TomHoppe.com

Hiking in Cartersville

2009-02-16T00:04:00.002-05:00

We did a 4.5 mile hike today at Pine Mountain in Cartersville. It was nice to get out with our friends and the dogs, and I also played with the new 40D. We never knew that this mountain existed and its a great spot to get some hiking in about 20 mins from the house. Elevation went from 800ft to about 2k over 2 miles. Whew!

I do dig the new camera. The picture quality isn't that much better then the 350d, but the whole package is greatly improved. The "feel" in my hand is a lot nicer, and the shutter on it rocks. It just sounds a lot more solid. I had to throttle back the drive setting, as leaving the shutter button pressed for a split second too long results in 3-4 more pictures because of the fast fps the camera is capable of. The 3" screen also rules. Reviewing shots is a good bit easier then the 1.5" screen I got used to on the 350D. I'm looking forward to getting out and shooting more with the new toy.

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V-Day Roses

2009-02-16T00:01:00.004-05:00

So I got Cathy some roses for V day. Since I got the new camera, and the purple roses were unusual I snapped a couple of pictures. Don't think I'm going with simple red roses anymore, as the flower shop had a ton of other choices. We'll see what combo I come up with next time :)

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Canon 40D!

2009-02-15T14:01:00.004-05:00

So I pulled the trigger on my upgrade. I've used the 350D for over 2 years now. I'm an "ok" amateur and never thought I would need an upgrade. I went the $$$ glass route, as suggested by many peers smarter then I, and it was well worth it. I got some great shots out of my 350D and 70-200L,24-105Ls. Recently, I've gotten the gear bug though, and with the used 40Ds coming down so much in price, I finally pulled the trigger.

Here are my impressions of 40D over the 350D for anyone else considering such a move

The "feel" of the camera is much better, yet smaller then my 350D + grip combo. The 350 w/o the grip is too small for my hands, but the 40D fits just perfectly.
The grip, the buttons, the locations, are just "right on" with this body, compared to being cramped in the 350D. I've seen people post that the 350D was a toy compared to the XXD series, and I kinda see what they are saying now.
The "click" of shutter sounds better. The 350D has more of a slap, where the motorized up and down of the 40D sounds a lot beefier.Its wierd, but I really like the sound of the 40D shutter.
In good light with 100 ISO, I can't really tell a difference between two "internet sized" shots. At full zoom, you can see a slight detail difference, but there isn't a huge wow factor in this situation
In low light, the difference really kicks in. 1600ISO on the 40D is about equal to 400ISO on the 350D. Its THAT much of a difference. I took a well exposed shot at 1600ISO and it looks excellent. Wow!
6.5fps = Wow. That part is NOT going to suck for taking 1/80th pans of race cars. The keeper ratio was low with the 350D when trying for such low shutter speeds. With the 6.5fps, I'll be able to nail a 4-5 shot combo of each car, where with the 350D i could get ~2 shots of "in frame" in.
Haven't noticed a huge difference in AF yet, but I haven't done any AI Servo work with race cars yet. The 40D seems to catch a little faster then I was used to, but its not that much. Then again, most of those were in great light, so the 350D didn't have much trouble and my amateur self never found the AF lacking with my 350D as I use the center point 99% of the time.

Not saying the 350D is bad. Its certainly a GREAT body, and at current prices ($350 used) its a KILLER deal for someone trying to get into DSLRs. Its just that the 40D really is a great step up and with the improved controls/format/performance allows you to enjoy photography more. I'm sure liking mine, and glad I pulled the trigger finally..

We're going for a hike this afternoon, so I'll take it with me and take some test shot. Sweet!

Car in the shop and PBR

2009-02-08T23:36:00.003-05:00

So my race car is in the shop. Since I'm the DIY type, it doesn't happen that often, but after the ARRC wreck, I decided to have the car checked out by Trever, who is the one that built it. I looked it over at the house and it doesn't actually look too bad. The only thing out alignment wise was the right front camber and toe. Looks like the upright got bent. The other 3 wheels where right in sync with each other and not even more a smidgen. The bottom subframe, which was 1/16" away from the header looks to have maybe moved in the accident, hit the header slightly cracking it, and then moved back. Since thats a $$$ custom header, figured, lets have it fixed by folks that know more then I do.

