Economy Size Geek

Ok I’ve spent a lot of time with the Nexus One. I did put my SIM card back in my iPhone once, but that was part of a configuration issue not because I was switching back.

The best discovery so far has been Slide Screen. This app takes over your home screen and condenses so much information into that single screen I’m still amazed. It manages to show my missed calls, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, and stocks. The only downside is some extra button pushes to get to my apps, but it is a small price to pay.

I had a real problem pairing my phone with my Nissan Cube. It would say it was connected, but it refused to route sound through my handsfree system. The good news is that there is a solution. The bad news is that it was esoteric enough to make me very sad. You have to go to the Bluetooth connection and click on “Options”. I unchecked “Connect” and made sure “Phone” was checked. Why this works - no idea - but it does.

I have a personal Google account. I also have a work Google account. I was able to add both accounts to my phone. This allows me to merge all the contacts which is great. The bad news is the OS only handles adding events to my primary (personal) calendar. It just ignores the other calendar. People have advised me to share the calendar but Google Apps won’t let me share the calendar across the two domains. I was hoping it was just something I messed up in the configuration. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a work around, but hope spring eternal. The really frustrating part is that I was able to do this on my iPhone…

Update This turns out to be my own fault. On Google Apps Accounts, you have the option to forbid sharing a calendar outside of the domain. Once I turned this off, I was able to share my calendars across accounts. Plus there is now an option in the date creation to select a calendar - so I’m back in business…

1Password was my password store of choice on the iPhone. They don’t have any plans to release an Android version. That forced me to start looking for another option. I ended up settling on LastPass.com. The base product fully supports Windows, Mac and most importantly Linux. They have mobile clients for iPhone, Symbian, and Android. The base version is free , and the mobile is $12/year. Migration over was easy and so far I’ve liked it a lot better than 1Password. The best part is OTA sync of passwords. Before I always had to check in with a mac at home to keep a backup of my password database.

I was easily able to upgrade to a 16GB sd card. Once that was installed, I started encoding video for a trip. I was able to find profiles for DVDFab and Handbrake. DoubleTwist sounds really cool, but doesn’t run under Linux so I haven’t used it yet. I guess this brings up the content issue. When I had an iPhone, I bought my mp3s on Amazon and most of the movies I watched were just re-encoded from my DVR. Now that I’m on Android - I buy my mp3s on Amazon and most of the movies I watch are just re-encoded from my DVR. As you can see not much of a change for me. If you are an iTunes addict, don’t think about coming over. Apple solved this content problem a long time ago (assuming you can run iTunes).

This actually brings up one of the things that I don’t miss. In the Apple world, my iPhone was tied to a single computer. That computer handled all the downloaded of mp3s,movies, and podcasts. If I was at another computer I was pretty much out of luck unless I wanted to wipe my phone and start over. I love that I can connect my phone to any of my computers (workstation at home, at work, laptop, netbook, or otherwise).

I ended up standardizing on My Pod as my podcasting tool of choice. It can be a little clunky but it has a freaking lot of features. I miss the iTunes podcast directory, but I love that I can download new podcasts directly to my phone - over wifi or cell - and that it doesn’t wipe out my music collection (which has happened a couple of times on my iPhone). That basically means I get more podcasts on the go - which works out a lot better since the time I really need my podcasts is on the road traveling.

I still miss the games from my iPhone - mainly Puzzle Quest and Plants vs Zombies. I hold out hope that the games will catch up.

Even after two weeks, I’m still impressed how fast the phone is. I’ve also been very surprised with reception. I’ve had a lot of failed calls on my iPhone. I assumed that trend would continue on my Nexus One since it is on the same network. So far, no failed calls. Nice change.

Updates - the phone tells you there are updates for the apps - great. There is no update all :( You have to update each application individually….annoying.

