Bauer-Power- Information is Power!

Get More Youtube Views For Free – On The Shady

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 21:02:00 +0000

I have came across tools out there that use proxy lists to artificailly boost your Youtube views. Why would you want that to happen you may ask? The idea is that the more views your video has, the more “popular” it is, and the more real people will see it, and also better Google search results come from the higher views.

Here is a quote from a non-free software company called Tube Increaser that makes a proxy based tool to beef up your views. They say:

YouTube search ranks videos according to how many views a YouTube user has. In other words – the more views you have, the more exposure you will get over the other videos that have the same keywords and content. Another important aspect of video marketing is google search. If your YouTube video views have high views, your google ranking of the specific video will increase!

By having sufficient youtube video views daily, you can now compete with big time YouTube celebrities. This is an important part of creating more exposure for yourself – being able to be seen with high views and highly ranked is one of the key components of becoming successful on YouTube!

Now I am not an expert on Youtube, but that seems like it makes sense. If you know more about Youtube rankings, let us all know if the above is true, or B.S in the comments!

Anyhoo, Tube Increaser sounds cool, but I am all about free so I decided to look for a free alternative to Tube Increaser. That is when I found ViewTubeTrain. It is completely web based, and doesn’t require proxies. It doesn’t require proxies because you are swapping views with others on the internet!

All you have to do is post the Youtube link to your video on their site, then sit back and watch other peoples videos! There is also an option called Automatic train that automatically takes you to the next video when the one you are watching is done. This is where the shadyness comes in. You can turn it on, then mute your sound and minimize your browser and just rack up the points!

I am trying it out right now on my new NinjURL.us commercial I just filmed:

Do you know of other similar Youtube boosting tools? I am interested in both paid and free ones. Post your links in the comments!

Technorati Tags: youtube,boost,views,increase,free,tube increaser,viewtube train,how to

Got My Invite For Google Voice – PURE WIN!

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:46:00 +0000

A few days ago on the 7th I finally got the all coveted email invite from Google to use their Google Voice service! I signed up for it about a year ago when I first heard of it from one of my college instructors.

First off the bat, users cannot give out invitations themselves at this time. At least, I can’t find that option anywhere when I login. So please don’t ask me for an invite. If I could give them out, I would totally do it in the form of a contest!

So I logged in for the first time, and it immediately asked me to enter the area code for the number I wanted, then it asked to enter a four letter word to see if it was available. I entered 619 for San Diego, and TECH because I am into techy stuff. Bam! It gave me about eight available numbers all with the TECH extension. If you jokers want to give me a call you can now reach me at (619) 630-TECH!

Once logged in, the interface is rather familiar. It resembles Gmail in a lot of ways, which is good because it makes using it pretty intuitive. Here is a screen shot of it:

I’ve only been using it for a few days, but so far I like it a lot. Here is a list of my favorite features and why:

Free nationwide calling – My cell phone reception at home sucks, but I am only paying for local service on my home phone. Now, with Google Voice, I can call long distance on my home phone without being charged
Online text messaging – I can send SMS text messages from within Google voice, and it shows up on the recipients phone with my Google voice number. When they reply back it goes to my cell phone. When I reply on my cell it still keeps the Google Voice number on the recipient’s end.
Free voice to text – When users leave a voice message, if you enable this feature, the messages automatically get transcribed to text format. Now I don’t have to call my voicemail box, I can just read it in an email. This feature still isn’t 100% yet, but it’s good enough.
One number – Now I have one, simple to remember number that I can give out to everyone, and they can reach me no matter where I am.

Now, there are many more features, but so far the ones above are what I have used, and what I like. For a full list of features click on this link: (Google Voice Features)

Do you have a Google Voice account yet? What are your favorite features? What don’t you like about it? Let us know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: google,voice,invite,invitation

Time for a Twitter cleanup?

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 07:02:00 +0000

I woke up this morning, and did what I usually do. I grabbed my Blackberry to check my emails and Twitter. What? You don’t do that too?

Anyway, so I am scrolling through the updates of the people I am following and it is just one spam post after another. I can’t hardly read the updates from those who I am interested in. Every friggin’ post was from a spammer!

This problem all stemmed from playing with a couple of autofollow services I tried out. I am always testing out new things, so I figured why not? The idea of the autofollow tools is that you automatically follow people based on keywords in the hopes that they will follow you back. Honestly, this doesn’t work out so good. Most of the people you end up autofollowing are themselves autofollowers, and most autofollowers are spammers.

Well, I couldn’t remember all of the services I tried out, so the only way I could think of to stop autofollowing people was to change my password on Twitter. Bam! No more autofollowing! Okay, so now I am following 750 people compared to the 450 that are following me back. Time for a little Twitter cleanup!

