Tech Stuff Archives - Page 12 of 22

Kill A Watt EZ P4460 – Power Consumption Checker

I picked up the Kill A Watt EZ P4460 in order to see how much energy various appliances are using in our house. This little unit is great because it doesn’t lose its settings when unplugged (or the power goes out). It will keep track of the elapsed time and give you hourly, daily, weekly and annual consumption for whatever’s plugged into it. Great for things that cycle on and off (your fridge) or are used intermittently (like the hair drier which is hooked up to it now).

To make things easier, I have a short 3 prong extension cord attached to it so I can keep the meter in an easy to view spot while it’s in use so I can remember that it is there and check it periodically.

Georgia power is reasonably expensive, about 10.6 cents/kilowatt hour according to my bill, and I only expect it to get more expensive in the future. However, our energy bills seem to be reasonably modest, averaging about $115 per
month throughout the year so it’s not like this is a huge bite in our
wallet. But, even though almost all of our lighting is now compact fluorescent, I am sure there are areas where improvement can be had. I’d prefer not to waste energy if I can help it.

So, over the next few months I will be attaching the unit to whatever strikes my fancy and will let it sit for a few days to try to gauge consumption and cost.

To test it, I initially hooked it up to our CF tri-light lamp that Michelle uses most mornings and can see that consumes negligible power. I believe it was going to be 5 cents a year to operate (she only ever uses the lowest power setting anyway – about 13 watts).

I am anxious to see how our nearly 12 year-old fridge rates. Then on to the computers…

OK Things should be pretty much back to normal

I’ve pieced things together and have tried using as much “off the shelf” stuff as I can. It seems it all needs a little tweaking to do exactly what *I* want it to, but overall I’m pretty pleased with the results.

If you see anything odd, please let me know. I use Firefox as my browser as I can customize it to work the way I think. So my Internet explorer testing may be lacking on some of the more obscure aspects of my site.

I’m pretty excited about some of the new widgets that I’ve found. Most notably the “Related Posts” widget. When you open an actual post it will show items that it thinks are somewhat related both in the sidebar (useful for longer posts) and at the bottom of the current post.

I expect to keep tweaking things over the next few days until I get all of the info that I want up into the sidebar. So far I haven’t found anything that satisfactorily handles the rather over-long “Archives” listing. If you have any suggestions on that, let me know.

Fixing my broken WordPress Blog

If you don’t have an interest in the guts of WordPress or your WordPress blog isn’t broken, you can probably just skip this posting.

I had my own, fairly heavily customized theme based on the original “Kubric” theme from WordPress’ earlier days.

I also have a mish-mash of plugins that support insertion of “Gallery2” plus “Picasa” images into the blog and a bunch of other little nice-to-have functions.

A few days ago, my ISP decided to upgrade a bunch of things on my server that I seem to depend upon, PHP was upgraded, the Zend optimizer, etc. this plumb broke my site – all the text was there but absolutely none of the graphics or gross formatting (columns in particular) was there. It was like being back in the late 80’s on the web. 🙂
Any attempt to access the admin panels or to do anything except just look at the basic posting pages was met with an “Internal Server Error”

I realized quickly that the LunarServers ISP techs would be of no use to me so here is how I got back. I’m not 100% there yet, but the site is functional and be refining it over the weekend. You can bet I’ll be using much more standardized plugins and themes from now on.

I don’t know why it’s so hard but I have absolutely no idea what version of WordPress I was running before. I think it’s around 2.3 but I can’t seem to find a way to tell just from looking at the files.

First, I backed up all of my WordPress files – I always keep a copy of my website on my computer synched nightly with the server version. I backed these files up to a safe, temporary location.

Then I blew away all of my WordPress files except those in wp-images. I knew I’d need some of the files in wp-content eventually but I wanted to be as clean as possible to get my site up and then pull in my older content into a fresh install.

Then I laid down the new WordPress files (2.6.1 – it says so on the zip file 🙂 ).

I went and both created a new database for this test and backed up my old database… just in case.

I set up wp-config.php as described in the 5-minute installation document (and in the wp-config.php file itself) – I didn’t copy over my old wp-config.php ’cause I knew there were new elements in the 2.6.1 version in support of new security features in wordpress.

I keep WordPress in a folder off of the root so I need to specify it when I invoke the following scripts, you may not need to do this or you need to specify the name you gave your folder.

I used the http://mysite.com/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php script to initialize the site and the “new” site worked just fine. This proved to me that the issue was not with WordPress so much as the stuff I’d added to it.

I went back and changed my wp-config.php file to point to my old database. This resulted in a blank screen when I tried to invoke my site. No errors (either on screen or in the error_log file in the WordPress folder).

