This was supposed to be a post about how much better my new hard drive case performs than my old case but I couldn't get the new case to work.  So, like any curious geek I poked around to see if I could find out what was wrong even though I have very little knowledge of electronics engineering.  What I came to find was the shoddiest craftsmanship I've seen in a modern electronic gadget.  The reseller (not manufacturer) who sold the device through Amazon UK promptly issued a full refund so there's no hard feelings toward them.  The reseller told me not to send the defective unit back so I decided to prod a bit more and blog about it.

My friend Paul tweeted about a new URL shortener like bit.ly and is.gd but with one major difference.  The domain for this shortener is only 2 letters "t-o" and they're not separated by a dot.  The link to the shortener was posted as http://to./ which appears to be an invalid link since it has no top level domain (com, net, org etc.) but low and behold, it worked.

Here's another unorthodox post but it's a subject very dear to me, local Hawaiian food.

I dislike email forwards since it's usually some lame inspirational message or joke but this one was a gem.  Attached to the email was an interesting cookbook with an awesome title, "Aunty Marialani's Go Cook 'em!". 

Download the cookbook

Most readers from Hawaii will recognize the name but for those of you who don't, here's the video clip from where the title comes.

The TWiT Network has pretty strict rules about profanity across all channels including the netcasts, chatrooms and the TWiT Army Canteen. There are usually moderators lurking the IRC and microblog but once in a while some profanity gets through the cracks. Therefore I wrote a little word filter to preempt the profanity.

After having gotten fed up with Gnome I decided to try XFCE as suggested by most of my Linux-using Twitter friends and I must say, it's a huge improvement.  One thing I missed though was Gome-do's dock launcher.  While I could install Gnome-do in XFCE it would install a ton of required packages and also requires compiz to look normal.  Instead I decided to create a simple and fast dock launcher that needed no extra packages.

Twitter is so simple yet surprisingly powerful and people are always telling me, I don't get Twitter. It's a lot easier to understand when you have examples so here's just one example of why Twitter rocks.

A few days ago I StumbledUpon a blog from a hardware hacker who built an amazing device which turns almost any deadbolt door into a "secret knock detecting door" (how cool is that eh?). On his blog was a link to his Twitter profile so I followed him.

Today Twitter rolled out the new "lists" feature to the remaining tweeters who were not already part of the beta and at first glance it's clear that Twitter lists will drastically change the way we view our social network.

It's not uncommon to see advertising on the sides of trains in Japan but it is rare to see one that's been completely covered in ads. Update: According to my friend @euphorythm, when a train's exterior is covered in a single company's advertising they say it's been "hijacked".

It's only been a little over a week since I was in Hawaii and I'm already jonsing for some of that local goodness.  A tweet about that great local food prompted some inquiries about what local expats eat so I thought I'd just blog about it.

Here are some of the places where I downed some ono grinds on this last trip.

Soon's Korean BBQ

Soon's is the best "Korean" BBQ in Hawaii (IMO).  All their food is tasty but their meat jun is really what sets them apart from the rest.  The secret's in the sauce.  In Hawaii we think of meat jun as Korean food but I'm told there's actually no such thing in Korea.

Just testing out the Drupal Flickr module. Below is an inserted image from Flickr.

In case you're wondering about the unusual choice of words for the autograph, I asked for that specifically. It's sort of an inside joke among geeks. Leo Laporte of TWiT went off on Techcrunch's Mike Arrington on Live streaming video (a very rare event since Leo is such a mellow guy).