Jan Ole Peek

Google Buzz Buzzes

It was about time I wrote down something else on this blog. For several months now I’ve had draft posts with nothing but titles in them, all so I could remember in the future what I at one time wanted to write about. I’m sure I’ll finish writing these any day now. Yeah. But yesterday Google rolled out a new service, Google Buzz, and it compelled me enough to at least write out a few of my initial thoughts.

First of all, I want you to really understand that these are just some initial thoughts, not in any particular order, and probably not well articulated. If you want to read a proper post about Google Buzz, check out Mitchell McKenna’s blog post, which I incidentally discovered via Google Buzz. Funny, huh? So here’s a few bullet points of the things I like, the things that bug me, and my general impressions of Google’s entry into the social networking arena.

Clickmap – See what’s hot!

I came across an interesting little Wordpress plugin a few weeks ago that I haven’t written about until now because it requires you to give it some time to show its usefulness. It’s called Clickmap and by its own description, this is what it does:

This little plugin will store each click made on pages of your site in a database, and from there, you’ll be able to go to your blog’s admin section and view the various pages. See what is popular with your visitors and what’s not.

Hack your $80 GPS System

GPS systems out there range anywhere from $70 to upwards of $400 depending on the feature sets included. I recently took advantage of the fact that some of the low-end GPS systems on the market run on Windows CE. This leaves open the opportunity to hack the system, gain access to the Windows CE desktop, and from there, the sky’s limit.

The GPS system that I purchased is the Nextar X3-01, which is a portable 3.5″ screen unit that comes complete with car mounting kit and SD card slot (this is critical). You’ll most likely be able to find this kind of model in the bargain bin or at liquidation retailers. Online the prices range from $80 – $300, but you can probably find it at the low end of that range at some local store.

Gaming on a Budget

Gaming isn’t a cheap hobby. One of the main “excuses” used for piracy is the cost of games and with rising production costs at the developer’s end, price increases are often considered during annual shareholders meetings of even big production houses like EA.

So what’s the frugal gamer to do? In this article I want to briefly point out a few great ways to feed your hobby on a small scale budget.

All of the major consoles have services that allow for alternatives to $50+retail titles: Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, and Wii Ware. With prices ranging from $8 – $15 the selection is quite vast and as of late the quality of these games has really picked up. Usually you expect only a few hours of entertainment from an arcade title but multiplayer games like Battlefield 1943 can provide literally endless hours of gaming. In this post I’m going to list a few of the games I got for next to no money.

Exploring Desktop Blog Writers

Several things happened today in the online world that’s making me consider writing more of my content on my own blog. To that end I’m going to try out a few desktop blogging applications that interface with Wordpress (hopefully well). First up is Blogo. This is a test post from it and we’ll see how it goes. More tomorrow…

Photo of the Day: Lightening Storm over Kalamalka Lake

Posted via web from Jan Ole Peek’s Posterous