Supergeekblog

Well as everyone has noticed, I took a little break from blogging here over the Christmas/New Years holiday period.  Part of it was traveling to see family and part of it was just taking a nice break to work on offline projects.  (Along with starting my new (well old) hobby.

You see, here at Supergeekblog I stay pretty focused on tech stuff.  Be that gadgets, tech news, scifi, etc.  Well I also have what I consider an “old school” geek blog that is rather niche. Modeltrainrookie.com is another blog I run – and over the break I was working on that hobby.  (Model trains.)  It is a hobby I was really into as a kid with my Dad.  Well around 12-13 years ago water got into my parents basement and we had to tear the whole thing down… and it just never got reset up.  Well for Christmas my Dad gave me all of the old train stuff.  (We had quite a lot!)  Now that I have my own house, made for quite the fun project over the holiday.

Feel free to head on over to that site and check out my progress there.  I am attempting to document my progress on that blog.  So far it is a blast and I am managing to keep up with the pictures and posts.

Posts to check out:

Märklin Setup in progress

Wiring now possible!

I hope everyone else had a great holiday.  Welcome back to SGB for the new year!

First, let me say, if you haven’t heard about the HP Magic Giveaway contest yet… go look at it! HP is having 50 different bloggers around the world give away $6,000 worth of computer equipment. It is a pretty cool (and fun) contest. I have entered a few of the contests, though haven’t won yet. (We can all hope right?)

Really the best part of this contest for me has been discovering some new blogs. This has been probably my favorite discovery so far. As you will see by the name, and looking through the site, they are a “fire family.” The husband (called FireDad on the site) is a 26 year old career firefighter. The wife (aka FireMom) is a 27 year old freelance writer and mother of 2. So seeing similar ages, interests, blogging, and loving all things department related, perked my interest to the site right away.

They are starting their contest today: Stop, Drop, and Blog. Here is the post for the HP contest. (Each site has their own rules, so make sure to read the contest rules before commenting.)

Disclamer: this post counts as an additional entry to the contest… but I also thought it would be fun to share how winning (if chance likes me) would impact my family, friends, and readers.

First, I would replace our aging family laptop, but more importantly I would give one to my wife so she can finally have her own computer. (Neither is in the Christmas budget this year.)

Secondly, I would see if anything would be of use to my (fire) dept. – I am guessing the photosmart the guys would have a lot of fun with and actually use productively. (Well sometimes.)

Last, I would share online as well by having a contest of my own on supergeekblog.com – not only would it be a blast, bring a lot of new readers, but someone I don’t even know would have a better holiday season as well.

So winning would have a positive, lasting, impact on myself and others. I encourage everyone to head on over and check out the Stop, Drop, and Blog site. It is a blast

Cross Post from Olorinpc.com

I just thought I would do a quick 100th post. Actually for Supergeekblog it is the 287th total post.

Supergeekblog first went live on September 1st, 2005 with three editors. Olorinpc (me), ThatEdeGuy, and Irrision. Due to different projects and whatnot, SGB kind of withered away for a year with minimal posting. A few months ago I resurrected it and have been working on building it back up since.

Here is how the site has looked in the past:

Nov. 2005

Jul. 2006

Jul. 2008

Nov. 2008+

You are looking at it!  I am still making tweaks to the template.  I started with one I liked and then I am ending up rewriting chunks of it as I see fit.  (I have rewritten quite a few of the pages/functions at this point.)

Well I hope you enjoyed that little look back at SuperGeekBlog and I hope you continue to visit in the future!  If you have seen all 4 revisions of the site – you clearly have and it is appreciated!

If you haven’t heard of this contest yet… get cracking! 50 different sites are giving away $6k prize packadges. (It was mentioned here on SGB before it started.) The contest is pretty cool.

Three more sites are starting their contests today:

Geeks to Go!
Gear Diary
Geeks!

A few others have already started.  (See the full list on HP’s site.)  Each has their own version of the contest.  Make sure to check them out!

Greetings new visitors! I have noticed a significant amount of traffic (for existing readers, think factor 10) coming in due to the “YouTube virus? Actns/Swif.T” post.  A lot of people are wondering what to do about it.  The best advice we can give is to update your AntiVirus as often as possible and don’t click on “install this” items if you do happen to be redirected to a different site.  The redirection is annoying but harmless, it is the actually voluntarily installing malware that is what causes the problems.