There were tables that I could see (using phpMyAdmin) in the new
database that were different from those in my existing database. So I used the http://mysite.com/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php script to upgrade the database design.

This still didn’t help. Remember that I was not able to disable my plugins (couldn’t get to the admin panels) before all this started. And my theme folder no longer existed on the server.

So I was thinking about trying to migrate my data from my old (not working) database to the new one. But most of the suggestions involved having a working WordPress installation- even for the older ones you could get a plugin that could be used to export your data. So that didn’t help me much.

I tried playing with my database by deleting all of the items listed in the “options” table for “active_plugins” and adding a row for “current_theme” (which did not exist in my old file but I could plainly see in the new installation’s db). But none of this worked so I backed out those changes.

Finally it struck me that my admin panels might be working now with the new WordPress install. They did!

So I opened them and walked through most of the panels, especially the design and plugin panels and just saved them. Tweaking here and there as I went along.

For the plugins I was informed that all of the plugins were being deactivated because the associated files could not be found (since I had removed them), Yes!

For the theme, this is most likely the cause of my blank screen, I explicitly selected the default them and activated it and *presto* the site was working again.

Admittedly I have a road ahead of me re-customizing, but I think I’ll just use plugins now rather than writing my own stuff since it’s WAY too much work trying to keep up with the various wordpress releases and dependencies.

Hopefully somebody else in a similar position will see this and can take advantage of what I ended up doing.

Sorry for the messy site

My ISP (LunarPages) decided it would be just swell to go ahead and update a bunch of my server’s software without notifying me. It turns out my site relied rather heavily on the older versions of that software.

I have no idea what actually broke the site but I’ve had to do some work to upgrade the WordPress software and the database behind it and had to disable anything even slightly fancy including my formatting and sidebar.

I’ll take this opportunity to do some housekeeping so stay tuned for changes galore!

The perfect photo software – (hint: I haven’t found it yet)

In trying to transfer my pictures from my camera to my computer and then, for some images, to flickr there are several challenges.

First, I want my pictures to remain organized in some fashion so that I can work with them at the file/folder level and still easily figure out what pictures belong where.

For example, all my photographs are in a folder called “Photo Album”. Under this there are folders representing each year (2001, 2002, etc.) and under these are the actual image folders with dates. I want my pictures consolidated somewhat so I actually use the date the pictures were downloaded (or the date of the last picture taken) to group them together (i.e. 20080615 – Marc’s Birthday Party). This has worked very well for me for the past decade.

Second, I access my pictures using several different kinds of software, some more sophisticated than others, and I want the images to be in the correct orientation in all of them. Pictures taken in a portrait mode need to show up as portrait and those taken landscape need to show up as landscape.
In the earlier digital days, before I had a camera that recorded this information in the EXIF orientation tag, it was all manual and I rotated the pictures after I downloaded them manually using IRFANVIEW, Picasa or, more recently, Windows Life Photo Gallery.
Now that I’ve acquired a Nikon D60 that writes out the EXIF orientation tag, I find that some software honors the tag and some doesn’t. Windows Live Photo Gallery for some idiotic reason doesn’t. Screen-Paver, easily my most used application if you consider how many hours a day and how many pictures I view with it, also doesn’t recognize EXIF orientation tags. So the images end up sideways in the forum where I, and others, are most likely to be viewing them.

Third, I tag my pictures. Sometimes I tag with situations, but mostly with the names of people found within them. I have found this invaluable over the years and can quickly find pictures of people that I have across my collection in seconds.

So I’m trying to pick my way through the software available to accomplish the above. Ideally I’d like to use ONE piece of software and use it for everything but each application has great strengths and great flaws. As of this writing I *don’t* have a simple solution but I wanted to lay out the issues and see if any ideas jump out. If anybody happens to read this and gets some ideas for themselves, that’s a bonus. Heck, if anybody can jump in and offer some solutions or software that would address some of the issues, that would be an even better bonus!

Here is what I have available to me at the moment and why:

IRFANVIEW:

This is the default image viewing software on any PC that I use.

Pros

Freeware
Very robust, ability to view pretty much any picture format,
Walks through directories of images easily,
Can do basic manipulations,
Can do batch manipulations.

Cons

Can’t do batch rotations based on EXIF Orientation data,
Keyword updates (EXIF and IPTC) are awkward, must drill down through menus to get to these,
EXIF information appears to be incomplete – can’t see descriptive keywords at all.

