I've never asked for help from a social media account, but I've been surprised by how non-corporate-seeming some Twitter accounts are - @amtrak sounds like a person, and @zappos replies to everyone like an insanely chipper, grinning chipmunk. In fact, the customer support people at Zappos are apparently so nice that…

Thanks, Whitson! The site isn't quite ready yet, but I wanted to let you know that I wrote my own guide to World Cup viewing on Hackerspace, making use of all the knowledge I gained from reading press releases while working on my schedule. (I didn't plug it there because I didn't want my first post on Hackerspace to…

Whitson! I actually made my own sortable schedule for the World Cup:

Also, the prices of the generic OTC drugs at Costco are ridiculous. The other day I bought a year's supply of generic Claritin (literally, 365 pills) for $8 and change.

Costco's food court is also great. For $1.50 you get a giant hot dog and a soda. For $10, you can also take home an 18" pizza that tastes better to me than the pizza I can get at most of my local pizzerias.

If you have dust mite allergies, you want to be careful about this because it's just as likely that your eyes are suffering due to high humidity, not excessive dryness. Dust mites absorb water from the air and can't survive if relative humidity is below 50%. Higher than that and they proliferate. If your itchy eyes…

A man, a plan, a canal - Panama.

Another thing people do naturally but shouldn't do on camera is move their head around. If you're shot in a close-up, the movement of your head is exaggerated on screen and can make you look jumpy and nervous. Here's one of my favorite Hollywood anecdotes:

One useful piece of advice, from a surprisingly popular reddit AMA by a vacuum repair technician:

I wondered when we might see a large-scale grocery delivery business again. Webvan, one of the best known early dot-com companies, folded in 2001. Since then, we've seen pretty much every other idea that failed in the early startup era done successfully - streaming video, social networks, every kind of e-tailer, maybe…

Here's a comparison of your CPU (Phenom X4 955) to the Intel G850, which is a couple of years old but should be very similar to the G3220 I mentioned earlier (I'd guess the newer model is about 15% faster):

By modern standards, yes. Intel's latest quad-core processors (Haswell) are 84W or 65W. There are even a few 45W and 35W models, although I'm not sure that I've ever seen them in stock on newegg. Dual-core models are all 54W or 35W.

Yes, but the reverse can be true as well - replacing your card can make your computer noisier. What's important isn't how recent your card is but how much heat it generates and how efficiently it is cooled. However, your main problem is that you have a 125W CPU. I think any change you'd hear from replacing your video…

Yes! It will make Excel run at 60 frames per second instead of 30 frames per second. You will have an advantage over your peers in any multiplayer game of Excel.

I assume that was a micro-HDMI to HDMI cable. That's the worst combination: a stiff cable and a small connector.

Thanks again. I've "made" my own speaker cables by stripping the ends off and screwing banana plugs on them, but that's about as DIY as I've gone so far. (Incidentally, those screw-on types never really seem to stay on.) I really like the GLS XLR cable I have, so I'll give their bulk cables a try.

Thanks! I'll definitely give this a try. I haven't soldered anything since I ruined my mom's carpet with a soldering gun as a poorly coordinated seven year old.

Oh, I really need to learn how to do that one day. It'd be an especially useful skill to have for long network cable runs.

They've really stepped up their quality over the last year or so. I actually wouldn't recommend their XLR cables because they're *too* well-built and don't bend easily. Some cables need to be flexible!

The nice thing about Monoprice cables is that they're both sturdy and incredibly cheap: