Ben's Bits

I've been looking for a good pro lab where I can get my digital photos printed. For film processing I've been using Dale Labs but they really specialize in film and not digital processing. So far I've heard good things about WHCC, Printroom.com, Mpix.com and Winkflash. I'm also trying Snapfish, Costco and Target just to get a good mix. I'm looking both for a high quality/low cost option and a more expensive super quality. If you have any suggestions or comments please let me know!

I was lucky to get a Google Gmail invitation early on and now anyone in the US can sign up. If you're outside the US and need an invitation for an account you can get one at this useful site or if you have a bunch of invitations you don't know what to do with you can share them by sending the invites to gmail@swal.org

There are a variety of reasons you may need to access USB mass storage devices (hard drives, CD-ROM drives, etc.) from a DOS prompt. Perhaps you're trying to run some disk repair software like SpinRite or trying to save an image of your main hard drive to an external drive in Symantec Ghost or maybe you just can't give up DOS! In any event you may be surprised to find out that DOS has not been left behind when it comes to USB storage though you will need a good understanding of how DOS drivers work and some time to make it all work. I would suggest looking at the following sites for more assistance and instructions:
USB DOS Resources
Computing.Net - DOS mass storage driver USBASPI.sys
Bootdisk.Com - DOS USB Drivers

Last year I started using TLS encryption on my email server with a self signed 365 day certificate. Since that time I started using CAcert for certificates so when my self signed certificate expired early this week I was able to modify the instructions found on this website to use a CAcert certificate on my Postfix mail server.

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For the September 2005 issue of Popular Science the magazine hired Jonathan Coulton to write a freely downloadable soundtrack. Being a pretty rare thing to see a soundtrack to a magazine I decided to check it out and it's a good thing I did. The songs are an absolute hoot and the PopSci page led me to Jonathon's website which has even more songs free for download all licensed under the supurb Creative Commons license which is even better! I've got an email in to Jonathan now to see if I can purcase FLAC versions of his music, in the meantime I suggest you check his stuff out. Described as geek pop be sure to listen to "Ikea" and "A Laptop Like You". Of course if you too enjoy his music I encourage you to buy it and/or make a donation!