when everything else fails
January 9, 2009 | No Comments | daily life, projects, tools
Had to share this: Sacrifice 10 friends from Facebook for a free WHOPPER®.
Facebook and Burger King are teaming up to give you a free Whopper–as long as you “sacrifice” 10 friends to get it. The world of social networking is getting meatier all the time.
Popularity: 1% [?]
December 4, 2008 | 9 Comments | daily life, projects, tips, tools
We’ve all been there, zapping through hundreds of channels and nothing interesting to watch. It only get worst if you forgot to record a show or something similar to your DVR. You still want to watch the damn tube but at the end of the night ended up with unnecessary purchases of some retarded infomercial channel.
But there is a ‘new’ way of watching TV and the best thing of it all, it is free!
Well, not completely free but for one thing you can cancel your subscription with your TV provider saving roughly 40 bucks a month. That’s almost $500 per year! In extreme cases (DirecTV premier package $82/mo) you will save $984.00
You need a few things but I bet most of it you already have. Let’s go over the list:
Since you are curious on how to save money on your monthly TV bill I’m guessing you already have a TV. You wouldn’t be able to read this post so you can check of internet access as well. A flash drive is a pretty common household item these days especially if you’re a geek. Flash drives are pretty cheap these days. Just do a Google search. Cheapest flash drive I found was 5 bucks.
That leaves you with the Apple TV and the boxee account. The low end Apple Tv (ATV) is $229 and is sufficient for the job. The next thing you’ll need is a Boxee account. If you don’t have one leave a comment with a valid email address and I’ll send you an invite. Boxee accounts are free!
Very simple. Connect your AppleTV to your TV. You just enhanced your TV viewing pleasure! Movies and/or music videos rented or bought through iTunes can now be viewed on your TV. Playlists can be streamed or created on the ATV.
But it doesn’t end here. There is more you can do with your ATV. Way more…
To get the fullest of your Boxee account you need to hack your ATV. It sounds scary but it’s not. All it takes is five minutes. If your not tech savvy I recommend buying your AplleTV with Boxee pre-installed. If you think hacking is your thing head over to atvusb-creator and follow the steps.
Basically what you’re doing is download a program on your usb stick (flash drive) and stick it in the back of the ATV. The usb port on your ATV is only used for diagnostics when you bring it in for repairs but with the atvusb-creator you just have opened up this port!
Congratulations! You have just hacked you ATV! Wasn’t too bad huh?
You’re all set up! Boxee is a media station and offers a wide variety of channels: CNN, Hulu, CBS, Comedy Central, YouTube and as of today: Netflix. Netflix isn’t ready for the ATV yet but I’m sure it will in the future.
Well, since I’m only interested in a few shows I was able to cancel my account with Dish networks. The shows are now being streamed by hulu on my boxee. And it gets even better. The title of this post mentioned RSS feeds. I was able to successfully add video RSS feeds to my boxee account (Since I’m Dutch I added some Dutch TV programs) and I’m now able to play those feeds through boxee on my ATV.
There are tons of other video feeds out there and you can add the ones you like. It’s like creating your own TV station. No more zapping around to find good content. You decide what to watch and when to watch it!
That’s a personal choice. Live broadcasting can’t be viewed on the ATV. I decided to give up those perks simply because I was becoming a couch potato. I read the news in the morning. No need to see it live. All it showed was another murder in town and it became depressing. I miss out on sports though. But hey! Go to a friends place and watch the game together! Have a social life!
So if anyone is interested in a boxee account lemme know. Leave a comment and I’ll send you an invite asap!
Popularity: 29% [?]
October 17, 2008 | No Comments | projects, tips, tools
Scheduled tasks on a PC are easy. With a Mac it’s easy and fun! I needed to make daily backups for a client to our local server. Leopard comes with Automator, a cool app to , you’ve guessed it, automate tasks. Since I’m using Transmit as my dedicated ftp client it gets only better!
Automator has Transmit defaults build in. As stated on Transmits website it’s not in the library anymore but you can find it under the ‘Internet’ submenu of your library. Another place to look is ‘Most Relevant’ and ‘Most Used’.
setting up an workflow in Automator is pretty intuitive and you should be able to crank out a workflow within minutes. Now comes the sweet part. Rather then saving it as a workflow you can save your task as an application. To set up a scheduled task open iCal and create a new event. In the ‘alarm’ section select ‘open file’ and pick your newly created application. You can manually set the time when to launch this, in my case 3X a week at midnight.
When waking up my files are downloaded to the folder I told it to, zipped up and renamed with a date stamp. Life is sweet…
Popularity: 1% [?]
August 19, 2008 | 1 Comments | C25K, music, tips, tools
No doubt that music is a big motivator for me when running. I was thrilled to find some of my ‘lost’ mixes online. My hard drive crashed twice on me with the result of losing most of my music. Today I found a link with the DJ mixes most precious to me. It’s radio mix by dutch female DJ 100% Isis. She used to be big early 2000 and not sure how she’s doing right now. Most of my dutch friends are into the Dance and DJ scene and having Isis play at my friends house was a trip. Kinda like a private session since only 10 people were present.
The site has also all the Essential Mixes (1993 – 2000) from the UK. If you need to fill up your iPod or other mp3 player I strongly recommend lekkerlui.nl
Popularity: 4% [?]
August 19, 2008 | 2 Comments | tips, tools, wordpress
I added some random quotes to the top right of this blog (go ahead and refresh!). Since I’m using Wordpress I decided to go with a PHP version instead of javascript. In a nutshell the differences between PHP and JS:
Anyone can use the JavaScript version. It will run on any blog that allows the use of scripts. It will also run on static, non-blog websites. For any blogging system that does not use PHP, like Blogger, it’s the only choice.
