Farb's Thoughts

Healthy - Me?

2011-07-24T21:14:00.000-07:00

Tech Day

2011-04-22T23:53:00.000-07:00

First Project. MacBook Pro 7

With Easter being this weekend I have an extra 2 days to fuck around and do whatever I please. So as I was lying in bed I decided I was going to get some shit done today. The previous night I had received a free copy of Windows 7 64bit Ultimate from a friend with a MSDN subscription and so I wanted to get windows 7 installed on my MacBook pro. I started by doing a test install in Parallels and when I got that to work I decided I wanted to use it completely separate from my OS X installation. Solution = Boot Camp. I proceeded to partition my HDD and then it was time to boot up from the windows disk. Everything went smooth. I had Windows 7 installed. I installed all the drivers from the Disk provided with my Mac. I then had Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, keyboard shortcuts, and sound. Everything went great.

The History of Farbs’ Desktop.

I've had my custom built desktop for about 3 years now. Slowly I'd upgraded the thing until I'd finally gotten some decent parts in it. The upgrading ended about a year and a half ago. I'd gotten a Wi-Fi enabled motherboard from a friend on the cheap and then picked up a 2.7ghz Dual Core AMD Processor on newegg.com for about 70 bucks. I'd done away with 2 of the biggest things that had slowed my previous set up down but there was a major one left, RAM. I had been running on a measly 2 gb's of ram, and by today's computing standards that wasn't much at all. So I hit up Newegg once again and discovered RAM is expensive. Or was to me at the time. What does a broke high school kid do when he needs computer parts you ask? Hit up eBay of course! I got 4gb of DDR2 ram for about 25 bucks from some guy in California. I was all set. I had the Mobo, CPU, and RAM and my trusty old 8600gt 256mb GeForce card. About the only other thing I needed was a hard drive. I had an old 250gb one from my previous set up so I figured, "what the hell, it's good enough." Only to later regret that decision. I got everything installed and ran a "legit" copy of Windows 7 given to me from a friend. The thing was a beast for its time. Not by others standards but for me. I'd never used a better machine. To top it off I had found 2 Black and Silver CRT's. It was the fucking cat's meow.

That machine allowed me to, 1. Play countless hours of Call of Duty 4 on Custom Servers, 2. Download gigabyte upon gigabytes of movies, 3. Crank up Eminem on my stereo that’s attached to it, and 4. Read and comment on what was my favorite website of the time, Gizmodo. I could do anything, (hell I even played Crysis), on that machine. Sure, not all of the most tasking programs, but at the time it was fucking awesome. Then the trouble started. After about a year 2 of the 4gb’s of RAM started to give me trouble so I was down to 2 gb’s. Then Windows 7 crapped out on me, and I was forced to format and start over. My computer continued to hold out for a few more months before shit hit the fan. That hard drive I was using which was going on 3 years busted. The thing wouldn’t even boot into Windows without BSODing on me. So my desktop sat, collecting dust, for 3 months. Until this morning! I dug through some old computer parts in my closet and found another 250gb hard drive. I threw that hard drive into my rig so fast Hussein Bolt would have been impressed. I stuck the Windows 7 disk I used on my MacBook in the drive and booted up. After destroying any shred’s of data on the hard drive I was installing Windows on the same computer for the third time. I got it all booted up and installed the drivers from Asrock’s site for the Sound and Wi-Fi and I was flying high. I had my beloved Desktop back. Installed Chrome, uTorrent, Steam, and LOTRO. The essentials :P and The computer is looking as good as new.

All I wanted was Wi-Fi…

3 Months Ago - I live in a large house. 3 stories large, not including the full basement and Attic. You get the picture. Our main router is on the first floor. My room is on the 3rd floor. Even wireless – n doesn’t like to travel that far through walls/ceilings/floors. So what would a tech-loving cheap ass student do? Hack an old router. We had an old WRT54g Linksys lying around from when they upgraded our Internet so I took it and 5 hours (of getting so mad I could have killed a baby penguin) later I had a fully running DD-WRT enabled router. Another hour later I had that thing hooked up and displaying the signal to the 3rd floor.

