Be The Pigeon

If you have multiple computers and would like to control them all with a single keyboard-mouse combo, it's easy to do. Use "Synergy." This doesn't require a KVM (keyboard-video-mouse) switch as it did in former days. In fact, the cool thing about Synergy is that you're not screen sharing. Each machine has its own separate display, and it can even have its own mouse and keyboard. But your main mouse and keyboard, when you move the mouse over to the new display, now controls the other machine. What's cool about this is that it works across platforms. For example, I have a Mac for my main machine, and a Windows 7 laptop sitting on the left-hand side. With Synergy running on both machines, I just move my mouse to the left until it comes onto the Win 7 laptop screen and then I can type and use it as though I were really connected there locally. It makes controlling multiple machines a snap. Synergy is available here for Windows, Mac, Linux, etc . It's ...

For years, I've had an ugly music library. Very little cover art, inconsistent album titles, artists, etc. I ripped all my old CD's years ago, and the formats seem to have varied quite a bit. A couple months ago I finally found a solution to clean the whole mess up. Now that I've switched to iTunes, the cover art is a nice thing to have, as it's shown on AppleTV and on the iPod when you listen. The cleanup process is very simple using a tool (which I purchased for about $20) called TuneUpMedia . TuneUp will listen to clips of your songs for you and then search them in an online database to come up with the right info and then retag your whole library. It will also add missing cover art and even detect duplicate tracks. Very nice. It loads up along side iTunes or Windows Media Player. I don't normally shell out bucks for this type of stuff (figuring that there's always a freebie if I look long enough), but this one was worth it. There's a free version...

Been a while. This is another techno-dump, so skip it if you could care about this stuff. We got an AppleTV unit for Christmas. Jolayne was interested in playing her music through the family-room stereo, and after doing some research (and a few worthless purchases) I finally decided on the Apple products, as they have been so easy for our family to use. We started by looking for something to just play music, and Apple has something called an Airport Express that does just that. But for the same price, AppleTV does the same thing, but also plays movies (both from your own library and from iTunes downloads). It's remarkably simple and yet easy to use, which we like. What drew me to this device, though, was the remote control. All iPods, iPads, and iPhones can have a free app called "REMOTE," which allows you to use the touch-screen abilities of the unit to control the AppleTV (or your iTunes on your computer). Makes it super simple to control the music, and since i...

I recently switched my broadband data service to Verizon and go a MiFi 2200 . This is quite a neat little device. Instead of just giving your Internet from anywhere on your computer, it also acts as a WiFi hotspot and allows you to connect up to 5 other devices wirelessly, with no config. So for me, that means that iPad, iPod Touch, etc can all be connected to the Internet without having to pay for data service for each device. The device is about the size of a deck of cards (sans card box), and runs for about 4 hours per charge. When you have it plugged into your PC, it acts like a normal USB-style data card and tethers for Internet access to your PC only. When you unplug it, the wireless access point lights up and you can connect yourself and 4 friends. The wireless mode has lots of settings that allow you to be secure, etc. Here's the interesting side note (honestly, only if you're me, but I needed a place to write this down). You can only charge this thing via the s...

{This post was updated in May 2011 with things I've learned over the last year.} Our family recently joined the Apple revolution (a few years late, we know). Jolayne got an iPod Touch (basically an iPhone without the phone part). I got a nano and iPhone, and there's an iPad in transit somewhere for me. With all this iHappiness, I knew we'd need to find a way to watch movies on these intrepid little devices. I managed to get it done just in time before our Disney trip a few weeks ago. Let me say, having movies on the iDevices sure makes long flights more fun. The amazing thing to me is that because of the hardware decoders built into the devices, it takes very little battery to watch a movie. A full-length movie watch on my iPhone takes less than 15% of the battery. Not bad at all. Once you've converted them, the movies can also be streamed via AppleTV (or equivalent) and watched on your main TV as well, so it's a great single format to do everything in. Afte...

