Just upgraded the guts of my Ubuntu 11.10 desktop to Sandy Bridge: Asus P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 paired with an i5-2500K and 16GB of G.SKILL DDR3 1866. I’m using an Nvidia card rather than the onboard graphics. No drivers to install. No fuss. Ubuntu booted without missing a beat. It just works.

A side-effect of installing the Tomato firmware on my router—which I installed so that I could get an accurate picture of our household bandwidth usage across 9 devices—is that it tells me when my kids wake up in the morning. My son’s activity is mostly games. My daughter’s is mostly Netflix.

For a long time I’ve wanted a bug tracking system that didn’t feel like a chore to use. Something fast and effortless where I could create a bug report and get back to what I was doing without destroying my flow. There are plenty of bug tracking systems out there. Conventional wisdom says it’s better [...]

I used to play a game called Traffic on my Commodore 64, 1984-ish (photos from C64 Wiki). I loved that game. Played it for hours and hours. You controlled traffic by changing the signal lights. If too many cars queued up at an intersection, the game would end. Otherwise you just tried to see how [...]

The Kindle’s text-to-speech capability surprised me by being much better than I imagined it would be. And everyone should expect that in the next few years computer voices will become indistinguishable from human voices (acoustically if not theatrically). The Authors Guild does. They’re worried that Amazon’s newest e-book device has the potential to undermine the [...]

In your /etc/vsftpd.conf add: pasv_min_port=10000 pasv_max_port=10024 pasv_address=1.2.3.4 (Where 1.2.3.4 is your external public IP address.) Then: ec2-authorize default -p 20-21 ec2-authorize default -p 10000-10024 and restart vsftpd. What this does is configure vsftpd to use ports 10000-10024 for passive data transfers. Then ec2-authorize opens ports 20-21 and 10000-10024 for active and passive connections. I was [...]

I need to enunciate more clearly or Jott is going to get me in trouble with the wife… I said “Opera,” not “Barbara.”

I just wrote a post on BigHugeLabs.com about how I’ve had 1,000,000 unique visitors over the past 30 days. That’s a million individual people. The more I think about it, the more it blows me away. Until the internet came along and changed everything, the only way for a person to reach a million people [...]

Spengler: There’s something very important I forgot to tell you. Venkman: What? Spengler: Don’t cross the streams. Venkman: Why? Spengler: It would be bad. Venkman: I’m fuzzy on the whole good/bad thing. What do you mean, “bad”? Spengler: Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body [...]

…but I resisted.