Teen Tech

Hello everyone. This blog entry is all about pipes. Yahoo! has recently released a service at pipes.yahoo.com which allows you to stream information like RSS feeds to one source. If you look in the right sidebar of this blog, you’ll see a “Family of Bloggers” block. This is created by making a pipe that gathers the five most recent posts from all of the Liske family’s blogs and puts them in one place, sorting them by date and time. It sounds daunting, but by using the Yahoo! service’s Drag-and-Drop interface, it’s VERY easy to do.
Here’s what the “Family of Bloggers” pipe “source” looks like:

Basically what’s being done here is, I gathered the RSS feeds from all of the blogs (Wordpress has the RSS feature built in), run the OUTPUT of the feeds to a “Union”, which joins them all together, then that runs to a sorter, which sorts them by date, then I cut it down to 5 entries only, then it’s output as a final feed. This is a relatively easy pipe to follow as it’s very linear. Using this, you can feed YouTube, Flickr, and Google and incorporate that in your site. Once you’re done, you can insert the final feed into your blog, MySpace, and whatnot.

As a final note, all you need to use pipes.yahoo.com is a Yahoo! ID, which is free.

Well,

I got a new job.  A tech-related job which is exactly what I was after.  It’s for http://www.supportspace.com doing on the fly online tech-support for random people.  My favorite part of the job is that there is such a variety of tech issues that people get online with.  One moment I could be fixing someone’s email and the next, a printer problem.  It’s great.  I like variety.

Ok,

So, I’m working on my stuff to get the rank of Eagle Scout.  That alone is hard enough.  Try adding in school, a business, and life in general and it becomes chaos extremely quickly.  That’s what I’ve been up against this past month or so.  That is why my blogging has slowed down dramatically.  I just can’t keep up with everything, so I’ve begun to throttle back everything that is not as important as the other stuff in comparison.  Unfortunately the blogging is one of those things.  I’m still here and will give updates on my progress, but I will not be able to blog as much as usual.  I will probably continue at a good pace after this month, but I’ll drop in every now and then between here and then, so wish me luck.

Aaron

I used to have this old LiveJournal blog that I blogged in for a while.  Well, today I went back to those old posts, and they surprised me.  I forgot about some of the stuff that I wrote about,  so the next few posts will be about my more insightful posts in 2005.

Title: Discipline

“Its not that no one has it (seemingly), but its that no one uses it in cooperation with common sense and self control.  There was recently a kid in my English class who was posing as another kid, so the other kid would not be marked absent.  Does this kid have disciple? Probably.  Common Sense and Self control?  Absolutely.  Did he use them together as a guide?  Definently Not.   Why would someone have all of these tools in life and not use them?  Granted there are those who are uneducated and don’t know right from wrong, but this and a majority of the others are not this case.  This is a human who takes what God gives them and throws it away.  I, at all times am not perfect.  In fact, about a month ago, I just walked out of class with another student while the teacher was doing something and was oblivious to all but what she was grading at one of the back tables.  At this time was I doing what I should have?  No I wasn’t.  There are a few instances like this where I will go out of character and do something irrational, though that is not often.  Thus here is my question of the day.  How do you define “out of character”  the person develops their own character according to what they have been taught.  How do we know what our own characters are?  How can one be truly sure?”

This post surprised me tonight when reading it.  I completely forgot about what had happened 2 years ago, and my line of thinking, though it is starting to come back.  This is just food for thought.  I don’t have anything to add to this post.  It just fits with the events in my life right now.

Well,

I’ve been busy with school and life in general, but I’ve been toying with a few ideas. Some, I’ve expressed on here before, while others are new. Firstly is my Online TV Show idea (IP-TV). Basically pre-record the episodes, then upload them so that they can be watched. My big inspiration came from a current IP-TV show Hak.5 (hak5.org). It’s awesome. I want to do something like that except target not only the seasoned computer user, but the beginner user. I’m thinking of calling it “The Teen Tech” and just use my blog title and slogan so that I don’t have to come up with anything new. That would cut down on some time. Second thing that I need to work on is a set. I plan on commandeering my dad’s garage (he doesn’t know yet, but he will once he reads this :D) . Then I design my set. I’ve got a basic backdrop design right now, and I may get it printed using my school’s wide-format printer this week or next. Somewhere in there. Here’s what I’ve come up with right now. Note, this is just a rough idea that could change.

When I print this, it will be 36″ x 26.5″, so it will be about the average size of a normal poster.  Then finally I need a camera.  After all of that is done, it’s all downhill from there.

So, I’m up at camp, and quite frankly, there is not ANY technology to report on up here. So, last week, I sprained my ankle. It was bad enough that the camp’s health officer wanted me to go to the hospital to get x-rays taken. It was a sprain and they put me in an air-cast. That was the highlight of my week. There is a new Scout Executive for Tall Pine Council, and he plainly does not trust anyone. He has increased all of our paperwork by about 300% because he wants us in business staff to account for absolutely everything. It Sucks. Other than those few bumps, camp has been great and I am going to continue for another three and a half weeks.

Thumb drives, memory sticks, whetever you want to call them, are cool little devices. They’re a far cry from the 1.44M floppy disks we used to store data on when Windows started becoming popular in the early-to-mid 1990s. My stepson John ordered a thumb drive last week, and is now in possession of his new 16G version. And to think Bill Gates once remarked he thought a home computer would never need more than 640k of memory …

With all the problems recently with memory devices being lost or stolen, what can you do? Similar devices contain onboard password protection, while others are now coming with built-in biometric protection (i.e., a fingerprint reader). Still, none of this will prevent the little beastie from disappearing either in your sock drawer or with the help of unscrupulous individuals.

Here’s something simple: Treat your thumb drive like a key. Keep it with your keys, wallet, cell phone, etc. Whatever kind of item you carry that you always know where it is, that’s how you should be thinking of your thumb drive. It’s pointless to even buy a thumb drive if you don’t intend to actively keep track of where the thing is. If you think for one moment you might forget where your thumb drive is located, hold off on buying one until you can hang onto it.

If you have to have portable memory and still don’t think you can keep track of it, a USB Memory Watch may be in order for you. $200 for a 2G version might be a little steep yet, but there are others out there. Options are available … you just need to be smart about it.

I kinda like the thumb drive that’s also a bottle opener. Of course, if the bottle cap’s stuck and you start banging on it with the thumb drive, the drive just might end up with amnesia …

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.

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.