I decided that I needed to geek out a bit this weekend and called Time Warner Cable to upgrade our standard 7 Mbps (512 Mbps upload) cable Internet access to Road Runner Turbo, which is instead capped at 15 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up. Sure, there’s plenty of stuff that this will have absolutely no impact on, but I noticed an immediate difference in online gaming as well as certain mainstream websites which I frequent. Uploading to the ftp servers for the websites I run has also doubled in speed, which is great. On top of those reasons there is, of course, always the geek bragging rights associated with having the fastest available Internet access available in Wisconsin and among the fastest in the country.

At first it was all over the news that some company in Miami named “Psystar” is selling Mac clones. Compatible PC hardware hacked to run Mac OS X. The term Hackintosh made its way in to mainstream media for the first time since the mid-90s when Mac clones were actually licensed. The Mac community has been in an uproar wondering about legal actions, EULAs, and all sorts of other boring things. Then, looking past the initial buzz, The Guardian’s Charles Arthur dug a little deeper and discovers that the company itself may just be a fraud. No one seems to be talking, there’s no actual support or sales team, they aren’t responding to emails, they company never seemed to exist prior to last week (even though they domain name has been around since 2000), and best of all, the address that was supplied on their website up until a day or so ago showed a generic suburban house in Miami.

The only name that has ever even been given to the media is Robert. No last name given, just Robert. No one really knows who “Robert” is, but with the new information of how new and unestablished the company is, he’s probably the owner and only employee. Well, I’ve got a last name for you. It you dig a little bit on Archive.org, you’ll see that the snapshot of the site that was taken in September, 2001 shows a different domain name: razorfx.com. The site is currently just a placeholder (although it shares a favicon with psystar.com and is hosted on the same host). So visiting razorfx.com didn’t help in it’s current state, but what if you use the Wayback Machine again and see how razorfx.com looked in November, 2002. Now we’re getting somewhere! Razofx.com was the online portfolio of Robert Pedraza.

Wanna make a bet as to if that’s the same Robert running things at Psystar?

Firefox is easily the best web browser available today, but part of what makes it great is the expandability that it offers its users in the form of add-on extensions. So, without further ado, here are some of my favorite add-ons in no particular order.

• Adblock Plus – I’ve not no issues with a few random text or graphical ads on the websites I visit, but the recent trend of flashing, page-covering, music playing and over all annoying ads is getting out of control. In comes Adblock Plus. Install it and you will rarely ever see another ad as long as you surf the web.
• Forecastfox – How’s the weather outside? Install this and you’ll always know. It’s extremely customizable: You can change where in the browser it appears, what information it tells you, how many days ahead it’ll list, and of course, which city to report the weather on. You can even easily pull up a radar to see the weather coming your way.
• StumbleUpon – Quite possibly the absolute best time waster ever invented. You create and account, choose what categories you like, and click the stumble button that will appear on Firefox. Every time you click that little “SU” button, a random new website will load up. Like the site? Click the thumbs up and you’ll see more like it. Don’t like it? Click the thumbs down. Just like prescription drug commercials, side effects include insomnia and dry eyes.
• Flagfox – It’s extremely simple and straightforward: A little icon will display for every site you visit showing you the flag of the country in which the site is hosted. If you right click the flag icon, it’ll give you a few more options including pulling up the wikipedia article on that country, copying the site’s ip address, and more.
• FireFTP – It’s not the most advanced FTP client ever, but for quick FTP uploads or downloads it has a nice clean interface, is easy to use, and can bookmark the sites you access so you don’t have to type in the account info each time.

Windows decided to take a complete dump on me today and I ended up spending the last 6 hours fixing my computer. Thankfully, I was able to pop in a live cd of Ubuntu 7.10 that I had lying around which allowed me to back up everything of value on to my slave drive, but as is always the case with Windows, nothing went quite how it was supposed to. I had to reinstall it twice before I could get it fully working again and now I’m running through a seemingly endless series of Windows Updates. I suppose I should be thankful that my hard drive didn’t fail or anything like that, but it sure is a pain in the ass to have to deal with pile of crap that is Windows.

It’ll be nice when Jessie and I get new iMacs and I can work with an operating system that was actually written well. At least when something goes wrong with Mac OS X I’ll know it was something I did and not some random corrupted system file that just happens to prevent the computer from fully loading, sending it in to a spiraling descent of reboots and system errors.