With the iPhone it is always the little things that really remind you how awesome it is. In this case, it was leaving behind Visual Voicemail. It turns out you can get it back if you forward your phone to Google Voice (which I have an account for). Then things work out well. The snag in that process was, I left voicemail on AT&T. When I swtiched everything on the phone over to Google Voice I could no longer retrieve the voicemail from the old box. I just kept getting a notification to check my voicemail. This is why I had to put the sim back in the old iPhone, clear out the voice mail and switch back. It now works great - even if it was a little confusing.

Two last things on the broader topic - First - iPod integration = iPhone integration. Now that I’ve swtiched over I run into a lot more hassles. For example, my Cube doesn’t offer a way to get sound out of my phone into the stereo other than the headphone jack. That means I can’t pause or change tracks from the control system anymore. I tried to mount my phone in my wife’s Range Rover and just got a “Device Error”. I was just at a hotel and it had an alarm clock with an iPod dock. Now that’s pretty much useless to me. This is one of those things that isn’t a deal breaker but is annoying enough to remind me I’m on a lesser platform…

Cory Doctorow and the Apple Hating

There has been a lot of talk from the tech side (iPad Clash) about the iPad. This is a spill over from the Android vs iPhone OS debate. I hear what Cory is saying about openess and the walled garden nature of Apple’s products. I dont’t think that is an unfair criticism. The real issue is that most people just don’t care. My wife is an avid user of Apple products. She loves them. She likes how they look and feel. She likes how easy it is to do stuff. She likes the way they just seem to know what she wants to do. The numbers don’t lie - there are a lot of people out there who feel that exact same way. I don’t see a conspiracy in that. People want what they want. Some part of me wishes that I was in that group. Instead, I know how much time and money Apple has spent polishing their products. That’s why it annoys me to no end when it won’t do what I want it to do (like allow me to load a movie on from another computer or show my calendar on the lock screen). When I use Linux or Android and things aren’t perfect - it doesn’t bug me. They are plugging away at things and they will get better. The deficiencies are rarely the result of someone making a conscious decision to block me from doing something. Both of the things I mentioned above were decided by Apple for business reasons. That is what sticks in my craw. Maybe it is an idealistic view of technology, but that’s how I am. I know for a fact that most people aren’t like that. In some ways, that worries me because I don’t have a problem with people choosing Apple as long as I get a more open option. The fewer people like me, the less viable that other option is. I’ve seen this fight before. The Internet was the great leveler that has allowed me to function as a full member even though I’m using a tool that is by many standards still a fringe choice (desktop Linux). I hope that as Google and Apple fight over the software driven future of the mobile computing platform that I get to continue to go my own path. (Ironically, I used a Mac for a long time when it was a doomed platform - so I learned a lot about how to survive as an outsider to the Microsoft kingdom. Guess that training continues to be useful). I suppose the real test will come when my wife’s iPad shows up and I see if it “changes everything” for me.

So I’ll leave my review at this - if you love computers then the Android platform is great. It can be what you want it to be in a lot of interesting ways. If you are on a provider that doesn’t offer the iPhone - it is great. It is part of the phone as actual software delivery system revolution that Apple pioneered. Otherwise, I have a hard time faulting you for choosing the iPhone. It’s slick, powerful, and everywhere.

Update:As a bonus, Apple will announce iPhone OS 4.0 in 3 days. Guess that will give me plenty of time to get over my android and get back with the faithful…..

I’ve been hoping for sometime that an Android phone would come to AT&T (since I’m still under contract). I’ve been using an iPhone since 2008 (I’ve got a 3G - and I skipped the update to 3GS figuring I might upgrade this summer).

I’ve been using the Nexus One for about a day. I figure I’ll document my very first day, and then if I stay organized I’ll update down the road with an overview of what happens as I get a little more comfortable with the platform.

The first thing that really hit me was how much the iPhone has shaped how I think things should work. That doesn’t mean they got everything right, but it was amazing how many times I tried to do something the way I would on the iPhone.

