New T-Shirts in the Bauer-Power Store

Hey readers out there! I know a lot of you snuck on board the RSS feed train well after my last post about my Bauer-Power Gear. For those of you new to Bauer-Power, I have a store where I offer some cool Bauer-Power schwag to help fund the cause! All proceeds help support Bauer-Power research, and projects!

Anyhoo, the purpose of this post is not just to acquaint you newer readers to Bauer-Power Gear, it is also to let some of you older readers that I have just added some new T-Shirts to the store. Some of the designs I borrowed from other popular T-Shirts, and then again a few I came up with myself :-)

All are 100% kick ass!

Check them out:

Have Your Tried Googling It?
Don't come to me unless you have searched on Google!

Apt-Get Beer

Ah yes, nothing like a smooth brew when coding and hacking.

I Hacked The Gibson
Did you pull off a righteous 1337 hack? Show it with this shirt!

I'm Linux
You have all seen the Mac vs PC ads. What about our good buddy Linux?

Call it version 1.0

You know that old saying, "If at first you don't succeed, try try again?" Nobody told that to the programmers...

Last but not least, my personal favorite...

Leeroy Jenkins is my homie
Leeeeeeerrrooooyyyyyy Jenkins! It's a battle cry heard around the internet!

There are a lot of t-shirt stores on the net, but there is only one that helps support Bauer-Power. Take a look. These shirts are way more affordable than others out there with similar designs. Hook a brother up, so we can continue to bring you quality content!

Visit http://gear.Bauer-Power.net

P.S. If you have an idea for a t-shirt, sticker, etc., let us know in the comments!

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Messing With Road Signs

I learned of a funny mischievous prank today while scrolling through my RSS feeds. This one no doubt can get you into a heap of trouble (If you get caught of course). So I should probably cover my ass now in saying that this is for informational purposes only, and that Bauer-Power is not liable for what its readers decide to run out and do.

Anyway, you have probably seen portable construction signs on the side of the road. Ones that say stuff like, "Trucks entering highway" or "Ice on Road." Did you know that these things are terribly unsecured? Yes, unsecured in three main ways:

1. Physically not well secure
2. Default passwords are rarely changed
3. If the password was reset, its easy to restore factory defaults

Seriously, wouldn't it kind of be fun to do something like this?



Okay, maybe it won't be one of those signs, but you get the idea. No, this post applies to the ADDCO portable sign below:




This particular sign is protected by a small lock, but are often left unprotected. Even if it were locked, you can probably make small work of it if you have a good lock pick set.

Anyway, once inside you need to find the control pad:



Once you have the pad, scroll down the menu selection until you get "Instant Text." Select it, and type in your new modified message and hit enter to submit. To publish it to the sign select "Run w/out save."

If it asks for a password try "DOTS" without the quotes. That is the default password. If the password has been changed, you can reset it back to defaults by holding down "Control" and "Shift" and typing in "DIPY". After the reset, the password will be back to default.

Know of any other road sign models that can be messed with? Let us know in the comments!

[Via I-Hacked]

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Finding DoFollow Sites on The Easy: Firefox Extension

One of my New Years resolutions this year was to comment on more blogs, and beef up my back links a bit. Sure, Bauer-Power does okay in the Google PR department, but certainly not as good as some other blogs.

Everyone knows that the way to boost your Google PR is to score relevant back links, and lots of them! Some people don't focus on this, and wonder why their blogs don't get any traffic. Lots of people say, "Screw Google, I'm going to spend all day trying to get to the front page of Digg." They don't realize that the quality traffic they need has to be natural traffic from people that want to read your stuff. Natural traffic comes from search engines, where the people landing on your site are actually looking for something you have!

Now don't get me wrong, getting to the front page of Digg will bring you server crushing traffic, but the chances of you getting your stories up there are slim to none, unless your handle is MrBabyMan. Besides, getting to the front page of Digg, or Reddit takes a crap load of work. You have to build friends, you have to shout stories, blah, blah, blah.

