Geekfoolery

Much like the hapless beauty queen, I’ve always believed we need more maps. Good thing we’re living in the Internet age… we’ve got more maps than we can shake a laser pointer at.

Back in the 1990’s, my jaw dropped when Mapquest came online with a searchable map of the entire US, with driving directions and guides to the nearest restaurants such. At a stroke, Mapquest seemed to put companies like Rand MacNally out of business, or at least on the ropes, with their versions of the same data for sale on CD. I knew the Internet was going to be cool, but in 1998, this seemed like too much! Read more…

Today’s Geekfoolery post comes from a good friend of mine, Ed Flores who writes his own blog at Scorpion Sandwich. Ed’s been a lot of thing in his life, but all we need to know right now is that he knows a good gadget when he sees one. Here’s his take on The Prybaby.

I once heard a British Intelligence Officer say that, “a man should always have a sturdy pair of shoes, a knife and something to start a fire with on him at all times.  Good advice nonetheless but you still come up short when trying to open a beer.  Enter the Prybaby, part pry bar, screwdriver and church key the Prybaby fills the gap as a tool where everything else we carry on a daily basis falls short.  About the size of a large car key the Prybaby is an indispensable tool that you never knew you needed.  Need to pry open a box? Prybaby easily chews through packing tape, much better than your car key.  Pull a nail from a wall? One quick twist and it’s popped out.  On a recent home construction project the Prybaby was constantly used to open boxes, packages, pry nails, chip drywall debris, and strip wire.  In many cases the Prybaby is used where knives are often misused or are ill suited. I’ve heard many a horror story where someone used a kitchen knife to pry open a stuck kitchen drawer or a hunting knife to pry the heads off an engine both occasions resulting in a snapped tip.  “I wish my wife would used that instead of my good kitchen knife,” a coworker moaned upon seeing the Prybaby for the first time.
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(First, apologies for the delay since the last post. Just been busy as all heck… there are many reasons, but no excuses. I’ll be back on a regular schedule now.)

Speaking of being busy, even without the distractions of work and family, we now live in a world where you can no longer do it all, or even half, or a quarter, or a tenth of it all. Television in all it’s various incarnations produces more worthwhile programming than than you could watch if you did nothing else all week. Videogames have stunning graphics, complex and compelling storylines, and challenging online play. The Internet with RSS feeds and social network sites now struggles to filter the overwhelming flow of information into manageable chunks. Then you read about a making say, a Dixie Cup dodecahedron on MAKE.com, and then you’re spending all afternoon on that.

So who, I ask, has time to watch movies? No one. So with that in mind, I propose that we create a new version of TiVo or Bittorrent or Netflix that doesn’t just deliver us one movie at a time, but rather, two movies combined into one. A double feature in half the time!

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I have been a happy Netflix subscriber for several years now. This is of course the age of 84-inch high-def plasma TVs, Tivo, and 800-channel cable/satellite channel lineups. I’ll spare you the tales of my Oliver Twist-like youth of audiovisual impoverishment, where we had 3, count ‘em, 3 channels. And if you weren’t home when it was on, you missed it, brother. To fully avail myself of everything that I could plug into on the boob tube I’d have to quit my job and lock myself in a room.

Which is why Netflix suits me so perfectly. Three DVDs at a time is about all I might ever want to watch at one time. The turn around on the little red envelopes is 3, 4 days tops. Everything I might ever want to watch on cable, broadcast, or in the theatre comes out on DVD soon enough. And at $17 a month, it’s at least a third of what cable would cost me.

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I was prompted to reset a password to a web-based tool I use at work the other day. It was something I don’t use everyday, so I assumed I had used some variant on my “standard” password, but it didn’t work. Tried a few other that I thought it might be, but no luck. So I was then sent to the “Forgot Password” link. I verified some data, and then a link to reset the password was sent to my mailbox, and there I was trying to choose a new one.

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Give yourself 2 Geek points if you know what the Perseids are. Another if you were aware that the Perseid meteor shower was this weekend. A full ten geek points if you actually went out and made the effort to watch them.

Mr. & Mrs. Alex and geeklings went out to see the show, making what was probably a longer-than-necessary drive to Joshua Tree National Park to be assured of clear skies free of light pollution from streetlights. And it was indeed a show worth the drive on a “school night.”

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