Fast forward to the present day. I found out my neighbor to the north was leeching off our Internet and sucking up my precious bandwidth. I was pissed. I hastily decided to add a password to our network not really thinking about the whole “Repeater Bridge” on my floor. I added the password to the network and then attempted to connect and I was met with a connection to the router but not the Internet. Fail. The router then proceeded to lock me out. Only way to get in was to reset the entire thing. I held the ‘reset’ button for 10 seconds and then power cycled the router. Completely wiped of previous settings. I set up my “Repeater Bridge” again and 10 minutes later I had Internet. 3rd Epic feat of the day.

Mark this a successful day.

P.s. This isn’t good writing but I just wanted to write something.

P.s.s. Fuck it. It’s my personal blog, I’ll do what I want.

Edit..heres a pic of my 'bitchin' setup :D

Scrim

2011-04-09T16:52:00.000-07:00

Sick of spam getting into your main email account because you have it out on the internet for everyone to email you at? You can use scrim to hide your email and keep it safe from spambots and that creepy guy you see pop up in your tinychat from time to time. Just navigate to scr.im and enter your email. It's as easy as that.

Windows to Mac

2011-04-09T07:42:00.000-07:00

My Windows 7 desktop died on me about a month ago. I’d had that computer for over 4 years. I started off with some measly cheap parts I picked up on online retailers and used some old parts as well. I kept upgrading that computer until the thing finally quit on me. I decided to not go ahead not bother repairing it because I wouldn’t be taking it to college in the coming months. I needed a laptop that was capable of doing my daily tasks and then some. There were many things I had to think about while getting a computer. Such as, would it last? Would it need regular maintenance? Would it give me a hell of time when I needed to do simple things? All of these problems I had encountered with Windows. All of these problems I had also come through and prevailed in whatever I was working on at the time. I had used Windows 7 for over 3 months before my desktop died and loved every blazing fast second of it. I’d also used the previous 5 versions of windows and they all had their ups and downs. Hell, I’d even dabbled in Linux for a year without it really sticking with me and eventually switching back to Windows, and then I realized what I’d been missing, a new challenge. Mac OS X.

My Achilles heel has always been and will always be with technology, I need to do something new every once in awhile. I can’t just go with the flow of things and keep using the same old same old over and over again. I have a need to learn more and engulf myself in new projects. Then it came to me. Mac OS X.

My brother had bought a unibody macbook when they were first released and he had never used Mac OS X either, yet he loved it after the first week. I barely touched that thing because he always had it with him and never let anyone use it so I still didn’t any knowledge of the way the computer ran. So when it came time to decide for a laptop/notebook for college I knew what I wanted. A Macbook Pro.

When I researched it I knew it was the machine for me. It had great battery life, great software options, and beautiful hardware. The one thing I didn’t know was the level of integration the OS X operating system had. You have a song that you like and want to cut the intro out of? All you have to do is open up iTunes drag the song into whatever editing application (i.e. garageband) and you can slice the clip right up. You have a flash drive with music you like? Plug it in and have iTunes scan it for music and it is automatically added to your collection, no more dragging to another folder then dropping the folder into iTunes. The hassle is just…gone!

I’m not saying that you should drop whatever you’re doing and go out and buy a macbook but from a windows user that had never experienced OS X. It is eye opening at such awesome features.

I do plan on boot camping or using parallels to get that lovely Windows 7 on my macbook in the near future and hopefully if everything goes well I’ll be able to right another post about it.

Mason Farber

too...tired...

2010-11-29T21:29:00.001-08:00

I have a pretty cool post coming up but i'm to dead tired to write it tonight. basketball just started and I'm a little worn out.

-mason

meh...

