Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Happy New Years!

Happy New Years, everyone! Hope 2014 is a great year! :)

RasPi Internet Radio

I love the Raspberry Pi, and there are so many great projects our there to inspire you. I especially like this Raspberry Pi Powered Radio on MAKE.

Monday, December 30, 2013

10 Best Computer Games, Ever

I just ran across an "abandonware" website and started thinking about my ten favourite computer games of all time. This list was extremely difficult to create because A) I haven't been much of a gamer over the past decade or so and B) there are too many different criteria to chose from. The criteria I finally settled on was how much fun I had at the time I was playing the game. If you feel differently about the list, feel free to share your favourites in the comments. And now, my 10 favourite PC games, in no particular order:


Colossal Cave (aka Adventure)

Commander Keen

Wing Commander

Civilization

Star Control

Space Quest

Wolfenstein 3D

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Warcraft

Ultima

Sunday, December 29, 2013

New book on my favorite 8-bit computer

There's a new book out on my favorite 8-bit computer, called CoCo: The Colorful History of Tandy's Underdog Computer [affiliate link]. It's definitely going on my wish list ;)

Friday, December 27, 2013

For you, Brandon!

I remember once, at a concert of a buddy's band, you being that guy who yells "Play me some Skynyrd!" regardless of the band's style. So, this if for you, my friend. Rest in peace.

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas, everyone! I hope that whatever holiday you might celebrate this season, it's a joyous one :)

Monday, December 23, 2013

Happy Birthday!

Happy Birthday, to the most wonderful woman in the world! I love you!

Top 10 Geek Books of All Time

Some geeks, myself included, love to read. While reading non-fiction is pretty much a requirement to keep on top of the things I love, this list will be restricted to fiction. Also, my favorite genre is cyberpunk. This is definitely reflected in the list below, even though it also includes other sci-fi and fantasy. So, without further ado, here are 10 of my favorite books, in no particular order:

  1. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

  2. Neuromancer by William Gibson

  3. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein

  4. The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner

  5. Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling

  6. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

  7. Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

  8. Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card

  9. Hammered by Elizabeth Bear

  10. Old Man's War by John Scalzi


I know there are many more great fiction books out there, and these are just some of my favorites. Also, because I went with fiction only, I had to leave out some of my other favorites, such as Wil Wheaton’s Just a Geek.

I also know I’ve done this post before, but it went away when I purged the site of old content. Also, my tastes may have changed slightly since last time, so the list might be slightly different.

Finally, for full disclosure, the links above are affiliate links.

Friday, December 20, 2013

Twitter

For those on Twitter, you should follow NSA Public Relations. It's the funniest parody account I've seen. Or follow the real NSA Public Affairs Office. It's less amusing, but they ARE following YOU, and turnabout is fair play. lol (Also, follow me as @wintermute740 on Twitter, if you would.)

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Feedly

Ever since Google decided to shutter Reader (which upset me greatly), I have been looking for a good RSS reader. I've used Bloglines in the past, and really loved them, but they are not the same as before they were bought out. That's when I switched to Reader, and when they decided to shutter, I switched to The Old Reader, which very reminds me of an older version of Google Reader (hence the name). But I've never been quite happy with it, and then I discovered Feedly. It took a little getting used to, but I absolutely love it. It's cross-platform, and includes a web interface as well, so even if you use multiple devices, you can keep your feeds synced up. That is probably my favorite feature.

So, what's your favorite RSS reader?

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Technorati

I know Technorati doesn't exactly hold the same relevance it once did, but I continue to use it, mostly out of habit. But I'm really starting to wonder if it has any relevance at all anymore. I can't tell you the last time I saw traffic come from there, and their wonderful widgets are long since gone. I wonder if it's time to stop bothering with making sure my blogs are listed there or not. Any thoughts?

Monday, December 16, 2013

Top 10 Geek Movies of All Time

Monday seems like a good day to do top 10 lists, and, while I'm sure this post will stir up a little controversy, as any subjective top ten list should, I can make an argument for why each of these movies should be in any geek's top-10. So here they are, in no particular order (affiliate links below):

  1. The Matrix The first one, not the trilogy or the second or third (though, I would argue that the third was better than the second, and could have been better still had the second not happened at all). I haven't watched it in some time, so I don't know how well it held up, but I absolutely loved it when it first came out.

  2. Sneakers This was highly entertaining and has an excellent cast, definitely worth watching.

  3. Hackers This movie is so filled with jokes from the computer underground scene of the time, how can you not love it, despite (or, perhaps, because of) the cheesiness? I laugh my way through it every single time I watch.

  4. Johnny Mnemonic This movie gets a bad rap, but I think it deserves its spot on the top ten. I love me some cyberpunk, and this movie certainly fit the bill. It's an adaptation of William Gibson's short story of the same name, and my only real disappointment was the replacement of Molly Millions, of Neuromancer fame, due to the movie rights of Neuromancer and related characters being owned by someone else, if I recall correctly. That's a movie I'd love to see made!

  5. WarGames A classic! As dated as it feels watching it now, it's still quite enjoyable.

  6. Tron The original is a classic. Very cheesy, even back then, but that's part of the charm.

  7. Monty Python and the Holy Grail What kind of list of top geek movies doesn't include at least one Monty Python movie? And I'd argue that thus is the best one.

