One of these windows is not like the other.....

So.. Since I recently bought a 130 year old house and we are having a super cold winter,  I’ve been looking for cheap cost effective ways to improve the insulating qualities of my house.

Guy Marsden Sustainable living  to the Rescue!

I followed (with slight modifications) his plans for DIY, inexpensive indoor storm windows. or INTERIOR WINDOW INSULATION PANELS as he calls them..

The pic above shows the results. (taken with awesome FLIR thermal camera)  I’ll post some Pics of my actual built windows in a little bit.

Disclaimer: I’ve got no relation to FLIR or Guy Marsden, they havn’t sent me a thermal imaging camera or a truck load of spare solar collectors. But as far as I’m concerned they both Rock.. Except that FLIR used to mean Forward Looking Infra Red.. so using that is like calling your company LASER..am I nit picking?   but still.. awesome product.

Check out this thermal Image I took with a borrowed FLIR Thermal Imaging Camera.

Inner Video card is RED

For Reference:

Yellow blob on bottom is Video card getting enough air.
Red Blob on top of it is the inner video card cooking,
This is why I need to find the time to setup the water blocks!
Blue Circle on top is the copper Water block on my CPU, That is doing it’s job!

Disclaimer: the FLIR Camera is AWESOME and super easy to use and I would be happy to take a review Unit  from the company and would then post tons of more crazy pics. But unfortunately they and I have NO relation and I had to borrow this one.  oh well.

So, as soon as it arrived I did the only thing I could do: Opened up and snapped a few pics with the Iphone.

Here they are:

BTW: I also just picked up a 2nd one of the 8800gt cards.  Now I’ve got to get a 2nd water block!.. Will update once I get them hooked up.
Also.  I went with these instead of the Danger Den for 2 reasons: 1. Price  2. Size/orientation: These have the barbs on the side while the DD ones are on top and I’d have to cut a chunk out of my Sunbeam acrylic case. (same 2 reasons that I have the 8800GT and not the GTX, that and power usage) I already had to drill 2 holes in the case for the coolant tubing.

Disclaimer: I received no product or  Treasure from the listed companies. (though I’ll take some, and then of course disclose it)  Just writing what’s at hand and what I know. I purchased all this myself.

The cool part is that it has current clamps for all the circuits in your breaker box and software that looks pretty slick to monitor everything.

Will update when I hear back from them.

Travis.

I’d been using something similar for a month or so at the office (a self-built nettop, uses the same kind of processor) and was pleased with the results.  So I thought, what they hey and took the plunge.  $360 (I added RAM) later, I have this awesome little netbook as my most-used computer.  I’m not worried about its small size, because usually when I’m using it its hooked up to a large LCD flat panel, keyboard and mouse.  When I’m on the road with it, in meetings etc, the keyboard on this model is large enough to type effectively.  It has WiFi, wired NIC, 3 USB ports, 160GB of hard drive space, 2GB of RAM…  sweet little machine.

One thing that was starting to bug me was the number of things I had to plug into the machine when I sat down at my desk.  I’ve been able to reduce it to 4: network, monitor, power, USB hub (for headphones, keyboard, mouse).  I could, if I really wanted to, move the network and monitor over to a USB replicator and only have to plug in two devices – but I’ll wait on that.  Another thing that was bothering me was the monitor setup.  Whenever I was in the office I was reconfiguring video settings every time – that was before I found the scheme settings in my graphics adapter (Intel) that allowed me to save many preferences.  And I can even have a program run when I choose a scheme – like mapping all of my drives (since its Windows XP Home, its not added to the domain – but I can still access the devices if I put in the right username/password).

I specifically didn’t buy this unit from a cell phone provider because doing so signs you up for a 2-year contract for $40 (or more) a month to get Internet service from them for it.  Almost everywhere I go I have access to WiFi, so I didn’t think this was necessary.  Also, having the Internet built into the netbook would have been limiting for me. I can always get one of their new MiFi devices or get the USB wireless adapters for more portability between devices.  This way I can just buy 1 of these for the company and hand it out to whomever needs it the most at any given time.  Or tether my phone (Verizon lets you do that for a fee….  AT&T doesn’t with their iPhone – another reason for me not to switch).

Anyway, I vote yes to netbooks.  But I have a lot of other computers, too.  So, for gaming I have my home PC set up to game on.  This will still play some good games ,but not the new intensive 3d graphics ones.

So, I was thinking to myself, do I really need a new iPod?  I really just need something that will play MP3 format files.  If I want to buy music, Amazon.com sells legal non-DRM MP3 files.  Or I can just buy the handy CD-ROM and rip it with Windows Media Player (or iTunes, you just have to configure it to use MP3 format).  So I ended up picking up a refurbished Sandisk Sansa e260 from buy.com (same place I bought my mighty Thinkpad).  The refurb unit was $39.99 – price was nice.  Has 4gb of built-in memory, a microSD card expansion slot, FM radio, and voice recorder to boot!  Not bad.  This is the version 1 of the device.

One of the features I didn’t like in the Sansa e260 was the ability it has to scan through audio files.  It was tedious and time-consuming.  Some of these podcasts are 1.5 hours long, and if I hook my Sansa up to my PC (say for new content or to charge), I lose the place I was in listening to a file.  It wouldn’t be so tedious if all I had was music, but my main purpose for the device is podcasts – much longer files than your typical song.  In order to scan, I’d have to turn the wheel and each full rotation of the wheel only got me a few seconds.  So to skip to 30 minutes… well you do the math because I got frustrated with it.

