Sweet, sweet digital information!
Well, I finally broke. We called to get the internet set up at the house. So come Wednesday, I should be back! I can’t wait! It’ll be like Christmas in July!
So I got this Twitter
From what I can tell it’s kinda like the Facebook feature that displays what you’re doing at the moment. Although twitter is intended to be used all the time, I guess. You can hook it up to your cell phone too and text your twitter, so that even if you aren’t near a computer you can still share with the world all of your impressively interesting exploits. I don’t have a text message plan, so that counts me out of that feature. Luckily I’m never more than 100 ft. from internet access.
I’ve added my Twitter feed to the blog as you see to the right. I don’t really like the layout, but I’m not springing for the editable CSS code so that’s as good as it gets I suppose.
It seems like a great stalker tool and I know there’s a few people out there that would like an easier way to keep tabs on me. I figure Twitter is probably the best way to do that.
I look forwarding to clogging my friends Twitter feeds with the most trivial observations you can imagine.
Enjoy!
New Gmail Custom Time!
Now you can back date e-mails when you send them. You can even mark them as “Read” before they’re sent. So say you forgot to e-mail somebody some information? Just back date it, mark it read, send it. Then tell them to check again. You sent that two weeks ago!
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/customtime/index.html
This is the sweetest idea since Google TiSP!
Macs hacked first
Apparently at the latest hacker convention the new Macbook Air that everybody is wetting their pants about, was hacked in a grand total of 2 minutes. Not so much a problem with Mac OS, but a flaw in the Safari browser that is standard on all Macs. On the last day of the competition, Vista was finally hacked thanks to a flaw in Adobe’s Flash software which isn’t standard, but present on a majority of PCs.
Ubuntu, however remained unscathed after three days of attempted hacking. Hey Ubuntu guys, make it a bit easier to play all my PC games and I’m 100% on board!
Once again, I’m late to the show.
Well I decided to take a look at some of the latest Firefox extensions since I’m pretty much running a bare bones Firefox. (What a waste). I was looking through and there’s a lot of gimmcky ones, or gaudy ones. But there’s a few non intrusive and functional ones. I added a G-Mail notifier that just parks in the bottom right of the screen and checks my e-mail every 10 minutes. That’s pretty handy.
One extension I knew about for a long time, but just never used for some reason. Adblock Plus. Like the name implies, it blocks ads. I guess I just always assumed it wasn’t very effective. I’d monkeyed around back in the day with block lists for ad servers, but they always seemed to slow surfing by causing timeout errors from the ad servers. But Adblock works amazingly well. Lots of websites, especially overly commercialized sites load noticably faster. I can imagine it’d be even more noticable on a dial up connection.
So check it out! And if you know of any other sweet extensions, let me know!
Photoshop now available as a web application.
Well I can’t try it out right now, because none of the computers at work have the latest version of Flash installed… >_< But Photoshop Express has been released for public beta at www.photoshop.com/express
It’s not as full featured as a traditional Photoshop installation, but should be more than adequate for touching up photos, cropping and mild editing. The best news is you don’t have to install it on every computer. It’s available anywhere you can get to the web. All you have to do is register for a free account, and you get 2 gigs for storage.
It’s exciting to see more software like this become available on the web. The ability to not only access, but use your files from anywhere, share them with others, kinda amazing really.
New computer case!
Well my original computer case from the first computer I ever built was starting to get annoying. It’s loud on it’s best day. But lately it’s been prone to buzzing as joints have gotten loose over the years from moving around. But it was a cheap computer case and it served me well!
I decided to step up to something a little more solid. The NZXT Hush case. It’s advertised as a “silent” case. But I don’t expect utter silence. I just though it was a slick looking computer case mostly.
It has sound deadening foam on all sides too!
I haven’t gotten it hooked up yet (obviously) but I have a nice little project to work on after work today! Once I get power to it it should have a cool glow to it. Like so:
It’s creepy, but I’m facinated…
This has been around for a while within the last couple days, I’ve been messing around with Google Maps Street View. In a few major cities, they sent a van out running around with a 360 degree camera on top and started taking pictures. The result is you can pick a street and zoom all the way down to the street and pan around as if you were almost there.
Here’s a guy’s house on Oldspower.com, haha.
To use it you just go to maps.google.com and click on the “Street View” button in the top right. Then the cities available will have a camera icon on them. Zoom in and any blue outlined street you can double click on and it will show you the view from street level. Pretty crazy!
I was checking out Las Vegas Blvd. earlier. Heck one of these days you’ll be able to take a trip without even leaving your house!
New toy
Well it’s been a while since I posted. Been busy with remotes and Grandma in the hospital and all. I’m feeling pretty drained.
So maybe it was just feeling like I need to reward myself or something, I dunno. But at some point we’re all allowed to make ridiculous purchases right?
So we bought a 47 inch LCD HDTV.
The picture doesn’t really do justice to how ridiculiously big this TV is in such a small room. Ha ha. But I figure my next place is hopefully a little bigger, and I plan on this TV lasting a while. I payed a little bit extra to make sure it was full HD 1080p. So it shouldn’t be obsolete in the immediate future. We had to get HDMI cables for our cable box and the DVD player that Andrea picked up today to get the digital picture. And we had to get the HD package from the cable company. But it looks great if you ask me.
On the other hand, regular TV looks kinda gross now. You ever take a small picture and stretch it out on your computer screen? Know how it gets all blurry? Yeah. Even PS2 games look pretty antiquated when blown up this big. We debated getting a PS3 or Xbox 360, but I think we’re going to hold off on those for a while.
So I have two 27″ TV’s laying around now. haha. One Stooks gave me a while back and if he has a use for it, he can sure have it back whenever. If not I have two TVs that I’m willing to GIVE away. You…someone you know…want a TV? Come get it or catch me on a trip close to you, and its yours.
I’m pretty excited though. I’ve had a nice sound system for a while now, and always said I just don’t have the TV to go with it. Now I do. I see no need to buy a movie ticket ever again.
01.25.08We need a couple more computers.
Andrea decided to do some upgrading to the server the other night. It involved a sort of Frankenstein operation taking parts from her old computer, my old one, and her sister’s all stitched together into one. Come to find out, the only spare video card we had was too old to be compatible with the new motherboard. So everything had to go back the way it was!
I get a kick out of that picture though, because there’s a total of two working computers, three monitors three disassembled computers laying around. And she’s on the laptop of all things!
Just another day in the life of a geek.