Justin Germino Ramblings

I love Audacity and use the program often to record my poetry recordings and other podcasts for my blogging related ventures.  One feature I rely on heavily is the noise removal function of Audacity which removes the background fan noises from my recordings which are the result of me having 5 case fans and a ceiling fan running all the time and no matter how much foam I have over my microphone it picks up the fan hiss.

Here is a video tutorial for a quick and easy way to cleanup your audio recordings with the Noise Removal functionality of Audacity.

-Justin Germino

I have had the fortune of having several companies contact me wanting me to give away products to readers in contests on my tech blog.  The contests I am running are getting more and more notice and readers really love the contest idea.

Nothing is better for a blogger than when you don’t have to come out of pocket to give away a cool prize, and in September we will be giving away not only a 64GB Kingston USB Drive, but also 5 – 1 year web hosting plans, 5 copies of Cloud System Performance Booster Pro which really impressed me for optimizing and cleaning up my PC.

The grand daddy contest however is one I collected sponsorship for and put my own money into and that is the Budget Gaming Laptop giveaway where we will hold a contest to giveaway a brand new Lenovo Z575 laptop to one lucky reader.

Expect even more cool stuff to come and I am already thinking about the big end of the year giveaway contest and what we may be able to give away (maybe Google Nexus 7 tablets or new Kindle Fire 2’s if they are announced).

-Justin Germino

Thanks to @GrowMap I learned about DoubleLinx which is a website (not unlike Fiverr) that allows you to list your services so that clients can find and hire services from you.

Where it differs from Fiverr is that you set the rate for your services there is no requirement on a specific dollar amount to charge, and they screen every listing before it is listed to make sure you appear to offer legit quality services first.

They also take a lower commission fee from the services than many other programs I have seen and tested over the years, and offer ways to help you write your service listing while taking the commission from your first sale rather than charging you up front.

I had only a passive marketing page on DragonBlogger.com for people to Hire WordPress Services but figured I would put a listing or two on DoubleLinx and see what it can do to help boost my service business which I do part time on the side.

It is definitely a well polished website, and easy to sign up as either a seller of services or buyer and switch back and forth between the two profile types.

The services listed are definitely geared toward online professionals, websites, bloggers, those needing web design work, social media work or backlink building and some of my highly valued peers have services listed on DoubleLinx.

I will let my readers know if it brings me any clients and provide a more detailed write up in the future after having some time testing the service.

-Justin Germino

It took me a while to figure it out but basically when you want to hook up with friends on Guild Wars 2 you add them as friends and invite them to your party.

Then you have to actually "join in" which puts a request to enter their "server" so that you can be on the same server and play together.  Sometimes the servers are so overloaded you end up in what is called an "overflow" queue.  This means you can play but you aren’t in the same server as your friends so their profile picture will be ghosted, you won’t see their character portrait.

Once you are joined to the same server as your friends, you will see their profile picture and they will show up as a blue dot on your map.

This will often require you to chat with your friends and agree to "join in" on one persons server or you could end up bouncing back and forth between each others servers.

Also, there can be quite a long delay and queue in the opening days of Guild Wars 2, I took almost 40 minutes before a "slot" opened up and I was able to get into the same "instance" as my two sons so we could join up and see each other again.

Guild Wars 2 should have the ability to "teleport to friend" when you are on the same instance as your friend, spend 5 gold and use your friend as a way point the same way Wizard 101 does.  But it does save time when you can all teleport to a waypoint you all have unlocked together.

-Justin Germino

I honestly didn’t put much thought into accent lighting, my typical idea of lighting a room is just flipping the switch on and a bulb glowing brightly overhead which causes my eyes to squint in reaction in the middle of the night.

But after putting more thought into it I certainly see the value of potentially adding LED accent lighting to a room not only to add visual appeal but give you just enough lighting to see what you need to without being to abrupt.

Sometimes in the dark at night when you want to get yourself some fruit (yeah right) or a drink of water you really end up wishing you installed kick lights so there could be some illumination on the floor to watch where you are stepping but nothing so bright it hurts your eyes.

They are also helpful for making sure you don’t step on a scorpion that may be wandering your floor which happens too often in my household.  Imagine having some floor accent lighting like the one in the photo above in your kitchen that way you can have all the lights off while watching a movie in the living room, and you wouldn’t need to turn the lights on to get a beverage!

I did get some ideas and may consider putting in some accent LED lighting in the future at some point if I put a budget together for it (I am not known for being a great handy man) but this may be something I can figure out and install.  Staircases would be an excellent area to have accent lighting on the floor in the middle of the night.

