Get An Apple Product For Free!

I know that the title might sound like a scam, but let me tell you, it's not. I found this legit site that gives away Apple products. They have things from an older iPod Shuffle, to Nanos, to an AppleTV, to iPhone and Touches, to MacBooks, and iMacs.

How does it work? You sign up, provide a valid email address. You then select a product. Each product has a number of "referrals" that you need to get in order to get the product. Then you fill out an offer. Some offers require you to pay something, others don't. If you don't want to fill out an offer, just get 3 more referrals, that's what I'm doing. Then you refer people to this site. When they sign up, you get one referral. When you reach the number of referrals you needed for the product you selected, they will send it to you.

When referring people, don't do it on forums or chats, that is against the Terms of Service and you risk losing your referrals and account. You can't have more then one account, even from the same house, and don't "refer" yourself. You will lose your account and any chance to make a new one.

I promise it is legit. Get going today and help me out by being a referral for me. - http://bit.ly/1IIbvl (it's shorten so I can track clicks)

Got My 30D Today!

I got my 30D today. A week and half after I bought it. When the doorbell rang, I don't think I ever went up the stairs that fast.The box that was in was huge and filled with broken Styrofoam peanut pieces. I finally got it out (and ended up with little Styrofoam pieces everywhere) and the 30D is big! It is a lot bigger then the XSi or even the 20D. I played around with it and it wouldn't auto-focus in Program, Shutter, Aperture, or Manual settings. It would focus in Auto and those types of settings, but I never use those settings. Finally I figured it out, you press a button to focus it. I am really liking the camera, and I haven't taken any pictures yet.

I have a telephoto lens, but I want to get a general lens. I also want to get an iPhone. I can't get these two things both right now, so I'm a little stuck. What do I get?

-Matt Loberg

Freelancing Complaint

I have been trying to make some money on the Internet. The first and most obvious thing I thought of was advertising. Google has an easy program called AdSense. I have been using it for 2 months and so far I have made $3! Problem is in order to get paid I have to get $100. My web site doesn't get enough traffic to earn enough money.

Makeuseof had an article on the top 10 things bored teens do online. Number 7 or so was make money. They had a couple ways to make money, most of them being writing. There was also one for programmers. There's a site that let's people post programming needs and then programmers bid on the project. It's a pretty cool idea and I made an account. A lot of the bids are public so everyone can see them. This is good and bad. Good for the buyer because the programmers are trying to bid lower then each other. Bad for the programmers because you have to bid so low to get a project.
There are these projects that want a completely hand-coded and designed site that looks professional. There are programmers that are bidding like $10 or $20. It's ridiculous! I don't want to do a web site for $10, that's a waste of time.

Maybe I'll I have to try my hand at writing.

-Matt Loberg

E Commerce

I am doing PSEO this year. That means that I am a high school student, but I take college classes, at a college. I am doing it online through Minnesota State Community and Technical College. I am taking a lot of web development classes. One of those classes is E Commerce.

As a student in Minnesota, one requirement to graduate is Economics, so I am taking an Economics class also from the college. The Economics class is pretty easy, even though I don't really understand money, business, and stuff like that, but my E Commerce class is tough, so tough that I was/am failing it. I have learned a lot more about business and economics from this class then my Economics class.

I hate my E Commerce class, especially this chapter we are on right now. We are learning about legal issues and I am bored and don't understand it.

As I was registering for next semester, I looked at a sample schedule for a web development major, and it turns out I wasn't supposed to take E Commerce until my final semester. Actually, almost all of my classes were supposed to be taken next year. It turns out that the classes and requirements are changing for this major because there has been changes in technologies used in web development. Because of the changes, it's going to take me longer to graduate.

That's enough of me ranting. I have to get back to my E Commerce...

-Matt Loberg

I Got A Canon 30D!

Today I got a Canon 30D at a really good price off eBay. I'm really excited about it. I think the interface on the D cameras are a lot better then that of the XSi. I talked about it in an earlier post.

Because I was able to save some money on the camera, I will soon be buying a new lens, which is about the cost of the camera.

I have been posting some of my photos on Facebook. I will soon be uploading them to Flickr and my own hosted Gallery, Now that I have a decent camera, I should be taking more pictures.

-Matt Loberg

Apple Magic Mouse

Apple released a new mouse today. It's called the Magic Mouse. It uses multi-touch technology like the iPhone, iPod Touch, and MacBooks use. It looks pretty sweet, I want one. Here is the link for it. - http://www.apple.com/magicmouse/

Hopefully it works better then the Mighty Mouse.

-Matt Loberg

Canon 30D

I decided today that I am getting a 30D instead of a 40D. The 40Ds are going for way more then I want to pay for them, and the 30D are considerably cheaper. I know that I was planning on getting a 40D for a while now, but the price made me look more closely into the differences between the 30D and 40D.

There isn't a lot of difference between the 30D and 40D. The biggest is the megapixel. The 30 has like an 8 megapixel while the 40 has 10. This really doesn't make any difference besides the fact that you can print it larger, but on a screen or printed smaller it's really hard to tell, and for a $250 price difference, the 8 megapixel will look just fine.

Another difference are some features that the 40 has that the 30 doesn't. One being wireless file transfer support. This was one thing I was looking at upgrading to eventually. I did some research and I guess it's kind of a joke. It doesn't work half the time and it's super expensive.

