New T-Shirts in the Bauer-Power Store

Hey readers out there! I know a lot of you snuck on board the RSS feed train well after my last post about my Bauer-Power Gear. For those of you new to Bauer-Power, I have a store where I offer some cool Bauer-Power schwag to help fund the cause! All proceeds help support Bauer-Power research, and projects!

Anyhoo, the purpose of this post is not just to acquaint you newer readers to Bauer-Power Gear, it is also to let some of you older readers that I have just added some new T-Shirts to the store. Some of the designs I borrowed from other popular T-Shirts, and then again a few I came up with myself :-)

All are 100% kick ass!

Check them out:

Have Your Tried Googling It?
Don't come to me unless you have searched on Google!

Apt-Get Beer

Ah yes, nothing like a smooth brew when coding and hacking.

I Hacked The Gibson
Did you pull off a righteous 1337 hack? Show it with this shirt!

I'm Linux
You have all seen the Mac vs PC ads. What about our good buddy Linux?

Call it version 1.0

You know that old saying, "If at first you don't succeed, try try again?" Nobody told that to the programmers...

Last but not least, my personal favorite...

Leeroy Jenkins is my homie
Leeeeeeerrrooooyyyyyy Jenkins! It's a battle cry heard around the internet!

There are a lot of t-shirt stores on the net, but there is only one that helps support Bauer-Power. Take a look. These shirts are way more affordable than others out there with similar designs. Hook a brother up, so we can continue to bring you quality content!

Visit http://gear.Bauer-Power.net

P.S. If you have an idea for a t-shirt, sticker, etc., let us know in the comments!

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Messing With Road Signs

I learned of a funny mischievous prank today while scrolling through my RSS feeds. This one no doubt can get you into a heap of trouble (If you get caught of course). So I should probably cover my ass now in saying that this is for informational purposes only, and that Bauer-Power is not liable for what its readers decide to run out and do.

Anyway, you have probably seen portable construction signs on the side of the road. Ones that say stuff like, "Trucks entering highway" or "Ice on Road." Did you know that these things are terribly unsecured? Yes, unsecured in three main ways:

1. Physically not well secure
2. Default passwords are rarely changed
3. If the password was reset, its easy to restore factory defaults

Seriously, wouldn't it kind of be fun to do something like this?



Okay, maybe it won't be one of those signs, but you get the idea. No, this post applies to the ADDCO portable sign below:




This particular sign is protected by a small lock, but are often left unprotected. Even if it were locked, you can probably make small work of it if you have a good lock pick set.

Anyway, once inside you need to find the control pad:



Once you have the pad, scroll down the menu selection until you get "Instant Text." Select it, and type in your new modified message and hit enter to submit. To publish it to the sign select "Run w/out save."

If it asks for a password try "DOTS" without the quotes. That is the default password. If the password has been changed, you can reset it back to defaults by holding down "Control" and "Shift" and typing in "DIPY". After the reset, the password will be back to default.

Know of any other road sign models that can be messed with? Let us know in the comments!

[Via I-Hacked]

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Finding DoFollow Sites on The Easy: Firefox Extension

One of my New Years resolutions this year was to comment on more blogs, and beef up my back links a bit. Sure, Bauer-Power does okay in the Google PR department, but certainly not as good as some other blogs.

Everyone knows that the way to boost your Google PR is to score relevant back links, and lots of them! Some people don't focus on this, and wonder why their blogs don't get any traffic. Lots of people say, "Screw Google, I'm going to spend all day trying to get to the front page of Digg." They don't realize that the quality traffic they need has to be natural traffic from people that want to read your stuff. Natural traffic comes from search engines, where the people landing on your site are actually looking for something you have!

Now don't get me wrong, getting to the front page of Digg will bring you server crushing traffic, but the chances of you getting your stories up there are slim to none, unless your handle is MrBabyMan. Besides, getting to the front page of Digg, or Reddit takes a crap load of work. You have to build friends, you have to shout stories, blah, blah, blah.