  8. Office Space Yeah. I'm gonna have to ask you to watch this movie if you haven't already. mmmkay? Did you get the memo? This is arguably Mike Judge's best work.

  9. Blade Runner This first adaptation of a Philip Dick story on the list. The granddaddy of cyberpunk, and definitely a classic.

  10. Total Recall The original version (the new one didn't totally suck, though), and the second Philip Dick story adaptation to make the cut. Another classic.


The Net gets an honorable mention. It was out at the same time as Hackers, but was, somehow, way more popular and did much better at the box office. I quite enjoyed it back in the day.


So, what's missing, and what needs removed? Let me know in comments!

Friday, December 13, 2013

One word review of Prisoners

As promised, this post marks the return from my One-Word Reviews. I'll try to make this a regular thing here, because I had a lot of fun with it before. With that said, here's my one-word review of Prisoners (aft): LONG!

Thursday, December 12, 2013

The $40 x86 Arduino

Hack A Day has a post up about The $40 x86 Arduino, and, as a fan of the Rasberry Pi, I find this to be VERY cool. It's only a matter of time before someone hacks in some low-cost video card (perhaps by buying two of these and splicing them together?), and then let the retro gaming fun begin!

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Archives

Because I have been an idiot with outright deleting old content, the only real way to import old archives is by combing the Wayback Machine and manually importing old posts. While doing that over the weekend, I discovered A) that I had some great content mixed in with the not-so great, and B) it is very time consuming. Probably too time consuming to worry about at the moment. If I manage to script the process (or, at least, mostly script it), I'll revisit the issue. For now, I may just go through and continue grabbing some of the gems. That said, I do still plan on grabbing the Ghosts of Ohio stuff manually, but it may take some time.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Set up a TOR WifI Gateway

With all the NSA spying and such, those who value their privacy may be interested in TOR, but not know where to start. Or they may want to enable TOR on their network by default. MAKE has a solution called How to Bake an Onion Pi, which many may find useful. My plan is to set something like this up, then having it sit alongside my regular wi-fi router. That way, I decide whether or not to use TOR via which WiFi network I connect to.

Monday, December 9, 2013

I'm Baaa-aack! (and here's what I've been up to)

It has been way too long since I fell off the running wagon, but it's time I hopped back on. Since my last post many moons ago, I've moved a bunch of times (including cross-country and back) and still been running on-and-off, but mostly off (shame on me!). I figured I'd resurrect the blog in order to make me more accountable, and tip that ratio more towards on. :) Today is a new day, and I have a plan, about which I will post more later. My goal is still to run a marathon, but, again, more on that when I lay out my plans.

Google+ Integration

I have integrated Google+ with Blogger, which is great! Except for a couple of minor annoyances. The first is that the "About Me" section changed to my Google+ profile. But I had preemptively copied the HTML from the original "About Me" block and pasted it into a new widget. The link still goes to my Google+ Profile instead of my Blogger profile, but I can live with that (or create an actual "About" page and send it there instead).

Another issue I have is that I prefer to show my handle to users instead of my real name, though I don't mind my real name being known. A quick Google search led me to several solutions, many of them editing the HTML of the template. But I also found instructions for using CSS to change the author name on posts to a nickname. As noted on that site, it's only really useful for single-author blogs, but it serves my needs just fine for now.

Friday, December 6, 2013

Hack a PSU to change output voltage

We've all been there. We need a specific voltage, and we've got a ton of power supply units, but none which suit our needs. Here's how one person decided to reverse engineer a PSU to change the output voltage to fit his project.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Updates

I've got some updates coming this way, and have started some updates to the site already.

First, you may have noticed that the "Technorati tags" line looks a little different. That's because, when I started using them, I had to manually make that line a part of each and every post. Well, Blogger has long since implemented "Labels," and it was a simple matter of changing a single line in the template. After you'd turned on labels and moved them where you want, simply find a line in your HTML that starts

a expr:href='data:label.url' rel='tag'

and change that section of it to

expr:href='"http://technorati.com/tag/"+data:label.name' rel='tag'

and you're set.

Second, I'll be moving this back to www. instead of blog. (edit: done)

Finally, as part of that, I'll be importing all of the "Ghosts of Ohio" posts into Blogger. (edit: in progress, but a very manual process)

Oh, and I may hit up the Wayback Machine to find some of my old posts and start importing them again. From now on, I'm not deleting a single thing ;) (edit: in progress, but an extremely manual process)

edit: Oh, and obviously I'm off my anti-Google kick ;) So also expect the feeds to be changed back over to Feedburner soon. (edit2: done)

edit2: And look for a return of my one-word move reviews (which will, obviously, contain affiliate links).

Best Firefox Extensions

Another list from Lifehacker, this one the best extensions for Firefox.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Lifehacker's Best Linux Apps

This is a bit old, but every year Lifehacker puts together a bunch of lists of great apps. Here's this year's best Linux apps according to them

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Raspberry Pi Emulation

There are lots of RasPi emulation machines out there, but here's an interesting portable version.