Category: News

I’ll be writing a bit more for Gadgetwise, mostly about travel tech but also about bags, apps, and gear related to road warriorship. Requests? Recommendations? Drop me a note.

Wow. That was fast. Looks like we’re expecting a July release on this puppy. It’s available for pre-order here, so please give us a little bit of muscle and help us move this thing!

Product Page

икони

I wrote a book in 2004 about hackers, spammers, and other nerds and I thought I’d like to share it with the world. It’s currently available on Amazon and B&N and is $9.99 for the print edition and an inexplicable $9.49 in the Kindle edition. It is apparently not available for the Nook.

The book is 7 years old and is nearly out of print. It is about spammers, hackers, and viruses and I wrote it for a general audience like my dad who may or may not be all that technically savvy. It’s not a How-To as much as an exploration of the personalities in hacking.

According to Bookscan I sold 0 copies in the past few months and rather than allow it to molder, I’ve decided to give it away, with some caveats.

MANDATORY STEP: Let me know you downloaded it. Email me at john @ bigwidelogic.com or tweet me at @johnbiggs

OPTIONAL STEPS:
1. Read it. It was pretty good, I was just starting out as a writer, and I thought some of it was fun/funny.
2. Buy it if you liked it. Or at least buy a copy for someone who you think will like it. Heck, even buy a paper copy. You can also buy my current book, Blogger’s Boot Camp.

3. Pass it around and tell others about it.

You guys are smart enough to know that nothing is free. It took me a two years to write this and it took Apress many resources to publish it. Now, however, it’s run its natural life and I’d like to perform this experiment to see how many copies will circulate in order to assess the feasibility of releasing books like this in the future. The publishing industry is changing before our very eyes and I’m worried many of us will be left behind if we don’t change with it.

Anyways, enjoy. Let me know if you want more formats.

EPub Version
Mobi Version

My friends, I am the GADGET DAD!

Charlie White and I are putting the final touches on a book about blogging for Focal Press. Why? Because we’re bloggers, that’s why. Watch this space.

I’ve been doing some searches for OS X tracking apps in case of theft and I came up with the most popular, an app called Adeona. Sadly, it’s been down since 2009 and the status hasn’t changed so I’m using the Prey Project, which seems far superior. The app runs every 20 minutes and keeps an eye on everything including your webcam, running programs, and nearby hotspots. Once it’s set as missing, it shuts the laptop down and starts reporting its location. Very cool stuff.

I still love VisualHub for the Mac and I just lost my copy when I reinstalled OS X on a clean disk. My attempts to find other transcoders were sadmaking so I decided to mirror the software here for you.

You can download a copy here for as long as it lasts.

UPDATE – Scratch that. Try Media Converter. It’s free, open source, and still supported.

Go into Terminal and type:
defaults write com.apple.screencapture location "~/Path/To/New/Location/"

killall SystemUIServer

Change the path, obviously. I always forget this so maybe you and I both will be helped by it.

This came from a nice lady who needs to find better friends. She read this article and then sent me this note:

Hello,

I just read your article “Storing computer data in the ‘cloud’. Here’s a naive question: When you say that it’s a celestial hard drive, a storage medium that exists solely in the electronic ether, do you mean that the information is just stored in the air and not in anything that one could touch or feel?

Thanks.

Lynne

I wrote:

oh wow. No, not at all. It’s stored on hard drives. Although I’d love to see whatever you’re thinking about.

JB

She wrote back:

Hi John,
Thanks for your prompt response. A friend who is much more tech savvy than I am said that our data was just electrical waves and was stored in the atmosphere and was somewhat like radio waves, etc. I was skeptical but when I read your article and you mentioned “electronic ether” I wondered if she was right. That’s how some of those in their 70’s interpret articles when they are much beyond our scope. Thanks for the clarification. I’ll tell her that the info is not stored in the vapor of the clouds in the sky.
Lynne
(A senior citizen. Some places consider anyone over 55 a senior but I’m 21 years past that!)

The Logitech K800 illuminated keyboard is pretty cool but it has a weird Alt/Windows key behavior that is impervious to changes in the standard Keyboard preferences pane. I downloaded DoubleCommand to simply swap the keys more permanently and it’s been working fine.

Being that I’m a clever girl and decided I liked the “feel” of the Windows key better than the flat feel of the Alt key, I swapped those physically on the keyboard.