Windows Live Photo Gallery:

This is my primary organization / labeling / bulk viewing tool on my main PCs

Pros

Freeware,
Superior tag manipulation ability (tags are intelligently suggested and can easily be updated on the right hand side of the screen, no drill down required),
Integrated flickr upload tool (after installing the flickr tool),
Excellent red-eye correction. The best I’ve come across so far,
Will optionally auto-rotate images on import (permanently rotates them).

Cons

Does not honor EXIF orientation on existing images – so portrait images remain in landscape orientation if they were imported by another application,
Does not initiate update of IPTC keywords (but will maintain them if they already exist),
Updating description info (used as caption in flickr) is cumbersome and only accessible via image properties dialog. Uses “Title” attribute for this purpose so that your flickr “title” is actually the image filename and the Windows Live Photo Gallery “title” becomes the description (caption) in flickr.

iTAG:

I use this software to easily add Title and Caption information to pictures that I want to upload to flickr. The advantage of adding this information via iTAG rather than on flickr or using the flickr Uploader tool is that the information remains a permanent part of the images files for future reference.
I started using it primarily for its ability to initiate/maintain use of IPTC keyword tags where Windows Live Photo Gallery was falling down.

Pros

Freeware,
Easy to manipulate Title and Description information (that will be used by flickr). You can easily and quickly see what is set for each image on the left hand side,
Recognizes existing EXIF keyword tags and will save both EXIF and IPTC Keyword tags.

Cons

A little rough around the edges – frequently need to restart to review another folder,
“Tag Bucket” consists only of those tags available from the currently shown images – making consistency in spelling, capitalization, pluralization and just naming somewhat challenging,
Completely dynamic, rebuilds thumbnails and any other ordinarily “catalog” information each time you access a folder which can be a little slow,
Need to explicitly save any changes you make – so making a change and then using an image in another application won’t have the expected updates. Unusual for tags (which update immediately in any other app I’ve used).

flickr Uploader:

I like being able to review all the images and, if necessary, assign them to different sets and assign different levels of access BEFORE initiating my upload.

Pros

Freeware,
Can create new sets, multiple ones if necessary, as part of a larger upload,
Can clearly see titles, descriptions, tags and permissions before upload.

Cons

Doesn’t recognize EXIF keyword tags.

Picasa:

I used this for quite a while before shifting to Windows Live Photo Gallery. I have not used the most recent version (have not used since October 2007)

Pros

Freeware,
Google product (I’m a big Google fan),
Easy to use, relatively fast,
Redeye correction was the reason I started using Picasa in the first place. It’s very good but the Windows Live Photo Gallery redeye correction is better IMHO.

Cons

Keywords were somewhat cumbersome to maintain – separate dialog required,
Not integrated with flickr.

Screen Paver:

I have been using this as my screensaver for YEARS. Not so much because I believe that my screens will burn in – the new technologies are not so prone to this – but because I absolutely love having my image collection displaying all the time. My main computer is in my kitchen so having my photo album displaying while we have guests over is a great source of conversation. But I love seeing images from old trips or adventures popping up throughout the day when I’m walking past my computer to get a glass of water.
I’ve been using Screen Paver since my Win95 days and have yet to find anything that can rival it in robustness and utility.
The Google Photos screensaver just doesn’t work how I want (can’t select all my folders, can’t pause or go forward or backward through images at will).
The Windows Live Photo Gallery screensaver simply doesn’t work on my machine (can only select a single folder, screen goes black and nothing ever shows up on it).
I’ve tried others through the years and they always crash or are too limited.

Pros

Very inexpensive ($13),
Always works,
Can select multiple folders,
Option to automatically pull in contents of all sub folders,
Can optionally play music (I never use this function),
Can disable all those annoying transition effects,
Can pause, jump back or move forward through images,
I have over 10,000 images in the folders that Screen Paver goes through and it has no problem with this,
You can configure it to display path and filename on the screen (which I do) so I can quickly find interesting items that show up on the screen,
Multi-Monitor support (as of 4.4b images are sized correctly on both).

Cons

Does not recognize EXIF Orientation flag,
While it supports multi-monitors, same image is shown on both.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6:

This is a new product for me. I’ve only had it for a week so far and I have to say I find it very confusing.
My experience with Photoshop years ago (needed it for a small project) was similar. I think I’m going to find the editor useful but the organizer appears to be nearly unusable.

Pros

Aggressive and robust photo collection – No hesitation trying to grab images from your camera,
Healing tool(s) and the very, very few tools I’ve figured out so far are staggeringly good,
Ability to rename photos on import has some potential.

