SvenOnTech’s official pace car is one 2000 Pontiac Grand Prix GTP with good ‘ol Borla pipes and an U-Bend remover. Add the K&N drop-in and we’re told we just added about 50 ponies to our ride. We’re sure the dyno would really say 15, maybe 20, but it’s still a fast four door off the line and we love hearing the whine of the supercharger when we’re quickly running down, er, our next big story.

Today while filling up a Costco Gas station for the nice high price of $3.249 per gallon (got to use supreme for the supercharger), I noticed a bar on the console for the supercharger. Even though the engine was off and door open, Eaton was geared up (excuse the pun) and ready to go! hehehe.

Just a little something we had to share. It was also a good excuse to open a YouTube account, though we’re sure YouTube will be gone or chargin’ phat bux in a year.

To all my fellow Americans, I bid you a Happy Independence Day!

For those not State-side, we hold this day with high regard. Well, some do. Most seem to just get drunk, do some BBQ’in, and watch fireworks at night and complain about how there wasn’t enough of those fuzzy red ones. Me? I’m proud to be a citizen of this grand land and very thankful to those that have given their lives for the freedom we celebrate today.

SvenOnTech would like to thank all those who have served in our armed forces and those serving today. Thank you!

Now go have a fine German beer with your good ‘ol American “house” burger. We’ll be having a US Flag cake for dessert. Mmm.

I’d like you all to welcome Jon Eilers to SvenOnTech. Jon has found his way on SvenOnTech way back to the days of Svenrox. He loved to stop by and leave lots of comments. Now we’re spinning the tables on him and asking him to write for us. He (foolishly?) agreed to do so.

Jon is a graduate of the fine University of Pacific her in California. He’s comes with lots of art and media experience and will be lending his hand in the video realm for us. In fact, his first article, coming tomorrow, will be about the lies (my words) of tapeless video recorders. If you’re thinking of getting an DVD recorder for the 4th (State side), then you’ll want to read his article first. Don’t worry, we’ll give you plenty of buying time as it’ll be up first thing in the morning.

Okay, y’all be good to Jon and say hi to him once in a while in his articles.

If you just are bummed that the NBA season is over and there’s no more good NBA news, then do I have something for you. The NBA saved the best for last…a new ball! Ya, that’s right, the NBA as officially announced it’s spanking new ball and don’t worry, it’s still orange. New sleek curvy lines, though.

Ya, I know this isn’t tech but sometimes we like to let our hair hang down and just blow in the hot Central California breeze. Know what I mean?

(BTW, we didn’t want to be a spoiler and just show it here on our site, hence the logo. Go to the link and read why the NBA felt it needed to update it’s orange Tang.)

Hey, I got the tags to work now. I had to fudge my .htaccess file and that was about it. Now we have tags fully working here and you can click on them and find related posts that have that tag in it.

Making life easier for ya folks!

I’ve added some new stuff to the site, most notable social tags. If you’re a Digger, for example, you can now click the icon below each post and easily send it to digg.com. This will help get the word out about SvenOnTech and some articles we know others would love to see.

I’ve also added tags. While the plug-in is causing some problems on the back-end, it’s working just fine here on the front. So I’ll just deal with the back-end issue for now since I think it will add a great value to the site. With the tags, you can click on a keyword and view all other posts that have the same word in it. It’ll help create a thread for you if you would like to continue with a certain subject. Yanked due to results page not working. Hope to get this in when I upgrade the server later.

Finally, you’ll probably notice the ads within post one and three. That’s another addition that I hope will help boost my revenue a bit which will allow for me to bring more great things to this site. I have no delusions of becoming an Engadget or Gizmodo, but maybe something else that many will come to often and enjoy.

SvenOnTech would like to thank all those that gave their life, literally, for our freedom. Those in the Revolution, those in the Civil War, those in both World Wars, and those in the battles since then.

The families of these fallen soldiers also gave this country much when they selflessly gave up their rights as a mother, father, sister, brother, or wife, or husband when they let their loved ones go and fight the good fight.

