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In: Web
With: 85 Comments

A few months ago, I noticed I was approaching my bandwidth limits on my hosting account. Switching hosting providers is a pain, so I decided to move some high-bandwidth graphics to Amazon S3, where the bandwidth is cheap and unlimited. All was well until I realized that Google was returning search results pointing to my bucket on s3.amazonaws.com instead of carltonbale.com. Luckily, AmazonAWS has a work-around. You can use your own domain name in an Amazon S3 bucket. Here are the instructions on how to do it, from beginning to end. Introductory Steps for new Amazon S3 Users: First of all, obviously, you need yourRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 4 Comments

I needed a new server case due to Antec P180 case becoming much to cramped. After reading many positive forums posts about the Cooler Master Stacker cases, I made my purchase. Here are my thoughts. To be clear, this is the older Stacker 810 case, not the newer Stacker 830 Evolution. I think the 810 offers many for features for a much lower price; I’m not sure why the 830 is even around. Th Stacker 810 is a great case if you have a bunch of drives and need a large, well cooled case. If you purchase 2 additional 4-in-3 modules, this case has 14Read More →

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In: Web
With: 31 Comments

I recently needed to share some open source files via BitTorrent and wanted to host them on my Amazon S3 account.  For those of you familiar with S3, here is the short-answer: add ?torrent to the end of the URL of a public-shared file to get the *.torrent file, so the link would be http://s3.amazonaws.com/your_bucket_name/your_file_name?torrent If you’re new to Amazon S3, read on for more info and detailed instructions. Why would you want to distribute a file using BitTorrent? I wanted to do this because, when sharing a file via a torrent, you use less of your Amazon S3 bandwidth and lower your monthly expense.Read More →

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In: Web
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I noticed a weird charge on my credit card from “Mnesvc Inc Seattle” on 9/1. I initially thought it was a fradulent charge, but it was for less than $2, so I was a little confused. After a little more research, I found that Mnesvc is really Amazon.com and this is how they are now billing their monthly Amazon Web Services, such as S3 backup. Why they made this change, I don’t know, but it probably signals a move to integrate TextPayMe in some fashion. I just wish they had provided me with a more clear warning of what to expect on my credit cardRead More →

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In: Tech
With: 1 Comment

After two years of use, it’s time to say farewell to my Palm Treo 650 and start looking for a new phone; this is my longterm wrap-up review. I’ve used a Palm OS device for the past 8 years. The OS is ancient and hasn’t received any significant updates in years, but even so, the Palm Treo line could be so much more they just put some effort into what the consider the status quo. Palm has a new executive chairman (Jonathan Rubinstein of iPod fame), and their new Treo 500 is the first significant step forward in years. Hopefully they will continue to makeRead More →

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In: Reviews
With: 5 Comments

As I stated in an earlier post, Google Reader is the best RSS Feed Reader on the Internet. However, it is not perfect. And the more I use it, the more potential for improvement I see. Here is my list of what I’d like to see changed with Google Reader: Lack of Different Default Views for Sites: Some websites (such as Digg.com) have hundreds of posts each day. For them, I’d like the default videw to be the List View, where it shows only the post title and the first 20 or so words from the entry. This is a much more space-efficient view andRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 0 Comments

I received a flyer in the mail yesterday from DirecTV. It was touting their newest MPEG-4 HD receivers or the 100 new HD channels they will be launching in the next couple of weeks. No, it was promoting features that will be available in a TiVo software update in early 2008! This is pretty surprising, first of all that they are releasing new features, and secondly that they once again care about TiVo customers, since they dropped TiVo as their DVR supplier many months ago. My best guess is that they know there are a lot of loyal TiVo users who are more loyal toRead More →

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In: Reviews
With: 80 Comments

I received my new Lenovo Thinkpad T61 and I’ve had a couple of days to play around with it. In summary, it is one awesome piece of hardware; this is the best laptop I’ve used. Unfortunately, it’s not perfect. Windows Vista looks beautiful, but it’s pretty slow and unreliable as compared to XP. Also, battery life is shorter than I expected (due to the power hungry nVidia graphics card and maybe due to Vista power management.) Here are the pros and cons: Pros: Keyboard: This keyboard is incredible; it has a great feel to it and the large, white letters on the black keys makeRead More →

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In: Tech

If you’re like me, you probably registered a few extra domain names over the years and never got a chance to do anything with them. They just sit there and you keep paying annual renewal fees. While renewing one such domain name, I noticed that GoDaddy.com now offers a service that they call Cash Parking.  I decided to give it a try to see if I could at least get these domain names to pay for their own registration fees. Looking at the example GoDoddy shows, it appeared that a domain would easily be able to pay for itself. With any luck, my domains shouldRead More →

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In: Home Theater
With: 0 Comments

Last night over at TiVoCommunity.com forum, TiVoPony announced that TiVoToGo will become available for the TiVo HD / TiVo Series 3 starting November 2007. (This was also announced at CEDIA, as was a new $200 Series 3 rebate.) This is the one feature I’ve been lusting after, in addition to all of the other Series 2 Stand Alone features that I currently have. Since I have a HR10-250 HD TiVo satellite receiver, many features such as these as well as networking, photo sharing, Home Media Engine, etc. are not available. So now I have to decide, do I stick with the DirecTV TiVo I haveRead More →