Zac Garrett

The left screen is my 15in MacBook Pro running at 1440 x 900 and the right is a 24in Samsung running at 1920 x 1200. On the left the wallpaper is an image I found on the web of China I believe and it is rather calming. By contrast the right screen is a photo of a nightline in Japan and is calming in its own right.

Applications running in the Dock

Finder

Firefox

Thunderbird

Minefield — Nightly version of Firefox

Adium

Terminal

Cyberduck

Azureus

iTunes

Path Finder

Grab

Activity monitor

Menu Bar Items

Adium

Path Finder

Wakoopa

Wireless Signal

Modem Status

Screen locking tool

VPN Status

Volume

Ever since Google bought YouTube people have been wondering how they would monetize their purchase. As of late they’ve been talking about google ads in videos. They’ve now released the system and it’s time to play around with it. Continue Reading »

Bruce Schneier is a security genius. In the past he has created crypto algorithm blowfish and now he is focused on how security works in the real world.

Below is a speech at Defcon 15 which was a pure questions and answers session. If you have even the slightest interest in security this will be interesting for you. He covers many topics from crypto to TSA to voting systems.

I help a ton of random people solve their technology problems. One thing that I’ve picked up on is a lot of odd stats, such as the amount of time it takes to completely infect a brand new computer to the state it has to be worked on. Continue Reading »

It is not often that I laugh at xkcd, but this one got me laughing out loud.

Click the image to see the rest

Earlier today I decided that I needed to upgrade the server to the latest version of Apache and PHP. To do this it requires you to compile both of the packages and then install them. Well, that is how it works if installing the software by command line. The issue was that the server I was working on uses cpanel/WHM. This puts a little kink in the system. Continue Reading »

This has to be one of the best stories I’ve read in a long time.

After repeated attempts to change her phone service from Verizon to Comcast’s Triple Play during a week in August, the 75-year-old Bristow resident with a heart condition took out her frustrations at the Manassas payment center on Center Street.

Shaw was arrested for disorderly conduct after she took a hammer to several items in the office - all the while saying, “Have I got your attention now?”

There have been many times when I’ve wanted to hurt the tech support on the other end of the phone. It took a 75 year old lady to actually follow through. With the way tech support is going today I will not be surprised to see more and more stories of this sort. Companies need to realize that good support will bring in more customers.

Yes, I’ve done something I said I would never do; put ads on one of my sites.

I’ve thought about creating a way for people to just hide the ads, but have not implemented it as of the moment. So if you do not wish to see the ads you can use a firefox extension to do so. Both adblock and noscript will allow you to remove them.

Oh yeah, you can send all hate mail to Dan as he talked me into adding the ads.

Stats can be used to prove anything and that is why I hate them. Well, that and I tend to look at them way too much.

There have been many reports of the Firefox market share growth. Some places say it is in the 35% while others say the share much lower. While if one were to look at the stats for this site it would show that nearly 90% of the visitors are running Firefox. Continue Reading »

In recent years people have been able to bypass the great firewall by using RSS feeds. China has recently blocked all rss feeds rather than blocking just certain ones. I am not quite sure why the government spends as much time as they do trying to protect their residents. All they are doing is creating smarter users. Continue Reading »