Archive for the 'Geeked Out' Category
Subscribe to This Category

I was tagged by Bill Slawski in a Nerdiness quiz meme where he scored a measly 65 - or “low rank nerd” … so I pushed up my glasses, took off my wrist braces and stumbled up to the challenge!

Eighty-freaking five. High-Nerd. Woah. I was thinking like mid-grade. Thank GOD the quiz didn’t ask me if I owned a metal detector (I have a nice one), programmed IR emitters by hand to control devices (I have), or re-wired any X-10 devices to do odd things ’round the house (I have a secret box)

Now I’ll meme-tag a few others. Answer honestly.. I did!

Jason Bartholme
Guy Kawasaki
Jeremy Zawodny
Carolyn Shelby

(the quiz is really quick BTW.)

It’s long been my opinion that hourly consultants who work on-screen most of the time are plagued with a lack of billing consistancy, losing both money and client confidence. I see this all the time with sub-contractors, and in forums I’ve read there are few who demonstrate a consistant methodology for recording the time they spend on client projects. So, for years I’ve struggled with ways to improve my recording of client work. End of the day. End of the hour. Little reminder beeps. You name it.Â

The one thing that has made a huge difference, and that I recommend for you too is to purchase a 2nd LCD monitor, and dedicate it to Quickbooks Weekly Timesheet.  Don’t use it for your email. Don’t pop up windows there. At the start of the day open Quickbooks, Open the Weekly Timesheet, Select yourself, and leave it there … all day.  If you’re running multi-user version, each of your employees can do the same. The costs for a 17″ high quality LCD and cabling is less than $200, which you’ll probably recoup in a couple of weeks.Â

If you don’t want to run Quickbooks on the system all the time, you could use this with Intuit’s Time Tracker or MC2 anywhere’s web-based system  too. With this, you could just run Firefox in the 2nd monitor and be done. Â

PS: Occasionally exit quickbooks so your backup system can pick it up.

Notes to self:

• Raid 0 is not worth it for desktop apps compared to the safety of Raid 1. Even log analysis tasks that hit the drive a lot.
• If you leave your USB drives plugged in during RAID 1 array config your main, Windows logical drive will end up on drive “G” or something.
• It’s hard to change logical drives once you’re all set up.
• MOZY rocks. This let me grab a few key files. It “could” have saved me totally if needed.
• Secondcopy rocks. This cut hours and hours off of this task since I use it to dupe many files to external drives nightly.
• Dell Precision 670 machines are noisy, no matter what fans you install, especially with dual processors.
• Maxtor drives have failed me twice. These failed after 5 months. I’m trying Western Digital this time.

Questions:

• Why isn’t drive formatting built into RAID array configuration? It’s silly to have to sit there and hit “ok” every few hours. Why not have a “two new drives” setting that handles it and lets you just go to bed.

personalpost

Yahoo Pipes (beta) is a kind of RSS feed aggregator mixer board for creating mashups. It has debugging helper tools, great filtering, and then you can publish the feed to use in your favorite feed reader.

I’ve long used Geckotribe’s CARP and GROUPER to do RSS mashups, and always found there to be tremendous power in this technology. When you can group, adjust, filter and publish resulting data feeds you have enormous power - thanks to the standards of XML.  UNIX Pipes (geek warning) are a way to send the output from one operation as input to another, and while the concept sounds simple, it allows for a rapid build-up of powerful and amazing tools using nothing more than simple pieces.Â

About 9 in 10 times I mention RSS to someone outside of the Internet industry, I have to explain it, so I don’t think we’ll be seeing a flockage of users to the new service just yet. For me, I’ll be using it to visually construct mashups I can then deploy with Carp and Grouper.Â

Another unexpected suprise in the Web 2.0 space. Fun!

Steampunk - Science Fiction where characters (often scientists) fight against an oppressive establishment often using ultra-modern technologies presented in Victorian-era form factors.
Okay, I admit it. I’m a steampunk fan. Not as much the literature, but the imaginative machines and bizarre mixes of digital and non-digital elements, craftsmanship, and tactile sensibility of the artists.

