Jim Becher - Surfing the Web

Contact   Blog

Blog

Blog posts and ramblings to chronicle my adventures in life. This may contain technology, family, business or products that I enjoy.

About

Hi, I’m Jim. A father, husband, business owner, entrepreneur, and a person who loves technology. I semi-often update this blog.

Contact

Feel free to reach out to me with questions, contact, business ideas, projects or just a random Hello. Located in the Mitten state.

Recent Posts


Pocket (read it later)–re-brand

I’ve been using Read It Later for a while.  It is / was a great tool to save articles found on twitter / flipboard / web.. and Read them later.  Prior to using that tool I would just email myself the article if I found something interesting or wanted to…

Grand Rapids–Facebook city

A Mashable article states a list of social savvy cities.  They list many large cities.  grand Rapids is not one of them.  However, they do mention that Grand Rapids has a high percentage of small businesses with face book pages (29%) Read the article here – http://mashable.com/2012/05/17/social-savvy-cities/

Developer Laptop

Dell has just launched a developer focused laptop.  The cool thing about this version is that it runs Ubuntu (linux) and is on a 13 inch laptop.    (check out the hardware here)  The article that I found regarding this was focused on the Sputnik project.   I think this is a…

When is it illegal to listen. Mapping wifi?

When did listening become illegal?  After reading this article I got to thinking more about how the concept of wireless is flawed.   http://gigaom.com/2012/05/01/google-wi-fi-snooping-and-the-ever-shifting-creepy-line/ As a technology it uses public airwaves to send data.  This concept works great when the data is suppose to be freely available.  The success of this…

Michigan Broadband

I have been evaluating my broadband connection at home lately.  I currently have a cable modem from Comcast.  I’ve been a cable modem user since @home.    There was  short period where I had  a $14 DSL line from yahoo but that did not last long.   We have recently had service…

Setup of Developer Workstation (.net)

I recently updated my laptop configuration and did some spring cleaning.  It was time to re-install the tools and get the machine ready.  I do most of my development in Virtual Machines (virtualbox) but I typically have Visual Studio on my local machine for ease of use.  I realized that…

Web Gui’s for management

It seems every device you purchase has a web admin page. The little linksys router you purchased, the NAS storage device, your Linux box, etc… The trend is to have any type of appliance have this type of management tool. These tools allow the managemnt of these devices to be…

Portable Hotspot from your laptop

I have often been with  group of people and need to share some type of wireless.  Frequently I’ve used my phone (iPhone 4 – Jailbroken) and myWi (http://intelliborn.com/mywi.html).  However, I have not recently jailbroke my phone after the last update.   The main reason I have ever jailbroke a phone was…