As you probably know if you’ve listened to, watched, or read any kind of respectable news source in the last day or so, yesterday was the 50th anniversary of the start of the Cold War Space Race. Sputnik was launched in to orbit and began a race between the US and the former USSR to conquer the real final frontier. Within 12 years of the USSR launching a little basket ball sized ball of metal in to orbit for first time ever, the US landed a manned mission on the moon. The innovation in orbital missions and beyond during that time was truly amazing, but it seems to have slowed down since then. At the pace things were moving, one would have expected manned space stations on the moon by now, not a barely manned orbiting station that is falling apart faster than it is being built. The general consensus as to why space exploration has slowed down is that the fall of the USSR got rid of the competition that kept it going.

Here’s my proposal: We need a new space race. This time, however, the competition is coming from more than just one country. China is developing space technology, Russia is still in space, several other countries have put men in to space, and more importantly in today’s capitalist world, companies are starting to develop that are interested in the prospect of space tourism and mining. Why, then, is the US acting as if there is no longer any motivation to compete in this newfound space race? We should be leading the pack, or, even better, cooperating even more than we might now with other countries and companies to take space exploration to the next level. With the way technology advanced in the 20th century and has continued to do so thus far in the 21st century, I see no reason that I shouldn’t be able to see a moon based and a manned mission to mars – or beyond – by the end of my life. To that end, my future grandchildren should be colonizing the moon and mars.

I see no reason that anything I just said is unreasonable, we just need someone in power to give NASA the one thing they really need to begin truly innovating again: Money. Sadly, however, our current government prefers to endlessly pump cash into a quagmire, while lining its own pockets and those of its friends with taxpayer’s dollars.

The reasons for saving energy in your home are twofold. First, and foremost, it benefits the entire energy grid. If everyone is consuming less energy, less power needs to be created, which, in turn, is generally better for the environment. The second and more selfish reason is that it saves you money and everyone loves to save money.

Here are 10 great ways to save energy:

1. Replace the standard conventional incandescent light bulbs in your house with significantly lower wattage compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs). They are available to replace most types of bulbs you would have in your home and as opposed to the 40-100 watts that a standard light bulb would consume, they will use only about 7-27 watts for equivalent light output. Even if you only replace the bulbs in high-traffic areas of your home where the lights are on the most, you will still have noticeable energy savings.
2. Do your electronics have a “sleep” feature? Use it. Most computers and some other electronics have a built-in feature where after a certain time of being idle they will automatically go to sleep, where they use minimal power, but can “wake up” rapidly if needed. On a computer, this is extremely helpful because it can turn off your monitor and spin down your hard disk when you walk away and are done using it.
3. Turn down your water heater. About 15% of average home energy bill is the cost of running the water heater. Turning this down even a little bit can save you at least a few dollars a month and isn’t really noticeable when you’re showering, because you’ll just turn the cold water down a little bit to compensate.
4. Staying on the topic of water, replace your shower head(s) and with low-flow shower heads and install sink aerators. They can be relatively inexpensive to buy, are easy to install, and pay for themselves pretty quickly with the savings on hot water. In our shower, we have a Waterpik that came with it and it’s great.
5. Here’s the last tip to involve savings related to hot water: Do your laundry with cold water. There’s detergent formulated specifically for cold water laundry and it does a good job. The combination of doing your laundry in cold water as well as the hot water saving techniques I mentioned above can save you a cool (pun intended) $60+ a year.
6. Buy products with the Energy Star^© logo. These products meet strict government guidelines for energy efficiency, so they’re pretty much guaranteed to shrink your energy bill as compared to the same product without the logo. You can get just about anything with this logo on it: refrigerators, TVs, cell phones, heaters, air conditioners, fluorescent lighting, and much much more.
7. Got a house with older windows and doors? Stop by the local hardware store and pick up some weather stripping for your doors and windows. During the winter, it’ll keep the hot air in and increase the efficiency of your heater and, likewise, will keep the cool air in during the summer and increase the efficiency of your A/C.
8. Check, clean, and/or replace your air filters on a regular basis. The dirtier they are, the more airflow is restricted, and the harder the heater or A/C will need to work to heat or cool your house. Not only does a dirty filter cause your equipment to work harder, but it’s likely going to shorten its life.
9. Install a programmable thermostat. It will allow you to automatically set the temperature of your house at comfortable levels while you’re home, while turning it down when you’re at work. From personal experience, I can guarantee that they’re easy to install for even the newest of homeowners.
10. Last, but not least: Turn stuff off! Not watching TV anymore? Turn if off. Done with the computer? Turn it off (or put it to sleep). Not using a room in your house at the moment? Turn off the lights. It’s not that hot outside? Turn off the A/C, open the windows, and get some fresh air.

