Archive for June, 2007
June 30, 2007 at 11:59 PM · Filed under Tech
As you know if you read my little corner of the Web, we recently switched Gizmos for Geeks over to a new platform. That was quite a task, and of course, there were errors that cropped up. For example, we had to reroute a bunch of old URLs from the old platform to conform to the new ones, and we got some of them wrong. The problem is that when visitors or search engine crawlers try to access those ‘new’ URLs, they get 404 or Not Found errors. That’s bad.
Luckily, we’re using Google’s Webmaster Tools and it generates a report that gives us all of the URLs that it can’t find. Since Google first started crawling the new site, we’ve fixed a bunch of those links, but not all, and Google continues to crawl the site as there are thousands of URLs and it’s not done yet. So I don’t really want to go through the entire list by hand to figure out which ones end up in 404s.
Time to write a script!
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June 26, 2007 at 10:20 AM · Filed under Gadgets, Tech
This is hardly the first article on the subject, but Reuters has a piece vaguely saying that some consumers are waiting on improvements or even a new version altogether before buying an iPhone. It would have been nice if they actually included some hard stats, instead of the opinions of just 3 people! Yes, yes, this is always true – there are always interested consumers who wait to see how others fare with a product before diving in themselves. But… based on my own (unscientific) experience, I actually believe the technology-buying public is becoming smarter – they’re not buying into new hype the second it comes out, because they’re learning that companies are more interested in getting the product out there quickly and fixing the smaller issues later on down the line.
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June 23, 2007 at 5:03 PM · Filed under Gadgets, KJH News
To think that I started my blog with one of my (shameless) intentions being to plug the rest of my Internet biz, and yet I’ve failed to plug the new version of our flagship site, Gizmos for Geeks. It has been a whole week! Ok, so I’ve been a little busy…
Yup, so we moved platforms, and did a little redesigning. It’s definitely faster now, and there are more of the standard blogging type niceties that people have come to expect. Let us know what you think. Now we can consider it plugged.
While I’m at it, we also quietly launched some related gadget blogs in the way of Gizmos for Babies and Gizmos for Kids. Yup, I’m not kidding. There’s a lot of gadgets out there in just those categories. Even I’m amazed at how many things there are for babies.
If this whole ‘making money on the Web’ thing starts to take off, perhaps we’ll start a blog on how we’ve done it/are doing it… Stay tuned.
June 23, 2007 at 7:18 AM · Filed under Amusing
Want a laugh? Here are some real answers given by some 16-year-olds on various examinations.
Geography
Q: Name the four seasons.
A: Salt, pepper, mustard and vinegar.
Q: Explain one of the processes by which water can be made safe to drink.
A: Flirtation makes water safe to drink because it removes large pollutant like grit, sand, dead sheep and canoeists.
Much more after the jump…
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June 21, 2007 at 4:22 PM · Filed under Computers, Cool, Software
There sure are a lot of talented people out there with a lot of time on their hands. Owen Grace is one such gentleman, who decided to turn his Guitar Hero controller into something that could really play music, and taking it to its ultimate conclusion by forming a band (The Guitar Zeros) that plays gigs.
Owen didn’t electronically/electrically modify the guitar itself (although he put a cool Eddie Van Halen design on it), but mapped out the signals from the various buttons and then wrote a computer program that would interpret the keys and send them through a synthesizer to produce the sounds.
Take a look at this video where Owen explains how he did it and demonstrates playing. Obviously, he’s expanded the capability of this seemingly simple device a lot. In this picture, he looks like he’s playing some hammer-on/hammer-off or other advanced guitar technique.
Oh yes, if you want to do this yourself, Owen has put up complete instructions on the Web and made the software (called FretBuzz) open source.
June 4, 2007 at 7:49 PM · Filed under Cool
Remember the A380 that I visited at LAX a few months ago? Well, luckily for Airbus, they’ve received some orders despite being 2 years late on their promise, and one of those orders is a very special one from an unknown billionaire who is having his tricked out to the tune of $150 million. Oh yeah, that’s in addition to the price tag of the plane itself ($325M).
I first noticed this piece in the hardcopy of Wired Magazine in the form of a double-paged full color article with descriptions of the various custom areas of the plane, but I wanted to give out some link love, and found a very cool Flash based version of the article on Wired’s site. Thank you Wired!
Just to give you an idea of some of the customizations, there are: lounges with sofas, an office, a shower, master bedroom, formal and casual dining rooms with a 70″ flat screen, and crew quarters. The staff seating area holds 25. 25 people!
