I’ve just recently started watching Battlestar Galactica and I was astounded to learn of the many sort of off shoots of the main seasons. So, with that in mind, here is a watch order as I’ve have come to understand it for anyone interested in watching it.

Miniseries

• Part 01
• Part 02

Season 1

• S01E01 - 33
• S01E02 - Water
• S01E03 - Bastille Day
• S01E04 - Act of Contrition
• S01E05 - You Can’t Go Home Again
• S01E06 - Litmus
• S01E07 - Six Degrees of Separation
• S01E08 - Flesh and Bone
• S01E09 - Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down
• S01E10 - The Hand of God
• S01E11 - Colonial Day
• S01E12 - Kobol’s Last Gleaming Part 01
• S01E13 - Kobol’s Last Gleaming Part 02

Season 2

• S02E01 - Scattered
• S02E02 - Valley of Darkness
• S02E03 - Fragged
• S02E04 - Resistance
• S02E05 - The Farm
• S02E06 - Home Part 01
• S02E07 - Home Part 02
• S02E08 - Final Cut
• S02E09 - Flight of the Phoenix
• S02E10 - Pegasus

Season 2.5

• S02.5E11 - Resurrection Ship Part 01
• S02.5E12 - Resurrection Ship Part 02
• S02.5E13 - Epiphanies
• S02.5E14 - Black Market
• S02.5E15 - Scar
• S02.5E16 - Sacrifice
• S02.5E17 - The Captain’s Hand

Razor Flashbacks – Webisodes

• 01 - Day 4,571
• 02 - The Hangar
• 03 - Operation Raptor Talon
• 04 - Free Fall
• 05 - The Lab
• 06 - Survivors
• 07 - Escape

Razor – The BSG movie

Season 2.5 (continued)

• S02.5E18 - Downloaded
• S02.5E19 - Lay Down Your Burdens Part 01
• S02.5E20 - Lay Down Your Burdens Part 02

The Resistance – Webisodes

• 01 - Webisode 1
• 02 - Webisode 2
• 03 – Webisode 3
• 04 - Webisode 4
• 05 - Webisode 5
• 06 - Webisode 6
• 07 - Webisode 7
• 08 - Webisode 8
• 09 - Webisode 9
• 10 - Webisode 10

Season 3

• S03E01 – Occupation
• S03E02 - Precipice
• S03E03 - Exodus Part 01
• S03E04 - Exodus Part 02
• S03E05 - Collaborators
• S03E06 - Torn
• S03E07 - A Measure of Salvation
• S03E08 - Hero
• S03E09 - Unfinished Business
• S03E10 - The Passage
• S03E11 - The Eye of Jupiter
• S03E12 - Rapture
• S03E13 - Taking a Break From All Your Worries
• S03E14 - The Woman King
• S03E15 - A Day in the Life
• S03E16 - Dirty Hands
• S03E17 - Maelstrom
• S03E18 - The Son Also Rises
• S03E19 - Crossroads Part 01
• S03E20 - Crossroads Part 02

Season 4

• S04E01 – He That Believeth In Me
• S04E02 - Six of One
• S04E03 -The Ties That Bind
• S04E04 - Escape Velocity
• S04E05 - The Road Less Traveled
• S04E06 - Faith
• S04E07 - Guess What’s Coming to Dinner?
• S04E08 - Sine Qua Non
• S04E09 - The Hub
• S04E10 - Revelations

Season 4.5

• S04.5E11 - Sometimes a Great Notion

The Face of the Enemy – Webisodes

• 01 – Webisode 1
• 02 - Webisode 2
• 03 - Webisode 3
• 04 - Webisode 4
• 05 - Webisode 5
• 06 - Webisode 6
• 07 - Webisode 7
• 08 - Webisode 8
• 09 - Webisode 9
• 10 - Webisode 10

Season 4.5 (continued)

• S04.5E12 - A Disquiet Follows My Soul
• S04.5E12 - The Oath
• S04.5E14 - Blood on the Scales
• S04.5E15 - No Exit

The Plan – The second BSG movie

Season 4.5 (continued)

• S04.5E16 - Deadlock
• S04.5E17 - Someone to Watch Over Me
• S04.5E18 - Islanded In a Stream of Stars
• S04.5E19 - Daybreak Part 01
• S04.5E20 – Daybreak Part 02

Caprica (Spin-off set 58 years before the events of BSG)

