Posts Tagged ‘technology’

Well here I am sitting at my desk with a shitty ass keyboard. The damn thing is loud when I type and just isn’t the best hardware I would prefer to use. I used to have a Zboard, which I was quite fond of, however I spilled some soda on it and it brok-ed.

Pitiful. I know.

So I decided to go with buying a new keyboard from the Razer Gaming Line.

So far I am completely satisfied with my decision. The keyboard is designed for M$ Windows, which almost swayed me into reconsidering since I only run Linux. So I got the new hardware home opened up the box and sweeeet…stickers. I don’t know about you but I love stickers, so that was a plus. The keyboard overall is very lightweight and sleek. The main layout between the key sections is glassy and somewhat reflective. The keys are slightly soft, and the clicking is not as loud as my previous piece of junk. Yea my desk is at the moment messy…

Now I haven’t tested using the adanced features of the keyboard yet, simply because I’m running Linux and I don’t know what kind of issues may come about using the WINE Windows Emulator with the packaged software that came with the keyboard. The buttons located at the top right are actually a touch pad, with the lighting button which allows me to switch through either the lights being off, the WASD cluster or the whole keyboard being lit. My primary reason for getting this keyboard is because I wanted something lightweight and lit up, so now all those late nights I’m up typing away, I’ll be able to see my keyboard if I need to look at it. Heres a Vid

So here I am thinking of wonderful things to do today…

Ok mabey not really that wonderful, but i have decided to start going through all the stuff I have laying around collecting dust. My primary objective is to weed out the things that I will use, and liquidate the things I will not, by setting them aside and selling them on ebay or eventually giving them away, and if I cannot do that, it’s to the recycler.

This is something I don’t like to do. For me it’s like throwing away a book I ‘may’ read. So I’ve decided to take some pictures to illustrate the amount of stuff I have. And to see if I can get a response out of you readers as to what I should do with some of them…perhaps.

Here we have an original Xbox console which needs repair, which I have not gotten around to fixing, an older Zenith television set, and an old Amiga (I dont remember the model)

A cascade of piled junk, miscellaneous peripherals, a USB and wireless keyboard motherboards and an old camcorder which I’m thinking of converting to a night vision headset as seen here.

Yes, I know I should likely take better care of my junk…anyways. Here we have a poorly modded PC case, which was actually fun to have while I was using it.Blue lighst windows and a drive bay mod that hid the drives. Now it just lays in a closet waiting for my opportunity to use it again. I need RAM and hardrives, to get this bastard back up to par.

So thats it for now, I have a huge array of wires, cables and the like that i need to go through as well as other miscellaneous pieces and parts. So please input and suggestions are welcome. I’m looking forward to getting this stuff organized, worked on, and rid of in the future. Cheers.

I just wanted to share a simple php logging function I wrote. The function is primitive as it records every accessed instance of a page it is called on, regardless of session time etc…It has a lot of room for expansion, and can be easily used in conjunction for hit stats etc…

First of all we want to create a Table in our database to record values we want, so goto your MySQL database, phpmyAdmin or whatever your preference and create the table described here.


CREATE TABLE `kind_log` (
`log_id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`rem_ip` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
`username` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
`usr_agent` varchar(100) NOT NULL,
`time` datetime NOT NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`log_id`)
)


After you create the database table you then need to create a functions.php, name it whatever you’d like as long as you remember it so you can include it in any of the subsequent pages you’ll be using the function. Usually most content management systems or CMS’s already have a pre-defined functions page.

Function Code:


function ip_log() {
$ip = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$agent = $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
$usr = 'Surfer Dude';

mysql_query(“INSERT INTO kind_log(rem_ip, username, usr_agent, time) VALUES (‘$ip’, ‘$usr’, ‘$agent’, NOW())”);
}

Now to use this function simply declare ip_log(); somewhere in your site, like in the top of your header, make sure to include the function file that it is located in however or the script wont work.

When the function passes during a visit it will record the users IP address($ip), the User Agent($agent) (ie: Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox etc…) , a name association ($usr) (which can be set to a logged in username from a SESSION value) and the time of the “hit” within the database.

When is the apparent signal of crossing the threshold between real and virtual reality? And not virtual reality as we see in the movies or thats being developed for gaming and simulations (you know with the headsets etc…). I’m talking about the virtual reality of the mind, the part that encapsulates us humans into the entire computer universe. People live on computers, sitting in front of a screen in either melancholy or eager bliss. Is it boredom the ensues this behavior? We face a revolution of human generation that is connected to technology in more than a physical sense. The connection to the world at the click of a button enables humans to interact and insinuate relationships with each other on such a wide scale that reality in the physical sense is diminished slightly. This is not to say that the human species will fall into de-evolution with the advent of a non-socializing structure in civilization, but merely to suggest that the connections between humans and computers becomes ever more closer to one another.

I sit at my computer daily, I live off it, I eat at it sometimes, I’ve spilled soda on my keyboard, but is it a requirement to my survival as a human? No. Is it conflicting with my ability as a person to socialize in a normal fashion with my peers in a ‘face-to-face’ situation? No. Yet has it interfered with my life in such a way as to being, not ridiculed but, instilled with the feeling of guilt? Yes. It is still a confusing relationship to those humans that prefer to live in the outer realms of civilization and communication. Those who don’t understand the relationship tend to view it with contempt, and stick with a more ‘primitive’ medium of social structure. If I had a choice, and could only pick one, between going out and drinking with my buddies, or chilling at home on my computer, which do you think I would pick? My computer. Only because it seems that over the last few years the whole aspect of going out and getting trashed has slowly perspired out of my system, and some other reasons, would I make that choice.

Something that has recently attached itself to my train of thought, is the aspect of Cyber-Spirituality. The whole god through technology is surely a perspective and prospering approach to understanding how and why humans are so comfortably attached to computers. I remember hearing the word ‘computer’ for the first time as a young boy, and actually knowing what it was, without any prior instruction to what it was. My child knows what one is already in a sense, she’s 5 months old, and will slap the keys and then look at the screen. Finding spirituality through technology will surely be a ‘tuning’ contribution to living in cyberspace. Religion as it is, has always been a fundamental part of humans. So as we prevail in the evolution of technology, spirituality will follow with us, as it has since we crawled out of the gene pool.

So to conclude this entry I’d like to add that; as a witness to this prospering level of behavior, I can honestly say that there is no apparent signal to crossing that threshold that diversifies our daily lives with the computer. It just happens.