Tips

Well you regular visitors may notice a new banner ad at the top from our new sponsor, Gray Kangaroo Liquor Filter, Its one of the most useful products I have seen for turning cheap Vodka into great Vodka, A few years ago I tested and messed with running Vodka through a Britta water filter, the idea is to run the cheap stuff through the filter and take the bad flavor and smell away.

I recently Stumbled onto Stickam, a very slick free online streaming video service, it allows anyone to stream high quality video to as many people as you like without hogging all your bandwidth.

Using WiFi to check your email has a simple little security problem, most of the time your user name and password are transmitted in plain text, pretty simple for someone to grab your info, at home more and more people are using some kind of security (WEP or WPA) but when you hit the local coffee shop its as open as can be, so one way that can be used on gmail is to use HTTPS instead of plain HTTP, so now your user name and password are encrypted along with all of your emails at this point.

Amazon.com has opened a new DRM free MP3 download service to compete with Apples iTunes Music Store. I have only purchased a few songs from iTunes first because of the DRM on them and it ties it to only a couple devices, I use many computers in a day so being able to use the music lots of places is a must, I also use Tivo Destop to serve my music but it only handles MP3 format, not AAC, as a matter of fact I'm not a fan of the AAC format for this reason.

A Quick tip on speeding web browsing on my Powerbook or any other computer by using an alternative DNS Server. I had run into Safari being slow in the past and recomended a way to speed things up but I now have even an easier way, using a free service called Open DNS, its not a new service or anything but it sure works sweet, you simply go to their website http://www.opendns.com/ and on the right side there are two DNS numbers, you add those into your network settings in the system preferences and thats it for a basic easy way to do it.

With all the new Web Development I have been doing lately I have learned some great new tips, I moved my websites from my own Linux servers over to Bluehost (see add to the left) and it has worked out great, all my websites on one server for one price, all the email accounts.. everything in one package.

well after running my own servers for some time I have moved a few sites over to bluehost (this site is still on my own servers until I get the content moved over nicely) I will say that this company rocks, they give you a ton of space, bandwidth seems great, I can host as many sites as I want and still only pay $6.95 a month, it includes emails for any of my domains, so far its unreal how nice th

As everyone knows I am somewhat of a Tivo freak, its one of my favorite electronic toys there is; I own two Tivo’s along with a couple computers running Tivo server software so I can store shows for later use.

Coming from a lifetime of Windows I have external hard drives laying around that I thought I’d use for extra storage on my imac via USB, well I had a ton of Music MP3’s that I ripped directly from CD’s, so I took the drive and plugged it the USB port and viola the drive mounted on the desktop and I was able to play the music, I changed the location in iTunes of where the library get stored (so it didn’t try and move all the files onto the local drive.

With my switch to Apple one thing that seemed odd was how slow it seemed, now granted I started on an old iMac so I accepted it being slow, then stepped up to a current PowerBook 17” with a gig of ram, sitting next to what I would say is a equivalent speed Windows computer the web browsing was painfully slow, it seemed worse at times depending on the update level of OS X… My mac guru buddy tho