Once Trever gives the car a thumbs up, I'll be taking it over to the body shop to have the rear quarter panel dents touched up and sprayed over with red paint. I might take it home inbetween and see how much of the body work I can touch up to save money. We'll see. Since I need new fenders and a new front bumper cover, I decided to go with a slightly different paint scheme for next season. I'm going to cover the hood and fenders with carbon fiber look vinyl, so I don't have to paint. And then extend that vinyl into the doors with some kind of design. The front bumper will stay "factory black" as its just easier that way.

Also yesterday was about the nicest day in the last month or so here, so we went out to the dog park with a couple of our friends and out for some beers and pizza. They had $5 PBR pitchers which I couldn't pass up :) I was actually pleasantly surprised at the taste of PBR being sober, as I usually reserve PBR for the end of the night once I don't care about what I'm drinking.

Cheap Digital Camber Gauge

2009-02-05T20:17:00.006-05:00

A few years ago I used someone's "Smart Camber" digital camber gauge. It was awesome! You could zero it on the ground and measure your camber on uneven ground with 0.1 accuracy. I was going to get my own, but the $250 street price kind of discouraged me. Being the DIY type, I decided to make my own.

Take:

(1) Digital Level from Sears with 0.1 accuracy which can be found on sale for $35
(1) 20in long, 1" wide, 1/8" thick piece of steel from Home Depot Racing
(2) 1" long 1/4" thick metal spacers from HDR
(2) Allen head 1.5" bolts
(2) Nuts and washers

Drill a hole on one end of the sheetmetal, then 3 holes for 15, 16 and 17" wheels on the other end. Put in the bolts into the spacers, through the sheetmetal and throw a washer/nut on the other end. The pictures at the end of the post show what I'm talking about. The level attaches to the sheetmetal and is very sturdy as it has a nice big magnet in it.

To do an alignment, just set the gauge on the ground in front of your tire and level out to 0 with the "zero" button. Then place against your wheel and do a tiny bit of math. 88 degrees on the gauge = -2 degrees camber. Easy, accurate to 0.1, and under $40 including all materials. It's been working great the last season and between this, and stringing up the car for toe, I can do pro alignments in the garage or the pits whenever I please. After the lift, the Jeep went to the shop for an alignment, so I got to verify the accuracy of the gauge and it matched their Hunter machine.

I've thought about making a better mount for the level, which would allow me to zero out the gauge vertically, but this has been working so well, I never bothered. If someone comes up with something better, send me a note.

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BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir

2009-02-03T00:16:00.007-05:00

This past Saturday we went to the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir Temple in Lilburn GA. This is an amazing temple and a serious work of art. The entire structure is floor to ceiling marble and the carvings and detail work is incredible. This particular one in Atlanta is the largest such temple outside of India and is a place we're going to have to take our Atlanta visitors from now on. We also did a little "mini tour" and learned a bit about the Hinduism. I wish I could have gotten some pictures of the interior but there are no cameras allowed inside. I took a panorama of the structure from the outside and a shot of the fountains out front.

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House WIP

2009-02-02T23:58:00.004-05:00

So we've got most of house completed. Took a couple of weekends working our butts off, but it was totally worth it. The appraisal came back right at the amount we needed, and the house looks awesome inside now. We decided to put the outside on hold until the spring, and at that time redo the shutters and tear ALL the bushes out to create a clean new look. As far as the inside, we finished everything except the crown molding in the upstairs hallway. We didn't need to do it for the appraisal and I haven't been inspired enough to take care of recently :) The bathroom came out being our favorite "after" room, as Cathy's paint work on the cabinets transformed them from old school oak to a nice looking cherry finish.

Here are a couple of pictures of the WIP and the "before" on the bathroom. Once we put our paintings/etc on the walls and finish cleaning up I'll take some after pictures.

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The remodel continues (finishes?)

2009-01-12T00:38:00.006-05:00

Since we moved into the house, we've been planning to update pretty much the whole look of the house. We've done a fair share of things, kitchen, downstairs paint, master bedroom paint, etc, but we certainly have started to slack off a bit.

With the mortgage rates being so down, we decided to refinance. With the refinance comes an appraisal. With the appraisal.....holy crap, we've got a lot to do! lol. We realized that we have to finish up all the "almost done" projects, as well as do a couple more updates in order to appraise at the number we need to get our super low rate. Loooong list of to-dos, but working our asses for through the next week, should have everything done.

