Belkin is notorious for making a good easy idea a very expensive little toy.  Take the iPhone headphone adapter I bought for my car that was $12, $12 for a plug…nice and sadly enough I paid for it.

Amazingly enough this great idea of convergence is only $25 which is very well priced for a Belkin product.  I like the idea of being able to charge gadgets via USB via a power outlet rather than a computer.  The only bad thing I have read about this product is it is a little heftier then the pictures make it look so its not ideal for traveling but I just want something I can charge my iTouch, iPod, and PS3 controllers on.

Belkin Mini Surge Protector with USB Charger

I found another WP Admin Theme that I am a big fan of because for some reason Fluency kept causing me a couple of issues as I found a few pages were dead and in all honesty I wasn’t too keen on the color usage.  Baltic Amber Admin Themes and Schemes is the name of the plugin.  I like this plugin because it works directly with WP’s new color scheme options for each user.  After installing the plugin you just go to users then click on your user and then change the theme color.  It also allows you to easily customize to use any color scheme you want so you are not limited in any way.  I haven’t played around with the CSS sheets too much yet but chances are I will change the fonts around and probably the sizes as I usually like to be different

Since I do all my blogging from Windows Live Writer I am not too worried about the Admin interface as I use it more to just manage and maintain my site. But this plugin makes for some nice effects and colors, currently I am using the Asphalt Color scheme.

As you can see I have changed my theme for my blog.  Well unless of course you only read my blog via RSS…yes all 14 of you!  I am really happy with the look of this new theme with some minor changes.  I had to do a couple of CSS tweaks to fix some issues I noticed as well as changing the header logo to my next car, the reason I am in school, the Audi A5.  I also made some tweaks to the templates to allow the Ajax plugin to work correctly and all seems well.  Overall I am very happy with this template and looking around TopWPThemes website they have a ton of very nice easily modifiable layouts, so I am adding them to the list of templates.  I was also very happy to see that my blogroll from Google looks pretty good with the new layout.

I am trying to keep up with my blogging but lately it has been a little rough running into the end of the semester along with spring it is tough to find time to contribute.  I have a lot in my backlog so you can expect an occasional flooding of new information.

Looks like Sony finally managed to figure out their legal issues with the company they ‘borrowed’ the force feedback technology from and were able to bring it to the PS3.

I went and picked one of these up as soon as I found a store that had them.  Since no one shops at Circuit City they had a whole display of them and for $5 less than retail.  Currently I am playing Devil May Cry 4 which is one of the games that is already rumble ready.  It is nice to have some more weight back into the controller as the regular Six Axis just felt way too light.  The rumble is nice and strong and a happy thing to welcome back.  I am just curious to see what this does to my battery life on the worst rated controllers in terms of battery life.

Oh well whatever I still love my PS3! Where is my GT/5 Prologue??  Working on Condemned 2 and Devil May Cry 4, I may have hit a wall with Devil May Cry but I need more time to play, damn school, work and warm weather keeps getting in my way!

So I finally purchased a cover for my iTouch that I won back in January.  That is one good thing about not having to pay for the original toy is I can buy some accessories for it and not feel too bad.  The case is exactly as described and works very well.  My only beef with the case is that they don’t mention that regular headphones will no longer plug in with this case because it recesses the headphone jack.  It is easily solved by buying an adapter but something I wasn’t expecting to deal with.  Other than that this is a great case and matches a similar one I bought for a 30GB 5G iPod.  The best part about the casing is it doesn’t add too much bulk to the iTouch it still fits in my pocket easily.

Another unexpected bonus was the nice letter that came in the well packaged product.  It was just a little thank you for purchasing our products and how they are a start up company.  Amazing how far a little communication back to the end user can go!

IvySkin.com

‘TrailCentral is the hub for high quality, free, trail information for Colorado and beyond.’

From the title of the site its pretty easy to see what this post is about.  This site has some great trail information as well as some great reviews and rants about local trails in Colorado.  It is nice to see a visual layout of where these trails are and it is also nice to see some pictures along the trail as I often wonder what the trails really look like compared to the difficulty rating.  I have just gotten into biking again in the past year so a year after trying to remember how to ride and getting comfortable on a bike I think I am ready to go off trail a little bit.

TrailCentral.com

I have finally found a new theme that I can live with.  This one is very clean and nice to use.  I made some very very small tweaks to userChrome.css to fix a few things but other than that this is a great new look for Firefox.

Download: iAqua

I ran across a need for a stand alone IE6 because I have installed IE7 at work but I need to test against IE6 because that is our corporate standard.  The only issues I have found with the stand alone are it doesn’t seem to register cookies correctly and the bookmarks don’t work but as long as you can get to your page for testing this should get the job done.  I just with Microsoft would pick a standard CSS, but because they don’t web pages will render differently on all versions of IE.  It will be nice to see IE8 as it looks like that passes the ACID test so it will render similar to FireFox.

Below is the link to the CU Denver Library online access for students.  They have a ton of resources online including LexisNexis a must for writing papers.  All you need to access the data is a valid student ID number.

Auraria Library Article Database and Indexes

Using a new plugin from the NextGen development group I now have a few more ways to display a slide show. You can check out their plugin for Wordpress here it is an easy install and adds some nice effects.