Teen Tech

Teen Tech (aka Aaron) and his brother Adam have been up north at Camp Tapico in Kalkaska for a week now during Staff Week, getting ready for the summer camping season. This weekend they’ll get their first batch of campers who will be there for a week. As they have no internet access up there (hey, even cell phone reception is sketchy out there in the boonies), I’ll be blogging for Aaron as much as I can.

So, here goes …

The first time I’d heard about problems with the XBox 360 was when my buddy Rob Chandler in Melbourne, Australia, posted this blog entry about the system’s “ring of death”. As Rob wrote:

It’s a worry — I’m seeing this report all over the web. XBox 360s failing either just before or just after the 12 month warrantee period.

This happened to Rob prior to our getting an XBox 360 in this household. Mary’s 17-year-old son John bought one a month or so ago and it wasn’t too long before we found it with the two-light “ring of death”. It had overheated just sitting there with no one playing it.

John’s a pretty resourceful guy and immediately started looking for a possible solution. He found one, too. At a GameStop store, he picked up this inexpensive USB-powered cooling fan/XBox 360 fan. For $9.99, it seems to be be doing a decent job. We haven’t seen the two-light overheat lights since installing the fan. What was interesting about it to both of us was the “pass-through” USB connector. When you plug the fan into a USB port on the XBox, the cable for the fan comes out of the side of the cable’s USB connector. The fan’s USB connector itself has another USB connector built into it, so you actually don’t lose the use of that USB port on your 360.

There are more elaborate/more expensive cooling fans for the XBox 360 out there, but the one John found seems to work well enough that it seems to be all he and his gaming friends need.

I’m not sure what Rob ended up doing with that particular XBox 360 of his. His stick upright basses are pretty cool, though! At the bottom of this page is a pic of Rob playing in an impromptu band at the Conference Center at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, Washington, in April 2004. Yes, us old guys can be pretty cool, too!

This post is about web browsers and who actually has the market. What is a web browser? If you are looking at this, you are looking at a web browser. It is a program that does just as its name implies, allows you to browse the World Wide Web. So, which web browser do most people use? These stats from W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) should shed some light on the topic:

Browser Statistics Month by Month

OK, so let’s interpret this. Way back in ‘02, people used Internet Explorer 6. This is most likely because it was packaged with Windows XP, and it was the most secure of its time. In ‘03, Mozilla comes into the market and by November, 7.2% of the market was using the new browser. This continued until ‘05 where Firefox came into the ring and took most of Mozilla’s thunder as it was made by the same group. It had 23.6% of the market the first year that Firefox was separate from Mozilla. Firefox’s Steady Growth caused a steady decay of Internet Explorer users, even with the release of the new Internet Explorer 7. Now, in May of ‘07, firefox has 33.7% of the market which is second only to Internet Explorer 6, and only by less than five percent.

Well,

This is probably my last post that I am going to post for a while.  I’m going up to Camp Tapico as staff Friday.  The term up there is about eight weeks, and I’m not going to have access to the internet.  I will however snail-mail my dad (LunaPierCook) my posts, and he is going to post them.  Tomorrow I will spend the day preparing for my stay, and then I’m gone on Friday.

So Long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Good Bye,
Aaron “TeenTech” Liske

It sounds just like what it is. It is the process of injecting code into something like a WordPress post where the web browser interprets the code presented like normal. To do that with a WordPress post, you have to be in HTML mode, or where you can edit the raw code of the post. Once there, you can insert code called CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, where you can change various aspects of the code. Take this snippet of code:

<style type=”text/css”>
a:hover {
color: #ff0000;
text-decoration: none;
}
</style>

In the standard default theme for WordPress, when you put your mouse over the link, the color changes, and the link becomes underlined. All that the above code does is make it so that when the mouse is on top of a link (hovering), it doesn’t underline it and changes it to red. This sort of code has been used on other sites like MySpace, but for more nefarious reasons. I’ve even heard of people injecting code onto CNN to make a fake news report for his mother. Using it to change the theme for a WordPress blog, or at least your own, is not malicious in any way. Using it to change someone else’s site is bad and considered hacking. Don’t use this technique for anything bad. That’s all that I have to say. Many parts of the WordPress theme can be edited through injections, you can see most of the parts through the theme editor and under styles.css. Then inject the individual parts into the post. Good Luck, and don’t break anything.