I found a pretty awesome tool that can help you with this. It is called Mutuality, and it lets you to do one of three cool things in bulk:

Unfollow all who do not follow you back
Unfollow all
Follow all who follow you

I decided to use the first option to do some bulk cleanup. Amazingly with this tool I went from about 750 people I was following down to 165. After that, manual cleanup was easy.

Is it time for you to do a Twitter cleanup? Did you try various autofollow services? Know of other cool Twitter cleanup tools? Let us know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: twitter,cleanup,bulk,unfollow,remove

Short URL Service… With Ninjas!

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 07:00:00 +0000

I know what you are all probably saying, “Why do we need another shorten URL service?” The answer is simple, you can never have enough! That is a fact!

Besides that, how many of them out there have Ninjas? Not too many! How can you possibly want to post a short URL on Twitter, or Facebook without the help of Ninjas? You wouldn’t!

So what am I really getting at here? I am introducing you to my personal alternative to TinyURL, and it is called NinjURL.us! Use it for all of your small URL needs! Take really long web addresses and turn them into something useful and small!

Do you want to make your own TinyURL like service? You can use the free PHP script I used. It is called Broken Script! All you need is a hosting service that supports PHP and MySQL, or build your own LAMP server.

The next time you are posting a long URL on Twitter, a forum, or something like that, why not give NinjURL.us a try?

Technorati Tags: ninjurl,ninja,tinyurl,shorten,url,service,alternative

Bauer-Power Episode 11

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 07:00:00 +0000

I hope you all had a great Independence day weekend! You know I did! Fortunately for me, my company gave use a three day weekend, and I took full advantage of it!

On Friday the 3rd, Sundance and I got together to do Episode 11 of Bauer-Power. In this episode we discuss epic geek battles. In that segment we try to determine who would win between the following:

Who do you think would win? Let us know your picks and the reasons why in the comments!

After we discuss that, we decided to Go Office Space on an Acer! As you all know, I don’t like Acer very much. Well, we got our hands on an Acer LCD monitor and decided to beat the living hell out of it!

When we were done taking out our aggressions on the poor defenseless monitor, we decided to introduce you to my new short URL service, NinjURL.us! (More on that tomorrow!)

Without further ado, here is Episode 11 of Bauer-Power! This time filmed with my Kodak Zi6!

So what did you think? Any recommendations, suggestions, hate mail? Hit us up in the comments!

Technorati Tags: bauer-power,episode,11,geek,battles,pwnage,ninja url

We have a winner! Enjoy your Linux Computer!

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:50:00 +0000

It has been a long month. I have been waiting for this very moment to let you all know who was the lucky winner of June's contest to win a free Bauer-Power Linux Computer! There was one in there that I didn't think I would be able to deliver due to some possible legal restrictions and what not, but in the end I made everything legit and I was able to see this to the end!

Okay, so who won right? Well, the winner is the very lucky...

...@barnett1949

You have until Monday at 12:00PM pacific time to DM me with your shipping address so I can get this machine out to ya!

To all of you who played, thank you very much! I really like doing these twitter contests, and I hope you do too.

Technorati Tags: contest, winner

Free Open Source Photo Gallery

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:18:00 +0000

My wife is an amateur photographer. She has been aspiring to go pro, and perhaps start making a little money on the side. She frequently has people asking her to take their family photos, wedding pictures, baby pictures, school pictures etc. Most of the time, she does this as a favor to friends and family, but eventually she wants to branch out.

One of the things she said she wanted to get her foot in the door, and to provide potential clients with samples of her work was an online photo gallery. I decided i would put my skills of finding cool free software to use, and decided to look into an Open Source solution for her!

What I found was a little PHP based photo gallery that ties to a MySQL back end. What’s that smell? Smells like an Ubuntu LAMP server! Well, in my case I went with a free hosting service that I wrote about a few months ago called 000webhost. Anyhoo, that is neither here nor there.

The free gallery is called Coppermine, and setup is a snap! Just create your MySQL database, username, password etc, then upload the Coppermine files to your web server. Then you browse to your website’s URL and follow the installation wizard. It really can’t be any simpler.

I plan in the future to do a number of video segments showing users how easy it is to setup some of these free PHP sites, and I plan on using Coppermine as an example.

Here is the URL to the site I setup for my wife (http://momentsbefore.com). It is still under construction, and she hasn’t uploaded any photos yet. There is one picture, but that is only because I uploaded it to show my wife how easy it is to use.

Speaking of my wife’s photography, here are some samples of her work:

Like many other free PHP CMS/website scripts out there, there are lots of free Coppermine templates available so you can put some customizing touches on your gallery. Just do a Google search for Free Coppermine Themes.

Do any of you out there dabble in photography? Do you use Coppermine? Do you use something else? If so, post your photo gallery URL’s in the comments!

