Category: Geek Alert!

Thanks to my friend, Jon, I have discovered Lifehacker. I so love this site. Since discovering it, I have started using:

• Rocketdock and Launchy, two kick ass programs that increase the efficiency of using my computer.

I also discovered

• IZarc, a great free archive program for dealing with .zip, .rar and other archive types
• Gaim, a free multi platform IM program (like Trillian, except it’s open source and free but I haven’t had a chance to actually try it out yet) and
• Paint.net which is a great free alternative for anyone who can’t afford Photoshop (GIMP is another free alternative)
• Free Download Manager and DownThemAll, 2 free download manager/accelerator programs which speed up your downloads and allow you to resume downloads if they’re stopped for any reason (by your own hand or by a crash/restart, etc). I prefer FDM, but DTA is good if you often find yourself wanting to mass download all the links on a page (such as downloading all images on a page or all mp3s on a page)
• Firebug which allows you to see the HTML and CSS of any page you’re viewing and let’s you make changes to the code right there in your browser and see the changed immediately (obviously it doesn’t actually change the code on the server but just temporarily in your browser).

I was already using ExplorerXP and several other recommended plugins and programs.
In general I’ve found Lifehacker’s opinions and suggestions indispensable.

If you’ve been wanting to turn your home PC into a recording studio, but don’t have hundreds or thousands of dollars to spend on expensive program,s I highly suggest checking out Reaper. This program is currently in development and completely free. Its capabilities are absolutely amazing and can very much give extremely expensive commercial programs a run for their money. In fact in some ways, and depending on your personal needs, it may be better than some of the big fish. Don’t be fooled by its plain appearance. It may look a bit primitive, but really that’s a good thing. You’re not wasting precious CPU cycles on shiny pretty graphics and bells and whistles. Instead all your computer power can go into important things like processing audio. While the UI may not be the sleekest looking thing, it’s certainly functional and easily does everything you need to do.
Though it is technically “in development”, there are extremely frequent updates, and it is a solid program, not some buggy beta. With this one free program, you can have more recording power in your PC than The Beatles had during their entire career. Talent, however, is not included.

So today I found Google’s new Google Calendar. So far, I’m impressed. As of yet, Google Groups has not been able to steal me from Yahoo groups, as Google doesn’t have nearly as many built in functions (though I’m sure it will only keep improving), but so far, the calendar has impressed me. It is one step closer to converting me form Yahoo.
You can have several different calendars in one such as personal, work related, etc. Then you can view all your entries at once or just view the ones you want. you can invite friends to events on your calendar, and share calendars with friends, co-workers or whoever. I’ve only just started playing with it, but thus far, I likey.

I know that probably no one who normally reads my blog has any interest in these posts, but I like to document certain things for my own sake, and the sake of anyone Googling for info.
When we moved into the condo, a new problem presented itself. The TiVo, which needs to make a daily call to update its information, had no phone jacks anywhere near it. Not even any that were in a location that could have been used with our 50′ phone cable which was used in the apartment to run across one doorway and around the edge of the room to the phone jack. It would have had to run across our main entryway and kitchen doorway into the kitchen where the nearest jack was. No way. It was time for the great TiVo Upgrade, part two.
I had always intended to this upgrade at some point, but could never be bothered to unhook the TiVo and take it apart, buy the parts I needed, etc., since everything was fine as it was in the old place. Since I knew we needed to do it now, I just left the TiVo unhooked after the move. The first upgrade I had done was adding a second hard drive to increase its capacity to 40 hours of recording at the best quality setting. I love TiVo but I think their naming conventions are deceptive. A “30-hour TiVo” is only 30 hours at the crappiest quality setting, which was unbearable to me. At best quality, it was more like a 6 hour TiVo.
For round 2, I decided to install a CacheCard. I had also other options, but this seemed to be the best. I could put a 512 MB stick of RAM on the card to cache the TiVo’s database, thus speeding up the access to menus and certain operations, plus the card also had an ethernet connection on it. Since there are also no ethernet jacks in the living room, I also bought a Linksys wireless bridge to connect to the TiVo and give it access to our wireless network to make its daily “call”. I followed all the instructions for backing up my TiVo and installing the CacheCard and drivers, and that part all went flawlessly. I had various fiascoes in the wireless bridge department, but that’s another story not worth the telling. Eventually I got it all working, and now my TiVo makes its “call” via wireless networking, which has the added advantage of being a LOT faster than the phone call, too.
I figured as long as I was tweaking, I might as well also install Tivoweb Plus. Now I can also access my TiVo via the web to do anything I can do on the TiVo itself, plus far more. Mine is an old school Series 1 TiVo (the modern ones are Series 2 at the time of this writing), and sadly a lot of the cool new features (such as TiVo’s own multimedia network functions) will never be available on Series 1 units, but since I’ve done all this upgrading, and since I bought the lifetime subscription (which has long since paid for itself) I’ll be sticking with unit. To be honest it does everything I need it to do, and while I love bells and whistles, I certainly don’t feel like I’m really missing out.

