Viper007Bond.com » Technology

New SSD Drives

Alex (Viper007Bond) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 11:33:29 +0000

Two Intel 320 series 160GB SSD drives that will be going into my PC this weekend in RAID 0 to replace my two existing Western Digital 640GB Black series drives in RAID 0. Should be quite the speed improvement!

I got them on sale for $155 each instead of the regular price of $285 each. Gotta love Cyber Monday weekend deals.

UPDATE: These things are amazingly fast!

My new SSD RAID:

For comparison, here is my old RAID:

Lastly, a normal Western Digital 2TB Green (energy saving) drive that is very commonly used for cheap (not fast) storage:

Crazy, huh?

Two Handy Sublime Text 2 Plugins

Alex (Viper007Bond) — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 03:57:47 +0000

After using EditPlus for the better part of a decade, I made the switch to the totally awesome Sublime Text 2 text editor a few weeks back. One of the great things about Sublime is it’s support for plugins.

Two such plugins I’d like to recommend are SublimeBrackets and SublimeTagmatcher. Both improve how the highlighting of opening and closing items are handled.

By default, Sublime just underlines paired brackets. When you have a ton of code, this can be really hard to see. SublimeBrackets changes this to something more apparent:

Much better, right? I personally use the solid background green style.

SublimeTagmatcher does something similar but for HTML tags. When you have your cursor inside of an HTML tag, it will highlight both the current tag and it’s opening or closing counterpart. This is helpful for making sure you have the correct number of opening and closing tags.

Introducing ARNI

Alex (Viper007Bond) — Sun, 23 Oct 2011 10:43:05 +0000

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=http

via Andy Peatling

Restoring “http://” To Your Firefox Address Bar

Alex (Viper007Bond) — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 00:26:53 +0000

Lifehacker has a great article on how to stop Firefox from greying out everything but the domain name in your address bar. While I personally don’t mind it and infact think it’s a great anti-phishing feature for the average user, one thing I don’t like is the removal of the protocol, i.e. http://, from the beginning of the address bar. I know they’re trying to conserve space, but screen real estate is not something that I am lacking.

So here’s how to once again show the protocol in your Firefox address bar:

Type about:config into your address bar to access a list of Firefox configuration options that are not exposed through a normal settings panel.
Paste browser.urlbar.trimURLs into the search box to find the parameter we’re going to change.
Right-click the row and select “Toggle” to change the value from true to false.
Close the tab and go back to a normal tab, such as this blog post. You should now see the protocol in your address bar once again.

GLaDOSiri On iPhone 4S

Alex (Viper007Bond) — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 18:37:38 +0000

Words cannot express how much I want this to actually become a reality.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=http

Whoever Said Chrome Used Less Memory Than Firefox Was Lying

Alex (Viper007Bond) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 19:03:13 +0000

Okay, so it has been open for a week or two but come on. You really need 44MB of RAM to display a single tab that has only ever displayed a single webpage?

Not that it really matters since my desktop has 16 gigabytes of RAM (10.5 of which is in use), but still…

Video Game In A Box

Alex (Viper007Bond) — Fri, 09 Sep 2011 23:15:40 +0000

http://www.vimeo.com/

A New Toy

Alex (Viper007Bond) — Thu, 14 Jul 2011 08:48:50 +0000

I’m planning on making use of it this weekend with a trip up the Columbia River Gorge.

What Online Backup Service Do You Recommend?

Alex (Viper007Bond) — Sun, 10 Oct 2010 04:16:17 +0000

About a month ago, I asked on Twitter for suggestions for online backup services as I’m tired of manually backing up and I never do it often enough. I was suggested Mozy, but I was also suggested a lot of alternatives. However I was leaving on a business trip basically the next day, so I never got around to reading the Tweets and they eventually slipped off my @mentions list.

So now I’m asking how I should have done it in the first place — on my blog. What online service do you use to backup your data? And before anyone suggests it, Dropbox is out of the running as it’s too expensive for actual backup (it’s great for sync though!).

Thanks!

Why Can’t Apple Make A Decent Windows Program?

Alex (Viper007Bond) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:49:46 +0000

Comon Apple, I get that Windows is a competing platform and you’d rather spend your time working on your own stuff, but if you’re going to force me to use iTunes with my iPhone, at least make iTunes not suck. I’ve ranted about iTunes before and while iTunes 10 seems more stable and less laggy so far, it’s still far from perfect.

I mean they can’t even manage to get the little things right. For example, their new logo has horrible transparency:

A simple thing to fix (look at all of the other icons there doing it just fine), but no, Apple had to not bother.

Wow, It Sure Is Hot Here…

Alex (Viper007Bond) — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:49:34 +0000

According to the AniWeather Firefox extension, it’s rather hot here right now:

Thankfully it refreshed a few minutes later and went down to 75F because I was really hot!

Jailbreak

Viper007Bond via iPhone — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 23:09:05 +0000

If you haven’t heard, comex released a jailbreak for iOS 4 (iPhone 4), iPads, and more today. Even more amazing is that it’s an in browser jailbreak that makes use of a PDF exploit. I just finished jailbreaking my iPhone 4 and it worked like a charm!

Looking For Firefox Addon: Make Bookmarks Buttons

Alex (Viper007Bond) — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 02:48:30 +0000

I only have a few items in my bookmarks toolbar and I’m looking for an addon that will allow me to place those bookmarks (in icon-only form) in my normal toolbar. I already have an addon that makes the bookmarks button toggle the bookmarks toolbar (better than nothing) and I know I can customize my menu to get the bookmarks in my normal toolbar, but then they show up with labels, a big “Bookmarks” button, and the last bookmark hidden by an expand arrow. Does anyone know of such an addon?

I Can’t Believe I Paid $30 For This

Alex (Viper007Bond) — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 23:43:32 +0000

I am such a sucker and (unsubsidized) Apple products are so overpriced. Oh well, it was worth it to not have to grab the end of the cable anymore.

Unhelpful CAPTCHA

Alex (Viper007Bond) — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 22:21:46 +0000

I went to go check the order status of my iPhone 4 and got this wonderful CAPTCHA:

The letters and numbers showed up properly after refreshing, but I still found it quite humorous.