This storyboard for Apple’s new I’m a PC I’m a Mac and I’m an iPad ad campaign was leaked to us by an Apple employee. Once again, the good folks here at Navarino Unincorporated got the scoop no one else got before anyone else got it! Feast your eyes on this bad boy! FEAST!

One of the things people who have sites have to deal with is people that reprint their content, whether it be text or images without permission. It’s a common problem on the Net and it’s something you may or may not have to deal with. See, what you say or do on the Net is yours, you and you alone have all the copyrights to what you do. As long as you don’t violate someone else’s rights while you do it, of course.

People have been reproducing the works of others without permission way before the Web existed; the web just made it easier for people to do so.

So how does one handle the situation when you find out that someone’s reposting your stuff (whether it be graphics or posts)? There are many, many ways to handle the matter.

In fact I had to just yesterday when I found my work being used without my permission on another site. On Feb. 2nd of this year, I posted an article about how I felt on the Academy snubbing both the Star Trek and Avatar actors as soon as I heard about it. The post was titled Academy Snubs Star Trek and Avatar Actors! I used a clever graphic (well I think it was) to accompany my blatherings and wouldn’t you know it, someone else thought it was clever too. And used it, without my permission.

Some people go absolutely bonkers when this occurs and usually rant, rave, foam at the mouth and go berserk on the individual committing the transgression. Which to me, is equally rude and quite unnecessary. You don’t know if someone didn’t know the stuff was yours or had a right to use it so why automatically assume the person is a lowlife, thieving, little weasel? That’s not fair or right.

When I found out that my DENIED graphic was used and by whom, I went to the person’s site and left him a nice comment about his piece which he recently wrote about the Star Trek actors being snubbed by the Oscars. See, great minds do think alike. Seriously. I totally agree with the dude and personally thought he has a really nice looking site.

I told him this in the comment and also let him know that he was using my DENIED graphic. I politely let him know it was totally cool for him to continue to use the image as long as he was kind enough to provide a Courtesy of Navarino Unincorporated link under the image and totally left it up to him on what to do.

He may or may not have known that the image was not his to use; I didn’t know one way or the other but was not pissed in the slightest to see someone else liked what I had done and wanted to use it too. A few hours later my image was taken down and another one put in it’s place.

Fine by me, no hard feelings and everything is right as rain. As a matter of fact I liked his site so much I’m definitely going back and reading his thoughts on movies and television from time to time. If it wasn’t for my DENIED graphic being used I wouldn’t have found his site! And I’m being serious here, really in the future you just might see me pointing you guys his way. So far I truly like what I have read there.

I love a happy ending. Don’t you?

PS. I just figured out that after yesterday’s post I hit the milestone of only having 300 Geek Worthy posts to go in my year-long challenge! 299 now…

Well, it looks like I just couldn’t let you guys go too long before letting you all know how to save a ton of dough on CD/DVD storage solutions like cases or binders. I’ve tried little portable wallets that stored 100 discs but those sucked and cost like $9-15. I’ve tried 128 binders, which were good but they were about $15 each. Binders that stored 256 or so were about $15-20 or more.

While they store DVDs well, I really wanted to bring the cost down. Over the many years of computing you acquire a TON of discs, especially after burners and media became so cheap. Also you have to take into account all the music CDs and movies on DVD people buy over the years; so it’s safe to say the average joe will have a truckload of DVDs and CDs to organize and take care of and binders are the best way of doing so.

You can easily spend over $100 on just a few binders that won’t store many discs, which sucks. So how do you store your entire collection without it costing you an arm or a leg? Easy. Look for the biggest CD/DVD binder you can find for the cheapest price of course! Try to stick to a particular vendor that makes their binders of decent quality and a good price.

For me, I’ve found Supermediastore’s mammoth 520 CD/DVD binders to be fantastic! I often pick them up for usually $16 shipped when they have them on sale and have never run into a problem with the quality of their binders. For the price and the quantity, you really can’t do better. The binder pages are made well, the fabric backings won’t scratch your discs and the handle is thick and pretty strong so it shouldn’t break on you. There is even a tough clip-on shoulder harness for lugging them to a friend’s house.

The cost per DVD/CD is low with these suckers and their average price if you can’t wait for a sale are around $20-23 each. Just don’t pull the trigger if there’s no free shipping. We don’t want to get too excited saving money to toss some of that savings away, ok?

If you find a better deal, please share. So how do you store your CD/DVDs?

I really can’t stand it when people pay too much money for stuff, especially geeky stuff. In this economy, let alone the Internet Era there’s just no good reason for people to pay any more than they should.

Case in point, as people already know I never ever NEVER pay more than $20 for a 100 pack of best-quality DVD media (Verbatim 16x DVD-Rs). Well, what happens if one of your DVD burner drives goes on the fritz? Or your old one is too slow and needs to be replaced because slow burn times are driving you crazy? So now that you’re in the market for a new one, how much do you think you should pay for a good DVD burner?

Would you believe almost the same amount I pay for that 100 pack of DVDs?