Office and Guest Bathroom
- Paint walls
- Prime and paint windows and trim
- Prime and paint closet doors
- Replace outlets
Guest Bathroom and Laundry Room
- Take down wallpaper and paint walls
- Prime and paint cabinets in both
- New light fixtures
Kitchen/Stairs
- Finish crown molding
- Prime and paint stairwell and trim
- Prime and paint all doors
Upstairs Hallway
- Crown molding
Outside
- Replace shutters
- Pull some bushes to clean up look
Clean all the carpets with our fancy Electrolux cleaning machine

Dang! Thats a lotta stuff.

How many times does "x" occur in a string?

2009-01-05T15:09:00.003-05:00

Had to figure out how many times a single characted occured in a string today. Found a nice clean way to do that instead of running a loop. Remove all the instances of that letter or character in the string, and the subtract that from the original length of the string. Viola.

You can also adapt this to multi character strings by dividing the result by the amount of chars in your search string. If you look for "asdf" in "1234asdf1234asdf1234asdf", you will remove 12 characters. Divide that by 4, and you have found "asdf" three times. Two examples below where the result is 3

str = 1234x1234x1234x;
str.length - str.replace(/x/gi,'').length;

str = 1234asdf1234asdf1234asdf
(str.length - str.replace(/xxxx/gi,'').length)/4

Its the end of the world...

2008-12-18T11:23:00.006-05:00

...as I know it, and I feel fine. See if you can figure that out from the pictures below :)

Steamboat has continued to be awesome. The weather has been great and we got to catch the sunset on top of the mountain. We also went snowmobiling yesterday. It was a blast! A few pics below, and I'll post the whole set when we get home.

Here is a big panorama I took. Its a reaaaally wide and big picture so be ready.

Steamboat!

2008-12-15T20:25:00.004-05:00

We started out our vacation by flying into Denver and heading up to Fort Collins. Our friend Chuck lives there, and we picked him up on our way to steamboat. While we were in Fort Collins we took advantage of the New Belgium brewery tour. New Belgium makes Cathy's favorite beer, skinny dip, as well as one of my faves, Fat Tire. With it being winter, they had a few awesome seasonals on tap, and it was the perfect start to our vacation. After a round of beers, it was time to head up to Steamboat.

Since we left Fort Collins late, we knew we would get a little of the snowstorm that was coming in, but we didn't quite expect it to be as bad as it was. We were driving 20mph and using our GPS to tell us where to road was headed as we couldn't see a damn thing out of the windshield. It was a helluva drive, but we made it no problem.

The skiing yesterday was sort of tough, as the 12 inches of snow didn't get groomed in time. The blues turned more difficult as ruts developed. It also snowed all day, and the fog made visibility a little short. It was still an incredibly fun time and we got our ski legs under us, as we haven't been out since Breckenridge last year.

Today was a totally different day, as the sun shone through, and the 13 degrees felt more like 50. The slopes were just awesome and we took quite a few runs down. Cathy turned in a bit early as her back was hurting, but the rest of us finished off the day on the slopes. We took quite a few runs on Tomahawk and the surrounding blues, did some jumps, and finished off the day with "3 oclock run" which was about the longest black diamond ever. Here is a pic from 3 oclock with the iPhone. I'll take the real camera tomorrow and have some awesome pics.

Time flies when you are ......

2008-12-12T19:38:00.003-05:00

So I can't believe its been pretty much a whole month since I posted anything. Even though it was supposed to be a super easy one, the last few weeks have been pretty busy and crazy.

ARRC
So November started out with the American Road Race of Champions. I have a car that is absolutely capable of winning this IT National Championship, but it wasn't to be. While I had a great qualifying run, I got punted on the 3rd turn of the 1st lap, which ended my race in a rough way. I ended up getting pinballed around by a few cars, and ended up out of the race, every panel on the car bent, and some busted suspension pieces. I was and am pretty miffed about the incident, so I took some time off from the car and decided to worry about other things for a while. I'll get back to the race car early next year. About $2k worth of damage or so, so not the end of the world. I had really shitty video, again, which prompted me to ask for a new bullet cam for Xmas. Next year, I'll have plenty of video action.

Kitchen
So we finally finished painting the damn kitchen :) The color ended up great, and Cathy's mom visited and helped with painting the trim. All we gotta do now is clean it up and take some pictures. Coming Soon!

