflix account now. The downside is the Netflix streaming content is a little thin. There are not many movies that I wold want to see on it, but is does have a good selection of documentaries and TV shows, especially Discovery Channel content. I love documentaries and they were the vast majority of DVDs I was getting anyway. For some strange reason I never caught Everest: Beyond the Limit on The Discovery Channel. If you haven’t seen it, do. ...
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01.06.10New Passwords for the New YearI’m not big on New Year’s Resolutions. I think if you want to change something, just do it because you want to do it and whenever you want to do it. Who cares what the calendar says. This year my goal is to change all my online passwords to something different, and impossible to guess. My current passwords are probably better than most people’s, but they aren’t perfect. I have three levels of passwords. I have really strong ones for banking stuff, somewhat strong one for other online stuff, and a crappy one for sites I ...
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01.01.10VHS to Blu-raySo yesterday we put some of our gift cards together and got a blu-ray player. It only costs us $50 after gift cards. Not too bad. Now we can finally watch movies in HD. To me even DVDs look better in the blu-ray player than in the old DVD player. The blu-ray player must upscale our DVDs better than our old DVD player did. We are also using this time to upgrade our receiver too. It's sad to retire our old receiver and DVD player that we spent over $600 on, but it would be ...
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12.22.09Test Your Geography KnowledgeAnybody that knows me knows that I love to learn, especially if it's fun. I am ok at geography, but could be better. I just spent an hour playing this game. I got up to level 6. I was pretty good at getting the right country, but pretty much sucked at knowing where the city was in each country.
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08.29.09Video Game EmulatorsBeing the computer tech guy in the family I always end up with everybody’s old hardware. I usually scrap out old PCs. I save parts that I could use and scrap the rest. This week I salvaged up enough parts to build a computer to run my emulators. Emulators are software programs that mimics a game console. You can find them for all but the latest game consoles. The Emulator Zone is full of info on all the latest emulators. I just run ones for the consoles that I had as a kid. I ...
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08.15.09My HackintoshSo if you have been following me on Twitter you would know that I just created a Hackintosh. What’s a Hackintosh? It’s a regular PC that is running Apple’s OS X. I love OS X, but wish Apple made a desktop PC that is powerful enough, without a monitor, and affordable. The Mac Mini is a little underpowered, the iMac has a monitor built in, and the Mac Pro is way to spendy. For years I have been wanting a headless Mac that is priced between the Mini and the Pro. My Mac Mini ...
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08.03.09New Link BlogI like to share all the stuff that I think is cool on the internet. With Posterous I have been able to send a lot of cool thing over to my blog. There are still other links that I find cool, but not necessary blog worthy. For those links I am now using Slinkset. SlinkSet makes it easy to share links. Currently I have my Google Reader share items, and my Instapaper stared items heading over there. My Slinkset page can be found at tinkr.slinkset.com. So while I don't blog about personal stuff ...
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07.26.09My Blackberry TourI have had my Blackberry for four days now. I like it for the most part. It is no iPhone though. My iPod Touch is much more user friendly and easier to use, but the Blackberry is easily the best phone I have had, and can get. It is really nice to have access to the internet and apps without having to look for a wifi hotspot. The Wife got a pink Curve, and she really likes it. I think it feels kinda cheap. I was glad when my Tour came, and it ...
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07.07.09Pocket Universe For the iPhoneI love laying outside and staring at the stars. It’s amazing how small we are, and how minor our problems are when you look at the size of the universe. I use to be real good at spotting a bunch of different constellations. I forgot most of them now. I pretty much can only find Ursa Major in the summer and Orion in the winter. Yesterday I discovered the iPhone app Pocket Universe. It’s pretty much a pocket planetarium, and very cool. It uses your location, time, and date to show you what ...
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06.14.0910th Anniversary of NapsterI first experienced downloading MP3s back in 1994. Back then it was easy to find copyright infringing MP3s right on the web. The problem was they took forever to download, and took up so much space. Back then a 1 GB hard drive was huge, so 3 and 4 MB files started to add up. I didn’t download too many MP3s back then. CD burners were way to costly, so you pretty much had to sit at your computer to listen to them. Eventually the RIAA and record companies discovered MP3 and started cracking down on ...
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06.10.09iPhone or Palm PreEvery time Apple announces a new iPhone it pisses me off that AT&T doesn’t have coverage here, so I can’t get one. There is one way I could get one. I can order one and use my home address as the billing address, but then use my Mom’s or Brother's address as the primary place of use. From what I hear that would work as long as I don’t go over the “off-net usage allowance”, which would be no problem because I really don’t talk on the phone much. The downside is I would have to ...
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03.14.09Happy π DayToday is the day we celebrate the the Greek letter that is used as the symbol for the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. Or in other words π. And another cool coincidence is that it also happens to be Albert Einstein's birthday.
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03.07.09My New Eee PCSo I have wanted a netbook for some time now. I had $70 in Best Buy gift cards burning a hole in my pocket, so I thought I would put them towards a netbook. I pretty much had three options at our Best Buy, the Dell Mini 9, the Asus Eee PC 900, or the HP Mini 1000. Of those three I like the HP the best, but I hate the track pad button placement. The Asus and Dell’s keyboards were really cramped. What I really wanted was the Asus Eee PC 1000H, but they ...
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03.03.09Happy Square Root DayToday is Square Root Day. Square Root Day is a rare day that occurs when the day and month are both the square root of the last two digits of the year as in, √9=3, or 3²=9, or 3×3=9. Square Root Days only happen nine times a century. The last one was February 2, 2004, and the next is April 4, 2016. I hear you are suppose to celebrate by eating root vegetables cut into squares. There is another geeky math holiday coming next Saturday. March 14th is a math holiday that happens every year. It’s Pi ...
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02.25.09PalindromesI love running across palindromes, but I can never remember them. In case you don’t know, a palindrome is a word or phrase that can be read the same forwards and backwards. I always thought the name palindrome should be a palindrome, but it’s not. The two that I always remember are “race car” and “race fast, safe car”. Chris Pirillo recently blogged about his favorite palindrome and asked for everybody’s favorites. Some of them are pretty amazing, but I think Weird Al has some of the best I have ever heard in this video. Then ...
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