DIY Home Theater

My home “media room” looks more like a garbage scowl than the bridge of the Enterprise. But this Star Trek-themed home theater in Florida is impressive. Okay, I’ll admit… I want it, I want it, I want it!

[ More photos ]

John Deere Motorcycle Lawn Mower

Honey, mind if I make a few modifications to the lawn mower?

Source

Stroller Mods

Fudge! Fudge, fudge, fudge. It never ocurred to me to mod our baby strollers. That would’ve been so cool. Too late now.
Fudge.

We’ll maybe you can benefit from this.

Star Wars AT-AT Baby Stroller [Instructions]

Patriotic Pony Cart

Ski Stroller [Buy]

On a Budget

Mac Users: Tips to Free Up Drive Space

Here’s a great tip for users of Mac OSX, especially MacBook and iBook users who always struggle with available drive space.

A year ago I heard a great tip on Mac Tips Daily about how to free up drive space by deleting alternate language versions of your software applications. It’s extremely helpful and you should check out the step-by-step instructions.

Today, I heard a great companion tip on The Mac Attack podcast to delete all the printer driver files for brands you never intend to use. Navigate to Library \ Printers folder and you’ll see a list very much like this screenshot:

For years, I’ve been very HP centric, so it’s not a problem for me to delete all the other brands. Just look at the potential drive space you can recover:

Epson = 1.3 GB
Xerox = 503 MB
Canon = 479 MB
HP = 425 MB
Lexmark = 352 MB
Brother = 19 MB
Toshiba = 7 MB
Richoh = 6 MB
Sharp = 6 MB
FujiXerox = 4 MB

It feels soooo good to clear all that wasted space. But please be cautious if you use either of these tips!

I hope you find this useful.
-Roland

Read Available Job RSS Feeds On Your Mobile Phone

You’re the king of the castle but it takes a lot of moolah to keep that kingdom of yours running smoothly.

I have a tech tip to help you keep an eye out for available jobs using the RSS feeds for job boards you frequent.

This is very convenient if you have a mobile phone, smart phone or PDA with Internet access. If not, you can still set this up to view with your desktop computer browser bookmarks.

Just follow these easy steps:

1. Create a Google Reader or Bloglines account via your desktop Web browser.
2. Go to your favorite job boards and find the specific RSS/XML feed links for the search results you want. Then paste them one-by-one into Google Reader or Bloglines and organize to your preference.
3. Go online with your phone or PDA and bookmark the appropriate URL:
   http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/
   http://m.bloglines.com
4. Login to your account on your phone/PDA.

That’s it. Now you have custom feeds available wherever and whenever you want them. Great for scanning job postings, or keeping track of sports and news topics.

I’ve found RSS feeds available on these job boards: Yahoo! Hot Jobs, Monster, CareerBuilder, Dice, NYTimes, Indeed

Please let me know if you find this useful and what feeds you’d use it for.
Thanks!
-BD

Vanity Domain Name for Your Family Email Addresses plus Free Email Hosting

Consider this plan for your families digital future… Register a domain for your family. Or possibly one for each kid to reserve it for when they’re old enough.

Plus, I want to show you how to get FREE email hosting.

Don’t scoff at the idea. People do it all the time. How many of your neighbors have their name on their license plates? They’re just showing off. But a vanity domain — that’s an investment in your family future. It gives you and your family members a permanent email address so people will not loose touch with you.

Starting with the vanity domain name, unfortunately you’ll be lucky to get a .COM or .NET. You might have to settle for a .ORG or .US or some other country code. Don’t bother with .NAME or .INFO — those are ridiculous.

I DO NOT recommend using a company like NetIdentity. Years ago they went out and bought up thousands of family sur names to rent back to people with reasonable claims to those names. Very bad behavior IMHO. The wont even consider selling a domain name to a person with the same last name as the domain. It’s more profitable for them to rent it to you over time.

I rented personalized email addresses for my wife and I for a few years but got fed up and bought my own .US domain as soon as they had become available.

Here’s how you get started…

1. Choose an available domain name. Preferably a .COM or .NET.

A great lookup tool is PCNames.com. It’s a huge time saver because you can look up domain names while you type instead of constantly submitting and doing WhoIs lookups.

2. Once you picked an available domain name, don’t dilly dally dude. Register ASAP.

Here’s what you should do. Go to a company like GoDaddy. They’re cheap and the customer service has been really good to me. (No I’m not being paid to say that, I’m just a satisfied customer.) Plus, they’re always running some sort of 10% off special. Do a search on “Go Daddy promo code” and see what turns up.

Or use any company you feel is reputable. Register.com has been around for years, but they were charging me $35 a year for practically the same service GD charges me $8 per year. It’s nuts. I see no difference based on my needs.

Here’s where we save you some Bad Mad Money. Booyah!

When registering a domain, you usually get an email account bundled in. Typically you are only allowed to create one address to send and receive from. That’s fine for a single guy, but not a family situation.

You can pay the domain name registrar for an email account with extra features and addresses, but I can save you some big money.

Let your inner geek shine…

Now here’s the fun part. If you are geek-minded, you certainly should enjoy it. If your faint of heart, tread cautiously, but you should be able to do it.