I first got a sense of Steampunk type hardware ideas while watching Brazil, Edward Scissorhands, Wallace and Grommit, and Harry Potter. Someday I will own a nixie clock. I have a wood en box in my garage full of antique tools. So I thought it would be a good idea to list a set of great steampunk-like sites that give a well-rounded overview of the phenomenon, along with a few words about each. If you have one to add to this list, post in the comments with a link. I’ll look-see and possibly add it to the main post as well. Steampunk Labs, Artists, History

• Robots of the Victorian Era
• Radio Guy

• Brass Goggles
• Steampunk Magazine - the journal of misapplied technology
• The Steampunk Workshop - awesome stuff and nicely done photos
• Datamancer - home of the home of the The Nagy Magical-Movable-Type Pixello-Dynamotronic Computational Engine (also featured on Wall-Street Journal Video)
• Steampunkopidia
• Dr Grordort’s Rayguns - this site is amazing. Check the custom cases.
• Stephen Berkman - Love the photography style … reminds me of Nine Inch Nails artwork. Perhaps NIN copied HIM!
• The Retrocomputing Museum
• Vladimir Gvozdev’s terrific artwork - sites’ a little hard to navigate.
• Da Vinci Automata - clockpunk
• Stephane Halleux - do not miss this gallery (example to right)
• Steampunk Fashion
• Steam Brass and Fzz - Check the lamps
• Steampunk Jewelry
• Christopher Locke’s Heartless Machine - Check out the Scissor Spider
• A Better World -Gaming console and ipod imagined in Steampunk Style
• Alex CF Artwork - Many Dead Thinks - brilliant research cases.
• Eccentric Genius - Antiques from a Parallel Universe.
• Spookypop - Wow, a lot of talent in one place (note, you must click on the vines on the left to navigate the site.)
• Animals from Junk - Steampunky
• Steampunk Labs
• Insect Lab
• Steampunk Jewelry and Goggles at EDM
  
• Art Donovan / Steampunk Design

Steampunk Devices

• Gramophone Ipod
• Steampunk iPod NEW!
• Steampunk Lamps
• Steam-Powered Computer
• The Electriclerk
• Automatic Tea Machine
• Steampunk Watches
• More Steampunk Watches (you can buy)
• Cool Steampunk Clocks
• Steampunk Tree House
• Steampunk Lightsabre
• The Vulciana Watch - I want one!
• Photos of cool devices on Flickr
• Steampunk iPhone - this thing is the coolest
• VictorioNixie Tube - Awesome Mod of a toy (also on video.)
• A couple of awesome clocks and some amazing Russian stuff.
• Steam-Powered Robot
• Steampunk LCD Monitor (with a few “how-to” photos)
• Pierre Matter Sculpture
• Steampunk R/C Centipede
• Big Steampunk Animals - wow, check out the crashed spaceship

Interactive Steampunk & Multimedia

• A Modern Compendium of Minateur Autometa
• Crazy Machines (my kids love it)
• Nine inch Nails Closer Video (mature / language / NSFW)
• Steampunk Rayguns (G Rated)
• The Golden Compass Movie Trailer

Articles / Blog Posts

• SlashBoing - Steampunk Eye
• Wired - Steampunk Design
• Gizmodo - Steampunk Laptop
• Gizmodo - Steampunk Keyboard
• Cre.ations.net - Jar of Fireflies

Stuff you can buy

• Steampunk Supplies/Salvage from Sequential Glass
• Klockwerks - amazing clocks
• Steampunk Watches
• The J Peterman Company Iron Gothic Clock
• Steampunk Gift Guide - Make Magazine
• Skerror’s bunch of great dark, gothic-modern designs.
• The Golden Compass , the Cryptex and the Spy Insect
• Steampunk iPod Skin (I tried to order this but javascript errors prevented it bah!)

Misc Fun Steampunk-like Sites & Resources for Steampunkers

• Wallace and Gromit Cracking Contraption
• Make Magazine “My God, It’s Full of Wires”

Gears image by mehrit used under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License

Warning - geeky post.

I had been putting off setting up an apache test server (Apache 2.2 with PHP 5.5) here in the “lab” until this week and allowed about 30 minutes to set it up. Two hours later I was still mucking about.

The Apache service kept colliding with another service on Port 80 - okay, freak out time. What could be running on port 80 on my machine…. After scouring to be sure that IIS was completely and totally GONE, scanning my httpd.conf and php.ini files until my head hurt, I finally got some wisdom and looked at the event log to find that SKYPE (of all things) is answering port 80. Whew… Nasty little option there, obviously meant to give those with laptops a way of bypassing hard-core firewalls when using Skype on the go.

