Ok, one month-ish break is over.  Let’s get some blogging down pat.  I’ve been putting some time into thinking about what this blog’s purpose should be.  I have been doing a lot of life reflecting, investigating my family’s finances (and started up another blog just for that), and other things.  Historically I haven’t had a solid theme for the blog.  It’s losely been revolving around technology, but I hadn’t really intended it to be that from the start.  It was just a general blog of my personal daily thoughts (which never actually became daily here.)  Well since I’ve started up a personal blog elsewhere to chronical my financial endeavors, and that has a solid theme….I figured I should really nail down a theme for this one too.  So, since one of the big interests in my life is technology I’m going to brand this blog my techy playground blog.  I’m somewhat taking a step away from technology in my personal life to focus on some other things right now, but I still work in technology so this will be a good spot to put daily notes or information I run into that is useful.  Onward we go….

Technorati Tags: blog, Tech, Technology

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I listen very regularly to the Twit netcast, Windows Weekly with Paul Thurrott.  This is a Windows only show, right?  I supposed to hear Windows news, and banter about the latest things going on with Microsoft and Windows from Leo and Paul.  Correct?

On paper, this guy appears to be a Windows guy.  He publishes articles for Windows IT Pro magazine, runs http://winsupersite.com, has a new version os his Windows Vista Secrets book coming out soon, everything about him on paper says Microsoft Windows.  But yet week after week when I hear him speak with Leo Laporte on the Windows Weekly netcast, he sounds more and more anti-Microsoft/Windows and more of an Apple/Mac/iPhone fan than anything else.

I thought I was going to get through episode 64 without hearing anything about Apple or Macs, or any Microsoft bashing…but fear not, 20 minutes into the show they start talking about bad Microsoft slogans, and how Apple’s commercials are so great even though they do nothing but bash Windows PC’s.  Then they go on and on about Apple’s image in the public’s mind compared to Microsoft’s…only to lead up to the fact that Paul admits he just bought a Macbook Pro recently.  Oh sure, he installed Windows on it, but left Leopard on it too…was that Windows install done just to keep the Windows fans somewhat happy?

He even mentioned that he’d leave the Windows platform for Macs if Microsoft did an ad with a Bruce Springsteen/John Cougar Mellencamp singer guy.

Paul doesn’t hide the fact that he has an iPhone user.  What?  Microsoft makes phones with Windows on them…how can you call yourself a Windows guy if you use the competition’s phone and OS?

30 minutes into episode 64, he’s talking about his first Macbook he bought…ugh!  Then makes a comment about the Apple store service being excellent, and ends up buying a brand new Macbook Pro.  He likes to keep his toe in the Mac side of things so he can stay up to date with what you can get on the Mac side that you can’t get on the PC side.  What?

So they continued to talk about Macs 36 minutes into the show, and then segwayed into Paul using iTunes, all his iPod’s and also the fact that he has an AppleTV.  Again, Paul’s a Windows guy, remember?  Not a Mac/Apple guy.  Are you convinced?

39 minutes in, we’re bashing Microsoft inability to get some decent branding on their music stuff, Urge, MSN Music, Plays-for-sure, the Zune store, etc..etc..

I could go on and on.  This is just one episode of Twit where Paul’s coming off sounding more like a Apple/Mac fan.  There’s plenty previous episodes where Apple’s name and products take centerstage on a Windows podcast in a positive light (meaning, it’s talked about how great it is, and then in another breath Microsoft and Windows are talked about how confusing it is, or bad the products are, or the poor decisision making on Microsoft’s part).

I have nothing against Apple.  I don’t use any of their products, but I would if I found a compelling reason to dump Windows/Linux (it just doesn’t make sense for me to spend the $$$ on it right now for something I wouldn’t get ultimately that much different functionality out of with Skype, Firefox, Google Docs, etc..etc..)  But Paul’s surrounded himself with everything-Windows, and makes money off publishing content revolving around Windows.  Just really bugs me and makes me question his loyalty if he comes on a Windows-based podcast and talks more about Apple in a positive light, and then turns around bashing Microsoft and Windows products.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Leo Laporte, Mac, microsoft, paul thurrott, SuperSite for Windows, twit, Windows, Windows IT Pro Magazine, Windows Weekly

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It’s not even out of beta yet (but you can participate using beta code “pingofpings“), but this along with FriendFeed.com is becoming one of my favorite websites.  It’s a very simplistic site really…there’s not much to it.  It isn’t really a social networking website on it’s own…but it’s highly involved in the social networking scene.

The typical problem with most folks that participate in social networking is that they’re involved in too many of them that are separate and don’t share information with each other.  I have profiles on Facebook, Linkedin, Plurk, Twitter, Friendfeed, and a number of other ones.  The trouble is that if you want to update any of those sites, you have to visit them all individually.

Ping.fm tries to resolve this problem by allowing you to post updates to all of your social networking sites all at once.  All you need to do is create an account on Ping.fm and then add in all the sites you’re a member of (that they support), and you can update from Ping.fm.  They also provide mobile pages to do updates from, API’s, and even an email address you can send email to that will update the status of all your social networking websites.

If you’re heavy into the social networking scene, this is a great tool to use to keep all of your friends on different sites updated with the latest information on what’s going on.  I highly recommend it.

