My family (two adults, 10 year old, and a 7 year old) recently visited Disneyland. There are plenty of descriptions about Disneyland trips on the web. So I’m not going to describe every single thing we did. This post will cover some of the highlights, tips, and things I learned during our trip so that you can hopefully improve your own trip.

It is very common to want to add a directory of files to your source control system. With Perforce the command line client doesn’t support this natively. I would think that a command like this would work: “p4 add …”. But unfortunately Perforce displays this non-useful message when you try that:

Remote Desktop is one of the best features of Windows. Unfortunately all the different Windows version of Remote Desktop seem to have a copy and paste bug. Pasting from the local machine to the remote machine in Remote Desktop will just randomly stop working.

The Google Chrome Omnibox is really useful for quick Google searches. It can also be easily customized to do quick searches for your most commonly used websites. I buy a lot of things from Amazon so I setup a quick Amazon search. Here is how to do it:

I couldn’t find any modern webpages that allowed the user to play chess against the computer. So as a learning experiment I decided to create a single page chess playing webpage using HTML5 and Javascript. The page runs entirely in the client browser, there is no server side code. I targeted the latest browsers Chrome, Firefox, and IE 9 and higher and found that they all have pretty good standards compliance now. I don’t have to make nearly as many browser hacks as were needed just a few years ago and I could use most modern HTML5 features. Here are some of the technologies I used to make the site:

Recently my old HP Inkjet printer stopped working so I needed to purchase a new printer. I don’t print all that often and I rarely print photos so I have fairly basic requirements so I don’t want to spend too much. With smartphones and tablets being so popular I wanted one that would support both iOS and Android. Apple supports printing with AirPrint and Google supports printing via Cloud Print. It is actually kind of difficult to find a printer that supports both AirPrint and Cloud Print. Each printing technology lists supported printers, but the lists are not complete and not cross referenced with each other. So you can find a printer that supports AirPrint, but not Cloud Print.

The Acer Aspire One AO722 netbook computer is a great laptop computer. It is affordable (around $300) and has all these features: compact size, nice high resolution screen, HDMI port, good battery life, quiet, decent CPU and video. The CPU isn’t very fast compared to a modern desktop computer, but for 95% of the people out there it is plenty fast enough for web browsing, office applications, etc.

My son is really into the TV show Mythbusters on the Discovery channel. So for his 6th birthday party he wanted to have a Mythbusters party. The birthday party ended up being a pretty standard 90 minute party with some Mythbusters like experiments and a special Mythbusters cake.

Occasionally I’ll download an MKV file that I want to watch on my Xbox 360. Unfortunately the Xbox 360 doesn’t support the MKV format natively. I tried a few conversion programs but they either took hours to run or just didn’t work. I finally found a simple and quick way to play these files which I describe below. This has been tested on the Xbox 360, but you should be able to play these files on the PS3 too.

I recently installed the Windows Phone 7 Development Tools on my Acer AspireOne netbook. Visual Studio works pretty well on this machine. But unfortunately when running my app for the first time the emulator started up and then just sat there with a message that said, “Windows Phone Emulator Is Doing A Complete OS Boot”.

Summary: Here is the link to the cheap Lapdawg Clone:

Amazon is a great online store and I order from them all the time. I really like the Free Super Saver Shipping. The problem is that sometimes I’m not buying $25 worth of items to get the free shipping. I searched through Amazon and found some cheap items to add as filler. These items will add filler to your purchase to “fill” it up to the minimum $25 to get free shipping.

I wanted to get started flying RC airplanes. I went down to the local RC club and flew a 3 channel plane. Even for a newbie like me it seemed a little too easy, I could fly and land it with no problem. So for my first plane I looked around for a plane with ailerons for a little more challenge. I found out about the AXN Floater jet which is available for purchase online at HobbyKing.com. As far as I’m aware the AXN is not available from any US or European retailers. HobbyKing orders take a couple of weeks to ship because they are located in Hong Kong, but they are a respected and reliable retailer in the RC community.

This post is now outdated. See this post for the recommended way of adding Amazon to Chrome.

I wanted to buy a RC car for my son. After looking around it seemed like the Rockslide RS10 from Redcat Racing was a good choice. There are a lot of expensive rock crawlers out there, but I didn’t want to spend too much. There is no reason to spend a bunch of money on high performance competition parts when the crawler is just going to be used in the backyard.

The Asus RT-N16 router is one of the most powerful routers currently available. The RT-N16 has 802.11n, gigabit network ports, a fast processor, lots of memory and flash, and two USB ports for running a printer and external hard drive at the same time.

My electric water heater was very old so I decided to replace it with a new one. I had heard about tankless water heaters before and they sounded pretty good: unlimited hot water, no tank to break, energy efficient, space saving. With the recent tax credits I figured I’d try one out.

My 35 year old Ruud furnace had been working ok, but it was getting pretty old and was really inefficient compared to newer models. So I decided to look into getting a new high efficiency furnace with the $1500 tax credit that is available. Here is my review:

I’ve had an old rice cooker with an aluminum pot for a few years and it stopped working the other day. I’d been meaning to look for a new one with a stainless steel pot. With all the talk about plastics and aluminum leaching into food I’m trying to convert to an all stainless steel or glass cooking tools.

One of the most annoying Visual Studio errors are the ones that don’t give you any details of what is wrong. This is one of those errors:

One of the more annoying things about email is the amount of junk email that one receives. If you have a website consider adding spam bait to it so that spammers who are harvesting email addresses get junk email addresses instead of valid ones.

I recently started riding Sound Transit’s 545 bus from Redmond to Seattle. Out of four rides so far I’ve gotten three buses that had wi-fi and one that didn’t have it.

With all the news recently about the chemical BPA in plastic water bottles, I started looking for an alternative. I just want a water bottle that doesn’t leach chemicals that also has a lid so that if it falls over it doesn’t spill water everywhere. Some of the stainless steel bottles look nice but they are expensive and even metal could eventually leach chemicals.

I use hibernate when I am done using my Windows Vista x64 machine for the day. Usually I would use sleep but for some reason my DFI motherboard doesn’t work with Vista’s sleep feature. Hibernate usually works fine, but maybe once or twice a month the computer will crash with a bluescreen when entering hibernation. Bluescreen errors are really annoying because Windows doesn’t give the user any useful information as to what is causing the error so it is really hard to fix it.

Update: I have confirmed that Rizal’s suggestion in the comments fixes the problem. Add a “–no-sandbox” argument to the Chrome shortcut and Chrome should start working. To do this right click on the Chrome desktop icon. In the Target box add “–no-sandbox” without the quotes to the very end of the box.

The gutters on my house are under a lot of trees. So they get clogged up all the time which causes the rain to overflow the gutters. I’m tired of going up on the roof to remove the leaves and pine needles from the gutter so I’m currently looking for one of the gutter cover products that are supposed to protect the gutters from leaves.

Recently I tried setting up Exact Audio Copy (EAC) in Vista Ultimate x64. With disk space being so cheap nowadays I also wanted to use WMA Lossless encoding. With lossless encoding no audio fidelity is lost and I can always convert back to the original WAV files if I want to in the future.

Spelling errors in Microsoft Windows are rare, but I recently found one in an error dialog. In Vista’s “Windows Fax and Scan” program my scanner doesn’t work and for some reason and I get an error message that says: