I love to play with nifty gadgets. Personally, I like the ones with lots of nifty features. Of course, it doesn’t help if half those features don’t work as advertised. I could say more, but this good article explains why more isn’t always better and why certain types of gadgets are doomed to fail.
Hooray for boat-airplane-cars!
…in a galaxy far, far away…
No, that’s not quite right.
But several years ago, there was a website that had ‘free’ software. All you had to do was pay the shipping (which, as I recall, was about $5 per CD). Sadly, that website died a couple years back. Disappointing, they had some nice stuff.
But I have found a replacement. Free-CDSoftware.com will ship you CDs for $7.50 per CD. Not all are current things, but there is some good stuff there.
Alas, I have counted no less than 20 titles I would like. That’s more than $100 worth of software that I want! Drat. Maybe, eventually, I’ll be able to get them all.
Today’s world can be a dangerous place. Even just traveling a short distance can be dangerous if you get into an accident on the wrong stretch of road. And even if you have a cell phone, there is no guarantee that you’ll be able to tell emergency workers where you are after an accident.
But what if you’d installed a GPS auto tracking system which someone back home could use to find out exactly where you are if you went missing? Instead of waiting days for help, it could be almost immediate.
You could also use it to keep track of your teens, to make sure that they’re not going somewhere that they shouldn’t. I suppose you could also use it to keep track of where your car is, in the even that it’s stolen.
There are lots of possibilities.
Everyone has a mouse (or mouse-like device) on their computer, as well as a keyboard of some type or another. But what if that’s just not enough? Maybe you need a bit more? I’m not quite sure exactly what else you need, but if you’re so inclined it is possible to hook up an alternate input device to your serial port. The author of the page states that they’ve hooked up a footswitch to their computer. I’m not sure what for, exactly, but extra gadgetry is always cool, right?
When you’re trying to run a business, getting a decent server setup can be expensive. For a really good setup, you cannot simply run down to the local computer store and pluck a desktop computer off the shelf to use as a server. It might work, for awhile, but that’s not what it was designed to do. Sooner or later you’re going to have problems.
That’s why you need to get something like a eServer i5 series computer. Yes, they can be a touch expensive, costing a several thousand dollars apiece, but when you’re working with critical data and you absolutely need to have your server up and running all the time, it’s an investment rather than a serious expense.
Just think about all the money you’d lose if your ‘homemade’ server crashed and died in the middle of an important project and you’ll see what I mean.
Thankfully, Performance Data Resources has all sorts of new and refurbished hardware available for your business to purchase. Whatever hardware (server, printer, etc.) your business needs, you’re likely going to be able to find it there at a reasonable price.
By now, you’ve probably seen or at least heard of the Microsoft interactive table system. This is one of the coolest things ever, even if you don’t care for Microsoft. Sort photos physically, ‘fling’ music and pictures onto your assorted devices and more.
But what if you don’t have the thousands of dollars to spend just to be able to have a really nifty setup like this?
I would love to be able to buy something like that. But if you don’t have the thousands of dollars to spend and are good with making things, then you can build a multi-touch input device (the fancy term for the touch screen system). The down sides are that it will be a bit ‘crude’ (you have to write your own apps) and you do need to find a video projector for this project.
On the other hand, it seems you can find projectors on eBay for not too much (if you look carefully). There is even an auction or two selling instructions on how to make an LCD projector (less than $10 for the instructions) if you’re so inclined.
As far as the ‘crudeness’ goes, I would guess that the more people that use it, the more call there will be for programs and the more people will build programs for it; just like how it is with Linux.
So go ahead, get in early on the next stage in computing - without breaking the bank.
I love playing older games, especially interactive fiction. They require thought, timing and a bit of skill. Unfortunately, newer games require an awful lot on how fast you can press buttons. That can be entertaining, but not always what I’d want from a game.
I’ve been looking at the IF wiki and considering digging out my old ‘The Infocom Collections: The Sci-Fi Collection’ CD and playing Stationfall again (even though I’ll have to use DOSBox to play it). I’m not entirely certain if I ever finished it, though I do remember it getting fairly difficult. I know I never completed the prequel, Planetfall. I think the only IF game I’ve actually completed has been Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Interactive fiction is cool… you just can’t do that sort of thing with a graphical game.
I’ve personally been quite fond of Dafont for quite some time. It’s easy to use and has tons of fonts to choose from. Whenever I’ve needed a font to use, I’ve been able to find one at Dafont.
