Supercow.net

I was just browsing around and found xkcd . It’s halarious, check it out. I did stumble upon a poster in the store of the photo of Internet Communities I posted a while back. I wasn’t sure where it came from… but now I know!

I was just reading about the kindle from amazon. I looks great and I’m really surprised by the wireless capability (cellular network with no monthly fee). I’m looking forward to it getting hacked! But even just buying it to read wikipedia, blogs, etc. seems like a pretty cool idea.

I think this would be great for the avid reader but I’ll be waiting on a price drop, or the capability to use it for other things like:

1. Surfing the web
2. taking notes – Parents would buy them for students
3. email
4. storage – like an oversized usb drive with viewing capabilities

I was looking for a program to get live stats for my yahoo fantasy football league and quickly found statfink. It’s openly available on sourceforge, is updated quickly if any issues arise, and is designed to be used by your whole league. For instance two updates were released this past weekend. One big interface update on saturday and another on monday for stat scraper issues. It’s more advanced however than the average fantasy football player will be able to accomplish but if words like mysql, php, htpasswd, and apache bring back fond memories you’ll feel right at home.

I’ve been using it for the league I play in for a few weeks now and everyone loves it. So check out my statfink page and see how my team, The Holy Hand Grenades, are doing this week. The new interface was just released this past week and is a huge improvement over the old that you can also check out at that link.

As for setup it was really simple. I’ll go ahead and include the most recent install guide here so you can get an idea of the process.

1) Extract the files from the archive.
(in linux: tar -zxf statfink-x.y.tar.gz)

2) Copy the statfink folder to a directory accessible from the web.
(usually /somewhere/public_html/)

2a) It is STRONGLY suggested that you password protect the ‘helm’ directory with an .htpasswd
file. There is a nice tool (http://www.clockwatchers.com/htaccess_tool.html) there to
handle this if you don’t know how. Many people have this functionality built into their
cPanel. Otherwise, anyone will be able to control your copy of statfink or get your yahoo
passsword, which could really ruin your day.

3) Make sure your permissions are set correctly, you can do this in an ftp client by going
to the file properties or file permissions(usually by right clicking the file). The permissions
to the statfink, statfink/helm/, and statfink/helm/config/ directories should all be “777” (or
all the boxes checked, read write exeecute for all). The reason for this is that the web server
will have to write some files to your directory in the next steps.

4) Fire up your favorite web browser and point it at the helm directory in the directory you
installed statfink into. (eg. http://www.your-host-here.com/statfink/helm/)
Click the link that says “Configure Statfink” to set up statfink. Fill out the form
completely, and then click the “Save Settings” button. This will bring you to a page telling
you everything was saved properly. If you’re setting up Statfink for the first time, click
the first link to initialize your database using the database settings you just entered.

5) At this point you need to set up a league for Statfink to track. If you just clicked the
database initialization link, you’re hopefully now at a page that says that it’s done making
databases and that you need to set up at least one league. Enter a league name here (10
characters or less, letters and numbers only) and click the button. On the next page you’ll
need to fill this form out COMPLETELY with every box containing something, at least a zero.
Click the save settings button. Congratulations! You’re ready to start using Statfink on
the helm page, or if you have more leagues you want to set up, go back to the main config page.

A great source for helping you get your site up and running is Statfink4Dummies.  It goes a little more in depth than the simple instructions I posted above.

I found this great write up the other day on lifehacker.com while I was looking for aftermarket firmware upgrades for my wap54gx(unfortunently no one makes one). They have several really cool idea’s on improving your home wifi network. So check it out and get better use out of your wifi.

Whoa! Don’t know how I missed this! Looks like Microsoft bought a new browser. 😉

I love it! Now I can “Do more by doing less.”

I just found this while searching google maps and thought it was funny enough to share.

go to http://maps.google.com

then search for your “zip code” to Rio de Janeiro

scroll down the directions.

Check out this new commercial from the Creation Museum. I thought it was pretty cool and reminded me a little of The Nightmare before Christmas at the beginning. Plus take a look at this article from David A. DeWitt, Ph.D., Director, Center for Creation Studies, Liberty University. He does a great job explaining just how different and awesome the Creation Museum is.

To download the Creation Museum commercial, right-click this link and choose “Save” or “Download linked file.”

I found this cool picture over at summet.com and just wanted to share it. My favorite part is the Noob Sea. I’m pretty sure however it’s not large enough!

I just noticed the absence of Google however. Maybe it doesn’t qualify as a community but I still think it should be there!

I’ve been building my own routers for a while now. Previously I’ve mainly used IPCop but recently I heard about Endian Firewall and really liked all the extra features it was boasting. So I tried it out, really liked it and started marketing it rather than IPCop to customers. I’ve built a couple of these now and they really run great. They’ve completely killed spam on the networks, stop all the secretaries and their various chat programs, have vpn capabilities, Sip quality of service, etc. Pretty much the ultimate small business/home router. The best part is they are super easy to manage. The install is nearly identical to that of IPCop, the menu has improved over IPCop, the only downside is the need for a beefier machine. From what I’ve seen you need at least a 500mhz, 256 mb memory, and a 10 gb harddrive. The one’s I’ve built are 1 Ghz, 256mb memory, and 40 gb harddrives (only because it was the smallest/cheapest I could find to use). I think the processor is plently but it probably wouldn’t hurt to have a little more memory in the future. Most of you are probably thinking thats hardly any machine at all but I’ve had IPCop running great on 100 mhz system with 64 mb of memory so in relation it is quite a difference. The mini-itx form factor is everwhere now and this Phylon 7F2WE-1G (aka jetway J7F2WE-1G)is a perfect match for a small router pc with it’s capability to handle up to 4 nics.

Endian Firewall does an excellent job and if that spare machine you have laying around can handle it, give it a try, I think you’ll be pleasently surprised at just how much better it will do that your linksys wrt54g, just convert it into an access point instead.

Figured I might as well do a quick update since I got on xanga to check out davonne’s post about my birthday party. Which by the way was the best birthday ever!!! Davonne made me dinner and surprised me with a movie room setup I’ve been planning on doing for a long time. She had the furniture all aranged with food supplied and I setup the tech stuff. Lcd projector, laptop with vongo, and some 2.1 speakers. All in all a very cool movie room. She even decorated with some old movie posters from starwars and batman.

On the turbo, since the last post I’ve put in 440cc injectors and and using an smt-6 to control the fuel, but the vortech piece of crap is gone. So after a long battle with tuning it’s running rather well and with little fuel mileage decline(about 2-3 mpg). I’m running 8-9 psi of boost and love it! Have to be extra careful in rain now though. When boost kicks in 2nd gear it’ll spin the tires and get wheel hop. Pretty impressive for a car that started out with 105 whp.