Scott Gruby, author of the fabulous ReceiptWallet, recently raved about Little Snapper over my personal favorite, SnapzProX. I have a license for LittleSnapper as a result of the recently ended and always fabulous MacHeist III . Click to read on.
(more)At the prompting of my friend Jay, and with a surprise refund from the Federal Government, Jay suggested it was time to upgrade my typing experience. I sit here, in front of my computer all day long, and sometimes all night long, doing what? Typing. Mousing, Using the computer. One would think that the three most important things are: chair, monitors, and input devices. Click read to read the rest.
(more)Just heard some thunder, and thought to look at the radar before going to sleep. Take a look at this lightning map — it’s like that shadow monster from Lost is heading straight for DC. Whee! Should be fun.
I was reading a post over at AutoBlog Green and started to think about why Biking across America would help us save money on gas. And in my calculations, biking actually is significantly less green than driving a pure electric vehicle.
Most EV companies say you pay about 2c/mile for an electric vehicle to run. Power that from solar or wind sources, and you have ZERO emissions. For our estimates, lets assume DOUBLE that estimate, or 4c/mile for an EV.
Take a gasoline car. Average fuel economy is about 22mpg. Though US average for regular was put at $3.69 yesterday, I’m going to use $4, because that’s what it will be in a month. Assuming you have an average car, you are paying 18c/mile for your petrol sucking car. Plus you are spewing CO2 emissions in the air; not as much as your parents were, but there are emissions.
Now look at biking, cycling or generally using a bicycle. Using a few different sites on the web, they average about 1000 calories for biking 15mph for 1 hour. I don’t know if this assumes hilly or flat terrain, but I don’t care — the number seems reasonable. For healthy food, not power bars but actual food with health value, I’m guessing you pay about $4 for 1000 calories. The calories have got to be sustainable over 8 hours of biking, and I’m guessing 32 power bars (at 230 cals per bar) isn’t the ideal consumption for long term performance. 
At $4/1kcal, you are paying an astonishing 26c/mile. And you’d like to think that biking is emissions-free, but it isn’t. All of your food is shipped and carted around this great country on diesel trains, trucks and boats, spewing more CO2 into the environment, just to process your healthy food for you to burn 26c/mile, forcing you to breathe all that pollution along the way, stupid bike.
But for skeptics, let us say $2 for 1000 calories. you are still at 13c/mile, 3+ times more expensive than our DOUBLED estimate per mile for an EV.
And on top of that, YOU are spewing CO2 into the environment!!! At a much greater rate than if you were sitting in a nice, quiet, efficient and ZERO EMISSIONS EV.
Bottom Line: Stop biking, you pollution loving hippies, and get yourself an EV.
Where to get an EV? The Aptera does 85mph for 40-60 miles on pure electric, and you can get up to 120mpg for longer drives, all for $29,900 (or the pure EV for $26,900 with 120 mile range). Or consider the Triac that does 80mph for 100 miles, and only costs $19,995. Or my favorite and future vehicle, the Venture One that does 0-60 in 7 seconds, goes 100mph, with all three types (1 EV, 2 gas-hybrids) doing better than 100mpg, and does it all while you feel like you are flying a fighter jet. Pricing between $18,000 and $23,000. Excellent.
PS — I guess you could almost say that food these days isn’t really green. So stop eating America! Save the environment!
PPS — Just kidding.
What a friggin’ cryptic error message, Apple. Your website on the WWAN Support Update page states all I need is OS X 10.4.8 and an Intel-based Macintosh Portable. Well, I sort of meet those criteria. Granted, I’ve got OS X 10.4.11, and I think the Intel-based Macbook Pro I have meets that Macintosh abstract inconsistent naming convention. So why oh why can’t I install you, my pretty WWAN Support? All I want to do is connect my Sprint Sanyo Katana DLX via Bluetooth (hell, I’ll even do it via USB if I must) to gain access to all the EVDO goodness I’m paying for. I even am paying for the PAM (Phone As Modem) plan with Sprint to make this work. I thought you were supposed to make things easy, Apple?
Apple Logo surrounded by razor wire used without permission; From the cover of Wired 16|04. © 2008 Wired Magazine.
I won’t bore the lot of you that could give two cents for what information I am about to offer. It’s extremely geeky, but it sucked up my entire evening of what could have been a productive night. To allow the rest of you having this problem to enjoy a productive and happy evening without banging your head against a wall, I’m sharing my solution to this annoying problem.
Don’t wanna read my blatherings? Add this to your ~/.ssh/config:
Voila, no more delays. No server config changes either. Hope you don’t have to use Kerberos! 
Read on to see how I got to this solution.
(more)So today I was happy to see my Joost Beta invite in my inbox. I decided to install it and take a run around. I now use a Mac, so my experience is solely Mac-based, no Windows here. I have a MacBook Pro Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33Ghz with 2GB of memory, connected to my network at 1Gbps, and my Internet connection is Verizon FIOS at 30Mbps down, 5Mbps up. My MBP is connected to an external Dell 24” widescreen monitor at 1920×1200.
The download took about 15 seconds for the 17MB dmg download, Firefox reporting a download speed of 1045Kbps, or about 8mbps. I was encouraged by this, hoping the video experience would be just as snappy.
Not so. Click more to read on.
(more)I got a MacBook Pro in December 2006 and have been quite happy with it. I have a SimpleTech SimpleShare NAS on my network that holds my MP3s, documents, photos, etc. I had been using SMB/CIFS to connect to the SimpleShare drive, but I read somewhere that CIFS is slower than NFS, and I wanted to try. SimpleTech has instructions for how to connect from an OSX box, so I figured it would be easy.
Trouble is that the SimpleShare documentation mentions NFS once, but doesn’t say how it works. Gack. Google to the rescue.
Click to read on.
(more)
Last week Venture Vehicles announced a new kind of green hybrid, the VentureOne. I was reading the AutoBlogGreen on the VentureOne: 100mpg, 0-60 in 5 seconds, and sweet looking to boot! They are going to run about USD$20,000, and I'd be onboard to buy one. Gotta start saving for that gadget!
That's pretty much what my doctor said to me on Tuesday. My cholesterol is 300+ and I weigh 263.4 pounds, not horrible for someone 6' 4" tall but still not great, and according to my doctor I have a very good chance of dying of some heart disease related death in the next 10 years unless I do something about it. I thought drinking grapefruit juice and taking my Omega-3 daily supplement would do it, and maybe it has, but the doc said that wasn't enough.I'm a big geek, serial entrepreneur and idea guy. I've been called names, such as PHP Guru, MySQL DBA, BOFH, Security God, etc. That and Peter-Peter-Pumpkin-Eater.
The image in the header is © Peter Beckman.
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DabbleDB, a new Web 2.0 way to manage databases. VERY very slick. Watch the demo.
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