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So two months ago Lifehacker detailed some steps to max out bonus referral space on Dropbox with Google AdWords and free ad credits. I ran this as a short experiment with SugarSync, a service similar to Dropbox, which I’ll talk about my experience with. But first a quick overview, The idea is to take free advertising credits offered for Google AdWords and use that to run text ads pointing at your referral link to get people to sign up and get the bonus space offered for the referrals.
The Lifehacker article didn’t have quite the same success as the article they originally based the idea from. It looks like they spent $60 of their $100 credit to get 8 GB of free space, the original article maxed out 16 GB using just under $10. Both of them used Dropbox while I went a similar route with SugarSync. There are some advantages of SugarSync over Dropbox. The two that stand out the most are they currently offer a larger amount of free storage over Dropbox (5 GB vs. 2 GB), and they don’t cap the maximum amount you can get from their referral bonus (which is also larger than Dropbox, 500 MB vs 250 MB).
While running the ads for about 3 days I spent a total of $43 in credits; this netted me 304 click-throughs, 33 sign-ups, with 13 currently completed that have awarded me bonus space. Of course if those other sign-ups can download the SugarSync software in the future, and I’ll get the bonus space when they do. Read more after the break for some ideas I have regarding this method along with some other ideas for using my free AdWord Credits.
Continue reading Getting Stuff From Free Google AdWords Credits
So with Christmas and the Steam Winter sale over now, I have A LOT of video games that I haven’t played. Between getting a PS3 bundle with 2 games, 2 Xbox 360 games, 7 games in the last Humble Indie Bundle, and 8 games from the Steam Holiday Sale I’ve built up quite the backlog. Of course this is on top of my existing game backlog which is already pretty long.
Continue reading A Gamer’s Dilemma.
FreeNAS is a task specific operating system designed to be used in Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. It’s built using FreeBSD as the underlying OS which lets it have some fairly low power hardware requirements. For example the Dell I used is an old Pentium 4 1.7 GHz with 512 MB of RAM and it runs like a charm, granted I don’t put a lot of demand on the box in the way of concurrent transfers or running processes. It’s worth mentioning that the recommended way to install FreeNAS is to install to, and boot from a USB thumb drive. This is the recommended method so it can save as much hard drive space for data storage, but even though it looked like I could boot from the thumb drive like a hard drive in the BIOS I had trouble getting it to boot so I installed the OS to the 160 GB hard drive with partitions for the OS and data. Here’s the parts list with some specifics after the jump.
Parts List:
- Old Dell Dimension 4400 – bought at university surplus sale, $5
- Various old IDE hard drives I had sitting around – two ~20 GB; one 160 GB, probably cost me something at some point…
- USB thumb drive – “borrowed” from family, free
Continue reading Setting up a FreeNAS Box Part 1: The Install
I upgraded my Linksys WRT54GL with the DD-WRT firmware a while ago and used it as a wireless bridge for internet access in my bedroom where there aren’t any ports (yet). I was using an old D-Link wireless router as the main router, but wanted the upgrade in functionality that DD-WRT provided. So I reset it back to “Factory” default and set it up as my main wireless router. This is mostly for my reference if needed later, but if it helps anyone who happens to stumble upon it later than even better. Continue reading My DD-WRT setup
Our front yard seems to be a never ending pursuit of needing improvement on the curb appeal. One project that we did a while ago was adding a graveled parking spot to the front yard for one car. As part of that we also put in a little walkway from the spot to our front porch. I made the mistake of using some cheap landscape edging that I had sitting around to use for the walkway, it looked ok at first, but then it started to come up and lose it’s shape and became more of an eyesore than anything else. So I decided to give it a face lift and match the stone edging that I used for the parking spot for the walkway too. I also decided to have it go in a straight line with a 90 degree turn than the curve shape that it was before. I don’t know what else to say about it, so look for some pictures if you want after the jump. Continue reading Our Home Walkway Gets a Face lift
I was wanting to get more use out of my current library of video games, as part of a personal justification to buy a new game system (why do I need an X-box 360 when I have a stack of games for my current systems that I haven’t even played though yet). So I’ve been slowly but surely making my way though some of the games that I already own with the intention of selling/trading them when I’ve finished. Now granted this approach doesn’t work for everyone; for example, I have a friend who plays through an older Zelda game about once a year, by his account, because he likes the story. I’m the kind of gamer that usually plays through games once and then I can be on to the next one. Video games that I keep around are more of the high re-playability games and group “party” games like, for me, the guitar hero series, Mario Kart, Wii Sports, etc… So I will make a page with this list that I will hopefully keep updated with my progress, but for now check below the fold for the current list of systems/games and where they all stand.
