10. Start a video podcast

Video has been hot online for a few years now. Broadband has become more widely available and YouTube gave us a simple channel for distributing our videos. However, in the past year, a number of video cameras have been introduced that cater to a new generation of online content producers. Cheap cameras are available from Flip, Creative, and Kodak (among others) to fill the niche. These cameras are tiny, shoot decent quality video, and make transfer to online venues quick and easy.

9. Maintain your social networks

No, we aren’t talking about your Facebook and Myspace profile although there are certainly benefits to participating in those communities. We’re talking about maintaining connections with the people you actually know. You never know when you may find an opportunity to collaborate with a friend who has a unique skill or when you might need a reference for a job application or maybe you know someone in a high place who could get you a job if times get hard. Maintaining your existing relationships when you don’t necessarily need them is much easier than making new ones when you do need them.

8. Fully utilize your calendar

I’m a big fan of Google Calendar, but there are plenty of nice calendar apps out there–web-based and otherwise. Whichever calendar you use, you may not be getting out of it everything it can offer. Sure, the calendar is a no-brainer for tracking events like birthdays, meetings, appointments, and the like, but have you ever thought of using the calendar to remind you when that promotional APR on the new credit card expires? How about a reminder every six months to make an appointment with the dentist? Maybe a reminder for changing the filter in the A/C unit in your home. Dare I suggest a reminder for your wedding anniversary? You wouldn’t forget that now, would you?

7. Get rid of stuff

It’s 2009, and you’re a geek. Unlike some people, you understand that movies and music are data. They are no different from Word documents or your computer’s alert sounds. I’m betting you don’t have a burned CD lying around for each document you want to keep, but you very well may have a stack of DVDs and CDs ready to play at a moment’s notice. Rip those bad boys to a cheap internal hard drive and ditch the mountains of discs. They will be easier to organize and access, and you’ll appreciate recovering that space they were taking up.

6. Who needs paper?

In keeping with the theme of getting rid of unneeded stuff, most paper records can be digitized and the original documents trashed. All you need is a scanner and a little free hard disk space and you’re ready to go. If you really want to do it in style, consider a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner which will feed multi-page documents, save as PDF, and OCR (That’s optical character recognition. It makes the text of your documents searchable!) your documents with the press of a button. It makes things much easier.

5. Setup a home server

So, now all your video, audio, and paper records have been digitized. It would be nice to have a centralized location to store all this data. You can use a spare computer you have lying around as a server to create a central point for storage and access of all your files! If you go with Linux, you can expect to do a bit more tweaking, but you can get away with a bit less in terms of hardware. I retired my old gaming PC into service as a home server/media center. It is connected to my TV and receiver so that I can fully enjoy all my media. I have a couple of 500GB hard drives in it to store everything. They are RAIDed so that I always have my data if one of the drives goes bad. If you’re really serious about preserving your data, there are several off-site backup solutions that give you peace-of-mind for a price.

4. Keep up-to-date backups

Speaking of backups, here we have the nerd equivalent of the “lose weight” New Year’s resolution: that thing that everyone knows they should be doing yet no one does or wants to do. The thing about backups is that they don’t pay off unless something goes wrong. You gain nothing from having one if everything is running smoothly which makes them that much more difficult to do because you can only perform them when everything is running smoothly. Don’t be that guy who has to mail off his hard drive and pay hundreds of dollars to have mission-critical data recovered the next time disaster strikes. Try one of the aforementioned off-site backup services or just buy a cheap USB hard drive and copy your entire hard disk over to it every couple of weeks or so. You’ll be glad you did.

3. Cut the cord and ditch your landline phone

It’s nothing new to cancel your landline and use the cell phone exclusively. Nearly 16% of Americans have taken this step already. If you’re like me, there may be some reason compelling you to hang on to the old standby. If that’s the case, you may be able to retain key functionality while saving loads of dough with a Skype subscription. Skype is an excellent VOIP service that works through your computer. I was able to cancel my already-cheaper-than-traditional-phone-service VOIP line which was $25 per month in favor of a year’s subscription to both SkypeIn and SkypeOut which gives us inbound and outbound calling for only $60 for the entire year! And if you really don’t want to have to use the computer as your phone, you can always pick up a standalone Skype handset.

