Yeesh.
As diligent readers will know, I don’t exactly lead a hectic life. With the exception of my weekly foray to Ashburn to visit Jenn and Jim, I’m mostly a homebody. I leave the house for errands and medical appointments.
That said, this week is quickly ramping up to be full of all sorts of social, and it’s actually kind of filling up. If there’s anything you need me for this week, speak now, or wait until after Christmas.
While I pretty much live on wireless networks for most of my Interwebly needs, there are times when a good old fashioned ethernet cable is your best friend. Like, say, when you’re transferring an 80G music collection from one computer to another. Directly connecting two GigE ports with a piece of CAT-5 is much much faster than doing it over WiFi (duh).
Just a few gigs to go! Yay, rsync! Yay, ethernet!
(Warning, your meri may be punchy. Please plan accordingly.)
In case any of you think that I’m convinced that All Things Cupertino are good, let me assure you that’s not the case. I use gmail’s web UI over mail.app. I use Chrome over Safari. I admit to using Contacts (formerly Address Book) and Calendar (formerly iCal) simply because the iPhone / iCloud interoperability is hard to beat. But, there are some things that the brainy little developers at 1 Infinite Loop come up with that drive me buggy. And iPhoto is about 3 of those things. So, it’s time for me to ditch iPhoto.
This week, I’ve acquired a new (to me, but also new in box, though not newest model) laptop. I got a great deal on it, thanks to a friend’s wife’s company liquidating some assets. It is a pretty spiffy system, all on its own: Late 2011 MacBook Pro, 2.4G Core i5, 4G of RAM, 500GB hard drive.
But then, being a geek, I got curious. And ともだち (tomodachi, the system in question) is getting a couple of upgrades.
First up, a new hard drive. I’ve opted for the Seagate Momentus XT. It’s a 2.5″ 750GB drive with a 32GB SSD cache. It is, by all reports, quite zippy. It is also $121.54, at the time of this writing.
I also thought that I might upgrade my RAM from 4G to 8G or so, and went to crucial to check things out. Turns out, I can upgrade from 4GB to 16GB for $77.99.
Now, I’m a reasonably old-school computer user, though I know many of you are much older hands. I never worked with punch cards. While I had used other computers before, the first one I really started making my own was a 386DX/33 that I got as a high school graduation gift. My benchmark pricing memory was being shocked when hard drives hit a dollar a megabyte. (That’s megabyte, kids, not gigabyte.)
And now, I find that I can get a kickass little laptop for less than a thousand dollars (with an admitted lucky break). It’s mostly the upgrades that I’m able to get for less than $200 that are really making me feel like I’m living in the future. I’ve recently renounced the statement, “I love living in the future,” but moments like these that kind of make me want to re-adopt it.
Amazon’s Gold Box Deal of the Day is a Scotch Thermal Laminator. I’ve had this laminator for a couple of years, and it works fantastically, especially for the deal price ($16.99). It will even handle 5 mil pouches, though you have to make sure you have it on the high setting for that. If you need a hot laminator, I highly recommend you pick this one up today.
I’ve been posting on Facebook about how I feel the urge to build things with my hands, but am stymied by the lack of actual artistic ability (and the fact that the really big LEGO sets cost more than a car payment). Brett suggested a trip to IKEA, somewhat as a joke. But my brain quickly tripped through the problems with that: Money and Space, neither of which I have. Which means that, if there were a smaller, cheaper version of IKEA…
IKEA dollhouses. Everything IKEA, in miniature, and everything is flatpack and whatnot, the way IKEA really is. Complete with miniature allen wrenches.
SOMEONE GET ME THE KING OF SWEDEN ON THE PHONE NOW!
So, it turns out there are any number of things that support Google Authenticator and its spiffy Two-Factor authentication services. However, I can’t seem to find a page that lists them all, which is a shame. Help me track things down, will you?
What else?
The closet bit is parenthetical because most of my friends who are lushes are very open about the whole thing.
Our friends at woot! have put up a pop-up store for the holidays, and they’re kicking it off right. There are a variety of drinking games up for sale, if you’re in to that sort of thing. (I know, I know, you don’t need no stinking game to help you drink, but it might be fun for a change.)
(Oh, and if anyone is looking for a custom -opoly board, we should talk. 😉
Since I jump between computers (or, more accurately, computing devices) a good bit, I am a huge fan of Dropbox. (For the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume that y’all know what Dropbox is, and won’t go into a big long explanation. The short version is: It’s file storage in The Cloud™, accessible from any number of computers, phones, tablets, and probably secret decoder rings that you got in your breakfast cereal.) If you’re like me, you probably have a reasonable amount of paranoia about putting your Stuff out where other people could conceivably get to it, and it makes you somewhat twitchy. You’ve turned on all of the “email me when a new device (app, secret decoder ring) is linked to my account” settings, but still wonder if you could be doing more. (more…)
Today is National “I Love to Write” Day. And by ‘write’, they mean actually taking a writing implement and applying it to paper or some other suitable surface, not moving your fingers over a keyboard.
Writing letters is a dying art form, and that’s kind of sad. Your kids are never going to be able to go through a box they found in the attic full of the love notes you and your significant other shared with one another. I don’t think it’s going to be the same to have them print out your old emails — or worse — read the archived SMSes in your Google Voice account. There’s just no romance in that.
So celebrate today by taking some time to sit down and write a letter to someone. It doesn’t have to be long. Just long enough to let someone know you’re thinking of them and wanted to share a few minutes with them. Then find an actual envelope and stamp, and mail it. Or, if that’s beyond you, write to someone in your household, and hand-deliver it.
We all like getting letters, but seem to forget that receiving a letter means someone took the time to write one out. Let it be your turn, and write a letter today.