Science Addiction

A dormant blog by Devanshu Mehta

Category: Uncategorized

Fetch Your Netflix Ratings

If you use the “Netflix”:http://www.netflix rating system even half as much as I do, your account has information documenting your entire movie watching life. At this point in time, I have rated 1348 films on Netflix and that number grows by about 15 per month- considering I am a movie geek and a statistics geek, that information is important- nay, vital– to me! If only there was a simple, friendly way to get at my information… Read the rest of this entry »

The Essential Guide to Selecting a Domain Name

In a time when a domain name is registered every two seconds, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find that perfect domain name for your cause. In such a situation, it has become necessary to devise a method to determine the best domain name for you.

Unfortunately, there is no straightforward method for this purpose. The best we can do is to try to achieve a balance between the different expectations and objectives you have about your domain name. Read the rest of this entry »

Woot: Between Disposable Income and Buyer’s Remorse

In my Bookmarks toolbar in “Firefox”:http://www.getfirefox.com I have a folder called ‘Daily’. Every morning when I start my computer, I open my browser, right-click on this folder and click ‘Open in Tabs’. This automatically opens the following in individual tabs:

Or should I say W00t? In either case, this is hands down the most addictive web site in the history of our consumer culture. If you find yourself inexplicably drawn to gadgets, deals on gadgets, the local electronics/gadget store and that new cool device that everyone will have in 6 months but you need now, the Woot is for you. Also, at about 12:03AM Central Time on an idle Tuesday you will also find yourself descending into a profound depression as you see the “Sold Out!” sign on Woot.com for that days wooot and find that you are not alone. Not by a long shot. In fact, there were thousands of others who fell upon Woot.com up to 3 minutes earlier than you did and snapped up that snazzy talking, wi-fi enabled coffee maker or trendy toaster. This is what Douglas Adams would have called as having descended into the long, dark tea-time of the soul. Read the rest of this entry »

9 Firefox Extensions I Actually Use

Everybody’s doing it so now, I guess, so will I. Here are my favorite Firefox extensions, in no particular order.
PDF Download: This extension allows me to view PDFs within my browser as a pdf, convert it to html to view. A dialog box that gives you pdf options also shows you the size of the pdf so you can decide what to do with it before downloading. Highly customizable, lightweight and highly recommended! “Download PDF Download”:http://www.rabotat.org/firefox

del.icio.us: I use “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us like a maniac and cannot live without my Del.icio.us plugin. It allows you to add the link you are viewing to your del.icio.us with a button on your main toolbar. Clicking on it pops up a window that will ask you for tags and a description of the link. When you submit that form, it will automatically submit the link you were viewing to your account. Again, highly customizable and easy to use. “Download del.icio.us extension”:http://del.icio.us/help/firefox/extension

SessionSaver: This one is a life saver. Some times your computer freezes up, or Firefox hangs, or you just have to shutdown or restart your computer- and you have 17 tabs open that you cannot afford to loose. Well, all hail Session Saver, a Firefox extension that will keep track of all the tabs you have open and when you reopen Firefox it will reload all of them (either automatically or when you ask it to). Can’t live without it. “Download SessionSaver”:http://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?id=436
Read the rest of this entry »

Apple Matters

Starting this week, I am a contributing writer on the popular Apple website “Apple Matters”:http://www.applematters.com. My first article, “Fink: The Power of Open Source”:http://www.applematters.com/index.php/section/comments/fink_the_power_of_open_source/ is up for you to read, enjoy, comment on. I will be writing for them once a week, on Thursdays.

Cellular Phones at the Movies

I just put up rant on “WideScreen Glory”:http://www.widescreenglory.com about the ridiculous push by theatre owners to “jam cell phones in movie theatres”:http://www.widescreenglory.com/2005/12/21/jamming-cell-phone-signals-at-the-movies/. From “that article”:http://www.widescreenglory.com/2005/12/21/jamming-cell-phone-signals-at-the-movies/

The annoying, distracting, place-reserved-in-hell, cell phone users are not the cause (of the movie industry slump); they are a nail in the coffin. […] In the past, the government tried to ban cell phones on airplanes based on the loosely defined threat of terrorists with phones. As with that case, the benefit of allowing decent people to keep their cell phones at their discretion far outweighs the annoyances of movie cell phone users.

Season’s Givings

Many people around the world plan their charitable giving around this time of the year, for religious, tax or other similarly benevolent reasons. As a geek who spends an inordinate amount of time with around his computer, these are the entities that have made my life easier in the past year and deserve all the recognition, money and general fulfillment of all Amazon Wish List desires: Read the rest of this entry »

Why ‘The Beatles’ Matter

“Steve Audio”:http://steveaudio.blogspot.com/2005/12/if-theres-anything-that-you-want-if.html has a great article on why The Beatles matter and how they changed everything. It should be required reading for anyone who appreciates modern pop, rock… or anything that came out of a studio in the last 50 years. Read the rest of this entry »

Flickr: Finally

The internet is adding language to our collective vocabularies faster than any other ‘”invention”:http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/stories/1999/03/09/president.2000/transcript.gore/ ‘. Here’s a prediction (if you haven’t heard enough of those):

In the “future”:http://rinkworks.com/said/predictions.shtml, flickr’ed will be part of you vocabulary.

Yep- you will be googling blogs with flickr’ed albums and nobody from the last century will have a clue what you just did. Maybe people will “del.icio.us”:http://del.icio.us you too. And hopefully, “AJAX-ing the CMS”:http://www.cmswatch.com/Trends/421 will be out of date. Read the rest of this entry »

Linux on the Xbox: Part II: Planning

This is the IInd part of an “ongoing series”:http://www.scienceaddiction.com/categories/geek-projects/linux-on-the-xbox/ on my experiences with installing Linux on my Xbox.

SO MAYBE I’M CRAZY ENOUGH TO TRY THISWHERE DO I START?
Ah, nice to know there are other zealots out there. So, before you do anything else, you want to bookmark the “Xbox-Linux website”:http://www.xbox-linux.org. Lot’s of interesting information about how and why you would want to attempt this project- the kind of stuff “I’ve already written about”:http://www.scienceaddiction.com/2005/08/06/linux-on-the-xbox-reasoning-part-i/. Read the rest of this entry »