Technorati Tags: coppermine,free,php,website,photo,gallery,mysql,easy,open source

How To Redirect To Exchange 2007 OWA in IIS 7 and Windows Server 2008

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 17:08:00 +0000

My company just setup our first Exchange 2007 cluster, and are getting ready to migrate our users over from Exchange 2003. Before we do that, we want to make sure everything is working correctly, and almost seamlessly to our users.

With that includes making the access to OWA (Outlook Web Access) in Exchange 2007 idiot proof. By default, there are two things that make idiot proofing difficult. For one, like most companies we set our OWA to require SSL. For two, the URL for OWA is https://servername/owa. No biggie right? Just tell the users to use that URL. Well, that won’t work too well for our users. We want to just tell them to go to “webmail” and have it work.

So here is what we did:

In IIS 7, I clicked on the Default Website
I clicked on Error Pages
I clicked on 403, and selected Edit
I clicked on the Respond with a 302 Redirect radio button, and inserted the URL to OWA:

Done!

Now our users don’t have to type in HTTP or HTTPS, they can just open up a browser, type the server name/address in and automatically end up in the right place!

Has your company moved to Exchange 2007 yet? Have any problems with the migration? Did it go smoothly? How do you like Exchange 2007? Let me know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: exchange 2007,iis,owa,redirect,windows server 2008

Blogger Scheduling is Not Working

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000

I am a big fan of the scheduling feature with blogger. It allows me to blog as much as I want, and stagger the posts to keep my content seemingly fresh every day of the week. Lately, I have been noticing that it has not been working.

I looked into it today (Finally) and it turns out that it is a known issue with Google, and their engineers are working one it. Here is a quote from the Google Known Issues blog:

Scheduled posting is currently unreliable for some users. We're looking into this and will post and update when we have more to share.

Thanks for your patience.

I am really hoping they get this fixed soon. It is one of the features I use the most. What about you? Do you use scheduled posting with blogger? Let me know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: blogger,scheduled,posts,not,working,known,issue

Bypass MDS on Blackberry Devices

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000

The other day I was told by one of our senior Systems Administrators that I needed to perform an upgrade to the latest version of Blackberry Enterprise Server within a few days to help us move to Microsoft Exchange 2007. We were running BES 4.1.4 fine, but apparently it isn’t supported with Exchange 2007.

No problem I thought, I checked the online documentation on the Blackberry Website. I canned Blackberry support to pick their brain, and to check my stuff to make sure there wouldn’t be any issues. After I was satisfied, I went ahead and backed up the VM that my BES is running on, took a snapshot of it as well, and backed up the SQL database. Yeah, perhaps I was a little over cautious, but Blackberry is one of the high profile killer apps at my company. I couldn’t afford failure.

I decided to go the in place upgrade route. It is was easier than the cutover process. The install for 5.0 was pretty smooth, and everything worked fairly well. Or so I thought.

The very next day I noticed that I couldn’t browse the internet any more. I would get an error saying:

A communication failure occurred with the selected Mobile Data Service. The server may be busy, please try again later. If the problem persists, contact your administrator.

Hmm, that didn’t sound good. I quickly logged into my BES, and saw that the Blackberry MDS Connection Service was stopped. I thought it would be a simple fix. I started the service and pow! Nope! The service would start, then after about five minutes it would stop.

I checked the BES log files and saw some of this awesomeness:

General Error connecting to the database.: application.handler.ldap.DEFAULT_PRT

Now, this whole time, everyone could send and receive emails, they just couldn’t access the internet through the MDS service. I called Blackberry support. They had me check some stuff, but after a while they were stumped and escalated the issue to their developers. GREAT! Now what am I supposed to do when the users come calling?

I’ll tell you what I had my users do. This of course is a workaround until Blackberry can get back to me with a permanent solution, but hey it works. I had my users perform the following on their devices:

Go to Options>Advanced Options> Browser
Change the Default Browser Configuration to use Internet Browser
Press the menu key, and save the change
On the main screen, open the browser
Press the menu button and select Bookmarks
Highlight your first bookmark, press the menu key and select edit bookmark
Change the browser option to Internet Browser and accept the change
Do that to any other bookmarks you may have.
Once complete, try to browse the internet on your device.

Using The Internet Browser instead of the Blackberry Browser sends your users web traffic out across the carrier’s network, instead of back through your BES. This is actually fine for us as we don’t have any internet policies enforced for our mobile users anyway. If you do though, then this may still be a good temporary solution until you can get your stuff fixed.

Have any of you experienced problems with the MDS service on BES 5.0MR1? Did you fix it? Care to hook a brutha up? Let me know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: bes,blackberry,5.0,mr1,mds,browse,bypass,internet

WOW Freak Out. Real or Fake?

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, one of my co-workers forwarded me this video allegedly of a kid who is freaking out because his mom canceled his World of Warcraft (WOW) account. At first I thought this may be a real clip of a kid having an emotional breakdown, but getting near the end of it, I started to have different thoughts.

