This nifty car stereo/CD Player has a USB port and SD memory card slot on the front to play MP3 files directly from either of those media, in addition to the regular MP3 CD and line-in features. Nice to see additional connection methods being added to car stereos. These days if you don’t have a tape player, you are pretty much stuck with those FM Transmitters, which don’t seem to work that well.

I wonder if the USB port will read MP3’s directly off of an iPod Shuffle or other USB MP3 player?

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There’s a lot going on in the Ruby on Rails world right now. I still don’t completely understand it, but I certainly want to learn. After watching the new video and seeing him basically create a complete Blog in 10 minutes, it’s hard not to want to learn more about it.

There is also a brand new release of RoR with a ton of new features and bug fixes. Some amazing new features like drag and drop and easy-to-create auto-complete fields are included. (Demo)

The Ruby on Rails book has also been finished, and you can purchase the PDF, or PDF + Paper copy right now.

Steve Jobs is known for his signature black mini turtle neck and blue jeans, but thanks to The Joy of Tech, you can now dress him up as a biker or a pirate or a space man. Or you can go crazy and make him a space pirate or a biker pimp. Or you can just leave him in the buff, with his leopard undies and OSX tattoos.

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Have you installed Tiger yet? Have you checked out Mail yet? Do you hate the new jelly-like buttons? Cage Fighter can help you get rid of them. It just removes the little button background graphics and changes the highlight color, so that it looks a little nicer and matches the rest of the OS instead of going out on its own for no apparent reason.

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Some observations on “the little things” that have changed in Apple’s new operating system. These are the things that really make a difference in your daily use of the machine after the initial wow-factor of the new big features have worn off.

One of my favorites is an Undo in text areas in Safari 2.0. A lot of CMS systems allow you to edit templates directly in a text area, and it’s very irritating that Safari has never let you undo any changes you make in a text area like every other browser. Now it does, and all is well. I just hope they fixed the other incredibly annoying bug that will scroll the text area all the way to the top if you switch to another tab and then back to the template or post that you were editing. ‘Cause that’s really annoying too.

The other cool one is: “I have 16,529 files on my computer that contain the word “the.” 16,530 now that I’ve saved this document. Spotlight results are updated instantly.”. That’s pretty amazing.

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So you’re a geek… You’re probably not big on camping. But if you were to camp, you’d probably have some soda or some beer and a chocolate bar for smores. At least if you are a stereotypical geek that drinks a lot of coke and eats a lot of chocolate.

Anyway… you’ll need a fire if you’re camping, to cook your food and keep the level 55 elite bears away. You could rub some sticks together like Tom Hanks in that movie with the volleyball, or just rub some chocolate or toothpaste on the bottom of a soda/beer can to polish it into a mirror, then use that to focus light on tinder and start your fire.

The site has lots of other survival tips as well.

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Well there may be mixed opinions on the movie, but the book is a classic and hilarious as ever. If you can’t afford the $5 for the paperback copy of the book, or just prefer reading on your computer (weirdo!), you can now access the entire book online in one giant page. Could be useful for searching for your favorite quote at the very least.

The other books are available as well. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; So long, and thanks for all the fish; Mostly Harmless.

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The new Family Guy episode to air on May 1st has been leaked a little early and is available for download on several of the typical places on the internets. The link below is to a 32mb Real Video file of the show. And wow, it is great to have the show back. Funnier than ever, with plenty of digs at Fox for canceling the show the first time.

ForeverGeek isn’t responsible if you get busted for downloading it. We aren’t hosting it, and I don’t even think it’s illegal, but you know…

Update: here is a Torrent file for a 270mb version of the show.

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Speaking of Napoleon Dynamite… Check out this replica of the “time machine” up for auction on eBay. It’s got the T-bar handles, the year selector, even the special crystals! Sweet! Yesssssssssssss.

The bidding is up to almost $100 so far, so serious collectors only!

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Well it took a little while, but someone finally made a hub/external hard drive to match the Mac Mini perfectly. It looks exactly the same as the Mini, and has a 160gb hard drive as well as a USB 2.0/Firewire hub with 3 plugs each. It can sit on top of or below your Mac Mini, and of course works with any other type of Mac or PC as well.

Amazon is offering 200 free full-length MP3’s for download from their web site. As far as I can tell they are free of any DRM stuff, and they played without any problems in iTunes on my Mac. The list of songs is updated every six hours, and you can choose to listen to a 30 second preview of each song, or download the entire thing.

There are quite a few well known artists like Moby and The Strokes and Jimmy Eat World on the list, rather than indie bands that no one has ever heard of. There are rare and unreleased tracks available as well.

Mac OSX 10.8 “Liger”.

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I thought we were supposed to be getting smarter and more advanced as time goes on? Getting a high school diploma or GED isn’t even this hard, and they are all multiple choice questions so you have a chance of just guessing to get them right anyway.

Doh – I’ve really gotta start reading the comments on digg before I post stuff! Haha.

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One of the most infuriating things about Windows for me is when you get one of those damn “Couldn’t find *.dll” error messages and you have no idea where to find them either. Well now you can, even if Windows is too stupid to do it for you.

Head over to DLL-Files.com the next time you need to find a DLL, and download some of the most common ones that mysteriously go missing.

Bitmap or “pixel fonts” were all the rage a few years ago, and still pop up every now and then today. There are already some great sets out there, much of which you can find at “DaFont.com”:http://www.dafont.com/, but if you don’t see anything you like there, you can always create one yourself.

Normally that would involved using a difficult program like Illustrator plus some sort of font creation program, but with this little Flash app, it’s as easy as tic-tac-toe.

Just click in the white squares to fill in the pixels, and preview your font with real text whenever you like. When you’re finished, save the font and it will be zipped up and sent to you to download.

It is pretty time consuming to create a whole font-face, let alone one that looks half-way decent, but it’s a fun little app anyway.

My wife doesn’t do much on the computer other than email, but she occasionally sells a dog online or something and wants to use my PayPal account to get the money. But she always wants to charge the buyer extra so that if she asks for $100, she’ll actually get $100, not $96.80, after PayPal takes their fees. So anyway, guess who she asks to handle that and figure up all of that information for her…

So anyway, after doing that more than a few times for her, myself, and other people, I decided to make a site that would do it for me. So here it is.

“The Fee Calculator”:http://www.thefeecalculator.com/

You can enter an amount like $100 and it will tell you what to charge to make sure you still have that much after PayPal’s fees are taken out. Or you can find out how much you’ll have left if you charge someone a certain amount.

It’s super simple, and lacking in fancy features, but it’s faster than a calculator, and isn’t bogged down with a lot of eBay junk like a couple of similar sites out there.

It’s only the second thing I’ve programmed from scratch, so it was a fun little project for a few hours anyway.

Thanks to JC, fellow FG editor, for helping me with a few areas that I had trouble with.