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With the recent increase in the price of gasoline to over $1 per liter across Manitoba - an increase that looks as though it’s here to stay, the simple act of driving has again become more expensive. There is however one aspect where Manitobans are receiving a break, and may continue to do so for some time - insurance premiums. Read more…

In Part II, I performed the OS X installation, and noted a couple minor issues - keyboard and shutdown issues. A bit of an update though: I found that the sometimes the system will shut down fine - it seems hit and miss though, and I can’t really narrow down a cause.

The second test consists of attempting an installation on another “white box” PC, but this time one with hardware different from the development kits. A machine I had available differed from the first in the following replacements: Read more…

Hopefully you’ve already read Part I of the experiment - if not, I suggest you do so now, as I’ll be picking up where I left off. Read more…

First, a little history…

For years, there have been PC users who liked the Macintosh, but couldn’t simply “switch” for various reasons. Often, the reasons had to do with software that was available for Windows that wasn’t available for the Mac. Since many users “needed” Windows, their options were either to buy both, or simply stick with the PC… until now. Read more…

The Gigabyte GA-8I915ME-GL motherboard is a pretty basic Micro-ATX motherboard based on the Intel 915GL chipset. I won’t list all of the specifications here as they can also be found on Gigabyte’s website. In addition, there are no benchmarks in with the review. All that this review contains is information on the motherboard & included software, as well as my experiences installing it. Read more…

My father runs a small business and has been looking to expand his customer base to the web. He’s had a company website for a couple of years, but it was fairly simplistic and was mainly there to create a presence on the web (as well as to hopefully bring in future business). Recently, after hearing about my Adwords experiences, we thought it might be worth it to try running an Adwords campaign. Of course, in it’s current state, the site probably wasn’t going to generate much of a ROI without some changes. The options we came up with were to either make minor updates to the site and rely on sales through the phone, or to run shopping cart software, and offer the ability to purchase products over the web. After some consideration, he chose the latter. Read more…

Looking to add Adsense ads to your WordPress blog? Look no further than the AdSense Deluxe WordPress Plugin. This free plugin is one of the best Adsense plug-ins I’ve seen. What makes it stand out from others (for example, the current Joomla varieties) is that it’s dead-simple to create new AdSense blocks and then to implement them within the pages of your blog. Read more…

The Kill A Watt device caught my attention, simply because it provides information about the power consumption of your devices, and can be found for under $50, making it somewhat affordable. I was interested in seeing how much power our household electronics and appliances were using - in particular the computers, as well as the TV that usually gets left on all night. Read more…

I had surprising difficulty finding information about changing a site from www.website.com to just website.com through redirects. I also wanted to be sure that it would redirect any directories and pages as well. Since I found some information here (a great page if you’re looking to do a copy-paste to your own .htaccess file), I thought I’d post what I’d found:

First, to redirect from www.website.com to website.com…… Read more…

Not everything I put in the riddles, puzzles, and brain teasers section involves a king and some sort of puzzle that has to be solved with fancy logic. Sometimes it’s a real life question, and this is one of those times.

The question of course is if you have a 2-prong outlet (live + neutral) and want to convert it to a 3-prong (live + neutral + ground), why can’t you simply use a little jumper-wire on the new outlet and hook up ground to neutral? After all, they both go to ground eventually. This would mean that your surge protector that needs ground to operate correctly would work (surge protectors simply dump surges to ground before they hit your equipment). The problem is, by connecting neutral to ground in the outlet, there’s a situation that could happen that could kill you. No, it doesn’t have to do with the surge protector or power surges. Want to guess what it is? Read more…