Cons

VERY steep learning curve for all aspects of this product
Automated redeye reduction is terrible, leaves black eyes on most of the images touched,
Ordinary redeye reduction does not hold a candle to Picasa and Windows Live Photo Gallery’s,
Tries to get photos from EVERYTHING that connects to it (even wants to grab them off my iPod while I’m syncing with iTunes). I can see that there are profiles associated with this behavior but, as with anything else I’ve tried with Photoshop Elements, it’s going to require 45 minutes of research to figure out how to set this up,
Adding keyword tags is pretty obtuse, there may be simpler ways to do it than I’ve tried but so far it’s much more manual than it needs to be,
Renaming of photos on import from camera has option to name them with dates and then a counter. But stupidly counter doesn’t reset for each date so you can have 20080605_0001, 20080605_0002, 20080609_0003 etc. (where the 0003 should logically be 0001). Again, maybe something I’m missing but I *did* spend a little time on this as my base organization is important to me and I wasn’t able to make this work to my satisfaction.
I still haven’t figured out how to refresh the current view. If I delete images at the OS level or with another application, Photoshop Elements still shows it (’cause it’s in its catalog) but lets you know it can’t find the physical file. If the file is gone, please stop showing the picture to me.

Nikon Transfer (sorry no link that I can find to this software):

This came with my Nikon and allows me to import my photos and, optionally, add some information to them.

Pros

Free (with the purchase of the camera presumably)

Cons

Does not save IPTC info
Does not rotate images on import (con for me, anyway)

So, in looking at the above, it looks like my strategy is going to be:

Import photos from camera using Windows Live Photo Gallery so that the images will be properly rotated and saved in the correct orientation so ALL other software can take advantage of this.
Use Windows Live Photo Gallery to preview all images to discard bad or blurry images off hand
Use iTag to “Touch” all images with a dummy Keyword tag – maybe I’ll just put a “Taken by Marc Bourassa” tag or something generic on all images just to initiate IPTC Keyword tags.
Use iTag to compose any Title and Description information
For quick, one-off uploads to flickr I’ll use the integrated publishing tool in Windows Live Photo Gallery.
For more extensive uploads I’ll go with the flickr Uploader.
Simple image editing will be done with Windows Live Photo Gallery.
More extensive editing will be done with Photoshop Elements. I’m looking forward to using this product but Adobe REALLY needs to steal some folks away from Apple so they can learn about interface design…
Most viewing at home will continue to be done using Screen Paver as it keeps my old memories alive.
For quickly viewing new images downloaded from email or that I come across in folders, Irfanview is the way to go.

Task Scheduler in Windows Vista Home Premium SP1

In a word, blows.

I have a backup job that uses the built-in task scheduler. Before SP1 the task scheduler would work just once and that’s it, I forget the actual failure message but I just had to stop using it. When SP1 came out I heard that many things were improved and I tried it again, it worked like a champ – or so I thought – when my machine is rebooted (maybe even when I just logoff – but I never bother doing that) subsequent runs would fail with “logon failure: unknown user name or bad password. (0x8007052E)” showing as the Last Logon result.

My Backup software is SyncBackSE, in the KB they offer up some free alternatives (I don’t really want to have to pay for something that should be part of the OS – and not be defective). I’m going to try “System Scheduler” from “splinterware software solutions”.

Problem with Firefox entering endless loop when trying to load image or PDF

I recently began having this issue and it was getting pretty annoying. This was with Firefox 2.0.0.14 (most current non beta) on Vista.

It turns out that I had recently allowed Skype to install it’s add-on that highlights phone numbers to ease making calls from your computer using Skype. I came upon the solution in this discussion.

Uninstalling the Skype add-on resolved the issue for me.

Sluggish Optical Mouse

This morning I noticed that my mouse (Wireless Intellimouse Explorer 2.0) was acting a little wonky. When moving the mouse smoothly over the mousepad, the cursor would go about 3/4 of the expected distance and then pause and then maybe go a little further. All the while I was continuously moving the mouse.

It was as if I had one of those old mice with the balls in them that were so annoying when they got dirty.

I opened up my mouse applet in the control panel and Battery level was good and the signal quality was high. I tried changing the mouse pad too. But nothing seemed to help.

I’ve had this mouse for about 4 years now and it has been great. So I was not enthusiastic that it might be failing me now.

I found this article which eventually clued me in that I should try hitting the “connect” button (little oval button on top of the mouse’s receiver that plugs into my computer). Which solved the problem.

I recall now that yesterday evening I bumped the mouse and knocked it off of my desk. Frankly I’m surprised I don’t do that more often. Anyway that must have jarred it sufficiently that it needed to “resync” with the receiver and all was good.