I hope the above list is helpful to whoever reads it, if anyone even does. I will admit that I haven’t done all of these things in my home (yet), but I’ve only been a homeowner for a few months now and will slowly do my best to save any energy I can.

Everyone knows that corn ethanol is a joke. Oh, you believed all those E85 commercials? Well, it’s not as good as it looks. Regular old gasoline is able to produce about 5 times as much energy as went in to it’s production. Corn ethanol only produces about 1.3 times as much energy as goes it to it’s creation because it has to have the sugar extracted from it, then it is converted to sugar ethanol. This process makes it barely break even in it’s efficiency. The plus, of course, being that it is a renewable resource that grows here in the US and removes dependency on foreign oil. Sure, it’s nice and “green”, but it’s still got 15% regular old gasoline in it and it really isn’t efficient enough to lower the prices at the pump.

What if we could take plants like corn or pretty much any other crop and turn it in to 100% ethanol fuel that is more efficient than current corn/sugar ethanol? Enter cellulosic ethanol. Part of what makes sugar ethanol inefficient and expensive is that not all plants have a lot of sugar in them to extract and process in to ethanol. All plants, however, have cellulose. Lots of it. A company called Range Fuels has plans to build a 100 million gallon per year cellulosic ethanol plant in Georgia, using wood waste from Georgia’s forests as it’s feed stock. Range Fuels’ claim is that their ethanol will be able to produce 16 times as much energy as goes in to its production. Similarly, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is spearheading a 125 million dollar initiative to research and develop biofuels utilizing cellulose to help relieve our dependence on foreign fuels.

These technologies go beyond using sugars found in sugarcane and corn to produce the ethanol and instead use non-food plants and parts of plants, relying on the cellulose. Instead of raising the prices of sugar or corn at the grocery store because it is instead being used to create fuel, the stalks left over would instead be used as the fuel. The corn could once again do what it’s best at: give me a stomach ache and not get fully digested. It goes beyond just using things like woodchips and corn stalks to create the fuel. Almost any bio waste could be turned in to ethanol, such as grass clippings, fallen trees, and pretty much any other plant waste. Now that the fuels are starting to be produced, it is just a matter of time before all of the car manufacturers start realizing that this is the way of the future and start making all of their cars ethanol-ready.

The real question is: How long until I’m driving an ethanol hybrid plug-in that I charge in my garage next to a personal ethanol processor into which I unload my grass clippings, weeds, and other yard waste so that I can fuel my car for the week?

I’ve wanted one of these things since before they were even released. Now, several months later, my terrific wife was awesome enough to find out that Best Buy was getting a bunch in and all we had to do was wake up early and wait for it this past Sunday. As soon as we got home, I set it up and we started playing Wii Sports and played all of the games in it: Tennis, Golf, Baseball, Bowling, and Boxing. If you aren’t familiar with how the Wii works, the controller is motion sensative, so in tennis, you have to swing it to hit the ball, in golf, you have to do a full swing to hit it or a short little swing to putt. We also got Wii Play which includes a second controller and offers us another 9 or so mini games whose purpose are to teach you how to use the controller to its fullest and has some crazy games such as cow racing, some sort of tank war game, duck-hunt-esque target practice, fishing, and a few others. The game that I’m hooked on right now is the golf game included with Wii Sports, but I can’t wait until we start building up our collection and get games like Super Monkey Ball, which was great on the GameCube and looks even better on the Wii, and possible a better golf game like Tiger Woods golf.

After a few years of using Firefox, I’ve learned some fun tricks that you can do to it to make your Internet browsing experience even better. If you use Firefox, I highly suggest reading through this and doing some of the things listed.

