TechgnosisWeb ReBoot

Well, folks, TechgnosisWeb is dead. Ding-dong, as a witch. No posts since January? Yeah, stick a fork in it, we’re all done. We had a good run, though. This blog has been going on in one way or another since April of 2003. But it’s finally time to move on to bigger and better things, not just on this blog but in my life. Over the past months, I’ve been getting ready to make a huge change, take a big leap, a chance on something massive. I’m moving back to NYC, along with my girlfriend, and this time we’re planning to stay. And I’m taking this opportunity to clear out a lot of the deadweight in my life and online. This blog, for one, has been hanging around my neck like a digital albatross for far too long. It’s time to put it to bed.

Does this mean you won’t hear from me ever again, though? Hardly! This isn’t an ending.. or at least, not just an ending. It’s also a new beginning. With renewed energy and a new sense of purpose and change, I’ve started a new blog, called Katsu Steps Out, over at http://katsushiro.squarespace.com/ (expect me to buy a proper domain for it soon enough). Just like I’ll be continuing my life soon in a whole new city, so will my online journey continue at a new home.

So! Thank you, to all of you who’ve taken the time to read any of the random idiocy I’ve posted here throughout the years. Thank you, and goodbye. The journey continues… here.

Oh boy.. I step back into blogging, and within the first couple of days, I’m already telling a major tech blog to suck my dick. And now, I’m tackling the latest hot-button topic: gay marriage. Why? Well, recent events have brought the topic up here and there, and I figure it’s about time I put down my own thoughts on this matter. Not that it’ll change anyone’s mind, but, I at least feel the need to have my say.

Now, I’ll be honest, this is really a fight I could just sit out. Gay marriage doesn’t really concern me one way or another, for the most part. Hell, I’m skeptical about this whole ‘marriage’ concept to begin with. Also, I’m neither gay myself, nor do I have any sort of religious or moral opposition to gay marriage. No one would blame me for not really giving a shit either way.. and yet, I do give a shit. And here’s why:
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So, who here is looking forward eagerly to the next Batman movie? Yeah, me too.. well, here’s something to keep you busy as well:

http://www.ibelieveinharveydent.com/

Neat, huh? Now, go here:

http://www.ibelieveinharveydenttoo.com/

Neater! Do your part, put in your address.. the more that do it, the more the secret’s revealed!

Alright, I just found out about this, and I know it’s a bit late (the promotion ends on the 21st), but it takes all of 5 minutes to do online and you could be saving someone’s life:

Because I’m an idiot and shoved a bunch of things into an “action” folder, I’ve almost missed telling you about this:

From May 7 to May 21 you can sign up to be on the national bone marrow registry for free (usually it is about $50-75 unless you sign up at a marrow drive). And they are making it VERY easy- they send you the entire kit in the mail and it only involves swabbing your cheek with a Q-tip, signing some forms, and sending it back. Most people stay on the list and never hear from them for their entire lives but by being on it you could potentially save the life of a child/adult with a bone marrow disease like leukemia.

If you are interested go to the website: www.marrow.org and click on the “Thanks Mom” icon.

Joe’s cousin John sent this to me. Get signed up and get active… please! Headed there right now myself.

Got this from the Wingin’ It guys, and it’s a good thing to do, I just signed up as a donor myself.

Taking a break from the (a)religious flamewar going on below, let’s touch on something I recently discovered that I think is freakin’ brilliant: Pandora.FM. What is it? basically, it’s a mashup of the two best music reccomendation engines I know of: Pandora, and last.FM. I’ve been using both for a while now, as each one has its own charm and uses. Pandora, for example, lets you create a station with as little as one song or artist to build from, letting you stream good, high-quality music no matter where you may be. As you listen to the station, you can fine-tune it to your tastes by giving each song a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’, which allows Pandora to find out more and more about the type of music you like, and give you more of it. Part of its beauty, to me, is the ability to have multiple stations: Pandora doesn’t just learn if you like rock, country, and dance, it learns exactly what kind of rock, country, and dance you like, and you can have individual stations for each of your tastes, tailored for you.

And then there’s last.FM. I love this service, because it allows me to track, tag, and view everything I listen to, by integrating into Winamp, Windows Media Player, Amarok, or whatever media player I happen to be using. Then, I can mark what I like, what I don’t, and build feeds and lists for me to go through and share with others. What was that track that you listened to a couple days ago about the monkeys? last.Fm knows. It also has a strong social aspect: get your friends to join up, and you can each see what the other is listening to, and make recommendations. The system is even smart enough to learn what tracks that you might like they’re listening to, and it’ll point them out to you. Add the ability to buy tracks directly through iTunes (and even the occasional free mp3 directly from the site), and you’ve got a winner.

Unfortunately, up until now, both services were separate: when I listened to my Pandora station, last.FM knew nothing of it. Songs I love came and went, and I’d lose track of them. Enter Pandora.FM, one of the coolest little mashups that RSS ever made possible. You log into Pandora.FM using your last.FM account, and the service takes care of the rest. As songs scroll by on your Pandora player, a bar at the bottom of the screen allows you to tag them, view and edit their metadata, and submits them to your last.FM profile, so when you look at your feeds, there’s everything you’ve been listening to, tagged, bagged, and ready to parse. Not to mention (if you use the ‘More Options’ interface), view information on the track, the band, your recently played tracks, top played tracks, browse photos and videos of the artist playing, and even start new Pandora stations based on the track you’re listening to. Sweetness. If you’re not using any of these services right now, I can’t recommend them highly enough for discovering new music to listen to. Go sign up for last.FM, set up a Pandora station or three, and feel the love with Pandora.FM.
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To bring you the following announcement:

09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

That is all. Move along.

