Driving on Electrons
About two weeks ago, I traded my 2011 Nissan Juke for a 2011 Nissan Leaf, an all-electric 5-passenger car that gets about 85 miles on a full charge (under ideal conditions, more on that later). My new Leaf has very low miles on it, less than half the miles the Juke already had, and did I mention that it is all-electric? That means that it relies solely on its electric power-train and battery to get around. That means that I save about $200 a month on gasoline. That means that I never have to get smog checks. That means that I can ride the...
read moreNew Project: Building a 3D Printer
I’ve been toying with the idea of putting together a 3D printer for quite some time now, but I finally decided to take a plunge, based on two factors: #1. President Obama mentioned 3D printing in his 2013 State of the Union address. “3D printing has the potential to revolutionize the way we make almost everything” #2. 3D printing is great for the RC Hobby. I see it all the time, people on the RC forums selling parts they made with their 3D printer. There’s a huge section in Thingiverse dedicated to all things radio...
read more2012 New Redesign – finally got around redesigning my own site
I’ve finally updated my site’s look and feel! I finally got around to designing and coding a brand-spankin’ new theme for this very own site. Last time I re-themed my site was about 3 years ago. I also did some architectural changes to this site: I did a clean install of WordPress on the root of the site, imported all my old articles and got rid of the old index file that redirected to /blog. I am still tweaking content and design around, but at this point I’m 99% done. So, what do you think of this new design? Please...
read moreGoogle's URL Shortening Service – Main Disadvantage
A couple of days ago Google officially launched their URL shortening service, in an already crowded scene (Bit.ly, Twitter’s t.co, etc). The service is very easy to use, just go to http:// goo.gl, input the URL you want shortened and voilà! If you are logged into your Google account, they will even provide detailed stats, like number of clicks, referrers, etc. You can even get a QR code. Here’s the kicker; those stats are available for anyone, just by appending .info to the end of the link, and there is no way of making that data...
read moreiPad: My Review and First Impressions
First off, let me set the record straight: I’m an Apple fanboy. At work I use a 24″ iMac, my personal computer is a MacBook and I carry around an iPhone 3GS. I picked up an iPad on launch day (no lines, I had a reservation). So far, I am loving this new device, as a matter of fact, I’m writing this from the newly redesigned WordPress app for the iPad. I am loving the battery life on this thing: I left home this morning with 90% charge and I’m still at 51% after a day of heavy usage including video streaming, courtesy of...
read moreCheap Security Certificates from Dreamhost
I’m a sucker for funny and informative newsletter and blog posts, and the latest blog post from Josh Jones, head of Dreamhost (great hosting – read more here) is both of these characteristics and it introduces a new product (or just a deeply discounted one) – $15 SSL certificates. After a long rant about how flawed internet security is (and our reliance on them SSL certs) he makes the announcement that Dreamhost will now offer 100% trusted and signed SSL certificates. I’ve had to deal with SSL certificates in the past...
read moreWhy You Should Host with Dreamhost too
I’ve been using Dreamhost for over 4 years now, and even though they’ve had their ups and downs in the past, I strongly believe that they are the best in their category, reliable and inexpensive hosting. After reading so many horror studies of awful customer support, bad service and unreliable servers with other Hosts (HostGator, BlueHost, I’m thinking of you!) I think I’ve been really lucky to have Dreamhost as my host. I’ve survived the time I hit the front page of Digg and the couple times I’ve gotten...
read moreBlogging Tips to Get More Traffic, Subscribers, and Readers
Here is a list of blogging tips, to increase your readership and exposure. Some I need to apply more myself, but here they are: When writting a post for a blog, use bullet points, headers and try to keep paragraphs short. These things attract readers to actually read the post. Read Melissa’s blog Writing Forward for writing tips, which are very useful. Try to always include an image; imagine a newspaper without images. Quite boring. If you can’t find something relevant look for usable images on Flickr. Encourage your readers to...
read moreWhy aren't we seeing hybrid hard drives?
I’ve been seriously considering replacing my MacBook’s regular spinning hard drive with a fancy new SSD drive, then sticking an external case to the old 320 GB hard drive and using it as external storage. I can get away with just 32 GB on the SSD drive, more than enough for the OS and all my apps, and I would put all the other space-taking media on the spinning drive. Not a bad idea, seeing as I travel a lot with my laptop, but why isn’t the whole concept of having two drives in computers now a days, a spinning and a...
read moreRedesign Explained
As you can see if you are an old blog visitor, I’ve changed the appearance of things around here. This time, I didn’t create my own theme, I went the classic “buy a premium theme” route, and I’m quite happy with the results. My past experience with my creating my last two themes was very helpful; I learned a lot about the inner workings of WordPress, even though I didn’t create the theme completely from scratch, I went the Sandbox route (who starts any coding project now a days with out some sort of...
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