Sea Lions
Sea Lions at Fisherman’s Wharf from Coleman McCormick on Vimeo.
Decluttering the home office
After moving into our new house, painting, buying furniture, assembling the furniture, painting the furniture, reorganizing, and finally, setting up the rooms, I was anxious to get everything in our new home office set up the way I’ve always wanted it. One of the biggest problems for myself in a home office is the epic amount of tangled cables, computer equipment, and downright crap all over my desk. After some thinking and internet searching, I set off on a project to get all this equipment properly organized.
I found couple of articles on the interwebs about installing cheap pegboard on the bottom or back of a desk to keep cable- and device-clutter to a minimum, so I decided to hack together my own solution inspired by these examples.
Materials:
- Pegboard - 24″ x 48″ section
- Steel eyes - Qty. 4 (for my table, YMMV)
- Wooden dowels (if you need them) - small enough to fit through the eyes
Tools:
- Saw
- Sandpaper
- Drill
- Pliers (if you have a hardwood table)
You could probably get by with less that this, but these are the tools I had and used.
Ever seen this Windows feature?
So I’m trying to install some management software for our Toshiba phone system, and I keep getting this error:
>”Windows cannot access the specified device, path, or file. You may not have the appropriate permissions to access the item.”
And stupid me, I assume it’s a permissions error (that’s what it looks like, right?), but it turns out it’s a security feature that Windows XP SP2 uses to protect the end user from a file they’ve copied from another location. Since I
copied said .exe file from a network share on the network, Server 2003 thought it was a dangerous file, so I couldn’t
get to it anymore. If you want even to execute the file, you have to right-click and go to the file properties and
select “Unblock” in order to stop the OS from stopping you. Kinda silly… I thought I would have seen this issue before.
A finished project
I just completed a website for the Davis Island Civic Association (a Tampa Bay-area local organization). Check it out here. I’m pretty happy with it, considering the speed with which I put it together. Leave some feedback for me!
Orange Box Domination
I just recently finished up everything in The Orange Box. First I tackled Portal (one of the best games ever in its own right). Then I played through the original Half-Life 2 again. I had played it once on the PC a while ago, but my PC was so shoddy that it wasn’t very exciting. I then beat Episodes 1 and 2 over the weekend. HL2: Episode One was something of a disappointment. It has some gameplay elements that add to the experience of HL2, but overall, I don’t really enjoy fighting only zombies in the dark. Episode Two was a total delight to play, a tremendous improvement over both previous games, in my opinion. The hunters in Episode Two have the potential to be something more annoying than exciting (a la the Flood in Halo…), but they only show up occasionally and actually provide awesome battles. The AI is pretty incredible, they’ll chase you around and if you hide in a certain room of a building they can’t get to, they’ll go outside and cap you through the window. Valve has also proven to be the master of building gigantic set-pieces and immersing you in the action; sometimes you may have control over the scene, others are interactive “cut-scenes” that you’re watching from the ground. Episode Two’s environments also show off the Source engine in ways the first two games couldn’t. Because the setting is mainly the White Forest between City 17 and the research facility you’re trying to reach, and you cross miles of landscape in a bitchin’ ride, Ep. 2 takes the opportunity to wow you with some sick visuals.
Up next: Call of Duty 4.
The Ultimate Halo Ebay Auction
This eBay auction is insane. Basically everything under the Halo sun, including Bill Gates’ autograph on your 360. His signature looks like a 2nd grader.
The Mist Trailer
Frank Darabont’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novella The Mist is finally a reality. Word is that Darabont’s been trying to make this movie for years (he had planned on making this his directorial debut, even before The Shawshank Redemption). I’m glad to see it’s actually happening, because the movie looks awesome, if something of a departure from his usual style. Shawshank, The Majestic, and The Green Mile (two of which were also King stories) all had strong similarities. They shared some spiritual qualities and sort of coming-of-age, philosophy-changing moments in the lives of the characters. The Mist looks much more gritty and in your face in the style of 24 or Battlestar Galactica.
The Mist tells a story of a fictional town in Maine which, after a storm, is overtaken by a mysterious “mist.” Concealed within the cloud of mist are strange and terrifying monsters that begin attacking the citizens of the town. The plot centers around a group of people trapped by the mist inside a supermarket, and the psychological breakdown of the survivors as they end up destroying one another in their attempts to stay alive.
A sick noseblunt in skate.
psMonitor: Make PDFs without Adobe Acrobat
At every IT job I’ve worked, I’ve noticed that the ability to create PDF files in business today is nothing less than an absolute necessity. Even with the pricing of Adobe Acrobat skyrocketing (about $250 per seat), and PDF becoming an open standard, it’s still difficult to find a reliable, totally free method for creating PDF documents.
My father’s company, like most, ran into this issue a couple of years ago. So my brother, who was doing the network management at the time, developed a PostScript monitoring service to convert PostScript files to PDFs; a program he called psMonitor. After some coding and setup, anyone in the office could print to a PostScript file in a specific directory and have it automatically spit out a PDF file. Saved the company nearly $3,000 instantly. The savings in a larger firm could be even more astounding. The full version of Acrobat is still crucial for proper PDF editing and markup, but most of us don’t need that. We just need a simple way to convert files.
What follows here is my guide on how to set up your own psMonitor service so that you too may disown Acrobat!
The cleverest of iPod accessories
It’s the binder clip dock! Bet you never thought of this. I’d hate to have bought some $30 plastic piece of crap from the Apple Store…
Instructables [via Make]
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