For the longest time I have been using two janky CRT monitors. My “huge” 19″ CRT monitor was totally awesome and a cheap $450 back when I bought it. I think small LCD monitors were still over $1000 back then. Last week I finally upgraded my monitors. I got two 22″ LCD monitors for less than my old 19″ CRT cost me.
Here is my old desktop.
And here is the new desktop.
That’s where I spend 90% of my free time. What does your desk look like?
I have been working on cleaning up the mess of cables underneath my desk the last couple of weeks. I eliminated two computers, both of them were pretty old. One was my emulator box that I used to when I wanted to re-live my childhood. It had all of my old console games on it. Those will be moving to my main Windows machine. The other computer that I got rid of was my Ubuntu system. I inherited my wife old laptop, and that has become my new Ubuntu system. Since I am down to two desktops, I also eliminated my KVM switch. I got a super small Apple bluetooth keyboard and a wireless mouse for my Mac. They sit on top of my desk, but can be moved out of the way if I don’t need them. My other keyboard and mouse sit on my keyboard try. So I eliminated two computers and a bunch of cables, but I still have four computers sitting at my desk, but two are laptops now.
To further clean of the cabling, I moved the routers, NAS, and cable modem to the closet. I just had to drill a whole in the wall and run the cables through our crawl space. I stapled some of those foam pipe insulators to the studs and ran the cables though them. It worked awesome, and looks super clean.
I should have taken some before pictures. It still looks like a lot of cables, but it’s way cleaner that it use to be.
I am going to try and build a Windows Home Server with some of the leftover parts, and I will eventually take a bunch to recycling. I still have the very first computer I built sitting in my closet. I am kinda attached to it, but a 350 MHz Pentium II isn’t really worth a thing.
Soon I will be upgrading my two CRT monitors. I am eyeing some 22″ LCDs on Newegg. Once I get them, my old janky setup should be totally awesome.
Normally I am not a pack rat, but when it come to computer parts I kinda am. I have four computer cases fill with miscellaneous junk and three old monitors in my closet right now.
Some social networks I get, others I don’t. I never could understand MySpace or Facebook. Twitter on the other hand, I fell in love with it right away, and it sucks when it, or some of it’s features goes down. FriendFeed was a service that I understood, but it always seemed to cluttery and noisy for me. This past weekend I just got fed up with all of Twitters problems and I decided to take the plunge to FriendFeed full time. I am really starting to like FriendFeed, and the cool thing is that it actually works.
A few weeks ago Dave Slusher blogged about his process of moving from Twitter to FriendFeed. I pretty much followed his plan. I used Kreg Steppe’s PHP script to help find my Twitter friends on FriendFeed, and then I just made imaginary friends for my Twitter friends that weren’t on FriendFeed. Then I signed up for a TwitterFeed account, and am using it to send my FriendFeed updates back to twitter. It took a while to get all my friends over, but I am really loving FriendFeed now.
There are so many new and cool webapps that is hard to actually find a use for them. I have played around a little bit with Adobe’s Photoshop Express. It’s pretty cool and amazing what you can do on the web these days. Yesterday I use Picnik for the first time. Picnik is another online photo editor. I like it better than Photoshop Express. I have a Picnik extension added to FireFox, so I can just right click on an image and send it to Picnik. I used it for the image in my post yesterday about Netflix. I found an image, resized it, and added a drop shadow in a matter of seconds. It really makes it easy to add images to blog posts. I don’t add images very often. In the past it’s been kind of a pain downloading the image, edited it, and then uploading it. Picnik makes it kinda fun. You just edit the picture on the web, then I downloaded and dropped it into MarsEdit. Easy peasy.
I have been a Netflix user for years. I probably only watch one movie a week, so they are making money off of me. It doesn’t really bother me that I am not getting full use out of my Netflix account. The main reason I like it is that I never forget what movies I want to watch. When I hear about something that sounds good I just add it to my queue and I get to it when I get to it. I am years behind, but I don’t really care.
We have the “two at a time” plan. It works well for us because of multiple profiles. I have my queue and my wife has hers. We each can watch the movies we want on the schedule we want.
Now, for some stupid reason Netflix is getting rid of their multiple profiles option on September 1st. That’s going to make me look at other options. I have never looked at Blockbusters online rental options because I was very happy with Netflix. Coming September that might change.
It seems like I am changing my blog template more often than my underwear. For my last template I wanted something simple, and something that brought all my social network posts together. Shortly after I released that one, Chris Pirillo came out with his WicketPixie theme. It is pretty cool because you can enter all your social network links and it will automatically get the favicon and integrate them into your blog. You can visit my “social activity” page and see all my social network activity. I still have some CSS tweaking to do. I ran out of time last night, and wont have much time to play with it for a while now.
I don’t really believe in superstitions. I have some, but I don’t really believe in them. Nothing bad has ever happened to me on Friday the 13th, but I am always leery about them. Well, this past Friday the 13th was a bad one. Our XBox 360 suffered the dreaded “Red Ring of Death”.
Someone on Twitter suggested that I try the wrapping it in towels so it overheats trick. Supposedly overheating it melts some solder points and then fixes them. I was pretty skeptical about that, but I thought I would give it a try.
I was right, it didn’t work, so we will be sending it back to Microsoft to get fixed, so we will be XBoxless for four to five weeks. It’s not going to bother me that much. I don’t play it all that often, but the wife is going nuts already.
My wife’s desktop PC and laptop are both getting a little old. She always ends up getting my hand-me-down computers. I am happy with my current computers, so I just bought her a new laptop. She figured she could replace both of her computers with a laptop.
So that means I am going to inherit two more computers. I currently have five computers at my desk. Is that too many? I think I will turn her old PC into a Windows Home Server, which will go into the closet, and I think I will run Ubuntu on her old laptop. I have always wanted a Linux based laptop. I always seem to find a use for my old computers. I think I have only gotten rid of three of my really old computers. Yeah, I need help.
Another thing I played around with over the weekend was streaming Netflix videos to my TV. I am sure a lot of you have heard about the Netflix streaming box from Roku. Well, you can do pretty much the same thing with a media center PC. There is a plug-in for Windows Media Center called vmcNetFlix. It allows you to watch streaming Netflix videos in Windows Media Center. I was able to watch streaming Netflix movies on my XBox 360. The software is a little slow and buggy, but for the most part worked really well. The quality wasn’t quite DVD quality, but that is Netflix’s problem mostly caused by the slow internets we have here in the US. It was more like standard definition TV quality. I don’t know if I would watch a movie this way, but it works great for TV shows. I watched and old episode of Criss Angel Mine Freak and it was quite enjoyable. I love having more and more ways to view what I want when I want.
I am usually not afraid of beta software. I am always looking for the latest and greatest thing, even if it breaks stuff sometimes. For some reason I was shying away from the FireFox 3 Beta. The main reason was that most of my favorite plug-ins weren’t FireFox 3 compatable. Now most of them are. Over the weekend it was pissing me off how slow FireFox 2 was. I love the browser, but it was just getting too slow for me, so I went to FireFox 3 Beta on all my computers. I was shocked how fast it is. There are lots of other new features too, but I haven’t dived down into much of them yet. One thing that is taking a little getting use to is the different themes. On my Macs it looks like an Apple app and on Vista it looks like a Vista app.
