Sumpmrother.com

Louis XIV may have broken up and gone separate ways for the time being, but all is not lost.  Singer/guitarist Brian Karscig has started a new band, called The Nervous Wreckords.  Not ironically, the song I have playing right now, Similar But Not the Same, is a great description of the sound compared to Louis XIV.  In other words, it has the overall nuance of classic rock, with an updated sound.  It’s not quite Rolling Stones meets Led Zeppelin meets Pink Floyd meets The Beatles, like Louis XIV had going on, but it’s good stuff nonetheless.

Their first album is called Valuminium, and you can pick up the MP3 download version on Amazon right now for less than six bucks.

I use Drop.io quite a lot for sharing files with family and friends that live across the country.  It’s not something I use every day, but when I need it, it’s great to know I can count on it.

Unfortunately, Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook crew have announced that they’ve bought Drop.io, and they’re going to shut down its services, and delete all data, in the middle of December.

Link:  http://mashable.com/2010/10/29/facebook-acquires-drop-io/

Not only am I, and countless others pissed to hear this news, but it’s just another reminder that, as web service users, we can never count 100% on any of the up-and-coming cloud services that are so common these days.

I’ve seen Back to the Future about a hundred times, and I never once noticed this.  Props to whoever figured it out.

Derek lays down his inspirational thoughts as to why drugs should be legle… er, legal.  Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em, Derek; it just makes it that much easier for the rest of us to stay ahead of the game.

Via Lamebook.com

Speeding tickets are, more or less, total crap.  Most of us have gotten one at some point or another, by a cop trying to meet department quotas.  Well, one guy–a computer network designer–in Bluff City, TN, jumped on a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to stick it right back to The Man after getting hit with a $90 speeding ticket from a traffic camera.

Sometime after getting the ticket, the guy noticed the police department’s website URL had expired, so he did what any wronged geek would do… he bought the rights to it.  It turns out the cop who was in charge of the website was on leave at the time, and all the other cops were too busy eating donuts or busting people for arbitrary crimes, to notice.

Under new ownership, the site has obviously changed somewhat:  http://www.bluffcitypd.com/

Congrats to Brian McCrary, the happy new owner.  And to the police department who lost their URL, take note:  treat citizens as your bosses, serve them, and protect your city from real criminals, and maybe people won’t be so quick to seek vengeance on you later.  Traffic cameras be damned.

Autoblog via The Associated Press

Hi.

Stuff is on the way, give me time.

Edit:  after a couple failed attempts, I finally got my old site imported to this one.  WordPress really needs to work on their export/import function, but at least it finally worked.

For those who haven’t heard, Microsoft has been doing a promotion to get the word out about Windows 7, the replacement for Vista.  Along with HouseParty.com, they’re giving out promotional packs for individuals to host Windows 7-themed parties, for getting together groups of people to install the new OS.  I entered, got accepted as a host, and finally received my pack today.  Here’s the bulk of what I received:

The box came from UPS just as you see here:

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A few months ago, Microsoft introduced free online file storage through their Windows Live service, called Skydrive.  In December 2008, they upgraded it from 5GB to 25GB of storage (read more here), with reports that they’ll give you even more space once you hit the 25GB limit.

Considering how much other services are charging for online storage space, Microsoft definitely gave us something great with all this free storage.  In fact, you can even use it to share photos with friends and family (or anyone, for that matter), if you’re not a Flickr user, or just have more photos to store and share than Flickr’s free account will allow.  However, as is usual with everything Microsoft does, there is a downside…

As you can see from the picture above, you’re allowed to upload exactly 5 files at a time.  Considering many of us have digital photos–not including all our other files–in the thousands, this creates a bit of a problem.  A way around uploading 5 photos at a time would be to put multiple photos in a single zip file, and then upload 5 zip files at a time.  However, as you can also see in the above photo, no file can exceed 50MB.  Assuming each photo averages about 5MB, you’re still looking at only uploading around 50 photos at a time… and they’ll all be inside zip files, which makes sharing them and viewing them more of a hassle.

As you can probably tell, this makes using Skydrive just about useless.  It’s on par with winning the lottery, and being told you can only purchase 5 items at a time, with a max $50 limit per item.  Thanks, Microsoft, you almost got it right, once again.

Gladinet

Fortunately, this is where Gladinet comes to the rescue.  It’s a free utility that creates what is basically a non-existent drive on your computer–inside your My Computer folder–which they label the Z: drive.  I call it non-existent because the drive is only available while Gladinet is running, and inside it, you’re not viewing files that are saved on your hard drive, but files saved to Skydrive.

After you install Gladinet, you’ll see a new folder inside My Computer, under Network Drives.  When you open this folder, you’ll see all the folders that are online in your Skydrive account.  The interface lets you easily browse through the folders to get to files, but even better, it lets you upload files simply by dragging and dropping as many as you like over to the Skydrive folder of your choice (i.e. Pictures, Documents, Public, etc…).

It will take some time, depending on the number of files you transfer and your upload speeds, for the process to complete, but just give it time to work.  I’ve found that it’s best to do this before bed, because it totally bogs down my internet bandwidth (the same thing happens anytime I upload to any online service).