Season 1

• S01E01 – Pilot
• S01E02 – Rebirth
• S01E03 - Reins of a Waterfall
• S01E04 - Gravedancing
• S01E05 - There Is Another Sky
• S01E06 - Know Thy Enemy
• S01E07 - The Imperfections of Memory
• S01E08 - Ghosts in the Machine
• S01E09 - End of the Line
• S01E10 - Unvanquished
• S01E11 – Retribution
• S01E12 - Things We Lock Away
• S01E13 - False Labor
• S01E14 - Blowback
• S01E15 - The Dirteaters
• S01E16 - The Heavens Will Rise
• S01E17 - Here Be Dragons
• S01E18 - Apotheosis

I’m writing this post to share an incident that involved a friend of mine and the subsequent hi-jacking of his Hotmail account as well as his Facebook account, which indirectly involved me and everyone in his Hotmail contact list.

Earlier this week I received an email from him…let’s read:

I’m writing this with tears in my eyes,my family and I came down here to Liverpool,United Kingdom for a short vacation unfortunately we were mugged at the park of the hotel where we stayed,all cash,credit card and cell were stolen off us but luckily for us we still have our passports with us.

We’ve been to the embassy and the Police here but they’re not helping issues at all and our flight leaves in less than hours from now but having problem settling the hotel bills and the hotel manager won’t let us leave until we settle the bills,I’m freaked out at the moment.wondering if you could help us with a quick loan,promise to refund it as soon as i return back home.i promise

Reading this, I was unsure if it was my friend or not. We were pretty good friends in high school, which for me was more than 10 years ago, and had since only kept in contact through Facebook. It didn’t really seem like him, but not wanting to be a jerk in case it was him, I waited to reply. I wanted to check his Facebook page for more info as I didn’t realize he’d made a trek to Liverpool. Maybe I missed something.

While I was busy checking that out, “he” messaged me. It was the same sort of stuff the email stated. He was in Liverpool and he needed money. Before I could get anything meaningful out of the convo, he signed off. I sat dumbfounded and wrote this simple reply to his email:

yo man, wtf?

The reply which told me for sure it wasn’t him:

I’m so glad you replied back,i cant call or receive right now,due to the muggers have stolen away my mobile phone and i dont have access to the hotel caling facilities due to my bills as accumulated, I have nothing left on me right now and I was lucky to have my Life and passport with me it would have been worst if they had made away with my passports.Well i need a quick favor from you, I was wondering if you can lend me $1,500USD, i will appreciate what ever you can assist me with so that i can sort the hotel bills and get a cab to the Airport. You can have it wired to my name via Western Union. I promise to pay you back as soon as I get back home. Here’s my info below

Name – ****** *************
Location – 69 Lord Street Liverpool, L2 1TL,United Kingdom

I still have my passport so I can use it as identification, e-mail me the transfer details and the confirmation number include the amount
sent. Please let me know if you heading to Western Union..

It was a scam, obviously. Every single person in his contact list received this email and I’m sure at least one person thought very hard about actually sending him money.

This raises a bigger question-how did this person gain access to his password? He admittedly used the same password for his email and Facebook, but stated that his chosen password shouldn’t have been easily guessed even by people who knew him. Perhaps he provided extremely simple answers to his security questions (which incidentally I didn’t think of until just now), or he had some sort of key logger, or perhaps, and this is my theory, he had registered on a site that wasn’t secure and his password was lifted from there.

The bottom line is that we need to be more vigilant when it comes to internet security. With more and more types of viruses, spyware, etc., coming out everyday, it’s only a matter of time before something like this happens to the rest of us.

Being a huge fan of Lifehacker.com, here are some ways you can help protect yourself. I would have outlined them all here, but I didn’t decide until writing this post that I would include the emails that got sent my way.

What are some horror stories you guys have involving a situation like this?

Note – In order to receive any kind of phone support for Hotmail, one must have an X-box Live account. This seems kind of odd, but they simply will not talk to you about a free Hotmail account over the phone. Since X-box Live is tied to Hotmail via your Windows Live ID, it might be worth signing up for one even if you don’t need one just in case you need a situation like this resolved. You do not need an X-box to sign up for this. It’s a free account, which is also used to track your achievements with Game for Windows Live for your PC. Bottom line-if you use Hotmail, sign up for this regardless if you play video games or not.

