Category Archives: Tech – Geek

Minecraft

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The big man has been into Minecraft for a while now. He connects to multiple different servers across the world, including one run by an old friend. Just about every one of his friends plays Minecraft, he even has a meetup with a bunch of his buddies from Hacker Scouts once a month. He has a ‘Steve’ head, which is a cardboard box that is shaped like the main character, a foam pickaxe, and about a billion Minecraft t-shirts. We’ll just say Minecraft runs a close second to Mario and Luigi.

I rarely have time to play video games even though I really enjoy them, so I had always held back on getting myself an account. A few weeks ago that changed and I finally went ahead and bought an account. (a funny thing is, another good friend of mine told me yesterday that he’s done the same thing)

The big man and I have been really enjoying it. We rarely connect to anything besides the ‘LAN world’ we created here at home, but, that is perfect. He and I have been creating a world with buildings, a castle, a mansion, a swimming pool, cave, and even a roller coaster! Just he and I.

Today while I was clearing out a cave near our swimming pool, he built a bunch of furniture in our mansion. Check out his DJ booth: (if it doesn’t load, refresh the page, Vine is wonky from time to time)

I have really been enjoying our time playing. We work together to build our own little world. Any other moms or dads out there play? Would love to hear about your experiences as well.

Comic Con 2013

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We are back from Comic Con and rested up! What a great time we had. Here are a few highlights:

Thursday

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Our drive down to San Diego. Overall, we made pretty good time and we were excited to be on our way down there.

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Then we RAN to the Nintendo Lounge so a very special little boy would get to see what he had been waiting for.

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Then we walked over to the Vikings area so Ian and I could go raid a village with shield maidens by our side! SKOL!!!!!

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 Then walked over to the Sega Arcade to play more games before heading to the hotel to rest up for a few days of adventure.

 Link to my gallery of Thursday pics on Google+

Friday

Dawn has this amazing ability to function on little to no sleep, and when Comic Con comes around, she is always on a mission! This years mission was The Walking Dead panel. She was in line for Hall H by 4AM. (Yes, Hall H is officially that ridiculous at this point.) Ian and I met up with her early in the morning as well to get our badges and make sure we were there for the panel too.

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‘The World’s End’ panel with Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright. The movie looks hilarious, cannot wait to see it.

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‘The Walking Dead’ panel!!!! Along with hearing from the majority of the cast, we saw scenes from the next season. Bring on the zombies!

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Next up, ‘Vikings’ panel!!! The cast were great to see in person, and seemed to have great chemistry with one another. They showed footage from Season 2 and I think my jaw stayed open for a few minutes afterwards. Huge huge huge season to look forward to! After the panel, we raced outside to try and meet them as they left, and we were in luck! We met Katheryn Winnick (Lagertha), Travis Fimmel (Ragnar), and Clive Standen (Rollo)!

One of the highlights of my Comic Con experience this year was meeting Katheryn Winnick. Not only did I get a picture with her, but I was also able to tell her thank you for portraying such a strong female character on the show. She seemed truly appreciative of the comment.  (We need more of this!)

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Dawn and I both got our picture with Travis Fimmel. A friend of mine commented that he and I could be brothers; I’ll take it! haha.

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And finally, I was lucky enough to also meet Clive Standen! He really seemed like he was having a great time at Con meeting the massive amounts of fans that came out to support their work and the show.

I recorded the cast introduction:

and the entire panel (without footage, since that isn’t legal):

Link to my gallery of Friday pics on Google+

Saturday

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Dawn went off to a few TV show panels, while Ian and I headed over to the Nintendo lounge. He loves it there!

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The happy guy playing the new Mario game for about the 400th time. haha.

 

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 The big man with his friend Prill from Nintendo. She is very nice and remembers him at every event!

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Even the photographer working for Nintendo commented that this was the best picture he’d seen all weekend! I have to agree, our little Viking rocks.

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Then we went out to the exhibit hall again for a while. Had to get a picture of this; Minecraft + Lego + Ian = awesome.

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Great costume from Popcap promoting their new Plants vs Zombies 2 game.

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Dawn and I waiting in line for Hall H again. Tried to get in for the Thor panel. Unfortunately, we didn’t get in.

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Amazing special effects makeup on display!

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And finally, an extremely impressive Lego ‘The Hobbit’ display.

Link to my gallery of Saturday pics on Google+

Sunday

 

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Walked around the exhibit hall and saw more great cosplay!

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Killed a couple of zombies at The Walking Dead booth.

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Then we met up with a couple of Ian’s buddies.