New Hobby - HTPC
For thanksgiving, we went to visit Cathy's brother and family, and I saw their showtime streaming box for streaming PC content to their HDTV. Oh I was hooked. After considering a few options, I realized I had my old pre-upgrade PC still sitting in our office. I purchased a case at Microcenter, and a few hours later, had a new HTPC (Home Theater PC). 720p Blue Ray movies, TV shows from Europe, playing h.264 converted backups of my DVDs. I love it. Also for my birthday, I bought myself a new receiver, so now everything in the entertainment center is using HDMI. This thing is awesome. After watching Casino Royale in 720p with DTS sound, I think it started to grow on Cathy as well :)

Work has also been nuts. We've been working on some end of the year projects and its been 150mph since the beginning of October. All exciting work, but I've been working so much, I've been forgetting to post some of the cool stuff I've been doing. Once the new year hits, I'll have to write some of the cool JS things I've done on here.

Last but not least, we're heading to Colorado for the next week. Going to do some skiing, snowshoeing, and snowmobiling in Steamboat Springs. Its been snowing pretty good the last few weeks out west (we have 28" of base) so the skiing should be good. We'll have plenty of pics of the trip and shenanigans when we get back. Its also going to be VERY weird not working for 2 weeks (going to Raleigh right after), but somehow I think I can manage :)

HDTV == HDTV

2008-11-23T01:29:00.003-05:00

So I went to Brandsmart tonight and pulled the trigger on an LG 47" LCD HDTV. When compared to the Sharp Aquos 52" we were thinking about, it just had better "pop" on the blacks, no matter what the settings. Also figured that sitting 8-10' from the TV, the 47" would actually look better.

Took this thing home and plopped it right next to the 3 year old LCD Projection 50" Hitachi that I currently have. I was thinking that I'd get a big upgrade in black levels, sharpness, picture quality etc etc by going to a "new" LCD TV versus the LCD projection that I've had for a while now.

After hooking both of them up to the cable box and tinkering with some settings on both TV's (got the LG looking great with the recommended CNET settings and then set up the Hitachi to look like the LG), we realized that its the same damn picture. While there is a slight difference in the black levels, its definitely only slight and can be noticed when viewing dark scenes. Watching normal TV, or discovery HD as we were, its hardly damn noticable. Maybe with a Blu-Ray player we could see it, but on normal HDTV and then upscaled regular DVD, there is just no way to justify the purchase.

I guess in the end I saved myself some $$ as it looks like we're just going to keep this 50" Hitachi till it goes away, or until OLED's come down in price, cause it ain't worth it going to a 1080P LG LCD right now. Color me surprised.

Uwharrie!

2008-11-04T10:23:00.003-05:00

On the way home on Sunday, we stopped by Uwharrie National Forest with a few friends, Jeff, Mike, and Dante. Never having been "really" 4 wheeling, I had no idea what to expect. On the way in we stopped by the main outpost, got some maps, aired down the tires, disconnected the swaybars, and took off up the mountain. Dante, having been there numerous times, led the way to the hardest trail, Daniel. I was definitely skeptical of the Jeep making it over all the obstacles and rocks, but it took it like a champ! We finally found the secret of wheeling a Jeep without lockers, left foot braking. Dragging your left foot on the brake while trying to go up a slippery rock/hill slows down the tire trying to spin, and lets grab instead of it just spinning like crazy. Also, it really is about the driving and not your equipment. Dante with his mostly stock, lockerless, 4 door ran through all the obstacles like they were a cobblestone road.

We decided to keep Zoey in the back of the Jeep instead of tying her up at the campsite, and despite the constant bouncing in the back of the Jeep, I think she had fun. During one of the rock crawls at Kodak rock, she decided she wanted to sit in the front seat. Then exactly at the worst possible time, she slipped and popped the Jeep into neutral. It was a little scary at the time, as I thought I broke something :) I took plenty of pics as it was a beautiful day. Thats not a polarizer filter, the sky really was that blue. I realized afterwards I took mostly pics of our Jeep and Jeffs. Dante with his superior 4 wheeling skillz was always up over the rocks and then walking back to help the rest of us, so I only got 1 pic of his Jeep.

