So maybe it’s re-post Ars Technica article day for me, but I found it interesting to see this as a featured article.
I’ve been to the Heritage Collection for a holiday party and found the place to be very well curated and manicured. If you like GM history, then this is definitely a must see in the Detroit area.
GM’s Heritage Collection - Ars Technica (Cars Technica) article
Of all the computers I’ve owned in my life, none were more exhilarating and exciting as the Commodore Amiga 500. Sure, the short time with the Vic-20 and then the long tenure with the Commodore 64 were very forming of my being, but the sheer innovation and wow-factor of the Amiga were legendary!
Ars Technica has a great blast from the past with their new article on the Amiga 500.
The Amiga just turned 30 years old this week. It’s amazing how time flies. I can still remembering playing all those awesome Psygnosis games in my basement!
Give it a read, you’ll really enjoy it if you are or were an Amiga fan or even if you want a little history lesson.
So, once in a lifetime we get Pi day to 10 digits. March 14, 2015 at 09:26:53 seconds. Pretty fun number stuff if you ask me. What else is cool is that Albert Einstein’s birth date is March 14.
So take today to enjoy 3.141592653 and heck, grab yourself a piece of pie!
I have been a big fan of Almico’s SpeedFan for probably as many years as it’s been out. I used to be in love with the app because I overclocked the heck out of my computers and wanted to keep track of various temperatures: CPU, GPU, Chipset, Case, and others. I also wanted to keep track of the RPMs of the fans associated with those components.
As I have grown up (some say I haven’t - I say I haven’t), I’ve shifted my love of SpeedFan to be more of a sanity-app. I want to slow the speed of my various fans so it doesn’t sound like I work and play in a wind tunnel. SpeedFan does a great job with this function, really, it does!
The one that has plagued me ever since moving to Windows 7, however, has been that I could never get SpeedFan to start on its own. Whether it be via placing a shortcut in the Startup group or making a scheduled task, it just never worked. I had to manually start it every time I start up my computer. Pain in the ass if you ask me.
That all changed today when I stumbled upon this simple YouTube video that pointed out that I needed to set a delay before it started. Wallah. Lo and behold. It works.
I’m not normally looking to make changes like this… who am I kidding? Of course I am. I’m a speed freak. I love pushing my technology to the limit.
Thanks to reddit user erythrocytes64, you can make a simple change to a Chrome flag.
Go into Chrome and surf to chrome://flags/#max-tiles-for-interest-area. Set that to 512 instead of the default (default is usually 128). At the bottom, it will have a Relaunch Now button. Click that.
So, was my real-world performance that much better on my Nexus 5? I’m not really that sure. I don’t do a TON of browsing using my Chrome browser. I usually digest most of my news and information via Twitter, with an occasional click-through to a web page that is referenced.
Well, I clicked through to an article and scrolled down as a test. Wow, very very fast. I did a test between Chrome and Chrome Beta on my phone and found that the Chrome browser that I made the changes on scrolled much faster.
How do you feel when you’re at a public place, like a Starbucks, and you search for a wireless network and you are given a few options, leading you to choose the one that you get as a benefit of being a subscriber.
At this Starbucks in Troy, MI, for instance, I was given the option to choose AT&T’s wireless network that is part of the Starbucks or the XFinity WiFi that must be at a nearby business. For the first time in my life, I chose the XFinity network because I felt it would be more reliable than AT&T’s and I’d be getting some use out of my XFinity account. You have to log into the XFinity network with your XFinity credentials to use the wireless network.
Anyway, long story getting long, I’ll make it short. The network just dropped me after a few minutes. I was in the middle of sending a few emails and an error popped up in Postbox (I still love using that for my Windows e-mail client of choice) saying that the SMTP connection couldn’t be made.
So AT&T, thanks for being more reliable. XFinity, I’m disappointed.
The other day, we were all driving in the car, perhaps on the way to Easter at my mom’s house after visiting my dad at the cemetery. Christopher asks Michelle for some water and says, “Water, it never gets old!”
Man, that guy….
We use Dropbox at work and I also use Dropbox personally. Prior to just recently, to use both of my Dropbox accounts, I had to use DropboxPortableAHK alongside the standard Dropbox client (for Windows). It worked about 99.8% as well as I wanted it to. Every now and again, the portable version would get stuck updating itself. I’d have to kill the process and relaunch it.
