Microsoft Need to Watch Out

By Matt | Published: 2010/07/29

Steve Ballmer is a tit!!! He admits being wrong to underestimate Apple’s innovations in touch and then goes on to brush off Android and Chrome OS.

http://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.co.uk/2010/07/29/ballmer_awake_at_night/

Here’s the thing – PCs will always be around but average consumers these days are moving more and more to a mobile platform. Not as a replacement but to compliment the PC and take a large amount of the internet use load off it. And Joe User doesn’t care what OS he uses. He just wants it to work and get him online but in a way that’s reliable and user friendly. Microsoft are really going to have to do a lot better or they risk losing a huge chunk of the market to Apple, Google and RIM.
Just my two cents. I wrote this post on my phone. I only use my PC for downloads and media streaming these days. As soon as I buy a tonido plug my pc will be used about 20% of the time it used to I think.

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

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Fat Matt

By Matt | Published: 2010/07/24

I had some ideas about what to use my geekhive.com site for but they’ve been on the back burner.  To be honest I lack the time, energy, motivation, etc to piss around with web coding.

In the absence of anything useful to use my site for I think I’ll get back to good old fashioned blogging.  The topic of the blog will be weight and how I intend to shift it – a chronicle of my attempt to get healthy.

As of right now I weigh approximately 185lbs and I’m 5’4″ tall.  My BMI is 31.8 which puts me almost 2 points into the obesity category.  I quit smoking about 2 and a half years ago and put on a few pounds.  Since quitting smoking I’ve found myself feeling a lot more healthy but I really want to shift the weight.  A secret goal of mine is to not only be more physically fit but also able to get up and go for a run at the drop of a hat.

A running program will come later – right now I need to identify my key areas of improvement and come up with a realistic starting point to a healthier lifestyle.  If anyone has any suggestions or has successfully reached a healthy lifestyle goal then I’m all ears.  You can comment at geekhive.com or, if you’re reading this on Facebook, comment on the FB note comments.

Thanks.

Image below is not me  :p

Fatty

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WordPress v3

By Matt | Published: 2010/07/15

Just upgraded to WordPress v3.  Hope nothing breaks. Don’t notice much difference  so far.  But then again any new features will be lost on me as I always neglect this site.

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Site Idea

By Matt | Published: 2010/05/08

I indicated in a previous post that I might have been selling geekhive.  This won’t be happening anytime soon.  A while ago an individual came forward with an offer, interested in buying.  I accepted the offer and suggested we use an escrow service.  He seemed fine with that…then he stopped all communication.  Didn’t return my phone calls or emails.  Classy.  Probably for the best.  He said he was an “enthusiast” who was not interested in using the domain for “commercial use”. Obviously this guy hasn’t been told about Google.  A few clicks after getting the first email from him I discovered he’s connected to a web business with a similar name to Geekhive…very similar.  I won’t link to it or mention his name as I wouldn’t want to drive any amount of clicks to his site!

Anyway, Geekhive is here to stay and I have an idea cooking for something other than a mere tech tidbit site.  May take a while to get going but I will keep you informed.

TTFN

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Lucid Lynx Install…from USB

By Matt | Published: 2010/04/30

Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve been using Linux at home for over 5 years now.  My wife and I both runUbuntu Linux and find it to be a great alternative to Windows.  Our media is streamed to our TV using a hacked original Xbox running the XBMC Linux distro.

Ubuntu are in the habit of releasing a new version of their distro every 6 months, coinciding with the 6 month release cycle of the Gnome desktop environment.  The latest version of Ubuntu is named Lucid Lynx and is a Long Term Support release.  I recently ran out of blank CDs so for the first time I will be using the usb-creator package on my current Ubuntu installation to create  a bootable USB Key image to install Lucid Lynx from.

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This Week in Back Stabbing

By Matt | Published: 2010/04/28

A few years ago after arriving in Canada I started watching TechTV on cable and became hooked on shows like “The Screen Savers” and “Call For Help”. This was back in the days before TechTV sold its soul and became a bland gaming channel named G4. Several of the presenters who walked or got kicked from the network, before its ghastly transformation, went on to bigger and better things.

Kevin Rose started up Digg and hosted the Diggnation audio/video podcast with fellow Screen Saver presenter Alex Albrecht. My favorite post-G4 success story, though is Leo Laporte. Leo occasionally co-hosted The Screen Savers and was the main presenter on Call For Help. He left the network and began an internet TV network called TWiT.tv – so named after its flagship show “This Week in Tech”. The name has nothing to do with Twitter as Twitter didn’t even exist at this point in time.  The TWiT network produces great quality shows covering Tech news, Cloud Computing, Hardware, Science, and there’s light hearted shows like NSFW and Munchcast.