Just some simple background to level set. I run Linux most of the time. I boot Windows to play games, edit video, and sync iTunes (once in a great while - several times triggered by the iPhone losing its mind because made the mistake of downloading podcasts directly to the iPhone - rant for another day). The iPhone is really neat. The apps are great. The ecosystem drives me nuts. I am constantly reminded that I’m not the target customer for iPhone. I’m hoping that Android is different on this front.

My first task was getting my contacts setup. Turned out it was pretty easy to do. I just logged into my Google account and started typing in contacts. As I added them on the site, they just showed up on my phone - nice!

I was pretty confused by the app layout. The apps seems to be randomly sprinkled across the screen. When I found the grid button I found a bunch of apps that weren’t on any screen. A little confusing at first, but it was a useful discovery. Especially since all the apps I downloaded end up in this app limbo.

My first task was just to replicate the apps I have on my iPhone onto the Android. I was able to find FourSquare, Evernote, Seesmic (for twitter), Facebook, Phoneflic (netflix queue), AroundMe, LinkedIn (beta), USAA, and TED. I found a couple of apps for video, podcasting, and stocks. Some apps were unavailable - 1Password, PuzzleQuest, Plants vs Zombies, Southwest, Mint.com, and Godaddy. That was the list of apps I really wanted. I guess this is a side effect of have 40,000 apps compared to 120,000 on iPhone. Plus the Android platform is still working on traction. Not the end of the world.

I haven’t gotten to usic or video today - I had work to do.

Things I Like

Wicked fast - everything about it seems really fast. I didn’t get to use the 3GS but this is way better than my 3G experience.

Micro USB charging cable - just like my kindle. Yea for standards!
MicroSD card for memory. It shipped with a 4GB - I bought a 16GB for $40. They have announced 32GB cards (starting at $200 but that will drop). Meaning you get to expand capacity without throwing your phone out - I’m all for less ewaste.

I like the combination of a home grid that lets you see all your apps alphabetically. That is seriously handy (since I sometimes misplace apps on my iPhone). The page layout is a little confusing since they just sprinkled apps around instead of organizing them.

The text message app doesn’t just correct you, it also shows you several options so you can just pick the word you are going for (reminds me of T9). This is nicer than the iPhone auto correction because you get a little more control over the correction.

Start an app - navigate to a screen - hit home. Come back to the app, and you will be exactly where you were. On the iPhone, all the apps seem to start over from scratch when you start them.

Things I Find Annoying

It is an iPhone/iPod world. My new Cube only integrates with an iPod/iPhone - no option for integrating in my phone. The Bluetooth pairing with the phone system also seems wonky - it thinks its paired but it doesn’t play over the hands free. I don’t know if this is a problem with Android or my car - either way it worked with the iPhone - and it doesn’t now… annoying.

Want to turn on the phone on to make a call or check in on FourSquare - you are probably going to press the big glowing trackball at the bottom of the phone. Keep pressing because it doesn’t do anything. THe only way to activate the phone is the power button on the top. That means you have to have to hold the phone awkwardly if you want to turn it on with one hand and the use it.

The support for Gmail/Calendaring is great. The only annoying thing is I have a personal and business Google Apps account. The phone handles the mail well, but falls down on calendaring. It refuses to sync calendars from both accounts. I can share my business calendar with my personal account, but it won’t let me create events on the shared calendar. On the iPhone I was able to add each calendar account separately so I didn’t have this problem.

SMS messages make a single tone then don’t remind you. Also they put a very tiny icon notification on the top of the screen - meaning I missed several SMS messages before I realized what was going on. Seriously annoying. Turns out you can get an app that will pop them up so you can see them. This appears to be an important part of the lesson for Android. On the iPhone - they say - “There’s an app for that”. On Android, when there is something wrong with the OS there may be an app for that. I didn’t expect so much of the system to be up for grabs in that way.