Once again it is time to spread my geeky joy and evangelize!
I recently started using the Logitech G15 keyboard at work. Awesome. First off, I love the feel of the keys. They are just a pleasure to press. A lot of people might dismiss this keyboard because one of the big features is the LCD screen on it, which in my opinion, is just the icing on the cake. The LCD is cool, but it’s not the biggest selling point to me. It normally displays time and date, and can also display CPU and RAM usage if you like. For games that build in support for it, it can also show game relevant information like your characters health, or a mission objective.
Aside from the feel, the coolest thing to me were the “G” keys. 18 keys in 3 groups of 6 on the left side of the keyboard Which can be totally customized to do just about anything you want. you can set them up to open your favorite programs, or even execute macros, which can be very helpful in games or other programs to easily execute pretty much anything that can be done with keystrokes. For example you could program the keys to open various game menus or execute certain powers. Maybe you normally have to type “//godmode on” to enable god mode, but now you could just set up a macro so that if you hit the G1 key it automatically does that. One key press and god mode is on!
While it is touted as a gaming keyboard, these functions could easily be as useful in any of your everyday programs. If 18 keys isn’t enough, there’s actually three different sets of 18 which are selectable with the M1-M3 keys above them for a total of 54. As if that weren’t enough you can also set up profiles which you can switch manually or which will load up automatically with a certain program. For example I have a “City of Heroes” profile which automatically loads up when I’m playing that game and has all the keys and macros I want within that game, but if I switch back to my email program then it either uses the profile for that program or else the default profile if I don’t have a program specific profile.
The keys are all lit from underneath with a blue glow, and it has the usual media dedicated buttons such as play/pause, stop, next/previous track and a volume wheel. Even though there is no ergonomic version of this yet, I will be ditching my ergonomic keyboard at home in favor of this one. It is far too cool. Now that I use it at work, I could never go back.

As I’ve made several posts lately expressing my joy for all things Google, I’ve made passing and joking comments about the “Cult of Google” and Google taking over the world and such.
Per haps I was closer to the truth than I knew!
How did I find this article? Through the news links on my Google home page.

I quit using the Google Toolbar when I switched to Firefox since it had a little search box in the browser. After checking out the most recent version, which is now compatible with the Firefox 1.5 Beta that I’m running, I once again have added the Google Toolbar to my browser. In addition to being able to do any kind of Google search (web page, images, etc.) it has built in spell checking for any web forms such as posting a message or creating a blog entry, it has an auto-fill function which can automatically fill in personal info for you so you don’t have to type your name and address every time, and some other pretty nifty features. Head over to the link above and check it out for yourself!

As I’m sure you all know by now, when I find some cool thing I feel the need to share it. I already knew about Google news and how you could totally customize it to show what you wanted, but today I found the customized Google home page. Just go to Google and click on “personalize this page” then go to town. It’s now my home page and every new tab I open loads it up showing me the news of my choice, miscellaneous daily tidbits, movie times, weather, my Gmail inbox and more. Geeky joy!