Search engine traffic, on the other hand comes without you working hardly at all. I guess I shouldn't say that, I mean you do have to write some stuff worth reading, and you have to increase your back links.

According to Google Analytics, search engine traffic to Bauer-Power comprises almost 62% of my traffic. That is more than half of my traffic!

Well I aim to change that. I want it to comprise way more than that, and still have an increase in visitors at the same time. Which brings me back to my original point... Increasing back links.

So as I mentioned I am planning on commenting on more blogs. I figure ten a day is easy enough. Now, I am not going to comment on just any old blogs. They must meet two criteria items.

1. They have to be relevant to the content of Bauer-Power
2. They have to be DoFollow sites
   

For those of you not in the know, DoFollow sites allow search engine spiders to crawl their sites and categorize the outgoing links. This helps those sites boost their page rank on search engines. If a site is a NoFollow site, they add a special tag to their links telling search engines not to categorize outbound links. Hence the reason why only commenting on DoFollow sites can help your rankings.

Anyhoo, I found a cool Firefox (Or Flock! Hells yeah!) plugin that allows you to tell who's who in the zoo when it comes to DoFollow and NoFollow. It's called NoDoFollow from ZacharyFox.com.

When activated it highlights all of the links on the page in one of two colors. Blue for DoFollow, and red for NoFollow. If it's red skip ahead, if its blue go through. (Like how I rhymed that?)

Want to know if you should comment or not on Bauer-Power? Check it!


The links are blue baby so comment away!

What other methods of increasing back links do you know of? I would love to hear about them in...you guessed it, the comments!

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Microsoft is Laying People Off. WTF?!

I was in a meeting yesterday at work, and I looked down to check my Twitter timeline on my Blackberry, when I noticed a tweet from my friend (@biggeek) saying that he had just been tweeted himself from a friend who works at Microsoft. That friend on the inside said they had been escorting people out of the building all day.

I sent him a direct message back asking him how many total are getting laid off, and he said 5,500 employees are slated to be laid off! WTF?!?! Turns out, only 1400 were laid off yesterday, but still.

A quick check online said that this is the first layoff in Microsoft's history! Crazy stuff! This is from the New York Times:

"Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., plans to lay off 5,000 of its 94,000 employees over the next 18 months, including 1,400 people on Thursday [yesterday]. The company disclosed the cuts as it released second-quarter results, which reflected an 11 percent drop in net income, to $4.17 billion, from $4.71 billion in the period a year ago."

This comes not very long after a recent notice I read about Google laying off people, of course not as many, only 100 compared to 5000 or so. This is from Silicon Alley Insider:

"Google has announced layoffs. Not contractors. Not hourly workers. Googlers.

Not many, thankfully--only 100--and some may be able to find jobs elsewhere in the company. But they're all in HR, which tells you something about how quickly Google has scaled back its own growth expectations."

This economy is seriously affecting all markets. I work in the Real Estate Market, and we have been hurting for over a year now, and have gone through three sets of layoffs our selves. It's certainly a scary time for everyone.

My recommendation: Make sure your resumes are up to date!

Have any of you been affected by layoffs? Know of someone that has? Share your stories in the comments.

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What do you know about that Torrent you are downloading?

How many times have you went to a torrent site, found the item you want to download only to get screwed in the end? Maybe is is a fake tracker put out to discourage illegal downloads. Maybe it is a virus. The potential for crappy torrents is endless.

I learned of a cool torrent search that only lists torrents that are verified as being good, quality torrents. The site is called VerTor (aka Verified Torrents).

Each torrent found on VerTor is checked for download ability, viruses, DRM and passwords. If any don't make the cut, they are scrapped so you don't have to waste your time getting your porn...errr...your copy of Paul Blart: Mall Cop ... errr... cracked copy of Abobe Photoshop... errr... perfectly legit open source software that happens to be available in torrent format (Phew)



VerTor has already verified 40,000 torrents to be virus, DRM, and just generally crap free. So check them out and get your download on with confidence.

