Umbral Echoes Blog

I bought a digital camera for my mother for Mother’s Day — got her a Kodak EasyShare based on the advice of friends (thanks guys!).  I love technology, and I love finding just the right tool for the job.  So this is a post for all the geeks* out there.  Below is a list of programs, services, and mashups (like Twitter + Jott/Facebook, or Wordpress + Livejournal/MySpace) that I use on a daily basis. You probably know about a lot of these things, but maybe not all.  I love to try out new things.  I love to tinker, so every blue moon** I make a post like this.  If any of you out there have anything to add, then by all means leave a comment and tell me what your technological must-haves are.

Being a tech reviewer would be my dream job — I absolutely love testing out gadgets and programs.  I could write a few pages on each of these things, but I tried to keep it as short as possible.  Information below the cut.

* I use the term “geek” in a positive way.  I have never used, nor taken, any such word in a derogatory fashion, even if it was meant that way.  To me, “geek” means “someone who is considerably more intelligent than the average person, so much so that they are constantly using their brain.”

** I had a discussion recently wherein I was told that a lot of people don’t know what a “blue moon” is.  I find this notion staggering.

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I run my personal site’s blog using Wordpress. It automatically posts everything I write there to LiveJournal. Well, Wordpress has recently come out with a major upgrade, so up shall I grade.  Hopefully nothing bad will come of this.

EDIT: Looks like everything went swimmingly.  For those of you who have a similar setup, there was one small change that needed to be made to the LiveJournal crossposter plugin, and that change can be found here.

So I was signing up for a site today that had a Captcha (the “type the text you see below”).  These things seem to be getting harder and harder to read by humans, it seems like.  Well, this one is over the line.  The instructions were to, “Enter both words below, separated by a space.“  Well, can you tell what the word on the left says?  Because I sure as hell can’t.

LifeHacker.com recently had an article on using the open-source custom firmware called Tomato. Basically, this replaces your router’s firmware and give you a lot more control over it. The main thing that most people find useful is the ability to increase the wireless signal. I had to stretch the router way across the loft to position it so that I got WiFi reception in the basement, but using this hack I can put the router right by the cable modem and still get great reception.

It also has some nifty features like a real-time bandwidth graph (that updates as you’re watching it), and also a lot of advanced features. Want World of Warcraft to have higher priority than other Internet traffic? Want to make it so that certain websites can only be visited certain times of the day? Want to turn off the wireless during certain times of the day? You can do all that and more.

Me, I just like the neat bandwidth graph (below), and the ability to boost the WiFi signal.  It was also hella easy to install, and use, though the advanced features could have used some better documentation.

From a series called “You Suck at Photoshop.” There are 4 in this series currently, and here’s #2. The guy reminds me a lot of Dane Cook.

Having decided that driving a stick shift makes talking on a cell phone a bit unwieldy, I decided to get a Bluetooth headset.  I had one before, but… well, I lost it within about a week of getting it.  This time I went for the BlueAnt Z9.  It’s not the sexiest thing in the world, but it received some good reviews, and seemed to have good noise cancellation technology — something that might come in handy in convention season.

So far, it’s worked beautifully.  The people (well, person) I’ve talked to said that my voice was actually clearer with the BlueAnt than it was using the phone itself.  Hooking up to my phone, the Samsung Sync, was painless.  They even release semi-regular firmware updates, that fix issues and make other improvements.  It’s pretty easy to operate, light, and comfortable.  I’m not the sort of person to wear it all day long (I just wear it when I’m in the car), but if I were, I don’t think it would get uncomfortable to do so.  I haven’t tried the ultra-noise-cancellation mode, but I have high hopes — the website has a demonstration of the technology, that seems to put it on the level of the Jawbone.