2010-11-28T18:29:00.000-08:00

Well, its sunday night. The most dreaded night of every person's minds. Not only do I go back to school tomorrow, but I have an essay do for english and then Basketball season..Don't get me wrong, I love basketball, but the thing is...bye bye Free time. I really enjoy my free time, such as this long drawn out break I watched the first 5 harry potter movies and played some Halo: Reach. It was very fun and staying up till 3 and then waking up at noon was very nice. I'm afraid after tomorrow my bed time will dramatically decrease which is good for the needed sleep but very very bad for my late night gaming obsessions...Oh well...

In other news, my father finally decided to switch internet providers so I will no longer be stuck with Slower than dial-up DSL. Yay dad!

- mason

ps. My adsense got banned..f*** you google.

Thanksgiving!

2010-11-25T10:12:00.000-08:00

Well the day has finally come where we can stuff our faces to our hearts content. Then proceed to wobble our overly stuffed bodies into the living room plop down on the couch and watch the Thanksgiving James Bondathon. Or at least that's my plans.. Thanksgiving is probably my second favorite holiday, tons of food, games, and of course, the bondathon. This year though it's just my immediate family instead of going anywhere we stayed home. It'll be nice, although I do like visiting family, but my mom is like the best cook in the world so that makes up for the fact we're staying home! So if you have something you're thankful for today don't be afraid to tell someone! and heres you're pic of the day. :)

Happy Thanksgiving!
-mason

Another day in the life...

2010-11-22T17:06:00.000-08:00

Well today was an interesting day... Woke up with a little snow on the ground and ice on the roads. Drove to school, went to school .... fast forward to lunch.... I eat at the school and head out to the parking lot to get into my car only to find that the construction class took the entire class period to scoop up all the snow and encase my car. with a foot of powdery snow surrounding my car i proceed to open the door and get in. I had to turn off the traction control in order to get out. Sad thing was I forgot I had it off and as i was turning the corner headed to the C store my tires don't get traction and i proceed to ramp a curb and miss a tree by about a damn foot. Luck was on my side this time.. pic above

- mason

Just about....

2010-11-21T15:19:00.000-08:00

Well folks, its just about thanksgiving here, and i suppose everywhere else. It should be a grand ole time with family, food, movies, and of course video games. My brother is coming home from college and so i'm sure we'll have a good time playing xbox. And most definitely a Harry Potter Movie Marathon, because I just saw the latest movie (HP7 Pt.1) and was mighty confused, I remembered Dumbledore dying but that was about it. So a refresher is high demand. Other than the coming holiday I haven't got much else going on, 2 tests this week in school, 1 over Frankenstein, the other over bones in the body for Anatomy class (that should be fun)...Hmmm. I start basketball in just over a week. And in preparation for that I shaved my head. I haven't cut my hair this short since about 5th grade so it was quite an achievement, ~~I'll be uploading a picture in the next few days of the before and after shot.~~ until next time folks, Good night, and good luck!

Edited - uploaded picture.

Nothing much new happening....

2010-11-09T19:59:00.000-08:00

Well, I just finished a paper for my Economics class on different types of fraud and how to avoid them, was supposed to be between 250 and 500 words, when I got done i had like 550, blah. had to shorten it up! hmmm what else. Lubuntu was a fail. Something went wrong from the burning so i'll have to try ubuntu next time. But its 2 minutes from 10 so I'm going to watch Conan! night.

-farbs

The Beginning...

2010-11-08T16:47:00.000-08:00

Well, here we are. A couple days ago I saw the movie, "The Social Network", and that prompted me to create a blog. I'm not really sure why or how, but it did. This blog doesn't really have one certain focus per se, but with what I'm working on lately or if I find something really cool and decide it has to be posted immediately to thy blog. One of my next blog post's will be about me installing and trying to use Lubuntu. It's a lightweight version of the very popular Ubuntu Linux Distro. I am a hardcore windows user and dabble in basic programming so this will be a test!

-farbs

http://lubuntu.net

p.s. thank god for Firefox's built-in spell check. I can't spell worth a damn.

p.p.s. this is a cat.