Here’s a cool DIY showing you how to use ceiling medallions as wall art, great idea for your home.

The lightweight urethane medallions were simply painted in subtly varying shades of yellow and easily mounted on the wall of this living room. The medallions are affordable, around $20 to $30, so it’s quite an attainable way to bring “art” into your home. Another thought? Pick up a medallion with a circular opening in the center, and have a glass cutter make you a round mirror to size, and you’ll have an ornate mirror at a fractional price.

via casasugar

Ghostbusters Cadillac Ecto is for sale on eBay.  Current bid is at $45,000 but I think it will go well over $100,000 for this authentic Hollywood classic.

In August of 2006 I purchased the original Universal Studios Ecto-1. The car was stripped of all the Ghost busting equipment and sold as an ambulance and with a little negotiation I was able to get all of the roof rack parts and the original light bars. This car was used at the park for over fifteen years for the Ghostbusters Experience, parades and display inside the Florida park. This car is one of three Sony/MGM authorized Ghostbusters 1959 Cadillac Miller Meteor Ecto-1. There are the two original cars used in the films and this one built exclusively for the Universal Studios Theme parks. This car has a rich history and thousands of fans have been photographed with this car. The only major change made to this car was the roof rack. We modified the roof rack to resemble the screen used Sony Ecto-1 original car. Other upgrades are cosmetic and mechanically it’s very sound.

via neatorama, ebay

I’ve read books of 2 of the most unique creators of operating systems, that is Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, and Bill Gates, the creator of Microsoft Windows.

Of course, I did get the feeling that Bill Gates was a money-hungry, arrogant, geek-vampire from his book while I got the feeling that Linus Torvalds had bigger things in mind like creating open-source operating system platform and spread of free knowledge.  I think when I was growing up, Linus Torvalds was one of my heroes while Bill Gates too, but Bill kept making bad operating systems for money.

If it wasn’t for Linus, I don’t think we would have Firefox, Google Chrome, and pretty much open source software in general.  (or at least they won’t be as popular)  This is that one guy who made the best open-source operating system and boosted the open-source community by gazillion miles.

Well, to cap it off, here’s an interview with Linux Torvalds on his thoughts with Linux as of lately:

I’ve used different distributions over the years. Right now I happen to use Fedora 9 on most of the computers I have, which really boils down to the fact that Fedora had fairly good support for PowerPC back when I used that, so I grew used to it. But I actually don’t care too much about the distribution, as long as it makes it easy to install and keep reasonably up-to-date. I care about the kernel and a few programs, and the set of programs I really care about is actually fairly small.

And when it comes to distributions, ease of installation has actually been one of my main issues - I’m a technical person, but I have a very specific area of interest, and I don’t want to fight the rest. So the only distributions I have actively avoided are the ones that are known to be “overly technical” - like the ones that encourage you to compile your own programs etc.

Yeah, I can do it, but it kind of defeats the whole point of a distribution for me. So I like the ones that have a name of being easy to use. I’ve never used plain Debian, for example, but I like Ubuntu. And before Debian people attack me - yeah, I know, I know, it’s supposedly much simpler and easier to install these days. But it certainly didn’t use to be, so I never had any reason to go for it.

via oreilly

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Here’s a cool wireless E-book from Amazon, the Amazon Kindle.  The Amazon Kindle allows you to access the Amazon store via its EDVO connection (meaning you don’t have to connect to WiFi) and buy books that will get downloaded to your Kindle.

I think you can say this new Kindle is more like the iPod for books.  Of course, I really like it except the fact that the Kindle is still in black and white.  But if you are a book-fanatic and you have thousands of books in collection, you might want to consider this E-book that can hold almost 200 books.

Aside from buying books, you can also read blogs, access Wikipedia, all this paid for by Amazon. (the EDVO connection)

Well, if you like it, knock youself out and get one at Amazon here.

Acer has just launched the very first laptops in the U.S. that are WiMAX-enabled.  Of course, people in Asia have been getting WiMAX laptops for the last year or so but hey, let’s just celebrate the fact that WiMAX is beginning its 4G speeds in the U.S.  This is just the start folks, you will begin to see people use WiMAX over all that other AT&T 3G crap.

