This is the blog where Rodney Blevins comes to pontificate on various subjects ranging from the spiritual to the scientific and sometimes downright whimsical. This is also where you can find his many podcasts.
// April 14th, 2009 // No Comments » // Current Events, Humor, Science, Technology
An example of a solarcooker from solarcooker.org
I just read about something called the “Kyoto Box” over at Steve Milloy’s blog.
What is it exactly? According to an article on the BBC website: (more…)
// April 9th, 2009 // No Comments » // Technology, wordpress
I’m posting this from my iPhone using the new version of WordPress for iPhone blogging app, version 1.2. It’s pretty awesome and you can check out a snazzy video of it at wordpress.tv.
Well, I started this post several days ago, but never got to finish it because WordPress for iPhone crashed on me and when I restarted it wouldn’t let me access this blog. I was also busy doing other things this weekend and so I forgot about it.
The cool thing is that when I started WordPress up just now and went to this blog it informed that it had auto-recovered the post and I could pick up where I left off. Seems like although there are a few bugs, they’ve got a nice auto-recover built into it.
I’ve taken a few screenshots, but I really suggest you check out the video.
// April 7th, 2009 // No Comments » // Humor, Technology
In Dave Barry’s article, Technical Difficulties, he laments the fact that much of modern telephone tech support is being outsourced to foreign countries.
As he so eloquently puts it:
THE GOOD NEWS IS: The foreign tech support people are smart, educated and eager to help, and they speak English.
THE BAD NEWS IS: They speak it in such a way that you understand only about every fifth word.
// January 5th, 2009 // No Comments » // Communication, Technology
Posterous is a relatively new online blogging service which allows you to post things easily to your new blog via e-mail.
You can even attach all kinds of files to your e-mail and they will go online, pictures will be displayed, multuple pictures will be displayed as a gallery, YouTube links as an embedded YouTube video, etc. Check out all the cool things you can do with it in their FAQ.
Signing up for a Posterous account is dead simple. Actually, you don’t even have to sign up at all, all you have to do is send an e-mail to post@posterous.com and within a few minutes you’ll get an e-mail back confirming your post and a link to that new post. There’s also a link to edit or delete that post.
At this point, they only give you a temporary subdomain, but there’s also a link in the e-mail which will take you a page where you can give your account a password and choose your own subdomain (if it doesn’t already exist, of course). I chose thedonkey.posterous.com.
The cool thing about it is that you can use posterous.com to post to your other sites via e-mail as well. One reason this is cool, is that I have been looking for a quick way to post to Twitter via e-mail, since twitter itself doesn’t allow this. I’ve tried the Twitterrific (link opens in iTunes) app on the iPhone, as well as the online services hahlo.com and PocketTweets.com, but sometimes it’s just easiest to fire up an e-mail message and send it that way. With Posterous it gives you individual addresses for each service, or one address to post to all services. For instance, if I send an e-mail to twitter@posterous.com, it will post to only my twitter account. Cool, huh?
Another cool thing I’m going to try and use it for is updating my Facebook status via e-mail. Once I’ve set up Posterous to use my Facebook account, I just send an e-mail to facebook@posterous.com and it will update my status. Double cool.
I’ll post back here about how it’s going. Maybe even via Posterous.
// September 22nd, 2008 // No Comments » // Communication, Technology
Well, I’m still kind of holding my breath, but I decided to upgrade to iTunes 8 and my first-gen iPhone to firmware 2.1 last night. I had previously used the Pwnage Tool from the iPhone Dev Team to upgrade to the 2.0 firmware. That went fairly smoothly except for the fact that it didn’t want to enter DFU mode right away, but eventually it did and things went well.
I started the upgrade and held my breath. First iTunes was upgraded to version 8 (more about that here) which went smoothly (as expected). I had already downloaded the 2.1 firmware so I located the place in my Library where the firmware was kept and copied it there. (I just looked for it again, but I can’t find it. You’re best bet is to just let iTunes update it for you.)
The upgrade went fine, my iPhone restarted and (holding my breath) … it started syncing, finished (still holding my breath) and that’s it. No questions asked, no Pwnage tool, no QuickPwn, it just worked, like some others I’ve read about.
One thing, though, I’m missing cydia and installer which is not a big loss, since I didn’t use them very much anyway. I think that may be the key to upgrading smoothly. If you haven’t done it yet and you’ve got a lot of 3rd party (i.e., non-official) apps installed, go in and un-install them all (you’ll lose them anyway during upgrade). I suspect many of the errors are due to conflicts with certain non-official apps.
Still, I will kind of miss the application that allowed me to stream live video to Qik. Even though I hadn’t used it very much, I had great plans for it.
Mostly, the reason I like having my iPhone pwned is that I am living in The Netherlands, and although they sell the new 3G version of the iPhone, they don’t offer official service for the original version. So, it’s either cough up the money for a relatively expensive voice and data plan for two years, or use my original iPhone which I already had anyway.
// July 23rd, 2007 // No Comments » // Communication, Current Events, Technology
So I wake up this morning and I’ve got a bright and shiny Pownce invitation in my inbox. Cool. Now what?
Pownce is kind of like twitter, right? I also have a twitter account, but I never use it. Apparently twitter is one of those extremely useless, highly addictive things.
Anyway, I have 6 invites. Who wants a pownce invite? I’ll warn ya’ though, it’s gonna cost ya’! Ha ha. How about a link exchange? You provide a link on your cool, hip blog read by thousands of actual people to my uncool blog read by, well, actually I think even the spambots have stopped dropping by.
People hate comment spam, but I actually kind of liked it, because they were just about the only comments I was getting. It made me feel a little less lonely.
Anyway, if you want an invite, leave a comment with the link to your blog. Maybe I’ll be in touch.
UPDATE: Oh yeah, I guess I left out this part – pownce.com/thedonkey is my address.
// December 11th, 2006 // No Comments » // Technology
I woke up this morning to snow. No, there was no snow on the ground, it was on my tv. Last night here in The Netherlands (December 10th-11th), the analog television signal was taken off the air and replaced with a digital signal (DVB-T, to be exact). This means that Dutch tv is now 100% digital. I know I should be happy about this – there are places where this ideal is only a dream – but I’m not, yet.
// December 1st, 2006 // No Comments » // Science, Technology
This is really cool: An Ancient Computer Surprises Scientists – New York Times
It raises a hypothetical situation in my mind. What if we were to set this object in front of a Creationist and an Evolutionist and ask them to explain its origin. Which answer would make more sense?
// September 13th, 2006 // No Comments » // Technology
Apple’s highly-touted announcement, cryptically labeled “Showtime”, came and went yesterday bringing us several new Apple products.
There was no new “Video iPod”, rumours of which had been floating around the internet for months now, but the present iPod did get a bump in capacity, the larger model going from 60GB to 80GB.
The Nano also got a facelift. Check them out here:
And the Shuffle is smaller, now being touted as the smallest mp3 player on the market:
Other noteworthy news, is that you can now buy and download full-length movies via the iTunes Music Store. For instance:
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
iTunes also got an update moving up to version 7, from version 6:
(If you click on the links and buy something, you also help support this website.)
// August 29th, 2006 // No Comments » // Technology
I just found a great way to make simple yet awesome-looking galleries with SimpleViewer. Check out my example.
You can export into this format in several different ways. The easiest is probably using a desktop program like Picasa for Windows or iPhoto on the Mac (instructions here). You can read about all of the other different ways to export your photos here.
Another cool way to export your photos into a gallery for Mac users and iPhoto is using the WebExport plug-in. Check it out.
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