It's A Binary World 2.0

Insights on fatherhood, technology, culture, photography, and politics

Websites and Lost Culture

| April 19, 2013

I had something of an obsession with preserving history. It’s why I am constantly using photography to document my life. (And was doing so back when we had to use expensive film) A few months ago I wrote about how emulation can help us preserve our culture when it comes to video games. We’re in [...]

Podcasts I’m Listening to 2013

| February 17, 2013

I’ve cut back a lot because I have less time to listen to podcasts. Here are the ones I have now:   Video Games Giant Bombcast – This is a HILARIOUS podcast that is mostly about video games.  I say it’s mostly about video games because these guys often will go off on random tangents [...]

When Twitter is Awesome

| January 17, 2013

The thing I like the most about Twitter is the ability to interact with creatives in real time.  In the past you had to write a letter to a writer, artist, musician, etc and hope that, maybe, they’d actually read it and that, maybe, they’d feel compelled to reply with something more than boilerplate.  I [...]

Trying out VMWare Player after nearly a decade

| January 11, 2013

Nearly a year ago I did a comparison of Virtualbox and Red Hat’s virt-manager.  Although I was pretty happy with virt-manager, I’ve had to continue using Virtualbox because so far virt-manager isn’t able to do a bridged ethernet connection without having to ditch NetworkManager and/or do some weird stuff.  I’d given up on VMWare a [...]

December 2012 Games Report

| January 4, 2013

Saint’s Row the Third (14 hrs):  I got a lot of video games for my birthday and Christmas (mostly on Steam).  So I wanted to finish up the last narrative game I had started before playing those games.  I played a few missions in Saint’s Row The Third.  As I had surmised before, the loose [...]

How Best to Rip and Manage Your Own (legally purchased) DVDs to create your own Netflix Instant

| February 27, 2012

I had two reasons for starting this project: 1) my wife and I like to collect Disney movies from our youth.  These movies are most likely to be watched by kids and kids are likely to damage DVDs.  I’ve heard lots of anecdotes on the net from parents who are on their fourth purchase of [...]

What I’ve Been Up To Comics-Wise

| January 30, 2012

Dan and I started a website called Comic POW! Where each week we go over the best comics of that week.  It’s been going for approximately 3 months and I’ve been having a lot of fun with it.  The main feature is posted every Friday, but we occasionally have content on other days.  I’ve also started writing [...]

Oracle’s Virtualbox vs Red Hat’s Virtual Machine Manager

| December 21, 2011

I’ve been using Virtualbox for a long time to run virtual machines when I want to check out other distros before I install them on one of my computers or to review them.  It’s MOSTLY open source, although some of the key parts like USB 2.0 are free to use, but not open source.  So [...]

A New Copyright Exception Should Be Considered

| December 5, 2011

In the past week I’ve listened to the most recent episodes of The Commandline Podcast and The Giant Bombcast. The former was a discussion of those who willingly violate copyright law as a comparison to those who violated the Volstead Act and 18th Amendment to the US constitution both of which made it illegal to [...]

Incredulity and Learning in Las Vegas

| September 10, 2011

It’s my second time in Vegas and I definitely think that the best way to first experience Vegas is arriving at night, as I did this time.  The city really looks wrong and ugly during the day.  Like a bar where they need to keep the lights dim so you’re 100% sure what that person [...]

Replacing the File/Print Server

| February 11, 2011

A few years ago I heard about the Fit-PC. It was a computer that was the size of a stack of two or three CD jewel cases running Ubuntu. This was pretty cool, but, most importantly, it only used 15 watts of electricity when under highest load. At first I entertained using it to replace [...]

Automatically Posting your Top 3 Artists from Last.fm onto Twitter (with Python!)

| December 20, 2010

I wrote this code a while back because a website that does the same thing seemed to miss my posts every other week.  So I figured I’d write my own in python to do the same thing to me.  Then I just put it into a cron job to automatically run it every Sunday.  I’m [...]

Getting my new Sandisk Sansa Fuze to work with gPodder

| November 10, 2010

So, a while back I caved and got an iPod shuffle.  While it worked well at first, over the last year it has been a constant pain in my butt.  All I want to do is use gPodder to get my podcasts and listen to them on the way to work and at the gym. [...]

Doctorow Review: Eastern Standard Tribe & A Place So Foreign and Eight More

| October 21, 2010

On my trip to the Grand Canyon I read Cory Doctorow’s second novel, Eastern Standard Tribe.  The book begins in media res with the main character informing us that he’s in an insane asylum and that he is deciding whether to give himself a lobotomy with a pencil.  We also quickly learn he believes himself [...]

Number 9 Number 9 Number 9

| September 19, 2010

14 Sept Sometime in my junior or senior year of college I came across a book about building my own computer and resolved to do it.  My tribulations with my Dell computer were enough to convince me that building computers with generic parts was the way to go.  Later experience with my Emachine and the [...]