geek of technology

it’s finally happened. months after Oracle’s acquisition of  Sun Microsystems — developers of the free Java platform, among other things — the formerly free alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite is now the cheap alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite. anyone who knew about the acquisition wouldn’t be too surprised by this, however it’s still sad to see.   OpenOffice was […]

An intelligent personalized agent (e.g., guardian angel) monitors and evaluates a user’s environment to assist in decision-making processes on behalf of the user. The guardian angel can… take automated action on behalf of the user for various purposes (e.g., to compensate for memory loss, to remind a user to take medicine, to assist in social […]

are there any regular readers out there?  anyone who might know about the whole upstart blogger and twitter/genesis rocket debacle?  a few?  well, good.  if not, check the archives for a refresher. the short story is that over the last year i followed, became entangled with, and then uncovered all sorts of unsavory things about […]

i got an email last night sent from a client we did a website for about a year ago inviting me to become a tester for an Apple iPad.  actually, i got two emails — one sent to each of my main addresses.  The subject line of the email was “Testers needed to test the Apple […]

a few months ago, i posted a link to a hack that revealed how to do an in-place “upgrade” (although it’s really a downgrade) from Windows 7 RC-1 to a lesser version of Windows 7.  as the nag alerts saying i need to backup my stuff and reinstall have started cropping up, i decided to […]

google voice is one of the latest in beta systems and software and may be the harbinger of goog’s plan to take over your phone.  the skinny is that google voice is sort of a layer on top of your normal phone service.  it’s a free system that offers voice mail (that transcribes your voice […]

Clive Thompson in Praise of Online Obscurity | Magazine. Wired mag article on the benefits of not having tens of thousands of followers on Twitter.  It’s interesting to see these articles, posts, and reviews cropping up now.  This time last year, it was all about amassing the biggest following on Twitter that you could, but […]

yesterday, SocialToo announced they were discontinuing the auto-unfollow feature associated with the services they offered.  this more or less confirms my own suspicions when i went to clean out the people @ArcanePalette was following a few days ago and get rid of the spammers, marketers, and others that, from a reading and using Twitter standpoint, weren’t really adding […]

while the fact that google wave isn’t natively integrated with all things google already — something that still baffles me; this is the technology that’s going to take over the world, isn’t it? — this particular trick works brilliantly and cleverly disguises the fact that your document isn’t actually natively integrated into your wave. first, […]

let me get this out there: i love winamp.  i’ve been using it since its’ inception.  i used to listen to tag’s trance shoutcast station back in the day (tag is/was one of the winamp devs and was responsible for a lot of the visualizations that come bundled with winamp).  i’ve tried many, many other music […]

stumbled across this “duh” of a hack to allow up/downgrading (depending on your perspective) of a more premium version of windows 7 to a less premium version.  why would you do this? if you were running a beta or rc version of windows 7 you can “upgrade” to a retail edition without wiping the system. […]

this theme is one that i ran on a fake news site that was part of a RPG erin and i were running over the summer based on a novel we were/are working on.  the name of the news site was The Harbinger and it specialized in reporting news relevant to the vampire/werewolf underworld.  the […]