Everyone knows that corn ethanol is a joke. Oh, you believed all those E85 commercials? Well, it’s not as good as it looks. Regular old gasoline is able to produce about 5 times as much energy as went in to it’s production. Corn ethanol only produces about 1.3 times as much energy as goes it to it’s creation because it has to have the sugar extracted from it, then it is converted to sugar ethanol. This process makes it barely break even in it’s efficiency. The plus, of course, being that it is a renewable resource that grows here in the US and removes dependency on foreign oil. Sure, it’s nice and “green”, but it’s still got 15% regular old gasoline in it and it really isn’t efficient enough to lower the prices at the pump.

What if we could take plants like corn or pretty much any other crop and turn it in to 100% ethanol fuel that is more efficient than current corn/sugar ethanol? Enter cellulosic ethanol. Part of what makes sugar ethanol inefficient and expensive is that not all plants have a lot of sugar in them to extract and process in to ethanol. All plants, however, have cellulose. Lots of it. A company called Range Fuels has plans to build a 100 million gallon per year cellulosic ethanol plant in Georgia, using wood waste from Georgia’s forests as it’s feed stock. Range Fuels’ claim is that their ethanol will be able to produce 16 times as much energy as goes in to its production. Similarly, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is spearheading a 125 million dollar initiative to research and develop biofuels utilizing cellulose to help relieve our dependence on foreign fuels.

These technologies go beyond using sugars found in sugarcane and corn to produce the ethanol and instead use non-food plants and parts of plants, relying on the cellulose. Instead of raising the prices of sugar or corn at the grocery store because it is instead being used to create fuel, the stalks left over would instead be used as the fuel. The corn could once again do what it’s best at: give me a stomach ache and not get fully digested. It goes beyond just using things like woodchips and corn stalks to create the fuel. Almost any bio waste could be turned in to ethanol, such as grass clippings, fallen trees, and pretty much any other plant waste. Now that the fuels are starting to be produced, it is just a matter of time before all of the car manufacturers start realizing that this is the way of the future and start making all of their cars ethanol-ready.

The real question is: How long until I’m driving an ethanol hybrid plug-in that I charge in my garage next to a personal ethanol processor into which I unload my grass clippings, weeds, and other yard waste so that I can fuel my car for the week?

I’ve wanted one of these things since before they were even released. Now, several months later, my terrific wife was awesome enough to find out that Best Buy was getting a bunch in and all we had to do was wake up early and wait for it this past Sunday. As soon as we got home, I set it up and we started playing Wii Sports and played all of the games in it: Tennis, Golf, Baseball, Bowling, and Boxing. If you aren’t familiar with how the Wii works, the controller is motion sensative, so in tennis, you have to swing it to hit the ball, in golf, you have to do a full swing to hit it or a short little swing to putt. We also got Wii Play which includes a second controller and offers us another 9 or so mini games whose purpose are to teach you how to use the controller to its fullest and has some crazy games such as cow racing, some sort of tank war game, duck-hunt-esque target practice, fishing, and a few others. The game that I’m hooked on right now is the golf game included with Wii Sports, but I can’t wait until we start building up our collection and get games like Super Monkey Ball, which was great on the GameCube and looks even better on the Wii, and possible a better golf game like Tiger Woods golf.

After a few years of using Firefox, I’ve learned some fun tricks that you can do to it to make your Internet browsing experience even better. If you use Firefox, I highly suggest reading through this and doing some of the things listed.

• Multiple Tabs As Your Homepage
  A while ago I accidentally discovered that you can easily have your homepage set with multiple pages, so when you open Firefox or click on the home button, it automatically opens each page in a different tab. The easiest way to do this is to open a tab for each page you want to have set as your home page, arrange the tabs the way you want them to appear each time, open up your main preferences, and click on “Use Current Pages” under home page. That’s it!
• Quick Find
  Looking for a specific word on a page? Hit the “/” key and you’ll notice that a little box on the bottom pops up that says “Quick Find”. Type what you want to find and it’ll instantly navigate you to that point on the page.
• Auto-Complete Addresses
  Type Control+L to get to the address bar, or just click on it. Type just the word that goes between the “www.” and the “.com/net/org”. If you hit Control+Enter, it will automatically fill it in with “.com”, Shift+Enter will automatically fill it in with “.net”, and Control+Shift+Enter will fill it in with “.org”.
• Navigating Tabs
  Hate having to click around with your mouse to navigate between the tabs you’ve got open? Here’s the keyboard shortcuts:
  • Control+Tab (Rotate forward through the tabs)
  • Control+Shift+Tab (Rotate backwards through the tabs)
  • Control+1-9 (Jump to any of the first nine tabs)
• Delete a URL From Your History
  You’ve probably noticed that as you type in a URL in the address bar, it shows you a list of similar links you’ve been to as you type. If you (for some unknown reason) want and/or need to remove one of those links, just use the up and down arrow keys on your keyboard to highlight, then simply hit the delete key and *poof* it’s gone.
• Got Broadband? Speed up Firefox
  If you have a broadband Internet connection (who doesn’t?), you can use pipelining to speed up your page loads. Basically, this allows Firefox to simultaneously load multiple items on a page, instead of the default setting of one at a time. Type “about:config” into the address bar and hit enter. Then, type “network.http” in the filter field at the top of the page and change the following settings by double-clicking on them to change them.
  • Set “network.http.pipelining” to “true”
  • Set “network.http.proxy.pipelining” to “true”
  • Set “network.http.pipelining.maxrequests” to a number of around 20-30 (depending on how fast your broadband is). This will allow it to make up to that many requests at once.
  • Last, but not least, right-click anywhere on the window and select New -> Integer. Name it “nglayout.initialpaint.delay” and set the value to “0″. This is the amount of time the browser waits before it will act on the data it receives.

