TheFarlands.Net » Techno Mumbo Jumbo

Future Pop Stars

don — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 13:06:35 +0000

I wasn’t expecting the delivery to come until after Christmas, but Santa (Amazon) made an early delivery. Only two days after we got socked with snow, I received my Blue Snowball USB Condenser Microphone. This is the first real creation with the mic.

blue-mic-test-1-abcs1

Wii Wii Wii, All the Way Home

don — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 18:58:06 +0000

Yesterday morning, I stood outside in the blistering cold, in gale force winds, outside the Toys ‘r Us in Nashua just to prove how much of an ~~idiot~~ ~~gamer~~ devoted father I am. I was hoping to score a Nintendo Wii and while the hardcore gamer in me wanted a PS3, it didn’t take a genius to figure out that if I wanted anybody else in the house to play games with me, it had to be a Wii.

Honestly, it wasn’t all that bad. I have to give credit to Toys ‘r Us for not only getting a large shipment, but also coming out and giving all of us waiting inline a ticket good until noon for a Wii. Once we had our tickets we could safely scurry back to the warmth of our cars and await the actual opening in relative comfort. When 10am finally arrived, the rush was a little crazy, but compared to the Leopard launch at the Apple Store, this was nothing.

Setting up the Wii is relatively straight-forward and I had it up and running in no time. My only gripe to date is that, unlike the GameCube, the Audio and Video are combined in one cable and can’t be split up. These means I have to listen to the audio through my TV for now. Ultimately, I would like to upgrade the video connection to component, composite stinks, but I need to upgrade my receiver to one that supports component and HDMI switching. For now I’ll have to deal with the audio going through the TV. Once I set things like the date and time, I hooked it in to the wireless network and setup the internet options.

One other reason the Wii was a natural fit for us was that we already had a Nintendo GameCube. The Wii plays all GameCube games, takes GameCube memory cards, and lets you plug in GameCube controllers including our wireless controllers. We tried out the bundled games included, called Wii Sports and found the Baseball and Tennis to be the easiest games for the girls to handle. The Bowling is fun, but a little more difficult for Ali to handle. I also picked up Wii Play, for the extra Wiimote, and while the games are cute and relatively simply, the title isn’t much more than a basic training game for the Wii. Given that the game bundled with the Wiimote is only $10 more than a Wiimote alone, it really is worth it. Christy picked out Carnival, essentially a midway themed wrapper for a bunch of standard carnie games designed to get the most out of the motion controls built in to the Wii. The game is fun enough, but between Wii Sports, Wii Play, and Carnival I actually hurt my shoulder. I can’t wait to try Major League Baseball 2008 and the new Madden, but I’m afraid I’ll end up needing Tommy John surgery.

TV, Apple Style

don — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 14:15:41 +0000

As many of you already now, the Farland household has gone without broadcast or cable television for nearly four years and that isn’t going to change any time soon. Yesterday, Madelyn and I went down to the Apple store in Salem and picked up an Apple TV.

In its previous form, the Apple TV was essentially nothing more than an iPod for the living room. It was designed to play music, photos, and video stored in your Apple iTunes library on a computer (Windows or Mac) somewhere in your house. As of this month, that has all changed. Now the Apple TV is capable of so much more like the following:

Rent movies directly from the Apple iTunes Store in standard and high-definition.
Buy music, videos, movies, and TV shows direct from Apple TV
View any iTunes content stored on your computer in your living room.
Subscribe to and view/listen to video and audio podcasts, most of them free.
Watch YouTube videos on your TV.

We haven’t had a lot of time to kick the tires, but I’m already impressed. We can import our DVDs into the iTunes library and watch them without having to put the disc in a player. This is very useful when the greasy little fingers in the house get the shiny side of the DVD all messed up. It will be nice to have the full music library available in the living room too.

Fresh Coat of Paint

don — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 21:13:50 +0000

In case you somehow missed it, TheFarlands.Net got a little work down over the past week. For the last few months, I was using a collection of themes that were artistically beautiful, they were not the most robust themes on the back-end. Given how busy I’ve been lately, I just haven’t had the time to put the work in to them that they needed. As a result, I went looking for something that was aesthetically pleasing as well as solidly built. I ended up using a theme called “Personal” from WPDesigner.com and so far, I couldn’t be happier.

In addition to the cosmetic changes, I managed to make a number of other improvements that I’m sure most of you could care less about. They make my life easier though so I promise to pass the savings on to you. Regardless, I hope you enjoy the site.

Apples to PCs

christy — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 16:12:49 +0000

I was amazed today when I opened our electric bill. Down by 40% since we replaced our “server room” of PCs, switches, gadgets and gizmos with the beautiful iMac. It may just pay for itself!

