This sign was another find at the Mio Flea Market where I got the nail puller. I’m slowly getting things for the walls of my workshop that make me smile, inspire me, or look cool (like the old golfer).
Tag: Internet
A Saturday of Pi-hole
Almost a full 24 hours of DNS activity on my home network. Nine of the top 10 domains queried were for home automation services, so if were to remove those from the stats, Pi-hole blocked over 10% of requests. If you want to run your own Pi-hole server, check out my step-by-step guide.
Unplugged
I just landed back in the United States after being on vacation in Costa Rica since Sunday night. I had a great time! The number one reason it was so good is because I completely disconnected from my life.
I didn’t bring a computer with me. I can’t remember the last time I went more than a couple days without using a computer; I practically live on the Internet.
I used my iPhone a bit on Monday because I was maybe going to meet up with Lori from my gym back home, who was out here with her husband and daughter. It didn’t work out though and I’ve been offline ever since. Since Monday afternoon, my phone was rarely out of airplane mode.
On Saturday night, even before leaving, I actually deleted the Facebook app so I wouldn’t be tempted to check on everyone back home. I spend way too much time on Facebook and may just leave it off my phone as an experiment. I can’t even explain how nice it was not reading all the status updates and liking pictures. No distractions from what I wanted to do for the day and none of that stupid logging in every 10 minutes to feed my curiosity if anyone had posted something new. Seriously, see if you can go FB-less for just a day.
No texting and I didn’t buy an international data plan for this trip. I really wanted to get away and I’d say mission accomplished. I was having withdrawals before I even got out of the States on Sunday, but I didn’t even have a second thought once I arrived in Costa Rica.
I have no idea what has been going on anywhere for the last 4+ days and I love it. I think I’m going to unplug more often to enjoy real life.
I Want An iPhone
The iPhone comes out this Friday, the 29th. I was at the MacWorld Expo keynote in January when Steve Jobs announced the revolutionary phone/iPod/Internet device and I was very excited to see it. I’ve thought about it quite a bit because my current Verizon contract isn’t up until February, so if I did get one, I’d have to pay nearly $200 to cancel my contract. What to do?
I could wait until February to get the iPhone and by that time they might have a newer one available with more storage capacity and GPS capabilities. The price might drop a couple hundred bucks by then. But boy, would I love to have the iPhone right away.
When I grabbed the link to the Apple iPhone page, I saw the rate plans were there and it’s a lot more affordable than I (or anyone else) expected it to be. For $60 a month, which is $15 more than I currently pay, I can get the same number of minutes I get now, but I’ll have an unlimited data plan. The one big question about the iPhone right now is…how fast will data actually be on AT&T’s Edge network. There are so many great things about the iPhone, which I won’t waste my time going over here (just look it up on Google and you’ll find tons of info), but the data speed can really make or break the deal for me. If I bought the iPhone I’d be using it all the time because there really isn’t any other portable device out there with Internet capabilities like this.
So what do I do?
If I decide to get one, you can bet, I’ll be posting again in a few days…
claimID
claimID.com is a neat service for keeping track of online info and sites. My claimID. (via Alex)
OpenDNS Preferences
I’ve been using OpenDNS for months now and it’s great. Today they launched My Account, which gives more control and eventually stats.
Free DNS from OpenDNS
I’m testing out OpenDNS here at work on my main computer. I’ll try out any service to replace something on our network. In testing the past couple of minutes some web pages seem to load faster and some slower. I’ll also be setting it up at home to see how it performs. Time will tell. […]
No WWW
I posted a couple of months ago about dropping the www from URLs and have been a supporter of it for much longer. All of my sites have been www free for as long as I can remember. The http://www.xxxx.com URLs will redirect to the one without www. If you’re using WordPress and have been […]
Address Bar Removal
Why in the world do web browsers give an option to turn off the address/location bar?
Websites as Graphs
Kind of cool to view your website as a graph of colored, connected dots representing the various HTML entities. Make your own at Websites as graphs. (via)
Nick Momrik 
