Best Home Theater Accessory Ever June 27, 2009
Posted by weare1 in gadgets, geek.Tags: home theater, remote
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You must get this exact version of Harmony’s fantastic universal remote control, not the fancier ones, and not the cheaper ones although you’ll be tempted. This ain’t cheap, but it has a feature called the RF extender, and what this little black box does receive the command from your remote via radio frequencies instead of infra-red (light) and then send that command to your components via infra-red which is what most components use. RF is way better then infra-red because it has longer range and does not require a line of sight, so you don’t have to “aim” your remote. Also, because the RF extender comes with IR emitters, you can put all of your components in a cabinet out of sight yet still have full remote control. Fantastic. Better still is the easy to use software (mac and PC) to set up the remote with all of your devices and even fine-tune it. The remote itself has a rechargeable battery, so there’s no concerns about running out of juice. The remote even plays a cute little slide show on its little LCD when it goes back in it’s cradle. The remote itself has an small screen on it, is fully customizable and works by activities rather then devices, what this means is that it offers things like “watch TV” or “listen to CDs”, not “CD->play”, it’s a subtle but significant difference. When in an activity the screen offers relevant choices. It took a few tries to get everything working perfectly, but each tweek made it a little bit better. I’m overjoyed with this device, it’s made my life better.
A Better Internet Experience October 25, 2007
Posted by weare1 in Internet, geek.Tags: web surfing browsing firefox explorer internet organize
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After talking with some friends about the way they browse the internet, I thought I’d share my workflow with you all to help us surf better and faster.
1) get Firefox (any platform)
2) add extensions to Firefox
A) Adblock+, I haven’t seen a web advertisement in two years
B) NoScript, changes default javascript to off, you have to give specific permission to run javascript on websites. Only running javascript you trust has two benefits, first, it’s a huge security improvement, and second, your browsing will be a lot faster.
3) setup your bookmark toolbar to be hierarchical folders.
Firefox’s Bookmark toolbar lets you put often used bookmarks right in your browser bar. What I do is to create large catagories here, like SF, ( I always use abbreviations to preserve screen real estate) Mac, Gadgets, Photo, ect. then make folders for those categories in the bookmark toolbar, like this:
Next always use RSS feeds instead of bookmarks, simply put the subscribed RSS feeds under your new categorized folders. For example put the RSS feed for SFGate under SF. After you’ve got a few RSS feeds under a category you can move your mouse down the column and read all the stories under SF quickly and easily like this:
You can also further organize by using folders within folders, for example, I break down my blog column by people blogs, political blogs, and consumer blogs, use whatever works for you, but keep the titles short to maximize your screen real estate.
I also recommend you regularly use Firefox’s bookmark manager to reorder your feeds regularly, put the best ones at the top. By doing this over time, you can rip through the day’s most important stories quickly, and not miss anything important.
I hope this insight into my web workflow helps you, and I welcome your recommendations for improvement.
The Annoy-a-tron November 28, 2006
Posted by weare1 in comedy, gadgets, geek.add a comment
File under extremely devious:
AtomFilms – Animator vs. Animation II November 19, 2006
Posted by weare1 in Internet, film, geek, software.add a comment
JungleDisk – Reliable online storage powered by Amazon S3™ October 4, 2006
Posted by weare1 in Internet, OS X, frugality, gadgets, geek, software.2 comments
Hard disks fail. It’s only a matter of time. Backups are a pain in the ass. Finally I’ve found a great solution for this common computing problem. JungleDisk is a cross-platform application to backup your data off-site on Amazon’s S3 storage server cloud. This thing is fantastic, and the economics of the S3 backup service are good. Having your data off-site is essential because any catastrophe could take out your original data as well as your on-site backups. Even RAID is not a good solution because of the locality of the data.
While JungleDisk isn’t perfect, it’s a great start. It has built-in encryption to protect your data, you can backup and access your data as a drive letter disk. This tool is going to help me sleep better at night, and that’s a good thing. I heartily recommend this application and service.