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Halloween on Franklin Street

2008-11-04T10:17:00.003-05:00

One of the reasons we went up to Raleigh was to hit up Franklin street for Halloween night. Having it on Friday should have meant a great turnout. Unfortunately, Chapel Hill got tired of being invaded by 80k people for that one night, so they put in a bunch of measures to bring the number of people way down. They basically discouraged any out of towners from showing up, by blocking parking everywhere and all side roads/neighborhoods. We met up with Cathy's friend Lee and her roomate and went anyways.

I dressed up as a NJ guido, complete with the spiked hair, headband, sweet glasses and double polos with popped collars. Cathy went as facebook. She ended up with a "fail" rating for the execution of the book on the head, as we forgot to measure for the fact that the headband she bought would expand once we put it on her head. Her shirt was great though, and we were able to write her status on her through the night. Lee was a drama queen, and her roommate went as Bristol Palin.

While there was still a decent turnout, it was nowhere as many people as in previous years. Also, the quality of costumes seemed to be down a bit. We did see some funny ones, and even though I got a littly drinky ;) I took some pictures. I'll post them up here shortly.

Lots of Wheeling in Raleigh

2008-10-27T23:06:00.007-04:00

Having come up to Raleigh for the week, we decided to meet up with some friends and head out to some in town 4 wheeling. The good power line trails are way closer to Raleigh then they are to us in Atlanta. There are some great trails and mud 15 mins out from house. We finally learned what the Jeep could really do....its a lot.

We started off with a pretty huge hill, and after a few tries to get the approach right, Cathy climbed right up! We finished off the ride playing in the mud. Wish we would have kept the damn windows on, as everything including the interior got covered with mud :) Took quite a few pics. Only a few really good ones, but I'm posting em all as it was all good fun.

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Javascript if then shortcut

2008-10-23T10:06:00.005-04:00

For some dumb reason, I can't ever remember this shortcut when I need it. Never again :)

varName == (value) ? (true) : false;

Race Car...

2008-10-19T18:20:00.005-04:00

She's almost ready for the ARRC (American Road Race of Champions, the Improved Touring National Championship). Got a good amount of work done today. New radius rod bearings, coolant flush, radio install, caliper rebuilds, etc etc. Pretty much all that is left is to bleed the brakes and do a once over on all the nuts and bolts. I also put the new "REDRUM" sticker on the front bumper. I was going to paint it and then put the sticker on, but I decided I'll be doing lots of bump drafting at the ARRC, so I might as well make it pretty during the offseason. Last but not leas, but front splitter is coming in a few weeks. That should give me a bit of downforce in the high speed turns, but also free up a mph or two on the top end. I'm looking forward to that, as started to get to the point where I was going to make the car looser with a bigger rear bar. I think the splitter will be just enough to make it a tad looser then it is today, without going overboard. We'll see!

Project Fatass continued....

2008-10-19T12:10:00.004-04:00

So its been about 2 weeks since I started Project Fatass. We sort of took last weekend off when we went camping, and went to the Apple festival and drank a bunch of beer yesterday. Other then that, I've been good and been following the diet. Its actually pretty easy to follow and I like it. I like the lunches a lot better then the usual microwave frozen lunch, and its actually more economical as I don't spend $8 a day on lunch every day. I'm a fan. I've lost 5 lbs so far. If I lose another 5 over the next two weeks, I'll be happy.

Ding, Jeep is done!

2008-10-19T11:54:00.004-04:00

So after about 3 weeks of being down, and probably 12-14 hours of total work, the lift is on. I worked on it about 2 hours a day, every 3rd day, lol. I guess thats the nice thing about having plenty of other cars to drive. I took the car to 4wheelparts after the install to get the caster and pinion angles set during the alignment. Figured the $100 was well spent, as never having even seen a stock Jeep, I didn't know exactly what the pinion angle should be. They ended up finding that the front trackbar bushing was busted, something I missed during the install, so the $$ was well spent. Another $200 later, we had a pimpy adjustable front trackbar with spherical ends.

We took the Jeep out yesterday for its maiden voyage, up to the Apple festival in Ellijay. While the festival was fun, our search for some 4 wheeling in that area was a big fat FAIL. We ended up playing in some construction sites and gravel roads and found out the lift was a success. The Jeep is a beast now. Once we add the front locker to it shortly, it will be pretty much unstoppable.

Here are a few pictures in "highway" mode with the top up.

