Monthly Archives: March, 2006

Firefox 2 Alpha Ramblings

Written by jciv on March 22, 2006 — Leave a Comment

Firefox 2 Alpha, branded Bon Echo, was just released. As usual with Firefox releases, it was announced on a number of big websites before it was officially ready. I downloaded it a day early too, but I knew what I was getting. This is an Alpha release meaning it is for testing, not for most [...]

Posted in rant, review

Canon Powershot S2 IS

Written by jciv on March 21, 2006 — Leave a Comment

Several months ago I decided it was finally time to buy a good digital camera. I have been wanting a good one for years but was never really happy with the ones anywhere near my price range. Previously the best I had was a 1.2 megapixel “keychain” camera. Anything would be a huge improvement, but [...]

Posted in camera, review

Techie Practical Joke

Written by jciv on March 20, 2006 — Leave a Comment

If you ever needed to pull a practical joke on a techie, this would be a good one. It takes some setup time, but seems well worth it. We all know keyboards can collect a lot of dirt. What if when your victim returns they find plants growing from between the keys? Johannes gives an [...]

Posted in links

High Resolution Gaming

Written by jciv on March 19, 2006 — Leave a Comment

plastk:net is a blog run by a guy researching multi-monitor game interfaces and notification systems. Looks like a lot of fun. He currently has Quake 3 going on 24 monitors at a resolution of 10240×3072. Even if you aren’t a gamer, that would be awesome to play. I play games some, but usually suck. My [...]

Posted in links

Emerge Failed

Written by jciv on March 17, 2006 — Leave a Comment

Don’t know exactly what happened, but when I checked on my linux box today hoping the KDE 3.5 compile was finally done, I saw bootup stuff on the screen. Something had caused it to reset (could have something to do with the 100% disk usage). /var/log/emerge.log says I got up to 106 of 277 of [...]

Posted in operating systems

Gentoo Upgrade

Written by jciv on March 16, 2006 — Leave a Comment

In my earlier post I talked about all kinds of Operating System stuff. One of those being my Gentoo upgrade. On one hand, upgrading Gentoo is really simple. You just emerge -U world. But then you get the notice at the end that there are some config files that need updating. That is where it [...]

Posted in operating systems

WordPress Review

Written by jciv on March 15, 2006 — Leave a Comment

I haven’t used WordPress much, but so far so good (mostly). The install page mentioned “the Famous 5-minute install.” I didn’t time it, but I bet it was pretty close to that. I am pretty amazed at how easy it was to setup. And the options and customizability is great, far better than blogger. I [...]

Posted in rant, review

OS Ramblings

Written by jciv on March 15, 2006 — 1 Comment

I don’t use Linux much (I used to use it more than Windows at the labs at school) but rather than just install a pre-setup desktop distro, I decided to go with Gentoo for my own box. I have learned a lot about Linux this way. There is no better way to learn about it [...]

Posted in operating systems

Torn Up Credit Card Application

Written by jciv on March 15, 2006 — 1 Comment

Rob Cockerham decided to see what would happen if he tore up a new credit card application, taped it back together, filled it out, changed his address, entered a cell phone number, and sent it back. Assuming you accidentally tore your application into 16 pieces, he has good news for you. Chase will happily send [...]

Posted in scams

Skins and Themes

Written by jciv on March 15, 2006 — 1 Comment

Is anyone else tired of the default WordPress theme “based on the famous Kubrick?” I can’t stand it anymore. Its not that it is a bad design, it is that so many blogs use it. It gets boring after a while. There are lots and lots of themes available to choose from. But the only [...]

Posted in rant