Most of you won't care about this one bit, and I have little that's good to blog about these days, but after updating to Windows 7 there's one nagging issue that I just finally figured out and need to document somewhere. I like to share files between all my machines at home. I backup data on one machine to another, and I keep all my downloaded files centrally. When we upgraded to Win 7, my mapped drives to administrative shares (C$, D$) broke. I searched high and low to find out why, and it appears to have something to do with Homegroup usage and increased security, blah blah blah. Finally, I found a registry update to fix the whole thing: How to access Administrative shares in Windows 7. I rarely use network shares on my computers. Ok, I have a few setup for the family to use if they need to copy something from one computer to another and a share for our network storage. Other than that I have always favored using admintrative shares. These don’t show up in network ...

You should all pause from your busy days to take a moment of silence for... MY DVR! It's about to croak. Very sad. Makes me want to cry. Take drugs. Valium. Seriously, can you think of a better invention in the last 20 years? No way. It's wonderful. It's like sticking it to all those networks and their commercials every time I turn something on. We bought this unit a number of years ago second-hand on eBay to avoid charges from Dish Network. It was the last model that didn't come with the monthly "access" crap fee. It's served us well for years. Now, it freezes up and does all sorts of indigestion things at least weekly, but usually every couple days. So I've been out shopping for new services lately. I've long been opposed to cable. I think Comcast is anything but Comcastic. Sadistic might be a better word. Just for kicks I went to their site this week to see what they'd want to charge me to switch to them. Didn't take me lon...

I know I probably do more "techy" posts than I should, but it's my blog and not yours, so there.  If you're not an avid Firefox user , shame on you.  It's so-way-entirely-cooler than Internet Exploder.  And, version 3 came out just recently.  What's so cool about version 3, you ask? Simply put, it's the " Awesome Bar ."  Does your browser have an Awesome Bar?  If not, you need one. The so-called Awesome Bar is the navigation bar where you enter your URL.  In Firefox (FF), you can now enter the actual site you want to visit, but you can also put in partial names of bookmarks, places you've been, and so on, and it's remarkably good at finding just the perfect place you want to go.  There are many sites out there explaining the finer points of it, so I won't waste space here.   You can now also tag bookmarks for easy lookup, plus it's pretty much the fastest browser out there.  My gmail loads 3x faster than with FF2.  I love it.  Whe...

Update (07/21) : it appears that a anti-static bag (or something that looks similar to it, anyway), will help kill that annoying noise. Check this out: He's charging $5 for a 2-pack . Just need a way to get it to have that shielding while in the holster; then it would sell very well! Thanks for the tip, Dave. I came across a very interesting article this week that explains why a blackberry or (less often) cell phone causes that annoying buzzing sound near speakers . I'm sure you've heard the noise; it's kind of like a bunch of buzzing bees. Basically, here's the crux of the whole thing: To get to the root of the issue, I spoke with Duncan Bradley, Research In Motion's (RIM) director of global market intelligence. RIM is the BlackBerry manufacturer. Bradley explained to me that cell phones cause this buzzing interference when near some speakers or other devices that can resonate radio frequencies (RF) because such devices often feature poor quality shielding...

WARNING: This isn't the most funny or entertaining post ever. I basically wanted to document some stuff I learned recently in case I needed it again, and putting it here made sense since both my readers might like to know it's available, though not perhaps necessarily for immediate consumption. Not too long ago, I finally got a new digital TV for the basement. As part of that activity, it was time to figure out about all this HD business. Though I'm usually pretty savvy with such stuff, I hadn't paid much attention to the HD thing and found myself in trouble. Thanks to Mitch for helping me sort it all out without laughing at all. So I'm going with Plan B. What's Plan B, you ask? No, it's nothing to do with birth control (phew!). It's my homemade HD antenna. I'm still a little too cheap to pony up to Dish Network an extra $20 for the privilege of watching signals in HD. It doesn't make much sense to me since the government is mandating t...

We all send email that we regret from time to time. Thankfully, I can't recall any flamers I've sent in the heat of the moment, only later to regret it. However, I did send a mail earlier this week at work that caught me off guard. The subject was about two people working on my team, Lucas and Marcus. The content really didn't matter. What mattered was that I typoed the subject and instead put "Lucas and Mucas"! Boy, I've never seen management reply so quickly. Within about 30 seconds I got IM's from two managers laughing hysterically. It was one of those laughing-milk-out-your-nose moments for us. At least Marcus wasn't on copy, but I'm sure he would have had a good laugh too. One of the managers suggested that if I needed more help on my project, I could see if Phlegm was available too. You can see where this is going... So here's to keeping an open mind, a sense of humor, and a second set of eyes on your subject lines before you h...

