Life in General – Kasperian Moving Parts

All You Can Eat (up to 4’x8′ at a time) Whiteboards for only $13!

Friday March 11, 2016

Inspired by LifeHacker’s older post about making your own whiteboard for cheap, I bought a 4’x8′ sheet of dry erase board from Home Depot for $13. I had them cut it down into 2 3’x4′ sections and one 2’x4′ section on account of I have a Honda Fit and that’s just not gonna hold a 4’x8′ section of anything. I had some spare aluminum foil tape left over from a previous project (fixing 10 individual water leaks in my 2007 Honda Fit). I lined the 4 edges of each board with the foil tape, putting roughly half of the foil tape on the front and then wrapping the rest around to the back of the board. This helps to provide Read more…

Life in General

On Facebook, Notifications, Filtering, and Hire Me

Saturday January 30, 2016

tl;dr: 1) Nice job on the Notifications dropdown, Facebook devs! 2) I still really miss RSS feeds and Jabber message integration!! 3) You should hire me! I have some ideas on how to make this better! =;P I’ve just never really used Facebook consistently before. My biggest complaint has always been that unlike Twitter or RSS feeds or e-mail, I did not see any way to stay caught up. To leave off wherever you are, come back to it later and your place in the list of events has not moved. With Twitter/RSS/e-mail/other things, you can do this. Pick up again wherever you left off and keep working your way through whatever it is, and most importantly, you know that Read more…

Life in General

Neato Botvac 80 Is The Best Robot Vacuum Out There (No Really)

Wednesday April 1, 2015

I posted this on my Amazon Reviews page too, but I figured it was worth a blog post as well. I cannot emphasize how much I love the Neato Botvac 80! It’s still early days and we’ve only had it for a month or so, but the Botvac 80 is absolutely perfect for our family. We have a large house. It’s around 1100 square feet per level and we have 3 levels. We’ve had a Neato XV-11 for 3 years now and it has some very major design flaws. The belt and gear assembly underneath, where the brush is, is exposed and not protected. This means that the belt and gear are constantly getting clogged with hair. The only way Read more…

Life in General

I need to blog more again, social media and iPad be darned

Sunday December 22, 2013

I haven’t blogged much lately. I’m sure this isn’t that big of a deal to anyone but me, based on the complete lack of questions like “hey, you haven’t blogged much lately, is everything okay”, etc. It’s also obvious to me that my friends, who themselves used to be avid bloggers, now don’t really do all that much with their blogs anymore either. But it’s been bothering me for a while. I blame Twitter and Facebook, personally. It used to be that the only way we had to be social, with ideas and feedback and such, were blogs. And with Twitter and Facebook, it’s so easy to satisfy 90% of my desire to communicate with and get feedback from my Read more…

Life in General

You Have To Actually Start To Cancel A Phone Line To Get Good Customer Service?

Friday November 9, 2012

This is more of a rant than anything else. I despise the “threaten to cancel your phone account to get good customer service” approach to dealing with companies, so I’ve not tried it before. And this was no idle threat today… I was fully prepared to cancel a phone line to get what I needed. So please don’t read this as “hey, this trick worked for me and you should try it too,” because it’s definitely not. I was prepared to cancel 1 phone line to get what I needed, but Sprint surprised me by doing what I’d been asking them to do for the last month to keep me from canceling. And I’m hesitant to even post this because Read more…

Life in General, Movies

In Search Of High Speed Network Connection From Basement to Second Floor

Saturday August 25, 2012

… or… man, I really don’t want to have to run CAT-6 wire from the basement to the second floor…. So I have a decently-big house. Thank you, God. 2 floors and a finished basement. I have a MacMini server in the second floor bedroom and it’s acting as the main audio/video server for the house. I want to have as fast a connection as possible between it and the AppleTV and GoogleTV in the main floor living room. I’ve already run CAT-6 from the main house router in the basement to the main living room. That was moderately unpainful as we have a drop ceiling in the basement. But there’s no easy way to get CAT-6 networking wire run Read more…

Life in General, Work Stuff

A Watch Band Fit For A James Bond Hacker

Sunday March 11, 2012

I finally found the first watch band I’ve ever been excited about in my entire life and I just wanted to share it. It’s the Ballistic Nylon Strap (24mm, 5-Ring, Black). The reason this is so exciting for me is that when you attach your watch to it, you end up with a non-standard watch band where the buckle is actually near the side of your watch instead of on the bottom of your wrist. This means that if you’re a programmer like me, you won’t have a bulky watch band buckle digging into your wrist all day! Now, first of all, this watch band is made from ballistic nylon, and while I don’t know exactly what that means, I’m pretty Read more…

Life in General

On Getting Unlarger and Unrounder

How many times have you heard something that starts with “it’s a funny thing when you start getting older” and then end up hearing things that make you cringe and silently vow to yourself that it’ll never happen to you. Yeah, me neither. But let’s imagine that we have. If “it’s a funny thing when you start getting older”, it’s an even funnier thing when you get older and work from home 100% of the time. And if you think that’s funny, it’s an absolute riot when you get older, have a sit-down job, have a wife and 3 kids, work from home 100% of the time, and have no reason to go outside your front door more than once a Read more…

Life in General

A Tale Of Two Tablets

Friday December 30, 2011

I’ve been meaning to blog about the two tablets I’ve been playing with for the last year+ for quite a while, and just never found the time or motivation. Let me say up front that I’m not writing this with the intention of swaying anyone’s opinions or influencing anyone’s purchase. I’ve been mulling the goods and bads about these two tablets around in my head for a long time and I just want to put them down somewhere so I can keep track of them. My first and main tablet is my iPad (first generation) with 32 GB of memory and built-in GPS/3G networking. I bought it on May 11, 2010. At the time, we were just about to head Read more…

Life in General

Need New Linux/KDE4-friendly Laptop

Saturday April 4, 2009

Dear Lazyweb, I need to buy a laptop for personal use. I’ve been using Thinkpads as work laptops for so long that I think I’d like to try something else out for a change. It needs to be Dual Core/Core 2 Duo/whatever. Would be nice if it had a fast 200+GB drive in it. And it absolutely MUST have a fast, awesome graphics card in it that has zero problems with compositing, Linux, KDE4, suspend/resume, or anything else. Having dealt with nVidia cards for quite a while now, I’m guessing this means that the new laptop shouldn’t have an nVidia graphics card in it. I am so tired of the constant problems I have with KDE4 and the nVidia Quadro Read more…