Eric Allen

My new favorite site – Google Reader

ericallen — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 04:06:56 +0000

So I spend a lot of time everyday checking different sites for news and information, like TUAW, Engadget, and Fake Steve Jobs (one of my new favorites). Checking many different sites all the time leaves me into manually going and checking the different sites or having tab open and manually reloading them when I remember.

Recently I have come across Google Reader. I know it is an RSS reader. I have never before been very big on RSS feeds but i thought I would give Google Reader a shot. What made me decide to give them a shot is when I read an article about using Google Reader on your Wii to check up on all of the news that you follow. I thought this was cool and tried it out. It worked remarkably well. So I thought I would see what Google Reader was all about.

I started by adding in the feeds for TUAW and Engadget. I think my favorite thing about the amount of stuff that you can do by press shortcut keys. To start off press ? and it will show you the legend for the shortcuts. r will reload a page, g then a will show you all post, and g then h will go home. Google has done a very good job with Reader it is easy to use and removes the culter that fills the web. It just gives me what I want when I want.

I know that you are problably thinking why not just use a RSS reader like NewsFire or something like it. I guess my response is these applications don’t seem to feel right to me. I don’t want to be overwhelmed by the information. Plus I can use Google Gears and take Reader offline and read the articles when I don’t have an internet connect. So the best of both worlds. I am very interested in where Google Gears is going. I just wish more sites supported it. But that is just a matter of time.

Well I guess this is enough random ramblings about Google Reader.

-eric

Allergies

ericallen — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 19:44:39 +0000

The last couple of weeks I have been hit hard be some allergies. I haven’t really had them before but I guess I have them now. When I was a kid, I never had allergies well I have always had one but besides that. I would always kind of laugh at my friends when they had allergies in the summer but now I guess that it is payback and I now get them. But yeah for drugs to make them go away. Well I guess that is enough rambelings now.

In the words of my nephew “peace out rainbow trout”

-eric

Apple tv

ericallen — Wed, 30 May 2007 21:20:20 +0000

So his Steveness announced that the Apple tv will be able to play videos off of youtube. This is a big deal. I think it is really cool and very interesting. I still don’t have one but this is drawing me closer to getting one. Not that I watch much youtube videos. I really like the interface and the apple remote to control it. Nice and easy and alot of eye candy.

I am actually holding out for one thing. The ability natively to play multiple formats of videos from a network drive(s). I really like my itunes but it is not where I keep my videos because mostly itunes doesn’t like the formats that I like for video. So once that happens I will probably be getting one.

I currently have a mythtv setup. I really like it but it requires alot of attention and configuration to do what you want it to do. I still haven’t gotten it perfect. What I like about it is that it plays back all of the formats that I want.

-eric

New site

ericallen — Wed, 30 May 2007 21:08:22 +0000

So I have been talking about a site that I have been building. So it is almost ready to come out and be seen. It is going to be called eroctech. The basis of it is that is going to be centered around your tech. So that you can let others know what you have, know how you like your tech, and how to use it. Eroctech adding in a social aspect to it too (I know that is what everyone is doing recently) but I feel that the social aspect helps to add another dimension to the site.

Once it is up I will post about it again. It should be soon.

-eric

Off roading

ericallen — Thu, 24 May 2007 05:45:23 +0000

So last Saturday, my dad and I took my Escape and went offroading up Logan canyon. It was a lot of fun. There weren’t too many people up off roading or 4 wheeling.

I was very suprized at how well my Escape did on the trails. When you think off roading you don’t think a Ford Escape you think of something like a Jeep Wrangler or a Land Rover Discovery or even an original Hummer. But my little Escape did everything that I through at it and didn’t even hickup.

There are a lot of off roading trails and roads around Logan and I would like to go on all of them. So I got a couple maps of the area and as I go on each of them I am going to highlight them and mark them off so that I know that I went on it. This way I can keep track of where I have been and where I need to go still. I think that I would be cool to have a GPS unit in my car so that I could track where I am going and also to build the maps into it. I also think it would be fun to do some geocaching.

