Archive for Tech
July 7, 2010 at 11:28 PM · Filed under Advice, Tech
Great presentation by Scott Hanselman on how to manage information overload and improve your efficiency and effectiveness. Includes specific recommendations for mechanisms and tools to use.
Unfortunately, I use (or at least know of) almost everything he mentioned. Why do I say ‘unfortunately’? Because while those tools all help – and in some cases tremendously – they’re not panaceas (love that word!). The real solution? Get obnoxiously rich and hire minions to do your bidding.
It’s about an hour long, but worth the listen if you feel like you’re drowning in ‘to dos’ and ‘thrashing’.
May 29, 2009 at 2:27 PM · Filed under Internet, Software, Tech
If you use Skype, then you should do yourself a huge favor and lock down your privacy settings asap. This will prevent you from receiving calls and notes/messages from spammers, phishers and malware vendors.
Just today I received a rather legitimate looking e-mail that could easily be misunderstood to be from Skype. If I had clicked on the embedded link, and installed any of the software I would have been in for a world of hurt. It was one of those malware writers that makes you believe you have a virus/malware and says you need their software to clean your computer. Their ‘software’ in turn ends up being garbage that costs lots of money.
Here’s how to lock down your Skype settings:
- Go to the menu Skype-> Privacy
- Ensure that all of the “from” settings are from “people in my Contact List only“
Here’s a screenshot of what that dialog box looks like. Click for a larger version.
There is just one minor drawback. You will need to manually add new contacts before they are allowed to call/message you. A small price to pay for a lot more security.
September 15, 2007 at 2:38 PM · Filed under Tech
For those of you computer geeks out there, in particular UNIX aficionados, you might get a chuckle out of this. My cousin saw this photo op in Barcelona and sent me the pic. For those of you who know both of us, you’ll be able to guess exactly who sent me this. We’re both UNIX geeks; he more so than me, yet ironically, I’m just the one who decided to turn it into a half-baked career of sorts. Click the pic for a larger image. BTW, I didn’t even come up with the title to this blog post; that honor goes to the photographer.
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!
Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
April 1, 2007 at 4:33 PM · Filed under Internet, KJH News, Tech
Warning: Shameless plug! 
Doug and I have just launched our latest venture, MvixCommunity.com. At CES, we hooked up with a small but promising company called MvixUSA that sells a number of very cool products. The most notable line of products they sell are Media Players, which as a product class have been growing over the past few years. In fact, Apple just released their own such product, the Apple TV.
So what’s a Media Player? [There are other names, like Streaming Media device and Media Center. At any rate, Media Player is what Mvix chose to go with.] Let’s phrase the answer in a problem-and-solution format. Problem: you have media (music, video, photos) all over the place (computer, DVR, etc.), and want to get it all in one place so that you can watch it on your TV. Solution: an Mvix media player! With a hard drive at its heart, an Mvix media player stores all of this media and plays it back using a on-screen control menu.
Anyway, we agreed to start a forum site that caters exclusively to Mvix products. So if you’re at all interested in these types of products, or better yet, if you own one, please jump on, sign up and participate. Tell all of your friends too!
March 20, 2007 at 10:57 PM · Filed under Tech
On Monday, I was one of the privileged few to get to attend a special viewing of the brand new Airbus A380 airplane. I have a friend who is a fantastic photographer and a huge airplane buff, and thanks to his connection with a rep over at Qantas, we were invited to this special screening. [BTW, while I'm not sure whether or not I should mention their name, I can say this much – they were extremely friendly and I'm glad my buddy knew them.] Qantas is one of the larger airlines to have already ordered A380s, and worked with LAX (Los Angeles International Airport) and Airbus to run this compatibility trial, as it was called. While JFK airport in New York received a plane with 500 guests serviced by a Lufthansa cabin crew on the same day (Mar 19), LAX got MSN1 – the very first A380 made.
Since the A380 that landed at LAX didn’t have the interior finished for passengers, we weren’t given a tour of the cabin, but we did get to go out on the tarmac and get quite close to the airplane. The perimeter that they created was a bit amusing (it matched the footprint of the plane), but we didn’t complain too much. After all, we were standing pretty much almost under the plane.
That morning we stood outside the airport very near to the leading edge of the runway that the A380 was scheduled to land on and watched it land. Later that day, we met a blogger who took a video of the landing [Other YouTube videos]. Not the best video, but it certainly conveyed the excitement of the crowd gathered to watch.
So what’s so special about the A380 [specs] apart from it now being the largest airliner in the world? In my opinion, the feature that stands out most is the double-decker passenger configuration. The wingspan is pretty impressive, but as far as overall size goes, it’s not as if it’s twice as large as the next largest plane in the world. As an LA Times reporter noted, “it doesn’t represent change on the scale its older cousin [Boeing 747] did.†In fact, it’s approximately the same length and width as a 747 give or take a few meters. One of the funny optical illusions is how short the A380 looks due to the height and fatness of the fuselage.
Take a look over at Gizmos for Geeks for some more pics.
Next entries »
