This weekend I had a trip planned to NYC and I usually rock my Richard Solo battery backup. It’s a great product with one draw back. It hangs off the bottom of the iPhone and it’s not very usable when you are walking around with your iPhone. So I decided to take a chance on a new product, the Mophie Juice Pack Air.

The Juice Pack Air is nice because it completely encloses the iPhone like a case, top and bottom. It does add a little weight and size to the iPhone but it’s so damned convenient that you don’t mind at all. It worked flawlessly, wait until you’re about 25% from a dead battery, flip the switch and the Mophie starts to recharge your phone. It works great! I very much recommend it!!!

Apple confirmed that the new NYC store, located in the Meat Packing District will be opening this Friday, December 7th at 6:00PM. This is the third store in NYC and it will mark another place for me to visit when I go to the city. More than anything I think image is fantastic! Clever boys… clever.

I am really happy with it. As a matter of fact I’m in the car, blogging on it, and I can’t tell a difference over being on my home network! This is amazing!!! Wow think of all the productive time I’ll have now. Hahhahaha, yeah right!

[UPDATE] fixed 1 MB to 1Mb and 500MB to 500kb

Today, I tackled the task of building my own PC for the first time. I know it’s lame that a person who professes to be as big a geek as I do has never built a PC, but I switched to Macs right about the time that PC building became popular. I have of course upgraded plenty of PCs in my life (I was a PC technician for quite some time) and figured that doing a complete build could not be that much harder, and I have to say that was a good assumption. But why would I want to build a PC? Especially since I’m such a Mac boy?

About a month or so ago, I was beyond fed up with my networking issues [Why Me, Straightened Out?], a few frustrated calls to Pinoyboy, and he suggested that I take more control over my network and install an IPCop box. IPCop is a Linux Install that provides a Firewall, DNS Services, DHCP Server etc. It replaces all the functions of my Linksys router. The install was super easy and thanks to Pinoyboy’s help, I even got some Firewall rules written. The nicest part of the IPCop install is that since it’s a very specialized Linux OS, the system requirements are very modest. I pulled out my now 7 year old Gateway out of the closet and used it to install the OS and it ran without issue. The only problem? The Gateway PC is a full-sized tower and it was LOUD, very loud, so I decided that I wanted a new, very small system. I figured that since the system requirements for IPCop were modest, I could do this on the cheap and I decided to build a Bare-Bones system myself.

After many hours of discussion with Pinoyboy, he helped me sort thru all the stuff I don’t know about PCs anymore, such as what processors go with what motherboards, what chips were good value and what I truly needed for this machine. I decided on a case that was about the size of two reams of paper, all black with a hidden floppy and DVD drive. This was important to me because I wanted to harvest what I could from the Gateway. Here’s the case I selected…

The BioStar iDEQ N1

The total cost of the box was 202 dollars before shipping. I went with an AMD Sempron 64 2600+ Palermo 1.6GHz for the processor, 512 MB of Corsair memory. I harvested the 10GB HD, CD burner, Floppy and NIC from the Gateway.

The build went well, the only issues I had were that I’d never applied thermal paste before and the cabling for the HD was so tight that I bent a pin on the hard disk. After that was sorted I spent about a total of an hour putting the machine together. The IPCop setup was a bit more time, as I did a back up and a restore and it was fine except the one NIC had changed. Once I had that sorted, everything was fine. The unit is super quiet and boots so fast. Another nice bonus is that it fits on TOP of the Mac Pro!

Now if you know me, or if you read this blog you know that aside from being an Apple fanboy, I’m also obsessed with Ferraris. I know it is a ridiculously overpriced, first world status symbol, and even if I really wanted to, I am never going to own one, but I like to look at them! I’ve seen only a few up close and personal and I’ve only TRIED to drive one. After the first big lurch and stall, that voice in my head said… “get out before you total a car worth more than your home”! (too bad Eddie Griffin’s inner voice didn’t say the same, if it had… maybe there wouldn’t be one less Enzo in the world.)

Anyway… years ago, I feel in love with the Ferrari I ever saw, I remember I was just a child looking though an old stack of Road & Track when I saw the Ferrari Dino. Back then I knew even less than I do about horsepower, torque and over-steer, but it was the curves, the lines that caught my attention. Even today almost some 40 years later, I still think it is beautiful.

My lust of the Ferrari has not dissipated over the last decade, it’s gotten much strong with models like the 360 Modena, the F430 and the 599 GTB Fiorano and today, while reading Autoblog, my lust for the marque has been pushed up notch… they’re rumored to be creating a new Dino…

I know it’s not for everyone, but for me… Drool.

I discovered that Pinoyboy also likes the Scrabble and furthermore, we both have an older Windows(R) copy of the game, and guess what? You can play together over the Internet! We set out to have a meetings of the minds over the Scrabble board, but as with most things, it was not that simple.

Two evenings later, Pinoyboy finally sorted out all the ports and glitches in DirectX and we were able to play. I don’t understand HOW he just figures it all out. I am truly in awe of him!

We played 3 games of Scrabble, which took us until the WEEEEE hours of the morning to complete. He came up with some amazing words and he’s much better than I since he actually looks for the Triple Word Scores etc. I really enjoyed the game and I can’t wait to do it again.

This one DEFINITELY goes into the “cut me some slack, i am a geek you know!” category.

My setup is not an simple one, but it’s also not a complex one. I had a linksys setup, a cable modem, a wireless router, a VoIP box, a switch and an AirPort express. I suspected the Wireless Router, which was old as dirt, was going bad so I replaced it with a Belkin wireless router, which then lead me to think maybe the cable modem was bad too, so I replaced that as well. Things seemed okay but I’d lose my connection to the Belkin router often. I was frustrated to say the least.

We recently acquired a Slingbox as well, which requires an Ethernet cable connection, so I grabbed another Belkin Wireless router and bridged them together. And that’s when the trouble just doubled. The bridge would go down often and then finally, the other day, one of the Belkin routers, just lost it’s power. It won’t stay on. It’s dead.

I hooked up all of the old Linksys stuff (I’m such a pack rat) and that’s when the latest drama began. For some reason I could NOT get the VoIP box to work behind the old Linksys router. So I put it in front of it and then… the internet would go out every 20-30 minutes. Sigh.

Last night was spent on the phone with Pinoyboy, troubleshooting, testing and triaging my network. The final decision? New router, again.

So far so good. Next… the wireless bridge for the Slingbox. Wish me luck boys and girls!

That you can do with Firewire, but with USB2? Not so much.

If you’re a coder check it out. Firebug.

I’d love to be able to get my email (work and personal) and chat it up with some friends while flying cross country. Also could make getting a Slingbox a priority.

US Airliners to Get Wi-Fi Action by Next Year via Gizmodo