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I have noticed something. Anytime we have family in to visit, the gadgets come out and everything gets a good playing with. This Thanksgiving there are two huge hits, the iPad and Xbox 360 Kinect.

There have been at least 5 people stationed in the family room on the Kinect since we finished eating. It’s been mostly Kinect Sports, that’s obviously the hit. I feel quite amped about it tho, being a Microsoft boy, it’s pretty exciting to see something that popular with good ole’ consumers. If you read the blogs lately you would get the impression that we just don’t get consumers anymore at all.

The other bigtime gadget, although thankfully in second place, is the iPad. Angry Birds, Cut the Rope, Tumble Drop, Scrabble… the games are huge.

Ironically the response for Kinect was overwhelmingly “I am buying one of these as soon as I get home.” The iPad response was quite different, it was “it’s pretty cool, but I wouldn’t spend $500 on one.”

Wonder what this Christmas will bring, I am looking forward to some awesome sales of Kinect, Xbox 360, Windows Phone 7 and hopefully some Windows 7 Tablets.

Merry Christmas and Happy Thanksgiving!

Being a hybrid PC-Mac user, one thing that always drives me bonkers on the Mac, is the lack of a decent blogging app. I have tried Ecto, Mars Edit, Qumana and countless others, but nothing has been less painful that booting up a VMWare copy of Windows and running a full, albeit slow, copy of Windows Live Writer.

Let me be clear in saying that no, Blogo is NOT better than Windows Live Writer. It’s not even equivalent. What it is, however, is decent. Decent will do when I don’t need to do something heavily formatted.

All of the other blogging clients forget about images and treat them like a 3rd class citizen. Blogo at least gives images proper priority and provides tools for using images in your posts.

It would be nice if it allowed you to preview your posts on your theme in realtime like Live Writer does, but at least it does give you the ability to open a preview window and see how it will look when it’s posted.

It’s nice that you can insert photos, crop them, add filters to them, but I am not a huge fan that you can’t edit and resize them in the blog post with handles like you can in Windows Live Writer.

Other seemingly missing features are the ability to specifically size the thumbnail and manually set the padding. It’s a little unintuitive to have to select the image, and then edit it via the thumbnail outside of the post.

I will also miss the tons of plugins for code formatting, videos, etc. That being said, it’s the best blogging client for Mac I have used so far and definitely worth the $25 price of admission. I guess that’s 25 more reasons I like Windows Live Writer better

It’s no secret that I have more than one person’s share of guitars. When I started getting close to finishing my new home recording studio, it was apparent that I needed them on the wall instead of losing all the floor space for the floor stands I have. You can buy decent guitar wall hangers for $7-10 each, but when you need 18 that gets spendy.

I did some looking around and saw some plans on Instructibles for making guitar hangers and figured I could do it just a little better.

The first part was finding a better way to mount them than a half cut piece of dowel rod. I decided to go with a pre-made trim piece you can get at Lowes for $1.88. It’s already routed and has a nice edge, white and just needs to be painted.

First I marked a center line on all of them, then I evenly measured out for 3 holes, two to mount it to the wall, and one for the hanger.

Once all 18 were marked, I went outside with my drill, two drill bits and a counter sink bit so I could make the holes and sink the screw holes so they screwed in flush.

Once I had them all drilled I laid them out and painted them all black to match the theme I have going in the studio. After that, it’s just a matter of screwing in the hanger itself, and then measuring and putting the sheetrock anchors in the wall.

The finish product speaks for itself. They hold all of my guitars perfect, they are very sturdy, and they look as good as something store bought.

All you need to build and hang them are:

• Super Hangers, Ace Hardware, $2.00 each.
• Trim Wall Plates, Lowes, $1.88 each
• Spray Paint to paint them, $4.
• Metal Sheetrock Anchors, $16/50ct. Holds 50lbs.
• 1/8” Drill Bit
• 1/4” Drill Bit
• Counter Sink Drill Bit

I have been incredibly negligent to my blog lately and I apologize. With Office planning at it’s peak and moving into a new house, I have been a little busy! That being said there has been so much going that I want to talk about, I’ll get some new posts and videos up this weekend to show you all what I have been up to. Stay tuned.

