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That’s all, folks

Sunday, November 18th, 2012

It’s been over two years since I posted anything new here. Actually, I’m mostly tweeting, using Google+ and posting to some other group blogs. I do get traffic from people who find the information on this blog useful. As of now, I don’t think anything is so outdated that it is wrong… but use caution. [...]

Uniden Scanner Close-Call Range Test

Friday, August 27th, 2010

How far away does the “Close Call” feature on Uniden scanners work? I just tried a test in a suburban area in a large parking lot. An FRS radio worked reliably at 100 feet and 80% of the time at 250 feet. One thing I did notice was that if the signal gradually increases, such [...]

Web Server Speed Comparisons

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009

I just tried a couple of tests by posting a 155k file on a few types of web servers to measure the load time. DNS was factored out and all client side caches were cleared. Rackspace CloudServer 1.35 to 1.65 seconds Rackspace VPS running Apache 2, consistently 1.05 seconds LimeLight CDN 0.404 seconds The differences [...]

Review of AirTran’s Wireless Internet

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

I tried AirTran’s Internet service on a recent flight. The provider was GoGo. The trip from Atlanta to Seattle had about 3 hours of usable time for $12.99. It was decent enough for email and web. I was able to establish a Skype connection, but not hold a conversation. The transit speed was about 1.6Mbps [...]

Podcasts I’m Currently Listening To

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

Today I asked some of my friends to Audio Book recommendations because I’m going to use up my credits on Audible.com and cancel for a while. I have well over 10 days of podcasts and audiobooks that are backlogged, with more arriving each day, so I figure I’ll save the fee until next year. I [...]

Using Smart Playlists to Manage Podcasts

Monday, May 11th, 2009

I’m sure I’m not the first to do this, but I just figured out you can create a “smart playlist” on your iPod to show the most recently downloaded podcasts. This makes it much easier to listen to new media instead of searching the 50 podcast feeds.

The CAPTCHAs found me out – I am, in fact, a machine

Monday, March 16th, 2009

I guess I’m a machine. I can’t get these CAPTCHAs from MegaUpload.com. I’ve been working on my own ray-traced CAPTCHA for a few weeks now, and I’m finding it very difficult to create a CAPTCHA that I can’t write software to break – unless it’s darn near impossible for a human to solve. I think [...]

Epoch 1234567890 = 2009-02-13 18:31:30

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

For those of you keeping track, the Unix Epoch will be 1234567890 on Feb 13th. (Exact time depending on your Time Zone… unless you want to be UTC about it.)

No longer excited about OLPC

Friday, February 15th, 2008

I eagerly ordered one of the One Laptop Per Child laptops in late November. While the unit looks really novel and many features (daylight readable screen, long battery life, swivel to e-book reader screen) make me drool, I’m a lot less enchanted this week.

I have had the opportunity to see a few units from friends, and while they are all very impressed with the unit, I’ve been underwhelmed by the speed. It seems like you spend a lot of time waiting. It frequently runs so slow that they just reboot it. Granted, my friends mostly try to stretch the limit on hardware, but I have yet to see it load anything quickly, even the bundled applications.

Learning Sign Language

Sunday, October 7th, 2007

Over the summer I took a class in American Sign Language. I was very impressed and enjoyed it a lot. It’s always been one of those skills I wanted to pick up (along with other languages, flying, etc.) so I finally did it. I have taken foreign language classes before, but always found them to [...]

                  

 
     
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