It has a trackball - I’m not sure why. I’m sure I’ll figure out - I mean it must have been expensive to put it there.

There are five little silk screens buttons along the bottom of the screen. I manage to hit one of them when I type about every 2 minutes. This dumps me out of the app - grrr. (At least it is easy to get back to where I was since they keep state)

Where does that leave me - so far it has some rough edges. That isn’t totally surprising - Apple is seriously good an polishing things to a nice shine. I figure I’ll give it some time and find some more apps. If it follows the path of most of the other open source stuff I use - it starts powerful and terrible - and gets more powerful and less terrible all the time.

In the spirit of getting back into the habit of writing for the blog, I figured I’d start with something easy. I’ve been playing a lot of Four Square lately. On the surface it is an incredibly simple game. When you visit a place (usually a business but could be a park or some other place of note), you run the Four Square application on your phone. This lets you “Check In” at that location.

In some ways, it mimics ideas from Dodgeball ( a social networking experiment that was acquired by Google and then shuttered). Namely, that you can see how else is playing where you are at, and you can get messages when your friends check in at new locations. That isn’t all that surprising since I was told several Dodgeball founders are involved.

If it stuck to its Dodgeball roots, it wouldn’t be that interesting. By turning it into a game, they’ve added an interesting element. You get points for each check in. The number of points is determined by how many times you been there before (You get the most for checking in the first time and much less after that) and the number of check ins you’ve done that day. As you check in, you can also earn badges. For example I earned a Jet Setter badge because I checked in at 5 different airports (heavy conference schedule this month).

There is one more twist on the check in process. If you check in the most at a location you become it’s mayor. That means that every player who shows up sees you on the list as the mayor of the location. If no one is the mayor when you get to a venue, you only need to check in one more time to get the title. After that, you just have to check in the most times. I’m sure there are mayor battles in larger cities. The game aspect of it makes it fun. I’ve actually been really surprised at how quickly people get into the game once they are exposed to it.

There are two things that I find really interesting about the game as a whole. The first is the location data. I’ve been pitched for investments by a number of location based startups. A real hurdle is getting all the location data. Getting a set of data is not that bad, but they cost of updates can be a real burden to a startup that doesn’t have a way to monetize quickly. Four Square solved that problem by rewarding you with more points for entering a new location. They sell it as encouraging you to “explore your city”. When I was in Chicago, I had a hard time finding locations that hadn’t already been entered by local players. I love the idea that they solved a tangible economic problem (the high price of location data) by organizing the game rules to reward players for doing something that would otherwise be a flaw (why isn’t this restaurant on the map?).

I don’t think they are in the money making phase of the project yet, but it seems like they are already experimenting with solutions beyond just sell ad words. I’ve read that some places in New York (where it started) give you special offers if you are a mayor. While I was in Chicago, I got a notice that a coffee shop near my hotel was offering a discount if you checked in there. I suppose it was their way of trying to lure me away from the burnt coffee at the Starbucks. Is this enough to fund the company, frankly I have no idea, but it will be interesting to see what else they try.

Bottom line: This is a really interesting demonstration of how a location based system can work when done right. They’re building up all this data about where people go and how often. I think it is funny that I’m willingly giving a company info that I would be in the streets protesting over if the government was doing the same thing. For the game to work, you need a smartphone with GPS. I believe you’ll see more things like this as that kind of hardware becomes more standard.

Idea to pursue: A friend of mine has Celiac’s Disease (an allergy to gluten). This is especially problematic because gluten sneaks its way into things so she has to work with the chief anywhere she goes. She has downloaded several apps for her phone to try to help her, but they are always out of date. What she needs is a Four Square like system -that lets her tag her comments as “Gluten Allergy”. I think you could probably add on other food things like vegan, vegetarian, lactose intolerant, or diabetic. That way the other people with your condition could log places that offered good stuff (that they ate without problem) and you could easily go there. There are millions of people with food allergies. They gain a benefit by having a place to store all this accumulated knowledge, and thanks to the Four Square model - you can skip paying for all of the restaurants - and rely on users to add in the updates.