In other news, those of you who use several online services, such as Facebook, Yahoo profiles, Twitter,  Gmail, LinkedIn, YouTube, Wordpress, Delicious, Microsoft Network (MSN), etc. will be interested in the DataPortability workgroup.  Below is a video that explains it, but the basic idea is you have your data, and when you want to make a profile on X site, you say, “Here’s my stuff — profile info, media, friends, et cetera.”  And the site keeps sync’d with that central repository of data.  Make a blog post?  It’s posted to all your sites that support that.  Upload a picture?  Ditto.  The names/sites mentioned above have all gotten in (Microsoft just recently), so there’s a pretty big push in this direction.

DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

I finally got around to setting up my desktop computer last weekend (I’ve just been using my laptop until now). While I was at it, I decided to go ahead and remove the hard drive that was going bad, and then I got the wild hair up my ass to install Ubuntu Linux (a popular distribution of Linux that actually has a nice user community that answers questions, and is built with ease-of-use in mind).

I downloaded the Live CD, and tried to rearrange one of my hard drives to make room for Linux there. The disk partition editor (GPartEd) froze up in the middle of resizing the old partition… so I rebooted, only to find that it actually did that successfully (regardless of freezing up). Then I tried to format the new area to the Linux file system type… and again, it froze up but seemed to have successfully done it anyway.

From this point, I clicked the option to install, and things went surprisingly smoothly. Ubuntu even has a neat little function that can import your Windows documents and settings. It installed a boot loader, so the next time I booted up I could choose Linux or Windows (I was halfway afraid that it would just set itself to the default OS and make it a hassle to boot back into Windows).

However, it doesn’t seem to include drivers for my wireless network card. But, Linux does have a utility that can make it use Windows drivers. After following the pleasantly complete and no-brainer-copy-paste instructions from the Ubuntu forums, I got that installed, and the drivers as well.

Linux could now see my wireless card, but it didn’t seem to be able to connect to the wireless network. It also gave no status indicator as to what might have gone wrong. And after playing with the settings a few more times… Linux froze. Linux geeks the world over have constantly ridden Windows for locking up, yet Linux does it too. This was a hardcore lockup, too — keyboard was totally nonresponsive, and I had to power off and back on again.

I haven’t tried messing with it since then, but I shall continue to chronicle my foray into using Linux as my desktop OS, for the (imaginary) people out there who might be interested to hear the tale.

So I’m reading the headlines from a computing newsletter I get, and this immediately jumped out at me:

A German Aerospace Center Space Agency research team led by Sami Haddadin has developed a robot that intentionally hits people in the face…

Now, the research is aimed at making robotic machinery that works near people able to detect if it hits a person.  But that first sentence had me laughing out loud.

Google recently revamped the interface for their Google Docs tool. For those not in the know, it’s sort of like a lite online version of MS Word and Excel. It also has ultra-keen collaboration features that let you work on things with other people, or just let other people view your stuff. It tracks changes, so if someone screws something up, you can always go undo it, etc. Anyway, the new interface is quite slick — makes it much easier to organize stuff. I’ve been playing with it for the past 10 minutes or so. No, it doesn’t take much to amuse me. Just something involving computers. Or boobs.

Kirstie and I are heading to Louisville a bit ahead of schedule, due to her grandmother’s worse-than-expected health. We’ll be leaving tomorrow afternoon, and hopefully arriving in Nashville at a time appropriate to visit Jared and Niquie. I have a 350+ page document that I’m reviewing, which I’m already most of the way through, and hope to finish on the trip up.

And just when I’ve mostly recovered from my dad’s visit and the plague taking me out of commission at work, now I get to go on another hiatus. Then when I’m done catching up with that, it’ll be time for GenCon. Then when I’m done catching up with that, it’ll be time for DragonCon. Whee!

There was a minor upgrade of Wordpress available (that’s the software I use to run my blog on my website), so of course I upgraded. Or at least, I tried to. Copied the files, everything worked fine. Ran the upgrade script… PHP vomit all over the screen. Tried tinkering with things to fix it, but unfortunately my web host was having some issues at the time (read: the server was choking again), so that was an aggravating process. Today I finally got things up and running again, though. So let’s cross our fingers, NOT run the latest version, and hope the next version they create doesn’t break things.