The T3sk3y Defenestrator

Sorry for the lack of updates this week.. it has been pretty slow as far as cool stuff happening. In lieu of that, I decided to share my ‘daily list’ – my list of sites that I visit on a daily basis to keep track of what is going on. It’s a fairly long list, but many sites are visited for about 10 seconds.

General News

• Minneapolis Star/Tribune – Yeah, it’s somewhere just right of Pravda – but it’s local.

Nerd News, Gadgets, and Gizmos

• Slashdot – General nerd news and commentary
• Lifehacker – Don’t live to geek – geek to live!
• Engadget – Lots of new gadgets
• Gizmodo – The gadgets weblog
• Hackaday – Modify your toys!
• MakeZine Blog – Extreme DIY

Hobbies

• rec.games.pinball – Usenet pinball discussion
• Magic: The Gathering – The official page
• The Mana Drain – Magic Type 1 forum discussion
• Digital Photography Review – Digital Photography forums

“Treasure” hunting

• Ben’s Bargains – Where ghetto dogs come for the lowdown on deals.
• Woot! – One deal a day
• Steep and Cheap – One deal per day on ski gear
• Ebay – Pinball parts, electronics, Magic cards, whatever!

Blogs of friends

• Andersonfam.org – Erik Anderson’s Blog
• 28thavenue.net – Erik Mitchell’s Blog
• Jayber.org – Mark Benson’s Blog

Other Entertaining Crap

• Compfused – Entertaining videos and clips

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With the holidays approaching, now is a great time for a quick reminder on how to make sure that all of your holiday pictures turn out as you want them to. Kodak published a quick guide listing their top 10 tips for great pictures. All are non-technical and are ultra-easy. Even with a cheapo camera, the quality of your pictures will go up a LOT by following their lead. For example:

#5: Move it from the middle

Center-stage is a great place for a performer to be. However, the middle of your picture is not the best place for your subject. Bring your picture to life by simply moving your subject away from the middle of your picture. Start by playing tick-tack-toe with subject position. Imagine a tick-tack-toe grid in your viewfinder. Now place your important subject at one of the intersections of lines.

Boring.

Better!

You’ll need to lock the focus if you have an auto-focus camera because most of them focus on whatever is in the center of the viewfinder.

Kodak’s tips can be found at: Top 10 Tips for Great Pictures

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I recently stumbled across the most interesting and useful site, Lifehacker. Lifehacker calls itself the “Productivity and Software Guide”. Their own description states:

Computers make us more productive. Yeah, right. Lifehacker recommends the downloads, web sites and shortcuts that actually save time. Don’t live to geek; geek to live.

Wow. As an arch-geek, the last statement really hits home: Don’t live to geek; geek to live..

This is very, very close to how things actually work at the T3sk3y compound.. there are so many things that can be simplified, optimized, enhanced, or just made cooler through a little hacking. Lifehacker lists a bunch of those things. Heather is starting to understand – I think. She did once exclaim (in joking frustration) “Do we have to hack EVERYTHING?

You’ll probably see a few re-links from there in the future. There’s so much good stuff! Check ‘em out at lifehacker.com

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What’s a rootkit?

It’s a chunk of spyware that embeds itself so tightly to your Windows kernel that virus & spyware scanners don’t know it’s there. You can’t see it, you can’t delete it. In short, it’s not there.

Well, except for the fact that it does some really unfriendly things like:

• Open ports so that your computer can be controlled remotely
• Turn your machine into a Spam zombie
• Suck up big gobs of your processing power, making your computer crawl
• Pop up random windows
• Insert random nasty behavior here

As you can guess by now, I was the recipient of the rootkit called “HackerDefender” on my home machine- which is a pretty nasty one. Fortunately, I could track down exactly when it happened. This allowed me to do a system rollback on Windows to the point in time before it took place (insert Time Warp jingle here).

All tolled – no damage was done, but it could have. I caught it and snuffed it before anything bad happened. It just got me thinking – knowing what I know and being as careful as I am, I still got it. And, if it was that much of a battle for me, the average computer user is SCREWED. This would have been a full re-install for most people.. if they would have even known why their computer was “getting slower”.

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I recieved the most unbelievable customer service today from a little company named StudBuddy. StudBuddy makes a line of really clever metal shelves that mount between your exposed studs. I originally found them while glancing through the new product section of Workbench (or some other handyman magazine).

I ordered a set for my workshop, but goofed and ordered the set for 16″ studs instead of 24″ studs. Yes, I didn’t realize how big of studs I had. I had full intentions of exchanging them, but forgot for several months. Yesterday, I e-mailed Harry Wood at StudBuddy (yes, really – I can’t make this stuff up) and asked about exchanging them. Here was the reply:

Mark,

This shouldn’t be a problem, give me another day to check inventory on the 24″ items to make sure I can pull off a swap. If I can I will send you the items you need and ask that you find a friend and give them the 16″ items as a Christmas gift from you and Stud Buddy, we will even pay for the freight. I hope this will work for you, we at Stud Buddy Products wish you and your family a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Kindest Regards,

Harry A. Wood
Customer Service
Stud Buddy Products Inc.

I was absolutely stunned – they were telling me they’d just *give* me another set (keep in mind that it’s a $100+ set that I have) and that they wouldn’t charge me shipping! Not totally believing it, I wrote back Harry to clarify. His response:

Mark,

You got it right just do us a favor tell everyone about our customer service at Stud Buddy Products and wish them a Merry Christmas and a Happy New year.

Kindest Regards,

Harry A. Wood
Customer Service
Stud Buddy Products Inc.

So – I can’t give a stronger testimonial. If you have any need to fix up your unfinished space.. give ‘em a call.

I still think they are on the top 10 list of “Things that look bad in your browser history but aren’t”

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