2. Be more active on the social web

This may seem frivolous to some, but you’d be surprised at the value you can glean from seeing what everyone is raving about on the web. Certainly, some communities have more to offer than others, but “crowdsourcing” is an awesome way to find cool stuff online more efficiently. Take a social news site like digg or reddit: you have a group of net addicts surfing millions of web sites, finding the best content, and putting it all in one place. Then you have those same users collectively voting on the content which should be seen most of all. The content that gets the most votes is what you see. It’s a win-win for everyone involved. Just don’t forget to give back by participating.

And the number one New Year’s resolution for the geek masses:

1. Make awesome things and put them online

Human beings need a creative outlet. The feeling of making something that others can enjoy or derive some sort of value from is without compare. Everyone can contribute something. If you are a professional geek, take what you do as your job and apply it to your own pet project. Developers- make a web app on your own time that fills a need you have (most likely, others have that need too). Writers- write an awesome story or a how-to article and post it on your blog. Artists- put up some of your work online for free. Troubleshooters- hang out in the forums for some software you like a lend a helping hand occasionally. There is no one who cannot contribute something of value to the fantastic ecosystem of knowledge we call the Internet.

Are there any of these items you would like me to elaborate on further? If so, hit me up in the comments or @raddevon on twitter. I love hearing from you!

Image used under Creative Commons license. By Mr Magoo ICU @ Flickr

Google Reader is a fantastic app. It is the perfect way to wrangle all those cool web sites your following into one easy location. I am able to take in far more information much more quickly and efficiently than I could by visiting each individual site. Google Reader also offers a sharing feature that allows user to easily broadcast their favorite items to other Reader users in their Gmail contacts list. Recently, Google added the ability to provide notes making the sharing even more robust. However, I now find myself re-sharing friends items with replies to their notes or my own notes or even e-mailing them a story they originally shared to give my two cents. As is the way of the web, there is a better way to carry on a conversation surrounding web content… and you don’t even have to ditch Google Reader to get there!

Read more »

I don’t have a lot of music in iTunes, but a lot of the music I have is not the easiest to automate lyrics downloads. There are a number of one-step automated solutions, but unless your collection is limited to Justin Timberlake, The Beatles, and Madonna, you may have trouble getting lyrics for all your songs. Even this method is imperfect, but it finds the most of anything I have tried.

Read more »

I purchased a Mini Inspiron from a seller on eBay. It had never been opened. He called them to transfer the warranty to me and was told it would take 10-15 business days. Naturally, the notebook turned out to be defective from the box. It does not charge when connected to a power outlet. The charge cable has some play left and right when it is connected so I suspect the receptacle is not properly attached to the motherboard. I called Dell for support. They first suggested that there may be a BIOS update that will fix the problem. However, they could not even give me the link to download the update because the warranty had not yet been transferred to my name. I called back to check the status of the transfer but they cannot do this. I have heard from two different reps that I can “one-ly” (I assume they mean “only”) transfer the warranty online. Last night I heard from a different rep that they can transfer the warranty immediately if they have the first and last name to which the computer is currently registered. I must call them up to provide this in spite of the fact that the original owner has already initiated a transfer of ownership and, in doing so, given them his name, my name, address, phone number, e-mail address, and whether or not I’m circumcised. It seems obvious to me that these are merely arbitrary barriers so that Dell will have a convenient way to evade having to make good on their warranty. The lessons learned:

1. Do not buy from Dell. Their products are tested so poorly they may come to you bad right out of the box.
2. Buy a Mac. Their support staff speaks English as their first language. I have no problem with anyone no matter where they are from, but taking people and teaching them enough English to troubleshoot is an unnecessary barrier between the customer and a solution. Troubleshooting is a process that is difficult enough already. I also have problems with companies that run a business in the United States to get our money while shipping as much work as possible overseas to save on labor costs. It exploits Americans and those people who are left doing the jobs for practically nothing.
3. Having a store nearby (as Apple does) is a fantastic tool in getting issue resolution. It’s easy for a Dell rep halfway across the globe to hang up on me because I don’t have the first name of the person who originally purchased the PC from them. It’s not so easy for my physical presence in a retail outlet to be ignored.
4. You get what you pay for.

