Geeky

Apple unveils all-new 17-inch MacBook Pro

January 7, 2009 by Curtis Leave a Comment

In Response To: Apple unveils all-new 17-inch MacBook Pro

Can I just say something quickly? “Curse you, Apple and your persistence in making products without removable batteries!!!” Okay, so it’s got a 17 inch 1900-pixel screen… and it sports 8 hours of productivity on a single charge… and it can last 5 years (1000 charges)… and it’s the thinnest, lightest 17-inch notebook ever designed…

… I guess that is pretty cool. Alright, I’ll let it slide this once or again, rather. Just like I did for my iPod annnd my iPhone. Apparently, making the battery “fixed” gives up to 40% more space to tuck the battery away. This, in turn, gives 40% more life to the battery, right? Well, in this case, probably more. But keep in mind, these numbers reflect integrated graphics performance. Switch it over to the GeForce 9600M GT and you’ll experience somewhere around 16 minutes of maximum battery life (give or take 8 minutes). Okay, that’s harsh and just not true, but, I’m sure you see my point.

Personally, I wasn’t aware that people even bought 17-inch notebooks anymore. I suppose for a notebook as sexy as the new Pro, one may reconsider. However, I’m still stuck on the 15 incher. Not too big, yet not so small as to not be able to pack the performance my nerdism requires. I guess as much as I am against a fixed battery, I’d kind of like to see the new battery on the 15-inch MacBook Pro so that it may also reap the extended life its big brother will be bragging about.

Filed Under: Geeky Tagged With: apple, battery, macbook pro

AT&T slowing EDGE to force customers to switch to 3G?

January 7, 2009 by Curtis 1 Comment

In Response To: AT&T slowing EDGE to force customers to switch to 3G?

I’m going to go ahead and say that this is for 3G areas. While At&t’s 3G service covers about 300 of the largest markets in the country, geographically speaking, on the other hand, most of it is not covered by 3G. I rarely see 3G unless I’m traveling. I think it’s pretty safe to say that I haven’t noticed a difference in performance of the EDGE network in non 3G areas. That just wouldn’t be right if they went messing with that.

Make way for 3G and, heck, even 4G

On the flip side, I can understand why at&t would want to move people to 3G. EDGE takes spectrum just like anything else. And just like the TDMA shutdown in February of 2007, so shall GSM see it’s final days. (not for awhile, mind you) But we need to make way for more efficient technologies such as 3G (UMTS and HSDPA) and 4G (LTE). 3G alone can pipe a whole lot more calls through the same spectrum than GSM could. This means even more space for at&t to roll out high speed data services, which in turn means more revenue. As long as EDGE and GSM are in existence, 3G can’t reach it’s full potential.

Filed Under: Geeky Tagged With: 3g lte, 4g, att, edge, umts

The Best Application for using Twitter on a Blackberry is…

December 22, 2008 by Curtis 2 Comments

TwitterBerry.

(What? You’re expecting more? That’s what you asked Google, wasn’t it?)

P.S. If someone has one better, I’d like to hear about it.

You can get find more info, including download links for TwitterBerry, here.

Filed Under: Geeky Tagged With: blackberry, bold, Curve, pearl, twitter, twitterberry

Configure Qmail to Send Outgoing Email Through a Barracuda Spam Firewall

December 22, 2008 by Curtis Leave a Comment

Well the title pretty much says it all. This post is going to address a pretty specific situation. You’re running qmail and you want to send all outgoing emails through your Barracuda spam firewall. Easy right? No, not easy… well not easy if you have no clue what you are doing. And try to find some documentation on how to do it, I dare you. It pretty much doesn’t exist. After a couple weeks of searching and trying to get it to work myself, I decided to put together this little guide.

Now if you are installing qmail for the first time and are trying to figure out how to do this, then you are in an easier situation than I was. Unfortunatly for me, my install of qmail was in full production mode and relied on daily by 30,000+ users. I didn’t have the luxury of messing things up.

NOTE: This guide assumes that your qmail install is working to be able to at least send email. If you need help with initial configuration, I suggest you check out qmailrocks.org.

The Guide

Configuring qmail to send outgoing mail to a spam filter requires setting up an SMTP smartroute. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Geeky Tagged With: barracuda, firewall, outgoing, qmail, smartroute, smtp, spam

Hello I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC, and I’m a Linux?

December 21, 2008 by Curtis Leave a Comment

It looks like people over at the Linux foundation are trying to get in a piece of the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” action. I’m not sure how much money there is to make in an industry that is based on a platform that is open source, but the resulting ads could prove to be very entertaining. Novell seems to already have a few videos of their own. They can, of course, be seen at that one video website… oh crap, what’s it called? Well, it’s that site with all the videos on it. Anyway, just search for “Novell Get a Mac Spoof.” I’ve included one of the videos below for your viewing pleasure.

Video

Filed Under: Funny Stuff, Geeky, Videos Tagged With: linux, mac, pc, video

WordPress 2.7 Upgrade

December 21, 2008 by Curtis 2 Comments

I just upgraded my install of wordpress to the newest version, 2.7. I had been sitting on version 2.5 for a while and figured it was time to make the change. In the past I was always hesitant to upgrade simply because I’m paranoid of losing all my work. Yes, it can be backup up prior to upgrading, and believe me, I do. But this takes a significant amount of time and it seems that every time I do it, a new version of wordpress surfaces and I get the notification that it’s time to upgrade once again. I knew that 2.7 was going to bring some nice changes to the admin panel, but I wasn’t expecting this. Simply put, it’s phenomenal, and it looks phenomenal.

It reminds me of the switch from Windows XP to Vista. Remember how amazed we were at how good Vista looked? The difference here is that the new version of wordpress doesn’t suck… at all. And Vista, well, did (suck) (a lot) (more than I expected). Anyway, if you’re a fellow blogger and you are still using wordpress version 2 point anything other smaller than 7, it’s time to upgrade, my friend. Added in version 2.7 is support for Gears. (Correction: One of my readers pointed out that support for Gears was added in version 2.6 (thanks kenny)). I know very little about Gears at this point, but you can bet I will be doing some research. All I know is that Gears is another Google enterprise, that makes web-based applications (such as the wp-admin panel) much faster by caching parts of those applications locally. The result? A wordpress admin panel that not only looks fantastic, but also has significant speed improvements over previous versions.

Any questions or comments… well, you know what to do.

Filed Under: Geeky Tagged With: gears, google, vista, windows xp, wordpress

Internet Footprint

December 9, 2008 by Curtis Leave a Comment

The following report shows the number of indexed pages that Xtego has as of December 9th, 2008 for the corresponding search engines. It’s not much. But it’s getting there.

227 – Google

80 – Yahoo

185 – AltaVista

190 – AllTheWeb

Filed Under: Geeky Tagged With: alltheweb, altavista, footprint, google, search engine, xtego, yahoo