Tech

New N900 Arrived and Unboxed

The N900 arrived and I’ve finally processed the pictures. I’ve been using the N900 about a week now and absolutely love it. It’s perfect for what I want to do. Here are the pictures of the unboxing. First, obligatory picture of the box. There are several progressive pictures: opening the box, the support letter from Nokia, box contents, and the first boot screens. I loves the Precious. Related Images:

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Cell phone is dying

My cell phone is dying a long, slow, painful death of the abused electronics kind. The phone has been to the barn, through dust and cat hair, riding in the rain, and all manner of abuse. It’s lasted almost three years — pretty good for a little touch phone with a battery back that comes off if you look at it wrong. It’s a good little cell phone: Motorola Ming A1200 running Monta...

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Apologies to people who follow me on Twitter

I played a game on Twitter today called Mobster World. When I signed on to the game, it asked for access to my Twitter account. Other Facebook applications also ask for access to FB pages, so I did not think anything of it. Happily played the game for a while and then went offline for a nap. My phone buzzed with a new text message: a friend on Twitter had un-followed me because...

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CSS Resources

A friend of mine asked for tutorials and resources for CSS, so I complied the following list of sites. The cascading style sheet (CSS) spec (current version is 2.1) is published and maintained by the World Wide Web Consorium (W3C). The W3C also has a tutorial on CSS. W3Schools is a good site with excellent tutorials for HTML, CSS, XHTML, among others. I learned HTML/CSS there — and then had to unlearn some...

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The Greatest Internet Pioneers You Never Heard Of

A friend of mine is a Finnish programmer. The man is bloody brilliant as a programmer — one of the sharpest programmers I know. It’s not surprising that Finns would have had the first truly innovated browser — even before Mosaic. And here’s something funny. The article in the link below has a picture of the programmers. Don’t they all look like they could be cousins? Three quiet and unknown Finnish engineers in...

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Day in the life of a Geek

I am working from home today using a virtual private network (VPN) connection. I can then connect to my desktop Windows work machine using remote access. All of these connections are done through browsers so it’s pretty straightforward. Unfortunately, the VPN system we use is primarily setup for Windows and not Macs. Once I had heard about the weather forecast yesterday evening, I grabbed one of the IT guys to help me get...

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New Theme, New WordPress

Every few months I find a new theme I like and change things around. This theme is called Lyrics, designed by ThemeRama. I like the layout, but I’m not crazy about some of the features. It would be nice to have a tab for each page (like archives and photography). I may try to tweak it and see what happens… I’ve also just updated to version 2.7 of WordPress. New sparkly. Yay. Seems...

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Type Racer

A friend of mine posted a note about typeracer.com, a site where you compete based upon typing speed. The faster you type, the faster your race car moves in its lane. You compete against yourself or against 1-5 other players. First car that gets to the finish line wins. I had to try it. Just cause. I used to tell people that I typed about 100 wpm because of a typing test I’d...

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Link collection for technical writing

At different times, I’ve mentored people who are interested in technical writing. I have over ten years of experience as a professional technical writer and some definite ideas about how to get started in the field. A friend of mine asked me for some suggested reading on getting started in technical writing. I collected a set of links as a starting point (see below) and realized other people might be interested in the...

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Too good to ignore: 6 alternative browsers

With the exception of Google’s Chrome, most of the alternative browsers out there tend to get lost in the shuffle. Three writers take some lesser-known browsers out for a spin: Camino (for the Mac), Maxthon (for the PC), OmniWeb (for the Mac), Opera (both the Mac and the PC versions) and Shiira (for the Mac). read more | digg story Related Images:

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$100 off a new MacBook at Best Buy

It’s nice to see that Apple is authorizing some discounts on the MacBook and MacBook Pro models. Gizmodo has an article onBest Buy’s 100 off on MacBooks and $150 off on MacBook Pros. It’s a start on a discount, but not enough to tempt me to buy a new computer… Now why can’t we get a substantial discount? Say 30%? Related Images:

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Company Soccer Team

I went to the company soccer team game last night and took pictures. Most of the guys in my engineering group are playing (about half of them are European). Figured I’d go and cheer them on. The game was late: started at 9:30 and went until 10:30 or so. They did very well — actually won the game. (Go team!) I used the opportunity to see how my camera did with sports photography....

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Flashback

I used to work at a company called iPIX. Like many other companies, it was struck down during the dot-com-bomb of 2000-2001. My job there was my dream job — and it stayed that way for the first 18 months. After that, things went downhill but not for what I was doing, but just things in the company in general. Any IT or internet-based business at that time was a chancy place to...

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Concern over giant UK database

The BBC web site today reported that the Home Office of the UK is proposing development of an large communications database — greatly reducing privacy in net or mobile communications. The Communications Data Bill, due to be introduced in November in the Queen’s Speech in the UK, will create a database holding “communications information” on people’s phone calls, email, web browsing (pages visited, etc.) and other data. Allegedly, this database will not retain...

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