camping

LaidOffCamp, held during daylight hours this week at the Temple night club in downtown San Francisco, brought together more than 600 unemployed and self-employed people seeking to share ideas about finding work amid the recession.

Volunteers, speakers, and sponsors came together to plug networking, information exchange, social media, and interconnected community as ways to find support and, hopefully, an income. Among the crowd, there were also entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and recruiters.

Another 16 such events are preliminarily scheduled across the nation, with the next one set for Friday in Dallas. But, not surprisingly, San Francisco was the first to play … Read more

Given how poorly the government seems to do with spending money (feeble-minded stimulus bill, anyone?), it's refreshing to hear about TransparencyCamp, an effort to "remix the geeks and the wonks so we can integrate transparency with policy in the government."

It's a laudable goal--one to be welcomed as technology CEOs lobby the U.S. federal government for policies and "stimuli" favorable to themselves.

This "unconference" has already assembled some stellar participants, including Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media, Apache luminary Brian Behlendorf, Bob Biersack of the Federal Election Commission, USA.gov … Read more

Emboldened by my success in getting Windows 7 to run on a Mac Mini using Boot Camp, I decided to press my luck. So Wednesday night, I took my Windows 7 beta disk home and set out to load it onto a virtual machine on my iMac.

Having used Parallels successfully in the past to run Vista, I decided to give VMware's Fusion a try--my first experience with the product. Getting up and running was relatively straightforward, a process aided by the fact that VMware lets you enter information such as your password and product key at the outset--handling … Read more

Finding myself with some free time on Tuesday, I decided to try and see whether and how Windows 7 would install using Boot Camp on a Mac.

I must say, I get a little sick pleasure turning a Mac into a Windows machine, knowing that it has to make both Microsoft and Apple's skin crawl to see their progeny used in such a way.

Plus, Macs do tend to make for pretty zippy (if pricey) Windows machines.

With that--and an older demo Mac Mini I hadn't been using much--I was off to the races. I got a fair … Read more

Monday, I wrote about the process of upgrading the hard disk on my Apple MacBook Pro, and the as-yet unsolved problem of migrating the 20GB Boot Camp partition on the old hard disk--along with its Windows Vista installation--to a 32GB partition on the new drive. (See "Another new hard disk...and an unsolved problem.")

Well, it's all working now. As I've always said about the Mac, most things are either easy or impossible...and this one turned out to be easy.

My thanks to my friend EDN senior technical editor Brian Dipert who provided half of … Read more

I bought my 2.33GHz MacBook Pro about two years ago, shortly after it was introduced. It came with a 160GB hard disk, but that wasn't really enough for all my stuff, particularly when I wanted to add a Boot Camp partition for Microsoft's Windows Vista.

So last July, I upgraded to a 250GB drive, a process I described here ("A new hard disk for my MacBook Pro").

That drive started feeling a little tight within just a few months, chiefly due to videos downloaded from the iTunes Store. Although I rarely buy videos from iTunes, … Read more

I honestly have no idea why this is called the Light My Fire Spork, but the concept is certainly one that makes sense to those who pay attention to kitchen appliances. Combine this with that, and there you go. That is, of course, unless you choose to combine this with that, along with some other thing. It seems to be true that most combination appliances prefer to combine only two things. (Which for some strange reason, most tend to include toasters into the mix). This crazy gizmo merges three, and not a one of them requires a power outlet.

The … Read more

I think I mentioned this before, but it bears repeating: I need my coffee in the morning. Immediately. Yes, I could be one of those plan-ahead people who have the automatic timer set to brew a steaming cup of deliciousness as soon as my head leaves the pillow. But I'm not. Anyway, I prefer to make my coffee on the stovetop in an espresso style maker. Since I doubt that timed automatic gas-fired stovetop burners will ever be in vogue, I will have to keep saving a cup of coffee in preparation for kick starting the next morning.

However, … Read more

Here's a solution to a problem that's been dogging mankind since the very first caveman figured out fire makes food taste good: Grandpa's FireFork. Sure, this could have been invented in the Iron Age, but it wasn't. Or if it was, it was lost to time. Which is perhaps why it is named as it is named. Grandpas all across the land tend to impart a certain wisdom you cannot find anywhere else. If anyone knows how to tame fire, it's the family elders--those who sit in rocking chairs chewing straw and jibber-jabbering about the … Read more