Posted by geetarista April 26, 2006
Head over to the Monopoly website, and vote for what will appear on the new Monopoly game coming out this summer: The Here and Now Edition.
This edition will include landmarks from major cities in the U.S., instead of the boring old street names of the older version of Monopoly. The landmarks that will appear on the board are determined by the votes that are cast through May 12. Each of the 22 cities has 3 landmarks that you can vote to be on the board. The board will then be arranged by how many total votes each landmark has compared to the others. That means that the highest voted landmark overall will be the next Boardwalk!
Source: Camelback Mountain a candidate to replace Boardwalk
Posted by geetarista April 25, 2006
There is a neat trick that I’ve seen all over the internet on how to fold a shirt real fast. I was a little skeptical at first thinking that this was a hoax, using a little video editing to make it work.
Apparently, this is for real. I tried it myself and later showed it to my wife. She loves it so much that she uses it all the time when she does the laundry.
It really works!
Posted by geetarista April 21, 2006
I found a great little program that helps me find out how much space certain directories take on my hard drive. It’s called JDiskReport. Here’s a little screenshot from the homepage:
JDiskReport is free, and it is very easy to use. All you have to do is scan the directory that you’re looking at, and the program will graphically show you the folders and how much space they take up. It helps you see where all your hard drive space is being used so you can do a little clean-up if necessary.
Posted by geetarista April 19, 2006
I read an interesting article telling about James Dyson (the maker of the vacuum) and how he made a garden exhibit that makes it look like the water runs uphill. I thought it was quite interesting, so I decided to post it here for those who haven’t seen it.
Dyson said in the article that he had M. C. Escher’s Waterfall painting as an inspiration. Escher’s paintings are notorious for their complex and beautiful optical illusions. I love how they make your mind freak by trying to figure out why it doesn’t work!
Wouldn’t it be nice to have the time and money to invent cool stuff like this?
Source: How does Dyson make water go uphill?
Update: Looks like someone has made a model of Escher’s Waterfall.
Posted by geetarista April 19, 2006
It seems that everything that has to do with the web nowadays has a type of feed attached to it. Every website, blog, news site, forum, and service has a feed. When I first learned about feeds, I didn’t really think they would be useful to me. I thought it was just some new technology that people were using just because they could.
Unfortunately, I’ve been finding that I’ve been missing out for a while now. A few weeks ago I set up a Bloglines account and figured that I would give it a try. I didn’t like going through all the sites I visit and trying to add feeds, but I got better as I went along. I even found a few sites that I was interested in as I was searching for my feeds. After only about five to ten minutes, I was up and running.
After you first set it up, there are a bunch of posts that you have to read for the past few days. This is sort of nice if you have a new site set up that you’ve never visited before or one that you’ve missed for a while. After that, you only get posts/content from your sites when they are new. This way, you don’t have to visit tons of pages to find if there is any new content out there. You just wait for everything to come to you!
The nice thing about feeds is that you can subscribe to just about anything. Almost everything that I do on the web has a feed that I can use. All I do is look for sites/services that I often use, and I just look for ways that I can implement the feeds into my reader.
If you haven’t started utilizing the power of feeds, now is a great time. There are many more little features of using feeds, but I won’t go into them here. Just find a good feed reader that you like, and start adding your feeds to it. Like me, you’ll start shaving off lots of time that you spent browsing and surfing around the internet.
Posted by geetarista April 18, 2006
I never posted about it before, but I had been toying around with Mandriva 2006 for the past few months. I really liked it a lot, but in the end, it just didn’t work out for me. I’m not saying that it’s not a good distribution–because it is. The same thing happened when I tried out Fedora: it just didn’t work for me. Whenever I look at newbie forums on the web that talk about which distribution to choose, they all say that it’s different for every person. Now I know that it’s true: every person has to try out a few distributions to find out which one works best. It may be a little time consuming with trying them all out, but it’s all part of one of the best advantages of Linux: choices!
Well, after trying out several different distributions, I’ve decided to stick with Kubuntu. I tried Ubuntu last year sometime, but I didn’t really like it that much. However, I now realize that my main problem was with the GNOME desktop, which I wasn’t fond of. I didn’t know too much about linux at the time, so I didn’t know that I could just install KDE. I was impressed that they sent me the free CDs in the mail–one for me and one to give to a friend. But this time I just downloaded and ISO and burned it to a DVD which is very nice!
So far, the experience has been perfect. Ubuntu recognizes all of my hardware, and installation was a breeze. I even took the disc down to my parents this weekend and showed my dad on his laptop. From what I’ve heard, linux is a little buggy on laptops, but not this case! I just did a live boot, and it worked perfectly. It even connected automatically to his network and the internet! One of the things that I really love is the package manager. It is so easy to manage the packages and programs that I couldn’t believe it! In Mandriva, there were 4 different sections that you had to use depending on what you were doing: installing, removing, updating, or managing sources for download. In Ubuntu, the interface is very simple and easy to use, and everything is done in one spot.
The other thing that I love about Ubuntu is the community. It seems that since Ubuntu is such a good distribution, there are so many users that are online. There are so many forums and ways to look for help that it makes it easier to learn and get answers to questions. This is great mostly for newbies like me that are looking to make the plunge and change entirely over to linux.
If you haven’t checked out Ubuntu or Kubuntu, do it!
Posted by geetarista April 18, 2006
I’ve been hearing about it a lot in the blogosphere, but this morning I found out it was true:
Gmail and Google Calendar now integrate together!
First of all, there is the same set of links in the top left corner of Gmail that you can see in calendar. It’s not the most important feature in the world, but it makes it easier to get around.
Next, there is a new little link when you compose an e-mail that lets you add event details to it so the person you are sending to can add the event to their calendar.
There is also a feature that recognizes event details in e-mails which allows you to add an event to your calendar by clicking on a link to the far right. This is similar to the maps feature that recognizes addresses in an e-mail and allows you to map the address easier.
It looks like Google knows what it’s doing. If they keep releasing little features like this, hopefully they can wean a few more people off Micro$oft!