• Edit the “Close Tab” Button
  Ever click on a tab to open it an accidentally clicked the [x] to close it? I know I have. Open up about:config and type “browser.tabs.closeButtons” in the filter. There are 4 values you can enter in to change how they will appear:
  • 0 - Only display the [x] on the tab at the forefront.
  • 1 - [Default] Display the [x] on all tabs.
  • 2 - Don’t display the [x] on any tabs (Control+W or middle click on the tab will still close it).
  • 3 - Display a single [x] at the far right of the tab bar (Firefox 1.x Style).

I hope this was all helpful!

Jessie and I have a DVR through Time Warner Cable. We love it. We’re hooked. It completely changes the television watching experience and allows us to watch shows when it’s convenient for us instead of when some network big shot decides when the best time to air it is. I would say of the shows we watch regularly, we only catch maybe one or two a week when they’re actually “live”.

That being said, I have a few suggestions for how the companies that manufacture these DVR units can drastically improve their features:

• Add another TV tuner. They’ve already got two TV tuners inside the box, allowing it to record two things at once or record one thing and watch something else, but if you want to record three things simultaneously or record two things and watch something besides those two, you’re out of luck.
• I understand why advertisers feel the need to broadcast their commercials at twice the volume that the program itself is broadcasting at, but at some point they’ve gotta realize that consumers aren’t going to buy a product if their ad campaign annoys the shit out of people. Cars have technology that auto-adjust the volume of the radio depending on outside noise, would it be that hard for cable boxes to auto-adjust the volume to keep the decibels at relatively even levels when it switches over from programming to commercials and from channel to channel?
• People pirate, it happens, get over it. Just like when people used to record copyrighted content on to *GASP* VHS tapes, they do it now with DVDs. My DVR has a SATA hookup as well as a USB hookup that are completely useless. Allow me to “back up” recorded shows so that I can view them again! Yes, I know I can always go out and buy a DVD burner to hook up to the video output of the DVR, but why do that when I already have the technology on my computer and it’s just a software limitation of the DVR preventing me from connecting the two.
• Ok, last one: Give it a larger hard drive. Sometimes I don’t get around to watching everything that week or even the next week. With HD programming readily available for many popular channels, it should be able to store more than a week or two’s worth of HD programs.

That’s it! If you had the attention span to read this far, I applaud you.

I’ve known for a while now that moving to Milwaukee was going to be a good idea, but I just found out how screwed I would have been had I decided to keep my job at CompUSA in Roseville, MN, and pursue an management career path. Before the press got wind of it, a friend and former coworker told me that everyone was losing their jobs because CompUSA is closing 120+ stores, including every store in Minnesota. I feel absolutely horrible for all of my former coworkers and friends, but holy crap am I dodged that bullet. Even if I had decided to keep a job with the company and transfer to the Brookfield store here in Wisconsin I’d still be screwed, because they’re closing that one too. It’s just a matter of time before the other half of the company gets “liquidated”. Sadly, another brick and mortar technology store circles the drain. Looks like I’ll be shopping for computer parts almost exclusively from Newegg now.

I just switched webhosts for both primakow.net and digitallywise.com. I’ve never actually done this before and I was quite nervous about doing it. Not as much for this site, because it is much smaller, but transferring Digitally Wise over scared the hell out of me. It has a 20mb+ database and about 60mb+ worth of files that needed to be transferred over. Thankfully, however, it went relatively smoothly, and my new host had live chat online while I was doing it to help me out the few times I needed it.