Happy computer shopping!

Here’s a novel message: Don’t vote! The consensus around election time always seems to be that everyone should vote no matter what. It’s your right as a citizen! It’s what keeps the wheels of democracy turning! Everyone should have a say. I’m here to say that’s all bullshit.

If you know who you want to vote for and why, then you should certainly vote. However, this leaves out a huge percentage of the people who will be voting this time around and choosing people based on party affiliation, skin color, or how they look in a bikini. If you are one of these people, the country would hope that you would stay home! Democracy is government by the people, but there is no value in this principal if the people are uninformed about the issues. If people are not educated to understand the implications of casting their votes for one or another candidate, everything good about the system is undermined. There is no value in a popularity contest to decide the presidency, no value in voting your pocketbook, no value in voting your skin color or the name you like or who is a better speaker or any of that. None of those things will determine where we will be in four or eight years.

So, I speak to those of you who don’t know what the fuck is going on right now. If you plan to vote for who your parents are voting for (for only that reason), if you plan to vote straight down the line for the party you prefer (without justification), or if you plan to vote based on the names of the candidates, do the world a favor: stay home and watch soap operas!

Unfortunately, the burden shouldn’t fall entirely on the voter. People must continue to live their lives in spite of the coming elections. The information we need to inform ourselves about the issues should be readily available. The presidential candidates are doing a much better job than they ever have (thanks in large part to the Internet) of getting out the information about their stances on the issues. There are also lots of lies coming from all sides of the debate. We are fortunate to have access to resources like factcheck.org to help sort those out. However, it seems that local politics (at least in my part of the country) thrive on as little information as possible getting out. It is very difficult to find pertinent information on local politicians. Local governments should take responsibility for making this type of information more easily accessible.

To get you started on the right foot, I would like to let everyone know that John McCain drowns puppies for fun on the weekends. He also enjoys burning down orphanages. Those are, of course, only the worst things about McCain. For the most part, he likes to just relax and “hang out with friends” on the grounds of his home, Castle Greyskull Snake Mountain.

Ever since the beginning of the cold war, we have cultivated an irrational fear of socialism that defies all logic while at the same time maintaining some socialism deeply ingrained in our society. It’s as though we can choose the socialism we like as long as we never acknowledge that it is socialism. In the eyes of most Americans, socialism is not just un-American—it is the anti-America. A truly balanced view would recognize that there are probably some aspects of our society that are privately controlled that would benefit from socialism, and, conversely, there are some aspects of society that are socialized that should be privatized.

Hit the link to see the rest… Read more »

I’m sorry I have neglected you so over the past several weeks. I am beginning to work on a number of exciting projects which will be detailed in this post. First, I am working on my first ever professional design job. When the job is completed, I plan to post a link to it here. Second, I am trying to learn Django as it will facilitate the next two projects I will describe. Third, I will be developing and designing a blog which will review audio and video podcasts. My final and most ambitious project is a site I have mentioned here before. Wheresitmade.org (my ethical consumerism social site) has struggled in the past with the limitations of various CMSs. I believe with Django I will finally be able to give it life as I have envisioned.

If you are interested in collaborating with me, drop me a line via e-mail or in the comments of this post.

This is one of the most profound quotes I have ever heard and describes my views perfectly.

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/108/252255239_534d83ea92.jpg

We have already established that waterboarding is not a torture technique, and Karl Rove refuses to testify. What are we waiting for?

I just organized all my iPhone apps into a number of categories with a screen for each:
The first page is for utilities and commonly used apps. The second is for games. Third we have apps for finding places (Currently only Yelp and YPMobile.). Fourth is entertainment apps: Pandora, last.fm, Shazam, and YouTube. The fifth page contains social apps. Finally, the ghetto–apps which cannot be deleted but that I can’t imagine using.

First post from the WordPress app!