I love technology and all the things that surround it, but ever since my wife and I made the decision that it was better for the kids that she become a full-time-mother then I haven't been able to enjoy the fullness of technology like I used to. Nevertheless over the years as my kids have grown I've been enjoying the cheaper things and I am amazed by all the stuff that isn't new to most but is new to me. I want to share a couple.
Once upon a time I used to go to the local software store and drool over the new office suite, but as someone that can't justify buying the latest office suite instead of 4 new boxes of diapers I never got it. Over time I discovered Open Office. It's open source and does all the things I got to love about Office 2003. The best part is that it's free and I haven't had a problem with it the whole time I've had it, it's been able to open all my old Word files without a problem and save my documents in a way that Word can read them.
Woot is the place were I get my latest tech. So far I've bought a 2 gig sansa mp3/photo/recorder for $20, a 4 gig sansa mp3/photo/video/recorder for $40, 2 SDmini 2 gig cards for $5 a piece. I always want to spend more there but again my budget doesn't stretch that far. From Woot you can access Shirt.Woot, Wine.Woot (I don't drink, but if I did I would go here) and Sellout.Woot.
Free Internet radio that only plays the stuff I like. You can't really beat that. In fact that's what I'm listening to now. It works with some cell phones so everyone should give this a glance.
This wonderful little program allows me to blog on the go (as you can see on the right) and if my friends are hooked up they can get the same updates. I like this little program because it wants you to be brief (140 characters), it makes an interesting challenge but can be a lot of fun, kind of like a commercial. Not to long ago this little program saved a guy's life, or at the very least, got him out of jail.
Diner Dash
This game has been out for a while but my wife (who doesn't like video games as a rule) loves this game and as it turns out we are about the same skill level so it makes for interesting competitions between us. Don't pay the $20 that the manufacturers are asking, go to Best Buy and get it for $10. Supposedly you can play it online for free but I don't trust those kind of things.
Who lives in today's world without a cell phone? We did for the longest time, until we discovered Tracphone. For $10 bucks we got the cheapest phone on the market, and when I say 'cheap phone' I mean CHEAP. This phone's ring tone reminds me of the time when the only sound to come from a computer was from the PC speaker. It's that cheap. Nevertheless if you work your minutes right you can end up paying less then $5 a month for phone service. I spent $30 on minutes back in May and still have plenty left to use. Texting costs .3 minutes so it's kind of economical although I call people and spend the one minute and I can communicate all I need to.
So my parents gave me a computer that was on it's last legs, so I had to format the hard drive in order to have some hope of getting to work for any length of time. Once I did that I had to put a new operating system on it. I couldn't find an old copy of Windows 98 and sure wasn't willing to pay very much to get this dinosaur up and running so I found Ubuntu. It's a operating system brought to you from Africa and it comes built with all the open source software you could want, from Firefox to OpenOffice. I had no problem getting it connected to the Internet, I didn't even try to get it to work with my home network. So as far as being able to get this computer to access the Internet and do basic tasks it worked great. The only thing you have to be aware of it that it's Linux based to if you want a printer to work with the thing you are going to have to find the right drivers.
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