Either way, if it were real, this is probably one of the funniest reactions I have ever seen to something as trivial as a video game. Sure it's easy for me to say, but then again I don't play too many games. Still though, no matter how important something was to me, I am fairly certain I wouldn't try to shove a TV remote up my rear end... Oh wait, you haven't seen it yet...

Before I get too much further, here it is, the alleged "Greatest WOW Freak Out Ever":

What do you think? Real? Fake? Have you ever got this worked up over a game, or anything else for that matter? Hit me up in the comments.

Technorati Tags: wow, freak, out, world of warcraft, humor, funny, video

Forcing Demotion of a Domain Controller

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000

The other day I was attempting to install a new antivirus software on one of my company’s remote domain controllers. Everything was going fine except the antivirus couldn’t create the user account it needs to perform updates.

I checked the knowledge base for my antivirus company (It’s Sophos if you must know) and they suggested trying to manually create the account in Active Directory if it is on a Domain Controller. When I opened up Active Directory Users and Computers, it defaulted to the next closest Domain Controller. When I tried to select the server I was on, I got an error message.

Apparently, one of our Systems administrators was doing some meta data cleanup a few weeks ago to try to fix some replication errors, and may have accidentally deleted this particular server’s roll as a Domain Controller. Ouch!

It was still a part of the domain, so I tried to simply demote it and re-promote it again. This is where I ran into an issue. When I tried to demote it I got the following error:

Error: An error occurred:
Win32 Error 8419(0x20e3): The DSA object could not be found.

I tried a few things with DNS, but nothing worked. I finally had to break down and force the demotion of the server. If you have never done it, you run the following command:

dcpromo /forceremoval

This runs dcpromo and ignores all errors. Once complete, the server will reboot and will no longer be a part of the domain.

When that was complete, I deleted the server object from Active Directory Users and Computers, and forced replication to the other Domain Controllers. I then ran the ntdsutils command line utility to make sure there wasn’t any stale metadata left over.

After that I tried to rejoin the server to the domain. I wasn’t able to, apparently the SID data was still in AD. To correct that I ran newsid from Sysinternals to change the SID and rebooted it. When it came back up, I rejoined it to the domain, and ran dcpromo successfully.

I’ve been keeping my eye on it, and everything seems to be replicating without issue. Hurray!

This just goes to show you that when trouble shooting the underbelly (AKA the Schema) of Active Directory, be careful, and pay close attention to what you are doing. One simple mistake can cause big problems.

Has anything like this happened to you? What caused it? How did you fix it? Did you do something similar? Let me know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: Error 8419(0x20e3),dcpromo,force,removal,domain,controller

Alternative Mobile Voicemail

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 12:46:00 +0000

Many many moons ago, when T-Mobile first appeared in San Diego, my wife and I signed up for their service because it was the cheapest thing available. For the most part we liked their services, but what we didn’t like was that every time you got a voice mail message you got an alert on your phone saying you had a voice mail, you also got a text message. They have since removed that feature, but it was sort of annoying.

Currently I am on Verizon, and their voice messaging is okay. I mean, it does what it is supposed to do. What I don’t like about Verizon’s is that when I dial in from my cell phone I still have to put in my pin number, then to play a message, I have to select “1’ or something to play it. It is rather inconvenient when I am driving, and I am supposed to be “hands free” yet I still have to look down to dial pin numbers, and menu items just to check a voice message.

All of those annoyances have gone away for me though. My buddy recommended an alternative voice messaging service, that is free to use, and has some really cool features. The service is called Youmail, and here is what they offer:

Visual Voicemail - See who called, from where, and even their picture
Use your smart phone or your computer - or you can still dial in like before
Save time - Point, click and play or delete
Personal Custom Greetings
Voicemail Sharing
Unwanted caller blocking
Voicemails at MP3’s direct to your email

Setup for me was really easy, and they have detailed instructions for just about every carrier out there to switch over to their service.

Another feature they offer (for a premium of course) is speech to text, so you can just read your voicemails. Pretty cool sounding, but I am not paying for that myself.

I have been using it for a week, and so far I like it way better than the stock Verizon voicemail. It is more convenient, and if I am close to the computer, I can play my messages through Windows Media Player, and I never have to call my voicemail.

What do you think? Do you find your current provider’s voicemail kind of annoying? What don’t you like about it? Have you tried Youmail? Know of a similar service? let us know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: alternative,voicemail,free,mobile,cellular

FREE Powered By Ubuntu Stickers! Get Them While They're HOT!

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 13:15:00 +0000

Many many moons ago I sent away for some free "Powered By Ubuntu" stickers from some laptop company in Colorado that make laptops with Ubuntu installed on them. They don't do Windows!