No matter your feelings about current or past wars, fact is men and women have died for our country and returned home in a coffin with the flag of United States of America upon it. This flag is filled with much meaning and with great honor, I salute it and thank those who fought for it.

Happy Memorial Day.

Call it funny, but this tech guy never really sat enough to learn how to play chess before. College was too busy with studying and, well, you know, stuff. Then work came into my life and more important things like Sony PlayStations. Okay, I never got one of those, either, but that should indicate how I just didn’t have time to learn such a complex game as chess.

When my nine year-old niece asked if I’d play a game of chess with her Thursday, I was like, ‘Mmm, that could be fun.’ I explained to her that I really didn’t remember who moved how, but she said she’d help me. So I took the challenge and about ten minutes later, my niece’s father came to my resecure and put a W in my column. Without my brother in-laws help, she would have creamed me.

So now I’m practicing. Through the weekend, I’ve been playing the computer and learning the moves. While I’m not quite advanced enough to even think two moves ahead, I am at least getting the pieces allowed moves down. Of late, my biggest problem is preventing a draw yet still trying to get that check mate. Seems that the computer isn’t really up to letting that happen and after about ten minutes of “band on the run”, I just give up and force the draw.

So how am I learning all this? Did I download some game for my PC? Nope, it’s already on my Mac…for free. Chess comes with OS X and while my Windows brethren can play card games to their eyes become blood shot, I’m more into the finer things in life as is my Mac.

Like the Get a Mac ad for iLife states, you just get a lot more cool stuff with your Mac than you do with a PC. Sure Windows does come with a bit more than just the calculator and clock, but truth is, it really doesn’t come with much useful free stuff. I’m finding that the chess game that comes with the Mac is quite nice and powerful enough for my needs. I don’t need to hunt around the web for a freeware version on the PC (which I tried once a long time ago and and there really isn’t anything good out there.) In the end, it’s just good that I have a Mac and can sharpen my chess skills so I don’t get a whoppin’ from a nine year old.

Looks like after some changes to our server and CSS modification, all games but Keep Uppy were messed up or not even showing (poor Spank the Monkey.) Welp, we’ve got it all fixed and working again, so your gaming fun can once again be enjoyed right here at SvenOnTech!

Now the screen shot does show only 308 MPH and that is not our best here at SOT, but see how high you can spank that monkey. If memory serves us right, we have hit the 500+ MPH barrier…or was that another reader? Mmm, can’t say for sure. Maybe we’ll go back to playing the old school favorite, Pac Man.

One common complaint I hear from many iPod users is that the Artists section has too many redundancies in it. The most prevalent occurrence is an Artist featuring Some One. Rappers are famous for bringing on a huge posse and thus you get LL Cool J featuring Janet Jackson or Fat Joe featuring Ja Rule & Ashanti. Of course if you get enough of these featuring people going, Fat Joe will fatten up your Artist list and truth is, he’s only one artist. If you’re like me, having over 85 GB of music can make going through your artist list a bit tedious.

It would be nice if Apple added a feature that would show “Similar Artists” much like it’s wonderful “Show Duplicate Songs” feature. But you can get around this by simply searching for “featuring” in the Song field. For me, it brought up a large amount of songs that I then edited and moved the featuring mark to the song title which is common practice in liner notes. Within a few minutes, I reduced my Artist count down to 1741.

The next phase of reduction is going through all your classical music (if you have that.) Most classic works put the symphony or conductor down as the artist and then you, once again, get this bloated list. At this point a personal decision on how you’d like to handle this has to be made. If you’re more in tune to the conductor than the composer, then keep it as is. If you would rather keep everything together by composer, like I do, then go and find all your classical by sorting Genre by Classical and then make the changes. To keep the conductor in the meta file (so you can still do searches,) move their name to the Comments field.

These two changes will greatly reduce your scrolling the next time you look for LL Cool J’s song he did with Janet.