SAN JOSE, Calif. and BALTIMORE–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Acer America, part of the world’s third largest PC company (source: Gartner data, 2Q 2008), today unveiled its first WiMAX-enabled notebooks – Aspire 4930-6862 and Aspire 6930-6771 – in support of the nation’s first U.S. WiMAX wireless broadband network launched by XOHM in Baltimore. Demonstrating the company’s focus on delivering innovative technology solutions, the Aspire 4930-6862 and Aspire 6930-6771 are WiMAX-enabled Intel® Centrino 2-based notebooks with the first-ever combined WiMAX/Wi-Fi module, previously codenamed “Echo Peak,” part of the Intel WiMAX/Wi-Fi Link 5050 Series.

via engadget, Press Release

Check out this cool Halloween DIY on how to make a pumpkin wreath.  It’s not Christmas but no one said you can’t make a wreath on a special American holiday.

Here’s a great use for those miniature pumpkins that you see in grocery stores and at produce stands this time of year. For a Halloween decoration that will bring seasonal color to your front door, attach some miniature pumpkins to a plastic foam wreath. It’s easy to do: Just wire the tiny pumpkins to the wreath form, and use sheet moss to fill in the spaces between them. Then cap the wreath with a big black bow, and hang it on the front door.

via akincaroll, DIY Page

I’ve always been fond of using red peppers for my homemade salads but here’s a cool food DIY on how to make “roasted” red peppers so you can get even better taste.  This is something I will definitely have to try as I didn’t know you could roast red peppers.

Adjust the top oven rack and place it 4 inches from the broiler. Turn on the broiler.

Place washed and dried red bell peppers on a greased baking sheet.

Broil the peppers for 10 minutes, or until skin is mostly blackened. Rotate pepper 1/4 turn and broil for an additional 10 minutes. Turn the peppers until the entire pepper is blackened. (Don’t be afraid to burn ‘em!) Remove from the oven.

via joshuaandshawnda

It looks like the Japanese are using barcodes for more than scanning, take a look at how they used barcodes as another place for advertising.  Great idea, I don’t see why U.S. companies are not doing this.

This kind of creative barcode design is completely new to me, but apparently it’s quite common in Asia - or at least Japan. Here’s a full gallery of some unusual product barcodes. Please comment if you have seen similar designs in your country (or if you are missing out on them as well).

via fosfor, source

Today, I decided to buy a new laptop since my previous two $2000 HP laptops keep dying on me constantly.

I did get a Dell Inspiron 1525 for about $600 at my local BestBuy.  It turns out the laptop gives you bang for your dollar.

Although I do hate even saying Vista as of lately, I decided to give it another go and see if Vista would stay on the laptop as it came with it.  The funniest thing happened though, I got the “unlimited” blue screens of death after installing one of my older programs.  This was the worst unlimited blue screens of death I’ve got in my 21 years career of using Microsoft’s products.

After installing that program, I’d get the blue screen of death whether I booted in Safe Mode or not.

So, if I wasn’t tech-savvy, I’d have to take it to the GeekSquad at BestBuy and spend another couple hundred bucks to fix it.  (Yes, let me also add that the BestBuy sales guy was worst than car salesman, he tried to sell me “optimization” and “virus protection” for MONEY, how fu*ked up is that?  I told him to shut the fu*k up and hand me the laptop so I can pay cash for it.  He actually agreed finally that I was right and he’s only doing his “job” as there are cameras watching him.)

Well, you can solve this problem by recovering Vista to an earlier point in time, similar to VMWare’s System Restore feature.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Press F8 at boot to enter the recovery mode.

(image credit)

2) Select “System Restore” and you will be able to select which “time” you want to recover the whole system to.

Now, I was very impressed that Vista had this capability to restore to a point in time.  But the bad news is that I should have been able to boot my Vista at least in Safe Mode.  I have never encountered such bad blue screen of death on my Windows XPs but this was just devastating for your average Joe user.

Again, I confirm the horribleness of Vista but I will keep using it on my laptop for now, just to see if I can come up with more hacks and write it on this blog.

It’s funny because the first 386DX-25Mhz PC computer was the very first computer I bought when I was 9 years old.  On the first day, somehow I deleted command.com from my MS-DOS operating system, of course made by Microsoft.  After that, I had to wait couple days so my parents could take the 30 pound PC back to the Chinese computer makers couple hours away so they could install command.com for me.

You see, Microsoft has been making vulnerable operating system since MS-DOS, how can you allow the user to erase command.com??? (Kinda stupid idea that you let that even happen without any security locks)

It was probably that first time I bought my PC that I fell in love with hacking, well, it seems like I do have to re-live my horrible operating system nightmares once in awhile.

I wonder how many people in the world do the same thing that I do, well, let me keep trying Vista and see if it gets any worse than today.