I’ve been in the market for a new laptop computer for a while now and just never found a deal I could live with, until about two weeks ago.  I found a Slickdeal for 15% off Dell refurbs.  I know other people who have had great success with factory refurbished Dell laptops, so I figured I would give it a try.

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Check out this link to NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive and get a little perspective.  Please.  Do it for the rest of us.

P.S.  I’m a big fan of the photos with the word “Nebula” in the title.

I had the opportunity to take a trip last year which covered the better part of Ireland.  While there, we had two cameras: a Nikon D70 DSLR and  a Sony DSC-N2.  More importantly though, I had a Sony GPS-CS1 geologger.  This little device locks onto GPS signals and records your location every 15 seconds in standard NMEA format to internal flash memory.  If you take the time to synchronize the internal clocks in your camera to GPS before you go shooting, afterwards you can correlate the time stamps in your photos with the position recorded by the device.  I use software by RoboGeo to do this, although Sony includes some basic software with the device.

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This past weekend, I took a trip to Dayton, Ohio for the annual airshow held at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.  The main draw this year was the demonstration of the F-22 Raptor.  The speed and agility displayed by this plane was really special even though the pilot wasn’t allowed to show its full capabilities.   Aside from the F-22, there were many other interesting planes and helicopters on display, including the C-17, C-130, P-3, Apache Longbow, A-10, Huey, CH-47, V-22, F-16, and many more.  While oogling at all the technology (some of it new, some of it really really old), I managed to take a few photos which I’ve included here in abridged form.

Edit: Somehow I missed the emergency landing in the middle of the show?  The plane must have (and should have) landed on a runway far from spectators because I certainly didn’t see it.

As I’ve previously mentioned, I run a Smoothwall Express 3.0 firewall on my home network.  I built this firewall using a crappy old computer I had lying around.  Well, the harddrive ate it big time this week and needed to be replaced.  Luckily, I had another old harddrive laying around which will get me by for a few more months (they just don’t make harddrives like they used to… the one that died was almost a decade old).  As you may know, Smoothwall has a built-in backup feature which will copy your settings over to a floppy disk.  It’s limited, but I guess it would work for some people.  I knew my old junk hardware would fail eventually so a few months ago I installed the SmoothBackup for SWE 3.0 v.1.4 mod.  One can configure this mod to make scheduled, complete drive backups.  Since a Smoothwall installation is inherently limited in size (~130 MB for mine), this mod generates a tar file of the entire file system.  It can also optionally SCP the file to another computer.  I had mine configured to put the tar on my server out of harms way.  So today, when I went to replace the crashed drive, I simply reinstalled smoothwall and the SmoothBackup mod, and then restored my previous installation from the tar which I copied back over from my server.  BAM!  10 minutes tops and I was back up and running.  Smoothwall is a quality application, and community-contributed mods like SmoothBackup are icing on the cake.

Due to a harddrive failure, I was forced to reinstall Linux on my aging laptop.  Previously, I had been running Gentoo which was built completely from source (if you want to learn about linux, building your own Gentoo installation from source is a great way).  Gentoo ran pretty fast on my old laptop since the only packages installed were the ones I had taken the time to build using Portage.  However, upgrades were always a pain since every package had to be built from source.  Yea yea yea, I know you can install pre-compiled packages from Portage, but what’s the fun in that, right?  Anyways, I’ve been running Debian on a home server and it’s pretty stable with no frills.  Ubuntu, being a quasi-derivative of Debian seemed like an attractive choice for a laptop.  Wow, is it ever.

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I can never leave well enough alone, so I started playing with the NextGEN Gallery WP Plugin today to spice things up. It has a fantastic administrative backend to create galleries of images and then albums of galleries, all of which can be easily inserted into posts using a small tag. While customizing this plugin, I stumbled upon the Highslide JS project which can be integrated into NextGEN, after some serious finagling, to enable cool effects when displaying your images. These effects include image navigation, fading, being able to drag images around, etc. The WP-Highslide plugin is a good place to start messing around. This plugin integrates a part of the Highslide JS codebase into WP as well as supplying a good place to locate all of the Highslide-specific CSS. Don’t ask me to explain how it works, as it took me a few hours of code and CSS editing to get something usable. If you don’t hate yourself, the NextGEN gallery plugin works perfectly fine without it. However, your images won’t do such cool things when you click on them as mine do. Here is an example of displaying a small gallery (caricatures of a few friends in the spirit of South Park).  When you click on a photo to enlarge it, try dragging it around and then maybe clicking on another one and dragging it around.  It’s oddly entertaining.

Wow. I did a double-take when I read the original FARK.com headline: “Group wants Wi-Fi banned from public buildings — because they’re allergic to it”. Much to my surprise, people really do believe they’re allergic to wireless communications. Hmm… maybe my own hypersensitivity to WiFi is what is causing this uncontrollable urge to beat my head against my computer monitor.

As my crappy 802.11b wireless router gasped its last breath, I started looking for a suitable replacement. My home network includes a web/email server, a dedicated MythBox, my standard desktop tower, and a laptop or two. Naturally, I wanted to upgrade from a just a simple router to a more full-featured firewall without spending a whole lot of money. An old AMD Athlon 900MHz computer with 512MB or ram would become an excellent base for a Smoothwall Express 3.0 installation.

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