Geek Around The House

I woke up this morning to the sound of heavy equipment on my street. From the moment I opened my eyes, I knew that I’d have to rearrange my plans for the day. Recording those voice over tracks would have to wait, as my home office has no soundproofing, whatsoever.
For the little guy working in [...]

Care to share any tips on you keep your home office organized? I’ve been fighting the clutter for eons. It’s a never-ending battle around these parts. Each time I implement a small office organization tactic, it works for a while … but over time, papers and other junk still pile up everywhere there’s open horizontal [...]

Do you drink bottled water? Have you ever taken the time to calculate how much you spend on bottled water in any given month? I can’t put an exact number on it, but I know that it’s been a considerable sum here at Ranchero Indebto.
While there’s no question that bottled water is convenient, the costs [...]

As I walked through the living room this afternoon, the sun was shining intensely through the sliding glass door to the deck. There was no hiding the fact that the glass needed to be cleaned. Seeing that I needed a distraction, I set myself to the task, only to realize that we were completely out [...]

“Content is King,” the saying goes, but words are cheap, the king is dead, and cheap is the new king.  What you knew has been turned around and twisted inside out in this brave new world. Folks are rabid for bargains and thankfully, they’re still not all that hard to come by … if you [...]

Is the Flying Monkey the Best Stocking Stuffer of 2008, as the latest unsolicited commercial email that invaded my inbox (ever.so.strongly) suggested? Oh, it looks like a barrel full of fun … until someone pokes an eye out, as will inevitably and sadly happen.  (When the Flying Monkey lawsuits begin, will there be a manufacturer [...]

Have you ever stopped to think how many times you run out of kitchen garbage bags each year? If you’re like most folks, you may have never given it a thought … you keep buying the smallest package of kitchen garbage bags you can each time you run out.
If you’re looking for a place to [...]

The thermometer hit 100 today and it’s only the 9th of June. It’s time to talk about the other kind of windows again … not Microsoft windows, but the windows on your home. Window tinting, specifically.
I’ve been giving a good bit of thought to installing D-I-Y solar window tinting on a handful of the windows [...]

When you’re the geek around the house, technology is where you find it. Last week, I found it in the master bath, when I replaced the original toilet with a hi-tech wonder … the toilet that flushes an entire bucket of golf balls.
It started out as a little job … we just wanted to replace [...]

Comcast recently took over our local cable company. We had a clue before the welcome packet arrived in the snail mail … the performance of our cable Internet dropped dramatically.
“Dad! What’s wrong with the Internet?”
When tested with one of the speed testing services, we’re still cranking at a download speed of roughly 3000 kb/s … [...]

I’ve long pondered this question: If you could control anything via the Internet, what would it be?
Over the years, I’ve come up with lots of crazy ideas, like RFID tagged socks (August ‘04) and net-controlled hot tubs. And I’ve stumbled into plenty of others, like the Proliphix Internet-controlled programmable thermostat.
Sometimes it seems like half of [...]

Faithful Technobabble readers may remember my long-running obsession with space heaters over the years and my decision to purchase the bargain electric fireplace (that turned out not to be a bargain in the long run).
The electric fireplace landed in our sun room, which for many years did double-duty as my home office… that is, until [...]

Do you have a home office copier? While there are a lot of pieces of home office tech that could (potentially) make my life easier, a home office copier is at the top of the list. I don’t have one of those newfangled multifunction print units … and I kick myself every time I need [...]

What do you do when your digital camera breaks? Do you toss it in a drawer and go shopping? Or do you look to get it fixed? Once upon a time, every town of a decent size had a place to get your TV fixed, your shoes repaired, your watches tweaked (remember the watchmaker?), and [...]

Thanksgiving, again … it’s time to pass the potatoes and stick a fork in that spyware. Just keep in mind that your post-holiday diet starts today … so think about that digital scale before you go for that third plate …
The conversation will inevitably turn to politics at one point or another. When things come [...]

I’ve had my eye out for a cheap network attached storage (NAS) device for my home/office network for a while now. But the cheapest NAS was never truly cheap … until now. I was pleasantly surprised when a post from Chuck’s Deals arrived in my mailbox today … Chuck turned up an insanely cheap NAS [...]

There’s little doubt that eBay has become the world’s marketplace … but sometimes it’s the world’s weirdest marketplace. We’ve all seen lots of crazy stuff appear on eBay over the years, but did you know that there’s an active market for haunted items on eBay?
It may be too late to win that auction or click [...]

You have a fine tradition to uphold as an upstanding member of the community of geekdom. That tradition extends to your abode, as humble as it might be … when Halloween time rolls around, there’s no question about it … you need to geek your castle.
You know from previous years that creating your costume takes [...]

The smaller that technology becomes, the easier it is to forget it’s there. Say an iPod. Or a cell phone. How easy is it to forget that you left one of those little critters in a pants pocket? And when you throw those pants onto the wash pile… well… you get the idea.
It’s even worse [...]

What do you do when your dishwasher gives notice that it’s ready to head south for the winter? Why you start looking for a new one, of course. The dishwasher here at Rancho Indebto hasn’t packed its bags… yet… but its performance is so abysmal that we’re ready to give it an early ticket out [...]