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Technology’s Infestation of my Life

Examples of how technology has permeated every single bit of my life.

More Ways to Digest What I’m Thinking

From 143 subscriptions, over the last 30 days I have read 6,426 items, shared 52 items, and emailed 12 items.

That’s the synopsis from Google Reader. If you’d like to see what I share (i.e. what I find interesting), you can read my Link Blog:
Andrew Ferguson’s Link Blog.

It’s a good way to see what I know and find out what I’m interested. Especially since I really hate to create echo chambers. I really try not to post links to things here unless I have something substantial to add.

At some point (and depending on if I get any requests and how many), I may integrate the AFdN feed and my link blog feed together.

1.5 TB for $76

I just bought an external 1.5TB hard drive for $81.38 from Dell.

You heard me right, for $67.99 + $7.99 shipping and $5.40 in taxes I got my hands on a SimpleTech 1.5TB SimpleDrive Pro Duo USB 2.0/eSata External Drive (FP-UFE2/1.5TB).

That’s 5.4 cents per a gigabyte, which is crazy low!

Amazon says that they should going for closer to $600.

I think that someone at Dell made a typo and instead of typing in 679.99, they punched 67.999 (and the computer just truncated the last digit).

Get’em while they hot and not sold out:

Dell/SimpleTech 1.5TB external HDD

Thanks to Matt for finding the link on Slickdeals

RescueTime

I’m trying out a new program called RescueTime. It’s a site/program designed to track what you do. And despite the potentially scary Big Brother implications, I think this will be a very interesting research/reflection opportunity.

First, some semi-technical background. RescueTime installs a program on your computer that sits in your tray and monitors what applications you are currently using and what websites you browse. It then uploads all the data to their server where it’s processed. You can tag applications and sites with the appropriate tags and then see how much time you spend using what programs/sites.

Thus, the interesting research/reflection opportunity. Exactly how much time do I spend on things: School? Email? Chatting? Blogging? Screwing around?

Better yet, how much time do I spend on the friggin’ computer?

So, place your bets in the comments.

You can place your bets as total time per an application/tag per a week (e.g. 10 hours of “communication” per a week which includes email and chatting) or as relative percent (e.g. twice as much time blogger as doing school related work).

Also feel free to ask clarifying questions (e.g. what programs count towards “school related work”?)

Guest Authoring at GottaBeMobile

Update: It’s up! Check it out: GottaBeAStudent and The Myth of Battery Life. Also a special thanks to Mom and Dad for A) proof reading it, and B) providing me with a title.

Starting later today, I’ll be doing a series of articles on GottaBeMobile.com that deals with tablet issues from a student perspective. We’ll, at least from my perspective (if you know me, you know that I can bring a unique perspective to anything).

GottaBeMobile is the site for Tablet PC information, so it’s a pretty big honor to write for them.

I also need to take a moment to point out the incredible irony that finds me, an engineer, writing in a situation like this. One of the reasons I went to Mines was to get away from all the writing that high school and humanities classes had. Yet, I find my self blogging several times a week on my personal site and writing articles for two outside sites.

In any event, it’s going to be more of an article based series, rather than the short and informative posting I do like to do at StudentTabletPC.com. However, I think many will find them just as helpful.

I’ll post again when I put up the first article later today.

I’d also like to thank Rob for giving me (and STPC) a chance to expand my (our) audience and Tracy for letting me get away with it 😉 . Rob was also very helpful and kind in helping me make the decision to contribute to GBM, including helping me with a list of topics.

Windows 3.11

In my attempts to procrastinate homework, I decided to relive some childhood memories and install Window 3.11. I’d forgotten how much of a pain in the ass it was to install it.

First, you need a boot disk. This is actually pretty easy to get, just head over to BootDisk.com and pick the one you need. Then you need to fdisk and then format c:. These are the two critical steps that I always seem to forget, even Back in the Day™ when Windows 3.11 is what I actually used.

