Anything to do with computers or anything of a similarly helpful / confounding nature
I just added a little plugin called “subscribe-to-comments” that gives you the option to receive an email whenever someone leaves a comment to a particular blog post.
Not that there are gobs of comments on this blog, most folks seem to just send me emails directly. But there are the occasional posts that do garner some comments and, if you wish to keep up with them easily, this should help.
Just look for the little checkbox at the bottom of the blog entry page.
My friend King sent this and I thought it was pretty interesting.
— From King —
If you don’t like the first link, give-up on the rest because they are all
on the same topic.http://www.econvergence.net
/electro.htm http://www.windstreampower.com
/humanpower/ppg.html http://www.voanews.com/english
/2007-03-11-voa14.cfm http://www.gulland.ca/homenerg
y/lindabike.htm http://users.erols.com/mshaver
/bikegen.htm http://www.otherpower.com
/otherpower_experiments _bicycle.html
— End From King —
I was biting my tongue when I saw the “average person can generate 150 to 200 watts of power” in that first article. Maybe if you set them on fire…
One of the later articles was talking about 50 watts which made MUCH more sense. My exercycle has a “watts” reading and, if it’s at all accurate, 200 watts is a LOT of exertion.
I recall at the Science center that you could watch yourself on that TV, I was never 100% sure how much you were powering, was it just the TV or was it the TV camera as well? With modern LCD panels and cool new CCD technology I imagine it would take a lot less effort now, but even the most stalwart pedaler would only last in the 10’s of seconds.
It’s a neat idea, I don’t think many of those “green” suggestions (the cool bikes in the later articles) are ever going to be to practical in our weather region. We’ve mentally (socially) evolved beyond the desire to get soaked or frozen trying to get to work.
Heck, even car pools seem to be an impossibility nowadays, especially with flex hours and whatnot.
** Update 2007-03-30 ** Just had an alarm that was supposed to go off at 7:30 pm this morning go off at 7:30 am. Checked the iPAQ clock and see that it’s set correctly. Still gathering clues..
** end update **
I’ve had this unit for a little over 4 and a half years and it’s performed admirably for all that time. Screen is still great and battery life is still wonderful.
When the useless 2007 DST change hit I went out and found a fix on the HP site to apply that was supposed to help. What it did was correct the time on my unit but messed up every single appointment in the 3 week period between the old and new DST start dates. Fortunately I didn’t have anything scheduled in November so that won’t be an issue. I ended up manually readjusting all my entries for the affected period. The worst was the “all day events” since they bled forward a day and ended up spanning two days.
Now I’m *pretty* sure that my alarms were working after that patch. A couple of days ago I noticed that my alarms were no longer going off. Not just not sounding, but nothing – no alert on the screen, no sound and no power light flashing.
The only change that I recall making was about a week or so ago I changed the flashing powerlight option to be “infinite” instead of whatever it was before (just flash for 10 or 15 minutes).
Today I realized that my alarms were awry so I went and changed the powerlight setting back to 10 minutes and created some test meetings. The ONLY thing that happens now is that the powerlight begins to flash. Still no screen alert or audible alarm. This makes me think that there is a bug that I’ve somehow triggered by changing this setting in the first place.
Of course I’ve reset the unit but I haven’t taken any major action yet. Also sound is working fine, I can manually play the alarm sound and it sounds great. In the settings I’ve indicated that I only want sounds for notifications and the like. It’s been like that for ages. Anybody out there who has some suggestions or ideas I’d like to hear from you.
I finally finished my move from POWWEB to Lunarpages as my web hosting provider.
Wow! What a difference. The site virtually hums now. It’s snappy and *much* faster than it was before. Back to getting on with business as usual.
Please swing by The Gallery and peruse the pictures. They now will render in a reasonable amount of time and not at the glacial pace that they used to.
Yes! Only took 30 years to get this technology! It will be VERY interesting to see what kind of side-effects are caused by installing this on a multi-media system. Or maybe some of your more jarring music can afford to be “tamed”.