If you’re interested in keeping track of upload progress, you can right-click on the Gladinet icon down by your system clock, and click on ‘Task Manager’…

A new window will pop up showing total tasks, as well as progress for each file.  As you’ll see, only 5 tasks at a time will run–the same number as you’re allowed via the Skydrive Uploader like I mentioned above–but it’ll all be automated, so once each task (file upload) finishes, new ones will begin.

All you have to do now is sit back (or go to bed) and wait, while Gladinet takes care of uploading your files for you.  When it’s finished, all your files can be accessed wither through the Z: drive on your computer, or via your Windows Live account.

Links:

Windows Live Skydrive:  http://skydrive.live.com
Gladinet:  http://www.gladinet.com/

Update:  I just discovered that you can right-click an image on a web page, go to My Computer, browse to the whichever folder on the Z: drive that you’d like, and save the image directly to Skydrive.

This week at CES, a new memory card specification was announced.  Called SD eXtended Capacity, or SDXC, it takes even the awesome 32GB (and anticipated 64GB) SDHC beyond what most thought would ever be possible in a form factor that small… all the way to 2-terabytes!!

This got me thinking.  Although it’ll start out at a comparatively measly 64GB, it has so far been the practice that the microSD standard holds about half the memory capacity of SD.  They haven’t yet announced a microSDXC spec, but assuming they eventually do, does that mean we can look forward to storing an entire terabyte of data on a card smaller than the average human thumbnail???

I guess we’ll know in a couple years, but for now, keep your fingers crossed.

So, I got my new Centro and an unlimited data plan, which means I’m sitting at my computer, but surfing the web on my phone’s 2.5" screen.  Makes a lot of sense, I know.  Eventually, I made my way to my blog, and suddenly remembered that it’s extremely unfriendly to the bandwidth-challenged out there.  I ended up getting errors from the Centro’s browser because it took too long to render the page.  That’s when I started looking for a WordPress plugin that would render an alternate layout for mobile devices.

I found some real crap out there, but one that worked absolutely great is made by Alex King (http://alexking.org).  My pages download extremely quickly to my Centro, and it also displays photos that I import via my Flickr-tag plugin (which another mobile plug did not).

If you have a WordPress website, I wouldn’t hesitate for a minute installing this plugin.  Considering how much time people spend surfing the web on mobile devices, you don’t want them avoiding you site simply because they can’t get it to load.

I installed a sweet GUI for my Palm Centro, called TouchLauncher.  It’s basically a skin that makes your Palm device look a whole lot better than OEM, and allows some convenient reorganizing, as well.  Originally, I’d been using the developer’s icon set (see here), but I got bored and decided to make some icons of my own.

In the screenshot below, which I took with the freeware application, Snap, you can see just a few of the 38 icons I made, namely the Firefox icon for the Blazer browser, and the camcorder, Facebook, and Twitter icons.  The rest you see are from the developer and some other guys.  Through TouchLauncher, I was able to set the Facebook icon to launch the Facebook app that Sprint included on the phone; the Twitter icon launches the browser and goes straight to Twitter Mobile.

If you want the icon set, I uploaded it here:  http://drop.io/tlauncher  There’s also a screen capture in the .RAR file so you know which icon is which.  If you don’t already use TouchLauncher, I’d suggest you get a copy and play with it.  At less than $7, it’s some of the best money you’ll put into apps for your Palm.

So there I was, just sitting at my PC, listening to my iRiver mp3 player and talking on my Motorola Razr, and in runs Steve Jobs.  "How’d you get in my house?" I yelled, but he just kept jumping up and down, yelling all sorts of nonsense.  I lept out of my chair to tackle the deranged man, only to be slapped by the iPhone 2.0 and some other crap he was peddling.

"NO!!!," I screamed.  "I need easy-to-use devices with great battery life that don’t force me to install third-party apps and convert to proprietary file systems!"  He had no answer.  He simply knocked over my monitor and left.

Hide your children, protect your women.  A crazy man is on the loose…

Article from: 

WITH understandable reluctance, Prime Minister John Howard recently donned the political hair-shirt of a carbon trading system.

On the same day, NASA chief Michael Griffin commented in a US radio interview that "I am not sure that it is fair to say that (global warming) is a problem that we must wrestle with".

NASA is an agency that knows a thing or two about climate change. As Griffin added: "We study global climate change, that is in our authorisation, we think we do it rather well.  "I’m proud of that, but NASA is not an agency chartered to, quote, battle climate change."

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The UPS man just dropped these off at my door.  Gee, I wonder what I’ll have to do with them…

My surround sound cabinets are finally 100% d-o-n-e!!  It’s been a long project and I’m glad to say it’s finally complete.  To take a look at the entire project and see lots of pictures, click here:  http://one9.us/blog/projects/midgets/.

Google is still making the news with their controversial Street View feature on Google Maps.  For more on the story, see the links below.  And here’s more proof that no one is safe!

http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/news/index.cfm?newsid=9576

http://thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/scenes-through-the-eye-of-google/

http://mashable.com/2007/05/31/top-15-google-street-view-sightings/