In a previous post, I’d discussed the Energizer batteries and charger I’d purchased, only to be disapointed by the chargers’ lack of 220v capability.  At Patrick from OMG’s recommendation, I ordered a set of NiZn AAs from PowerGenix, and am pretty pleased overall. In addition to better flash-charging performance (Which is amazingly hard to quantify, so you’ll [...]

This won’t be my usual excessively verbose review, as I haven’t really had a chance to dive into the subject matter yet, but I picked up the new Barry Eisler short-story  (and preview of this upcoming book) last night, and wish I’d have known about Smashwords sooner. Smashwords’ claim to fame is “Your ebook, your [...]

One of the features of the Makery (now the defacto name for the Omaha Maker Group’s space) is a standing webcam that publishes live photos of the space to the Internet.  We have a few USB webcams hooked up to a PC running YawCam, which is a free (as in beer) webcam package written in [...]

Last night, I installed new side mirrors on my Jetta, to replace the stock mirrors whose anti-glare coating had started to discolor. Technically, I’ve only replaced the drivers’ side, so far, but I ordered both mirrors and the process is the same for both sides. The replacement mirrors that I purchased came from DubStop Imports, [...]

Tonight found me in a debate about OSS firewall platforms for about the 5th time this week. It’s generally my position that BSD-based firewalls (like pfsense or m0n0wall) are superior to Linux-based ones (like DD-WRT).  Anyhow, it got me wondering just how old my own M0n0wall install was. Turns out, the answer was “too old [...]

Tonight, I picked up a pair of Shimano MD86 bike shoes.  I’ve wanted to try clipless pedals for some time, and have had the pedals for almost a year, but just never got around to finding shoes. I found this particular pair on clearance at Scheels.  Google Shopper (on my phone) said that list price [...]

Since I started my document-scanning project, I’ve been backing the scanned data up to my local file server, manually at first, and then with Xcopy.  That lead to a few problems when documents would get moved, so I started purging the backup copy each time and doing a full copy instead.  That worked fine (gigabit [...]

Monday night, our aging Dish Network DVR612′s hard drive died.  It started with error code #311 when trying to access recorded shows, and popped up complaining about the drive when I restarted the box.  Old hardware dying, however, isn’t the interesting part.

I was finally troubled last weekend to upgrade my main workstation to Windows 7, though not for the reasons you might think.  You might have been reading a year or so ago when I built Phenomenon, my then-new Quad-core AMD Phenom-based PC.  At the time, I just slapped my existing Raptor hard drive in, and [...]

This past week, Becky and I decided to rearrange the living room a bit, as we seem to do every few months.  This time, we shifted the shelf that the TV sits on so that it’s flat against the wall (as opposed to angled out, with stereo gear on a small table behind it).  To [...]