It took a while, but I got my stickers, and I was a happy camper. I promptly removed my Windows sticker from my laptop, cleaned off the old adhesive with some rubbing alcohol, and replaced it with my shiny new Ubuntu sticker. I proudly showed the world around me that I didn't answer to multi-million dollar, self absorbed, monopolistic software companies like Microshaft. No, I did things on my own terms using free, as in FREE BEER, software available to anyone savvy enough to download it and install it!

I decided I would extend that same offer to you my readers, and anyone else that comes along that enjoys the freedom that Ubuntu Linux has to offer!

I will print out, and mail you a sheet of six "Powered By Ubuntu" self adhesive stickers free of charge! I am a big proponent of Ubuntu, and I want to spread the Ubuntu love to as many people out there as possible!

The sticker comes from the Free Software Stickers book that I blogged about quite a while ago. Sure, you can download the book yourself, print out the stickers and tape them to your laptop all ghetto style and whatnot. I on the other hand will print them out for you on nice, self adhesive sticker paper for a more professional look that says, "Hey, I'm not a douche bag!"

Here is a blurry photo I snapped using my Blackberry of the one I have on my laptop:

So you want some right? I knew you did. All you have to do is mail me a self addressed stamped envelope to:

Bauer-Power Ubuntu Stickers
www.Bauer-Power.net
1520 Petree Street, Suite 632
El Cajon, CA 92020

When I get your envelope, I will return it with your sheet of FREE "Powered By Ubuntu" stickers!

For you Kubuntu users, I haven't forgot about you either! Just change the address from Bauer-Power Ubuntu Stickers to Bauer-Power Kubuntu Stickers and I will send you stickers reflecting your choice in Linux desktop managers (KDE v.s. Gnome)!

Please tell all your friends!

Remember When Megabytes Were Expensive?

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000

My buddy Sundance sent me this picture the other day, and I almost fell out of my chair. Looking at old advertisements like this makes you almost snicker inside considerent what you can get these days for under $30! Seriously, you can get a Bauer-Power Gear 4 GB USB drive for $24.99.

When you consider that, then paying almost $3,000 for 15 MB seems pretty outrageous. Back then though, it was probably a bargain!

Not only is the disk almost $3000 by itself, you also have to spend almost $80 on the appropriate installation kit! Are you friggin kidding me?

Check out the ad I'm talking about:

Thankfully I entered the I.T. game when I did. I couldn't imagine forking over that kind of dough for so little storage capacity. What about you? Were you working in the computer field when 15 MB was a premium amount of space? Do you remember paying these prices? Let us know know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: old, computer, advertisement, 15mb, hard drive

New Contest: Win a Free Bauer-Puntu Computer!

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Thu, 18 Jun 2009 15:10:00 +0000

Oh yes you read that correctly! I got my grubby little hands on a little mini computer, and I am going to be giving that mofo away free and clear to one lucky winner! This puppy will come with Bauer-Puntu Linux 9.04 pre-installed for some awesome hacking fun!

I will run this contest just like the last one which is via Twitter! It just makes things easy for everyone! Entering is really simple, and takes only a few seconds of your time. If you are a Twitter user you know how following someone, and retweeting a message only takes seconds of time, but in this case those seconds can get you a mutha friggin' computer!

All you have to do to enter is

Follow me on Twitter: (@ElDiPablo)
Retweet about this contest: (Click here to retweet correctly)

Doing those two very easy things will get you one entry in the contest! YOU HAVE TO DO THIS TO ENTER! If you want another entry all you have to do is subscribe to my RSS feed, and post a link to a screen shot of Bauer-Power in your RSS reader in the comments. If you want, yet another entry (Yes, three chances to win) write up a blog post linking back to this contest. Post a link to your blog post in the comments!

I will add each entry to an Excel spread sheet, and I will use a random number generator to pick a winner. Drawing will be July 3rd at 2:00PM Pacific time via Twitter.

So what kind of computer will you all be competing for? A used Compaq EVO D51e with a 2.0Ghz Pentum IV Processor and 1 GB of RAM. Sure, the specs aren't top of the line, but it runs Bauer-Puntu Linux like a son-of-a-bitch! Plus, it's small as hell and free (So stop complaining!)

In interest of full disclosure, I obtained this machine from my current employer (Who shall remain nameless) as we recently cleaned out our store room and designated a number of machines to be sent to the recycling center. My boss, who got approval from his boss, said that we could pick through these obsolete machines to take home. The only stipulation? We can't sell these for a profit (Which I'm not, I am giving it away). I have received a signed receipt from management authorizing me to have this computer.

With that out of the way, here is a picture of the computer:

What are you waiting for? Start retweeting, and tell all your friends!

NOTE: Contest Open to U.S. Residents Only

Technorati Tags: contest, free, computer, twitter

Why an Ubuntu Workstation is better than Windows at work

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I decided to say damn the man and install Ubuntu as my operating system at work. So far there isn’t anything I am unable to do on Ubuntu that I couldn’t do in Windows to get my work done.

