Hello again, friends and tech-lovers. Today we are going to talk about building a Home Theater PC or HTPC for short. More importantly, building a budget-friendly HTPC. In one of my previous posts, I talked about the Ceton inifiniTV 4 tuner, a great way to turn your PC into a set-top box for your cable [...]
Got an Old PowerPC Mac? Resuscitate It with Linux.
Apple has long left the PowerPC based Macs of old behind; however, any G4 or G5 based Mac is still a very capable machine. Most of the G5 Power Macs I have come across are dual-core G5 machines and some of the iMacs are as well. Apple isn’t releasing updates for the last supported version [...]
D-Star Breathes New Life into Amateur Radio
D-Star is the newest mode I have recently added to my Amateur Radio arsenal. I bought an Icom ID-31A D-star, radio which I will be reviewing here soon, but I wanted to share a little about D-star and why it’s a cool mode before I did the review. The History of D-Star D-star is a [...]
How to Root the Nexus 7; And Some Good Reasons Why You Should do it
The Nexus 7 is no doubt one of the hottest tablets to hit the Android Community. Running a bloat free Google OS on top of a Tegra 3 platform has proven to be a crowd favorite. So why take the possibly “warranty voiding” steps to gain Root access to the device? Even if you [...]
Building a Simple Ham Radio Antenna without Soldering
One of the first things you might want to do after getting your Ham Radio License is talk on the radio. However, there are many things you may have to do to get that done depending on what kind of radio you purchase. If you purchase a handheld radio, you likely already have an antenna [...]
How to get Amazon Prime Streaming Media and Flash Content to Play on your Nexus 7
Amazon Prime Streaming “Ronin” on Nexus 7 Flash is dead…or is it? Although Adobe Flash is no longer support on the latest version of Android 4.1 (Jellybean), that does not mean you can’t enjoy the benefits of Flash content and movies. The move from flash-based content to HTML5 has been long underway but the [...]
Making Siri Work for You; Some Gear Diary Suggestions
Image courtesy of headlondon.com Siri is an interesting innovation. I remember back in my early days in the tech biz, when I read about and heard plenty of people talking about a) how voice recognition was just around the corner, and b) how voice recognition was dang hard, and it was going to be a [...]
Go Custom with Skinit’s Infinity Case for iPhone 4
Tired of going to Best Buy and looking through hundreds of boring, repetitive case designs? Skinit.com thinks they’ve got you covered. Today, the website launches an innovative line of customizable cases for the iPhone 4 and 4S. As a site known for their high-quality protective skins and casings, the company’s aptly named Infinity series offers [...]
When is a ROM Update an Official Update? The Verizon Galaxy Nexus Edition
As a Verizon Galaxy Nexus owner for merely a month, one thing that I have learned is that you can not expect to have the update from Google at the same time as the GSM version. Here I sit one month in, and it’s been five months since the launch of the phone on Verizon [...]
Mobile Blogging in 2012; What a Difference!
I am headed into the city for a meeting on behalf of Gear Diary, and after I’m done, Elana and I are grabbing a quick dinner in Manhattan before we have a fund-raiser for an organization that supports services for those who are hearing-impaired. Were I going into the city for a full day of [...]
Got a Weird Icon in Your Android Notification Area? Here’s How to Remove It
I have only had this happen twice, and it has annoyed me to no end until I figured out what was causing it. What I am talking about are two different issues caused by the same piece of adware; one issue is a weird icon appearing in your Android notification area. Another is an icon [...]
Which Ham Radio Should I Buy?
In my continuing series on the subject of Ham Radio, I’ll now attempt to answer the great unknown question: Which ham radio should I buy?? Well What do you Want to Do? In a lot of ways, this is almost the same as asking which phone one should buy. The first question you should be asking isn’t which [...]
How to Get a Ham Radio License
After my last ham radio post, one of the first things I wanted to write about is how you can get your Amateur Radio License. Well, it’s not as difficult now as it used to be. When I last tested to get my General Class license, I had to be able to receive Morse Code at 13 [...]
SBCGlobal Users, Are You Having Trouble Sending Your Mail? Here’s Help!
Image courtesy of OrganicKuwait blog Hi there, SBCGlobal users! I’d like to speak to those of you who work on Macs or Macbook Pros; I’ve been off Windows for a while (wow; I make it sound like heroin, don’t I), so I don’t know if what happened to me today is true on Windows boxes [...]
How To Replace a Kindle Keyboard Battery
On a recent game day, I charged up my Kindle in anticipation for the long trip since it was not my turn to drive. I planned on staying relaxed before we played while following the adventures of Katniss Everdeen fighting to survive in the arena, but when I laid back with my neck pillow, the [...]






