I would like to take this post to welcome all of the new visitors and encourage you to subscribe to SuperGeekBlog.  This is a tech and geek site.  We sometimes are a bit random, but try to come up with interesting, helpful, or just plain fun posts for you to read.

Take a look around the site, bookmark it, and let us know what you think in the comments!  As for my existing readers and visitors, I certainly haven’t forgotten about you folks!  Thank you as well for your continued support to this site.  It is exciting to see the growth and increased interaction – both on posts here and on Twitter.  (Along with other social networking sites.)

From CrunchGear moments ago, reports of a new virus are coming out just this morning.  The virus seems to imbed a URL redirect to a phishing site.

The site apparently installs Antivirus 2009, which is malware. We’ll pull our most recent YouTube embeds, but be careful because this one appears to have just broken out today. If you find yourself being automatically redirected or experience other weird pop-ups, especially for something called Antivirus 2009, don’t click on anything.

Keep an eye out for more info/patches/etc on this.

This morning, I read a post by ThatEdeGuy on his twitter reflections.  Now around a month ago we had been discussing Twitter and how we didn’t really see the point, but let’s give it a shot.  I personally had tested Plurk before, but found it clunky and just didn’t keep up with it.  So like Ede, I anticipate having issues with keeping updated with it.  I use text enough, but I tend to notice a long lag time between txting in a tweet and actually seeing the update.  So don’t often.

I have found myself using Twitter much *much* more than I thought I would.  Twitterfox has had a lot to do with that of course.  Firefox is always open, whether at home or at work.  I have discovered that it isn’t as disruptive as I thought it would be to getting actual work done.  That being said, it is fairly addictive as I try to make sure I keep updated and follow along with other conversations.

ThatEdeGuy out it well:

Twitter is somewhat addictive.  It’s way more conversational than a blog or any other website.  It’s the closest thing to a IM client that there is currently available.  The nice thing is that you can “follow” several conversations at once without a separate window open for each and also, without the clutter that having all those conversations would be in one place.  They are still in one “stream” but, with the @ reply function, it makes it much easier to find the twits that are aimed at you and those that belong to a different conversation.

I have noticed moderate trafic from Twitter URL’s, so I believe there is potential there the more one grows their followers.  Growth from 1 follower and 1 post to 42 followers and 189 posts might also have something to do with that.  I am finding it quite enjoyable… there are a number of people who are not only fun to follow, but extremely helpful as well. (@wilw and @problogger being a couple persons of note.)

If you haven’t already found my Twitter via the sidebar… here is the link:

http://www.twitter.com/olorinpc

Ede’s Twitter:
http://www.twitter.com/thatedeguy

HP, Windows Live, and 50 different bloggers have teamed up to give away $300,000 worth of prizes!  50 bloggers will be giving away 50 prize packages worth $6000 each.  Here’s the full list of participating bloggers at HP.  Like ThatEdeGuy said, I would love to pick up one of these packages and I really would have loved to be one of the participating bloggers.  Of course I am totally ok with winning one of the prizes as well… but would have been awesome to do the review for SGB.

Here’s the details on the prize package as well.  Each of the 50 blogs will be holding their own individual contest with their own individual rules so you’ll have to visit each one and catch up on the rules.  Ede is going see if I can’t throw in a few updates as we go along too, so I plan on keeping an eye on both some of those blogs and his site.  It does’t look like they’ll be starting the contests until Friday, but you might want to just add them all to your feedreader now so you get the contest update post right away.  I have already seen a couple, and look forward to seeing how the rest of the contests turn out.  Good luck!

It’s finally coming!  The last half of season 4 of Battlestar Galactica.  (The final season as well.)  I have been waiting for this all year, so pretty pumped it is almost time!

They have it for pre-order now, but the release date is before Season 4.5, so you have enough time to get caught up… (or a subtle hint to friends and family…)

In a follow up to my post on Tweaking Your Desktop, I found this great post on Lifehacker.  Essentially what it does is tell you how to change your default windows Wallpaper directory.

I had actually forgotten you could do this.  (I prefer to change my wallpaper quite frequently, so make use of John’s Background Switcher.)  This is a pretty quick reg hack, but note you will need to have permissions to make modifications to the registry. (Start: Run > Regedit)

The difficulty, as you see on the Lifehacker article, is pretty minimal.  The risk of messing up your computer, pretty low as well.  However, if that is a worry for you, skip this and go straight to the background switcher program I recommended.  That way it is like any other program you can install/uninstall at your leisure.

As you can see, there are a variety of options when it comes to customizing your computing experience.  Dig in and try it – have more fun!