Another feature that the 40 has is dust cleaner/removal. This feature comes in the Rebel X models and is one that made me rethink my choice for a 30. You can pay to have your camera cleaned, but I've heard it's expensive, but if take care of your camera this shouldn't be an issue.

The 40 also has a higher buffer and can take more consecutive pictures. With the 40 you can take up to 75 pictures in jpeg quality simultaneously! Wow! You would never have to wait for the camera again. The FPS (frames per second) only increased to 7 from 5 (which is still pretty good).

I was still debating between the 30 and 40, then I thought about the extra money I would have if I got the 30D. I would be that much closer to a better lens! Which is almost more important than the body. I looked at the lens I was going to buy next and I would be extremely close to being able to buy it. So because of that fact I am going with the 30D.

Let's see if I can snatch one of eBay now.

-Matt Loberg

Another Way To Follow Me and My Adventures

I set up a Tumblr account. I don't know much about Tumblr, I thought it was a micro-blog service, but it seems like it could be used as a full-fledged blog. I'm going to use it as the first. A micro-blog is longer than a status update, but not long enough to be a blog post. I will mainly be posting thoughts there. So now you can stalk follow me another way. Though Twitter is probably the best way because I will usually post links to stuff I posted.

The link is mloberg.tumblr.com

I also changed the theme of my web site, go check it out and tell me what you think.

-Matt Loberg

Customize Your Blogger

I've gotten some questions on how you customize your Blogger theme. At first it may seem impossible to do, but it's not.

The first thing you need to do is find a template of theme. Here is a list of 120 popular ones http://www.instantshift.com/2009/03/09/120-best-free-blogger-templates-around/. You could also do a Google search for 'Blogger templates' or 'Blogger themes'.

Once you find one you like download it. If you like widgets, make sure there is a place for them. There are some themes that don't support widgets. All the ones I've seen are in a .zip file so unzip it. In there there should be a .xml file.

In Blogger go to the layout tab and click on 'Edit HTML'. If you have customized the theme you have at all download it. Click the browse and find the .xml file and click 'Upload'. A warning saying something about your current widgets being deleted, if your fine with that click 'Confirm and Save'. If the theme is correctly coded, everything should work just find. View your blog to see if you like it.

Add widgets to make it how you like it.

There you go! You have your own customized blog.

You probably will run into some issues, but that's usually the template's fault. Hope it works for you.

-Matt Loberg

Cameras

One thing that I like to do is take pictures. Photographs capture memories, show people what you saw, and can be amazing. Until recently I had always used a point-and-shoot camera. Two summers ago I was going to buy a Canon DSLR, but I got a speeding ticket and therefore didn't have enough money so I spent it on something else. In September I bought a Canon XSi. I had used a XSi a little bit during the summer and I kinda liked it. I was the photographer at Camp Lebanon for some family weeks and I used their Nikon D5000.

I got my XSi and started shooting with it and I didn't really like it. I don't really know what it was. It felt a little flimsy/weak and the picture quality wasn't what I thought it was going to be. I would rather shot with the Nikon. One weekend, my friend Guy Magno, who owns his own photography business in Minneapolis, let me use his Canon 5D MarkII and I loved it. He talked to me about my camera and said I should have got a Canon 30D. He had been using a 20D until recently and he said that was a good camera. The 30D was $150 cheaper then the XSi and was a better camera.

I tried selling my XSi on Craigslist and it wasn't going so well. I had a couple people that were interested, but none of them went through with the purchase. I finally got this lady down in the cities that was interested in my camera. On Monday I sold her my camera.

Now I need to figure out what I want. I have been looking at a 40D which is a step up from a 30D. It has some features that I would like and is more compatible with some cool accessories. I found a guy in Shakopee that is selling a 40D or a 50D. They are both very reasonable prices, but I don't know which one I want to get. The 50D is newer and has less use, but some reviews on Amazon say that the picture quality isn't as good as the 40D. Did that guy get a bad camera or is that with all 50D's? The 40D would be enough camera for me, but it has a fair amount of use, about a fifth of the average shutter life is gone and I plan on using it a lot. What should I do? I think I am leaning towards the 40D because it's less money and still a really good camera.

What are your thoughts?

-Matt Loberg

Welcome

Welcome to my personal blog. Here you can find my adventures, thoughts, rants, etc. If you are interested in photography or tech stuff you should check out my other blog at www.mloberg.com. There might be some photography and tech stuff here, but it will mostly be over there.

The title of my blog is a geek term. On Linux, if you want to install a program from the command line you would usually write sudo apt-get install name-of-program, this is the best original name I could think of. If you have any ideas please comment.

I am usually pretty inconsistent with posting stuff. I can go months without posting anything and then I'll have a couple posts in one day. I usually write something and then I don't like it so I'll delete it or put it in the drafts. I also don't like posting small, one or two paragraph, posts. I will try to get over that in this blog, maybe. Another thing you probably noticed is that some posts are just completely random (like this one). I also like to split my posts in to a lot of paragraphs to make it easier reading, but then again I sometimes just go and go on one subject and it's hard to split that up.

That's my blog and I hope you enjoy it.

-Matt Loberg