Category: Computer bits

Browsing around the Google Earth Community BBS can turn up a lot of interesting things to mess around in Google Earth with.
Thanks to pseabury, you can find a collection of Atlantic hurricanes as a series of .kmz files organized by decade, which you can then load into Google Earth. It’s really kind of neat to have 250 years of storm tracks showing up on Google Earth. What’s even neater is turning them all on. It really drives home the fact that pretty much wherever you live on the Gulf/Atlantic coast, some day a storms going to hit that area.
I thought I’d check out how many storms went past the Charleston area in the past 250 years. With a little bit of clicking, I counted 17 storms that passed through or near the Charleston area (within about 30 miles or so, give or take). Most were tropical storms, with only 1 or two hurricanes. Not as bad as I thought it would be for this area.

Inspired by Blogus Maximus‘ footprints in the internet post, I decided to see what kind of ‘Googleprint’ I had. I’ve been around the net for a good long time, so I was expecting it to be reasonably substantial.
Googling my name returned 237 000 results, with me having a significant presence in the first 5 pages. Sporadic mention in the next 3 or 4 pages, but still there. I didn’t go much farther than that.
Googling my name in quotes returns 644 results with the majority of it actually referring to me. Many of the results are things like mailing list/newsgroup postings or trails I’ve left behind at Amazon.com
Googling my Net alias yields 517 results, the vast majority of them belonging to me (board/blog/newsgroup postings making up the bulk).
Not as much as I expected, but I guess it’s about right considering Google’s only been indexing for the past 7 years.
Oh, and as a side note, I am not this guy:

Police in West Vancouver, British Columbia, said in April that they had stopped a three-year petty-crime spree in a neighborhood of upscale homes when they arrested multimillionaire Eugene Mah, 64, and his son, Avery, 32. According to police, the two are responsible for stealing hundreds of minor and even tacky items, such as garbage cans, marginal lawn decorations and even government recycling boxes, and keeping them at their own posh home. Mah’s Vancouver real estate holdings are reported at about $13 million (U.S.), but among the items he allegedly stole were one family’s doormat and, subsequently, each of the 14 doormats the family purchased as replacements.

I started playing around with GoogleEarth during one of my procrastination moments and labeled a bunch of stuff around work. Check it out.
It’s kinda cool. I can see myself wasting entirely too much time messing around with GoogleEarth.

Fruit flies live longer it seems.
PalmOne‘s T5, introduced in October last year, is apparently already being EOL’d (end-of-life) to make way for new models, according to rumours posted at PalmInfocenter.com. The specs on the rumoured T|X look pretty good, and might be a promising replacement should my trusty T|3 die prematurely on me. None of Palm’s recent offerings (T5 or the LifeDrive) have had any of that ‘Wow’ factor to impress me enough to want either one. I think this is what a lot of people would have liked to see in a PDA a couple of years ago though.
Lets hope my T3 holds out for another year or so to see a Cobalt based PDA tempt me.

Forget reinstalling Windoze from CD. Stick it on a USB flash drive. All the instructions are provided for creating a bootable USB flash drive and installing WinXP on it. And if you have a large enough flash drive, all those other useful programs like anti-virus, spyware detectors, CD burning software, etc can go on it too. That will probably save you from carrying around more CDs or hunting around the Net for the software.
Of course, your computer needs to be able to boot from a USB device in the first place. The article says for newer computers this shouldn’t be a problem. For middle aged computers, it should be possible with a BIOS update. For old computers, you’re probably better off getting a new one anyway.