The iRecycle App by Earth911 Inc. Shows You Where and When to Recycle All of Those Old Electronics You've Been Meaning to Get Rid of

I was looking for a place to drop off all of the outdated and broken bits and bobs laying around my office. I have a staggering collection of broken and outdated computer parts, from laptop and desktop parts to any kind of wire cable or cord imaginable. Salvaging working computer parts was something I always found useful. Every now and again I'd come across a sweet score like a spare video card or extra hard drive or stick of RAM, even a perfectly good DVD burner from a new machine that got zapped when lightning hit a house. Now, it seems, my scavenging ways are beginning to catch up with me.

Since my wife and I are looking buy a home in the next few months and I was tasked with getting rid of any old electronics I didn't need. By the time I sorted through it all, I cleared out about 70% of the crap I had laying around and it felt great. I minimized my office clutter and took an inventory of my working spare parts. The only problem, I have a big plastic storage container with all of this useless junk and I don't know what to do with it. I can't put it out with my recycling, they won't take it that way. Aside from being illegal, trashing it will just send it to a landfill, adding to the growing e-waste problem.

After a brief search, I found the iRecycle app by Earth911 and it's available for Android and iOS. iRecycle is an excellent resource to find locations for recycling any item imaginable. There are 12 main categories covering everything from automotive to construction materials to electronics and even paint. Each category has a considerable and specific list of subcategories. From there you enter your City and State and the search displays recycling centers in your area. This makes it easy to find places that recycle less common items. The interface is comfortably simple and easy to navigate and the GPS integration is great bonus. It is clear the people at Earth911 took great care preparing this app.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus.

This Christmas marked the very first return of a gift for me other than to trade up or down sizes of clothing. I was lucky enough to receive an iPad2 32Gb with wifi from my mom and step-dad, but as I'm not particularly impressed by Apple products, I decided to swap it out.

Playing with the iPad for a few hours throughout the weekend, I really tried to like it. I tried a few e-books, an episode or two of Married with Children on Netflix, but I just couldn't get into it. So I made the decision to swap it out for a smaller Android tablet and use the leftover cash towards a new TV for the living room. I took a trip to Best Buy and put fingerprints on all of the Android tablets they until finally, after a bit of deliberation and some ooh's and ahh's, decided on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus 16gb edition.

I drove home as fast as I could swerve in and out of traffic, laughing maniacally as raced from South Philly to Fishtown. Upon arriving home, I darted up to my Fortress of Nerditude and plugged in this sexy looking piece of machinery for its first charge. After a short amount of time, I heard the chirp which signaled the charge was complete. Finally I was ready to set this thing up. It was only about 2 minutes later, that I experienced my first disappointment. Now, I'm still a Linux newbie and should have probably been on the lookout for this, but... Samsung's sync software Kies(r) was not compatible with my system. No problem. I'll work around it. I should be able to do this via USB, right? After plugging the tablet into my PC running Ubuntu Oneiric, I couldn't view any of the mounted file system. It looks like I'll be doing any sync activities through my Windows machine. No big deal. However, I do take issue with the inability to charge via USB, not even for a slow charge. It would be nice to be able to sync and charge at the same time. Two birds, one stone blah blah blah. Not one make quick judgments, I decided to press on.

I really wanted to investigate the PEEL Smart Remote that interfaced with the built in IR transmitter to control my TV, STB, and DVD player. It seemed like a pretty cool option, but I was a little disappointed to learn that the initial setup requited a set top box and TV service. This essentially rendered the software useless to me, but from the reviews I read about it, it does look pretty useful if you have a FiOS or Digital Cable provider. I searched the Android App Store for a Roku remote and found a satisfactory one, but I barely use it. It's much easier to just grab the remote from the coffee table than it is to switch out of whatever I'm doing and open the remote and then switch back. This speaks somewhat more about the poor multitasking ability of tablet technology as a whole and less about the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus itself.

This thing is awesome for streaming video. Crappy selection aside, Netflix Instant Watch works extremely well. The picture quality is awesome and I haven't had any problems with the audio feed sync or choppy video. I'm a little sad that Hulu Plus doesn't support streaming to this device yet, but I'm patient. The YouTube app is decent enough and the experience is what I expected. I have the Plex App for my media server installed and watching The Goonies last night was awesome. I didn't have to leave my bed to find a DVD, or use my laptop form across the room on the nightstand.

The Amazon Kindle App works like a light weight version of the Kindle Fire. I've read a Star Wars Universe novel, a couple of tech books and downloaded a score of free literary classics. I wish I could port my Popular Mechanics subscription over, but oh well.

