ChichaPlanet

We were talking in downtown Toronto over the weekend and saw this

I am selling Rayman Ravind Rabbids.

OpenDNS is a company that provides free and high quality DNS services. I found this through a friend who recommended them because I had noticed that my own ISP's (TW's Road Runner) DNS resolution was very slow and inconsistent.

I replaced the Road Runner's DNS with OpenDNS (208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220). The difference was noticeable. You can also sign up and get extra services but you don't have to if you just want basic DNS functionality.

When I first signed up with Road Runner some months ago, the download was about 600KB/s so I was surprised to see that I was able to download a video from apple.com at 1200KB/s, almost 10Mbps. All for the great price of $24.95. Not bad.

Now everyone who has posted a blog entry or had a daily article on Mises.org gets a special URL. Here's mine.

This is why.

Some changes to my blog:

I'm starting to use del.icio.us for real this time.

Here's my page; subscribe to my RSS feed. I plan on moving all of my bookmarks on there over the next few days.

It's been a few days since I got the Mac Mini. The first thing I did was to install a number of programs. Some of them are well known of course and some others I've discovered thanks to blogs and online chatting.

Here's a brief list:

I've used Linux for about 7 years as my primary desktop computer and love it. But when I started getting serious about photography, I found that I unfortunately could not do the things I wanted. Take a simple thing like configuring X.org. I spent about 20 hours over several days trying to get my Samsung 10:9 LCD to work at the proper resolution (1440x900) and I failed again and again. Though I am quite recalcitrant, it was not worth my time to try to fix that problem. Another issue is that I needed to calibrate my monitor and create a color profile. Needless to say, the calibration hardware could not be used with Ubuntu. Then there was Photoshop and features that only existed there, not to mention special plugins.

Therefore, I made the decision some months ago to get a Mac Mini. While it's not really a powerful computer, it will nonetheless allow me to have a much better workflow for my photography. Besides, Macs are cool

by Manuel Lora at 8:36 PM under tech (Comments)

Flights to the moon could become a reality soon, for $100 million:

"I personally think that it's the biggest thing in private spaceflight. It would change the way the whole world thinks about private spaceflight. It is definitely doable for under the $200 million price tag," Anderson [president and CEO of Space Adventures] explained, thereby signaling a radical reduction in cost [emphasis mine] of any past piloted lunar flight.

You really have to see this!

"Using photos of oft-snapped subjects (like Notre Dame) scraped from around the Web, Photosynth creates breathtaking multidimensional spaces with zoom and navigation features that outstrip all expectation."

I decided to splurge a bit and upgrade to a widescreen LCD monitor to better work on my photos.

Here's the list of specs that I was looking for:

Brand name

After some hours of googling, the finalist was the Samsung 906BW, which I found on Newegg for around $200, so I bought it.



But the story does not end there, for what good is a good monitor without proper calibration? I looked around many of the online tools and charts and sample images that you can use to calibrate a screen but the problem is that they are all done by eye and I wanted a bit more consistency. The product I chose was the Spyder2 Express (B&H;). Now I have an ICC profile associated with my monitor, one that I can use in Photoshop and other software.



We've had this new setup now for a couple of weeks and the difference in the image is really noticeable, particularly in the shadow area of images. It's nice to see some of the photos from the gallery under much better conditions.

I've also been thinking about getting a Mac Mini for a while. I'm waiting for a possible upgrade (particularly CPU and RAM improvements) before taking the plunge and switching completely. The next announcement for hardware and software updates could be in June at the WWDC. Until then, I wait.

by Manuel Lora at 8:55 PM under tech (Comments)

I needed a new printer. We had an ancient one that barely worked; it jammed often and was too slow for our needs. Thus, Stan recommended a Samsung ML-2010. I found one on ebay for about $75 shipped.

It was a very easy install and it worked out of the box in Ubuntu. I just added the printer from the Gnome printer config and clicked on "next" a few times.

From the Samsung page:

Key Specs
? Up to 22 ppm print speed
? First page out in less than 10 seconds
? Ultra-compact and stylish design
? Up to 1200 x 600 dpi effective resolution
? 150 sheets input, 100 sheets output
? 5,000 pages per month duty cycle
? TonerSave? extends cartridge life up to 40%
? USB 1.1 connectivity, compatible with USB 2.0
? Compatible with Windows, Macintosh, Linux

While this printer is not very quiet when printing, it is definitely fast, small and very affordable. This seems to have been a good purchase.

Veo en el blog de SlayerX que nos pregunta qué usamos para trabajar.

Stan has posted an interesting summary of why ZFS, which is being included in the next release of Mac OS, is important. This is pretty much required reading. There is also a ZFS-fuse project for Linux and possibly soon we'll also see the development of a kernel-level ZFS implementation also.

Read the blog post here.