This is a photo of my new home office, and the studio is being built, hope you love it as much as I do.

I love the Ars Technica website. I read it regularly and find a lot of good information there. Unfortunately today was not one of those days. While I am beating this dead horse, I might as well get one more swat in. Ars posted “5 years later, 5 ways that Ubuntu has made Linux more human” and I have a little beef.

First let me say that by and large Ubuntu has made Linux more human, more approachable and just plain less scary to the non-Linux initiated. But we have to understand the concept of scale here. Ubuntu has made Linux more approachable in the same way that a Phillips head screwdriver made screws more screwable. It’s definitely better, but not by much.

Let’s go through the 5 points, and see how Ars Technica sees users through the rose colored eyes of a Linux nerd.

1. The Ubuntu Code of Conduct

Let me try and make this point succinct. It’s one that I know Microsoft understands, and one that Apple almost ensures with an iron fist. Users Do Not Contribute. Users use, that’s why they are called Users. A simple breakdown of the word itself is all you need.

While we are talking about contribution, if Linux was going to have a contribution towards contribution (boy is that cyclical) then they would try to make a move towards some common fundamentals like a single window manager, a translation based model for hardware communication and maybe an IDE that allows for rapid application development into a single installable that will run on any distribution.

Linux is splintered. The Gnome/KDE divide needs to disappear to a common language. Linux needs some Direct-X type functionality if they ever want to get games. This code of conduct does nothing to help users, and it sounds about as useful to a developer as a lifetime warranty on a disposable pen.

2. Short, Time-based Release Cycles

Here is my tip for Ubuntu. Drop the “awesome” 6-month release cycles. I have yet to install a new version of Ubuntu and think anything other than “this looks just like the last one.” If you are making performance, stability or security fixes, install those with an update manager. If you are going to make me download and install or upgrade a new version, change something other than the wallpaper. Wow people, impress them. If you can’t do that in 6 months, then adopt a cadence that allows you to actually create a product worth the hassle of upgrading.

3. Easy Installation from a Single CD Image

Now I will admit that the Live CD idea is really cool. It’s actually saved my ass a few times when I had a Windows installation go tits up and I needed to save some data. That’s a great feature. That being said, Linux had easy install nailed before Ubuntu came along, off a single CD. Live CD is neat, but I am sure Fedora, SuSe and even the older Corel distributions would have quite a bit of gripe if you said Ubuntu made installing Linux easy.

4. Convenient Access to Useful Proprietary Components

How about you really get with this one. Instead of claiming victory for having another tool that the user has to find and use to install drivers for certain hardware, get over the Richard Stallman freetard crap and just have the system find the drivers and install them automatico. Why does the user care if the driver is FREE or not, if they don’t need their credit card to install it, install it for them and shut up.

5. Strong Focus on Improving Desktop Usability

Ok, this is where I have the largest gripe. I did a post a few months ago where I showed Ubuntu’s progress through the years. It’s really not very significant. If the Mac and Linux community call the progression between Vista and Windows 7 merely a service pack, then I’d have to blame Ubuntu for releasing bug fixes for the last few, either that or they are playing air hockey and phoning in the releases. “Change the wallpaper, these idiots won’t notice.”

Will they ever get it?

I don’t want to risk sounding like some asshole or worse (John C. Dvorak maybe?) but Linux is progressing at a snails pace. Given that they have nowhere near the users, liabilities or let’s face it, responsibilities of an OS X or Windows, you would think they could really be aggressive. It seems like Linux has a “Good Enough” strategy. Make it work, make it usable, and then hope people like it. This is a glitz and glam world. Why do you think we have the phrase “put lipstick on a pig?” It’s almost like the Linux community uses the reverse strategy, “put sweatpants and a hairnet on an average looking girl.”