Today I was a little light on the workload so I decided to browse the Ubuntu repositories to see what games were available. Of course, two that popped right out at me were some of my favorite Open Source games; Tux Racer and SuperTux!

These two games got me thinking about how much cooler the free games for Ubuntu are compared to the free games that come with Windows. I also got to thinking about how many people play solitaire and minesweeper at work.

Because of that, I decided to make this little video:

What do you think? Am I wrong on this? I suppose there are lots of free games you can download for Windows too, including SuperTux and Tux Racer, however these are available directly in the repositories for Ubuntu.

What games do you like to play on your Linux system? What free games do you play in Windows? Let me know in the comments.

Technorati Tags: linux,ubuntu,games,free,tux racer,supertux,windows,xp,solitaire,minesweeper

The Best Non Adobe Air Twitter Clients For Linux

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000

I have been using Twitter fairly regularly for a few months now, and I have been an active Linux user for over a few years. Since I started using Twitter, I have been playing with a lot of Twitter clients. If you have been looking for different clients to use, you probably already know that there are a bot load of clients made with Adobe Air.

That's fine, but what if you don't want to use Adobe Air applications for some reason or another. One reason I don't like it is in 64 bit Ubuntu. It is just too quirky, and you have to do a lot more tricks to get Adobe Air apps to work. No, in 64 bit Ubuntu, I would rather use a non-adobe Twitter client. If you have been looking, here are my two recommendations:

Twitux - This one is a very simple, and easy to use Twitter client. With it you can do almost anything else you can do in any other Twitter client, like update your status, look at replies and direct messages, list friends, etc.
Gwibber - Gwibber is my favorite non-adobe air client. The makers of Gwibber label it as a micro-blogging client because you can use it for more than just Twitter. You can update Jaiku, Identic.ca, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, and RSS. It even has Ping.fm integration for even more networks!

There are a few others out there, but these two in my humble opinion are the best alternatives to Adobe Air clients like Twirl, or Tweetdeck. Especially in Linux, where it is always better to support small, Open Source projects.

What Twitter clients do you guys use in Linux? Know of any other good alternatives to Adobe Air Twitter clients in Linux? Hit me up in the comments!

Technorati Tags: twitter, client, linux, alternative, adobe, air, twhirl, tweetdeck

You Are The Controller

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000

Have you seen it yet? I’m talking about one of the coolest things to hit the gaming seen since mutha friggin’ Frogger! Okay, so maybe Frogger wasn’t that cool, but this thing is.

I am talking about the new hotness that Microsoft laid down at the recent E3 Expo in Los Angeles. This is a new way to play games on the XBox 360, and that new way is without a remote. Actually, YOU are the controller to be more precise.

The Nintendo Wii has nothing on this sucker. Many people liked the Wii because it let them get up and get more involved with their games. The Wii however still required a controller. This new way of playing games with the XBox 360 doesn’t require a controller at all. It only requires You!

Check it out, Project Natal:

What do you think about this? When it finally comes out are you going to get one? I honestly think this is my IN to convince my wife to let me have an XBox 360.

Technorati Tags: xbox,no controller,project natal,e3

My New Favorite Free Windows Screen Capture Software

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000

I was watching IPTV shows on my Tivo again this weekend, when I came across episode 91 of Tekzilla, and they mentioned their free software pick of the week. This week they chose a free web capture software that is pretty robust, is easy to use, and is absolutely free.

Normally for screen capture in Windows I would use Camstudio which works pretty good, but I could never for the life of me get the audio to work. Also, I have found it to be rather flakey at times.

Good news for me that I watch Tekzilla though, because the software they mentioned is pretty awesome! It is called BB Flashback Express from Blueberry Software. Here are some of it's features:

Webcam recording for that Picture-in-picture touch
Record Windows, Full screen or region
Record commentary or PC sounds
Exports to Flash Video (FLV) or AVI
One button web publishing to Youtube, Blip.tv, Viddler or Revvler

Here is a clip of Tekzilla talking about BB Flashback express:

What video capture software do you like to use? Know of any other free programs with more features than BB Flashback Express? Let us know in the comments!

Technorati Tags: free, screen, capture, windows, bb flashback express,

Don't Laugh - I Am Talking About Real Super Heroes!

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000

This one doesn't go in the tech category, no this has to get filed somewhere in the strange and geeky bucket. That's okay because geekiness and technology go hand-in-hand. Because they mesh so well, I though I would write a quick post on a phenomenon going on across America, and that is the uprising of "real" super heroes. Think about it for a second, when you were a kid reading comic books, did you ever once think that it would be cool to take down perps, and drug dealers while flying through the air in a cape and skin tight spandex? No?...errr.... me neither....

