Bump for bookcat. A few years back I started using it, I was getting into a situation where I had purchased a couple of books I already owned and wanted to start keeping track of them all. Started with a spreadsheet for simple search. Got tired of maintaining it, then transitioned to this.

Process for physical books is now:
          Buy book
          When it arrives, scan the barcode with an android phone, put the book away.
          Import the isbn into Bookcat, then bookcat downloads the cover/metadata etc for it
          Update location field, any other metrics you want to keep, price paid, condition for used etc.

Then you've got a nice searchable index. It's made for small libraries so it does have the loan & check in/check out functionality as well, and I think it's like $40?

Yeah that's what I use, it's dirt cheap and you can just buy a roll and cut the lengths you need. My home office desk I screwed some longer strips to the back underside of the desk so everything stays up high, out of the way and out of sight, then it's easy enough to redo since you're working with velcro. Being able to get behind the desk I highly recommend as well.

For Wall warts, I use these guys ( http://www.cablestogo.com/product_list.asp?cat_id=1020 ), power squid type power strips, you can attach them high underneath your desk then coil up the excess cable length near them so you don't have hanging wires. Additionally then you dont have to worry about them blocking recepticles on your good power strips (I'm still an isobar fan for those http://www.tripplite.com/en/products/product-series.cfm?txtSeriesID=825 )

Also dont be afraid of physical separation, I have my cable modem, firewall, and a switch on one side of the room on a cabinet where printer, mfd etc are, along with a small nas, then gig isl's over to the other side of the room where workstations on the desk are plugged in.

I'm also a big fan of synergy ( http://synergy-foss.org/ ) as a software keyboard/mouse for machines vs having use physical keyboards or physical kvm's for multiples, and you still get the separated video output for each which is nice.

Every once and a while you need to go through the stuff you've got cabled up, getting rid of things you don't use all the time, or can consolidate (that's probably an annual or bi-annual job though lol). I did that earlier this year and it actually helped quite a bit.
 

AOL's 3 remaining customers are going to use a new application to aggregate their mail from services that already provide more functionality than AOL does in an attempt to show relevant value and usefulness. One of the 3 customers, known simply as "granma" was quoted as saying "Now I don't have to remember all those complicated things like gee mails and yahooie for when I need to tell my grandson that the guv'ment is going to start charging for email, or if I forward this message bill gates is going to give me a dollar!".

Cool story, would read again, +1, +like & stuff. Need's more bitcoin.

Agreed. Last title I picked up from them I think I paid like $50 for it, messed around with it for like a week. Then removed it and their stupid drm launcher/rootkit.

Publishers can quote piracy all they want but I think crap content is a bigger detriment to their financial base and word about that gets around just as quick as draconian drm.

Honestly, if there was a mechanism in place to get a refund on some of the garbage software I've bought over the years I think there's only a hand full of stuff I would actually keep.

I didn't read all the responses but from my dealing with the FBI cyber crimes division they won't even look at it unless there's $10k USD or more in loss/damages.

What I do (when I'm bored :P ) is just take the logs, pull the source address, punch it through arin and see who owns the netblock, then file a abuse/fraud ticket through whoever owns the netblock (including providing the logs). That seems to work pretty well for us based companies. I was really impressed with the amazon cloud guys and how fast they shut down a compromised vm after I sent them the info. Regional/smaller ISP's are usually pretty good, larger ones it can be hit or miss.

Dealing with offshore addresses is more problematic, due to inconsistent controls, communications barriers etc. For addresses like that if it's not a country I'm going to be travelling to or do business with I'll just acl the whole block (sometimes the whole country) at my perimeter.

Aside from that, nonstandard ports, knocking, vpn are all good ways to deal with this kind of thing. I'm guessing you're at least not leaving all your personally critical data there, and that you do at least have some isolation.

This pretty much sums it up. Earlier this year I broke my slide out keyboard smartphone. I went to the shop to see what they had, and it was either get the same one I bought a year ago or buy the new model. New model had a faster processor, better radio, more memory etc. Yeah it's bigger and it doesn't have a slide out keyboard, but I bought it anyway because I didn't want to buy the slower one even though the faster phone didn't have some of the features I wanted and I didn't like that it's larger.

It seems like you get 3 options when you go with a carrier and narrow it down to a specific manufacturer. The budget model that has pretty much nothing, the older version that's ok, but you know there's something better or the shiny new one that's not really what you want but it's the only option left.

The display annoyances trend is getting worse though I'm dreading when I have to replace my desktop displays again because the industry seems to think that the only thing people do with computers is watch movies on them so all the displays have to be widescreen and 1080p is fine, so you don't need a lot of vertical resolution. I'm tired of the arguments there too, no I don't want to turn it sideways because then it's to narrow and too tall.

I want a phone, not a tablet.

I want my vertical pixels back.

I'll add a gripe #3 just because... Blue LED's, enough said. Shuji Nakamura, it's your fault.

My dog would go nuts over this, he'd never get tired of chasing a flying cat around the yard. I want one just to see how he'd react to it.

These went from $180/drive, to $399 2 weeks ago. Now they're back to $299/drive today.

I was going to replace a 1TB mirror set with a pair of them but I was holding off because at $180/per I was like "Meh, they're still kinda pricy, it's not outta space yet so I'll hold off a bit."

I checked a couple of my other vendors, highest price on that drive was $450.

& stop accepting bitcoin articles to be greenlit for the front page. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Here here! On my first android phone with them I saw that they had bundled some crappy NFL sports app, nascar bs, as well as Sprint TV and a couple others. They autostart at boot, were difficult to remove. They were the reason one of the first android apps I went looking for was a task manager to kill them with.

Just upgraded my phone last weekend, those are still bundled, although I haven't done an update yet and gotten hit with blockbuster (seriously? just f'in die already, your customers hate you and nobody cares... It's because of them I've been using netflix since '99) & their nova shooter. Now I have to keep an eye out and reject firmware until their new 'removal tool' is released.

This would have been easier to put together 20 years ago, I think they tried to do a movie a couple of times already but it fell apart.

Nowadays, this is going trying to take the 'futuristic' concepts of global spanning data networks and present them to people that pretty much grew up with them in place, minus the neural interfaces... It was a great book, and I remember in the late 80's was excited to see they were working on a movie. Now, well, I don't think they're going to be able to pull it off.

Next up, Snow Crash? Why not, these things are going to have to be changed so much to make sense in today's terms of technology that they're not really going to be able to resemble the original except in a vague sort of way.

too true.

Years back I remember a symantec app on windows that would pop up a dialogue box when it was trying to shut down that just said:

Should not see this.

with a big red X on the left and a cancel button on it. I had a screenshot of it somewhere, it was my favorite error message to date. I was always thinking ok... you took the time to have it pop a box with that message in it, but couldn't actually put any useful info in it?

That's what I was going to ask, how do they even have money anymore? What do they actually do? Do people still pay them for some kind of portal service or is it all ad based revenue from aim or something?