Homo-not-so-erotic

This could be the reason why gay men multiply eventhough they can't bear children. If you have a baby boy this article is a must read.

Sleeping too much

I always sleep too much. If you have the same problem as me then go read How to become an early riser. The article has some insights on sleeping patterns.

Once I nail waking up at 5 am everyday maybe this blog will have better content.

Calling Geekman

To all 'ya wantin' 'ta download some audiobooks, head over at ISO Hunt for a torrent tracker of popular audio bookz. Shout out to Geekman who introduced me to audiobooks.

I've been busy last week because I found myself another writing job. I'm now a one man media crew of a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO). I will still post here, so don't worry my zombiefied fanboys (as if). This blog is like a therapeutic cup of tea for me.

Update: Geekman told me that Torrentspy has a better selection of audiobooks.

Podcast mania

Since downloading This Week in Tech (TWIT) I've been searching the net for other entertaining podcasts. So basically TWIT made me interested in other podcasts. I can't believe how podcasting has become as popular as blogs; many believe that podcasting and video blogging will be the next big thing, and it's damn shaping up to be one.

Incidentally, TWIT is now the number one most popular podcast in PodcastAlley dot com. PodcastAlley is a site dedicated to quality podcasts and lists the top 50 most popular podcasts in the net. The site is very useful because it lists the categories of podcasts, gives a description to all of them, and they open user comments so surfers can see what other people thinks of the shows.

Please go support independent narrowcast shows. It's one of the most refreshing things in a long time.

Futile search

Just when I decided to take Textpattern for a test run, I found out that it's not easy to find a free web host that supports Apache, PHP 4, and MySQL. It's really a bummer since Textpattern really looked easy and cool. Back to Blogger I go (This is not a problem, Blogger is still wonderful...and free).

The reason I want to run a Content Management System (CMS) like Textpattern is because I want to have full control over my blog. Blogger unfortunately lacks essential functionality like categories. There's buzz that Blogger will support categories in the future, but who knows if that will be free.

My old free blog in Tripod did have the categories function. The problem were the huge banner ads that's on the homepage that practically slows down the loading of the site. The banners were also real ugly.

Anyway, even though I found no free web host that supports Textpattern, I still found some gems in the web. The first gem I found was Doteasy , a cool free web host that does not display any banner ads or pop-up in your site. Doteasy gives you 100 mb of storage space and allows for a gig of bandwidth use. They also offer free tech support even on free hosting. Unfortunately, the free hosting does not support PHP/MySQL or even Perl.

Another one I found was Blogsome (Hmm, the site is currently down). This site offers free Wordpress blog hosting. What's so special about it, you ask? You don't need to install Wordpress, just sign up and get ready to blog in your very own Wordpress blog. How about that for a free service. There's really no catch, except that the ease of use makes Blogsome hard to customize (design-wsie) and they have small Google ads on the sidebar of free blogs. I'm still trying it out but the site is down for the moment.

That's it for now.

The god of war

I just tried Ares P2P software as an alternative to Limewire. Limewire is not that bad except it's a Java based application so it bogs down even our 2 ghz machine.

Ares is a very fast program, especially Ares lite which is specifically made for slow PCs. I found the interface of Ares almost similar to Kazaa and Limewire so I got into the program pretty fast. I must say that the search results of Ares is just as good as Limewire. The download speed in my 56k modem is a decent 2-5 kbps--similar to Limewire.

In a nutshell, the program loads fast, has a good selection of search results, and fast download speed. I have not found any significant negatives about this program, just that the queueing can occur even if you were first to download. Aside from this minor quirk, I like Ares.

Some thoughts

I'm seriously considering transferring this blog to this new homepage I created. The best thing about a real website is the complete control over the design of the page, not only that, it is also more personal. The problem with a website is the fact that you need to design and upload your HTML to the net, which is very time consuming, unlike this blog that you can just push buttons to publish.

I made the webpage above in 5 minutes flat, but this entry will probably be made in about 15 seconds - so the value of this blog is not lost to me. Maybe I just need a little change since the visitors of this site has dropped considerably this past month. It could be my fault that this blog is not updated very often anymore, but I see stagnant websites make more hits than this blog.

I'm not making this entry for the readers, actually. I'm just recording this for my own personal evaluation.

On another note, there are also great (and free) Content Management Systems like Text Pattern and Drupal. Both software can make a real website (not just a blog), but the great thing about this is they have back ends like that of Blogger that makes it very easy to publish content of any type. According to Leo Laporte, Drupal is very easy. Of course that's the opinion of a tech guru adept at using Pmachine's Expression Engine and every software available. I want to try some of these free Content Management Systems but I have no real experience using 'em. I hope I can find good tutorials for this stuff.

Well, that's it for now. Stay tuned for another manga/anime review post. I'm also working on my Robin fanfic.

Firetune Firefox the easy way

We all know that Firefox can be tweaked to any individual computer's and connection specifications. The problem is editing the About:config can be tedious and inputting a lot of adjustments to it makes one prone to commit an error. Enter Firetune a GUI interface to finetune Firefox easily. The great thing about this utility is that it comes with pre-installed Firefox config that are floating around the internet. The configs were actually released officially by Mozilla, so it's sure not to make any errors. Once you choose a config, all you need to do is back up your former settings and click one button to activate the changes. Give it a try.

By the way. I'm road testing a config (slow computers with slow connection for my dial-up connection and ancient PC) so far I felt Firefox is reacting smoothly to the tweak.

You TWIT

TWIT - This WEEK in TECH is a great downloadable technology talk show. The file is in MP3 format and stars Leo Laporte, Patrick Norton, Kevin Rose, John C. Dvorak, Robert Heron, and god knows who else in technology. So far the show only has 4 episodes, 3 of which were in 30 minute format while the latest one is a 1 hour special. Damn, do I have to say go get it? [Edit: There were only 3 episodes so far. TWIT is still a tentative show name, a possible being GEEK WEEK or This WEEK in GEEK.]