Search engine traffic, on the other hand comes without you working hardly at all. I guess I shouldn't say that, I mean you do have to write some stuff worth reading, and you have to increase your back links.

According to Google Analytics, search engine traffic to Bauer-Power comprises almost 62% of my traffic. That is more than half of my traffic!

Well I aim to change that. I want it to comprise way more than that, and still have an increase in visitors at the same time. Which brings me back to my original point... Increasing back links.

So as I mentioned I am planning on commenting on more blogs. I figure ten a day is easy enough. Now, I am not going to comment on just any old blogs. They must meet two criteria items.

1. They have to be relevant to the content of Bauer-Power
2. They have to be DoFollow sites
   

For those of you not in the know, DoFollow sites allow search engine spiders to crawl their sites and categorize the outgoing links. This helps those sites boost their page rank on search engines. If a site is a NoFollow site, they add a special tag to their links telling search engines not to categorize outbound links. Hence the reason why only commenting on DoFollow sites can help your rankings.

Anyhoo, I found a cool Firefox (Or Flock! Hells yeah!) plugin that allows you to tell who's who in the zoo when it comes to DoFollow and NoFollow. It's called NoDoFollow from ZacharyFox.com.

When activated it highlights all of the links on the page in one of two colors. Blue for DoFollow, and red for NoFollow. If it's red skip ahead, if its blue go through. (Like how I rhymed that?)

Want to know if you should comment or not on Bauer-Power? Check it!


The links are blue baby so comment away!

What other methods of increasing back links do you know of? I would love to hear about them in...you guessed it, the comments!

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Microsoft is Laying People Off. WTF?!

I was in a meeting yesterday at work, and I looked down to check my Twitter timeline on my Blackberry, when I noticed a tweet from my friend (@biggeek) saying that he had just been tweeted himself from a friend who works at Microsoft. That friend on the inside said they had been escorting people out of the building all day.

I sent him a direct message back asking him how many total are getting laid off, and he said 5,500 employees are slated to be laid off! WTF?!?! Turns out, only 1400 were laid off yesterday, but still.

A quick check online said that this is the first layoff in Microsoft's history! Crazy stuff! This is from the New York Times:

"Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., plans to lay off 5,000 of its 94,000 employees over the next 18 months, including 1,400 people on Thursday [yesterday]. The company disclosed the cuts as it released second-quarter results, which reflected an 11 percent drop in net income, to $4.17 billion, from $4.71 billion in the period a year ago."

This comes not very long after a recent notice I read about Google laying off people, of course not as many, only 100 compared to 5000 or so. This is from Silicon Alley Insider:

"Google has announced layoffs. Not contractors. Not hourly workers. Googlers.

Not many, thankfully--only 100--and some may be able to find jobs elsewhere in the company. But they're all in HR, which tells you something about how quickly Google has scaled back its own growth expectations."

This economy is seriously affecting all markets. I work in the Real Estate Market, and we have been hurting for over a year now, and have gone through three sets of layoffs our selves. It's certainly a scary time for everyone.

My recommendation: Make sure your resumes are up to date!

Have any of you been affected by layoffs? Know of someone that has? Share your stories in the comments.

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What do you know about that Torrent you are downloading?

How many times have you went to a torrent site, found the item you want to download only to get screwed in the end? Maybe is is a fake tracker put out to discourage illegal downloads. Maybe it is a virus. The potential for crappy torrents is endless.

I learned of a cool torrent search that only lists torrents that are verified as being good, quality torrents. The site is called VerTor (aka Verified Torrents).

Each torrent found on VerTor is checked for download ability, viruses, DRM and passwords. If any don't make the cut, they are scrapped so you don't have to waste your time getting your porn...errr...your copy of Paul Blart: Mall Cop ... errr... cracked copy of Abobe Photoshop... errr... perfectly legit open source software that happens to be available in torrent format (Phew)



VerTor has already verified 40,000 torrents to be virus, DRM, and just generally crap free. So check them out and get your download on with confidence.

What torrent searches do you use? Let us know in the comments!

[Via IHecker]

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What the Flock browser are you using?