Seriously, if you look on the Net, especially at popular sites like Newegg or ZipZoomFly they usually have plenty of good, state-of-the-art, fast name-brand DVD drives for about $22-25 shipped on sale. There are drives that are more, of course but really all you have to do is check the review or user comments on the drive in question and you’ll easily find out if it’s a good drive or not. And most of the time it’s a pretty decent drive so it’s all good and time to place that order!

So now that we stopped you for paying too much for those DVDs and the drive that burns them, we’ll probably start letting you know about how not to pay too much for CD/DVD storage cases before too long…

Whether you’re a professional graphic artist or someone that just dabbles with creating or modifying graphics on your computer the best tool to help you out, besides traveling back in time and apprenticing yourself to Leonardo da Vinci, is a graphics tablet.

Sure you can get along just fine without one but since the price of tablets have come down over the years what’s stopping you from giving one a try? Used to be even the small 4″x5″ tablets would set you back hundreds of dollars, but usually you can find even top-branded Wacom 4x5’s for $40-50 on sale these days! I say if it’s a gadget that’s under a hundred smackers it deserves a try to see if you’ll like it. Besides, if you don’t like it you can always take it back and get a refund, so it’s all good.

A few years back my good friend [let’s call her L to help protect her identity] gave me a Wacom Graphire3 tablet. She knew I used to draw a lot (I dabbled) so she bought me the tablet and gave it to me for Christmas. She figured since I knew how to draw I should be able to adapt to using a tablet and I did pretty freaking easily if I must say so myself. I love it! It was a 4x5 tablet, which is a good enough size for someone like me to use with easy. Larger tablets cost far more money and to be blunt, only die-hard professionals need such large and expensive units.

Using a tablet makes a lot of things easier, especially anything that requires free and fluid motions or precision. A tablet can definitely take the place of a mouse with practice not just for graphic applications like Photoshop but for using the computer too. Tablets can usually be used just like a mouse even outside the graphics application and it’s much easier on the hands. It can definitely help people who suffer from carpal tunnel, arthritis and other ailments that affect the wrist or hands.

I currently use a combination of my mouse and tablet to do my graphics work, depending on what I’m doing. If I need finer control then I definitely use my tablet. I really can’t tell you how using my Wacom helps me with creating or editing graphics; you’ll just have to try one out for yourself and see.

One word of warning though, pay attention to certain tablet specs like resolution and levels of sensitivity; the greater the better. And it’s best not to be lulled by chintzy no-named super-low priced tablets out there. Stick to name brands; it’ll save you a world of hurt. If you see a much larger no-name tablet going for the price of a Wacom 4x5, well you know the saying if it sounds too good to be true… don’t bother. In the words of Admiral Akbar from Star Wars: IT’S A TRAP!

I hug my tablet daily (as well strangers passing by on the street) and I’m sure if you gave one a try you would love it. So get out there people, there’s yet another shiny, geek gadget to buy!!!

Millions of people shop online every day and millions of people are wasting vast amounts of time, collectively as they wait for a store’s weekly ads to load up. As internet speeds have increased over the years, good optimized web design has sadly decreased. Slow-loading web pages are the norm filled to the brim with lots of graphics, javascript, flash or multimedia elements which clog the tubes that make up the Internet.

Former United States Senator, Ted Stevens from Alaska tried to warn us all about cramming too much into those tubes that make up the Net on that fateful day, June 28 2006 with these prophetic words:

“They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the Internet. And again, the Internet is not something that you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck. It’s a series of tubes. And if you don’t understand, those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and it’s going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.”

Like Al Gore’s Global Warming warning *cough* nosuchthing*cough*, Ted Steven’s cries of alarm rang in deaf ears. The Internet tubes continue to be overstuffed and clogged worse and worse these days. Which causes delays and makes us wait and wait and wait for valuable information like sports scores, random clips of the Daily Show, Twitter entries ad infinitum and oh yeah, perusing through weekly ads in freaking Flash.

Flash requires more bandwidth than simple HTML does and we all pay the price waiting for it all to load up so we can graphically flip through pages. Which is ridiculous. Why wait for graphical representations of page flipping when all we want is to see the ad pages themselves?

If you go to just about any retailer like Best Buy, Staples, Office Depot or Office Max after you click on their Weekly Ads there’s usually a Dialup or HTML mode option. Clicking on this time-saving option will present to you the ad pages you want to see in a fraction of the time the flash/broadband animated bloat option does. This saves you time. Not only that but it saves everyone time. Which helps keep those Internet tubes unclogged and working great for everyone. And that’s a good thing.

You want those ad pages to load faster right? You want to keep the Internet tubes unclogged right? Trust me, you don’t want to have to take a plunger to the Internet, do you? It’s much much filthier than a backed up toilet on Burrito Tuesday… *shudder* ack! Trust me.

Keep those Internet tubes clog-free and load those store ads much faster by choosing the Dialup/HTML option when viewing Weekly Ads. Why waste your valuable time waiting when you could be perusing and finding those latest bargains?