Matt's Blog

Lately I’ve come to the realization that most any photo will look much better after being processed in Photoshop. Here’s a post-processed image from my trip to Ghana: It has some technical flaws (it was taken through a window and is crooked), but it’s a pretty good shot technically… There it is straight out of [...]

Since Windows keeps hinting that I could use my CompactFlash card as a ReadyBoost drive, I was just thinking… My Thinkpad has an ExpressCard slot… ….and an 8GB Lexar solid-state drive* is only $90 at NewEgg. In theory, I could pluck it in and use it for ReadyBoost and as a paging file, and still [...]

I’d posted before about how my ‘dream computer setup’ would have a big fileserver with a bunch of disks… Something like 4-8 SATA drives, 7200 RPM, running RAID 5. The net result is several terabytes of storage, and, since RAID 5 provides striping, excellent performance. It would have to be delivered over Gigabit Ethernet, since [...]

Someone ought to make an application that will allow you to download files from sites, but submit the URLs to a central service that’s a BitTorrent tracker, and see if anyone else using the service is also downloading those files, or has recently downloaded them, to try to accelerate the download a bit. I’m currently [...]

As usual, there’s no reason not to be proud to be from New Hampshire.

Firefox 3, hot off the press! I’ve been using it in beta for a while and was quite pleased. Today it was released in finished form, and developers are hoping for a record. So download it and give it a try. Internet Explorer users, you won’t be disappointed! (And it can even import your bookmarks [...]

I just noticed that Piriform has released Defraggler, a free defrag tool. You may not recognize the name Piriform, but many will recognize CCleaner, their most popular product. Defraggler seems a little spiffier than the standard Windows tool, though I’m not yet sure how it compares with Diskeeper, a commercial solution I’ve used in the [...]

For a really long time, I felt like all I ever did was bash Microsoft. Not so much because I’m mean, but because I really didn’t see them doing anything terribly creative. I was somewhat impressed with Vista, mostly because it’s a ‘fresh’ attempt at Windows, one without all the suck. It seems like they [...]

A quick tutorial on keeping accurate time in Windows… Double-click on the clock in the system tray (usually in the very lower-right of your screen). There should be an “Internet Time” tab. If the tab isn’t there, you’re either running an ancient version of Windows, or your PC is a member of an Active Domain [...]