So there I am, doing one of the things I swore I'd never do. I was actually almost disgusted with myself. As I sat there I thought to myself as I often do. Well this isn't so bad, I guess I can see why so many people do it. At that very moment I threw up in my mouth a little bit. As time went on I got more and more into it. I soon began neglecting what time it is. I neglected sleep, food, water, and other necessities to living. The more I did it the more comfortable I felt with it and I began looking for tools to help me do it. It didn't effect my driving or my ability to pass a piss test, but it did give me a great buzz.

I'm talking about Digg. It became a problem for me that cold winter night. Gaming and humor section for me. But I from that experience and my love for tools and improving my efficiency in everything I do on the computer I came across the Flock Browser. Your one stop shop to everything you need online. To the right there is a list of the online resources it supports. With so many built-in features it eliminates the need for any custom toolbars for every site you use. Flock also has a nice built in Media Bar that lets you all your photo's in Photobucket, Picasa or all your videos on YouTube or even all your Friends' favorites in Digg.

It has quick buttons to make your life so much easier. Like say you want to Submit a site to Digg and you don't see any Digg buttons on the site. Well there's a Digg button right at the top of the page. Also in the button bar to the top left of the browser there's button for viewing your Friends which you can sort by social network. One for the media bar. Another for your RSS feeds. A nice button for new Emails, which along with the other three will highlight red when there is new information. The others are Favorites, Accounts and Services(shown to the right), Web Clipboard Sidebar. Blog Editor and Photo Upload.



Now the first button there is the My World button. Basically the default starting page but contains relevant data. It has your RSS Feeds, Friends Activities, Favorite Sites which is determined by hitting the blue star or the sties you visit the most and Favorite Media.

The Flock Browser is based on Mozilla's Firefox browser so most all the extensions that work with Firefox will work with Flock. The only one extension that has crashed the Flock Browser was the IE-Tab extension.

So just add Flock and Digsby together and you'll never get anything done at work. Social networking for life. Hmm.... Maybe I should get that tattooed across my chest. On second thought maybe not.

By Sundance of MakeMeASammich.com

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Bauer-Power Episode 5

Hey Bauer-Power readers! As promised from my video post last week, here is Episode 5 of Bauer-Power!

We are a little early with this one. That is mainly because my wife was out of town so it gave Sundance and I an opportunity to get together to do some shooting. And shooting we did! Not only did we get a standard episode in, we were also able to shoot an entirely new opening sequence! One that is meant to be action packed, and completely ridiculous :-)

The opening sequence is rather long. In future episodes, I will be shortening it, so drink it in before we cut out all of the gratuitous action!

In this episode Sundance and I list our top ten list of video editors, being as how we are starting to get into the whole IPTV game.

So grab some popcorn, some beer and get ready to get your geek on!



- Link to video for feed readers -

If you missed, our list of editors because you were so deeply engrossed in the awesomeness, they were:

• Windows Movie Maker
• Apple iMove
• Jump Cut
• ABC Video Roll
• Blender
• ZS4
• Avid Free DV
• Video Spin
• Jahshaka
• Wax

Check out a couple of bloopers and outtakes from the filming here: (Episode 5 Bloopers)

If you are curious where the running sequence was filmed, it was filmed at the Neuroscience Institute in La Jolla, CA: (www.nsi.edu)

How did you like this episode? What would you like to see differently? What video editors do you use? Let us know in the comments, or shoot me an IM via Digsby on the right side of the page.

For other episodes of Bauer-Power, visit our Veoh Channel at http://video.Bauer-Power.net were all episodes are available as a Podcast!

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Regretting Migrating Feedburner to Google

On Friday I noticed a link when I logged into Feedburner asking if I wanted to associate my feeds with my gmail account. I like things simple, so why not right? I fell for it hook, line and sinker!

The very next day I noticed my subscribers stats plummeted! I went from having 283 subscribers to 78! WTF!?!?! I know sometimes I can be controversial, but come on! How can I have lost that many subscribers overnight?

