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Since my family and I just moved to a new state for this new job, we took the opportunity to look at different options for home phone. Some friends had switched to ooma and liked it, and after a little research, we decided to go with ooma too, specifically the ooma telo . We got it at best buy on sale for about $225, and that's all you pay. Apparently we'll eventually have to start paying about $11 a year for some sort of telecom tax. Other than that, nothing. You might be able to find the telo for cheaper on ebay or something too, I didn't look into that too much. I connect my cable modem directly to the telo, and then the telo to my router, and then my computers to my router. You plug your normal land-line phone into telo too, and then it works like it always has. With everything going through the telo, it does QOS to make sure your voice traffic always has enough bandwidth, and it can do port forwarding so web and ssh requests still get to my linux machine. It...

My employer just supplied me with a MacBook Pro running OS X Version 10.6.1 (is that a little redundant?). For a long time I have eyed macs with wary suspicion, but with a lot of curiosity too. If Microsoft is evil, as some like to say, because it locks customers in to its proprietary software, Apple must be at least twice as evil. They lock customers in to their software *and* hardware! I kind of like the new laptop, though. Mechanically, it's awesome. The aluminum body feels nice and solid. The lid doesn't latch when it closes, it just kind of (magnetically?) holds to the body. The buttons and USB slots and everything are also very nicely done. The display is one of those glossy ones for "brighter colors" and I hate the glare. The user interface has me all confused with buttons and menus in places I'm not used to. It has this fancy new mouse trackpad that is huge and it lest you do multi-finger stuff kind of like an iPhone (which I don't have). T...

A friend recently purchased an ASUS WL-500g Premium V2 wifi router and installed PacketProtector on it for his mom. She wanted some filtering for the household internet connection, and my buddy thought that this would be a nice self-contained, stand-alone, hard-to-bypass solution for her and the fam. So far it seems to be all of that. I got to thinking about my own curious boys and wondering if I might want some DansGuardian filtering on my own internet connection. I've been pretty anti web filter ever since I discovered the web, mainly because I've been successful at avoiding and ignoring bad stuff on my own, and have only been annoyed by filters that always seem to block useful pages right when you need them. I've realized lately, though, that without even thinking about it very much, I really don't let my kids online at all. I think it's because I know that they won't be able to avoid all the bad stuff, and I fear they won't ignore and quickly m...

If you receive a document as an attachment, open that attachment, start editing, and then click save, guess what happens? You work is quietly saved in a file in /tmp . Guess what happens when you try to find that important file later? Sure, it shows up in the menu under File->Recent Documents, but when you select it, it has likely been deleted, as is the fate of most files left in /tmp for too long. Wonderful. This happened to my brother-in-law (a non-geek who has successfully been using Linux for a couple years now, well, until now, I guess) a couple weeks ago resulting in the loss of some hard work of his, and I almost let it happen to me today. Couldn't we make our apps a little smarter? If it's running on a UNIX like system, would it hurt to make it aware that /tmp is not a safe place to save its user's files? Could it at least give people a little warning before doing so? UPDATE : I don't know what happened, but I received an attachment today and O...

My wife is from Oklahoma and we currently reside in Vancouver, WA. We don’t get to see her family out there in the midwest very often and we just missed a trip out there in April due to the stomach flu (long, messy story). Since April our youngest has turned 2 thereby raising the price of airline tickets for our family by another $500 or so. We also recently purchased a nice new minivan. All of this coalesced into a decision to pack up our three boys and drive to visit her family. We took it in two weeks, visiting friends and other family members along the way, and it was quite an adventure. Even with the price of gas these days it was less expensive than flying us all and renting a van for the time we would have been there. In fact, gas got cheaper the farther we got from Washington. Those Oklahomans have it pretty good at $3.87 or so a gallon. We had a really fun time and connected with a lot of people that we hadn’t seen in a while. It is especially fun to see your kids h...

Packing for a family trip, we brought: A cell phone, plus charger A portable dvd player, plus charger A digital camera, plus charger An mp3 player, plus charger A GPS, plus charger A laptop, plus charger As I plugged them all in to charge the night before, and then filled an entire backpack with them the next the morning, an iPhone started to look really attractive. I think when they get GPS on that thing it's going to be very hard to resist.

Often when I'm typing at the computer, like right now, my three-year old will come up to me and tell me to, "click on the monkey!" It took me a while, but I finally figured out what he was talking about: *click* For some reason he finds that to be pretty darn funny. Three years old and already a greasemonkey fan.