October 2008 Entries
I've decided to go get into the netbook craze. I've been very excited about them ever since the Eee PC came out. Unfortunately the super-small SSD drives have been a deterrent as have the micro-small screens on the first generation. It's got to be a touch balancing act to create a small notebook that isn't too small to be useful. The second and third generation netbooks are getting better with this, though some have just gone crazy with price point and features. I'm getting an Acer One with 1.5GB RAM and 120GB hard drive. I don't need that big of...
You are bidding on an excellent condition Gateway tablet/convertible laptop running Windows XP Tablet Edition SP3. This is a great laptop that is also a powerful tablet. That means you can flip the screen around and even close the laptop with the screen facing up! The included stylus lets you enter text using your own handwriting or draw pictures or diagrams naturally. Windows XP Tablet Edition and Windows Vista include full support for handwriting recognition and interaction using the stylus. Two gigabytes of RAM give you plenty of space for even the most demanding tasks. Eighty gigabytes of hard drive...
Just a stream of new posts from me! This is a pretty quick one though. I wanted to add my Google Analytics tracking code back to the site without modifying templates as I've had to in the past. Too annoying. I saw somewhere that you could also modify the DTP.aspx page in the root, but I discovered an even easier way. Perhaps this was before 2.0, but regardless I just noticed it tonight. It turns out that in the Admin tool, under Options, then Configure, there's a handy field called: Sitewide Tracking code. Just fill in the <script> block and...
I bought a Shuttle KPC from Newegg for my Windows Home Server and I couldn't be happier with it. My only complaint was no case fan and not very many ports on the power supply. Until I could get a hold of a power splitter I decided to just plug in a spare power supply (why do I have so many?!) so I could install a fan. Yeah, it's a waste of power using a second power supply, but only temporary! The problem is that modern power supplies don't turn on when you switch them on. It's up to the...
So today we went to our two boys' soccer games. We went home with a new dog. Of course! Isn't that what happens to everyone? Well, Iowa was playing Wisconsin so there was a lot of game traffic so we took a different route home. That took us by the pet store. Not much into pets, I walked across the parking lot to a Panera for coffee. In the time it took me to get my coffee and walk around a bit my family had fallen in love! My wife, Karen, has been looking into the Japanese Shiba Inu breed...
In case you missed this, Microsoft recently released the Image Composite Editor (also known as ICE). This is a very cool app for doing panoramic pictures. I love Autostitch, but you need to reset settings each time, and you can only choose JPEG output (though 100% quality is darn good). ICE lets you output in JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PNG, HD Photo, and even the interactive Silverlight Deep Zoom format. It defaults to 100% scaling (Autostitch defaults to 25% or something like that), and it even auto-crops for nice clean borders. Not only that, but it’s fast, and the user interface...
Arrgghh!! Well that was an ordeal! I took down the site last night to upgrade to Subtext 2.0. I noticed it came out a few months ago and somehow I missed it. Upgrading is always painful for me since I’m on Go Daddy hosting. This means that I always have two things that necessitate a less than painless upgrade. You can’t set the trust level. Go Daddy sets it at machine level and you can’t override it. All SQL scripts require extensive manual rework since they rely on the [INFORMATION_SCHEMA].[TABLES] object to...
So I've finally decided to inventory much of my old "vintage" computer stuff. I have old Atari- and Commodore-related items and I'd really like to find a good home for them. I considered throwing them away, but I know that there are plenty of people still collecting them and surely someone out there will thank me! I'm not looking to make money on this. Shipping money plus a dollar or two toward my site upkeep is all that I ask. You can pay via Paypal if interested and I'll try my best to get it out the next day. Just...