After that, it’s pretty easy. Pop in the MS-DOS disks and install that, then pop in Windows 3.11 disks and install that.

What amazes me is how fast it starts up. Including the BIOS, it takes 9.46 seconds to get into Windows. 9.46 seconds!!!

I’m going to try to get networking and Internet Explorer setup and installed…could be interesting.

For those who care, I’m doing this all in Virtual PC 2007.

GBM Reader Meetup

What I spent my Saturday doing:

From studenttabletpc.com:

All in all, this is one of the best meetups of any kind I’ve ever been to. For whatever reason, I think tablet owners are even more passionate then bloggers. Part of this might be the higher barrier to entry – you have to drop at least a couple hundred bucks to get into the tablet/UMPC club versus almost nothing for a blogger. The other part might be tableteers extreme dedication to their babies devices, despite the dearth of them (we gotta band together, ya know?!).

One of the best/most exciting parts was finally being able to meet the people I read online in meatspace. I should start a list of who I read and have met and who I need to meet. Hmmmm.

Moving In and Setting Up

I was finally able to move in to my place on Saturday. We (Mom, Dad, Uncle Danny, and myself) managed to do the entire move in just one trip with two Subaru’s and Danny’s truck. Thanks for helping everybody.

My new address is up on Facebook if you want to send me something…even an empty envelope, although hopefully something nice.

I may also post pictures sometime soon, we’ll see.

What I’m really excited for1 is not having to buy Internet. Instead, I’m sharing it with Ben and Co. via the miracles of WDS. Using two Linksys routers, the DD-WRT firmware upgrade, and this spiffy guide: DD-WRT Tutorial 2: Extend Range with WDS I was able to get that wonderful series of tubes to extend all the way from Ben and Co. side of the complex to my side. In fact, we could theoretically share with anyone know since I literally live the greatest distance away from Ben and Co. then any other unit in this complex.

1The actual exciting part is that I save tons of money over the year and I got to play around with/set up WDS.

[tags]wds, apartment, golden, colorado, linksys, router, ddwrt, dd-wrt, series of tubes[/tags]

First Cell Phone Spam

I received my first ever piece of cell phone spam the other day. I was rather incredulous about getting it, but one can’t deny the fact that it was sitting there on my cellphone.

The FCC has had a law banning the spamming of cellphones for a little over three years now. The law is supposed to “outlaw all unauthorized text messages to mobile phones and pagers unless the owner has given permission.” [1]

My text was a pump and dump scheme that promised the stock to be an “easy tripler [sic]” and stating that “It’ll be $2 within a week.”

The brevity of the message leads me to believe that the spam was targeted at cellphones. I’m actually surprised that I haven’t received more text spams, considering the small finite set of cellphone numbers there are and the ease at which they can be spam’d. I won’t go into the details, but I could very easily write a 10 line PHP program that could spam all phones in the US.

Hopefully this won’t become a recurring issue…other I might have to break my collapsible bat out1.

[1] http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/08/04/HNbancellphonespam_1.html

1This is actually just a figure of speech. I don’t own a collapsible bat (or a regular bat for that matter, except for the one I have in my bedroom in Seattle). The point being, just please don’t spam my cell phone anymore.

JavaScript Geotagging Bookmarklet for Google Maps

Here’s a bookmarklet I made after I found out Google Maps had an API function (thanks to tech-recipes via Lifehacker) I could tap into (makes sense in retrospect).

I use the bookmarklet when I’m geotagging my pictures in flickr (over 3,500 geotagged photos and counting).

I used to use a Greasemonkey script, but using the API is much faster (I don’t have to reload the page) and works more consistently (if I Google search for a location, the Greasemonkey script doesn’t work).

Just drag and drop the following link to your tool bar:

Google Map Geotag

[tags]google maps, javascript, flickr, geotag, geotagging, geotagged[/tags]