I'm impressed with the internal storage capacity even though it is only 16 gb. I have installed about 70 apps and haven't had a problem with running out of room. Among my favorite apps are Spotify, Pulse, RTFM (Linux Man Pages), and Evernote. Evernote is a recent discovery of mine. When I make notes for myself, or have an idea or momentary lapse of stupidity, I usually write it down on the closest piece of paper and then promptly lose it. For the last couple of weeks, I've been forcing myself to use Evernote. I;ve been able to maintain a solid collection of my thoughts and access them from my phone, tablet, PC and laptop. I like this app so much, I'll likely pay for it. When I run out of storage or have a need for some of the premium features like collaborative notes, larger storage or offline note history.

As a higher end “cheap tablet”, The Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus has a great user experience. I even like Samsung's TouchWiz Android Skin. The interface is comfortable and easy to use. The graphics are smooth and give me the warm and fuzzy. Aside from the proprietary Cable and lack of Linux support for the Kies Wifi Sync, I'm very satisfied with this purchase. It's lightweight, feels nice in my hand and performs like I would have expected. The battery life is excellent, and I'm impressed with the quality of the streaming video.

As usual. If anyone have any thing to say about this post, please comment!

Closing Windows and Opening My Eyes – Part 1

Closing Windows and Opening My Eyes – Part 1

This is the first of a multi part blog post about my complete transition from Microsoft to the wonderful world of Linux and open source computing.

First, a little background...

For the last sixteen years I have been living in a Microsoft centric world. It started with Windows 3.1 and has spanned every version of the popular OS all the way up to Windows 7 on my Toshiba Satellite A665 Laptop. I became intrigued by Linux a few months back when I had a hard drive failure with that beloved laptop. Unfortunately, or rather, fortunately for me, Toshiba and their sub-par customer support required me to send the laptop in for service and wait 10 business days to get it back. I call shenanigans.

As usual when this kind of thing happens, my last backup was months old. I had since collected a large amount of work documents, hundreds of pictures from a recent road trip and was about a third of the way through ripping my DVD collection. Thinking back, I really should have seen it coming.

I absolutely did not want to be without a computer for 2 weeks and replacing a hard drive is well within my capabilities as an IT guy by trade. I made the decision to just shell out for a new hard drive and do the job myself (besides, I wanted to upgrade the drive since I bought it and this was as good an opportunity as any). I procured a replacement drive and using an old beater with some data recovery software I had laying around, got my data back.

Searching the house for my Windows 7 recovery discs and all of the documentation that came with my

laptop, I remembered that computers don't come with those any more. It was on a recovery partition on the hard disk which was now completely lifeless, so now I had to pay $25 for recovery media to be shipped from Toshiba and I wasn't happy. Fortunately, it would only take 5 days to get here, but this was still too long to be without. After a few expletives and beer or five to calm my frustration, I had an epiphany. UBUNTU!

I currently support a Linux based product at work which consists of the basic kernel and a few custom modules built for scanning of web and email traffic. So, I knew a little bit about the OS and its command line, how hard could this be? I have also in my travels needed to use Linux to retrieve lost computer passwords and files from a corrupt installation of Windows. Other than that, I was clueless to the true nature of this wonderful beast. After I received the recovery media, It took me weeks to reinstall Windows and I only did it because I needed it for work.

October came around and I had some spare cash and was in the market for a new desktop. I needed something that was going to last and had the juice to run a small virtual testing environment. I bought a moderately priced bare-bones PC kit from TigerDirect with a beefy set of specs and a pair of 22” LCD's, all for just under a $900. I didn't even think about buying a copy of Windows 7. As soon as I finished putting it together, I booted up the Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot Live CD and haven't looked back. I spent the first day or two customizing all of the settings and apps for the basic user experience I played around with the native Bit Torrent client, Transmission, and installed the Spotify for Linux Beta (awesome). I also played around with some media players and the like, customized the desktop, and attempted to fix the issue I had installing the drivers for my Rad eon 6770. Over the course of the next month I felt a renewed passion for computing. I wrote a post in November comparing Ubuntu 11.10 to Windows 7 and mistakenly said that it was not an operating system for the average home user just yet and needed to be improved upon further. I would like to take the opportunity to retract that portion of the post. I am now a firm believer that Linux is for everyone, though the learning curve is a little steep.

Since then, I have gone through Linux+ training courtesy of my employer and am gearing up to take the exams next week. I built a PLEX server, played around with RHEL5&6, CentOS, Debian and BackTrack, a flavor of Linux designed around penetration testing and security. I think it's safe to say that I'm hooked.

Coming up in Part 2, I'll take you through delights of having a media server that can stream music and movies to my Roku 2 XS, Android phone, and Samsung Galaxy Tab 7 Plus all without spending a dime.