If you have a MacBook Air or recent MacBook Pro with a multitouch trackpad, you have probably already fallen in love with the “swipe” gesture. Three fingers swiped across the trackpad to the left or right take you back or forward a page, respectively, in your browsing history. Only native apps like Finder and Safari have built-in Continue Reading »

By the time most people read this post I will have stayed in three different hotels in New York, New Jersey and Maryland while trekking along with Challenge X teams for their final competition. That means I have had a chance to glance through several terms of service agreements for various hotel internet Continue Reading »

Amazon EC2 is among the more potent items in Amazon’s web services arsenal. You’ve probably heard of many of the other services such as S3 for storage and FPS for payments. EC2 is all about the “elastic compute cloud.” In layman’s terms, it’s a server. In slightly less layman’s terms, EC2 lets you easily run Continue Reading »

After working on Skribit for the last 4 months, I have gotten a grip on my workflow and the tools I as well as the other co-founders use. The scope of this post is to give potential starter-uppers an idea of how to get work done collaboratively with others Continue Reading »

It has been almost a year that I have been shooting with a Nikon D80 DSLR camera. After taking many product review photos and dealing with uneven and blurry pictures, I finally came to my senses and purchased a cheap tripod on Amazon. It happened to Continue Reading »

So you’ve built a nifty file server running Linux after following your favorite blogger’s series of DIY 200 Dollar PC articles (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Now what? Wouldn’t it be nice if you could turn that server into a speedy downloading machine? Continue Reading »

It has been about two weeks since I first started writing about building your own, affordable PC that could easily be used as a file server or basic Linux/Windows computer. My first article in this series, DIY: 200 Dollar PC, went through the parts you would need while my second Continue Reading »

John Ratcliffe-Lee writes in with a question about how to use Subversion to easily keep tabs on a frequently updated software CMS he wants to use. First off, what is Subversion? It’s a widely used version control system, or in Continue Reading »

Last year around superbowl time, I posted an article showing how my roommate and I had built a stadium seating setup for our living room. This year, we went one step further and added a 2500 lumen projector to the mix to create the ultimate home theater system on a budget. Continue Reading »

My recent article, DIY: 200 Dollar PC, proved to be quite popular with over 50k pageviews in the last few days. The Intel D201GLY2 motherboard that I linked to in the last article drove so much traffic to Newegg that the item has since been “deactivated” and gone out-of-stock indefinitely. Taking that subtle hint, Continue Reading »

Looking for a small and affordable computer to add to your collection of boxen? I’m not talking about the Everex gPC, OLPC or the Asus Eee PC. I’m talking about building your own mini-ITX form factor computer. For around $200 you can have a computer with the following specs: 1.2GHz Intel Celeron 220 processor, 1GB Continue Reading »

By default, recent Macs ship with their hibernate mode set such that when your Mac goes to sleep, contents of the RAM remain stored in the powered-on RAM in addition to written to the hard disk. The is called safe sleep mode because in the event that your computer loses power during sleep, the contents of the RAM can be read from the hard disk Continue Reading »

From the not-sure-how-useful-this-is department comes a simple method of changing the default desktop wallpaper shown when logging into OS X Leopard if space and stars aren’t your cup o’ tea. All you need to do is replace the file DefaultDesktop.jpg located Continue Reading »

Today is Blog Action Day where thousands of blogs and companies have united to increase awareness about the environment. Now would be a great time to share a few energy saving tips I attempt to employ daily. Using less energy with your daily routines means there will be less demand for power and therefore less coal being burned to provide that power. Continue Reading »

While I have seen a few mentions of Amazon S3 supporting BitTorrent tracking and file-sharing, I don’t think it has been a well publicized feature. PSTAM reader Carlton Bale wrote a great guide for getting Amazon S3 to create a torrent for a file of yours on S3 and seed the file. He goes through Continue Reading »

Going a little off-topic today, I’m going to address an issue I deal with daily - public relations people sending me press releases. In general, I appreciate the effort and can often find great things I wouldn’t have found out about until after it was too late or not at all. However, if PR folk followed a few steps that I shall propose below, a considerable amount of time and energy could be spared on both ends. Continue Reading »

I was browsing through Jonathan Snook’s blog earlier this morning when I noticed something at the bottom of his posts; a link for users to bookmark his posts on del.icio.us with a count of saves. I love stats and rather than going to sleep I decided to investigate this and roll it out on my blog. Continue Reading »

I normally try to avoid server/unix jargon on this blog but as you can tell I have become infatuated with Amazon’s affordable storage solution, S3, as of late. We all know that it is important to keep recent backups of anything you value at all, so why not automate the process? Until I started tinkering with S3, my server Continue Reading »

With my last few posts on website optimization, one of the larger areas of focus was reducing HTTP requests. By reducing the number of requests your browser must make to retrieve all of your website, you speed up your site’s loading time with less overall HTTP latency for requests. Continue Reading »

When it comes to high-performance, speed and optimization, I’m there. I have written several articles about this subject in the past with 5 Ways to Speed Up Your Site, How To: Optimize Your CSS Even More and a brief look into image maps to reduce HTTP calls and bandwidth usage. However, similar to modifying a car there is always something more that can be done. Continue Reading »

Chances are that if you use Gmail or Gmail for your domain, you are also a devout user of Google Notifier to let you know when your inbox needs your attention. Also, chances are that if you read this blog you have been on your neighbor’s Wi-Fi an insecure Wi-Fi network a few times before. Continue Reading »

I am not going to lie, Firefox for OS X is horrible reliability-wise. It crashes all the time, uses exorbitant amounts of physical and virtual RAM, sometimes won’t let you use the address bar… you get the point. The best fix is to restart Firefox whenever it begins acting sluggish, selfishly uses a lot of your CPU, etcetera. Unfortunately, that seems Continue Reading »

Every week I receive more than a handful of emails from people asking me what I use to display my Twitter status on this blog, as well as how I do the “popular this month” block and display random blog stats in my sidebar. Hopefully this post Continue Reading »

After hearing about the joys of Lighttpd, a lightweight alternative to the Apache web server, for a long time I opened a Connector account with Joyent/TextDrive. I planned on using this account as a development sandbox where I can tinker with Lighttpd without the Continue Reading »

Search forms on most sites lack any styling at all, leaving for the browser’s default appearance which can be ugly at times. By simply adding a border to the form in CSS you can easily improve the look. Of course, this also applies to any text input form, not just search boxes. Continue Reading »