As if it’s not bad enough that I work with 3 monitors, I recently got the Dell 3008WFP 30″ monitor. I’ve only had it for a week so far, but wrote up a mini-review with pics and added it to the tutorial page at my website.

Check it out the review here.

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

The live action was shot in a day, and then about 2 years was spent in post production. (!)
Branit is the owner of Branit VFX based in Kansas City.

Enter Folding@home, a distributed computing project where your PS3 and thousands of others contribute calculations for ongoing research involving “protein folding, misfolding and related diseases.”

The project has been running for several years now and includes PC’s for the calculating power, but the stats for the power of the PS3′s is impressive.

You can check out the PS3 area of the Folding@home website here.

I recently built a new system and decided to photograph the entire process as a sort of tutorial for those that may be curious about the process. This new system uses the Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 CPU, the ASUS P5B Deluxe motherboard, 4 gigs of RAM and Windows XP Pro 64-bit.

It’s in the tutorials section of my gallery site…check it out here.

What sets it apart from the crowd is the fact that it automatically balances and updates your schedule for you, based on the parameters you specify. For instance, you can specify certain tasks that can be done within a certain time frame, but don’t have an absolute begin or end time, and it will fit these tasks in dynamically around the items that do have to be done at specific times.

It also allows the setting of priorities for tasks and has a multitude of user options.

Another great thing about it is that it is a program that is frequently being updated, and there’s an active email list where user questions are answered.

You can read about it and download the demo from here.

Hard drives are so cheap these days that it’s probably one of the best ways to back up critical data…just add a second drive to your system and copy what you want to keep safe.

One of the easiest programs I’ve seen for automatically copying data from one place to another is Second Copy. It uses a very straightforward series of steps where you specify what you want to copy, where you want it copied, and how often. It works great.

Check it out here.

In fact, it’s a bit strange when I think about it just how much time I do spend on computers. I spend all day on them from about 8:30 in the morning till 6pm, unless we’re in crunch mode at work, which means I may be there till midnight or later.

Even if I do get home at a normal time, one of the first things I do when I walk through the door is sit down at the computer. It’s how I spend my evenings as well. I cancelled my cable TV, because there was just too much crap that I didn’t want to watch. I can’t stand “Reality TV”, or sitcoms or most of the mindless drivel that I kept running into. I do like the Discovery channel and the History channel, but not $50.00 a month worth.

The only thing I use my TV for is console games and rented movies.

So in the evenings, I work on my own artwork, as opposed to the art I create at my job. Since I’m either working with 3D graphics, Photoshop, or digital photos, everything I do as far as my own artwork is on the computer as well. It’s a fun time in history to be doing all of this, because it’s changing so fast. I keep wondering what computers will be like in 10-20 years from now. I watched and worked with the earliest home computers at a point when graphics were pretty much impossible, and in the course of only about 15 to 20 years we’re creating photo-realistic 3D computer graphics that in some cases can’t even be spotted as anything other than reality.

What a wild ride!

As I write this I am flying down the highway, a passenger on a trip from Elko, NV to Minden, NV to attend the wedding of Regina and her future husband. It’s about a 5 1/2 hour drive, and these road trips used to make me fairly crazy. Currently we’re about 20 miles West of Lovelock, and while there’s plenty of scenery, there’s not a tremendous amount of variation to said scenery. What’s a geek to do?

Enter laptop goodness. I have been meaning to get a laptop for probably 6 or 7 years now, but never took the plunge. When I was recently looking to replace my cell phone, I was checking out smart phones, PDA’s, and general communication gadgets, and my wife said “you’ve been talking about getting a laptop for years…why don’t you just get one?”

Since the purchase was now officially wife-sanctioned, who was I to argue?

So here I am, in the passenger seat of a Nissan Sentra, hurtling along at a speed that shall remain unmentioned (the Wife likes to drive fast) and typing away. The best part is that the power converter plugged into the cigarette lighter means I’m not even using battery juice.

Road trips just got a whole lot better.

Don’t you love it when you arrive at a site and a giant form pops up and you say to yourself “Oh boy! I get to fill out my name and address for the 4,621st time!…Awesome!”

Roboform allows you to store all your information (you can decide what you want to store and what you don’t want to) and with the push of a button from the Roboform toolbar, the form will be filled out automatically. You can check it to make sure all is good, and then that’s it.

I’ve been using it for years, and am very happy with it.

Check it out here.

If you want to use your computer to talk to someone with a normal phone though, you’ve had to pay minutes for SkypeOut service. But it seems that until the end of the year, even that is free now, essentially giving you free long distance calling using your computer.

Here’s the article.

Skype Site