Overall it was a lot of fun. Here are a couple pictures that I took of the area. It was awesome, everything was green and in bloom.

off roading 5-19-07

You might be a geek if…

ericallen — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 18:46:14 +0000

You might be a geek if you dream in WoW.
You might be a geek if everything else stops around 11 pm (or the correct time for your location) so that you can check woot.
You might be a geek if you go into withdrawls when you are not around your computer for hours.
You might be a geek if you more email addresses than personalities in your head. (ok this one doesn’t really make sense)

Well here are acouple you might be a geek jokes that i have been coming up with. I will add more to it later.

peace out

ericallen — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 19:42:23 +0000

Ok I am a geek and I’m proud of it. I am always thinking of the next and best techonology out there. But this is were I run into a little bit of a problem, why does most techological things suck? Why do I have to spend most of my time adjusting, fixing, or reinstalling things. I hate this. I want my gadgets, my software, my computers, my parents TV just to work and not having to have me spending my time on it.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like alot of the tinkering with different gadgets and software that I have in order to get the best possible use out of it. But I don’t want it so that evenever my parents try to watch a tv show they recorded on the DVR they call me. Why can’t techology in general be easier to use.

For the most part, I am my father’s son, wow that was a strange referrence. Let me give some background. My dad will research cars for months before he will even go test drive one. He will know more about every car on the lot and all the other compribal cars than a callective of all of the salesmen at the dealership. I like to go with him to look at cars to see how many times he can stump the salesman in one converstation. Moving on from that tangent. My point that I was getting to was that there are so many different techology, gadgets, devices, software, etc… out there that it is hard for the review companies to review them all. Don’t get me wrong they do a good job in reviewing alot of things but well it bugs me when it doesn’t have the one that i’m looking for.

So I am currently working on a project to fix this. Here is the idea behind it. Turn the users of the different devices, gadgets, software into the review and let them let you know about it. This way maybe a broader range of things can be reviewed with real world experinces. Allowing the users to roc their stuff. So that is my idea and i’m working on it. I hope to have it up in the next month or two.

Eric

My experiences with Mythtv

ericallen — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 17:50:30 +0000

So recently I have been toying around with using Mythtv. For the past little while whenever I have tried to do it something would happen, for instance my motherboard got fired. I have finally gotten everything and got everything installed.

I have installed it on 2 different computers. My first computer that I put it on was a HP e-pc, 700 mhz celeron, with 256mb of ram, and a 60 gb hd. Yeah it is a pretty small box and not very much power but it was something to test out on and eventually I want to make it into a front end that I attach to my tv.

I decided to use Fedora core 6 Zod to run mythtv on top of. I would recommend this way because it makes it very easy to setup. You just need to install fedora and update it. Then add a repository for the mythtv stuff and then just run yum install mythtv-suite and it will install pretty much everything for you. It is a nice easy installation.

Well I got it installed on my e-pc after a little work because I didn’t have a cd-rom or anything in it. Because of the lack of expansion on the e-pc I decided not to put a tuner in this box but just play back the stuff I already had. This little box does a great job at play back of videos pretty much any kind of without alot of processing power. I was very impressed by it.

Finally I got a new motherboard for my computer. I got everything installed and set everything up. I ran into a small snag while trying to use the mythtv. My video card was freaking out. At first I was using the on board SiS video card (yeah not my favorate) and it just could not handle the video that was being thrown at it. So I put in an old tnt2 that I had lieing around. It does the job and does it well, no problems at all with it. Well I am only using my monitor as the screen instead of hooking it up to the tv. That is a project for another day.

All in all I have really enjoyed the mythtv and it wasn’t very hard to setup. Also it is very customizable, an added bonus.

Here is the link to the setup that I used to install everything. Jarod has done a very good job at putting everything together. Wilsonet

Eric

New Year, New Semester

ericallen — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 17:56:42 +0000

Well it is a new year, welcome 2007. Today is the begining of Spring semester at school. With that I am finally in some of the classes that relate to my major, WAHOO! Not that it has taken 3 years or so to get this far but hey I’m here.

The class that I’m looking forward to the most is my Database class. I know this probably sounds a little different and weird. Currently, I’m writing a web page that is driven off of php and mysql. I don’t really know alot about database structure and design so I am probably making all kinds of mistakes. So I’m looking forward to his class in order to help design the database of the site properly and most effectively and efficently. I will problably have to get some help with it in the long run anyways in order to tune it properly and to make it scream.

Well Christmas was good. I got to spend alot of time home with my family over the break. The only bad part is that most of the time that I was down there I had a sinus infection. It kind of knocked me out for most of it.

One of the exciting things was spending time with my necies and nephews. After christmas all of my family went on a train ride for a couple of hours. My nephews are train fanatics. They really love Thomas the train and his friends. So they had a lot of fun on the train ride. To me it was a little painful mostly because of the sinus infection. It was also 3 hours and well with a sinus infection its not to happy. Also I took my DS to pass along the time but i forgot to charge it the night before so it died half was through.

That is what has been happening recently.
peace out.
Eric

Planes!

ericallen — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 02:18:05 +0000

This is a very interesting picture (photoshoped) of planes taking off at an airport.