Hard to believe but I started posting to this blog way back in March of 2005. I’ve covered a lot of random ground in that time. If you read my feed - you seen a heck of a lot of pictures of things I eat. I spent a lot of time satisfying my craving to write by reviewing movies. I’ve also made a lot of notes about technology I’m experimenting with or learning.
I’ve been tweeting for a while (going back - 07 I used it as a todo list - and jan ‘08 I started posting for other people). I admit I like twitter because it is in the moment - totally disposable - and the perfect place to post pictures of food and drink. Then I joined Facebook. I was a hold out. I played with social stuff via Orkut and Friendster - and much like the first time I sat through a discussion of RSS I just didn’t get it. So when MySpace came out and pushed personal webpage design back to the stone age (hello blink tags) I continued to ignore it. Facebook showed up and has grown into a special kind of monster. The kind of monster who converts everyone I know into recruiters. When I tell non-wired friends that I’m not on Facebook they give me that look I used to give people who didn’t have an email address. As a result a lot of random personal thoughts have been pushed there - since that seems to be the place to indulge people if they want to know what I’m up to. Not too long ago I got a column in Linux Journal (which just got picked up for a 6 month contract - woot!). Having to turn in 1500-3000 words a month has done a lot to satisfy my need to write.

That leaves with a very basic question - what do I do with the blog in 2010? High randomness goes to twitter. Facebook gets the - I’m hanging with Max (my son) notifications - and the occupational NSFW post. It is harder to write long technical posts when LinuxJournal wants me to do that every month as it is. Mix that in with my desire to get out of the server running business. Since my blog sits on one of my servers - I need to determine what to do with it so I can shut the server down.

Twitter doesn’t allow me to write very much - and Linux Journal wants it to be on a specific topic (or at least related to Linux users in some way). Originally, I was going to say Facebook limits posts to ~300 characters - giving me more room than Twitter, but not enough for anything of substance. Of course in the process of trying to figure out what the limit was on characters in Facebook I learned about Notes - which are basically blog posts inside of Facebook. For a moment, I contemplated just packing up the blog and moving over there - especially since you can now easily (some would argue too easily) share everything with everybody. The reality is - I prefer my blog to be a separate thing. That’s probably just old-school dislike of the new school single point of failure Internet, but it is a conceit that is easily accommodated.

Since I find myself with more time and control over my direction in 2010 - the blog is going to take a slight turn. I’m hoping to spend this year learning a lot of new things. Normally, I dump that info into a variety of Red n’ Black notebooks that I keep my experimentation logs in. This year I’m going to try to translate those notes into the blog (so I can search and get a better sense of my progress). I’m going to leave it out here in the public Internet because somebody out there might find some of it useful. I’ll probably end up finding a way to notify my Facebook friends (a large number of which don’t use RSS) what’s going on. So if you miss the food pictures - follow me on twitter or friend me on facebook. If you’re interested in following me on a learning journey - stay tuned.

I published this a page some time ago - now I’m putting it as a post

I wasn’t sure when I was going to talk about this, but I have some good news. I have a new column in Linux Journal. All in all, that’s pretty cool! Both because I have such a long history with the magazine, but also because I’m such a big proponent of Linux.

So far it has been a rough road to hoe. The first deadline was right after my accident. That meant putting some painful time in a chair just so I could I write an article that was long enough. The additional challenge was that the first two subjects were my weakest - Embedded and Security. There are lots of things I do with computers - but I tend to avoid those to areas like the plague.

Truth be told, I thought the reason I was struggling was the subject matter. Normally, I can sit down and speak/write 1000 words on just about any subject. In this case, I had a hard time putting keyboard to open office document. Sure I was in pain - that never helps the creative process. I was writing about things I don’t normally enjoy - that doesn’t help either.

