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Hi. My name is Adam. I am the co-founder of Pure Adapt, Inc in Albany, NY. We own Detailed Image, LockerPulse, and a bunch of other websites. I write about our company, entrepreneurship in general, work-life balance, and whatever else interests me.
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Category Archives: Technology
How I Worked Last Wednesday
Most weeks I go to the warehouse on Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, leaving Wednesday and Thursday to – in theory – work from home. I say “in theory” because those days always get filled with errands and the gym and lunches with friends, especially lately because during the holidays I was at the warehouse more often and didn’t get around to a lot of that type of stuff. Case in point, last Wednesday. Here’s how my day unfolded: 6 AM - Wake up, shower, eat. 7:30 AM – head off to the VW dealership to get my car looked at. … Continue reading
I Just Tried Google Chrome OS And…
I think people are kind of missing the point. If you haven’t had a chance, watch the short video below and read the live blog of the event from TechCrunch. I installed it as a virtual machine using VirtualBox, as you can see in the picture above. Given that there aren’t any guest additions, it’s somewhat limited – even with a ton of memory allocated, it lags a bit and has a 800×600 resolution. So I’ll withhold my real review until those are released. Some people in the comments on TechCrunch and Lifehacker don’t understand this and are blaming these … Continue reading
Computing in 2019
On my way to work I’ve been listening to a bunch of the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Podcasts. They are all fascinating. I feel like it’s such a better use of my time than just listening to music. I actually look forward to my drives because these talks just turn my creative side loose. The Vinod Khosla lecture was particularly fascinating. Khosla is best known for starting Sun Microsystems, but he currently is making waves in cleantech and other environmentally friendly technologies with his VC company Khosla ventures. In the talk, Khosla mentions how 10 years ago he predicted that … Continue reading
Why The Release of IE8 Matters (to us at least)
Yesterday Microsoft finally released the latest version of the Internet Explorer browser, IE8, which can now be downloaded from Microsoft’s official site. Hopefully within a few weeks it will get pushed to people via Windows updates and the majority of people using IE7 right now will be upgraded to IE8. Why do I say hopefully? Because for us there is one little feature that will drastically increase the quality of the new Detailed Image – CSS table support. Let me explain. Way back when I started doing web design, people used tables to lay out pages. They worked great … Continue reading
Pimp My Desktop
One of my favorite things to read are the Featured Desktop posts on Lifehacker. For anyone who isn’t familiar, they basically take very unique Windows, Mac, and Linux desktop setups and explain how to configure your computer to look and act just like the featured desktop. While they all vary quite a bit, the common link is that they all make work for the user incredibly more efficient than a standard desktop environment. All of these posts have led to me doing quite a bit of experimenting with my setup over the past year. Prett much every time I see … Continue reading
Back Up Your Shit People!
My jaw dropped when I read on Lifehacker that blogging service JournalSpace went under a few days ago because all of their data got erased! More specifically, according to JournalSpace themselves: Journalspace is no more. Here is what happened: the server which held the journalspace data had two large drives in a RAID configuration. As data is written (such as saving an item to the database), it’s automatically copied to both drives, as a backup mechanism. The value of such a setup is that if one drive fails, the server keeps running, using the remaining drive. Since the remaining drive … Continue reading
A Wacky End to ’08
It was New Year’s Eve. Mike, George, and I would normally be out at a party, but because we were all sick and the weather sucked, we all were home resting. Around 8 PM I woke up from a nap and made my way over to my computer to read my feeds, when I noticed all of our sites were down. Not “down” per se, but all had a 500 Internal Server Error like the one below from the Pure Adapt site: Now, I’ve seen this plenty of times, but never on ALL the sites at once. Usually it’s while … Continue reading
Hello Songbird, Goodbye iTunes
I love open source software. There’s something fascinating to me about a community of passionate developers being able to release highly customizable software that is equal to or better than the commercial alternatives. As I wrote in a post last year, our company uses almost all open source software, both because of the affordability and because of the extensibility. My office suite is Open Office, my email client is Thunderbird, my browser is Firefox, and my image editor is Paint.net (although GIMP is just as good). In my free time I like to mess with every flavor of Linux in … Continue reading
Set up SMS Monitoring for Your Sites for Free in Less than Five Minutes
Earlier this week I set out to sign us up for an independent website monitoring service. In case you don’t know, these services periodically check your websites to ensure that the site is up and running. If it isn’t, they contact you. It’s really pretty simple, but it’s also very useful, especially for someone like me. Now that we run our own server and I can control everything, I can usually fix any issue. If I can’t, I can call Liquid Web and their awesome help usually resolves it for me in a matter of minutes. However, I need to … Continue reading
Times Are Changing
Back when I was in high school, we barely used computers. Other than typing up reports and a little bit for research, I don’t think I really needed a computer in any of my non-elective classes. I graduated in 2000. A lot has changed since then. Our sports writer for the Tastefully Driven Lifestyle Blog runs a great blog called The Blog of Champions. He also happens to be in high school. As part of a social studies project he and his classmates were asked to create a blog about social injustice in America. Let me repeat that: as part … Continue reading