If you subscribe to Bauer-Power, but you haven't seen your feed updating, you may want to unsubscribe, and re-subscribe using the following link: (New Feed Address)


If you all had any interruptions due to the move, I apologist. Hopefully everything in "stat-land" over at Google will get straightened out soon.

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Another Blooper from Episode 5 of Bauer-Power

In this video, we just finished filming a clip for our upcoming Bauer-Power video. At this point Sundance is a drunken fool, and is all bubbly and happy go lucky. So much so in fact that he forgot to stop recording.

Lucky for you he did! Enjoy another blooper from Sundance!

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Bauer-Power Episode 5 Blooper

Sundance and I filmed episode 5 of Bauer-Power today as well as a newer exciting opening sequence. We generally were able to film everything in one take with the exception of the following little gem that I am about to share with all of you.

You see, Sundance isn't the best runner in the world, nor is he the most athletic. That is okay, as he readily admits it. In the following scene he is supposed to run and jump off a flower bed to get a freeze frame action shot for the opening credits. His jump was good, but he just couldn't stick the landing. Enjoy!

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Recovering Forgotten Passwords II - Email

Another goody from Nir Sofer, the sole developer of Nirsoft is a handy dandy utility for finding passwords in email clients. To be more specific, it finds passwords for POP3, SMTP, and IMAP in those clients.

Think about the practical (and legal) use for this for a second. You are configuring your Grandma a new computer, and you need to configure her email client on her new computer. You can't expect that senile old bat to remember her password on her old computer now can you? (Kidding!)

This tool is called Mail PassView. From the Nirsoft site:

Mail PassView is a small password-recovery tool that reveals the passwords and other account details for the following email clients:

• Outlook Express
• Microsoft Outlook 2000 (POP3 and SMTP Accounts only)
• Microsoft Outlook 2002/2003/2007 (POP3, IMAP, HTTP and SMTP Accounts)
• Windows Mail
• IncrediMail
• Eudora
• Netscape 6.x/7.x (If the password is not encrypted with master password)
• Mozilla Thunderbird (If the password is not encrypted with master password)
• Group Mail Free
• Yahoo! Mail - If the password is saved in Yahoo! Messenger application.
• Hotmail/MSN mail - If the password is saved in MSN/Windows/Live Messenger application.
• Gmail - If the password is saved by Gmail Notifier application, Google Desktop, or by Google Talk.

Here is a screen shot:



If your client isn't supported by Mail PassView, there is another option from Nirsoft.... for that you will have to wait for part III.

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Recovering Forgotten Passwords I - IM Clients

As you all certainly know from reading Tuesdays' article, I am now using Digsby for my IM client. I decided to force my wife to jump on the bandwagon herself, so I removed Windows Live Messenger from her computer, and installed Digsby.

When setting up a new Instant Messenger client, obviously you need to setup your accounts. For that, you need passwords. Of course, I installed Digsby when my wife was sleeping so I couldn't ask her for her password.

I knew she had it saved in Windows Live messenger, so I needed something that could unhide her password, or just simply show me. That is when I found a handy new tool (New to me anyway).

This software is called MessenPass from Nirsoft. From their site:

MessenPass is a password recovery tool that reveals the passwords of the following instant messenger applications:

• MSN Messenger
• Windows Messenger (In Windows XP)
• Windows Live Messenger (In Windows XP And Vista)
• Yahoo Messenger (Versions 5.x and 6.x)
• Google Talk
• ICQ Lite 4.x/5.x/2003
• AOL Instant Messenger v4.6 or below, AIM 6.x, and AIM Pro.
• Trillian
• Miranda
• GAIM/Pidgin
• MySpace IM
• PaltalkScene
• Digsby

I see some of you hackers out there drooling. Calm down a bit, because this tool can only be used for the logged on user. As in my situation above, I was running the application under my wife's account. But when I did, oh boy! Lots of passwords came up like in this example:

The makers of MessenPass have some other cool password recovery tools. Stay tuned tomorrow for Part II.

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Heads Up! Bauer-Power Episode 5 Coming Out Next Week!

