Tech
Blu-ray and Netflix Streaming Video - So Easy a Caveman Could Do It (wait, is that copyrighted?)
I’ve come late to the Blu-ray party. Like most HD junkies I was waiting for the fight between HDDVD and Blu-ray to be won, which it was in convincing fashion in 2008. Now that I’ve arrived at the party with martini in hand, I’m happy to be here. What I’ve ended up with is an LG BD300 Blu-ray player with built in Netflix streaming capabilities. If you’ve dismissed Blu-ray or streaming video you owe it to yourself to investigate this. What’s sitting in my entertainment center now is proof positive that we’ve reached an age where even stupid people can be dangerous with technology.
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15 Free Windows Apps that I Heart
1. 7zip - File Compression/Extraction - www.7zip.org
I have been using 7zip for quite a long time and with good reason. 7zip is a small program that sets up easily, quickly, and with no fuss. The shell integration is great for archiving/extracting files and it works very well. A program I have come accustomed to taking for granted, almost.
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Average Joe Home Networking - Intro to Hardware
This is going to be a multi-part series with the amount of installments being a number divisible by 0 and starting and ending wherever I damn well feel like. In other words, just read, learn, and shut it. The scope of these documents is simple everyday usage of a home network. I am not going to delve into subnetting (it’s been awhile anyway) or talk of Cisco devices but merely basic networks and how to set them up to be very functional and do some troubleshooting. Starting with picking out the hardware…
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Death From The Skies: Give the gift of DEATH!
For manic depressives, goths, or doomsday preachers, Dr. Phil Plait has got just the holiday gift for you. Plait has run the popular website Bad Astronomy for a number of years and has just released his delightful new book of planet wide cataclysm: Death From the Skies! These are the Ways the World Will End.
We live in a dangerous universe. As Plait puts it in his book’s introduction “The universe is trying to kill you. It’s trying to kill me, too. It’s trying to kill everybody. And it doesn’t even have to try very hard.” You’ll be surprised how enjoyable it is finding out how you might die. After you come to terms that we are not even a molecule inside a spec on a pimple on the ass of the universe, you can start to wrap your head around the type of events Phil Plait covers in this book.
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LASIK - Is it the miracle it’s cracked up to be?
I’d been contemplating the Lasik eye procedure for several years. For those living under a rock that past few decades, this is a surgical procedure that reshapes the cornea in order to “fix” near or far-sightedness.
For those that have battled glasses or contacts for a lifetime, the thought of not having to deal with that nightmare is enticing. Now that I’ve taken the plunge, I’ve found that the experience is not really what I expected.
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Deal o’ Day - Guitar Hero 360 Bundle - $55
I normally won’t be doing this but I’m sure everyone knows someone asking for Guitar Hero something this year so…
Guitar Hero Aerosmith Bundle 360 - $54.99 + shipping from Newegg.com
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16874117059
INCLUDES WIRELESS GUITAR + GAME + Other junk!
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Wireless Network Security for the Stupid
I’m amazed I’m even posting this, but I’m mighty thankful to Huey right now. Here’s a piece of advice that 95% of you must already know. Shouldn’t you?
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Virtual PC vs VMWare - XP Pro
I needed a test environment for a Windows box that was acting like a web server using Apache, MySQL, and PHP. I decided to try Microsoft’s Virtual PC since I was going to simulate XP Pro and I wanted to see if it was any good (I was using the Release Candidate 6.0.142.0). I had recently attended a small seminar on MS Products where one of instructors was saving it was “so fast” so I wanted to test it. Keep in mind I’m running a Core 2 Duo - 2.13 Ghz with 2 GB of ram.
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Disable EVDO for Extra Battery Life
Get Those Bars - The Energy Kind
First, let me say that this does not apply to anyone who actually uses VCAST or maybe another digital phone service I dunno. I haven’t much of a use for VCAST and thus this works for me. I guess VCAST is neat if you want a mobile television but I’ll save my money. Battery life is cut into about 1/12th (just a rough estimate) for me with VCAST/EVDO/Digital Network.
Let’s put it this way. I can talk on my phone an hour a day and send 30 text messages each day for 3 days without the VCAST/Digital/EVDO network. With the Digital network enabled my phone will die in 6 hours without ANY use. I have an LG9800 so it could be different with other phones but it’s not acceptable to me. So, how do you get that battery life back in areas with EVDO? Here’s How.
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Razer Diamondback Configuration for Linux
Diamondback via Xorg
Firstly, I am using Ubuntu Dapper Drake 6.06. After the upgrade I needed to do full configuration of my mouse in Xorg. Here are the lines in my config under Section “InputDevice”
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