Today I shall be the pigeon... I enjoy listening to tunes while I work. I have an ample collection of MP3's I've amassed over the years. I even pony up for the RealPlayer DRM songs once in a while when I like something. In the past I've really enjoyed the smarts of the LaunchCast service (now owned by Yahoo) which plays songs it thinks you'll like. You rate the tunes and it learns your tastes. It's even free with commercials (or you pay a few bucks a month to lose the commercials). The thing I didn't like was that you had to restart the stream hourly if you didn't pay, plus you had the commercials. But the worst part was that it was IE only, and didn't work in Firefox. A friend at work today turned me onto a new service you have to check out. It's called Pandora and does everything LaunchCast did, plus more, and so far I haven't even had any commercials (though I'm sure they're there; they also have a pay service that eliminates...

According to wikipedia, lurker is defined as the following: lurker is a person who reads discussions on a message board , newsgroup , chatroom , file sharing or other interactive system, but rarely participates. So, are you a lurker? I've noticed with blogging that the commenting process is--for many--some sort of personal validation. Validation that the post is actually available to real, breathing people on the real Internet (and not some scam by Google to trick us into sending our thoughts into the ether where they are only consumed by the Matrix who will someday take over our existence). Validation that those real, breathing people actually read, ponder, and even chuckle at what is written. I hear it over and over from my friends; apparently for (most) of us who blog, we are so unsure of our self worth that we can only be content with our web presence when other choose to provide witty feedback. So my questions are twofold: Why? Why do I need this validation? I have a f...

Well, I've done it. I've taken the plunge to a place from whence I'm surely to never emerge. I just ordered a Blackberry. Because these handheld PDA devices are so addictive, they've been coined Crackberries. In addition to the regular web/mail/IM junk, though, my Crackberry will: be red (very sexy!) have GPS (totally geeky!) have a 2MP camera (totally unnecessary!) tether to my PC so I can be online (either from the device or directly to the PC) anywhere. This will replace my data card I have on my PC now, but will be slower, though a little more useful. (totally mobile!) have a card slot where I can put on 4GB of whatever, including docs, music, etc (totally helpful!) So the next time you see me, don't be surprised if there's a Crackberry on my person! Now I can be a geek anytime, anywhere (as if I needed an excuse). Why, I'll likely even be asked to fix someone's PC using it at some point!

Yes, that's my alter-ego. It's a good thing I know how to fix computers, because I'd have nothing to do with my evenings otherwise! A friend from church called me up several weeks ago with a problem on his college-aged daughter's laptop. It was full of crap. The kind of crap you get from going to sites you shouldn't be on, like the music-pirating sites. Of course, the daughter says that it was her "friend" who did that, and she told her not to... This machine wasn't just full of crap, it was absolutely trashed beyond repair. So I spend hours upon hours on it and manage to salvage the data. Then I get to order recovery CD's since none were available. Wait a few days for the mail to come, reload WinXP, patch the heck out of it, add all the free security and malware tools I can think of, restore the data. Phew, it's fixed and I'm a nice guy! Game over . But then... Game not over. Instead, now it's round two (imagine me on Do...

So I got a digital music player (I really like my Sansa e280R player , and it's cheaper and much more versatile than an iPod) for my birthday in October and I've been having fun loading it up with tunes. The trouble is, all the tunes I've had for years aren't exactly organized like one would expect of someone as anal as me. The tags (the info on artist, album, genre, etc.) are all messed up. I have no idea how it happened, but many of them have really wacky genres (apparently it isn't good enough to have only like 5-10 genres in the great Internet DB of music; there are more like 100+). So I have country tunes with "Blues" and so on. Thus I found myself spending time fixing many of them (which I'm only too sure I've done previously only to have them messed up again). Then I got to working with my ratings (you know, the little stars that accompany each track). Though I'm sure I've fixed them before, too, many are goofed up. (RealPlaye...