"Project fatass"

2008-10-06T13:56:00.003-04:00

So my parents just "got" me the NutriSystem package after calling me fat for the last year or two. Guess I'll turn this into Project Fatass and see what I can do. I weighed in this morning at 224.0 and started the diet. I also have my plan to get back to "fighting shape". I've been playing soccer and tennis and just realizing that I'm way out of shape compared to where I've been in the past. Few years of sitting at a desk and playing with cars I guess :)

The nutrisystem is pretty cool so far. Good amount of food, but spread throughout the day, so you are not hungry. I think the main goal is showing you how much to each, and by liming the amount, making sure you don't overeat. Also, splitting up your food categories, so you get enough of everything. One of the first things I've noticed, is I don't eat much dairy and veggies at all. This plan has me do 3-4 servings of dairy/protein a day.

I'm also going to take the next season off of soccer and tennis and hit the gym and mountain bike to get some strength and endurance. I'll be back with a vengeance for the spring season :)

Quest for cheap radios has ended

2008-10-06T01:00:00.004-04:00

In an earlier post, I talked about how I was going to get a nice cheap radio setup for the race car. Well, after turning on the Midland GPRS radios from Bass Pro shops that sat around for a while, I figured out they were busted. Crapola. So I decided to get "real" radios instead. After messing around on Ebay and finding some Chinese knockoffs, a friend suggested I call Sampson Racing and see if they had any used gear. They hooked me up with a set of Vertex radios, crew chief headset, and a PTT button, all demo gear out of the owner's race car. Sweet! Cameron at Conover Motorsports is going to build me a badass antenna, and I will still have my "cheap-er" radio system.

Vertex 5-watt - $160
Crew Chief headset - $90
PTT + free car harness - $25
Driver helmet gear - $140
Badass Conover antenna - $50
Misc adapters (headset to radio, car harness to radio) - $25

In the end, I've spend $500 and ended up with around an $800 system. My cheap ass is happy :) Looking forward to being able to hear my crew at the ARRC

The Urban Sophisticates

2008-10-06T00:40:00.003-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, we went up to Raleigh to visit some of out friends and also see one of Cathy's favorite bands, The Urban Sophisticates. They are a mix of hip hop with horns and have a great sound. They played at the Pour House in downtown Raleigh which is always a good time. I brought the camera, but ended up doing more drinking then picture taking and it showed :) Check out their website as they have their music streaming on it.

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How to make a MacBook Pro hibernate

2008-09-22T17:07:00.004-04:00

Since I've had the MacBook Pro I've been wanting it to "hibernate" instead of "sleep" when I close the lid. There are times when I've shut the lid, stuck it into my backpack, just to not look at it again for 3 days over a long weekend. During that time, even in regular sleep mode, the battery dies as the laptop is not all the way off. My Thinkpad on the other hand can fully hibernate, in which it turns itself all the way off and stores its current state to the hdd.

Turns out that the MacBooks have the same mode, but its not an option in the menu. After a little digging, I've found a site that tells you what to do. I've outlined the steps below for "mac noobs" such as myself.

Go to Finder, Utilities, Terminal
type pmset -g | grep hibernate
You should see that your hibernate is set for mode 3. This means when it sleeps, your items are saved to the RAM and power stays on. What you want is to set that to mode 5 which will function just like windows hibernate, and actually turn your laptop all the way off while saving where your state to the hdd.
Create two aliases, one to enable mode 5, and another to set back to 3 if you want.
Type alias hibernateon="sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 5"
Type alias hibernateoff="sudo pmset -a hibernatemode 3"
Now when you type hibernateon, it will set that mode to 5. Once you do that, type pmset -g | grep hibernate again to confirm that you are on mode 5
Your laptop is now set to hibernate like windows when you close the lid. If you ever want to revert back, run terminal again and type hibernateoff

How to make iPhone ringtones from MP3s

2008-09-19T14:51:00.006-04:00

This is easy as pie. With the below steps, you can take any MP3 and make it into a ringtone for your iPhone.

Grab the MP3 you want to turn into a ringtone and using Audacity turn it into an MP3 that is less then 30 seconds in length.
Drag the newly shortened file into iTunes
Find it in iTunes, right click on it and choose "Convert to AAC". It will make another version of the song.
Find that song in your iTunes folder library (probably c:/..../My Documents/My Music/iTunes) and rename if from .m4a to m4r. In iTunes, delete the m4a that you made.
In iTunes, go to "file" then "add file to library" and select the newly renamed m4r that you made in the step above
Now you can sync with your iPhone and you will have a new ringtone to select.