But now I’ve got another font site to look at. This one is called ‘UrbanFonts‘. UrbanFonts seems to be almost exactly the same as Dafont, except the fonts are organized into slightly different categories. This means it’s more likely that I might find a good font ‘by accident’, since the categories are more general than Dafont’s.
Trying to create a logo for a new company or website can be a real hassle. What color? What shape? Can you even draw what you want to draw? I’ve done this logo thing before and it is not easy at all to create one from scratch.
Fortunately, you don’t have to design your own logo from scratch. LogoYes will help you create a custom logo in almost no time at all. They even let you try it out for free and if you like the logo that you create, you can buy various versions of it. If I were going to make a logo for my blog, it might look something like the example to the right. Even though just the logo costs only $99, I didn’t want to buy it just to show you in only one blog post, so you’ll have to click on the example to see the quick logo I made and the final screen.
It only took me about 10 minutes to make that logo (way faster than creating from scratch) and I was quite impressed by the selection offered. I could have easily spent a lot more time there in the careful creation of a logo since they have over 20,000 images to choose from.
And if I had wanted business cards, post cards or even more based off my logo, I could have chosen that as well. Not only do they have a lot of choices, but the price is also quite right as well.
After several successive computer failures (for various random reasons), I’ve finally decided to do something smart… back up my files! I know, I know… I should have done it sooner, much sooner, but it’s always been something that ‘I’ll do later’. Smart idea, right?
Anyway, I decided to take a look at four different services:
I started off looking at IBackup. Their site looks nice, but $10/month for only 5GB? Uhm… I can get webhosting for cheaper than that and you get bandwidth included. It may be a very nice company, but no good for me! Next!
I looked next at IDrive-E and saw that you only get 2GB for free. Not bad, but I decided to check out Orbitfiles instead. With Orbitfiles, you get a whole 6GB for free, plus you can share files and they (supposedly) even let you sell those same files. Unfortunately, even though their FAQ says that you can sell files, that seems to be disabled at the moment. Oh well, sharing is still good, right? Maybe you have to sign up for one of the paid plans? I don’t know. At least you can set passwords on files (password: blogic) and even notify people via email that you have shared a file with them. This could be handy for someone who does something like custom artwork since you don’t want to be emailing someone a file larger than maybe 5MB. Ew. Anyway, there are two ways to add files to Orbitfiles: through the web interface or through their ‘Hercules Uploader’. At this time, the uploader is at version 0.9 and still has bugs to be worked out. It does upload files, but I’m not entirely positive it will upload all your files. This is important, since you’ll have to double check to see if everything transfered… a pain, if you’ve got more than a handful of files. On the plus side, the both of the uploaders are easy to use. Free accounts have a limit of 100MB per file, however. All in all, Orbitfiles seems decent (though with the spelling errors on the site, it does look like it was created by a bunch of high school/college age people), but is currently unsuited for backing up large amounts of data.
After I was done playing with Orbitfiles, I went back to looking at IDrive-E and decided to sign up and download their software. Software doesn’t work at all without a restart. Uhm, ack! Alright, so one restart later and I try to back up a few of what I thought were relatively small folders. I get the message that it’s now backing up 9.2GB! What? I only have a 2GB free account. What’s going to happen when it hits the limit? Why didn’t it tell me this before starting the backup? Completely unsuitable.
So I look again. On IDrive-E’s own front page, it mentions ‘Mozy’. What is Mozy? I’d never heard of Mozy before. So I go to look at Mozy. 2GB free! Woo! So I sign up and download. The software takes a bit to install, but once it does it tells me exactly how much data I’m trying to back up (around 9GB). Oops. So I can navigate around and tell it to take out all ‘music’ files, documents, etc. I can tweak it to only back up the files in a particular folder or all of those types of files for the whole drive. I finally got it down to just under 2GB. Phew. So after I get this set up, as I’m waiting for the backing up go, I started poking around my account page on Mozy. Apparently, for everyone I refer to Mozy, I can get an extra 250MB of storage space… and the person that signed up under me also gets an extra 250MB space. I think that’s pretty nifty. Of course, if you don’t have enough friends that you can convince to backup their computers, you can get unlimited storage space for only $5/month per computer. Down side? Every computer in your account has to be unlimited. That means $10/month for 2 computers, $15 for 3, etc. But, hey, you probably already wanted that anyway if you have multiple computers, right? On another positive note, Mozy also works for Mac computers, something that the other backup sites don’t seem to offer.
All-in-all, Orbitfiles is good for sharing the occasional random (and large) file while Mozy is good for the actual backing up of your computer. Why don’t you give Mozy a shot and see how you like it?