With Skype running, Apache cannot start. The fix is to go in and un-check the “Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections” box on the connections tab. Restart Apache and you’re good.

What made this so tricky is that it matters what order you load things up in. Whichever service binds to port 80 first gets to keep it, and neither one seem to do a good job of alerting you of problems.

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, but the ZDNET At The Whiteboard page is probably one of the coolest, geekiest marketing ideas I’ve seen in a while. I found myself chomping to figure out how I might be able to use it someday. Why I like it?

a) it’s all content. No fluff.

b) it talks to me in a mode that I’m used to.

c) it’s well paced.

Check it out.

One of the most important priorities in my life is to, um, have a life.

As far as I can tell, most entrepreneurs also have this on their goal-sheet, possibly as their top goal for going into business on their own. So why is it that even the simplest technologies don’t support this?

Take soho office phones, for example. In order to get a basic “after hours” switch, I have to spend $600 on a Talkswitch24 (highly recommended.) Every other phone system requires that you remember to flip a switch at night. I don’t even know of cell phones that have after hours modes despite their full-featured OSs.

So now, I’m a heavy Skype user. More and more of my clients are using it, and for good reason. It’s cheap, it’s crystal clear, and the chat mode on it is fully encrypted. End of those praises, leave it at that.

Skype is really light on features (just look at Pamela’s offering and you get a feeling for what’s missing… VOIP voice mail, call recording, and voice memos are some incredibly useful things that Pamela allows.) But neither allow you to set your business hours and have Skype adjust your phone modes based on them.

I know, give and take, features are risk, etc. Few people probably want it. So what I propose to the Ebay-Skype empire is that you add several simple command line options. I will use Windows scheduler to send the right commands to Skype’s command line This should require almost ZERO code change for Skype Engineers.

Current Skype Command Line Options

/nosplash - do not display splash screen when Skype starts
/minimized - Skype is minimized to system tray when it starts
/callto:nameornumber - call the specified Skype Name or SkypeOut number
/shutdown - close Skype
….that’s it?

Command Line Wishlist Options To Support “having a life”

/mode=m - set running Skype into mode m
/forward=number - forward my Skype calls to this number
/forwardstop=number - stop forwarding my Skype calls to this number

with the “mode” command, I’d set up a scheduled windows event that would change it to “do not disturb mode” after 7:00 PM, and then turn it back to “available” at 7:30 AM. It would be unavailable Sat and Sunday.

With forward modes, I’d set up a shortcut on my start menu that would turn forwarding to my cell phone on or off. One click and it’s forwarded, one click and it’s not.

I really don’t want to add-on anything. Pamela gives me enough headaches with Skype. But if you know of something please speak up.

I think every web designer should have a great setup of monitors. So, even though
I’m often ribbed about my bank of three monitors in my office. Now I have a new setup in mind. Wow. This setup rocks

24″ high-resolution screens; industry’s top-quality LCD panels24″ super-premium Samsung LCD panels 5760 by 2400 resolution (6X 1920×1200 WUXGA panels) 1000:1 contrast ratio; 500 cd/m? brightness 178? (H) / 178? (V) viewing angle Ultra-fast 6 ms response (G to G) Digital DVI and analog D-sub connections TV video inputs with PIP (picture in picture) option Backed by industry-best Zenview Quality Guarantee Exclusive Zenview Manager multimonitor utilities Introductory Web Price: $11,999

I just got this neat Internet Phone Wizardfrom Actiontec. It’s a little box (about the size of a mini-hub) that you plug into your PC with USB. It then has a phone plug that you stick your phone into.

It makes using SKYPE the same as your regular phone. I can use my much loved Plantronics headset for all calls rather than having yet another pc. of hardware laying about my messed up desk.

So far, it is working great. I have it hooked to line “2″ of my phone system. This way, I can choose local or long-distance calls easily. The Skype voice quality is very good but it is a few db quieter than the same call on an analog phone. Some folks said I was quiet. I’ve boosted my mic some and that helped.

Another neat thing is now I can conference in lots of folks AND record the calls using my “Pamela” Skype tool. So far it’s working great. Hopefully I can both improve service and save a little mula as I work.