The wifey is out of town visiting her aunt up in San Francisco this week, so you know what that means? That's right, Sundance and I can transform my apartment into an IPTV studio and film some kick ass geeky shiznite for all of you!

We have some big plans for the next episode or two, so you don't want to miss this. To kind of give you a taste, I made this little teaser for you:





Everything is happening like I said...well, except the hot chicks mud wrestling. That's neither here nor there though. Check back next week for some cool geeky goodness!

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Digsby - My New Favorite IM/Social Network Client

Today I logged into my work computer like I normally do. I have my IM client set to automatically sign me in, so i never think about it. This morning that client was Pidgin.

After 30 minutes or so of being at my desk, one of my other colleagues yelled over the cubicles telling me to sign in to IM. I use MSN, and for some reason Pidgin wouldn't let me sign in anymore. Another colleague told me that MSN just made an update to their network and until Pidgin could release an update it wouldn't work.

That is when I decided that maybe it was time to try out some other products. I remembered an article my buddy Karl over at AskTheAdmin wrote about an all-in-one client called Digsby.

Digsby is a little more robust than Pidgin as it not only handles all of the different IM networks out there like AIM, MSN, Google Talk, ICQ, IRC etc. It also handles emails, and social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Myspace!

From The Digsby Site:

• Instant Messaging: digsby is a multiprotocol IM client that lets you chat with all your friends on AIM, MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google Talk, and Jabber with one simple to manage buddy list.
• Email Notifications: digsby is an email notification tool that alerts you of new email and lets you perform actions such as 'Delete' or 'Report Spam' with just one click.
• Social Networks: digsby is a social networking tool that alerts you of events like new messages and gives you a live Newsfeed of what your friends are up to.

You may also notice that I have put up a Digsby widget on the right side of the blog. Now you guys can shoot me an IM directly if you have any questions, or comments right from the page!

Digsby isn't all roses and sunshine though. I have noticed a couple of drawbacks. For one, the installer comes with a bunch of adware. You can cancel through all of that though to keep your system free of junk. The other thing is that it is only available for Windows right now. They do say that they will have a Mac and Linux release eventually, so keep an eye out for it.

So what IM/Social networking clients do you use? I want to know! Post links to them in the comments... Or shoot me an IM via Digsby!

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Anonymize Your Links!

I found a real cool website while browsing through the apps at one of my favorite legally questionable software pirating sites. This website allows you to post anonymous links to other websites.

My software pirate site above used this to post links to cracks and software executables without the hosting sites knowing where the traffic is coming from exactly. Pretty cool right?

The site I am talking about is called anonym.to. They let you post anonymous links in several different languages. They also have a script generator to automatically anonymize all links on a web page. That is good for legally questionable websites and forums.

From anonym.to:

Webmasters can use this tool to prevent their site from appearing in the server logs of referred pages as referrer. The operators of the referred pages cannot see where their visitors come from any more.

Using the referrer removal service is quite easy:

http://anonym.to/?http://www.gulli.com/ produces an anonymous link to gulli.com which prevents the original site from appearing as a referrer in the logfiles of the referred page.

I'm sure there are other services like this. If you know of any, please post links to them in the comments :-)

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Download The Bauer-Power Security Pack

Many moons ago, like most guys in the biz, I used to do my own Geek Squad style home computer repair/consulting gig. It was a pretty sweet racket. So many home users trashing their computers, so little time! I was making money hand over fist advertising on Craig's List, and doing spyware cleanups in the evening.

One of my little marketing ploys was to hand out a CD of free software to all of my clients, and I called it the "Bauer-Power Consultation Security Pack!"

Good idea right?

Well, tonight after spending the last three or four hours assisting my two neighbors with their various computer issues, I got to thinking about that CD, so I decided to download some cool and most importantly Free security and performance software, and stick them on a CD to give a kick ass update to the old idea!