Anyway, I am not talking about one or two confused individuals, no there are hundreds, if not thousands of these guys taking to the streets, and assuming flamboyant persona's in the name of justice! Straight out of a comic book, and onto your streets, these guys are taking this very seriously.

Why, right here in San Diego we have our very own Super Hero that goes by the name of Mr. Xtreme. Mr. Xtreme has started his own local organization of Super Heroes called the Xtreme Justice League. I first read about Mr. Xtreme, and learned of this unusual phenomenon sweeping the nation in an article in the San Diego Reader. Mr. Xtreme, like most other "real" super hero's hands out food to the homeless and the needy, and patrols the streets of his neighborhood at night looking for evil doers.

Another super hero I stumbled on is Geist, who patrols the streets of Rochester Minnesota. So far, Geist has to be my favorite. Check out his MySpace page, and have a look around his pictures. They are seriously straight out of the movies. I don't know about how well he fights crime, but I can tell you this... He has a better costume than Mr. Xtreme from San Diego. Here are some of Geist's "interestests" from his MySPace page:

"Victims of tragedy, the homeless, general community service, charitable non-political causes, crime deterrence, obliterating graffiti, crime fighting. I give food and supplies to food shelves and animal shelters and toys to kids. Anyone who considers themselves one of the Forgotten. I patrol the streets to deter, prevent or report crime. Police, I'm just another pair of eyes and ears at your side. I'm not looking to get in your way, but will help as I can until you arrive."

Most of these guys belong to larger groups. Not unlike the "Justice League of America" from DC comics, or the X-Men from Marvel. Geist for instance is a part of the Great Lakes Heroes Guild with such super hero members as Razorhawk and Shadowflare. From what I gather, these smaller groups join forces, and network with groups in other areas to form a much larger network to strike fear in the hearts of those who would do evil! Speaking of Razorhawk, he did an interview with Fox News, check it out:

Do you think these guys are joking around? Oh no, these guys are serious as a mutha friggin' heart attack! Here is a video from "The Heroes Network" where a bunch of these guys got together to put the word out that they are taking back our streets!

So what do you think? Have you heard of this phenomenon in your town? Do you know any of these guys? Do you want to join them? I want to know your take on the whole thing in the comments!

Technorati Tags: real, superhero, super hero, geist, mr. xtreme, razorhawk, shadowflare, heroes network, great lakes heroes guild, xtreme justice league

Besides Scribefire, There Are No Good Blog Editors in Linux

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000

I am rather writing this out of frustration more than anything. I have been trying to find a viable alternative to Windows Live Writer for Linux. I know that I mentioned Scribefire a few months ago, but ever since my buddy Sundance convinced me to make the switch to Windows Live Writer (WLW) it has been hard to go back.

There are many desktop blog editors for Linux, just none as good as WLW. I've tried Drivel and Gnome-Blog, both are basically glorified text editors. BloGTK showed some promise, but it crashes when you try to run it in Ubuntu 9.04 (Known bug). There is Qumana, which is Java based, but it hangs when trying to post. There are a few others, and not one of them has the features of WLW.

Scribefire is still pretty good. It has most of the features that WLW has, except it doesn't do on-the-fly picture editing, which is the main reason I like WLW so much. I can just grab a picture from my desktop, import it into WLW, watermark it, add a drop shadow, and tilt it all in one program. I can't do that in any other editor, especially none for Linux.

So how am I working around it? I decided I would use Scribefire in conjunction with the Picture2Life, which is a free online photo manipulation program. There is also a Firefox plugin for Picture2Life so you can grab any picture off the web easily and load it into Picture2Life's editor lickity split.

Now Firefox is my blog editor of choice in Linux. I can blog in Scribefire, and in the window above Scribefire, i can make my edits to pictures using Picture2Life, download the edited pic, and re-upload it into Scribefire without minimizing my window.

It's no WLW, but it is the best blogging solution I have found for Linux that offers the closest-to-wlw experience I can get. So far, nothing else has come close. Above is a picture I did real quick with Picture2Life. I was able to watermark it, add a drop shadow, and tilt it all like I do in wlw. There are other effects you can add too like mirror, lighting, and cropping to name a few.

What do you use for blogging in Linux? Have you gotten BloGTK to work? Maybe you are using a lesser known Linux blog editor. Who knows? Let me know what you are doing in the comments.

Technorati Tags: blog, editor, linux, windows live writer, picture editing, drop shadows, water marks

A Review of The Kodak Zi6 HD Pocket Video Camera

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000

I am a cheap bastard. You guys all know that! That is why I have been using my crappy little Kodak Easy Share camera to film all of the Bauer-Power videos. Since I have been getting a lot of complaints on the quality of the videos, I decided I should get a better camera.