Made the Switch

don — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 08:24:03 +0000

Another week, another PC voted off the island. Over the past month, we lost both PCs and the death of the latest PC couldn’t have been more poorly timed. Christy’s PC died a few pitches short of a two run double by Varitek in game 2 of the World Series while I was watching the game on ESPN.com. The machine simply powered off and refused to boot from there on out. Christy suspects foul play despite my reassurances that it died of natural causes and I just can’t shake the unfounded reputation of forcing upgrades by artificial necessity. My mother’s infamous bludgeoning of a troublesome lawnmower does nothing to minimize that reputation. Regardless, this PC has been a strong argument for Macs ever since the day I built it. The motherboard was an undiluted shot of lemon juice from day 1. I went through two sets of memory sticks before I found one that would work properly. The instability was legendary and I regularly ran the system under-clocked. I was in the process of shutting it down for good and moving everything to my PC when my computer suddenly blew up on me about a month ago. I knew then that it was gonna die sooner or later; I just didn’t realize that it would be much sooner rather than later.

Friday night we decided to get a Mac and proceeded to go down to the Apple store in Salem and pick up a new 24″ iMac. Now, I knew that Friday was the unveiling a new version of Mac OS X, but I thought, “How bad can it be?” The answer came in the form of 100+ people lined up like would-be riders on Space Mountain. Not really keen on standing in line, we mulled around the Mall, got something to eat, and then went back to survey the state of the line. Seeing as it dropped significantly, we hopped in line and proceeded to wind through the cordoned off rat maze to the store’s entrance. Once in the store, we made every effort to make this deal go down as quickly as possible and in hindsight it wasn’t all that bad … for me. Christy, on the other hand, wasn’t doing so well. She wasn’t feeling well, dangerously under-caffeinated, and well … we wont talk about what Ali did to her.

I can honestly say that I grossly underestimated the enthusiasm Mac zealots would have for a new version of their favorite operating system. That is until I heard a familiar, “Mr. Farland, fancy meeting you here?” I didn’t even have to turn around to recognize the voice of one, Justin Riggle, poster-child for Macs Anonymous. I was complaining about my PCs death to Justin about a week before and that I just might “Go Mac” before long. Neither one of us quite expected “before long” to translate to “not long at all”.

Overall, our impression with the new iMac and Mac OS X is one of wonder, but the whole experience has been tempered with the fact that the OS is radically different than the last time either of us used a Mac. I, for one, consider this a good thing. My experience with Mac’s back in the version 9 days was anything less than pleasurable. This latest incarnation, however, is truly a wonder. We’re slowly coming up to speed and the simple differences between Mac and Windows versions of such stalwarts like Office, Firefox, and Quicken have provided us ample challenges, but ones we are starting to overcome. Now, I just need to complete the arduous process of restoring all of our files from various removable disks and DVDs and we’re back in business.

Say Cheese, Photos are Back

don — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 17:08:24 +0000

It took me a while to get around to it, but photos are once again a staple of this web site. There has been a lot of activity in the WordPress arena related to major software updates and many of the photo gallery developers simply haven’t been able to keep up. Couple this reality with my drawn out indecision on which service I prefer (Yahoo! Flickr or Google Picasa) and I have finally found a web based photo gallery that doesn’t force me to decide yet. dfGallery is a Flash based photo gallery designed by the guys at DezinerFolio.com and made freely available to all to use.

Upgrade to WordPress 2.3

don — Fri, 28 Sep 2007 03:19:31 +0000

The WordPress developers recently came out with a major release of their popular web publishing framework. I am officially in the process of upgrading this site to WordPress 2.3 and I’m taking the conservative, but time consuming approach of building the site from scratch and re-importing the old data from the previous incarnation. This update introduces some major design changes and the upgrade process has been reported to have issues. Please bear with us as we slowly bring the site back up to speed.

Welcome to WordPress Curt

don — Sat, 10 Mar 2007 23:29:19 +0000

Red Sox Ace, Curt Shilling, has joined the blogosphere with his new WordPress blog, 38Pitches.com. Knowing Curt’s penchant for speaking his mind and pulling no punches; I’m sure Red Sox management was thrilled with the news.

TheFarlands.Net Moves to WordPress

don — Wed, 03 May 2006 03:06:48 +0000

The site has just received its third major overhaul and has moved from the PostNuke content management system to WordPress. With this moves comes a lot of changes including:

Dropping Gallery and moving to Flickr for photo management.
A whole new look, in case you hadn’t noticed.
An easier framework to manage and update.
Tools and utilities that allow us to provide more timely updates.

We hope you enjoy the new site as much as you enjoyed the last one.