Recently, a semi-regular guest on This Week in Tech, Jason Calacanis, has decided to start up his own online TV network called….ThisWeekIn.com.  This is somewhat annoying news.  Don’t get me wrong – Leo doesn’t own the rights to the words “This Week In…”, in fact there have been TV shows that have used that name in the past.  Jason even asked permission of Leo before he went ahead.  At that time Jason had said he wanted to do a show called “This Week In Startups” on a new network which makes sense as he is a web entrepreneur.  But he has now gone ahead and started setting up several shows on this network with names like “This Week in Cloud Computing”, “This Week in iPad”, “This Week in Twitter”, “This Week in Youtube”, and the list goes on.  I don’t think Leo knew this was what Jason had in mind.  There is the risk that people will confuse the two networks which is a shame as, in Leo’s words, “Jason’s shows are kind of crappy…”

Either Calacanis is completely unoriginal in creating and naming his content or he knows exactly what he’s doing to one of his contemporaries.  This seems like a deliberate move to try and force Leo’s hand into a joint network…something which Calacanis pretty much outlined a business plan for in a recent blog post.  It looks like Leo isn’t too pleased about the situation…

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Life Without Facebook

By Matt | Published: 2010/04/25

3 days ago I deactivated my Facebook account.  I did this for a few reasons with the top 3 being:

  • Signal to noise ratio – I had 130 or so people on my friends list.  The news stream has evolved these past few years with Facebook trying their best to to decide what I’d be interested in.  Unfortunately, they didn’t do a very good job as I was finding myself missing out on status messages from my favorite friends.  I only discovered this when I visited their profile pages…which kind of defeats the entire purpose of the news stream.  The news stream worked back in the early Facebook days.  Why change it?
  • Data Farms - Everyone and their dog was becoming obsessed with Farmville, Mafia Wars and other games.  These games are nothing more than data mining operations which, when given access to your profile, will gather stats and information about you and your interests.  There’s nothing wrong with that if you don’t mind being targeted by ad campaigns but here’s the thing – By giving these companies access to your Profile when you play the game or answer questions on an IQ quiz, you’re also allowing them access to your friends’ pages.  I don’t want 3rd parties gathering data on me because one of my friends wants to ride around on a virtual tractor.
  • Crowd Sourcing Fail – One of the things I love(d) about Facebook was the Crowd Sourcing potential. For example, Want to know where to buy good quality bagels?  Ask your friend base in your status.  It’s a great way to reach out to many people at once.  Unfortunately it’s not always so simple.  You’re more likely to get quizzed about “why the hell you eat bagels” or “did you know that bagels aren’t as healthy as whole wheat bread…” or some other crap you didn’t ask about.  This may say more about some of my Facebook friends as well as my temperament on some occasions though.  :p

So, I have flown the coop for now.  I opted to disable my account rather than delete it. Facebook make it very difficult to delete one’s account fully.  Plus, I may want to jump back in to grab photos I have that only exist on Facebook.  For any of my Facebook friends reading this, I can be found via email (check out the contact page) or on Twitter @1morematt or on Google Buzz.

I shall post more at a later stage to let you know if I suffer any Facebook withdrawls.

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3-2-1 Backup

By Matt | Published: 2010/04/22

Something I’ve been taking more seriously these days is backup.  My music and video collection are replaceable but my photos of friends and family aren’t.  I’m now following the 3-2-1 Rule of thumb for backup of photos.

  • 3 copies of any important files
  • 2 different media types
  • 1 copy should be stored offsite

For my photos I store them on my hard drive, a removable drive and on Picasaweb.  In Picassa you can choose to make galleries private or public.  For $5 a year you can purchase 20GB storage from Google to be used for Gmail and Picassa.  The Picassa desktop software will scan your photo albums and offer you options for syncing to your online folder.  You can copy original size, reduced size, control bandwidth usage when syncing, etc.  Admittedly it can take some time for your first backup but after it’ll only sync the new files.

Well worth considering, especially if like me you have amassed a huge collection of pictures over the years.

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Podcast Recommendations

By Matt | Published: 2010/04/17

There’s a couple of really interesting podcasts that I’ve discovered over the past month that I’d like to share with you.  The first is a weekly show called “This American Life“.  Each week the show, hosted by Ira Glass, chooses a theme and then present 2 or 3 stories around that theme.

For example this week the theme happens to be Babysitting.  In Act One Hillary Frank reports on what can happen when a teenaged son is put in charge of his younger brothers. It’s not pretty…

Act Two –  The story of several huge companies that accidentally got put into the babysitting business in a big, big way because of snow on December 26, 1988…

Act Three – Myron Jones and his sister Carol Bove explain what happened when they were teenagers, and they ended up babysitting children who didn’t exist…

If you are familiar with the work of Jon Ronson or David Sedaris then chances are you will like this show.  The show was also presented as a TV show for two seasons of 6 episodes each.

Another podcast I’ve found incredibly interesting is “Radiolab“.  Radiolab is similar in journalistic style to This American Life, with the main difference being that each hour-long show focuses on a topic of a scientific and philosophical nature.  This is done through stories, interviews, and thought experiments. The show attempts to approach broad, difficult topics such as “time” and “morality” in an accessible and light-hearted manner.  Radiolab airs every two weeks occasionally producing mini 10-15 minute episodes in between called “shorts”.

Each show is completely free and available via podcast RSS feed or iTunes.  Or you can manually download the MP3 file.

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DNS Tools

By Matt | Published: 2010/04/11

Recently I’ve changed my dynamic DNS service to DynDNS who offer a great free service.  Now I can connect to my home PC via IP using a custom URL, e.g., geekhive.hostpc.org.  I used to use No-IP.org for this service but their Linux client wasn’t working too well with Ubuntu installation.

Speaking of DNS I’ve been using OpenDNS for a few months now with great success.  OpenDNS provide a DNS service you can use in place of your ISP for Domain Name Resolution.  Because they have a huge cache of internet domain names they are able to process requests very quickly.  With your free account you are also given a dashboard enabling you to create custom DNS entries for your favourite sites.  You could setup “fb” to send you to http://www.facebook.com, for example.  OpenDNS also includes a phishing filter, typo correction and gives you control over the types of content that PCs on your network can view.  I highly recommend OpenDNS to anyone.

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