Eric Mills

One evening while wondering along the streets of Dubrovnic, Croatia, my friend Chris happened upon a sign and took a picture of it. As you can see, they really do have “internets” in Croatia.

Edition #1:

Obviously someone stepped in too late to fix this crap.

File under: the internets

My Mile Marker . com is a great way to keep track of your car’s fuel economy (or lack thereof). I know these things can be accomplished in spreadsheets, but it’s nice to have someone else take the headache out of it for you, plus there are neat graphs to view once you establish your MPG (ie, fill your tank more than once, consecutively). And, we all know that if your MPG is decreasing, something is wrong with your car. So give it a go, and help the planet a bit while you’re at it!

Go There!>>

A long time ago, in a money management crisis far far away…

I switched from a credit union (whose https site was powered by Washington Mutual anyway) to the monolithic US Bank for my everyday banking needs. Why? Easy, US Bank updates its information every minute. That means: I get up from the computer to purchase a coffee, I sit back down and check my balance, it says “purchase of coffee pending $1.25″ nice, eh?

Tonight I took the next step and consolidated my accounts into one account to rule them all. Yes, that’s right — sky miles, email (even!), bank, stocks, savings, checking, credit cards, student loans, paypal and the like — all from one site. My brother had this very same great idea a few months ago, but someone beat him to it. Yodlee, I say tonight, “thanks” for your money center, and goodnight.

June 26th is the internet radio day of silence, which you can read more about here. Personally, I don’t know how I would live without streaming KCRW.com. Nic Harcourt and his team are responsible for my brilliant taste in music. So if you stream radio via the internets, go join that station as a member now to help offset the ridiculous royalty fees that will be in place shortly.

that the right testicle of a whale (why not the left?) is the weight equivalent of 17636.9808 human eyeballs

more on weirdconverter.com

Now that I am currently downloading Windows Vista Release Candidate 1, I thought I might finally put “pen to paper” and jot down my 27 tinkers for Windows XP that will make your life a lot easier (despite what my wife thinks). I’ll start by directing people to my really old, “general schpiel,” which you probably should bypass anyway because it’s mostly outdated. Some things I will recap, though, are that I use Fedora Core 5, Redhat Linux for 1/3 of my computer stuff. Why? Because, like OSX, it comes with just about everything I need built-in. Then, OSX makes up another chunk of my computing time, and f
inally the remainder goes to Ubuntu, Windows XP, and Windows Vista Beta / RC1. If that all sounded like a different language, let me assure you that we are
only discussing Windows XP right now.

Afte
r installing XP, the first thing you need to do is get Firefox. It is twice as good as Internet Explorer at everything, and one-hundred times more customizable. If you want to see what the web was meant to look like, you need Firefox. There are hundreds of extensions available that are so easy to install it’s almost ridiculous. Among them, I can recommend a few that I can’t live without:
Colorful tabs makes your chaotic web experience a little more organized; Bug Me Not supplies user-submitted names and passwords for sites that require registration for no apparent reason; the Google image re-linker redirects Google’s image search to go directly to the image you are looking for when you click on it, which is what you wanted anyway, not someone’s strange site; I wouldn’t be able to use 4 different operating systems quite so comfortably if it weren’t for Foxmarks, which syncs all our bookmarks across computers; for more advanced users, Greasemonkey does everything from block time-wasting web sites while you’r
e at work, to adding “add-ons” to web pages like Gmail or Flickr.

I’ve tried Google’s Desktop Search 3 times, and didn’t like it. Now that they’ve decided to go all out and rival both Windows and Macs, but with an online twist, it is really functional and useful. I don’t think I could live without the ctrl ctrl function. You find things you didn’t know you still had.[Next time I'll tell you how to make your windows transparent, how to have a date in the taskbar, and why you don't need half the stuff you think you need]