If you’re using a system like WordPress, there are advantages to the PHP version. The biggest of these is that PHP is server-side and JavaScript is not. The JavaScript version will download everything and a visitor’s web browser runs the script to determine what to display. Because of this, your visitor’s browser must be able to run JavaScript for anything to happen. Some devices, like mobile phones and other small-screen browsers, don’t support JavaScript at all.
PHP works differently. The PHP script runs on the web server, so only the output is sent to the web browser. In addition to saving you a marginal amount of bandwidth, this guarantees that all viewers will see the content properly.
If you can use PHP, there’s not really any reason at all to use the JavaScript version.
Here is the code but just like with the JavaScript version, the script generates no HTML, so you’ll need to wrap the script in whatever tags are appropriate for your situation:
PHP Version:
<?php
$myRandomQuotes=array(
'quote 1 goes here.',
'quote 2 goes here.',
'quote 3 goes here.',
'quote 4 goes here.'
);
echo $myRandomQuotes[rand(0,sizeof($myRandomQuotes)-1)];
?>
note: To prevent the apostrophes in “You’re” and “Don’t” etc. from screwing up everything, I added in a backslash to tell the JavaScript interpreter to treat the next character as text rather than a command.
Popularity: 7% [?]
August 4, 2008 | 3 Comments | daily life, outdoors, tips, tools, work
Last weekend was men boys only (John, Jason and me) at Lake Sonoma. Camp site was Buck Pastures 05 close to the water play area. Since all three of us work in the tech/internet industry it is of no surprise we exchange a zillion links. Without having any sort of connection to the W3 at the time I’ll try to mention a few links/subjects discussed this weekend. Unfortunately I forgot my camera to accompany this story with pictures… (John, send me the camera pics!)
Of course we talked about movies and TV shows, duh… If the list doesn’t make sense to you; you’re right. Pretty random stuff!
Geek talk and websites in general:
Totally random stuff:
Last but not least my former employee on Google’s street view. Proof that rural America is being mapped by Google:
Popularity: 10% [?]
July 31, 2008 | No Comments | C25K, daily life, goals, tools
And week 2 is a wrap! It was a perfect morning, low 50’s and no wind. I completed the session with ease and I’m ready for week 3! I’ll start week 3 on Saturday morning and after my run I will be camping once again at Lake Sonoma.
This time it’s a boys only trip. Jason, John and me. I’m pretty excited about both events: running and camping!
the numbers:
Distance: 2.07 mi
Duration: 28′’57″”
Pace: 13′56″
Popularity: 1% [?]
July 25, 2008 | 2 Comments | C25K, daily life, goals, music, tools
I found the voice-over for my C25K podcasts! Hopefully Mel McMurrin has some time this weekend to provide me with some sound bites. More about the talented Mel McMurrin:
A veteran jingle singer in the San Francisco Bay area, Mel has recorded commercials for Nations Hamburgers, Sun Microsystems, Luckys, Glidden, Harvey’s Casinos and others in studios like, Green Street Music, Michael Boyd Music, Ed Bogus Productions and Bongo Bob Productions.
His malleable voice has found it’s way on to a number of video/computer games including Sony’s Twisted Metal, and Cool Borders, Konami’s NHL:Blades of Steel, Lucas Arts’ Mortimer and the Riddles of the Medallion (for which he also co-wrote the music) and Brøderbund’s Where in Time is Carman San Diego?
He has done commercial voice-over for Schwab, Novell, Gallo, Lincoln-Mercury, Siemens and dozens of others and was a morning-drive radio host for then country-gospel format, KASA in Phoenix.
Popularity: 7% [?]
July 23, 2008 | No Comments | projects, tips, tools
We all know about the Digg effect, the reddit effect, the Slashdot effect etc. but you rarely ever hear about the power of StumbleUpon. Today I experienced the StumbleUpon effect on a small scale.
Recently I build a few pages about the C25K program (more about this in my next post). The main page got stumbled and within two hours my Snoop app from reinvigorate went nuts. The counter went through the roof (note that I have a low ceiling 
so the numbers might not impress you). I was able to capture some screenshots of reinvigorate.net:
The above image is a screenshot when I came home walking my dog and noticed Snoop was producing a continuous sound.
Another snapshot 15 minutes later. The number went up for another minute and then slowly decreased. The next snapshot is a total of visitors.
I’m curious how Google Analytics is processing the numbers. More later
Popularity: 1% [?]
July 20, 2008 | No Comments | C25K, daily life, goals, music, outdoors, sports, tools
Wow, a whole new world opened this week: Running. To get back in shape and loose some pounds I decided to go with the C25K (Couch to 5K) program. It will prepare you to run 5 kilometers in 9 weeks.
The original people who came up with the program can be found here. Since I’m a gadget freak and I love my stats I decided to buy the Nike + iPod sports kit. I already own an iPod nano so I was thrilled to found out the possibilities with the kit! Nike+ will give you feedback on how you’re running, while you’re running – hear your pace, distance and calories burned with your iPod nano.
After the run you upload the data to nikeplus.com and you can track your progress, runs and training schedule. You can connect with other runners, compete etc. The website and the kit are a real motivator!
As of today I will log my runs and share it as well. Just to add another motivator to my program. Today will be my W1D1 (Week 1, Day 1). Training will be three times a week and I’m using DJ Steveboy’s Podrunner Intervals podcasts.
There is a great community for C25K runners here:
Be sure to check out the story of Christian Torresluna. Christian had a treadmill, trouble was he was using it to walk the dog. Then one day he discovered C25K. Read Christian’s incredible story: from couch potato to 5k runner.
Popularity: 1% [?]