What torrent searches do you use? Let us know in the comments!

[Via IHecker]

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What the Flock browser are you using?

So there I am, doing one of the things I swore I'd never do. I was actually almost disgusted with myself. As I sat there I thought to myself as I often do. Well this isn't so bad, I guess I can see why so many people do it. At that very moment I threw up in my mouth a little bit. As time went on I got more and more into it. I soon began neglecting what time it is. I neglected sleep, food, water, and other necessities to living. The more I did it the more comfortable I felt with it and I began looking for tools to help me do it. It didn't effect my driving or my ability to pass a piss test, but it did give me a great buzz.

I'm talking about Digg. It became a problem for me that cold winter night. Gaming and humor section for me. But I from that experience and my love for tools and improving my efficiency in everything I do on the computer I came across the Flock Browser. Your one stop shop to everything you need online. To the right there is a list of the online resources it supports. With so many built-in features it eliminates the need for any custom toolbars for every site you use. Flock also has a nice built in Media Bar that lets you all your photo's in Photobucket, Picasa or all your videos on YouTube or even all your Friends' favorites in Digg.

It has quick buttons to make your life so much easier. Like say you want to Submit a site to Digg and you don't see any Digg buttons on the site. Well there's a Digg button right at the top of the page. Also in the button bar to the top left of the browser there's button for viewing your Friends which you can sort by social network. One for the media bar. Another for your RSS feeds. A nice button for new Emails, which along with the other three will highlight red when there is new information. The others are Favorites, Accounts and Services(shown to the right), Web Clipboard Sidebar. Blog Editor and Photo Upload.



Now the first button there is the My World button. Basically the default starting page but contains relevant data. It has your RSS Feeds, Friends Activities, Favorite Sites which is determined by hitting the blue star or the sties you visit the most and Favorite Media.

The Flock Browser is based on Mozilla's Firefox browser so most all the extensions that work with Firefox will work with Flock. The only one extension that has crashed the Flock Browser was the IE-Tab extension.

So just add Flock and Digsby together and you'll never get anything done at work. Social networking for life. Hmm.... Maybe I should get that tattooed across my chest. On second thought maybe not.

By Sundance of MakeMeASammich.com

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Bauer-Power Episode 5

Hey Bauer-Power readers! As promised from my video post last week, here is Episode 5 of Bauer-Power!

We are a little early with this one. That is mainly because my wife was out of town so it gave Sundance and I an opportunity to get together to do some shooting. And shooting we did! Not only did we get a standard episode in, we were also able to shoot an entirely new opening sequence! One that is meant to be action packed, and completely ridiculous :-)

The opening sequence is rather long. In future episodes, I will be shortening it, so drink it in before we cut out all of the gratuitous action!

In this episode Sundance and I list our top ten list of video editors, being as how we are starting to get into the whole IPTV game.

So grab some popcorn, some beer and get ready to get your geek on!



- Link to video for feed readers -

If you missed, our list of editors because you were so deeply engrossed in the awesomeness, they were:

• Windows Movie Maker
• Apple iMove
• Jump Cut
• ABC Video Roll
• Blender
• ZS4
• Avid Free DV
• Video Spin
• Jahshaka
• Wax

Check out a couple of bloopers and outtakes from the filming here: (Episode 5 Bloopers)

If you are curious where the running sequence was filmed, it was filmed at the Neuroscience Institute in La Jolla, CA: (www.nsi.edu)

How did you like this episode? What would you like to see differently? What video editors do you use? Let us know in the comments, or shoot me an IM via Digsby on the right side of the page.

For other episodes of Bauer-Power, visit our Veoh Channel at http://video.Bauer-Power.net were all episodes are available as a Podcast!

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