Dec
18
via Jalopnik:
Tyler Shipman loves Pontiac Fieros so much he posed for his senior picture with one he bought for $150. Weeks later he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He’d need a miracle to finish his project car.
And boy, did that miracle show up in a big way. Watch the video above for the story.
Dec
16
This is huge for anyone who owns an Apple product and has ever dealt with having to fix, say, a keyboard that your cat puked on (ask me how I know this…): iFixit has released it’s fixit guides for iPhones, iPods, Macbooks, and Mac desktops under a Creative Commons license. For the average person, this basically means that you can access their online guides for free.
via Lifehacker:
We’ve always been impressed with the detailed, step-by-step guides iFixit has posted for MacBooks, iPods, and other devices. Now the site’s put every bit of its content, and future posts, under a Creative Commons license, one that allows for free, non-commercial distribution and modification, with attribution. That doesn’t mean you can go selling your own knocked-off repair guides, but you can rest assured that iFixit will get better international translations, and that its sometimes irreplaceable repair guides will stick around in one form or another for some time.
Nov
27
…or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Overview.
I’ll freely admit that I suck with money: I spend it if I’ve got it, I can’t keep track of it very well, and budgeting is… well… one of those things I’ve never learned. For the last 10 years or so I’ve been an avid Quicken user, using it much like a high-powered check register: I’d enter every single transaction, and as those cleared the bank I would reconcile them in Quicken. With the advent and proliferation of debit cards and my preference to use cash less and less, the amount of transactions I was entering and reconciling was in the thousands per year. That’s a lot of work, and for very little gain it turns out. Read more »
Oct
16
Oftentimes I look at my iPhone and wonder why I’m not enjoying it more like all those people on the commercials who link up with 27 of their closest friends in downtown San Francisco for some flashmob Titterific event… or something.
And then I find an app like RedLaser. So incredibly worth the $2 they’re charging for it. In short, point your iPhone at a bar code and it almost instantly will give you price comparisons across Amazon.com and Google Product Search. I started scanning everything in my house. It told me we could replace Anna’s BlackBerry for $249, told me where to purchase Ramen by the case, and even gave me price comparisons for a box of Winchester .308 FMJ. ($14.99? Are you kidding me?) It would seem that if something’s got a UPC barcode, this app will look it up for you. Simply awesome.
Oct
5
Jul
28
In a Hyundai. We seem to have come a long way from the Excel, folks.
via Jalopnik
Feb
20
To quote Gizmodo today:
Sure, you can get a fuel-efficient hybrid car, but it’ll cost tens of thousands of dollars. That’s too much for the Top Gear crew, who’ve set out to build a 70MPG car for only $7,000.
They’re doing this by buying a 28-year-old Volkswagen Rabbit, driving it up to CWS Tuning in Saskatchewan, replacing the engine with a “modern, computer-controlled, turbocharged VW TDI engine” and then driving it down to UCLA where aerodynamics professor John McNulty will help, as they say “make the car more slippery.”
And for reference, a 2009 Toyota Prius achieves 48MPG and costs $22,720, while a 2009 Honda Civic Hybrid achieves 40MPG and costs $24,320. This thing will get 70MPG for $7,000.
It’s a downright awesome project, one that they’ll be covering step by step online via video and images. And they’re looking to get the internet to name it for them, so look for the Ballsmobile to hitting the road in the near future. We can’t wait.
Jan
27
EDIT: as of 3/1/2009, my free license for esXpress expired, and unfortunately – although the GUI interface still lists an available option as “FREE” as far as licensing goes – esXpress will not work in free mode after your trial license expires. They really need to update their GUI to reflect this and not just blame this on “There was an old document on the web site that had incorrect information, that has now been corrected.” Disappointing to say the least. With that said…
I run a decent-sized, fairly simple ESX environment as I’ve mentioned before – so simple, in fact, that the powers that be feel I’m fine admin’ing at all alone.
Something I’d been struggling with for a while was an easy, straightforward way to back up all the VMs that we have in place – and I had originally sought to rely on Vizioncore’s vRanger Pro. However, I’ve been using that product for a few weeks in evaluation and have come away disappointed – when trying to run multiple backups with the product installed on my VirtualCenter server, I ran into too many (seemingly) .NET-related errors to be reliable. Instead, I set up a second Windows machine dedicated to VM backups – a more expensive option, even considering Vizioncore’s relatively low price point.
Well, enter TechTarget’s Best Virtualization Products of 2008 in which they rate PHD Technologies’ esXpress, v3.1 at the top of the bunch – so I tried it out. And boy, color me impressed.
Jan
23
I’ve got an Xbox 360, mostly to become a millionaire in Forza Motorsport 2. Well, a little way’s back, the add-on hard drive failed with an E67 error indicating a bad external hard drive. So, there the Xbox sat, unused. What’s the point when you can’t save that Porsche 911 GT3 you just won?
And so I managed to stumble across this article on PCWorld, and in a certain moment of serindipity happened across a Western Digital Scorpio hard drive. Well, I tell you: once I downloaded HDDHackr and booted my machine to DOS off a USB stick, I was all set – 107gig usable hard drive space.
Now to earn all those Porsches, BMWs, Mercs, and Lotuses back…
Jan
20
I don’t try to get too political here, but I’ve got to mark the date with a followup to a post made a couple of months ago.
I’m happy, and content, and excited, and proud. Well done, President Obama.
- mike