… for about 10 minutes anyway. Last night I tested my new APC J15 home theater power conditioner and UPS. A neat feature of the unit is the front VFD that shows various informational screens, one of which is the total watts being drawn. With everything connected turned on (receiver, DVD player, TiVo, Wii, and …
I started out 2009 by re-organizing my home theater media cabinet. Several years back I used to have a UPS in the cabinet to protect the various components and keep the TiVo running in case of the occasional power fluctuation (which can happen a lot during the summer months here in Florida). That UPS eventually …
I’m a long-time Palm user: I’ve owned four different Palm OS devices over the past 12 years from the original Pilot 1000 to my Treo 680. Palm is finally starting to do some advertising, and the latest round of Santa’s Gone Centro videos are pretty funny. I’m looking forward to CES next week as Palm …
The beloved computer mouse turned 40 earlier this week. Check out some of these great video clips from Doug Englebart’s 1968 demo at Stanford. Jump right to clip #12 to see Doug demo the mouse and explain how it works. Did you know they used to call the cursor (or pointer) the bug? Really cool, …
I had some free time over the long holiday weekend so I decided to experiment with running Ubuntu on my EeePC. Out of the box, the Linux version of the Eee puts a simplified UI (called Easy Mode) on top of a stripped-down version of the Xandros distro. It also employs the unionfs file system …
I love the Clippy cameos, and my favorite part is the last line. 😉
It seems like just yesterday (ok, last decade!) when I got my first digital video camera and then purchased a Firewire card for my PC so I could download and edit my home movies. Since then I’ve owned a multitude of laptops and PCs with IEE 1394 built in. It was aimed primarily for high-speed …
I’ve been playing around with Microsoft’s free Virtual PC 2007 product at work lately in an attempt to keep an old Visual FoxPro 3.0 application running on newer hardware. This particular application refuses to run on any machine with more than 256mb of physical RAM. That’s right, 256 megabytes. Needless to say this is not …
Tonight I did another in-place upgrade on my server, this time from Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) to 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex). Like last time, I did the upgrade through PuTTY over an SSH connection and it was flawless. I just had to clean up a few configuration files and put back my installation of Gallery 2.3 …
I’ve complained about my Vista woes here before since I upgraded from XP back in April. Well, apparently the solution to my Vista problems was just to buy a new PC. Thanks to a 20% off coupon found through my slickdeals.net RSS feed, I purchased a “built-for-new” (i.e., not refurbished) Dell Inspiron 530 desktop from …