When I first started working on a web app project I had never worked with CSS “Media Queries” before.  One of the blog posts I found online about how they work was this one: http://www.cloudfour.com/css-media-query-for-mobile-is-fools-gold/ The author argues that CSS Media Queries are “Fool’s Gold” because they don’t really deliver the optimizations for mobile that [...]

I previously wrote about why I felt The Cloud Will Win.  In this post I’d like to go into more detail on why I think WebApps are the future of software development, especially for mobile devices. There are a couple of reasons that Apps are all the craze, first of all “smart phones” were not [...]

You’ve probably heard of this thing called “The Cloud.”  It’s really just a romanticized name for the Internet, but specifically it refers to a couple things: Applications that are stored on and run from remote locations.  You don’t install them.  Also known as WebApps. Public or private data stored on remote servers instead of on [...]

The Haipad M701-R (and its sibling the M701) are considered by many to be a knock-off of the Apple iPad, and I’ll grant you that the silver one I bought does bear an obvious resemblance, but you could say the same of pretty much every tablet on the market and many yet-to-be-released. This tablet is manufactured [...]

Whenever I play videos on my Linux Media Center with a browser-based player (i.e., YouTube, Hulu, etc.) or with Hulu Desktop, after a few minutes the entire screen goes blank/black.  If I bump the mouse the picture comes back. There is no screensaver activated.  In fact I completely uninstalled the screensaver utility. Power Management is [...]

The ATI graphics card in my XBMC Media Center recently died and I decided to avoid all the ATI-related issues and just put an Nvidia card in it instead. This allowed me to upgrade the operating system to Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx (though I ultimately opted for the Linux Mint 9 derivative).  Nvidia’s drivers are [...]

I know some people rave about the Apple aluminum keyboard, so I’m probably in the minority of people who don’t like it. Actually I really kind of hate it. Sure, it’s thin and sleek – it wouldn’t look out of place in a modern art museum collection. However, I can’t stand typing on the damned [...]

On my Linux system, every time I unplug a game controller and either plug it back in or swap to another one I have to recalibrate it.  You usually have to do that since most games and emulators expect the controller to be connected at “/dev/input/js0″ which gets changed as you change controllers. You could [...]

If you have some REALLY old games, such as DOS, then the best solution is to run them on Bochs.  But there are tons of old Windows 95, 98, ME, and XP games you may have chucked in the attic or basement if you’ve switched to Linux.  You will need to have a working copy [...]

It’s 2010, and like a lot of folks I’m a bit disappointed the future was not available as advertised. No rocket packs, no flying cars, no moon bases, no androids, no space hotels, no Martian colonies, nor any eerie black monoliths igniting Jupiter into a sun (that we know of). Watching TV hasn’t evolved very [...]