Originally published at Welcome to the Monkey House. Please leave any comments there.

I finally have a proper replacement for the Windows Vista sticker on my Dell XPS M1330 laptop.

For $5 you can get 10 of these metallic stickers at this link

Originally published at Welcome to the Monkey House. Please leave any comments there.

Purchased some stickers to support the Pirate Bay

Originally published at Welcome to the Monkey House. Please leave any comments there.

I am writing this blog post from my HTC Touch Pro mobile phone with the help of a Wordpress plugin called WPhone.
WPhone is a plugin that makes updating and managing your Wordpress blog much easier from a mobile browser. It keeps almost all the functionality of the regular Wordpress admin page, but changes the gui so things are easier to read, access, and use from a limited mobile interface.
Once WPhone is installed, just go to the normal WordPress admin login page and check “Use mobile admin interface”.
WPhone can be easily install from the WordPress admin page by selecting “add new” plugins and searching for it. I highly recommend it for anyone who might need to blog or manage their blog on the go.

Originally published at Welcome to the Monkey House. Please leave any comments there.

They look a lot like my old glasses from the front, but have the wider bows which seem to be all the rage with the kiddos these days. My last glasses were scratched to hell and were roughly 9-ish years old.

Originally published at Welcome to the Monkey House. Please leave any comments there.

Last Saturday I finally got a new cellphone. I decided to stick with Alltel/Verizon. The vast majority of my friends and family are with Alltel already and many who live downstate, as we say in the north, are already with Verizon. Thinking logically, staying with the new Verizon makes more economical sense for me. All these people will remain or become in network.

Anyway, I went with the HTC Touch Pro as my phone. To me, it was the coolest phone Alltel and Verizon offered.Sure, it would have been cool to get an iPhone, but it just wasn’t in the cards.

The HTC Touch Pro has many features that reminds me of the iPhone and exceeds the iPhone in some respects. It has a 3.2 megapixel camera which does video, it has a touch screen which can be used with a finger or a stylus, it has a slide out full keyboard, it uses wi-fi, and supports mini sd cards up to 32GB.

The HTC Touch Pro runs Windows Mobile 6.1, but I actually prefer Windows Mobile to the BlackBerry OS. Maybe it’s all the years of using Microsoft operating systems, but things are just where I expect them to be. It’s definitely not perfect, but it works for me. Also, in many ways, Windows Mobile is the most open mobile operating system available. It’s not Android by any means, but it’s less locked down and restricted than the iPhone. There are thousands of free and paid mobile apps available and soon Microsoft will be releasing their own version of an app store to make installing and find apps easier.

Do you have any Windows Mobile apps you would recommend? Leave a reply.

HTC Touch PRO

Originally published at Welcome to the Monkey House. Please leave any comments there.

You may have notice a new addition to this blog’s sidebar. It’s an Xbox 360 gamertag badge. Yup, about a month and a half ago I purchased an Xbox 360.
Surprising enough, the idea to purchase the Xbox 360 was not motivated by the ability to play video games on the machine. My main goal was to stream media to the new HDTV I had recently purchased.
The Xbox 360 seemed like a good choice for streaming movies and audio to my TV. It is cheaper than the Playstation 3 (PS3),  it plays h.264 video, it can play videos from a Linux file server via UPnP, and has the ability to play games (duh) which is an added bonus. I also don’t see the need to “upgrade” to blu-ray, which minimizes one of the PS3’s “advanatges”.
I haven’t own a game cosole since the Sega Genesis and don’t generally consider myself a gamer, but I have to admit I am loving the Xbox 360! I’ve hardly used it for streaming at all. Instead I spend most of my time with it playing games.
So far I’ve mostly bought used games from my brother or from Gamestop. The great thing about not playing games for awhile is that even the older Xbox games are new to me, so I’ve picked up a bunch of older Xbox & older Xbox 360 games for really cheap.
I’m a pretty casual gamer. I like games like the Civilization series, city building games, The Sims series, Guitar Hero, some sports games, and adventure games.
I’m not into 1st person shooters at all. In fact, they give me motion sickness. I don’t get motion sickness from anything else. On planes, boats, cars, roller coasters, or anything else I;ve experienced I’m fine. Pretty odd.
So far I’ve enjoyed “Guitar Hero III”, “Lego Indiana Jones”, and “Psychonauts”. From the Xbox Live arcade I’ve liked “A Kingdom for Kifflings” and “Feeding Frenzy”.
Anyway, I’d love to hear your recommendations for good Xbox 360 or compatible Xbox games. Like I said, I’ve been out of the loop for awhile.