Technorati Tags: facebook, friendfeed, linkedin, Ping.fm, plurk, social networking, twitter

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Well, I had originally opened up a Flickr account for myself.  It’s the “in” photo site, right?  It’s what everyone uses I hear.  :P  Whatever, I’ve pretty much written off Yahoo (who owns Flickr).  I’ll be honest, lately I’m totally into everything Google does.

So, I’m ditching Flickr tonight and trying out Picasa.  I suppose right off the bat what I love is that Picasa is more than just an online photo service.  My wife has been using the offline photo application for a long time now, so I had a good laugh tonight when I asked her to help me with it.

The other factor that made me switch…Friendfeed supports it!  I had thought that only Flickr was on there a while back (maybe it was?) but I checked tonight and it’s out there now, so I added it to my feed.

We’ll see how things go.  It does look like there’s quite a limit on photo storage though… 1 GB?  Seems low, but I really don’t need to upload high quality photos.  In fact, I have a crappy $15 camera that I’m carrying around that will most likely be the source of everything I upload.

I’ll have a magic shortcut button for my feed on the right side of my blog soon as I can find a nice image, but if you’d like to check out my photo feed you can find it here:  http://picasaweb.google.com/pagesix1536 .  Or just follow me on FriendFeed.com to keep updated on when I publish photos.

Technorati Tags: flickr, Google, photos, picasa, yahoo

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So, I was at the Detroit Metro Airport (DTW) yesterday waiting to pick up the wife/kids from a trip they went on.  Brought my Cloudbook with me because I hear airports have wifi access in them now.  I figured it’d be cool to get on and read some news or watch TwitLive.tv while I was waiting for them.

Little did I know, the service provider for the airport, Boingo, doesn’t offer it free.  They have 3 or 4 different plans you can pay for depending on the amount of time you want service in whatever airport you happen to be at.  So that shot all my plans to just kill some time while I was waiting, until I started to do some Googling on my Blackberry.

I discovered that there’s a promotional plan for iPhone users which allows them free access for 15 minutes at a time.  The only catch is that you have to watch a small advertisement (which didn’t even work on my laptop anyway).  Well, I don’t have an iPhone, but what I did have is some more information gathered via Googling which you can use to make Internet Explorer pretend to be an iPhone (there’s other articles out there for how to do this on Firefox, which is honestly easier…go find em.)

This is the string you need (make it all one line, it just wraps here in my blog due to the width limitations):

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3

And here’s where you need to put it in the Windows registry for it to work:

HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\5.0\User Agent

Create a “String Value” named Version under that area in the registry and put that iPhone string in as the data.

Now, when you launch IE, it’ll present itself as an iPhone.  You should be able to get on Boingo’s wifi network and watch the mini ad.  One thing I found out though is that if you continue to use that string after you’ve connected, some sites will format as a mobile version.  So what I did was just go back into the registry and rename the “Version” key to something like “Boingo_free_Version” and then restart IE.  Voila, 15 minutes of free internet access at the airport.

After 15 minutes is up, just repeat the process and you can continue.  One thing you could probably do is export that key to a .REG file.  Save it to your desktop.  Then create the other version of the key (the “off” version) and save that to the desktop as well as a .REG file.  Just double-click them to turn on/off the iPhone disguise.

If someone knows of a User Agent plugin for IE (similar to the one that Firefox has), sound off in the comments to this post.

Technorati Tags: airport, boingo, free wifi, Internet Explorer, iphone

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Ok, so far this past week or two, I’ve run into no less than 5 separate people, some who are die-hard technology folks, that even a year and a half after it’s release are still whiny about Vista.  What’s up with that?  Honestly, they’re starting to sound like the Mac fanboys to me.  Annoying.  Get over it…your old XP is out, yesterday’s stuff.  While it may suit certain purposes (UMPC’s and your 6 year old computer with 256 MB of RAM), it’s soooo 2001.  And it smells like moth balls.

Now, anyone that knows me…(which I’m guessing is everyone reading this because no one seems to read my blog except people I know…heck maybe it’s just me that reads my blog) knows that I’m not a fanboy of any operating system.  I use all of them (with the exception of Mac OSX really, since I only have ever used that in school.)  I have Linux, Vista, and XP all installed on various computers I uses (this one I’m using now is a triple-booter, all three are on here).  I’m not hating on XP…I think XP was a fantastic operating system.  But people that say, “You need to take that brand new computer with 4 GB of RAM and get it upgraded from Vista to XP” are obviously misguided souls that might as well stay using their computers from the 1990’s.

Vista is a rock solid, kick-ass OS.  So was XP, and so is Linux.  I actually use Linux mostly for personal use.  Vista for business, and XP for older hardware (Cloudbook) or some older games.  Vista is a far superior operating system over XP though, hands down.  Everyone argues with me (useless arguments because they can’t back anything up), but these are the same folks that argued Windows 98 was better than XP back in the day.  Are those folks still running Windows 98?  Why aren’t you…I thought it was better?

Here’s the only two places you should be running XP.  A) Older hardware (maybe 2 years or older), or B) an Ultra Mobile PC like the Asus Eee.  If you bought a brand new computer, and you had the choice of XP or Vista and you picked XP… you’re better off sticking with your old computer then.  Return that one to the store and continue using your 1.6 Ghz system with XP on it.  Better yet, give your new system to me and I’ll use it with Vista and you can stick with your old XP system.

Technorati Tags: hater, Linux, Vista, Windows, xp

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