Posts tagged as:

How To’s

In late 2008 I wrote about my experience using the first generation 80GB Intel X25-M SSD — my first SSD. I had to pay the early adopter tax for that SSD, so it cost me around $700. The speed boost alone justified the price to me. Fast-forward about a year and that SSD stopped working. I’m not quite sure what died — the controller or something else — but I RMA’d it with Intel and they sent me a new, second generation X25-M that week. The second generation (G2) X25-M is based on 34nm fabrication compared to the 50nm first generation. The G2 is also substantially cheaper at roughly $299 and noticeably faster due to a new controller and firmware. Intel still claims the same “up to 250MB/s” sequential read speed and “up to 70MB/s” sequential write speed but the G2 brings improved (2x for 80GB, 2.5x for 160GB version) random 4KB writes. [click to continue…]

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Knowing how to keep your web traffic data safe while browsing the web on unknown networks is a vital skill that not enough savvy Internet surfers take part in. I have previously discussed a few ways of solving this issue through the use of SSH tunnels (manually-created and application managed). I have also discussed things like “anonymous” web browsing through the Janus Privacy Adapter as well as with public Tor nodes. (Side note: Anonymous in quotes because truly anon browsing requires encrypted, signed traffic over private Tor networks — not public, published ones everyone knows about — but I digress). While VPN is nothing new and has been used by businesses and their employees for over a decade, it has not generally been something aimed at the typical Internet user. [click to continue…]

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By the time you read this, Microsoft’s latest attempt at making a decent desktop operating system (I kid, I kid), dubbed Windows 7, will have been released worldwide. I took it upon myself (and my debit card) to build a new computer properly suited for Windows 7, as well as some HTPC/gaming goodness, after receiving this Skribit suggestion. I have always been a fan of Small Form Factor computers, dating back to my old Shuttle SB61G2 (Intel P4) and SN85G4 (AMD Athlon 64) computers. When it came time to plan out my next PC build, I decided to stick with SFF and base the system off of the fairly new Shuttle SX58H7 barebones kit. [click to continue…]

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Welcome to the third and likely final part of my series on High Dynamic Range photography. In the first part I covered what HDR imaging actually is and how it works while the second part went over DSLR camera setup for taking shots necessary for the HDR imaging process, in addition to configuring a regular Canon Point-and-Shoot camera for auto-bracketed RAW shooting. If you’ve been following along, you should now have several RAW images to use for HDR imaging. If not, take your camera outside and take some nice shots. I’ll wait right here. [click to continue…]

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This post is part of a series detailing what High Dynamic Range photography (well, there’s no such thing as HDR photography.. take photos first, use HDR process to come up with HDR images, not photos) is, how it works and how you can do it yourself! In the first post I went through the basics and some of the geeky bits about HDR photography: from showing off example HDR images, detailing why HDR images need to be processed and what you’ll need to get started. [click to continue…]

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Thanks to my second Ford Fiesta Movement mission (much more on this later once I get around to reviewing the 2011 Fiesta), I recently jumped head first into HDR photography. HDR, short for High Dynamic Range, is a “set of techniques that allows a greater dynamic range of luminances between light and dark areas of a scene than normal digital imaging techniques” according to Wikipedia. In short, it involves taking several photographs of the same [click to continue…]

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I recently did the unthinkable. I changed the URL structure of my blog’s URLs. Long considered a scary territory, along with moving domains, due to the SEO implications and potential for losing traffic, I was convinced by Bruce Keener to give it a shot. Ever since my blog launched I have been using the domain/year/month/day/post-name URL structure. I thought it was quite handy to know when the post was written before even loading it, but I ended up dealing with very long URLs that got quite annoying. In addition, [click to continue…]

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I take a lot of pictures for reviews on this blog, most with a Nikon D90 DSLR camera. A good chunk of my time on larger reviews is actually spent reviewing hundreds of images, then fine-tuning the best ones in Photoshop (case in point, my upcoming car review is taking forever). I’ve been using some version of Photoshop since the Mac OS 8 days. However, I mainly used it for the same basic image manipulation techniques — cutting people out of backgrounds while I was on my high school’s yearbook staff, and lots of cropping, levels tweaks [click to continue…]

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How To: Optimize Your Apache Site with Mod Deflate

April 23, 2009

The title of this post might be a little cryptic to those not familiar with the Apache webserver, but this post is a sort of followup to Paul Buchheit’s recent post “Make your site faster and cheaper to operate in one easy step” as well as a response to a recent Skribit suggestion. The step [...]

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How To: Getting Started with Amazon CloudFront

December 8, 2008

Amazon’s Simple Storage Service, S3, is quite wonderful. It’s cheap, secure and virtually infinite in storage capacity. Some people have begun utilizing S3 to host files for their website that would otherwise be expensive in bandwidth costs to serve from their own server. I actually used to host all static template images on [...]

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How To: Create an OS X Icon from a Vector Graphic

November 19, 2008

Back in 2005 I wrote an very basic article on how to change icons in OS X with ones you find online at sites like Interface Lift. Unfortunately, that method of icon swapping only works with actual embedded icon files. I quickly discovered this when I wanted to make my laptop more work-oriented and use [...]

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Flickr How To: Auto Geotag iPhone Photos

November 14, 2008

I use Flickr a lot. I have over 12,000 photos on my Flickr account, with over 500 coming from my iPhone alone (with over 2,000 on my iPhone as mentioned in this post). I was enamored when the GPS-toting iPhone 3G came out as I assumed my photos would automatically be geotagged when I uploaded [...]

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How I Learned to Code

October 6, 2008

When you talk to accomplished programmers, it’s no shock to hear they began programming at a very young age. Unfortunately, I was not the same way and did not grow up programming. I was much more into hardware during my childhood. I learned how to solder, read and write circuit schematics and build small projects. [...]

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How To: Upgrade to Studio Monitor Speakers

September 13, 2008

For the past 5 years I have owned the same set of Logitech 2.1 Z-2200 speakers. They have served me well in college and the large subwoofer made for an excellent footrest. However, they are typical “computer speakers” in the sense that they don’t accurately reproduce each frequency and provide too much bass, even with [...]

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How To: Live the Cloud Life

August 21, 2008

There’s no doubt about it, I’m in love with the cloud. Some people might not share my fascination with storage-in-the-cloud and compute-in-the-cloud models but I can’t wait to have the same computing experience regardless of the computer or device I’m using to connect to the Internet. I’ve taken it upon myself to

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