It turns out that the form itself is what was really causing me problems. If you pickup a copy of Linux Journal or Linux Format or any of the other technical journals you will quickly get a feel for the writing style. It breaks down into three categories. First, reporting things as they are. This kind of article replays some event for people who weren’t paying attention. The canonical version is one about kernel development. Who has the time to read the mailing list? This is an easy way to see what is getting included in the next release. The second is the pontification. In this kind of article, the author tackles some kind of broad topic (like the rise of the Linux desktop or penetration of Linux in the enterprise) and describes the situation and possible ways to make things better. The third form has the most representatives, I’ll call it the recipe article. In this article, the author walks you through a path of very specific steps that result in a very specific outcome. I call it a recipe because it tends to follow the same path as a cooking recipe - ingredients, getting setup, steps involved, and final product.

The recipe is cool because it shows you concretely how to do something. When I got the column I though I’d be cranking out recipes for things that I’m doing in my daily life. Turns out I’m a terrible recipe writer. I usually start out with some sort of vague goal that I optimistically think I can accomplish. In the process of pursuing it, I end up learning a lot of extraneous stuff. I also end up pursuing a lot of dead ends. I don’t know that they are dead ends when I start, but eventually stall out and realize I’m not much closer to my goal.

I’m trying to introduce a new form - less recipe - more lab notebook. Instead of editing out and hiding away all the dead ends, I record them. I try to put up signs for the people who come behind me - don’t do this it doesn’t work the way you think it will. It ends up making the article a lot less pristine. In some cases, I end up changing my goal midstream just so I can actually claim victory. That is just how my process of exploration works. To me the failures are as important as the successes.

I’m about to turn in my second article in this style. I have no idea how people are going to re-act to it. Will they like it because it gives them the info they need to explore what I’m talking about, or will they hate it because it just introduces a lot of kruft? I have no idea. What I have learned from the process is that I find it a much easier way to write. It is how I approach the problem, and it seems like a waste to throw out all that extra learning just because it might distract you. I guess I feel like it will only distract you if you are trying to do exactly what I was trying to do. Most of the time, I can’t find a recipe for what I want to do. Instead i have to comb through several and try to intuit which parts apply as I build my path on the fly.

So wish me luck! I tried to write recipes and failed. I guess I’m just not that organized. If it turns out that the readers hate my way, I’ll end up writing technical posts on my blog again - which isn’t the end of the world, but will bum me out. I love writing. Having a monthly deadline has been complicated, but has also allowed me to follow up on projects I would have left on my back shelf. In my wildest dreams, I hope people like it and I get other people to do the same. That way when I go look for information to help me do what I want to do, I have a better chance of finding pitfalls before I even get started.

Thanks to the pain from my accident I can’t sit in one place for too long, and thanks to my pain medicine I can’t think thoughts that are too long. What has resulted over the last week or so is a Vicodyn fueled ADD romp through a lot of topics. Some of this you main enjoy, but in reality I’m just writing some notes down for future me.

1st generation SSD drives suck. Sure they are great at first, but the longer you use them and the more fragmented they get, the more they let you down. You can get 2nd generation SSD drives with onboard cache and a lot of other fixes. These things scream even if you don’t buy the Intel X25 ( I went with a Cosair 128GB - Learn More Here

If you upgrade your Xbox360 hard drive - things till be great. If you get one of the new elites figuring that you’ll dump your old flaky xbox 360 on ebay things are more complicated. Whatever you do - DON’T BUY THE TRANSFER CABLE ON EBAY. If you do, you’ll get the transfer cable and some sort of weird pirate software that doesn’t help you legally transfer your stuff from old drive to new drive. For that you’ll need to find a friend with the kit, contact microsoft, or borrow on from bestbuy (process left as an exercise for the reader).