1. Get a Google Gmail account. They’re free now. You no longer need an invitation.
   www.google.com/accounts
2. Register for a free Google Apps for Your Domain account at:
   www.google.com/a
3. Follow the instructions Google provides to set up the domain.

They require you to make some edits in the domain registrar admin account, but the instructions were clear and worked for me.

It took a few hours for all the changes to propogate online, but everything works. I’ve use this for over a month with no problems or down time.

Once set up, use the Google admin function to add/edit email accounts for members of your family.

So your thinking to yourself, why do all this?

Benefits:

1. Use your family domain.
2. Everyone get’s a personalized email address.
3. Encrypted secure logins.
4. We now have a sharable calendar.
5. Google’s spam filter is pretty good.
6. They also have chat and some basic Web hosting if you want to take advantage of that.
7. The sense of geeky accomplishment you’ll feel when you are done.

Plus, I think the math explains it all.

• GoDaddy charges $20/yr for 5 email address (on top of the domain registration)
• Register.com charges $99/yr for a multi user account.
• Google Apps for Your Domains costs is Free.

Go for it. You have so much to save … and won’t it feel good to be in control?

-Roland




Written by Bad Dad · Filed Under All, DIY, Technology 

Data backup tips

January 25, 2007

I’ve suffered through a few huge loses of data over the years. Not from a lack of knowledge, but more from becoming complacent. You have to accept the reality that computer hardware will fail, eventually. As much as I’ve become dependent on technology to complete professional and personal tasks, and as much as I know about the risks, I still occasionally slip into complacency and get burned.

You should take it seriously. The last thing you want is your spouse screaming at you that you lost a few years of family digital photos.

Two years ago was my last bad experience. Six months of professional emails lost because my company had no proactive means of backing up Outlook archives at the time. We were encouraged to archive our email to our hard drive, not the network. I found out the hard way when my hard drive crashed hard and a data recovery firm said it was unsalvagable.

WHAT DID I LEARN?

1. Losing data isn’t the end of the world. Sure it sucks. I struggled for several months afterwards because much of my professional correspondence was lost. But I survived.

2. Take matters into my own hands. Since the company didn’t (at the time) have an archive process in place, I started having my email archive files burned to DVD once per month. I also started saving HTML or TEXT versions of important emails to our network project folders to help make sure there was redundant documentation.

3. On a personal level, I’ve looked more carefully at how I save my personal files. Backing up is time consuming. So I prioritized and worked out a method I’m comfortable with.

Monthly: I have an external hard drive and perform a full backup of my main hard drive personal files at the end of each month. That gets backed up to CD/DVD. Getting into the habit of backing up every 1-2 weeks would be ideal. My preferred hard drive is the Seagate ST3400601CB-RK 400 GB External Hard Drive FireWire/USB 2.0. When considering a drive, go for at least 7200 RPM and 16 MB cache. To manage automated backups, I purchased SuperDuper! by Shirt Pocket Software instead of the free BounceBack Express software that comes bundled with the Seagate drive.

Quarterly: At last count, I have over five thousand digital photos over the past three years. So every three months I sort through them, delete the bad ones, and burn a complete backup to CDs or DVDs.

Yearly: I do a full backup of my digital music files once a year. This is the least important to me since I have the physical, original CD for most of what I listen to. Music can always be bought again, but family photos and other personal document cannot be replaced so easily.

4. Store an extra set of backup CDs/DVDs offsite. Big companies have long known it is essential for disaster preparedness to maintain full backups at an offsite location. That way if the primary facility is damaged, backups located far away presumably maybe safe. So when backing up to CD or DVD, make an extra set and keep it some where you think is far away or safe, such as a relative’s house or your bank’s deposit box.

Backup, Backup, Backup.

5. We still don’t fully understand how long CDs and DVDs will last. Plus, some studies indicate that cheaper media may degrade at a faster rate. There are actually very few manufacturers, and most of the brands found on shelves are just repackaged/rebranded versions. Take some time, do the research. Consider paying more for archival quality media.

DEVELOP YOUR STRATEGY AND STICK TO IT!
Photos and video are tricky. With consumer adoption of digital photos and digital video, come new challenges. Shoe boxes of film negatives served us well for many decades, but now it’s time to rethink and retrain people’s behavior.

Photos are easy to burn from your PC to CD/DVD. But what about your video? I specifically bought a camcorder with A/V input so I can import old analog video from VHS tapes and 8mm video into MiniDV. I can pull from any device (VCR, tape deck, Tivo) that has traditional composite connections. That makes it simpler to keep the most important older footage on a current media that is easier to import eventually to a PC for editing or burning to DVD.

UNDERSTANDING DIFFERENT TYPES OF MEDIA

VideoHelp.com Details on DVD

PCWorld: Backup Medium Comparison Chart

GET STARTED. READ ABOUT BACKUP STRATEGIES:

MacWorld: Make your images last

The Mac Observer: Dr. Mac’s Guide to Backing Up Your Mac

PCWorld: Keep Your Data Backups Safe, Simple, and Fast

PCWorld: Backup data to separate partition

What do you think? Please post your comments or suggestions. Thanks.
Roland

Artwork Source:
Hard drive image from http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Harddisk-head.jpg

Written by Bad Dad · Filed Under All, DIY, Polls, Technology 

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