Technology

Day 1 at WordCamp

September 17, 2011 by Milan Cole, Realtor

Scott Berkun from automattic is talking about blogging every day and how he and the wordpress development team are starting to do this internally. It’s a great practice which he calls dogfooding; I love this word. The great part about this is that when developers use their own products then they get better, faster, because they experience the same frustrations that we as users do. More dogfooding please 🙂

Evan Soloman is talking about a/b testing. He ended with a note that a .org plugin is forthcoming. Exciting.

Diigo for Organizing Web Research

September 14, 2011 by Milan Cole, Realtor

I just tried Diigo which is a web-based tool to organize information found on the web. I know, it sounds like a mouthful. Anyway, I created my homepage and it appears that this tool is the evolution of social bookmarking tools. It allows you to mix bookmarks with your own notes and images. Seems like it would be most useful as a tool for academic type research projects.

Blogging from my iPhone

July 23, 2011 by Milan Cole, Realtor

There is something fundamentally different about the experience of blogging from an iPhone versus a computer. It is much more personal and intimate. Maybe the fact that I carry this device around with me nearly 24/7 changes my relationship to it, like it’s my lifeline to the information superhighway or connection to friends and family. Fascinating.

More Private Web Browsing

July 18, 2011 by Milan Cole, Realtor

I have long been a fan of the Firefox web browser, and I am happy to see that they have put a renewed emphasis on privacy in the latest version of their web browser. As a real estate broker and Internet marketer, I lead a fairly public life, and I am comfortable with that, but I also like to know what other websites and companies are doing with my personal information and I want to have as much control over that as possible. It’s great to see Firefox respond to this need by giving users more control over what data gets stored about them when they browse the web. I also applaud the “Do Not Track” initiative that they are now supporting.

Using the Apple Cinema Display with Windows

January 24, 2010 by Milan Cole, Realtor

I recently upgraded my computer and decided that the nicest display I could get for my budget was an Apple Cinema Display. I found the refurbished model for $599 and have not been disappointed. However, I am a PC user running windows, and Apple clearly did not intend for PC users to buy this display.

In light of this, I will share what I’ve learned about running the display on a Windows PC. First, you need a compatible video card, because apparently the display does not work with all PC video cards. I am using a Sapphire ATI Radeon 4890 which is one of the few cards that is known to be compatible. I read elsewhere that cards using the newer ATI 5750 chipset (which I wanted to get) do not seem to work, though I haven’t tested this myself.

The next step in making this display compatible is dealing with the mini-Displayport connector that is not available on any PC video cards that I am aware of. The solution is a cheap adapter, the Mini Displayport Female to Displayport Male Adapter Cable.

Now the last part of the fun is the integrated Apple Isight camera. Apple doe not offer the PC/bootcamp drivers available for download directly from their website. Instead they offer packages of drivers that are in a format that only can be loaded on a Mac (thanks apple), however, if you have access to a Mac then this package of drivers can be burned to a PC compatible CD. From this CD, the file you need is the latest AppleiSightInstaller64.exe or AppleiSightInstaller.exe depending on whether you or running a 64-bit or 32-bit OS. In my case, the only version of this driver I could track down was slightly outdated and so I actually had to edit the INF file to make it work, however, if you don’t know what an INF file is, then you are probably better off finding a friend with a Mac to burn the latest driver CD for you and while you are at it you should have them update your display’s firmware.

Good luck to anyone else who is foolish enough to mix Apple hardware with a PC 🙂

7FA8FN85WBGB