HOWTO: Repurpose shipping foam as a cable manager
February 5th, 2010
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Today like clockwork my notebook’s power cord fell into that void between my desk and the dresser as soon as I unplugged it. Swearing like a sea-captain and scratching my arm while surely looking like an idiot performing contortions to get that darned cable back I thought to myself: There must be a better way. After looking around the house for something slightly more elegant than duct tape to keep cables in place, I came across some shipping foam in the trash can.
When my ‘04 Corolla’s odometer hit 70,000 miles it was time to get new front brake pads, so I ventured over to brake masters and had them replaced. $50 dollars later I was back on the road driving to and fro various consulting gigs. A few thousand miles later though, I noticed some vibration when applying the brakes. When I went back to brake masters to have them re-checked, this is what I learned: 
I rely on Gmail for all my email needs because it has great spam filters and an uncluttered functional interface. Last week I had some time to organize my Gmail and now finding, noticing and keeping track of email messages is even easier. I use labels as pseudo email folders, filters to automatically categorize messages, archiving control clutter and some Labs features to make my Gmail more useful than ever. 
I know that the mac works differently (so everyone keeps telling me!) but I’m sorry, that’s not a valid solution to a host of real annoyances. It’s true that I’m a Windows user and that I’ve got Windows habits (think delete key), but listing folders sorted separately from files in a window just seems something I ought to be able to do. Not in OSX though…unless you do this: 
My home theater has been built around a home-made DVR since 2003. It started off on a used Dell Optiplex GX150 and moved to a bigger case with more hard drives and a P4 in 2006. It worked great for nearly 3 years, but in December I earned some extra cash and upgraded my DVR to a lean mean HD recording machine. Now my HTPC is finally up to par with the LCD TV in my living room. Now it plays my favorite shows in 5.1 surround, free of commercials, and in all their high def glory. Here’s the step by step guide covering my upgrade: 
There are a lot of Windows Apps I miss on my MacBook Pro. One of them is an awesome free swiss army knife of image manipulation tools called 
This weekend I decided to make my 
My parents gave me a MacBook for Christmas, so in an effort to “learn something new” in 2010 I’ve gotten accustomed to a multi-touch track-pad, command + c/v for copy & pasta and Safari for browsing the web. One thing I couldn’t give up though, was my Firefox with 
I’m still running the Windows 7 x64 Release Candidate and so I expect and deal with the occasional operating system bug here and there, but this was more of a Visual Studio 2008 problem. I VS 2008 Professional (after getting it free from school) a couple of weeks ago and needed to code a console app in C++. Upon choosing the new project option I was left with no new project and just a tiny message at the bottom of the VS status bar stating “Project Creation Failed…” Here’s how I fixed it.