Volume 1 of the O’Reilly Make Magazine showed up at my house while I was in Houston, so I spent some time this weekend reading through it. I am impressed, it is everything I hoped it would be.

It is full of really detailed articles on how to build the projects within. The best one for my money is the 5-in-1 network cable. For those of you who are always looking around for one of those Cisco cables or a crossover cable, this is the only way to fly. Probably would take about 30 minutes to throw together once you had all the parts, which is the same 30 minutes you would spend searching through piles of old Cisco boxes every few weeks when you realize you left your console cable somewhere. Plus the null modem and the crossover are priceless to carry with you too, and since it was something you put together, you will be less tempted to leave it behind for someone else to use.

Some of the other articles look good too, the primer on soldering is a must read for getting started with this kind of stuff.

To sum it up: Chock full O’ Geeky goodness. So subscribe or at the very least order the first volume from Amazon to check it out.

Wanna track all the daily deals in your favorite news aggregator? Well get on over to Roosster and add a couple feeds so when you finally do crack open that wallet to buy crap you will have some money left over to put your McDonald’s coupons to use.

Some other good resources for the more thrifty among us are freecycle and craigslist. Freecycle: I was able to get a “new” color printer for my brother, I think the Wookie secured a chest freezer to store dead things in, and there were another couple near misses. Plus once I start filling up on extra junk I will be more than happy to give back.

And check out your local craigslist, which is basically a high signal to noise classifieds section. I think they charge for job postings to support themselves, but otherwise anyone can post. And they wisely have RSS feeds for most of their stuff too.

A few posts ago I mentioned in passing that a great firefox plugin would provide the ability to sync up bookmarks over the internet. Well I shouldn’t have rhetorically asked myself and the 3 people who read this thing, I should have asked google. So I did. And someone has written the greatest plugin for firefox ever: Bookmarks Synchronizer.

You just need access to an FTP or WebDAV server to upload. But now finally after many years of using web browsers is the bookmark function actually useful and makes it worthwhile to maintain some level of bookmark organization. And if you don’t currently use firefox, maybe you should.

The courts are trying to break the Internet. There has been a temporary restraining order issued in a state court allowing a customer to take a non-portable IP address with them when they leave. Read about the insanity here. This would be a bad thing for service providers if the precedent is set. And provides no measurable gain for consumers. I mean DNS sort of solved whatever problem the petitioner seeks to rectify by keeping their IP address.

Frankly I am of the opinion that telephone number portability is stupid as well. I barely remember phone numbers any more, my cell phone has made that practice obsolete.

Opt out of Doubleclick

Now you can be tracked as id=OPT_OUT instead of whoever doubleclick thinks you are. This is a nice step forward in privacy.

Perusing bugzilla led me to a workaround that solves this problem: install the Firefox help.

The new release of firefox seems to have a major bug in Linux. If you browse to a secure site which doesn’t have a pristine SSL cert, it locks it up. I found the following bug that appears to have been hijacked by 0.9 users to report this bug. So either show me the real bug so I can vote for it, or everyone hop in create an account and vote for this bug.

My Aiptek mini pencam went neglected for a while, the joys of home ownership reduced not only my free time but also my ability to find the camera. It has recently been located, but I found that alkaline batteries that I left inside had begun to cause corrosion on the contacts. I brushed some of it away at the bottom, but when I put batteries in, I found that it wasn’t working. I feared the worst, and ignored it for a couple of days. But it occured to me that I never tended to the corrosion that was up on the spring contacts at the top of the battery bay. I googled a bit and found that you can use a baking soda paste to clean it away chemically. However, I didn’t bother with that, I just got a screwdriver and flaked a bunch of it off of the spring, and behold, the camera lives again.

Now the only thing I need to do, is install some kind of recessed switch to actually physically break the contact of the battery, as it just sits there and drains the battery even when it is “off.” Right now a piece of post-it serves that purpose for me.

But this should provide for some nice 1.3 MP shots at the bike race. I am even considering looking to see if I can get a hold of the pocket cam x to play with and take some 2.1 MP shots, and see if the flash actually makes it useful indoors. However I haven’t found any reviews or example pics from that, which makes me skeptical. Also I’d like to find a refurb or something so I don’t have to pay a full $100.