It’s time to expand my home file server again. 2TB drives are seriously cheap. THat means it is time to think about RAID. I still hate hardware RAID. The funny thing is now every motherboard and PCI card supports it - you’d think that you should go that way, but it sounds like the ASIC chips for RAID are terrible. In the past I’ve avoided RAID cards because you have to have a spare card if the card is at fault. Previously I’ve always done RAID5. People seem to hate RAID5 now. So you can contemplate RAID6 (sounds like RAID5 + extra parity drive). Given the rise in drive size and decrease is $/GB people are excited about the performance of RAID10 (which there are several versions of but the sane one is really RAID1 into pairs and then RAID0 those pairs into a big single device). That gives you better performance and you can survive more drive failure at the price of less usable drive space. Inevitably, I’ll end up putting LVM on top of the RAID array. Which led me to ask the question - why do RAID10 - if LVM can handle the RAID0 part. Then after more research it turns out LVM can do mirroring as well. So it might be possible to dump RAID altogether and just use JBOD and LVM (or if I’m feeling crazy adventurous - ZFS via FUSE). I haven’t decided but who knew there were so many options.

As for SATA, there’s straight eSATA and then there is port multiplication. Apparently port multiplication just happens on the fly. As far as I can tell - a PCI-X card should work in x1,x4,x8,x16. I say should - because the one I have seems to fit but it doesn’t work. I can’t tell if that is an issue with the card or the fact that it doesn’t work that way after all.

If you are going to watch the screencasts on closure - spend the time (3hrs) and watch the one where Hickey talks to Lispers. The Java one is seriously boring. After spending a lot of time getting over my Lisp aversion, I’m beginning to think it might be fun to play with. Most notable because - it gives me all the libraries and tools of Java, it gives me the years of thinking on Lisp, and it gives me a whole new way to think about concurrency.

Bluetooth on Linux has come a long way. I had my Ubuntu laptop hooked up to the TV in my living room. It took me all of 2 seconds to pair in a bluetooth mouse and keyboard (from a mac mini). I didn’t even have to go to the command line. I could use the little Gnome panel applet.

Speaking of coming a long way, the ATI card in my laptop seems to be running an open source driver now. This is great because it support hibernate and handled configuring things like turning off the lcd and throwing all the graphics power at the tv. This is stilla bit funky with an nVidia card (which is what I normally select) so maybe I need to keep my eyes on ATI.

Email management sucks. I’m thinking about using Google to do my mail just to get it off my server. I talked to some people and they said - “Google mail goes down - but the good thing is you just wait and it comes back”. Spoken like a system admin - when mail goes down right now I have to scramble until it works.

Wire in The Blood just hit Netflix instant streaming. Very exciting. I did some research and it turns out the show has been cancelled in the UK. Just to add insult to injury they’re working on a US version. Why do they have to do that?

Let’s say you have a motherbaord that needs a BIOS update. Let’s say you don’t run windows on that machine. It seems like most manufactuers has moved out of the stone ages and now provide tools to flash the bios under windows. Since that isn’t an option I’m supposed to whip out a floppy and do the update. Turns out you can use a bootable CD. If you need one get it here Flash CD Iso. Once you have this you can use a tool call IsoMaster (available from apt-get) to add the flash files you need. Reburn it and you are off. Unless you are like me :( I switch to SATA CDRom drives a while ago for ripping performance. No worries - I found a version that will handle it as well Flash CD for SATA Iso. Works the same way but with better drivers.

Big UPSs have big on/off buttons that make a very satisfying click which you push them. Plus you get to hear everything immediately power off or on. I’ve never hit that button on my APC1500. Turns out it is at eye height for my 1 year old son. He like the sound of turning daddy’s infrastructure on and off.

I’m sure there is more but this seems like plenty for one cup of coffee.

I thought it wad just a brand they made up for the intro to tool academy but iguess it is an actual drink

Ozygen saturation sensor - wonder how it works