I actually had my fire alarm go off the other day and fortunately it was one of the upstairs one (and just a battery low alert) but I would have raced down the stairs so quick I could have tripped without the lights on, so maybe I should have considered adding some floor lighting or something to help illuminate the steps.

Does any of my readers have accent lighting in rooms in their home and did you install it yourself, or have a professional do it?

-Justin Germino

My kids are both very excited that tomorrow starts the Guild Wars 2 gaming weekend.  I promised my two boys that we would all wait and create characters together at the same time on Saturday August 25th and we all have the client installed and updated so we can get started right away.

I hope the game is at least as good as the original Guild Wars, that’s I all I need for it to meet my expectations and also maybe that my 5 year old won’t have too hard a time playing it as Runes of Magic was still a bit difficult for him.

I caught up on all my work this week and even had as many blog posts as I could write at night (thanks to not being able to sleep from my cold earlier in the week) so I can game away blissfully.

-Justin Germino

Reminder to myself, need to pick up a few canisters of the Starbucks Green Refreshers Energy Drinks, these things are AWESOME and come in the best flavors.

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When I got a cheapy $5 iPhone belt clip case my wife had immediately pointed out the error I had made.  The glass front of the iPhone case faced outward with no protection so that if I were to bump into a desk or table the iphone glass could crack easily.  There were also other issues with the iPhone glass facing outward in that if a text came in even while the iPhone was locked, it would be visible to anyone looking at my hip.

So I did some research and found the best iPhone belt clip case that I could find and I succeeded with the OtterBox Universal Defender Case which at $20.98 on Amazon.com right now wasn’t that expensive and is well worth the price.

The case is sturdy with a belt clip component that rotates a full 360 degrees.

The sleeve you put over the phone can take a few minutes to install properly, but once it is on it is extremely snug and secure.

Then you have the option of putting the phone in the case on your hip either screen facing your body for extra protection.

Or for quick reading, you can face the screen outward.

I was very pleased with the phone and you have access to the volume buttons easily while it is still in the clip on your belt.  The only issue that I may have with the OtterBox Universal Defender Case is that it has a protective screen that slides over the actual phone screen which makes you have to press a tad harder than normal for your finger strokes to get recognized but this is very minor.

If you are looking for an iPhone 4S protective belt clip case, you won’t do better than the OtterBox Universal Defender Case.

-Justin Germino

Was so thrilled when a package from Kingston Technology arrived the other day with a box full of USB Flash Drives to review and many to give away to my readers.  I am still deciding the best way to leverage how to distribute them to readers. I think some I will reward for just my mailing list subscribers, and the larger ones I will give away via a traditional Rafflecopter blog contest on DragonBlogger.com.

The great thing is many of these are the DataTraveler Locker+ G2 USB drives which have password security and full encryption to keep your data secure and safe for when you travel.

The 64GB DataTraveler HyperX 3.0 is the fasted USB drive I have ever tested and I can confirm over 230MB/s read and 130MB/s write rates which are incredible!

Stay tuned for the upcoming contests!

-Justin Germino

It is like an unstoppable force when you hear about your kid’s classmate being sick in school and within days the virus spreads and sure enough your kid comes down sick the following day and then you as a parent become sick just two days later.  You can almost watch it spread like a flame with human hosts the kindling as the virus jumps from host to host.

Fortunately it is only a common cold, but this is why there is such fear and panic with the potentially lethal flu virus like the flu pandemic of 1918 also called the Spanish flu.  The Spanish flu killed between 50 and 130 million people and is considered the worst natural disaster in human history.  It is said some 500 million people were infected, this is about 28% of the world’s population at the time which was only 1.86 billion.  3% of the world’s population actually died from it.

The Spanish Flu caused so many death’s because it stirred up your own body’s immune system so badly, causing a cytokine storm. Due to weaker immune systems children and elderly actually were the lowest death rates compared to young healthy adults who had stronger immune systems.

Despite how far science has come along, how quickly could we react to viruses or flu’s that mutate and spread so quickly, constantly mutating to be more efficient and bypass or adapt to anything we can throw at it.

So as my whole family caught just the common cold from it spreading through my son’s class, I couldn’t help but wonder what if something like that type of flu comes back around? 

-Justin Germino

I think I may have found a quick cheat in Wizard 101 to refill all of your purple potions in less than a minute, these are the potions that sit at the bottom left of the screen and are used to completely refill your hit points and mana between battles while you are stuck in a dungeon.

I recorded a video on how you can use the Potion Motion game in Wizard 101 to quickly refill all your purple potion bottles by only playing the game until level 3 (taking 10-20 seconds each time) and then force quitting.  This only allows you to fill your purple potions this way, and no other mini game refills your potions as quickly.

Hopefully this will save players time and let me know if you found this tip to refill your purple potions helpful.

-Justin Germino