Where I work we had a bunch of old hardware laying around waiting to be recycled, so we set it up to knock it down. In the video is an old Apple Macbook, several Apple Mac Minis, a Netgear Firewall/Route and a bunch of various sized hard drives.

I was searching all over for a decent dial-up modem ringtone for my iPhone for the longest time, but just couldn’t find one that I liked. So I decided to make my own. It was a major pain in the ass. Seeing as how I haven’t used a dialup modem since around the year 2000, and I only had one system that still has a dial-up modem. Then I had to find a dialup service to test with. Then record. Then edit. Then convert. But after much doing and a little geeking out, the result is 10 seconds of retro goodness that will make your friends jealous. I settled on this 10 second slice as my favorite in the modem handshake sequence. I think it makes the best ringtone and is the perfect length too.

So go ahead and download my freshly made 56k Dialup Modem Handshake Ringtone for your iPhone. Once you’ve downloaded the ringtone simply double click and it will be imported into iTunes as a ringtone. Enjoy!

UPDATE: as requested in the comments below, here is a 56k Modem Ringtone in .mp3 format for Android users as well. Go nuts.

Last month I was fortunate enough to attend the George Clinton and P-Funk All Stars concert at the B.B. King Blues Club in midtown Manhattan. It was an early birthday gift from my Fiancé, quite possibly the best birthday gift I’ve received in quite some time (if ever). Because of George Clinton’s policy of allowing fan recordings (much like the Grateful Dead’s policies), I was able to shoot some video at the concert. It isn’t the best video as it was shot on my iPhone 3G, but still not horrible. I figured I would share it for all those true funk fans out there. Already looking forward to my next George Clinton concert (this one was my 5th).
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Some of you may not know, but I drink a lot of coffee. And when I say a lot, I mean like around 100 fl oz per day. I’m also a bit of a coffee-snob, meaning that I won’t drink any old swill you get at Dunkin’ Doughnuts (umm yuck!). So even a large (venti) black coffee at Starbucks costs over $2, and a couple coffees per day (even with free refills) adds up fast.

The recession and a new job have forced me to re-work my budget. So I decided to make coffee at work, but I’m the only one in the office who drinks coffee. So if I were to brew a whole pot, it would go to waste, and I’d be spending about $14/week on beans. So I decided to get the Keurig B60 Special Edition Gourmet Single-Cup Home-Brewing System for the office.

I’m not going to use the K-Cups that most people have to buy for the Keurig. Instead, I’m going to grind my own coffee and use the My K-Cup Reusable Coffee Filter. This will allow me to only use 1-2 lbs of coffee per month at work. This will actually save me somewhere between $50-70 per month on my coffee expenses.

Now for the review of the machine. I’ve been using it for almost a week at this point. Overall I am pleased with the quality of coffee it brews. The trial K-Cups that came with the brewer were pretty bad, not anywhere near up to my standards. However using my own coffee with the reusable filter makes a pretty good cup of java. You need to grind the coffee about as fine as you can (think espresso grind) in order to get good extraction and a dark cup. Be sure to tamp the grounds down lightly into the filter too. The coffee it brews is akin to a French Press, this is because the reusable filter is metal, and not paper. This lets all the flavorful coffee oils flow into your cup. Great for taste, but can do a number on your stomach, so be careful.

As for care and maintenance of the machine, it’s pretty easy. The only major pain is cleaning the reusable filter, but for the money savings, I don’t mind it. All in all I would suggest this machine to anyone who wants fresh coffee often, where brewing an entire pot isn’t economical. So work out the math, and if it makes cents (har har), get one!

I am not a huge fan of OSX, but I have to support it for users at my job. I’ve had several people recently ask me how to permanently disable the bouncing icons in the dock/taskbar. The solution is simple. Open a Terminal window and type the following commands:

$ defaults write com.apple.dock no-bouncing -bool TRUE
$ killall Dock

This will permanently disable the jumping and bouncing icons in the dock bar. To re-enable the bouncing, change the above command’s ‘True’ argument to ‘False’

Have fun with that.

So, I’m sitting in my apartment tonight, and my Chefmate P70D2AL-D4 Microwave starts beeping randomly. At first it was just a single beep, then a few minutes later it went ape-shit. Scary thing was it first was saying 6:66 then 66:66. The keypad wouldn’t work anymore, and just kept on beeping until I unplugged the thing. Reading around the internet, I’ve found that others have had this same problem with this microwave. Wonderful.

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