My CD includes:

• AVG Anti-virus - Free Antivirus
• Malwarebytes Anti-Malware - Anti-Malware to clean up
• Spybot S&D - Anti-Spyware cleaner
• Zone Alarm - Firewall
• Defraggler - Disk Defragmenter
• Truecrypt - File and Disk Encryption
• Eraser - Secure File Destruction
• Recuva - File Recovery
  

To make it easy to share my CD with all of my friends, family and of course you guys out there in cyberspace, I have saved my Bauer-Power Security Pack CD to an ISO and made it available for you to download here: (Bauer-Power Security Pack)

Feel free to download it, burn it to a CD, and hand it out any time someone tells you that they have a virus, or they mention that they have let their anti-virus lapse, or need to securely erase porn... You get the idea.

If you don't want to take the time to burn them a CD yourself, feel free to send them the link to this post so they can download and burn it themselves!

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Scour - The Social Search Engine... Better than Google?

So I've never really liked Microsoft but they do have good software products. Also I've never really like Google either but they make the best search engine around. So here I am sitting in my little hypocritical world and always trying to find a way to switch to something that's not owned by a major corporation but still get the best performance and options that I prefer. I had used Firefox for years but tested the new IE8 Beta to make sure all the sites I work will still look okay when it comes around. Then I fell in love with it. We had little IE8 babies and live in our Windows Vista64 home with a white picket fence.

Then one day I stumbled onto Scour. It said, "Get paid to search" and I thought to myself, "Yeah, I've heard that one before..." and almost moved on, but just before I was about to move on I noticed it also said Social Search Engine. Hmm..... Just what we need another search engine. Just below that it said it queries Google, MS Live Search and Yahoo for results. So I was interested to see what they do different than say Dogpile.

I noticed right away there's a "Sort by" option right at the top of the search results. So if you perfer to give a higher preference than the others. You can also vote sites up or down depending if the content of the site is actually relevant or not to your search and you can add comments to the search results. So say if a site is good but loads really really slow or has a ton of popups you can let everyone know about it.

They've also added a section in your profile that you can set the weight of each search engine in case you prefer one over the other. Thus being able to still get the same results you'd get say from Google but with the extra social aspect of it to ensure the best quality out of the results. Sure you also gain points from searching, leaving comments and voting. But it would take so long to actually earn money that I do not suggest singing up for that reason and instead sign up to start searching better.

Another thing is that you will gain points if you refer people and they search on Scour also. So to help yourself and help Bauer-Power sign up from this link and at least try it for one week. Like with anything new it will be hard getting used to it at first but I'm sure you'll grow to like it as much as I do. If we do ever make any money off of Scour all proceeds will go to Bauer-Power and making this site better for all of our readers.

By Sundance of MakeMeASammich Games

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Google Offering Free Gmail Stickers

Similar to my free "Powered By Ubuntu" sticker offer, Google is answering the call for free stickers by offering free Gmail stickers in a variety of assortments so you can show off your Gmail pride!

I am pretty excited about this. I have been an avid Gmail user for a while, and I love everything about it. That, and I'm always down for some free stickers to put on my laptop.

From the Official Gmail Blog:

There's the standard Gmail m-velope -- dressed up in glitter. One of three bookplate style stickers you can stick on anything from the inside of a favorite book to your laptop or your skateboard. (Trading with friends is encouraged -- we realize the unicorn isn't for everyone.) And there's a sheet of keyboard shortcut stickers intended as a tool to help people learn Gmail's shortcuts. The adhesive is a bit more removable than standard stickiness, so you can take them off once you've trained your fingers.

To get the stickers, all you have to do is send a self addresses stamped envelope to:


Send me some Gmail stickers already
P.O. Box 391420
Mountain View, CA 94039-1420

As I have found out through my own sticker offer, some of you don't know what "self addressed stamped envelope" means. For those who don't it means you stuff an envelope with another envelope that is addressed back to you with with some friggin' postage on it so they can mail the stickers back to you.

For more information about the sticker offer visit the Official Gmail Blog.

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Converting Tivo to Mpeg

If you are like me, you love your Tivo. If you are also like me, you decided to get the cheapest Tivo out there. I would have gone for the lowest end model they had, but that one was out of stock so I paid for the next one up. I just got tivo-fied recently. Two Christmas's ago, I finally wore my wife down, and she let me get one. It has literally made my life worth living again.

