By john on Sep 9, 2008 in Apple, featured | 3 Comments
I’ve had the same home directory for a long time, migrating it and it’s data from one machine to another for years. In the process I’ve accumulated a lot of cruft that ballooned my home directory to a whopping 73.5GB of disk space. This was becoming a pain to manage, so I decided to freshen […]
Popularity: 63% [?]
By john on Sep 9, 2008 in Apple, featured | 0 Comments
A long while back I acquired an Apple XServe for use in my home network. It was used, and definitely not new (sadly, not an Intel XServe), but still quite the powerful (and loud) machine! At the behest of my buddy I set it up as my gateway, providing VPN termination, firewall,DNS, nat, dhcp and […]
Popularity: 66% [?]
By john on Aug 6, 2008 in AT&T, Apple, featured | 0 Comments
It’s no surprise to many that my home network is more advanced than most. I’m a geek, it’s what we do. Over the past few weeks I’ve slowly been building out my home network - from it’s initial incarnation as a typical broadband home network with an airport extreme base station serving as my router […]
Popularity: 82% [?]
By john on Jul 30, 2008 in Apple, featured | 0 Comments
With the release of the iPhone and iPod Touch 2.0 software update, and launch of the 3G iPhone (I’ll have one soon), Apple also launched the App Store, where 3rd party applications are sold and distributed for the platform. This is a wonderful thing as it creates a slick, clean, one stop shop for applications […]
Popularity: 75% [?]
By john on Jul 25, 2008 in Apple, Microsoft, featured | 2 Comments
The company I work for gave me a Blacberry 8830 “World Phone” not long after I started here. I’d love to say I was thrilled, but I’d be lying. I don’t necessarily have anything against BlackBerry, I just don’t really like them all that much.
Popularity: 87% [?]
Popularity: 87% [?]
By john on Jul 22, 2008 in Apple, Wordpress, featured | 0 Comments
Earlier today one of the iPhone apps I’ve been waiting for hit the app store, Wordpress.
I’ve been waiting for it simply so I could have a method of bloging on the go, wherever I happen to be when an idea strikes me.
I’m giving it a shot right now, in fact, and think it’s […]
Popularity: 82% [?]
By john on Jul 11, 2008 in Apple, featured | 0 Comments
Today is the long awaited release day for the iPhone 3G, as well as the day when MobileMe finally shows up and is accessible (while some were able to get to it yesterday, I was not amongst them). It’s also supposedly the release date for the iPhone 2.0 software update release, though an unofficial leaked version was available early yesterday. A few brave souls decided to take the plunge and install the unofficial version - I’m not that daring, especially with a major update like this. And of course, the much anticipated App Store is now officially online as well.
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By john on Jun 25, 2008 in Apple, Home Automation, featured | 0 Comments
Earlier in the week I mentioned I had a project cooking that I thought was pretty cool. Last night, after I received the last piece of hardware I needed to make it work, I got it all set up and working. This didn’t involve much heavy lifting (none, actually) as I had already done the difficult parts when I set up a proof of concept to show Ann ( my girlfriend, for those who don’t know).
I’ve had it set up for a while such that, when I wake up in the morning I press a button on a keypad (mounted in wall) in my room and my room light comes up slowly - so as to be easy on the eyes - and the bathroom vanity lights turn on. The vent fan is then set on a 5 minute timer to turn on about the time my shower really starts producing steam - and turns itself off after about 15 minutes, ensuring it got all the steam. I press the same button on my way out my bedroom door and the bathroom light shuts off, as does my bedroom light.
Pretty cool way to do things - one button controls everything. It just got cooler.
Popularity: 43% [?]
By john on Feb 15, 2008 in Apple, featured | 0 Comments
For a few months now I’ve been running OS X 10.5 Leopard Server on an older XServe I acquired. I’ve been using it as a gateway on my network, but also as an open directory, DNS and DHCP server as well. Initially, I was impressed - the setup seemed to go alright and it seemed to work well.
That is, until I tried to really do anything
Popularity: 87% [?]
By john on Feb 6, 2008 in Apple, featured | 2 Comments
I am one of the few who, last year, went out and bought an AppleTV. I’d experimented with several media center PC’s over the years, but honestly didn’t really want a bulky PC sitting there beside my entertainment center. It also didn’t really work all that great. I’m sure if I had put more effort into things I could have succeeded with that project, but I didn’t and I didn’t. Regardless, though, I still wanted the ability to do the things a media center could do, and AppleTV made it fairly easy to do. Music could be streamed seamlessly from inside it’s interface, movies and TV shows could be organized and watched as well. In short it did a lot of what I wanted it to do, even with it’s limitations.
Popularity: 29% [?]