This Friday, I leave for boyscout camp for about 8 weeks. There is quite a bit of preparation that goes along with that. First, I have to get all of my clothes together. A lot of that will be my uniforms, but some civilian clothes will be taken. Then, I need to take all of my toiletries, which includes stuff for laundry as there are laundry facilities for staff members. I will also be taking up two of my computers. One Desktop, and one laptop, and of course, my networking gear. It should be interesting. Next on my list is some reading materials. I will probably take my book titled “Calculus” as I’m trying to teach myself, maybe a Harry Potter book, and probably an Artemis Fowl book. For those who have never heard of Artemis Fowl, it is a sci-fi / fantasy book about a boy mastermind criminal and characters from a fantasy world. Great Series. I will also take up all of my scouting manuals, books, and reference materials. I need to make Eagle before my 18th birthday according to scouting rules. There’ll be a few other odds and ends that I’ll take, but that’s a majority of it. So, I’ll be going up to Tapico at the end of this week and return mid August. It’ll be a ton of fun. In my stead, my Dad, the LunaPierCook will be posting my posts as I send them to him via snail mail, and some that I’ll pre-write. So good luck goes out to him.

When you pull a computer out of a box, it instantly becomes obsolete, or so it seems.  Why is this?  We are in an age where technology is advancing faster than we can adapt.  It is getting smaller, faster and just better, faster than  we can acquire and use it.  Whenever I am about to build someone a computer as a job, I always get the question “Is this going to last me for a few years.”  The base idea behind computers is still there.  To compute.  This idea has simply been built upon over the past few decades, and we are now at a point where we need a new computer about every three years to just keep up.  This will never stop.  When the Comodore 64 came out, I’m almost positive people thought that that was the best computers would ever get.  I have a book on game creation for the computer, and it states in there (it’s an older book) that 256 colors are all that a video game developer will ever need to make a good game.  Now computers show about 16.7 billion (correct me if I’m wrong) colors on the screen simultaneously.  So, even since 1999, technology has been moving at an exponential rate, and it will not slow down.  Ever.  So, how can we fight it?  Basically we can’t.  All that we can do is to make our technological purchases with the future in mind.  It may be more expensive now, but in the long run, it will be less expensive because you won’t be upgrading as much.  That’s about all the advice I can offer on this somewhat grim topic.

Today was the MonroeBlogs.com blogger get together at Dan’s House. Let me tell you, it was a lot of fun. Usually, I would rather be at home at a computer than out socializing, but I would not have missed this chance to meet a majority of the other bloggers and their families. It was great. It was kind of funny when no one knew eachother’s names, but when they said what blog they were from, people were like, “Oh now I know who you are, I like your blog”, and stuff like that. It was a great mish-mash of all sorts of people with a variety of interests coming together. Some for music, the environment, technology, and many many more backgrounds. I think that everyone really got to know everyone else. Over at “What is Normal“, Tonya tells about how my dad, Dave Liske (LunaPierCook), had a little mishap with Dan’s Deck, so check her post out about that. All in all, it was a great time, great food, and great people.

OK, so yesterday, I got two copies of the same game, and neither of them worked because of scratches and such. So, I’m going to go through some things that worked and some that didn’t. First thing first, a little anatomy of the CD. NONE of the data is stored on the plastic of the disc, or the part that gets scratched. All of the data is stored on an extremely thin piece of aluminum sandwiched between the plastic that gets scratched, and a piece of acrylic under the layer. If you scratch the bottom of a disc, it can still be technically used.  So, with that, what does a scratch do? A scratch simply screws with how the CD or DVD drive’s laser bounces off of the back of the label where the disc is. If the laser beam is reflected back at an improper angle, the drive can not read the disc. So, if you buffer out the scratches, it can then read the disc like usual. So, I tried a few things on test discs (discs that were obsolete that I never used, or were broken).