Laptops run really hot, especially when gaming. You know it, I know it, the people suffering from Toasted Skin Syndrome know it. Laptops run hot because of inefficient cooling. Most intake air from the bottom and blow it out the side and since your laptop sits only a fraction of an inch off whatever surface it’s on, it doesn’t get the air it needs to be properly cooled. Couple that with a dirty fan and you’ve got some major overheating issues. This tutorial aims to help you build you very own laptop cooling pad with things you may already have around the house. You may find that you can buy an already assembled cooling pad cheaper, but when possible, I prefer to do things myself. That and after reading all the reviews on various cooling pads, I couldn’t come up with one I was completely satisfied with spending my money on.

Tools and Supplies:

• Heat shrink of various sizes or electrical tape if you don’t have any heat shrink
• Solder
• Soldering Iron
• 5v/0.35A Computer fans as needed
• A rack of some sort to mount the fans (preferably something that sits a full inch or two off the table)
• Unneeded USB Cable
• Small zip ties for wire routing purposes
• Razor blade or electrician’s knife

The first thing you are going to want to do is find a rack to mount everything to. I used a freezer drawer from a fridge that my brother and I had to cut apart because it wouldn’t fit out my door. Of course, I had to make some adjustments to get it to work for this purpose, but the finished product was satisfactory (I used a dremel tool to cut away parts I didn’t want). You should try to find a rack where the bars that make the rack up are about an inch apart. This will help greatly when mounting your fans as the small, 5v ones are about 2 inches square.

I realize that this next section here would benefit from pictures greatly, but as I said above, I didn’t take pics of the process itself, only of the finished product.

Fit your laptop to the rack you have so you can mark where you’ll need the fans placed. I placed a fan everywhere I could see the motherboard through the holes in the bottom, which was 3 places. You might have more, you might have less and it might be overkill to place 3 fans on this fan, but I had 3 lying around and thus decided to use 3 fans.

Take your USB cable and cut off the end that doesn’t connect to your computer. Inside you’ll find four wires. We are only concerned about the black and red ones. The black is the ground and the red is the 5v power line. If the wires aren’t colored like this, you’ll need a multi-meter to test for ground and power while the cable is plugged in to your computer. Tie back and insulate the unused wires with heat shrink or tape. This is accomplished by simply folding the wire over and putting heat shrink over it. I usually just fold the wire over at the halfway point. When you are putting the shrink or tape on, make sure the conductor of the wire isn’t exposed. I’m not telling you to just cut them off because we want to ensure that the wires will not touch anything.

Next go ahead and cut the connectors off your fans. Hopefully you bought fans with only two wires, because there are some that have a third wire. What you’ll need to do now is tie all the fans together to the USB cable. Go ahead and slip a 2 or three-inch piece of shrink onto the USB cable now because you won’t be able to this after the next step. Be sure not to heat it up just yet.

Solder all the red wires together and put shrink over the solder joint. Do the same for the black wires. Slide that peice of shrink I talked about earlier over the whole thing now.

The result should look something like the picture to the left. For those of you who are using electrical tape, the same principles apply.

Feel free to go ahead and test your set up now to make sure it works before you start mounting anything. You don’t want to mount everything only to find that the setup won’t work.

Use your zip ties to mount all the fans to the rack. You could also pretty it up by routing all the wiring like I have done in the picture below with zip ties. Alternatively, you could use your electrical tape to wrap the wires in; entirely up to you. At this point, you may want to consider adding some feet to the bottom of your cooler so that it doesn’t scratch what it’s sitting on. I used the rubber bottoms from house pool cue sticks. You may also want to put some rubber or foam down where the laptop will sit on the cooler, without blocking the fans of course.

This setup, when plugged in, will run constantly and at full speed, so make sure you’re plugged in at all times because it will kill your battery. Also, while I haven’t done it to mine yet, you could set up a way to control the speed of your fans and a way to turn it off and on. The voltage outputs in a USB port cannot be controlled with software, so you’ll likely want to use a 1k Ohm potentiometer for speed control and a single pole, single throw switch for on/off control, though I guess if you turn the pot all the way down, the fans will be off. I’d rather have a dedicated switch for it, though.

And that’s about it. I really enjoyed building this thing and it works beautifully. This setup literally cools my laptop to below room temperature, and I can now enjoy playing PC games for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time.

DISCLAIMER: I used high-end AVC ball-bearing fans for this project which normally go for $10-15 bucks a piece, so I can’t guarantee you’ll have the same results as I did using cheaper fans. Also be sure you get the proper fans for this, because fans that require more than 5 volts won’t work. So no PC case fans for this.