One of the most frustrating things about stargazing (aside from the cold) is not being able to actually find the objects you’d like to look at. Picking an object of interest while you look at a map of the heavens in your nice, warm house is very different than finding that object when you’re freezing to death out in your back yard, trying to figure out why the stars above your house look so different than they do on your star atlas.

If you have a laptop computer and a desire to simplify your stargazing you can make your experience a lot easier with Stellarium. How? Let’s take a look.

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There are shows on television which are entertaining and there are shows on television which are educational. Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you can find a show that’s both entertaining and educational at the same time. MythBusters is one of those shows.

After watching the show for a few years I’ve come to realize that MythBusters does more than just entertain and educate — it also has taught me some valuable lessons about life itself. Here, then, are the things I’ve learned about life by watching MythBusters:

1. If you want to make your life more exciting you should befriend a retired FBI agent.
2. Everyone on MythBusters has a chance to get promoted. Even Buster, through years of hard work and self-sacrifice without complaint, was somehow able to rise through the ranks from a lowly “crash test dummy” to a much more impressive-sounding “human analogue”.
3. Never trust Adam to give you the odds on anything.
4. The easiest way to sell an old car that nobody wants is to invent a myth about it and wait for the show to buy it from you.
5. The MythBusters can control anything using a remote control except, ironically, a remote-controlled helicopter, which they simply crash.
6. Grant really doesn’t want anyone to take his calculator.
7. If you can’t reproduce the myth try to reproduce the results. If you can’t reproduce the results just blow something up.
8. The word “MythTern” really means “menial task person”.
9. If you ever lose control of your car try to make sure that it doesn’t plunge into a raging river — instead, in order to improve your odds of survival, lose control of it in such a way that it gets gently lowered into a shallow swimming pool.
10. Even the most mundane tasks can become more exciting if you say the magic words “In 3… 2… 1…” before you do them.

In a previous post I talked about the benefits of OpenID-enabled web sites. In a nutshell, OpenID promises to let you use the same logon credentials across multiple sites rather than having to create a new username and password at each site you visit. If you manage your own web site (or even a page on a web site) you can use your site’s URL instead of your OpenID provider’s URL. That means that you can log to OpenID-enabled sites using a “friendly” OpenID name (something like “techwandering.com”) instead of your OpenID provider’s name (like “techwandering.myopenid.com”). Here’s how. [Read more →]

Here’s an easy way to make your web surfing faster and safer at the same time. It doesn’t require you to install any software on your PC and it’s compatible with just about any version of any operating system. It’s called OpenDNS. Let’s see how it works. [Read more →]

I’ve had a DVR (“digital video recorder”, such as TiVo) in my home theater for years. My DVR allows me to schedule TV recordings and watch them at a later time, freeing me from being a slave to the TV network broadcast schedules. In fact, I’ve become so accustomed to this way of watching television that I don’t even really know when the shows I watch are actually broadcast. When I sit down to watch my television shows I’m shown a list of recordings which my DVR has made for me and I choose a show to watch from that list.

Now what if I told you that there was a way to do that same thing with much of the video which you watch on the internet? There is, and its name is Miro. Let’s take a closer look. [Read more →]

One of the annoying things about surfing around the web is that just about every website you visit wants you to create an account for yourself. To make matters worse, all of those accounts want to know a lot of the same information about you: your name, your address, your phone number, etc. Not only is typing that information over and over again more likely to result in a typo, it’s also tedious.

Most websites also make you choose a username and password so that you can log in when you visit the site. If you’re like 99% of the other web surfers out there you make your username and password the same for all of the sites you visit. From a security perspective that’s a dangerous thing to do since it means that if any of those sites get compromised it may be possible for a hacker to learn your username and password and log into any of those other sites while masquerading as you.

Wouldn’t it be great if you could create your account information once and have that information shared across all of the websites you visit? How about logging into your account once and not having to log in again as you surf around the web? OpenID is an open-source technology which may someday be able to turn that promise into a reality. How does it work? Let’s check it out. [Read more →]

We’ve heard for years that web-based applications accessed through a web browser (think the Writely word processor and GMail mail service) are soon going to replace applications installed on your PC (think Microsoft Word and Outlook). These thin-client applications hold the promise of allowing us to run complex applications on any operating system using any browser without having to install any bloated software.

Well, that’s the theory, at least. In reality things are a little more complicated. Many of these online applications require specialized plug-ins which means that they’ll only work on specific browsers running on specific operating systems. And, although these online applications are becoming more robust, they still have nowhere near the same feature sets that their thick-client cousins have. Still, though, those problems aren’t insurmountable. The plug-in problem is being addressed as more and more applications incorporate AJAX, and most of us use only the basic features of those applications, anyway.

Perhaps the biggest hurdle with using online applications is that, by definition, they’re only available when you’re online. Want to do some work during your 3-hour flight to Cleveland? You’re not online when you’re flying so you have to use the applications installed on your laptop instead of their web-based equivalents.

But what if there was a technology that would let you use your web-based applications when you weren’t connected to the web? There is, and it’s called Google Gears. Let’s take a look at what it is, what it isn’t, how it works, and what it can do. [Read more →]

Once in a while I wander across a PC utility that really saves me a lot of work. Recently I discovered a piece of software called “What’s Running?” which I now use instead of the collection of PC monitoring tools that I had been using. How’s it possible to replace an entire suite of tools with a single piece of free software? Let’s take a look.
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