Geocaching featured in the Montreal Mirror newspaper

• Author: DigitalMind
• Filed under: Techie Toys'n'Games
• Date: Jul 31,2008

A few weeks ago I was contacted by Erik Leijon, a writer for The Mirror. (A local, free, montreal newspaper that is read by many, including myself)  He found me via TechieNATION, and told me he was writing an article on geocaching and asked if I had time to answer some questions and maybe do a cache with him.  I was glad to help spread the word about geocaching so we set an appointment to meet near the newspapers office downtown by the old port. (If you don’t know what geo-caching is, please click here to read my post about geo-caching)

There were 3 cache’s within about 4 small city blocks of his office. Oddly enough, I have never been out looking for these ones even though I’m in the neighborhood often. I was a little nervous that the cache’s might be gone or that I couldn’t find them, but it was not the case.

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My Razor E200 Electric Scooter review

• Author: DigitalMind
• Filed under: Techie Toys'n'Games
• Date: Jul 29,2008

Last Thursday I was at a customers and noticed this tiny little electric scooter inside the IT guy’s office.  I asked him about it, and he told me that he uses this scooter to get to and from work regularly during the summer.  By car, it would take him 20 minutes to get to work.  He comes in with the scooter, then plugs it in his office to recharge so that it’s ready to go back at the end of the day ! Wow !

Needless to say I went online and started looking into this scooter.  It can go up to 12 MILES per hour for 40 minutes.  That’s more or less a 15 km drive with a single charge !   The selling point for me was the low price tag:  $200 dollars !  I bought one the next weekend.

I went to a couple of stores that were supposed to sell it, but they were all out.  I lucked out to find this one, the last one on the shelf, at Toys’R'Us. (I can’t believe this thing is made for children 12 years old and up!)  The box was in bad shape so I was worried about the contents, but everything was fine.

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Ham Radio Field Day 2008

• Author: DigitalMind
• Filed under: Ham Radio
• Date: Jul 17,2008

A few weeks ago was the Field Day for Amateur Radio operators throughout Canada and the United States.  Field Day, basically, is a contest for Ham Radio operators about who can get the most amount of confirmed contacts within a 24 hour period using only temporary installations.

This is how the Wikipedia describes the field day :

Field Day is an annual amateur radio exercise, widely sponsored by IARU regions and member organizations, encouraging emergency communications preparedness among amateur radio operators. In the United States, it is typically the largest single emergency preparedness exercise in the country, with over 30,000 operators participating each year.

Since the first ARRL Field Day in 1933, radio amateurs throughout North America have practiced the rapid deployment of radio communications equipment in environments ranging from operations under tents in remote areas to operations inside Emergency Operations Centers (EOCs). Operations using emergency and alternative power sources are highly encouraged, since electricity and other public infrastructures are often among the first to fail during a natural disaster or severe weather.

To determine the effectiveness of the exercise and of each participant’s operations, there is an integrated contesting component, and many clubs also engage in concurrent leisure activities (camping out, cookouts, etc.). Operations typically last a continuous twenty-four hours, requiring scheduled relief operators to keep stations on the air. Additional contest points are awarded for experimenting with unusual modes, making contacts via satellite, and involving youth in the activity.

In the past field day’s that i’ve been involved in, this meant setting up in a field.  We put up huge shelters and powered everything with Generators. We installed temporary towers and masts to hold our antenna’s.  The last field day I went to (almost 10 years ago!) we had about 2 HF Voice stations, 2 HF Morse Code Stations, a Satellite Station, and a Packet Radio Station. There were always LOTS of people present during the 24 hour period.  We even had a cooking station to make food for all the operators !

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Grid-Tied Solar Energy is the inevitable future

• Author: DigitalMind
• Filed under: Solar Power and Off-Grid Living
• Date: Jul 14,2008

Simon Stapleton recently wrote a few posts on the subject of IT being green.  He questioned many people in the field about their environmental considerations while at work.  Long story short, most people are aware of it, although not doing anything about it yet.  He brought up the points of tele-working,  virtualization technologies, and using alternative energy sources.

In the past I have written a few articles about Solar Power, and about how IT people have a certain amount of leverage to make the business’s they work for “greener”.  Although Solar Power is a GREAT method of generating your own environmentally friendly power, the panels and batteries can get VERY expensive.  This article is about Grid-Tied solar energy systems and how they can help you save electricity, save the future of man-kind on this planet, and not go broke getting enough panels to power ALL your needs in one shot.

The key is to do it step by step.

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Using OpenX to Manage your ads on your website or Blog

• Author: DigitalMind
• Filed under: Uncategorized
• Date: Jul 12,2008

OpenX is a free PHP based software to manage and deliver ads on your website/blog however way you want it to.

For example, here on TechieNATION, I have 3 ad spaces.  One on the top right next to the title, one just below it and to the right underneath the random quotes I display there, and one near the bottom left.  At first, I was only displaying Google ads so the ads changed constantly and kept everything looking “fresh” so there wasn’t much to do.  I eventually joined other programs like Google’s Adsense in order to get more flexibility with the ads that I display, however I didn’t want to completely stop with Adsense either.  I also didn’t always want to display the very SAME banner from my other affiliate programs every time at the same spot.  This is where OpenX comes in.

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Demotivational Pictures from demotivationalpics.com

• Author: DigitalMind
• Filed under: Uncategorized
• Date: Jul 11,2008

I apologize for the lack of posts in the last 2 weeks.  I have a good reason, I swear !

Last week a friend of mine, (who is kept busy maintaining ps3center.net and working on other bigger projects) , has given me a website that already has a decent amount of traffic.  A wonderful gift ! I’ve been spending the last 2 weeks getting to know the website and upgrading it as much as I could.

Demotivationalpics.com is the anti-motivational poster website. They’re funny pictures with not so motivational things written below them.  It’s hard to explain but i’m sure that looking at the 3 pictures in this post you get the idea.  There’s enough to keep you busy watching new ones for hours on the site ! (Although I would not suggest it for children AT ALL, there are posters with vulgar language and naughty pictures)

Although not techie related at all, I gladly took it over, and I will add a section eventually for techie demotivational pictures.