Blog.amhill

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Posts Tagged technology

Product Review: Roku Box

Feb 13

Posted by Aaron in Reviews | 1 Comment

We’ve been Netflix subscribers for a while, and we use both the DVD rental service (2 at a time) as well as the Internet streaming service; Sullivan likes to watch kids shows on there, and I’ll watch some movies that I find too dubious to get on disc (they end up being good slightly less than half the time).

A while back, I had queried the Internet community about their feelings on the Roku box, a third-party product that streams Netflix movies directly to a television set. I had heard good things about it, but wanted some opinions from people I trust.

The general opinion was that it does indeed work as described, and the only negative thing I heard about it, anywhere, was simply that you have to add things to your queue via a computer, rather than browsing on the Roku itself. That seemed a very reasonable limitation, so we decided it was worth it to take the plunge. Read the rest of this entry »

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Linux FTW: Quake-style terminal window

Jan 22

Posted by Aaron in Geekery | 6 Comments

Long ago (mid-90’s), there was a revolutionary 3-d first-person-shooter game called “Quake”, made by id Software, the same people that made DooM a few years before.

Quake had this really cool feature where you could press the ~ key at anytime during the game and a terminal window would drop down from the top of the screen. This terminal screen could be used for anything from chatting to changing maps and more. It was sweet.

Since then, there have been many attempts at replicating the functionality in both Mac and Linux environments, where it is still common to use a terminal window with some regularity.

One such software package, Guake, has become a personal favorite of mine. It’s very simple; no bells or whistles other than the ability to adjust the Opacity. My only beef with it was simply that the terminal would just pop up on the screen rather than drop down from the top. Totally superficial — but what’s the point of using an open-source OS if you can’t customize it to do exactly what you want?

Last night, I figured out how to do it. And it’s glorious (video demo after the jump). Read the rest of this entry »

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In Search of: Network-shareable Photo Organization Solution

Jan 20

Posted by Aaron in Geekery | 4 Comments

Ok, so we have this problem at my job.

We have this fileserver for the marketing team. It’s got photos in it. Lots and lots of photos. It also has Photoshop files, Indesign files, Illustrator files, some videos, and other bits — but it’s mostly Photos. We have so many photos that our network admin had us move off of the main fileserver and onto our own special one that is not backed up with the nightly backups.

Having lots of photos presents its own problems, of course. One must organize large collections. We spend an inordinate amount of time searching for Photos — even those that are used relatively often. When we’re looking for photos that match a theme, it’s even worse because we have to iteratively look through each one.

Does anyone have any suggestions for software packages that would help with this?

Most of the ones I’ve seen that organize the photos (Picasa, Adobe Bridge, FSpot) do not share the tags / categories with others. It is not enough to simply organize them by date — we really need the ability to tag them based on who’s in them, what event they are from, the location, and any abstract descriptors we can think of.

We’ve considered using FlickR, but I’d prefer to keep these files off the cloud, mostly for maintenance reasons.

Basically, what we need is a Digital Asset Management solution that does the following things: Read the rest of this entry »

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Perspective

Dec 16

Posted by Aaron in Geekery | 4 Comments

Just caught this tweet from a colleague:

“Mom, I have a call at 1:30 so don’t use the internet.” HAHAHAHAHAHHAHA

He was, of course, lampooning one of his friends who has the misfortune of visiting his parents who are still apparently using dial-up Internet. It took me back for a moment:

Back Then (1991)

When I was 11, our incoming Freshmen at IU East were just being born. The Internet, as we know it, did not exist.

We had a 486 SX desktop computer with a processor that was 25MHz, a 121 MB hard drive, 1MB graphics card capable of 256 color graphics, and 4 MB of RAM. (a later upgrade to 8MB cost $160) The modem we had, which connected over landline, would tie up our phone while I used it;  it could also only transfer 2400 bps (aka “baud”). (note that the lowercase “b” there indicates BITS and not BYTES. 2400 bps is roughly equal to 300 bytes per second, or Bps)

My friends and I would connect to local bulletin-board systems (BBS’s), which were kind of like websites: there was mail features, multi-user games, files to download, and you could communicate with people far away via mail relay services like FIDONet. To give you an idea about speed: when you would load a “page” on the BBS (login screen, a game, a filelist, etc.) you could literally see the text appear on the screen as it was received. It was that slow.

Downloading a single image (hot girls, funny pictures, desktop wallpaper, etc.) took anywhere from a solid minute for a small (15 kilobyte) image. A larger image, say 50kB, would take about 3 minutes. For a frame of reference, the banner at the top of this blog, featuring my picture and “Two-year-olds think I’m awesome”, is 22kB (about a minute and a half) and the entire web page is roughly 500kB.

That would have taken a half-hour. Just to load http://blog.amhill.net.

I am not even kidding. Read the rest of this entry »

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Opting Out of Comcast’s Domain Hijacker Service

Oct 3

Posted by Aaron in Geekery | 8 Comments

A couple weeks ago, I mistyped a web address in my browser and I was taken to a page run by Comcast that displayed many ads related to the words in the URL I entered. This phenomenon was covered by Slashdot and other sources. If you’ve followed me for a while, you may have seen my previous rants regarding Domaineers such as Kevin Hamm; He made deals with the countries of Colombia (.co) and Cameroon (.cm) to force any mistyped URLs to those domains (ie. google.co, google.cm) to be routed through one of his ad-laden content-light websites.

This Comcast Domain Helper service is the same sort of racket — you type in an incorrect URL, and Comcast shows you a page rich with referral links, advertisemets, and other click-thru advertising.

Anyways — what follows are instructions on “opting out” of the domain helper service, with thanks to Bonnie from Comcast, who directed me to the solution initially, as well as Matt McKimmy who suggested an alternate solution. Read the rest of this entry »

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