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Next, it was off to the SpongeBob panel. During a sing-along, one of the people from Nickelodeon approached me and asked if I would be captain for Team Patrick. I had no idea what this meant, but of course I said yes. Later found out what it meant – getting up in front of the entire ballroom with Bill Fagerbakke (Patrick Star) and Tom Kenny (SpongeBob) to dance!!  What the heck,,, when in Rome, right?!! Ian wouldn’t come up with me, but his buddy Corbin did and we made a great team. About half way through I look over and Dawn is in tears she’s laughing so hard! Ian said I was really goofy. Mission accomplished. After I asked Bill Fagerbakke to take a picture and later realized (when I actually looked at the picture on the phone) that Tom Kenny photo-bombed us!! How many chances do you get to say you were taking a picture with Patrick and SpongeBob photo-bombed you????!!!! After the panel we even got to talk to them again for more pictures and they signed shirts for us. Definitely another major highlight of Comic Con this year. (We have video of the dancing, will post it as soon as we can)

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Next, it was back out to the exhibit hall. We even got to sit on the Star Trek Bridge.

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Finally done, and extremely tired….

Link to my gallery of Sunday pics on Google+

The Zen Of Steve Jobs, A Graphic Novel That Reimagines Jobs’ Relationship With Zen Buddhist Priest

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Not positive if this would qualify as a ‘Dharma Burger‘ but I’ll admit, this looks very interesting to me.  Added to my wishlist.

Read more over at The Laughing Squid:

The Zen Of Steve Jobs, A Graphic Novel That Reimagines Jobs’ Relationship With Zen Buddhist Priest.

Flying the camera up on our kite

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We had a lot of fun flying the little man’s kite the other day and wanted to experiment with a camera. So, when I got home from work today we made a quick case for our Flip camera out of an old washcloth and some duct tape then headed back up to the field. The following video is what footage we captured. It’s very shaky, but still a lot of fun.

As you can see, the camera was a bit too heavy for the small kite we have, but it was still a worthwhile first attempt. Plus, now we have another fun project to work towards; building a bigger kite so we can film from a higher point in the sky.

Google Launches Its Answer to Facebook: Introducing Google+ via @Mashable (& sadly, it’s already a #FAIL for me) CC @google

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via mashable.com

Google+ launches, and it is already a failure for me:

“Oops… you need a Google profile to use this feature.
Google Profiles is not available for your organization.”

I have my own domain integrated as a Google Apps domain. I love having gmail, docs, etc for my own domain.

What really gets me is how Google continues to treat those of us who have made this choice as secondary. We have trusted them enough, and love their products enough, to go ‘all in’ with Apps, yet continually are locked out from new releases.

Anyone else think this may be a reason why Google’s attempts at “social software” continue to fail? Their users, the ones who have apps accounts, who may arguably be the most inclined to adopt these new offerings, are usually locked out. Google, are you listening?

Sweetcron

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As many of you may know, Sweetcron has been released into the wild. Yongfook (Jon) had been working on this for quite some time; even had been running his own site on it for a while before announcing it would be released.

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I’ve installed a ‘beta site‘ with it, and am continuing to play around; time permitting.

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The installation went fairly well, but I did run into one unfortunate incedent. Some of the files use upper case as the first character in the name. The FTP client I used decided to not pay attention to that on certain directories, and a good deal of searching and replacing had to happen. While I personally would like to see them as lower case characters, it was easy to figure out, and not a huge deal.

So far, it updates rather well, and adding new streams into the items tab is easy enough. I would like to see the ability to change my password, but Jon is working on that in a new version. I anticipate updates to come quickly; he did well with 8apps. (I was a fan of the site, but understand why he did not take it forward. Well written, beautiful to use, but I’m sure something of that nature would have turned into a full time job.)

I agree with the concepts of lifestreaming; I know Sweetcron is not the first, but to me, it does the bext job I’ve seen in solving the issues. Those of us that spend a lot of time online have data scattered everywhere. It was something I’d been thinking about for quite some time. Pownce, Twitter, Flicker, & YouTube accounts that we post to. But no real way to connect them. Sure, there is FriendFeed, but in my opinion it just add to the problem. It’s still just another account with your data. Having your own domain for this to collect upon just seems proper.

Jon makes a good point in the beginning of a recent talk he gave (I’ve not watched it’s entirety, but plan to soon). How many of us update our blogs daily? HAHA ya, exactly, not unless we essentially are out to make money in doing so.

While I do plan to keep my WordPress blog around, I imagine it too will become just another feed in my Sweetcron lifestream. Yes, I know Sweetcron has a notes area, but for now the blog is staying – we’ll see long term. I do however, see this becoming the main page on my domain, blog taking or subdomain. I do post many places, and presenting this, on my own domain, is wonderful. (and Jon, if you read this, kudos again on the release of Sweetcron; you did not disappoint in the least – keep up the great work)

Twitter: woke up too early and now I…

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Twitter / Kris Freedain: woke up too early and now I…, originally uploaded by mindonly.

Not sure how or why, but lately I’ve really taken a liking to Twitter. For the longest time I just didn’t. The interface seemed hard to follow, seemed too random, just difficult to interact with. Then I gave it another chance. I’ve really grown to like it. It’s funny, though a bunch of it is just random chatter, it’s also a way to find out news; sometimes even quicker than traditional channels. Doing a search on earthquake the day one hit was remarkable. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=earthquake

If interested, I’m at:
http://twitter.com/mindonly