• Multiple Tabs As Your Homepage
  A while ago I accidentally discovered that you can easily have your homepage set with multiple pages, so when you open Firefox or click on the home button, it automatically opens each page in a different tab. The easiest way to do this is to open a tab for each page you want to have set as your home page, arrange the tabs the way you want them to appear each time, open up your main preferences, and click on “Use Current Pages” under home page. That’s it!
• Quick Find
  Looking for a specific word on a page? Hit the “/” key and you’ll notice that a little box on the bottom pops up that says “Quick Find”. Type what you want to find and it’ll instantly navigate you to that point on the page.
• Auto-Complete Addresses
  Type Control+L to get to the address bar, or just click on it. Type just the word that goes between the “www.” and the “.com/net/org”. If you hit Control+Enter, it will automatically fill it in with “.com”, Shift+Enter will automatically fill it in with “.net”, and Control+Shift+Enter will fill it in with “.org”.
• Navigating Tabs
  Hate having to click around with your mouse to navigate between the tabs you’ve got open? Here’s the keyboard shortcuts:
  • Control+Tab (Rotate forward through the tabs)
  • Control+Shift+Tab (Rotate backwards through the tabs)
  • Control+1-9 (Jump to any of the first nine tabs)
• Delete a URL From Your History
  You’ve probably noticed that as you type in a URL in the address bar, it shows you a list of similar links you’ve been to as you type. If you (for some unknown reason) want and/or need to remove one of those links, just use the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard to highlight, then simply hit the delete key and *poof* it’s gone.
• Got Broadband? Speed up Firefox
  If you have a broadband Internet connection (who doesn’t?), you can use pipelining to speed up your page loads. Basically, this allows Firefox to simultaneously load multiple items on a page, instead of the default setting of one at a time. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit enter. Then, type “network.http” in the filter field at the top of the page and change the following settings by double-clicking on them to change them.
  • Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
  • Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
  • Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to a number of around 20-30 (depending on how fast your broadband is). This will allow it to make up to that many requests at once.
  • Last, but not least, right-click anywhere on the window and select New -> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set the value to “0″. This is the amount of time the browser waits before it will act on the data it receives.

• Edit the “Close Tab” Button
  Ever click on a tab to open it an accidentally clicked the [x] to close it? I know I have. Open up about:config and type “browser.tabs.closeButtons” in the filter. There are 4 values you can enter in to change how they will appear:
  • 0 – Only display the [x] on the tab at the forefront.
  • 1 – [Default] Display the [x] on all tabs.
  • 2 – Don’t display the [x] on any tabs (Control+W or middle click on the tab will still close it).
  • 3 – Display a single [x] at the far right of the tab bar (Firefox 1.x Style).

I hope this was all helpful!

Jessie and I have a DVR through Time Warner Cable. We love it. We’re hooked. It completely changes the television watching experience and allows us to watch shows when it’s convenient for us instead of when some network big shot decides when the best time to air it is. I would say of the shows we watch regularly, we only catch maybe one or two a week when they’re actually “live”.

That being said, I have a few suggestions for how the companies that manufacture these DVR units can drastically improve their features:

• Add another TV tuner. They’ve already got two TV tuners inside the box, allowing it to record two things at once or record one thing and watch something else, but if you want to record three things simultaneously or record two things and watch something besides those two, you’re out of luck.
• I understand why advertisers feel the need to broadcast their commercials at twice the volume that the program itself is broadcasting at, but at some point they’ve gotta realize that consumers aren’t going to buy a product if their ad campaign annoys the shit out of people. Cars have technology that auto-adjust the volume of the radio depending on outside noise, would it be that hard for cable boxes to auto-adjust the volume to keep the decibels at relatively even levels when it switches over from programming to commercials and from channel to channel?
• People pirate, it happens, get over it. Just like when people used to record copyrighted content on to *GASP* VHS tapes, they do it now with DVDs. My DVR has a SATA hookup as well as a USB hookup that are completely useless. Allow me to “back up” recorded shows so that I can view them again! Yes, I know I can always go out and buy a DVD burner to hook up to the video output of the DVR, but why do that when I already have the technology on my computer and it’s just a software limitation of the DVR preventing me from connecting the two.
• Ok, last one: Give it a larger hard drive. Sometimes I don’t get around to watching everything that week or even the next week. With HD programming readily available for many popular channels, it should be able to store more than a week or two’s worth of HD programs.

That’s it! If you had the attention span to read this far, I applaud you.