Walk Your Way to a Healthy Weight in 7 Steps October 11, 2008
Posted by toddp in : Clever Life, Health , add a commentI’m a 5′11″ (180cm) guy. Back in 1997 I had enjoyed my college years to the point where I had gained a lot of weight. I topped out at over 230 pounds (104 kg), giving me a body mass index (BMI) of 32. Anything over 25 and you’re overweight - over 30 and you’re obese. Eventually I was able to drop down to about 160 lbs (74 kg) and keep it that way for many years. One of the keys to that was… walking. Yes, walking! A good walk will burn over 300 calories in an hour. A fast walk can burn 500 calories - almost as much as jogging!
Here’s what you need to get you going…
4 Ways to Keep Linux Livey - Security, Speed, Cleanliness, Safety October 10, 2008
Posted by toddp in : Ice Hot Tech, Linux , add a comment
Picture thanks to NathanFromDeVryEET
As with any technology, it will treat you as well as you treat it. Getting your system up and running is only the beginning. Over time you’ll be installing (and uninstalling) software, installing patches, saving those critical files with the cure for cancer, and bulking up on downloads of pirated publicly licensed media. Just using your system can slowly turn your wicked fast system into something as slow and annoying as sucking peanut butter through a straw. So here are the four areas that you need to pay attention to.
Changes are Coming to the Penguin Trail! October 9, 2008
Posted by toddp in : PenguinTrail , add a comment
I am in the process of moving from Wordpress.com to my own site at PenguinTrail.com. By making this change it will be easier for me to post more stuff, have better features (e.g. bookmarking, commentLuv, etc.), and expand the range of stuff I talk about. In other words, I’m going to make the website bigger, stronger, faster!
Among the changes, you’ll see a new look to the site. Don’t fret. It’s the same olde goodness of the existing site only with the new coolness. So far things the transition is going well, but if you notice a broken link, let me know.
Have a suggestion on how to improve things or want that extra hot new feature on this site? Leave a comment and I just might do it!
Don’t Eat That Garlic Butter - It’s got DNA in it! October 8, 2008
Posted by toddp in : Cool Fun, Oddities , add a comment
“You even have some of my DNA in you now, as I had been double dipping in that dish for a good 10 minutes”
Do you want McNuggets with your Whopper? October 8, 2008
Posted by toddp in : Cool Fun, Movies and TV , add a commentIf you read other parts of my blog you’ll know (or discover) that I spend a lot of time in Vietnam. During my last visit there I was walking through the backpacker’s area in District 1 of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and wandered into a store selling bootleg DVDs, where I found these two gems that had be laughing pretty hard:
Restoring Windows MBR (Vista) - bootrec is also your friend August 22, 2008
Posted by toddp in : Ice Hot Tech, Linux, Windows , 3commentsA lot of people have found my previous blog post about restoring your master boot record (MBR) helpful. I did assume, however, that you were using Windows XP. But, what if you (gasp), have a dual boot configuration with Windows Vista? Vista has a different boot loader that can be quite annoying, and the tools to restore your MBR have also changed, but not a lot. So, here are the steps.
Where Have I Been? and the Summer of Hardy Haron July 7, 2008
Posted by toddp in : PenguinTrail , add a commentThanks to all of you that have been submitting comments. I’ll try to research a few and update the entries. I think there are a few tweaks needed for Hardy Haron too. So, where have I been? Well, it was the first year of my PhD program and I was buried in work and shuttling back and forth between France and Singapore. It’s finally over and I will be enjoying some of the slower pace of the summer by moving to Hardy and trying out some new stuff: HD video, encryption, WEP cracking, bibliographic databases, etc. If you have any requests for me to try to figure out, let me know!
Share folders via Samba without a password - easy! June 3, 2007
Posted by toddp in : Ice Hot Tech, Linux, Windows , 23comments
Coming from the Windows world to Linux, one of the first things I wanted to do was to share directories on Ubuntu with my Windows laptop to easily transfer files. In Windows I can just right click a folder, go to sharing, and enable it. No users and passwords to set up. It goes without saying that this is not secure and you want to be careful doing it, but it’s a great way to share files between computers at home. Here’s how…
Overclocking the Intel Core 2 Duo E4300 makes me happy! May 15, 2007
Posted by toddp in : General Tech, Ice Hot Tech , 2commentsIn the last few years I’ve been running computers from Dell and HP, but when I first switched to PCs from the Mac about 10 years ago I always built my own machines. Back in the day of the overclocking my Celeron 300MHz processor to 464Mhz it was great fun. The Celery (Celeron) was cheap and you could very easily squeeze a 50% or greater overclock out of it with just a bit of tweaking and some better cooling. Heck, often you could get that without anything but the stock cooler. Let’s see what I was able to do with the E4300…
Running Windows in Ubuntu part 2 - VirtualBox rocks! May 3, 2007
Posted by toddp in : Ice Hot Tech, Linux, Windows , add a comment
Following up on my prior post about running Windows (or other OS’s) in Ubuntu, I kept searching around for something better than VMware server. Why? I wanted something that was:
- Not only free, but open source
- Easier to install and configure than VMware
- Had a GUI for managing virtual machines
- Fairly stable and speedy