Continue reading Gaming with what you’ve got…
I’ve decided I’m going to take this site in a new direction. Instead of trying to strictly work on write ups for here I’m going to use this more as a kind of status report for my many ongoing projects that I always seem to be working on. I’m thinking that this will hopefully motivate me to work on them more often and maybe even bring some of them to completion. Doing status reports at work usually gets me to work on tasks more often, so I’m hoping that blog posts here will have the same affects on my personal projects. I still haven’t decided on a file structure of what I’m going to do specifically; break everything down by pages, use just posts, or a combination of the two. I also might do another more personal site with another of my domains I have I’ll have to wait and see.
DH
I like most people have quite a few music files laying around on various places on my hard drive, and not all of it is in what could be called the best “shape.” After doing some playing around trying to get things fixed up, I think the best solution that I’ve come across so far is to use a combination of MusicBrainz and MediaMonkey. First things first, the two biggest requirements I wanted to get out of this project was to 1) clean up my meta-data for all of my songs and 2) display the album art in the best “cross-platform” way possible. For requirement number two, the best way is to embed the art into the music file itself, this works with all the media players I use as well as displays very nicely in Windows Vista explorer.
MusicBrainz is one of the better tools I’ve used to clean up meta-data, especially if it doesn’t even exist for some files. It has an ability to scan files to generate an “audio fingerprint” and match that against it’s database to come up with possible matches. The two weaknesses I’ve run into using it so far is that it’s database is entirely community driven, which isn’t itself a bad thing but it seems that there’s not a good way to remove invalid data from their database. You’ll understand once you search their database and get 4 album results with the exact same name but 4 different number of tracks for each, or a slightly different capitalization scheme. The only other weakness i’ve run into is probably with the software i’m using, but the Picard tagger doesn’t have the ability to play music while you work (a must if you are using it’s scan functionality). Here is the documentation page for the Picard tagger which is the one i’m currently working with. From there start with the Getting started guide or go to the more in depth documentation.
MediaMonkey is the album art heavy weight that I’ve seen. it’s one of the few that will embed album art into the music file if it can, and flexible enough to save it to a file if it can’t. MediaMonkey will also tag files, but doesn’t have the scan feature of MusicBrainz. By default will will use Amazon to find album art, although that can be changed with various plugins. another great thing is that it has a built in player so you can play music while you’re working on your music (seems kinda obvious, right) which makes the work go by so much quicker. One of the better write ups I’ve seen so far is an older write up in Lifehacker with step-by-step instructions for embedding album art using MediaMonkey, even though it’s old, everything they’ve written still holds true.
Now go forth and rid the world of bad meta-data and album-artless music files…
A how-to on WikiHow has been making the rounds on some blogs and I figure I’ll add to that here since many places in the US are still under moderate to severe drought including my part of the country. The article is “How to Convert Any Toilet to a Low Flush Toilet” and the just of it is to take a half-gallon container of milk or juice, remove any labels, put in something to make it sink (pebbles, sand, gravel, whatever…), and then add water so it doesn’t move around. Take this unit you just put together seal it shut (put on the lid) and place it the tank of the toilet so it doesn’t interfere with the mechanism. Replace the lid and then use as normal. The container will displace an equal amount of water up to a half gallon depending on the type of toilet you already have.
There are a number of other things you can do if you feel to lazy to put together this milk jug, simply putting a rock in the tank can have the same affect, of course you’ll want to be VERY careful not to crack the tank and make sure to clean it off very well before you put it in the tank. As you can see you can use about anything to take up space in the tank, the big criteria is that it doesn’t get in the way of the mechanism or damage the toilet or septic system.
There are a ton of good reasons to have your computer as a dual-monitor setup, there’s the added productivity of being able to have applications open in each monitor to work with at the same time. You could also have one monitor dedicated to goofing off, but we won’t tell the boss about that one… There also the fact that they are cool and get plenty of attention, if you’re like me you will have to explain almost daily how just because you have two monitors you don’t have two computers.
Continue reading Easy way to add a second monitor.
KeePass, along with KeePassX and KeePass Portable, is software that safely and securely stores username and password information. One big advantage of KeePass over lots of other methods of storing passwords is the ability to setup groups and subgroups of passwords along with keeping your password database encrypted using AES or Twofish encryption algorithms. So lets get started by going through how to set up and use a database as well as some useful options in the program.
Continue reading How-To use KeePass to Store Password and Other Sensitive Information
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