Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

THIS IS TOO AWESOME! Good one on his part!

You know an Internet craze has jumped the shark when it makes its way into that most traditional of Thanksgiving ceremonies: the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Here we are watching the “Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends” float drift by when suddenly the Rick Roller himself pops up for that most irritating of YouTube pranks.

Rick Rolled! Rick Astley Crashes Macy’s Parade.

It looks like President-Elect Obama isn’t going to give up his beloved BlackBerry this January without some sort of fight. In an interview with Barbara Walters, he revealed that he was working to find a solution to that whole surrender-your-cellphones-and-email-accounts at the door policy.

BlackBerry Love: Obama Looking for Ways to Hold onto His Blackberry.

If you are Canadian like I am then this sucks! I am sure that this is not the fault of Twitter but the fault of the wireless providers in Canada. To be completely honest they all are pretty bad up here. In a statement release on their site they explain the reason is due to cost.

Unexpected changes in our billing have forced us into a difficult situation with our Canadian SMS service. We can’t afford to support this service given our current arrangement with our providers (where costs have been doubling for the past several months.) As a result, effective today we are no longer delivering outbound SMS over our Canadian shortcode (21212).

The ability to update Twitter over SMS will still be supported over 21212. But we know that this is only part of the experience and we want to make Twitter work in the way folks want … regardless of where they live.

There is a realistic, scalable SMS solution for Canada (and the rest of the world.) We’re working on that and will post more details on the Twitter blog as we make progress.

I hope that they are successful at finding a better solution. Until then I actually will have to get on my computer to look at twitter. DOH!

Have fun, and Happy Tweeting!

Thanks to Thomas Aleksander from geeks.pirillo.com for this link. A great site with a program that changes your desktop backgrounds as often as you like.

☆ Desktoptopia ☆ .

I like to change it up every once in a while and put a new wallpaper on my computer. Usually I take something that is pertinant to the seasons or something going on in my life. Right now in my neck of the woods we have had our first real snow fall and the big bad winter is coming. So I decided to go with this one:

Snowy Pine

This and many more of my wallpapers come from a website called InterfaceLIFT. A great site that not only has good quality images but also has them in different formats. There are other sites out there that have nice images but I have not really found one that organizes them as well as InterfaceLIFT. You will find wallpaper in standard 4:3 format, wide screen format, and dual monitor format.

I also want to give an honorable mention to Digital Blasphemy. They have some great wallpapers that have been created rather than photographed. Not all of them are completely up my ally but I can appreciate their quality.

So get out there and change your wallpaper. It’s nice sometimes to look at something a little different.

Love these types of things. For all you Trekkers out there!

ThinkGeek :: Star Trek TNG Plate Covers.

Christmas is coming!!! A fun entry for all you Firefox users. Slap one of these on to feel the spirit of the holidays. And if you are American then do it next week :)

Festive Firefox: 10 Themes for the Holidays

I installed 8.10 with KDE4 last week on a IBM T43 laptop and it went quite smoothly. I was impressed with how easy it went through and that all the hardware except for the wireless card worked out of the of the box. The wireless card setup even though not 100% automated was still quite easy. The driver is a restricted driver and required approval before being used. I saw the warning icon on the taskbar right away and enabled the driver which let me connect to my wireless network.

From what I can see the application set is quite the same as with previous Kubuntu releases. New versions of a lot of them mind you but I didn’t see anything that popped out as a flashy change, except for KDE itself. I am sure there are some meaningful updates in the application suite but I was really looking for something that caught my eye right away. So the people making KDE have made some really nice changes to the menu and desktop. The integration of widgets is nice on the desktop. It actually makes your desktop space for icons another widget so you can arrange it and other widgets around the way you like. Then they are all active if you look at the desktop.

The overall look is nice as well. I mentioned that the programs (or start for all the MS people) menu has been changed. The navigation takes a little getting used to but it’s still quite intuitive. It is actually much better than the Vista menu in my opinion.

I recommend everyone take a look at a Linux distro with KDE4 integrated. You will most likely be surprised at how it looks and how easy it is to navigate. The easiest way to do that for free is by using VirtualBox and creating a virtual computer under Windows so you don’t have to change your current Windows config.

Have fun and happy Kubuntu :)

It’s been a long time since I have written a post on here and it’s depressing. I have done some thinking in the last couple of days and here is what I came up with.

I have wanted to do some online video streaming for quite some time and I have spent a lot of time getting my setup working so that it would run correctly. That took away from my posting time so there was a lack of presence on the blog which wasn’t good. Then for some reason I got it in my head that if I was going to spend any time on the website it should be in the video stream. There are 2 issues with that. First is that I absolutely need to be in my home office for that to work. I don’t have any mobile cameras to play with so it’s not a choice at the moment. The other issue is that it takes planning and some dedicated time. I can post from any computer connected to the internet, hell… even my cell phone.

Now that I realize what my mental block was I hope that I can get past it… Christmas is coming and there will be much tech to talk about :)