• Drywall Sandpaper. Yes, I tried drywall sandpaper. It smooths Drywall, why not a disc? Well, something about drywall being made of Gypsom and not Plastic may have something to do with it.
• Frying Pan. I thought that maybe if I heated up the plastic enough, the scratches would smooth over. All that I succeeded in doing was warping the test disc.
• Professional Scratch Remover. First off, this stuff is messy, and doesn’t work as well as most people think. It was crap. I didn’t like it, and I don’t suggest it unless as a last resort.
• Car Wax. I found a thing of Turtle Wax in the basement. It worked wonders on the test disc, and then I took it to the Halo 2 Disc that refused to work, and it worked perfectly. It takes a little elbow grease and a soft applicator cloth, otherwise, it will cause more scratches, but it worked the best. If you deal with a lot of scratched discs, I suggest a thing of Car Wax. Works wonders.

Well, these are the ways that I attempted to get scratches out of discs. I wouldn’t suggest the first two, but the last two are OK to use.

In the Past, I’ve talked about this “Linux” Thing. So, What is linux anyway, and what does it have to do with me? Well, in short, Linux is an alternative to Microsoft Windows, and it is FREE. You can do almost anything that you can do on Windows, with a Distrobution (Version) of Linux. So, How does it differ from Windows just for home and office use, and is it possible to use in the Home and Office? It really depends on what you are doing. First and foremost, Linux does not support a lot of games. You can download a copy of Doom for it, but you can’t go too far beyond that, but if you are setting up a game Server, then Linux is the system for you. Let’s look at some of the differences:

• The Login Screen:

You can see, that with this version of Linux (SuSE created by Novell), you do not have to push Ctrl + Alt +Del as with most Windows Versions. It still asks you for a password and username as is customary, but beyond, that, it is very simple.

• The Desktop. The desktop is your work environment, where you are put after you logon.
  

There are a few key differences between the above desktop environment (From Ubuntu Linux) and a Windows Environment. First, the “Start” Menu is at the top and is renamed the “Applications” menu. Also at the top, is some more menus like the “Places” And “System”. The System Menu is basically like the Control Panel, and the “Places” is like the “My Computer”. At the bottom, you will notice another bar. This is where your minimized programs are put, like the taskbar in Windows. If you can get over and learn these subtle differences, you should be OK in a Linux Environment.

• Open Office. Open Office is a free alternative to Microsoft Office. It includes everything for word processing, spreadsheets, databases, slideshow presentations, and even math formula setup. What’s even better, is that this Open Office Suite can save files, so that they can be opened from Microsoft Office, so if you’re using Linux and a colleague is using Windows, there isn’t a problem with file compatability.
  

As you can see, through the slightly blurry image, it looks very much the same as Microsoft Word, so people don’t have too many problems switching to the new Operating System.

That just about wraps it up, and if you do decide to try Linux out, I suggest you hop over to http://www.linux.org, and search for Live CD distrobutions. Live CDs do not install anything to your computer and they give the full desktop environment. I suggest Knoppix, or Ubuntu, though if you want to actually install it, I suggest SuSE or Red Hat.

Good Luck to all those who want to give this a go.

Today I have had a pretty bad day.  I first went to the nearest “Game Stop” with the intentions of trading in a few games, and purchasing a used copy of “Halo 2″.  I got to the store, made the trades and purchased the game, then I went out to the van to go back home.  I locked my keys in.  So, with no cell phone to call anyone or money to pay for a locksmith, I got smart.  I was able to break into the van using one of my shoelaces, my wallet, a yellow tube I found, and a stick.  I’m not going to go into any details, just in case someone wanted to use this information for malicious reasons, but after just an hour, I was on my way back home.  When I got home, the game didn’t work.  It was just too scratched, so I go back in my van to go back to the store, and when I got there, the lady behind the counter showed me all of the copies of Halo 2 she had in stock, and I took the best one, so I head back home.  It didn’t work either, so after driving about 80 miles (it is about 20 miles to the game store), I still don’t have a working copy of the game.  Very Depressing.