Now, Dropbox lets business users link their personal account… this makes things much easier. I always like to use the official software with the various services I use in my internet/cloud living.
So if you’ve been wondering about how to use both business and personal accounts, your answer is now officially supported by Dropbox.
So I’m reading this article over at Ars Technica that talks about how Windows XP is near its end of life for support from Microsoft (April 8). It has all kinds of graphs and charts that say one thing: Microsoft is still winning the OS and browser war. What else it shows is that with only a few weeks left for Windows XP to stop being supported, Microsoft isn’t listening to its customer base. The proof is in the numbers.
Microsoft can’t keep a skeleton crew of engineers and developers together to keep supporting it? I guess that begs the question: When is “enough”, enough?
Side note: In reading another article at Ars Technica, I came across this site that tells the user whether or not they are running Windows XP. I guess I never consider that the MAJORITY of people out there probably don’t know what OS they are running. Am I running XP?
Me, I’m a fairly early-adopter. I’ve slowed down a bit as my having time to fix computer grief is waning as my kids get older and more involved in what used to be “my” free time. Being this early-adopter, however, really didn’t cause me any issues with Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 for my home PC.
So what does that mean? I guess MSFT should kill XP… it’s old. Tired. Or is it?
I recently made the switch from an HTC One that I got back in May, my first Android phone, to the Google Nexus 5.
Why did I do this? There are a few reasons, but one of them was that I wanted to have a phone that ran Google’s most current version of Android without having to go through hoops, like having to unlock my bootloader and install an alternate ROM, like Cyanogenmod 10, and then 11 for KitKat.
I also wanted to be able to use my phone as a hotspot without having to do the activity above, as Cyanogenmod allowed me to tether my phone, as it bypassed any lock my carrier had on this. I have unlimited data and do not want to switch my plan by enabling a shared data plan on my account.
I was looking around the ’net to see if I could find out how to enable USB Tethering with Windows 7 and ran into this article, which explains how to use your Nexus 5 as a Portable Wi-Fi Hotspot. Rather than writing the article myself, I’ll just share it. :)
Let’s give this one more try.
Yes, I want to know. Thanks for the help. Just testing a microblogging plugin.
Seriously…the family dog helps you find buried treasure on a walk. Unbelievable. 10M dollars. That’s way cooler than winning the lottery!
Buried treasure, $10M in gold coins!
What would you do with that kind off treasure? Do you get taxed on something like that?
Me, I’d get out of Dodge and take my family on a cruise around the world and come back and chill out, building an even larger evil empire!
I don’t usually see Ars Technica talking about World of Warcraft. Maybe I’m not looking for it, either. As a person who has 2 level 90s and a handful of toons in the 70s, I find the option to purchase 90s appealing. What I really want Blizzard to do is allow for users to purchase a prorated option for leveling toons to 90. What if I want my level 71 Monk to be 90? Can’t I pay a fraction of that cost?
I thought I loved the HTC One. I was wrong. I LOVE the Nexus 5. Why?
Unlocked right from the get go. Tethering on AT&T without having to run alternate ROM, splendid. Seemingly less or no issues with group text or MMS like I had with the HTC One. I even had those issues running Cyanogenmod 10 and 11. Let’s hope I don’t have those issues again.
The phone is fast. Quad core 2260 vs quad core 1700. It has the same resolution as the HTC One and other current Android phones in a 5" screen. It doesn’t feel big. Physically, it’s about the same size as the HTC One was.
Wireless Qi charging is pretty damn slick. I bought a Black Powerbot from Amazon for $25 rather than paying $50 from Google for the Nexus charger.
I also bought a Diztronic black TPU plastic case for $10. Had the same case for my iPhone 5 and loved it.
Maybe LG makes a nicer device than HTC? I’m not sure about that as I’ve only ever had iPhones in recent years and HTC and LG are my first foray into Android land.
I’m really looking forward to using this thing over the next few months. I’ll probably buy a Nexus 6 if they come out with one. I love that this phone isn’t bound by a contract or a carrier and it’s really a high quality piece of computing smallness!