X-Geek

Extreme geekiness

There are 700 posts filed in X-Geek (this is page 62 of 70).

MarkAnywhere?

I’ve been thinking more of the IvanAnywhere idea of a roaming office camera. Sure its Star Wars-ish, but it also makes sense. It costs a tremendous amount of money for an employee to travel somewhere for a few-day trip. Figure $150/night, minimum for a hotel, $70/day for a rental car, $40/day for food, and $400 or so for airfare. For a three-day trip, that’s almost $1200!
Continue reading →

Fuel Cells

So, where is my fuel cell? Ten years ago they were supposedly ten years away.

I could deal with the drought two ways with a fuel cell. I could (quietly!) generate electricity for my air conditioner, heat my hot water, and produce my own water (though probably not enough to whet my lawn’s thirst). Sadly, without using hydrogen as a fuel the cell would produce carbon dioxide in the process, so it wouldn’t otherwise help on the green front.

So, why aren’t residential fuel cells on the market yet?

Cheap Thoughts: Using pictures to express emotion in IM clients

Macintosh OS X instant-messaging (IM) clients display your login picture during chats. If you’re having a chat, the traditional way to express smiling is to use a emoticon like this: 🙂 . Why not make your login picture smile, instead? Take different shots of yourself expressing various emotions and provide an easy way of changing them during a chat.

Nothing expresses emotion better than a face. Why not put this to use?

Quirky server issues

So the switch to the VPS Farm hosting provider is not going as smoothly as I’d hoped. Even with a swap partition enabled, the session ran out of memory.

I set up my home network management software instance to monitor the server for memory issues but I turned my network management box off as painters are working in the room where it normally lives. Thus I was unable to track issues with the server. I did have a console open on it which indicated it died around 11 AM today, though from what I still don’t know. Seems every 36 hours it decides to done blowed up.

Bear with me, folks, as I work out these issues. Thanks, y’all.

Google Earth Flight Simulator

The latest version of Google Earth has a crude flight simulator as an Easter egg. Simply hit Command-Option-A in the Mac version and a flight simulator dialog will pop up. After you’ve “discovered” the Easter egg, it will appear in the Tools menu for future flights.

I tried flying it and was wildly unsuccessful. Didn’t try it with a joystick or with my yoke or pedals. I still prefer the freeware flights that Flightgear provides. Still, its kind of cool flying around with picture-perfect scenery, even if you wind up crashing into that scenery a bit too often.

(h/t, Marco via Boing Boing)

More Phishiness

I had a call come in from “Tuscany Industries” this morning, number 702-520-1117. I answered and decided to play their little game. A recorded female voice warned about my car’s warranty expiring. If I was not interested in renewing it, she said, press 2, otherwise press 1.

I pressed 1 and their phone switch said “transferring to the operator.”
Continue reading →

Virtualization and the death of KVM

I just got back from a client visit which lead to an interesting revelation. I went there to support the network management software that my company makes. Upon arriving at the client’s desk, I happened to notice a familiar KVM appliance sitting on his desk.
Continue reading →

Hosting Provider Switcheroo

MT.Net may go dark briefly in the next day or so as it moves to its new home on a box at VPSFarm, a Xen hosting provider. This could normally be done with no service interruption to you, my dear readers, but a DNS change is being made simultaneously. Those tend to take a while to propagate so its possible you may not jump to the new site as quickly as you’d like.

Should you happen to lose your MT.Net goodness, please – do not panic! The new DNS changes should eventually propagate to you.

You’ll know you’re looking at the wrong site if you don’t see a post about Miss Teen South Carolina next up.

Woz’s next thing: energy efficient houses

Steve Wozniak, the legendary engineer who created the Apple computer, has now focused his considerable talent on creating more energy efficient houses.

Woz has always been a huge proponent of engineering efficiency. This drove him to design the Apple do some miraculous things with a mere handful of parts – a fraction of what competitiors used. Its no surprise then that he’s drawn to the clever tricks that can be used to heat and cool homes.
Continue reading →