Water in Chicago comes straight from Lake Michigan, and is pretty decent quality in general. Most houses do not have water meters, which I suspect leads to very little incentive to conserve water. During the summer months, especially during lawn-watering season, it’s not unusual for our water to dwindle to… Continue reading
Like many modern consumers faced with a variety of possibly arbitrary choices, I find it useful to consult with others who have purchased similar items. The Internet brings with it a plethora of unbiased and helpful product reviews, collected and categorized by retailers, bloggers, and, well, fake sites set up… Continue reading
If you’re like me, you have several devices on your desk that emit audio (or are at least capable of it) — on my desk alone, I’ve got two PCs, a laptop, a Chumby, an iPad, an iPhone, a Mac, and an iPod. It seems sensible to me that rather… Continue reading
I’ll be as succinct and as blunt as I can be: high fructose corn syrup gave me kidney stones. For nearly ten years, I got kidney stones about once per year, on average. Kidney stones are probably the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced, and I tried an awful lot… Continue reading
I’m sure I’m not alone in my buying habits of researching a product that I want, then searching for the lowest price on the Internet. In general, this practice has served me well, and I’ve had trouble-free dealings with a number of storefronts without any trouble whatsoever. I occasionally run… Continue reading
It’s unusual for me to see charges I don’t recognize on my credit card bill, and even then, it’s usually something my wife bought — or that I bought and the vendor name shows up as something unusual. Therefore, when I saw a charge I didn’t recognize from “Silicon Solar,”… Continue reading
The venerable X-Windows has network support with grace and elegance that other window systems (I’m looking at you, Windows) have yet to come anywhere near. Point your applications at any xserver on the network, and there they run — what could be easier? On the down side, this seems to… Continue reading
HP Image Zone comes with HP cameras and printers, and is, in general, perfectly adequate for routine image printing and minor manipulation such as cropping, resizing, etc. On the other hand, it’s remarkably opaque, having the concept of an “Album Shelf” onto which albums can be placed. Albums are collections… Continue reading
After installing new drivers for an old ATI All-In-Wonder, every time the system booted up, atievxx.exe would crash. Annoying, but not tragic, and I lived with it for a while. Cleaning out the old drivers didn’t help, nor did reinstalling the OS. On the chance that it was a hardware… Continue reading
The words “web” and “remote control” are used together to describe all manner of things, but here I’m talking about a remote control of a PVR, using a web page. In these days of wireless connectivity, and distributed video, it’s almost a natural thing to want to be able to… Continue reading