This is the first of a series of posts about the Excessive Use of Technology to Make Simple Tasks Difficult (or “EUTOMASITAD”, for short).

Like most people, I watch television programs and movies on my TV, not on my computer screen. As with many things in life, however, I’ve learned to make this otherwise simple activity quite complicated through EUTOMASITAD (Excessive Use of Technology to Make Simple Tasks Difficult). [Read more →]

Sometime near the beginning of summer I bought a little radio-controlled plane from Air Hogs called the Aero Ace. I even wrote up a little post about it here. My opinion of the plane hasn’t really changed since then – it’s fun, it’s easy to fly, and it’s the right price: $20 on sale, $30 normally, and $40 at WalMart (I have no idea why). [Read more →]

Networked computers are great. You can share files across a network. You can print documents across a network. You can play games across a network. You can do just about everything across a network, assuming, of course, that the network is your own and is completely under your control.But what if you involve a network that’s not under your control? How easy is it to copy a file from your school or work computer to your home computer, especially if that school or work computer is behind a firewall and your home computer is behind a NAT’d router? Not very. [Read more →]

Oh, the drudgery of performing system backups. We all know that we’re supposed to do it and that we’ll someday get burned if we don’t, but many of us still don’t take the time to perform full system backups regularly. Even if you are diligent enough to create a full system backup, restoring an OS that’s gone belly-up is often time-consuming and tedious. But if you’re running your OS as a virtual machine within VMWare performing a full system backup is as easy as copying off a small handful of files and recovering from a failure is as easy as copying them back. (If you’re not familiar with VMWare you get take a look at my earlier post about what VMWare is and how it works.) [Read more →]

Every Toyota Prius that rolls off of the assembly line has the programming built into the computer to enable “EV” (“electric vehicle”) Mode. EV Mode tells the computer controlling the Prius to turn off the gas engine and use only its batteries until one of the following things happens:

• the batteries get too discharged (down to 2 bars on the Prius’ Energy display)
• the vehicle speed hits 35mph
• the driver asks for a lot of power (climbing a steep hill or getting onto the highway)
• the drive disengages EV Mode

When one of the above conditions is met the gasoline engine will turn on and the Prius will be out of EV Mode and back into its normal driving mode.

Because of reasons no one quite understands the Prius that you buy in the United States is missing the button on the dashboard to initiate EV Mode (but we all know that it’s somehow because of lawyers, right?). The computer in the US-market Prius knows what EV mode is and what it’s supposed to do when it’s in EV Mode — it’s just that there’s no way to tell the it that you want it to engage EV Mode. Unless you hack your Prius a bit. [Read more →]

Imagine being able to watch television programs that you’ve recorded on your home PC from a hotel room a thousand miles away — on your cell phone. Or being able to watch one of your DVDs that you’ve backed up at home during a 2 hour layover at the airport using your PDA. Or being able to listen to the music you’ve ripped at home from your friend’s house. Or send a link in an e-mail to your parents so they can watch a slideshow of your latest pictures. That’s Orb. [Read more →]

I’ve had a number of radio-controlled planes from AirHogs over the years and, while I guess what they did could technically be called “flying”, they weren’t very controllable and they weren’t a whole lot of fun.

My first AirHogs plane was the Titan. This beast used 4 ducted fans to generate a huge amount of thrust — almost enough to overcome its massive weight and actually allow the plane to fly. I finally got it into the air with a bit of — shall we say — “aeronautic improvisation” (you know, like taping soda straws to the trailing edges of the wings to act as flaps). By the time I made enough tweaks to allow the plane to fly the batteries decided that they didn’t want to hold a charge anymore. It’s blue, it’s too heavy, and it doesn’t fly, so I named it the “Blue Spruce Goose”.

My next AirHogs plane was the SkyWinder. This plane flew, but it was too fast through the air and too tough to control to fly in small areas (like my back yard). Just about the time I was getting some control over the SkyWinder one of the two propellers went flying off during a flight and the SkyWinder came crashing down and broke one of it’s wings. I pieced it back together but it’s sitting down in my basement keeping the Blue Spruce Goose company.

You can understand, then, why I was a bit skeptical when I saw the Air Hogs Aero Ace. Here was a tiny little plane with a tiny little price ($30, but you can find them on sale for $20). I took a chance and have been having a blast ever since. [Read more →]

There are a number of ways to securely gain access to your computer from a remote location. You can purchase licenses for remote control software like GoToMyPC or PCAnywhere. You can use some flavor of VNC such as RealVNC, TightVNC, UltraVNC, etc. (the free VNC servers aren’t secure by default, but there are ways to use SSH to make them secure). Or you can use LogMeIn. [Read more →]