I was thinking about saving up about $500-$600 to purchase a Canon HV20 HD camera, but then I thought better of it. Besides the awesome video quality, the HV20 comes with a mic jack. The only problem is that my Bauer-Power video co-host and I have two microphones, and there is only one mic jack. I figured since I will have to record audio separately anyway for both mics to take care of our audio complaints, and dub it back in later, I might as well save a few hundo, and buy something less expensive.

Enter the Kodak Zi6 HD Pocket video camera. I have seen them all over the internet at various prices, almost all of them for under $150. I got mine refurbished from Geeks.com for under $99 after shipping and handling, but since last weekend, their price for the refurbished model went up to $99 before shipping.

Here are some of the camera's specs:

Shoots in 720P HD at 60 FPS or 30 FPS
Has a VGA mode to save space
Has a 2X digital zoom
Uses 2 AA Batteries
Uses SDHC card storage up to 32GB
Can take 3MP picture snap shots

I decided to shoot a quick video in HD at 30FPS. The reason I didn't do 60 FPS was that my video editor only outputs to 30 FPS, and Youtube converts to 30 FPS, so I figured I was wasting my time shooting a video at 60 FPS if I was just going to edit it and upload it to the internet anyway. Here is my video review so you can get an idea of the video and sound quality:

Final verdict? I love it! For under $100, I just don't think you can beat the quality. The only things I don't like are the 2X zoom because it is too jerky for me, and I don't like that there is no image stabilization. Neither of those things are deal breakers in my opinion though.

If you are trying to figure out whether or not to buy this thing, I say go for it! If you have any more questions about the Zi6, hit me up in the comments!

Technorati Tags: kodak, zi6, review, 30fps, test

I finally Got the Global Address To Work in Evolution for Jaunty!

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000

This post is going to be relatively small and quick, but I thought I would put it out there because I had the damnedest time getting the Global Address list in Evolution to work in Ubuntu 9.04.

First off let me say that I hate Evolution. I don't use it on my Linux machines at home at all! If only someone would make a good OWA plugin for Thunderbird, then things would be better! Until then, Evolution is the only Exchange game for 'nix systems in town.

So back to my problem. I could not access the Global Address List! No matter what I put in, I would get an error saying that Evolution couldn't access the Global address list. Depending where I was in Evolution, here are the errors i got:

Error Loading Address Book

Or I would get this error:

Error Loading Address book.

This address book cannot be opened. This either means that an incorrect URI was entered, or the server is unreachable.

It was my fault though, I mistakenly thought that I should be putting in the FQDN of the Exchange server were you input the URI for the Global Catalog Server. I also read somewhere that you are supposed to put the URL of the OWA server. None of those worked. What did work though was putting in the FQDN of the local Domain Controller!

If you don't know where to do that, click on Edit > Preferences. Select your Exchange account and press the Edit button.

Click on the Receiving Options Tab, and under Global Catalog Server Name, input the FQDN of your local Domain Controller then click OK. You will have to restart Evolution for the changes to take effect.

After I did that, I was able to access the GAL, and grab contacts straight from Active Directory!

Now I believe this only works behind the corporate firewall. I am not quite sure what to do if you are wanting to access Exchange email from home on your Linux box. If you have gotten the GAL to open from outside of the network, hit me up in the comments to let me know what you did!

Technorati Tags: evolution, exchange, gal, global address list, ubuntu, 9.04, jaunty jackelope

Who Wants a Free Microsoft Technet Subscription?

noreply@blogger.com (El Di Pablo) — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:00:00 +0000

I just saw a pretty cool retweet on Twitter from @digininja talking about a free Microsoft Technet subscription! Gee, do I want cool free exclusive downloads, IT news, and updates about the haps at Microsoft? Umm... Yes please!

Of course, this is available only to U.S., U.K., and Canadian Residents, so sorry to you other international Bauer-Power readers. Microsoft is basically saying you can go pound sand. Don't worry though, there will always be a special place for you in my heart ;-P

For those of you (like my boss) who aren't familiar with Technet, here is a description from Wikipedia:

Microsoft TechNet is a Microsoft program and resource for technical information, news, and events for IT professionals. Along with a website, they also produce a monthly subscription magazine titled "TechNet Magazine".

TechNet was originally available only to customers with paid subscriptions; however, it has been expanded to include public information, webcasts, local events, and free newsletters. They have also started an open source blog on April 6, 2006 called Port 25 to publicly explore that business model and provide discussion forums.

I signed up for mine, now I have free access to all of Microsoft's software including operating systems! I am downloading a copy of Vista Ultimate right now. Put that in your pipe and smoke it!

Normally a subscription like this goes for about $399 per user, so you HAVE to take advantage of this right now! This subscription will only last until September 30th (Convenient right? it ends just before they release Windows 7 to the public in October).

Okay, so how do you claim your free subscription? Just click one of these links of course:
(US)
(UK)
(Canada)

Technorati Tags: free, microsoft, technet, subscription