Just throwing this up here in case anybody else runs into this issue.

How to fix choosing the wrong CDDB album when ripping CDs in iTunes?

Recall I run Vista Home Premium and am using iTunes 7.5 as I write this.

I’m currently ripping the latest Harry Potter audiobook so that I can listen to it on my iPod. For most discs I am prompted to choose which “album” I wish to use. For consistency I am going with each track named as a chapter/letter (i.e. 1a, 1b, etc.).

Somebody, with a different numbering scheme inadvertently used the identical album naming convention so, for one of my discs I had to guess (hey 50% odds, not bad right?) when I chose the “other album” I ended up with different chapter names.

Now, when I pull the CD out and re-insert it, iTunes has locally recorded the incorrect track names for me and associated them with some unique identifier on the disc. How to remove the association between an CD and the CDDB album information once you’ve selected it?

Since I don’t really use CDs except to rip them to my collection, losing that information is not a big deal for me. So I just shut down iTunes, went to “C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\iTunes” and deleted the “CD Info.cidb” file.

Start up iTunes, insert the disk and *presto* I’m again prompted for the album. I will, of course, be prompted for every audio CD I stick in my CD player going forward, but again, that’s not an issue for me.

How to rip an audiobook to iTunes so it has bookmarks

Recall I won’t debate the ethics of ripping and sharing CDs in this post. Suffice it to say that folks who know me know my stand on this issue.

Where I can get audiobooks already in MP3 format I just do that. It saves a LOT of hassle. I even will get them in DRM’d format as I don’t tend to listen to audiobooks more than once.

But there is still a lot of content out there that you can get only on CD that I want to listen to on my iPod (I don’t have a CD player in my car, nor do I intend to get one), so I consider it fair use to purchase the CD and rip it for my own use on my iPod.

Steps:

I tend to listen to lengthy audiobooks (ones that I really wouldn’t have the time to read) so they often have many CDs. In iTunes I go to Edit > Preferences… then click on the “Advanced” tab and then on the importing sub-tab I temporarily set:
“On CD Insert” = “Import CD and Eject”,
“Import using” = “AAC Encoder”,
“Setting” = “High Quality (128 kbps)” <– personal preference, you can set for “Spoken Podcast” but I like the higher sound quality better.

Start putting your CDs in and, with luck, you’ll be offered albums from CDDB that will label your tracks for you. When there is a conflict (sometimes different CD tracks are uploaded for the same CDs – usually by folks with differing ideas about how the tracks should be labeled), you’ll be offered a choice of available albums. You aren’t given anything more than the album name (no track details) at this stage, so pick one and make sure that you pick the same “style” from now on so that all your tracks will be labeled consistently. I’ll post a subsequent article about how to correct an incorrect choice in a few days.

Once you’ve pulled in all of your CDs fire up xnview (a free graphic and photoviewer) and navigate to where your tracks are located. If you don’t know where this is, right-click on the track in iTunes and choose “Show in Windows Explorer” (sorry Mac users). You may find that your tracks have been stored in more than one folder depending on the naming that you got from CDDB. In xnview, select all of the *.m4a files (aac encoded) and right click to select “Rename…”.
You’ll be presented with a dialog titled “Batch Rename” (as of xnview version 1.91.6). In the upper right corner check the “Extension” box and type “m4b”. You’ll see all the files you selected with the old name and the proposed new names showing at the bottom of this dialog. Click “Rename”.

Back in iTunes, select all of the tracks that you’ve just renamed and delete them (you’ll see little exclamation points appearing beside them as iTunes figures out that it can no longer find the files).
Then select File > Add Folder to Library… and choose the folders with the renamed files in them.

For ease of listening I create a smart playlist for these audiobooks:
I usually use the “Album Name contains” and use some significant part of the audiobook name
I also specify that the play count < 1
Make sure you sort by the track name. If you end up with a bad sorting order (sometimes happens with > 9 chapters), consider making two smart playlists and then use the Rating to separate them – one star rating for the first 9 chapters, none for the rest and then add this as a criteria for the smarplaylist.

Then, when I’m driving (my most frequent listening venue) all I need to do after I’ve selected the playlist and listened to the playlist starting from the beginning. If, in “settings” on the iPod, I have “Shuffle” set to “songs” then my iPod will stop after each track (my preferred method). I hit the middle button 4 times and I get the next track (the “count” parameter above excludes the one(s) I’ve already listened to). If I have “Shuffle” set to “none” then the iPod will play each track in sequence. This is different between my older generation iPod (which does not refresh the list dynamically) and my current one (iPod Video – 30 GB) so YMMV.

Hopefully you find this useful.