Home Improvement Tool and Toy Reviews

I have really been feeling it at the pump over the last few weeks when getting gas. Just within the last 5 days I had to fill up 3 times for a grand total of $130 (my car twice and my wife’s once). Because of this absurd amount of money and frequency I went car shopping last week to look for a more fuel efficient car.

The Situation

I have a 2002 Nissan Xterra that has 95k miles on it. On the average it gets about 20 miles to the gallon with its 16 Gallon tank (it actually has more but that it the most I have ever put in when it was on empty). I drive 20 miles one way to work for a total of 200 miles a week which is 800 miles a month. The car is really driven a least 1000-1200 miles a month with weekends and such.

I like the car a lot other then the gas mileage. I especially like the fact that I own the car outright and do not have a payment on it. The current trade in value for it right now is $8k. If I could sell it personally (which I do not think it likely) I might be able to get $10k. I paid $14.5 for it 2 years ago with 56k miles on it.

(more…)

I am one of those procrastinating people like most. Because of that I  have lacked a backup of my important files. The most important thing on my computer are actually all the photos of the my kids. Since we hardly ever print the photos out if my hard drive got hosed we would loose a ton of memories.

I had looked at online backups several months ago and had decided that I was going to use Carbonite since I had read so many good reviews of them. I even told a coworker about Carbonite and he said he was going to use it also - neither of us did.

Recently I installed Vista and was extremely disappoint so I wanted to try the whole OSx86 thing to get Mac OS X running on my Dell. Because the install deals with messing around with partitions (when dual booting) I did not want to take the chance with all of our pictures. Therefore I restricted myself to having a complete backup somewhere in case things went bad.

The first thing I did was check out what people were saying about Carbonite (blog search rocks!). Some people were not-so-happy with them and had mentions Mozy. Another quick search of Mozy found that people were generally happy with their service.

(more…)

Things are really heating up over at The Masters House blog concerning the DR Horton Warranty Problems that I have been having. They really are not big issues but getting them fixed has become a very big deal.

It all stems from the fact that every time (yes EVERYTIME) I call them out to fix something on our new house they do not fix it correctly. They either do not finish it or they create a new issue while fixing the existing one.

Basically I had to do 4 levels up in the warranty department before I could get someone to actually get my issues addressed. Well actually they have not been addressed yet but hopefully Mike of DR Horton will come through for me.

Check out the post and let me know if you have had any issues with DR Horton.

Man, I wish more people would realize that this is not the first time that America realized that we have gone through this immigration thing before.

This video is a really funny way of showing the truth.

Technorati: Funny Video, Immigration, Indians, Crackers, Mexicans

As mentioned before I got a SanDisk Sansa e250r MP3 player for Christmas. I was replacing a 512mb MP3 player that I had gotten free from my Napster subscription.

The main reason for wanting to get rid of the 512mb MP3 player was that I could only get about 5 full albums on it. The e250r had 2GB of space so I expected to get about 20 albums on there.

To my disappointment I was only able to get about twice as much on the e250r. The reason for this was that it was preloaded with almost a gigabyte of music that they wanted you to subscribe to Rhapsody music service to continue to listen to. Some of the music was cool but not 1GBs cool.

Unfortunately it took a little digging but I found where all the preloaded music was hiding out and was able to delete it.

This is where it was hiding - \system\music\

There are 275 .rax files in this locationby default from the factory.

UPDATE: You will also need to delete the PP500.DAT file under the System\data directory. This will delete the entries from your database. I had deleted the songs but they wee still showing up in my Album, Artist, and Song lists.

Now that I have more space I have some ripping to do to fill my Sansa back up again.

Technorati: MP3, MP3 Player, Sansa e250r, iPod

Usually it is all about the latest goodies and gadgets that I have seen or have been messing around with. It is not that I haven’t been messing around with stuff, it is just that th stuff that I have been messing with fits more in my other blogs then this one.

Mac OS XFor instance, I recently got OS X running on my Dell Dimension 4700. I then got Vista running on it too. While this fit way within the scope of this blog I had already started blogging about Macs on my idano.net blog. Therefore I felt that it was only fitting that I continue to blog there about. Speaking of OS X, I got a MacBook at work and have been using it - which is cool. But then again, I started blogging about it over there first.

Porch RailingAlso, I just did a pretty major project at my house. I built and installed porch railing on the back porch of my house. I did this so that we could let our kids play outside while keeping an eye on them. Oh course that type of blogging belonged at my Masters House blog.

So see, the thing is that I have been blogging, but the blogging has been in other blogs that I usually neglected while I blogged here. The winds of change are starting to blow though so you should see posts flowing out of here more regularly now so check back soon.

Technorati: Blog, Blogging, Home Improvement, DIY, OS X, Windows Vista