Evo pointed out this new service called iStalkr, which basically aggregates all of one’s disparate Web 2.0 social rss feeds into one handy dandy place, so that instead of having to visit 4 or 5 different services to stalk me, one can just subscribe to my iStalkr meta-feed, and keep track of all of them at once (plus, any new services I might start using will be added to that feed, and you’ll automatically follow those too, without having to do anything! I added this blog, my Tumblr feed, my Twitter feed, and my Flickr feed (update: just added my blogHUD, Digg and del.icio.us feeds too.. am I forgetting any?), and it’s already getting rave reviews. As my good friend Monster just told me over IM:

How creepy is that?

Answer: very, very creepy. Go check my meta-feed out and add it to your Netvibes/Firefox/RSS reader of choice.
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I think it’s about that time again, to change the look of this site. Over the past few years that I’ve run Techgnosisweb, it’s had a couple different looks, from dark and personal to more light and airy. But as time goes on, things change, my other domains come due for renewal, and I think it’s time to mix things up a bit more around here. Not only that, but I’ve started doing a lot more micro-blogging, as it were, with posts on Twitter, the Katsustumbling blog, my Flickr feed, etc. So, I believe I’m going to try and change the look of this place once more, but not just the look, but the actual functionality a bit. I think I’ll make this site into the main hub of my onine activities, but have more obvious links and displays to the other services where I post. Thus, I will keep posting my random moment-to-moment thoughts on Twitter, links and cool things I want to point at on Katsustumbling, pics through Flickr, and more thought-out posts here, but I will set up display elements, windows, badges, whatever, so that they can all be seen from here, rather than having to visit 3 or 4 different sites. Ought to be interesting to see what I can come up with. Wish me luck!

I just ran across something called a ‘tumblelog‘.. It’s basically a blog, but designed for short-form little links, pictures, quotes, things like that. Stuff that I wouldn’t spend the effort on writing a full-fledged blog post on, but that I still think is cool or interesting enough to share. So, I just set up the Katsustumbling tumblelog, and am making a few posts on it as I go, just to see what it’s like. So, this brings the total ways for me to document random events in my life to three at the least: this blog for bigger, more in-depth stuff (as if I ever got really in-depth here anyway), Twitter for all those random ‘Allright, I’m having lunch now’ announcements, and now the Katsustumbling thingy for random stuff I, well, stumble across on the web. We’ll see if anyone likes it.
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So, I’ve always wanted to be more of a DIY sorta guy, but working with power tools and such never quite appealed to me. I never really felt the lure of the power tool section at Sears. But I always wanted to be able to have something in my hands and be able to say: “Look! I made this!” It’s a wonder I never turned to electronics before.

Recently, Dethroner dedicated a week to the wonders of electronics, specifically the DIY kind, and they invited Aaron Dunlap, of Electroids fame, to co-host the week. The whole thing inspired me to actually get around to ordering one of the $10 9V USB Charger kits from his site, and the parts arrived not too long ago. Of course, the kit only includes the basic stuff: the battery snap, the USB connector, an LED light, a resistor, a 9V-to-5V IC, and that’s about it. You supply your own solder, soldering iron, electrical tape, battery, and, of course, Altoids tin. So, for those of you thinking of taking this on as your first electronics project, and telling yourself it’s worth it ’cause it’s so cheap: you’re going to end up going to Radio Shack and spending ~$100 on additional parts, including the solder, hookup cable, soldering iron (stay away from those ColdHeat irons, they suck), electrical tape, and, if you’re like me, a little Dremel tool for poking holes in the Altoids tin. However, look on the bright side: by the time you’re done buying all that extra stuff, you’re well-equiped to handle other electronics projects, and I can assure you that once you finish your first one, and get the ‘OMG, I made something that works!’ high, you’ll definitely want to make more.

So, over the past couple of days, I’ve been cursing my lack of soldering skills, and slowly trying to avoid burning myself (or frying the components) while soldering wires and resistors and stuff… but it has been worth it:

Behold! My very own Electroids charger, fully working, and charging up Glitch. It’s a thing of beauty! And I can say with pride: I made this.

Now this is a really interesting thing: hanzo:web, a ‘social webarchiving service‘. What it is, is a mix between a site to store your Bookmarks (’Favorites’, to you stubborn and spyware-ridden Internet Explorer users) so they’re accessible from any computer, and the Internet Archive, keeping a full archived copy of the bookmarked site available, so that if the original site goes down or is changed, you can see exactly what it looked like when you bookmarked it.

That’s pretty handy, I gotta say. Especially for folk like me, who day in and day out trawl technical blogs, which sometimes have a nasty tendency of being there one day, and being down the next when their maintaner gets bored with them. However, I can see it working handily for the pr0n-hounds among you: surfing for pr0n and you find something nice, you can use hanzo:web to not only bookmark the site, but cache a full copy of it in case the site goes away, as many pr0n sites do. From their website:

Reliable access
Hanzo servers continually crawl the web as directed by you, archiving your chosen sites and providing free access to the archives forever. Even if you cancel your account, the archive content will remain, as will your access to it.
Respect for content
All archived pages, links and sites are stored exactly as they appeared on the web. Pictures, objects, links and flash are all retained as they are, preserved as originally conceived.
Durability
Hanzo stores all archived content and user metadata in open web archive standards-based formats.

I just got my beta login today, and I’ll be playing around with it, see what I think. There’s a few different service levels, from the free one which allows you to archive around 100MB per month, to more advanced ones that allow you to archive from 1 to 10 GB per month. And the cool thing is that even if you discontinue the service, the sites you’ve archived remain archived pretty much forever, so they’re never lost, no matter what. Lots of promise here.
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Technorati Tags: hanzo:web, social, webarchiving, Internet Archive