Then I just happened to be listening to FLOSS Weekly Episode 43: Rockbox.  Rockbox is an open source system that gives you an alternate interface for an MP3 player.  They said they support some Sandisk Sansa devices.  So I go check, yep – they support the entire e200 series (this includes my e260), provided its the version 1 of the devices (yep, check that as well!).  Scanning through a file now is a much nicer experience.  And multiple bookmarks, which I haven’t figured out how to use yet, but I imagine will allow me to keep my place in many files instead of just the last one I played!  I even get to play minesweeper on my MP3 player while listening to audio files.  And a whole bunch of other things.  They even have voice-enabled navigation which helps the hard of seeing rather nicely.  And huge fonts you can choose.

So, I love Rockbox, i’m so glad they made it so easy to hack my mp3 player.  I had to do a manual install, which wasn’t too difficult for me to manage.  They have an auto installer, but it wouldn’t work on the device.  the manual install basically has you copy the Rockbox files, the fonts it needs access to, then I had to download an updater program that would allow me to modify the Sansa bootloader so it would load the rockbox firmware instead of the Sansa firmware.

If you’re not happy with your MP3 player, take a look to see if Rockbox will run on it.  You might be impressed with it again :)

Rockbox doesn’t now, and likely never will, support DRM-encoded/encrypted files (but neither did my Sansa e260, either).  This is by necessity since all of Rockbox is open source, and in order to natively support the DRM files (like iTunes or Audible.com), the source code must be released and that violates the agreement you sign up for when you are given the code to process these files.  However, rockbox does have a plugin architecture…  so perhaps someone could write a free, or cheap, closed-source plugin that will allow the use of DRM files.  That would be very nice, because I want to be able to use Adubile.com on this device (currently I use my TomTom for my audio books).

• You’ve heard it before, and this is serious.  Don’t open attachments if you don’t know why you received them.  If its work related, that’s great.  But if its an email from someone that says “Here are the sales figures” but they don’t give any other details, it might be a virus – even if it appears to have been sent from a colleague.  This means not to open the funny email attachments your friends send you, like video files or powerpoint files – they might have sent them and they might be okay, but they might not have and might not be.  Links to YouTube are fine.
• I run Firefox as my main web browser with the NoScript add-in installed.  Not only does this prevent cross site scripting and a host of other vulnerabilities, I get the added benefit of not seeing so many ads.  However, since I actually use Google Analytics and Google AdSense, I allow these domains access to run scripts.  It would be hypocritical otherwise.  This script does make it annoying to purchase things sometimes.
• I don’t spend time on suspicious looking web pages.  This is arbitrary google-fu type stuff, I can’t help you here.
• I’ve switched to OpenDNS.  Go to their website for information.  And its free.
• I use the Paypal SecureCard PlugIn service to buy online now – this helps against identity theft and stolen credit cards.  They want you to install the Plugin into your browser, but I don’t do that.  I just log into the website and click on plugin to generate card numbers.  You have to have a PayPal account to read about it.
• I use Google Apps for my email at itlegends.net – they have an excellent spam filter that also catches a lot of viruses, worms, trojans, etc.  Gmail works just as well if you aren’t running a domain and just want a personal email address, if not better.  You can even send/receive email from your other hosts with this tool and I really like the feature set.
• I regularly update my Windows operating system.  The easiest way for you users to do this is to use the Microsoft Update Service.  Only works in Internet Explorer.  Personally, I don’t like that service and it doesn’t work for every user.  I use the Heise Security DIY Service Pack.  If you’re a geek, check out their security RSS feed.
• My Windows Firewall is turned on.  I rarely allow exceptions.

There’s a lot more that I do, but at the moment I can’t think of it.  I’ll add edits to this page if I need to.  By the way, if you’re looking for a free anti virus to use for home, try Avast! Home Edition or AVG Free Edition.  I installed Avast! for my roommate and its working out well for him.  I would steer well clear of the Norton or McAfee security suites if I were you.  When people tell me they have problems with their computers, I usually uninstall these.

If you’re looking for professional licensing for a business, the Corporate Symantec Antivirus is pretty good.  So is AVG by Grisoft (but its becoming more bloated) and NOD32 by Eset.

And no, I’m not installing antivirus on my home PC.  But I do have it installed on my trusty ThinkPad since I bring it all over the place to open WiFi networks.  I’m using AVG 8.0 Free there.

I just recently bought a TomTom Go 720. It’s pretty neat. Has handsfree with my phone, multiple methods of getting audio to me (via internal speaker, line-out, wired headset 2.5mm cell style, and FM transmitter), and an expansion slot for SD cards that I can put my Security Now podcasts on. The player is a lot better than the Windows Mobile player on my phone, so that makes me happy. It also has voice-activated commands! Yeah, I can talk to my car now. “Computer… navigate to…” almost like Star Trek. (oh god, I’m such a dork)

There is a feature that doesn’t work, but its because of my phone and not the TomTom. It will use the data plan on a PDA phone to update things like traffic. I’m considering buying a phone on the Bluetooth compatability list (scroll down and you’ll see a link for the compatibility list), but none of the PDA phones I’d be interested in do anything more than my current phone – which is just for handsfree.

Buy your own! I bought mine “recertified” – cheaper and works just fine for me.

TomTom GO 720 4.3″ Automotive GPS Navigation TomTom GO 720 4.3″ Automotive GPS Navigation