The reasons for doing this were twofold: First and foremost, money. My new host saves me about $150 a year. Beyond that, however, my previous webhost, to be blunt, blew chunks. Big nasty chunks. They overloaded the hell out of their servers, which is why Digitally Wise often took forever to load (or didn’t load at all!). Also, their customer support was less than helpful. Every time I attempted to contact them because my site was down (yet, mysteriously, their “netstatus” page always said it was up and working fine) the best answer I could get was “it’s a known issue with your server, our technicians are working on fixing it.” No saying when it would be back up, no explination as to what was causing the problems. Even when I was promised compensation for their failure (I’ve been told I would recieve a month for free - twice), I never recieved it. Don’t get me wrong, I will admit that I never had issues with them for primakow.net, but the database for this blog is tiny and with DigitallyWise.com they put me on a crappy overloaded server and wouldn’t move me.

Ok, enough bitching about things past. My new webhost, ASO, has so far been great. I’ve immediately noticed a difference in load times for my sites, I can host both sites on the same account using the same bandwidth and storage space, which saves me a shitload of cash, and best of all, they’re helpful!

A few years ago Jessie and I were given an original iBook (300mhz G3) by my mom, who no longer needed it and rarely every used it. At the time it was already very dated and didn’t really have much use other than word processing. It had only 96mb of RAM, no wireless card, was running OS 8.6, and the battery was basically dead. I immediately updated it to OS 9.2.1, but didnt’ have a copy of OS X to install and with only 96mb of RAM it would have run poorly anyways. For a long while, we really didn’t use it for very much other than dragging a long ethernet cable over and hooking it up to the internet.

Recently, however, I have breathed new life in to the system. The first big upgrade it got was a AirPort card. The style used in this notebook is discontinued and kind of hard to find, but I ended up finding one relatively inexpensively, so I installed it. So now it had wireless internet access, but the battery was still dead, it was still running only OS 9.2.1 and the lack of RAM was killing me. Next step: Find more RAM. This thing takes PC66 memory, which is honestly a huge pain in the ass to find. Even just finding PC100 that will downclock to PC66 was tough, but I somehow found a VERY inexpensive stick of 256mb PC133 on eBay that would downclock all the way to PC66 and was compatable with the computer. The difference between having 96mb of RAM and having it now maxed out at 288mb is huge. I know it’s slow no matter what, but this made a big difference.

The iBook was now ready to handle a copy of OS X. Unfortunately, the newest version, “Tiger”, requires a FireWire port and a DVD player, neither of which my iBook has, so I had to settle with the next best thing, “Panther”, or OS X 10.3. I got everything installed last night and just now finished installing all of the newest updates to bring it to 10.3.9 as well as a whole slew of software updates. Suprisingly for its age, its running great! Its obviously not performing like a new iBook would, but its running OS X much smoother than I thought it would and the wireless access is working great, which is not something I could say for OS 9.2.1. The only thing left that it needs is to get the battery working, but I’m not sure if that’s the battery itself or the charging board, as it actually doesn’t see a battery right now. That, however, is a problem for a different day.

I was reading slashdot today, as I do every day, and there’s an article that, if you had seen my old keyboard, seemed to be stating the obvious. Some test at some lab in Sweden showed that a normal PC keyboard contains something like 33,000 bacteria per square centimeter. To give you a sense of what that means, they also pointed out that the average toilet seat has 130 bacteria per square centimeter. Pretty nasty, eh?

This, for the record, is why I decided a few weeks ago to pour a glass of wine in to my keyboard because as we all know, alcohol kills bacteria. Apparently, however, alcohol also kills keyboards, which is why I have a spiffy new keyboard!

Ok, so I know I just reinstalled Windows on my computer, but after a bit of research I’ve decided to convert my primary operating system over to a Linux distro called Ubuntu. It’s easy to install (easier than Windows!), offers good online support from a very large community, and it has all of the features and software I’d need from Windows built-in to it as well as a few additional networking features that I don’t neccesarily need, but are nice to have.

The only down-side is that there’s no native Guild Wars client for Linux, so I’m keeping Winblows XP just for that purpose. Hopefully, Arena.net, the makers of Guild Wars, will release a Linux client sometime soon and I can completely abandon Windows.

Whelp, I finally got my computer to ‘FUBAR‘ status the other day. I’m not sure exactly what I had done, but some where along the lines I corrupted what had obviously been some important system files, because I was getting errors that I just couldn’t ignore any longer. Maybe it was when I was messing around in my registry, or maybe it was just natural windows decay, but either way I had to move all my shit to my backup drive so I could format and reinstall Windows XP Pro on my main drive. I’ve pretty much got all of the essentials re-installed (Trillian, Guild Wars, iTunes, Firefox, etc) and most of my settings are back the way I want them, so it looks like everything is going well. I do, however, understand why some of my customers throw a fit when they learn that they too will have to do all the reinstallation after we format and restore their computer to the original factory software settings. It can certainly be a pain if you don’t know what you’re doing and weren’t expecting to have to do it. On the plus side, my desktop has never been less cluttered with a record-breaking 4 icons.