May 2012
3 posts
1-800-style Data
Today, the CTO of Verizon Wireless again brought up the concept of billing content providers for data headed to wireless subscribers. AT&T has brought this up in the past as well. Today, with the high penetration of capped data plans, Im significantly less opposed to this idea…executed a certain way…than I once was. Heck, I might even be in favor of it, given some...
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Resurrecting a Suspended Skype Account
Sometime over the past weekend my Skype account, which I’ve had for eight-plus years, got suspended. Something about someone maybe accessing it in an unauthorized manner. Not that this didn’t happen…I had a weak password on the account…but my guess is that I simply signed on from a different IP and that somehow set off all kinds of alarms. I’ll probably never know...
BBC Essential Mix
If you’re into dance/drum ‘n’ bass/house/etc. style music, the BBC has a weekly two-hour mix from a featured artist (including such names as Groove Armada, Daft Punk and Skrillex). It’s called the Essential Mix and it’s available online. This week’s selection replaces last week’s with no recourse…if you stick to the BBC’s own site. The...
March 2012
2 posts
Terminal Colors in PHP
Say you’re using PHP via its CLI (command line interface) on Bash (probably via SSH). You want to show colors for some reason (e.g. that non-standard test script that I wrote recently, to be replaced with PHPUnit momentarily). Colorizing text is fortunately surprisingly easy, though I found it rather difficult to find the magical escaped strings that you need to perform the colorization.
So...
Spectrum in Denver
So with all the news of T-Mobile adding 3G on PCS frequencies (iPhone and iPad compatible), I had to check out how much spectrum in the various bands the “big five” (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Leap/CricKet in this case) have here in the Denver metro…
NOTE: The numbers after the overall MHz per band are the bandwidths of each license. Most licenses are paired...
February 2012
13 posts
Pros of Installing Windows 7 From A Flash Drive
Today I’m upgrading two friends’ computers to Windows 7 (a Dell Inspiron 1525 and an Inspiron 1420 for those interested in boring minutiae). I’m using a flash drive as the installation media, thanks to this tool. There are a few big benefits from using flash instead of a DVD to perform the installation, and since every PC I’ve come across new enough for Windows 7 supports...
Windows 7 ISOs
I’m getting a little off-track here, but this is actually quite useful: a list of ISO images for the various versions of Windows 7. The downloads are from Microsoft, so they’re pretty fast (I’m pulling down one at 2.2 MB/s, give or take, thanks to DownThemAll). They also include the option to grab Service Pack 1, versus the old RTM ISOs that I had stored on my computer....
Windows 8 on a Cr-48 Part 1: The Basics
I’m typing this post from my Cr-48. You know, the prototype Chromebook that Google was handing out a year and change ago? Well, this one’s different. It’s running Windows 8.
I’ll be posting over the next few days gems of wisdom (or something like that) that may make people’s experiences getting their Cr-48s up and running with WIndows 8 easier (all three of you).
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Windows 8 in VirtualBox
Today I installed Windows 8 (32-bit) into a VirtualBox VM. The process, once I figured out which settings to use, wasn’t all that difficult. I was even able to get 3D graphics (e.g. the Aero UI) to work. Here are a few things that may make things easier if you want to set up something similar:
I gave Win8 a 25GB partition. Really, 15GB or so should be fine, though with VBox’s dynamic...
Destinations from Denver: United, Southwest &...
Frontier Airlines today announced that they’ll be adding some more routes to, among other places, Denver. A few months from now, this means they’ll be serving 67 destinations from the airport, though this will drop as places like San Antonio, Aspen and Rockford are discontinued.
This announcement piqued my curiosity (and caused me to waste a fair amount of time as a result): how many...
REST + Controller in a few lines of PHP +...
I’m building an admin interface for this ”on the side.” One of the things I want in the project is a REST-style URL structure (e.g. /people/123 rather than /people.php?id=123). I also wanted all requests to be handled by one file, which would then divvy things up to other scripts/functions as needed. So I wanted a kind of micro-framework, but wanted to build it myself.
So I...
