Mike's Weblog

I drank the Kool-Aid

rebele93 — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:37:22 +0000

I waited and waited. Finally my old mobile phone contract with T-Mobile expired. My phone had only been on its last leg for about 3 months now.

Karen and I went to the Apple store and I got the new iPhone 3GS. We were in and out of the Apple store in about 15 minutes. My current phone number was transferred within minutes of leaving. No fuss, no bother. Easy as cake.

I spent some time over the weekend browsing through all of the apps in the Apple store. They seem to go on forever. Now I know what all of the fuss is about. This is by far the coolest gadget I’ve ever owned.

Here is a list of my favorite apps so far:

Tweetdeck – Twitter client
MotionX GPS
Maps (included)
Skype
Yelp
Fandango
Google Earth
Paper toss (free game)
FREE Wi-Fi

Would anyone like some Kool-Aid?

Have an application to suggest? Drop me a note.

Mike

Shaolin Soccer is Real in Brazil

rebele93 — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:16:28 +0000

View origional post

Sumatra or Bust

rebele93 — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:40:03 +0000

Here is a link to one of my co-worker’s travel blog to Sumantra, Indonesia.

http://www.sumatraorbust.blogspot.com/

James Kuhn, the man who painted his face every day of the year, has finished the 365-day project

rebele93 — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:09:04 +0000

Title says it all…

Visit page

Snowing again in Colorado.

rebele93 — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:25:50 +0000

We are currently expecting 9-12″ here at the house. Bummer.

2009 Monarch Girls Hockey Pictures

rebele93 — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 18:04:57 +0000

Check out my Smugmug site for 2009 Monarch Girls Hockey images.

All of the images in this gallery are completely unaltered in their largest .jpg size.
Images can be printed professionally from this gallery, or downloaded to your computer.

Hint: To save a full size image, first roll over the image until the menu appears on the right. Select the ‘Original Size’. Once it loads, right+click the image to ‘Save Image As…’.

View Smugmug Gallery

Mike

Scotland Blog Posted!

rebele93 — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:53:03 +0000

2009ScotlandVacation.Wordpress.com

My EEE PC

rebele93 — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 17:09:12 +0000

For our upcoming Scotland trip I decided to invest in a travel computer rather than lugging around my 10lbs. laptop. I went with the EEE PC 900HA. This system came with Windows XP Home edition pre-installed.

The first thing I did was upgrade it to dual boot with Ubuntu. The system booted up properly under Ubuntu, but it had a few quirks that had to be fixed. The system default had the webcam turned ‘off’ for power conservation. I also lost functionality to my wireless card, and my function keys no longer worked.

I did some more digging around and discovered 2 other flavors of Ubuntu that I thought I’d play around with instead. One was dubbed “Easy Peasy” and the other, which I decided to use, was Ubuntu – EEE. This ditribution had some extra tweaks necessary for the EEE PC. I was having a difficult time figuring out how to uninstall the first version of Ubuntu that I had installed, so I started clean and formatted my hard drive, waxed XP, and reinstalled Ubuntu EEE as an Ubuntu-only machine. This fixed some of the issues including the smaller screen size issues I was experiencing, and also added a shift-lock icon to the screen. (No LED on the shift lock button on this system)

There were still some necessary issues that had to be overcome, including adding a script to control the camera.

I’m still trying to figure out how to get my Logitech USB headset working for use with Skype. No luck yet. Not exactly plug-n-play. Wireless seems to work fine now. No other major issues have been discovered.

What I like about this system and Ubuntu:

Easy access to open-source software and applications from the Synaptic Package manager.
Easy to figure out GUI
Command line control
Portability: Size and weight
Video performance is better than my HP Pavilion dv2000
Long battery life 3.5-4 hours
Price – really nice mini-computer for 300 bones

What I do not like:

No way to run Google Earth (Although I have not tried it using Wine yet)
I miss my Adobe Suite. Gimp was clunky to install and does not always run (still working on this issue)
No way to easily add my images to my Smugmug.com acount. (I use to use Adobe Bridge for this which was a real snap)
Had to uninstall and reinstall Firefox and Flash in order to see videos in Youtube. This was a strange issue that took me a long time to figure out.
No iTunes – still have not researched my alternatives for working with files on my iPod

Helpful site for fixing EEE issues: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/EeePC/Fixes

Broken Camera

rebele93 — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 21:27:08 +0000

I just took my Nikon D40x to be repaired. The the LCD screen got cracked on a recent trip. Sounds like I’ll be without for a few weeks while they are waiting for the new LCD screen to come in.

SMUGMUG.com

rebele93 — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 18:00:57 +0000

I’ve just added some images to my SMUGMUG account. I’ll keep a link to this account in my links list. Be sure to check back often for additional galleries. http://rebele93.smugmug.com/