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Tech
How to never loose your Digital Camera
Mar 24th
I’ve written a nifty guide I though up after I found someone’s digital camera. The first thing people do when they find a digital camera is look at the pictures. Partly out of pure curiosity, partly out of a legitimate desire to see if they know anyone in the pictures, or will recognize the owner if they see them. This guide shows you how to lock your contact information on the memory card, so if you do loose it, it can easily be returned.
Why I still choose Seagate Hard Drives
Mar 22nd
A little history: When the hard drive industry, uniformly stepped back their three year warranty’s to one year, one company did the opposite: Seagate; they went to FIVE Years. And boy did they gobble up market share! Thus after a year or two the other hard drive manufacturers started to wake up, and moved it back to 3 years. Thanks Seagate. A year or so later Seagate stepped back to 3 years. Then Seagate started to have all kinds of firmware issues, of which I was affected too, and yes this was annoying. Luckily I am smart enough to have Raid 1, so I never lost 1 single bit or byte of data. Anyways, this is why I still stick with them:
When you return a WD, Samsung, or a Hitachi (even Seagate) you get a refurbished drive, which is the industry standard – no surprises here. But here’s the difference, Seagate transfers your original warranty over to the drive. So if you have a DOA drive, and buy a WD, Samsung or Hitachi drive, you actually got a drive with a 90 day warranty on it. Oops, it turns out 3 years was actually 3 months. Lucky you. But when you buy Seagate, you are basically paying to guaranteed have the drive of your choosing for the full warranty period no matter how many times it fails.
For example, if you have the unfortunate luck of having a hard drive fail every 3 months and 1 day, your original single Seagate purchase will get you though the 3 year period, while you would have to pay Western Digital, Samsung or Hitachi for ABOUT 10 more hard drives. When all hard drive fail, are you still willing to pay several times more for the same storage? If so, I applaud your loyalty.
Oh yeah, and another thing, Raid 1 your drives if you haven’t already!
The best backup system in the world: Raid 1 – Get it!
Mar 21st
If you are like most people, and use your computer daily, and use it to store photos, documents, media, Raid 1 is the greatest and best backup system, that protects against hard drive failure AND downtime. Raid is the cheapest solutions that ensures zero downtime, minimal hassles, minimal price and piece of mind 24/7. Raid 1 basically has two identical hard drives, and mirrors each hard drive to each other constantly. So it one fails, you get a notice to replace it, and you just keep clicking along just like nothing happened. You send back the bad hard drive, pop-it in, and it re-synchronizes up, and you’re back to being backed up again. The chances both hard drives will fail at the exact same time or within a few days of each other are infinitesimally small, while the chances one or the other hard drive will fail “sometime” between this instant and anytime in the future, is the dreaded and unsatisfying probability of 100%.
So that’s all you need to know, build or ask that your next computer have “Raid 1″ installed. If you want all the nerdy details, and why it’s the best solution there is for most people, you can click here.
Vista & Windows7 File Searching Fix
Mar 12th
One of my complaints (and many many many others – read the comments at the end of the page) about the new non XP Versions of Windows (Vista and Windows 7) is that search returns at times 99% False-Positives.
Well, I figured out if you go into Tools > Folder Options > Search, you can set it up to start searching like XP again!
Just change the options like so, and now you’re back to classic XP search, and it’s oh so nice! – Enjoy!
How to Buy a UPS (Uninteruptable Power Supply)
Mar 10th
All. Batteries. Fail. Period.
Buying yourself a nice high quality long lasting UPS is quite simple. You should know how many watts you need, and you remember that the higher the volt-amp-hours, the bigger the “gas-tank”.
They key to getting a good deal is simple this: Check the price of the replacement batteries. The UPS may cost $200. The replacement batteries can range from $30 to $160. Yes, replacement batteries can be anywhere from 15% to 75% of the cost the original UPS. Inotherwords, if you see a good “deal” on a UPS, and they get you with their own proprietary battery replacement. Countless industries do this, primarily printers and the like. So do the math, find a UPS that uses a popular (easily findable) UPS battery, in which the free market will keep prices down.
Yes the G1 (HTC Dream) will work without a Dataplan
Mar 9th
If you google “G1 without a dataplan” you will find countless posts, even from Official T-mobile sources, that the G1 will NOT work without a data plan. Some other smaller posts, you will find that some people have done it. I wanted to add a 2010 guide and say that YES officially, it DOES work.
Many people have access to Wifi and don’t need or want a data plan. They just want to buy a used G1 phone and make that their primary phone too. Here is how to do it: (I have an existing t-mobile account.)
Option #1:
1. Have the person you are buying it from put in their sim, and sign in. This is what I did. (Or if you have a friend that has a data plan, put in their card, OR just activate a data plan for a day then cancel it)
2. Then put in your Sim, and go delete all the account information and sign in with your Google account. You may want to be connected to a wifi area when you do this. The phone will go into 3G mode.
3. Then head over the “Market” and search and install “APNDroid” this turns off the data plan, kills the Edge Network and 3G access. You can turn on the data plan and buy it ala cart.
OR
Which involved hacking it up, and rooting it. You will still need to install “APNDroid”
That’s all there is and I can confirm it works perfectly. By the way, the phone is AWESOME. Open source is the killer app and will always triumph over locked down tight state controlled devices… ahem….
My favorite favorite Internet app, of all time, times ten. (No exaggeration)
Sep 3rd
There is very little software I can’t live without. There is hardly any software for the PC (sorry macs) that there isn’t dozens of free freeware alternatives that are just as good to the commercial applications.
There is one exception: AdMuncher.
This is the greatest piece of software that changes your entire browsing experience every single webpage, every single day. I can NOT live without it. I have become so accustomed to it, whenever I am using a computer without, I am dumbfounded and am convinced the site was hijacked by spammers (aka advertisers; same class).
I know what you’re thinking, “I have firefox and the adblocker extension that blocks ads.” You do, but it doesn’t. I’ve tried installing multiple ad-blocking plugins and the way they compare is: LAUGHABLE. The problem with the popular ad blockers is everyone works around them. Some for some reason, nobody pays attention to Admuncher.
Here is an example I made right this minute.
It’s seamless, tiny memory & CPU footprint, fully customizable, and 99.999% of all sites work with it just fine. It also blocks hulu video ads! When a commercial is set to come up a “AdMuncher Blocked this Ad” for a split second, then your show continues. Saves bandwidth, pages load faster, no annoying flashing ads, I love it. Many people will not switch to a MAC just because of this one piece of software.
All for $20-3$30? YES! That’s what I’m talking about.
So it’s with a sort of split desire I highly recommend this software.
1. If everyone uses it, the advertisers will just become more creative and work around it.
2. What do I care if you see ads all day?
It also keeps track of how many ads it blocks. This are all ads that Firefox’s Adblocker MISSED:
Ad Muncher Usage Statistics for v4.72 Build 30400/2235
Adverts removed by Ad Muncher: 328,444
Approximate bandwidth saved: 2,565 MB
Counter started: January 8, 2009
That’s a lot of missed annoyance. Picking up a copy use it for a month and if you’re not thrilled, leave me some negative comments below. 
Admuncher.com
Google Docs Announces Templates
Jul 17th
Google’s Docs (Awesome) now has hundred of useful Google Doc’s Templates. Very cool.