If you are a Tivo owner, you may or may not know that Tivo gives you free desktop software to install on your computer so that you can transfer shows over to you desktop to save for later. You can also share your music, pictures or certain video formats from your computer to your Tivo. Not bad at all for a free little program. What if you want to burn your show to a DVD though? You either have to buy the more expensive Tivo with the built in DVD burner, or you have to buy their upgrade software to convert the .tivo files to .mpeg. Once you convert them to mpeg, you can burn them to DVD with Nero or some other DVD Authoring program (sorry I haven't found a free one yet).

Not any more though. I once found a little command line program that would convert .tivo to .mpeg on Sourceforge. I couldn't find it today though when I went to write this. So, I decided to upload my copy and the little script I wrote to MediaFire so you can download it. I took all the work out of it for you too! All you need is your Tivo Media access Key to decode and your done. You can download the utility here for 30 days.

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Bauer-Power Episode 4

Go ahead and pinch yourself, because you are not dreaming! Yes I have completed another video episode of Bauer-Power! This time, I did it on my own. Sundance couldn't make it in for the shooting yesterday, so I ended up doing everything solo for this one.

I decided to change things up a bit this time and not do it "diggnation style" for one main reason. I LEARNED HOW TO DO CHROMA KEYING! (aka Green Screening).

In this episode I talk about the top ten most common new years resolutions, and the top ten techy things to help you keep those resolutions! Check it out!



I am so sorry for the audio quality, and I realize that some of the transitions weren't so smooth, but I was working under a time constraint, as I had to get everything done while the wife and kid were out of the house yesterday.

Besides that though, what do you think about the new format? Like? Dislike? Bring back diggnation style? Let me know in the comments.

If you haven't seen one of the other episodes, you can view them all on my Veoh Channel here: (Bauer-Power Veoh Channel)

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Ubuntu Certificate of Authenticity

I decided to bring this one to the top today. You see, I just got a Powered by Ubuntu sticker request in the mail today, and with it the guy asked if there was a sticker to replace the Microsoft Windows License sticker on his computer. That request reminding me of this post I put up a while back. So without further ado, here it is again:

I found the below picture in my internet Stumbles and thought I would repost it. The image is apparently created by some guy on the Ubuntu Forums with the handle of MenZa, who released it with a GPL license, so feel free to re-post, re-distribute or whatever! This should make the transition to Ubuntu for Windows users a little more smooth.

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Time To Get Funky

How many of you use a service like MySpace, Facebook or Twitter? How many of you participate in online forums? What do all of these have in common? If you said avatars, then you just read my mind!

I found a pretty cool website the other day that allows you to take your favorite pictures, and transform them into really kick-ass avatars for free!.

This website is called BeFunky, and it can manipulate your pictures in two ways (From their website):

1. Cartoonizer:
   
   
   
   If you’re a fan of funky-looking cartoons and comics, you're going to be all over this.
   
   
   
2. Uvatar:
   
   
   
   Avatars are boring and generic. Take your online persona further with Uvatar

If you like those, then coming soon you will love their Video Cartoonizer they are comming out with. According to their site, Video Cartoonizer allows you to, "put yourself in the director’s chair and turn your home movie into an animated feature film."



Pretty cool right? Here is one I did of myself:



If you use this tool, I want to see your handy work! Post a link to your image in the comments!

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Happy New Year!

Another year has come and gone! For the most part 2008 was a pretty good year (Blogging wise). Thank you all for sticking around to read my articles. Though I do this as a hobby for myself, the only reason I keep doing it is for you guys who drop by each day to see what I have to say!

I hope you all have a wonderful and prosperous 2009! Please keep coming back, as I don't plan on going anywhere any time soon.

We finally broke 200 subscribers this year. Please do me a solid and tell your techy friends about Bauer-Power. I am hoping to break 300 this year (or more if possible!). Your friends can subscribe by clicking here: (Subscribe to Bauer-Power's RSS Feed)

Once again, Happy New Year!

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