Technorati Tags: Xbox, Xbox 360, freedom-hating, Microsoft

Originally published at Welcome to the Monkey House. Please leave any comments there.

About a month ago we joined the 21st century and bought a new LCD HDTV. We looked around a bit, checked prices around town, and settled on a 37″ 720p LG that we picked up for $650 at Best Buy. The TV was originally marked at $800. We were originally looking for a 32″ TV, but this one fell into our laps for the same price as most of the 32″ TVs. This TV was a Valentine’s/my birthday present.

I’m pretty happy with this TV. 37″. It seems to be just the right size for the living room. Our living room is an odd shape. It’s 22 feet long, but only about 14feet wide. The way the room is laid out, the couch and two chairs are sitting across from the wall width-wise.  Therefore the TV sits around 12 feet from where we sit. A TV any bigger would be too big, in my opinion. As it was, I found myself craning my neck back when watching this TV. Thankfully I’m over that.

A cool thing about the wall behind the TV is that on the other side is a utility closet that houses our washer and dryer. With my trusty cordless drill I made a few holes and routed all the wires from the TV through the closet. Now the TV is mounted on the wall with no wires showing! The mount I picked has an arm that swings out so the TV can be adjusted for viewing from anywhere in the room.

Here are some pictures I took during the install. I’ll take another pic to show how it looks now:

Edit:

Current picture

Technorati Tags: TV, HDTV,

Originally published at Welcome to the Monkey House. Please leave any comments there.

This is my current desktop. I’m running Linux Mint 6. Along the side is the often mentioned Conky.

Conky is a really cool system monitor that can be modified thousands of ways. It goes beyond simply monitoring the PC. As an example, you can see where I have mine report the current weather. There are also scripts to do things like monitor your email inbox, show your Gmail Calendar, serve up RSS feeds, and display lyrics to a song your listening to in a media player, among other things.

Click this link to see a larger version of this picture.

Technorati Tags: Conky, Linux, Linux Mint

Originally published at Welcome to the Monkey House. Please leave any comments there.

For those of you into these sorts of things, Woot.com is in the middle of a Woot-Off. Might be a good chance to get a good deal on a Christmas gift.

Technorati Tags: Deals

Originally published at Welcome to the Monkey House. Please leave any comments there.

A few weeks back I finally got my invite to download Skyfire. It’s a new mobile internet browser for Windows Mobile devices that is currently in beta.

There are a bunch of mobile internet browsers out there; Opera Mobile, Internet Explorer Mobile, Etc.

Skyfire is different. It delivers real webpages to your Windows Mobile Device. That includes Flash and Java, which is missing from other browsers. This means you can watch Youtube videos or streaming audio.

Skyfire does this by routing all the webpages through their servers and delivering images of the page to your browser. All the links and text boxes on the page are still clickable and work as if you were looking at the page with a desktop browser. When the browser is started it logs into Skyfire’s server, where it also stores your bookmarks.

I impressed by Skyfire’s performance. Even thought all it’s traffic is routed through their servers, the browser seems speedy. With my EVDO connection, it is only marginally slower than loading a mobile webpage in another browser. Videos on Youtube, while not the smoothest you’ve ever seen, are very watchable. Audio is delivered very well.

If you have a Windows Mobile device I strongly recommend this beta. Sign up at their website. There are versions for traditional Windows Mobile devices and those that have touch interfaces.