geeky tutorials, tips, guides and reviews
Ubunturd!
I wish I had a clue of what the designs behind Ubuntu were thinking – the interface was already ugly and now they want to go uglier?
As I mentioned in the comments over on CyberNet, this is one reason why I am personally looking a lot more at linuxmint.com and the like.
Have a big block of text you need to send to a friend? What about a list of URLs or another miscellaneous reason to copy and paste something over from any sort of document to a friend? TinyPaste is here to help.
To use, all you need to do is copy any text you have into the pastebin and then hit the submit button. In return, you’ll be given a URL to get easy access to that text. Think of it as TinyURL for just about anything text-based. As if that wasn’t enough to love – they also have a Firefox extension too.
There is another neat web application that has caught my eye this week. Kwout allows you to "quote" a part of a web page by cutting out a piece of it to post to your own web site. You can post to Flickr, Tumblr or your web site with the easy to use embed code when your done.
To check out a demo of the service, try out this link:
http://kwout.com/grab?address=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mitchkeeler.com
Left-click and drag over the area you wish to cut out, or shrink and enlarge the image all together. The end result looks like this:
Give Kwout a shot next time you need to do a quick snapshot from the Web.
PrimoPDF if a great tool to have in hand, if you need to do some printing but you don’t really want to have a paper copy laying around. This is a free tool that outputs high-quality PDFs. The very easy to understand user interface scores tons of points for me too. You also have the ability to optimize the PDF output for a screen, print, ebook and will add document information for you- such as the title, author, keywords and more. Download this free application and try to tell me it doesn’t replace your current print to PDF option.
Over the past few days I have been playing a lot of the Wii’s Zapper games. The light gun attachment for the Wii is a lot of fun to use, and I wanted to make sure I got my money’s worth on the deal. Here are some of the best Wii Zapper compatible games I have bought thus far:
Wii Zapper with Link’s Crossbow Training
Yes! Finally Link gets his name in one of the Zelda games! Ok, this one I didn’t have much choice about due to the fact it came with the Zapper itself but I do have to say it is much more fun than I thought it would be. Having the anticipation that it would just be a demo title showing me “how to use” the Zapper it ended up being an entertaining “pick it up when you have nothing else to do” game.
Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles
I have been a fan of the Resident Evil series, even though this is my first actual game in the series to own. This game’s controls kind of makes you feel like the Zapper was a second thought (due to the fact you have to move your hand up on top to hit the “A” button a lot. Other than that it is another cool “on rails” shoot’em up that ends up being very entertaining.
Go through some of the historic places from past Resident Evil games and shoot a lot. That is this game in a nutshell.
Now I am not usually a big fan of the Army/Police first person shooter type games but for some reason this one looked as if it might be a lot of fun. I have not gotten to spend much time with it yet but from what I have played it looks great. There are also a lot of side routes you can take so one level never has to be the same twice. Another great thing about it is you change your weapon type up as you go to suit the situation. Tons of fun.
House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return
This title, as the name tells you right off the bat, gives you both House of the Dead 2 and 3 to play with your Zapper.
The voice acting in this game is so bad, it’s good. I’m a big fan of your campy horror movies though. I missed out both of these days the first time around but now I get to finally see what all the buzz was about. You would be amazed how gratifying blowing the head off a zombie really is.
Any More Games for the Wii Zapper?
From what I have seen, only other one I’m missing is some army/war game (Metal of Honor?) but that really isn’t my cup of tea. Know anymore Zapper ready games I should pick up for Wii?
With Firefox 3 out, now I need something else to look forward to in the area of tech. Hmm, WordPress is already working on version 2.6 you say? I like WordPress, and the hinted at list of new features looks to be building on an already solid 2.5.
Here are a few things to look forward to in WordPress 2.6:
You can check out the full list of goodies over at Ryan’s blog and also pickup the beta 1 if you have a place you’d like to play with it.
Time you learned how to defend yourself, isn’t it? The only catch this time around is you must have a walking stick with you at all times. Ok, so maybe we don’t all do that anymore but after reading this article on the issue I am looking at the idea of bringing it back into style! Here is some more on the topic:
It will be seen that the figure on the right is exposing his body in order to insure his adversary attacking him there, and to be prepared with an immediate defence.
Directly the man with the alpenstock attempts to bayonette him, he diverts the blow by turning sideways, and making a circular downward cut, which hits the alpenstock and causes it to glide slightly upwards and sideways — a guard known in sword play as "Septime envelopé." The moment the blow has been diverted, the man with the stick must seize the alpenstock with his left hand, and, stepping in, strike his assailant a blow across the face.
At least you can say you had an entertaining start to your week now.
Looks like my post-Firefox 3 bump in stats is starting to come to an end for Firefox Facts. While the madness was going on (one post got up to 80+ comments!) I came up with a few tactics to try to milk the proverbial press cow as long as I could.
Watch where people are coming in. Via Google Analytics I was able to check out in nearly real time where people were coming in via search, blogs and other places and edit my content to meet the needs of the people.
Keep an eye on search phrases and the results they get. For example, if a lot of people were coming in for the phrase “firefox 3 themes” and the story they were getting was about the themes but didn’t give them much selection, I made sure I added a link to a post like this one that gave some new Firefox 3 ready themes for them to try.
Just some handy advice you might keep in mind for yourself next time you see your own web site going through a popularity surge.
I always like to check out the new services out there and one of the new ones to catch my socializing eye is Second Brain. It is another place that promises to be a “catch all” for all of your social content on the Web. Supporting everything from Flickr to Twitter you can import all your various profiles all in one place.
Once setup, here is what it looks like:
So far everything is fast, and looks like there is a lot of things to explore. If you’ve signed up feel free to check me out too: http://mitch.secondbrain.com/
Back a few weeks I decided I’d upgrade to DirecTV’s HD lineup. This of course meant I would have to get two new boxes for my house (one regular DirecTV DVR and one HD DVR) and a new dish. Ever since then I have almost been kicking myself because DirecTV’s customer service has… well, totally sucked.
Back on June 4th I setup the order and they said they would be here to set it up on the 13th. Oh goodie I said, can’t wait to get it up and running. Well, about 9:00 AM on the 13th they said they wouldn’t be here cause they didn’t have enough techs working. Fair enough, it was Friday the 13th afterall.
Next they were suppose to show up Monday, the 16th. I got excited again because I thought I’d get to watch WWE RAW on my new TV in high definition. Oh goodie I thought again. Well, Monday about 1:00pm (an hour after their deadline for being here) I contact DirecTV to see where they were at. The first person I talk to doesn’t have a clue but she gives me a local number. Call the local number and I’m told they still don’t have enough techs to work in the area, and they move my install date again… to today.
So here we are. Will they show up? Will I have to call them to see why they haven’t shown up? Should know sometime this afternoon. Overall though, I have to say I am pretty disapointed with DirecTV’s customer service in a whole. What if I was a new customer? Heck – Dish Network is looking kind of nice by now. Wonder how good their tech support is?
Update: Still nobody, and they got 20 minutes left to get here to meet their “promise” of behing here from 8AM – Noon. Posted about it on their user forums too.
Looks like DirecTV deleted my thread without reason? Wasn’t anything bad there – just going over what had happened thus far. Once again, DirecTV ends up with two thumbs down as far as customer service goes.
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Mitch Keeler is nothing more than your average Joe trying to leave his mark on the world though both his professional work and his online projects, articles, podcasts and more.