Adding Plain Text Types to Quick Look
I use a Mac as my main workstation. One of the annoying things about “stock” Quick Look (the handy space-bar-to-preview extension of the OS’s file manager, Finder) is that it won’t magically “pick up” the various programming language file types (e.g. YAML, Behat features) that I use regularly.
Fortunately, there is a solution. I’d recommend making a...
Superbowl XLVI - Ads and Streaming
Despite the fact that I’m a Packers fan by association, I rooted for the non-Patriots (aka the Giants in this case) this afternoon/evening. Glad they won.
In other news, the ads this year were decidedly less spectacular than usual. To be clear, the Doritos ads were fine, as was E-Trade. The Best Buy ad was a nice nerd moment for me, but it was otherwise unspectacular. The Avengers will be a...
My Flights in 2011
On the topic of flights (and acknowledging that I didn’t post anything yesterday), let’s see if I can list all the flights/airlines/aircraft types/airports I traversed in 2011. Should be fun, since if I stayed on one airline for the entire year I’d probably have low-tier elite status, and if I strung together the miles that I flew, I could go around the world (albeit just once).
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Southwest's New Fleet (sort of)
I fly Southwest Airlines a fair amount, thanks to their dollars-based reward program that works out quite well for holders of its credit card. So I’m used to trekking out to Concourse C of Denver International Airport, waiting by numbered posts to board and picking my seat once I get on the plane rather than well before. One thing I’ve noticed while flying them is they have just a tad...
Fixing Same-Domain Email Issues on a LAMP Server
Have a web server on one machine but host e-mail somewhere else? You might run into issues where web applications (e.g. ones that use PHP Mailer) will fail when trying to send mail to an address on the same domain. Specifically, I’m talking about the issue that took awhile to track down at work, where e-mails sent to addresses on the same domain from a CPanel/WHM box were failing with an...
A Quick Note on LogMeIn
For the uninitiated, LogMeIn is an online remote access service that can be had for free, or for-pay, with a variety of client types (Android, iPad, Windows, web-based via a full-on plugin or Java) and “server” compatibility with both WIndows and Mac OS. THe service is free for basic functionality, or cheap (per-computer anyway) if you want something more. I highly recommend it.
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League of Legends - When "Freemium" Works
I’m a bit biased, with 200+ play hours logged, however I think that League of Legends executes on the concept of “freemium” well without being obnoxious about it. This allows players who want to play for free to do so, increasing the size of the playing community and making the game more fun for paying members.
Speaking of paying members there are certain items that you have to...
January 2012
5 posts
New Computer Notes: Toshiba Satellite L745D-S4350...
My mom’s old Toshiba Satellite M55 (with an upgrade to 1.5GB of RAM) became very, very unreliable a few weeks ago. Its replacement arrived today. The new laptop is a fair-sized upgrade from the old one, with a 500GB hard drive, an HD-capable GPU and over five hours of battery life. However it took a little while to get the system running the way I wanted it to. Here’s what I did:
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Good Software Report: EA Origin
I have to give Electronic Arts props for their Origin game download software. The user interface is clear, performance is good (a 15.1GB download of Need for Speed The Run took about an hour, maxing out my 25+ Mbps cable connection) and it’s simple to pull in older EA games (e.g. Need for Speed Hot Pursuit…the new one) so that, should your computer fail, games can be downloaded quickly...
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Three Reasons I Like Frontier Airlines
In short, I like the amount of competition they add to Denver, the ability to pick and choose the amenities that you want (and pay for them a la carte or as part of a given fare tier), and the airline’s increasing service to small cities in a time where other low cost carriers (mainly Southwest) are heading in the opposite direction. More inof can be found on my (normal) blog…
[tap, tap, tap] Is This Thing On?
A fair amount has happened since I last updated this Tumblr blog. Examples include college, grad school and, more recently, turning 21. Which brings me to my goal for this site: post scraps of information that are too long for tweets but, in my opinion, too short for full blog posts. And public enough that I won’t just relegate the information to an access-limited Facebook or Google+ post.
...
April 2007
1 post
“…why, it’s a theory. You can’t see it, can’t touch it, it’s a theory. But what...”
– Sir Thomas More, A Man of All Seasons (Act II, Scene 1)