Michael Castellon

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#aloha Merry Christmas, from way out here https://www.instagram.com/p/DO4GdyOEvAE/ My #Maine squeeze 🦞🇺🇸 Happy birthday to the most amazing woman in my life. Your love, laughter, and kindness make every day brighter. Here’s to celebrating you and all the joy you bring to everyone around you. https://www.instagram.com/p/DE0AEGvPk0b/ After hundreds of hours in the Texas sky, I can say this: the quiet charm of small-town airports never fades. ✈️ #flying #aopa #eaa #aviation https://www.instagram.com/p/DC-lpVgtZg9/ https://www.instagram.com/p/DBXe_dsvXQ6/

Category: personal

  • Why AOL is still a miserable experience

    A few weeks ago I decided to install the newest version of AOL Instant Messenger on my laptop at the request of Kevin Rose who wanted to chat about the discovery of a technical glitch on Digg.

    Although I configured the setup utility to install only AIM and none of the other malware AOL tries to install by default, it still installed their miserable browser, which automatically set itself as the default browser for several apps including the Flickr image upload utility.

    The browser would start itself at random times – especially when I was doing anything involving AIM or Flickr.

    Naturally, the AOL browser doesn’t show up in the Windows Add/Remove Programs utility. Instead, only the AIM program itself does. After finally getting angry enough to uninstall AIM in the hope of getting rid of AOL’s trash browser, I decided to search my hard drive for AOL programs, and saw that all these files were still embedded in my computer. I stress the fact that files were found on my computer after I uninstalled every AOL program using it’s uninstaller.

    (click to enlarge)

    Before anything else, I visited AOL Tech Support’s Website for assistance. Naturally, this is the page that comes up when you click on a button that offers help on uninstalling AOL:

    If you want to do yourself and your computer a favor, stay far away from anything with the AOL brand.



  • First full length feature movie now available at iTunes

    In what may be a hint that Apple (finally) releasing a full-blown video iPod in the very near future, the iTunes music store has made available it’s first full-length feature movie.

    High School Musical (more) is a 1 hour and 39-minute Disney Channel original production that was quietly posted to iTunes in the past day or so. The movie is almost 500MB big and costs only $1.99 which is about the same as all other videos on the iTunes Music Store. iTunes link

    It remains unclear if this will is a price point for movies in similarly situated genres – or a promotional price to encourage movie downloads for the upcoming iPod.



  • I’m featured on Geek News Central

    You can imagine the look on my face when I heard one of my favorite podcasters, Todd Cochrane of Geek News Central, give my post on backing up Gmail a shout-out on his show.


  • ‘Happy face’ photographed on Mars

    From Malin Space Science Systems:

    There are a number of Viking Orbiter images of Mars that, from time to time, have been invoked as examples of landforms that look like familiar objects. On of the better examples is the crater Galle (51.1° S, 31.3° W; 215 km across), located on the eastern margin of the large basin Argyre. The “face” was first noticed in synoptic observations taken early in the Viking Orbiter 1 mission. (more)

  • Google to sell ebooks?

    This is news. As if their rececnt ventures into video, chat, email, and webpages weren’t enough, it now seems that Google may be preparing to dive into the ebooks market:

    Google is inviting UK and US publishers to sign up for a forthcoming e-book store on its website.

    Users will get access to purchased book through their browser only, and will not be allowed to save local copies of the book or copy pages.

    “Google Book Search helps users who find and preview your books buy them through online retailers, local bookstores, and soon, will let them pay for immediate access to them right from their browser. It’s a way for publishers to experiment with a new method of earning money from their books in addition to those that already exist,” the search engine said on a webpage where it invites publishers to sign up for the service.

    The service is part of Google’s book search, a feature that lets users perform search queries against texts published in books. The service presents users with fragments from the books and in some cases links online retailers. But so far it doesn’t provide direct access to the works.

    This may be a logical step for Google. It’s no surprise the mega-company will some day be in posession of all the world’s data. But recent lukewarm responses to some of Google’s recent endeavors raises some questions about how this service will be executed.



  • How to maximize your cable/DSL performance using Windows XP

    Here’s a handy guide to tweaking some Windows XP setting that should help you get the most out of your broadband connection:

    • In the “My Network Places” properties (right-click on the desktop icon and choose properties), highlight the connectionthen at the menu bar choose “Advanced” then “Advanced Settings”. Uncheck the two boxes in the lower half for thebindings for File and Printer sharing and Client for MS networks. Click OK.
    • From the Windows XP CD in the support directory from the support cab, extract the file netcap.exe and place it in adirectory on your hard drive or even in the root of your C: drive.
    • Next, open up a command prompt window and change directories to where you put netcap.exe. then type “netcap/?”. It will list some commands that are available for netcap and a netmon driver will be installed. At the bottom you willsee your adapters. You should see two of them if using a 3Com card. One will be for LAN and the other will be forWAN something or other.
    • Next type “netcap/Remove”. This will remove the netmon driver.
    • Open up Control Panel->System->Dev Man and look at your network adapters. You should now see two of them and one will have a yellow ! on it. Right-click on the one without the yellow ! and choose uninstall. YES! You are uninstalling your network adapter, continue with the uninstall. Do not restart yet.
    • Check your connection properties to make sure that no connection exists. If you get a wizard just cancel out of it. Now re-start the machine.
    • After re-start go to your connection properties again and you should have a new connection called “Local area connection 2”. Highlight the connection, then at the menu bar choose “Advanced” then “Advanced Settings”. Uncheck the two boxes in the lower half for the bindings for File and Printer sharing and Client for MS networks. Click OK.
    • Choose connection properties and uncheck the “QOS” box.
    • Re-start the machine. (thanks to tunexp for these steps)

    It’s highly advised that you check with your ISP to make sure it’s Ok to self-bump your broadband speed. Some providers don’t like it when you do that.

  • Did you know … ?

    That MC Hammer has a blog? You can tell by some of his content that he reads other people’s blogs.

    For example, he has the obligatory emo-esque self portrait taken in the mirror with a camera phone.

    The site’s design hints that this might be a fluff promotional site put up by Hammer’s handlers. It has ads and uses a pretty slick design.


  • How to import archived Outlook email into Gmail

    There are a lot of reasons to want to move your Outlook email archives into a Gmail account. I find that many companies grant their employeees very little email space on the servers, creating a need to always have to backup and archive your email locally on your work computer.

    On several occasions I’ve wanted to move my Outlook archives into Gmail so that they’re more accessible and searchable online and so I won’t have to worry about bounced emails if my work server is full.

    If this is your situation and at work and you use a Gmail account at home, you likely dream of being able to store all your email on one Gmail account.

    Following these steps it will be easy for you to move your Outlook archives into your Gmail account.

    1. Import your Outlook mailbox into Microsoft Outlook Express. Open Outlook, then open Outlook Express. In Outlook Express, select Tools > Import, and instruct it to import Mail from Outlook.
    2. Download and install Mozilla Thunderbird, an open source replacement for Outlook from the people who make Firefox. Be sure during the installation process to have Thunderbird import your mail from Outlook Express. Installing Thunderbird allows extraction of your old mail from Microsoft’s proprietary (and difficult) PST file format into a more open mBox file. While Thunderbird offers the option to import mail directly from Microsoft Outlook, the data is less likely to get corrupted if you add the intermediate step of importing to Outlook Express.
    3. Download and install the free, open source program Google GMail Loader (GML) by Mark Lyon.
    4. Open GML loader.
    5. Select the find button under Configure Your Email File, and browse your hard drive to locate the mail file for Thunderbird. To locate your Profile folder, follow these instructions from Mozilla. Note if the Application Data file does not appear where it is supposed to, open the folder it should be located in and instruct Windows to display hidden files. It should now appear.
    6. Select and highlight the individual folder of mail you wish to import into GMail.
    7. Open your GMail account and, if possible, clean out your inbox. All the archived mail you import will come into your inbox. Once it does, you will want to select it all and archive it. It will be much simpler to do this without archiving emails you don’t want archived if you clean out your email box. Alternatively, you can tag all current emails with a tag, so they can be easily located in the archives and returned to the inbox later.
    8. Choose the File Type in GML. There are two options for mBox files. If you try with the more strict option and GML finds 0 messages in your file, change to the Less Strict mBox option on File Type and try again.
    9. Choose the message type. Messages imported from your Sent Items folder can be sent to the Sent Items folder in GMail. However, they will also appear in your inbox, where you will then want to delete them. All other messages will be sent to the inbox, and from there you can select them and archive them.
    10. Enter your GMail address.
    11. Consider entering your SMTP server information. The program defaults with a google SMTP server, which for most people works fine. Consider changing it to your SMTP server only if it doesn’t work otherwise.
    12. Click the Send to GMail button in GML and monitor the send process. If you have thousands of emails, it could take hours to import.
    13. Open your GMail account and review the progress as GML imports your messages.
    14. As your messages are being imported, they can be archived from the inbox (or deleted from the inbox for Sent Mail only). To archive, click the All link in Gmail to select all, then press Y to Archive. (Keyboard shortcuts must be turned on from your Settings menu). This will archive the 50 most recent messages. Repeat until all messages have been archived. If you are processing sent mail, a copy has been placed directly into your Sent Mail folder, so you can select All and then click the Delete button to delete the most recent 50. (special thanks to wikihow for these steps).

    Once you follow these steps, you may consider creating an alias and forwarding your work email directly to your Gmail account.