TV Volume Regulator Keeps Those Loud Commercials on an Even Keel – Gizmodo
After going around and around with POWWEB about the slow response of my website, I finally decided to move to a different host. Here I am at Lunarpages and the speed is blazingly fast. The acid test will be if the site is still this fast during normal business hours tomorrow.
The downside is that I still have some configuration issues to overcome, hence no pictures on the site right now. But I expect to get those kinks worked out over the next day or so. Everything else appears to be operating as per normal.
Let me know if you see anything odd. Upgrade was done from about 7:30 to 8:30 pm today (Saturday February 24).
One pet peeve that I have with Google is their seeming inability to actually finish stuff.
Maybe it’s the nature of the Internet or a web 2.0 thing, but it seems that so few of Google’s wonderful offerings develop to the point where you can finally commit to using them and get rid of other paradigms.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Google and what they’ve done for Search and email. Their Gmail product is the best on or offline interface that I’ve yet encountered, and I was a die-hard Outlook user before that. (MR/2 before that, Lotus Notes at work).
The problem is, I use a PDA when I’m away from home. An iPAQ 3955 ig you’re interested. And the best PIM for syncing this device is Outlook. So my calendaring is in Outlook, my tasks are in Outlook and my Contacts are all in Outlook.
I don’t know what world most of the wireless PDA aficionados live in today, but it isn’t mine. I do not have Wi-Fi access most places that I go and I haven’t found a PDA-based calendar that can hold a candle to “Pocket Informant” on my iPAQ (well, maybe DateBK4 but that was in the heyday of Palm devices..).
I also use a Blackberry since I support these devices at work, their calendaring is staid and reliable but not very good for planning.
Google has a great contacts scheme in Gmail. Why can I not sync them with Outlook? Heck, Google owns ORKUT, why can’t they sync with each other and THEN with Outlook?
I also am enamored of Google’s calendaring app, but I have no way of getting the information from it to my iPAQ. Again, Google has created a kick-ass interface and then does not provide sufficient functionality to allow me to take advantage of it. It has to sync with Outlook in order for my iPAQ to have it available for me. It’s been out there for over a year now (nearly 2??) and can do some spiffy things, but still cannot do something as basic as sync with Outlook.
I just tried using “Remote Calendars” and “Companionlink” over the weekend to see if either was up to the task. Never mind that Google is in perpetual Beta so neither of these offerings are able to guarantee that they will continue to work flawlessly as Google’s products are tweaked. At least they are trying to bridge the gap.
“Remote Calendars” simply doesn’t work on my system – I have the feeling it’s either a conflict with GDS (ironic) or an old plug-in called lookout that I used to use with Outlook. And the “Companionlink” offering, which installed and worked right out of the box (so to speak) started duplicating some (but not all) calendar entries with each sync. I really didn’t need to be walking around with 20 reminders of an impending doctor’s appointment waiting for me next month so, after trialing to satisfy myself of the current state of the situation, I uninstalled it and will check it out again in another quarter or so.
The same can be said for Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets app. I keep a list of movies that I want to see on a little excel spreadsheet on my iPAQ. I like to update it from a real keyboard if I’m at home and so I use Excel. I would be just as happy to use the Google offering, except the only way to see the spreadsheet is to access the web, which I’m not doing in my local Blockbuster. The same applies for my weight and balance spreadsheets for flying, my groceries-needed spreadsheet and a half dozen other little lists that spreadsheets are useful for. Again, the ability to sync the files out of Google is needed.
Perhaps I’m falling behind the times and I need to shell out for some kind of unlimited data plan and a WinCE-based phone. But the offerings out there seem to me to be prohibitively expensive. I do play somewhat with these services from my Blackberry as such access is included with the corporate plan that we use but most small-screen access of the web seems to me to be lacking. It’s not a very rich experience and it is so very, very slow. My plan is EVDO for those who know what that is, so it’s pretty much as fast as you can get on a Verizon wireless device.
So, as usual, my desires are about a decade ahead of what is being offered. I can certainly keep doing what I’m doing now, it’s worked for the past few years, I’m sure it will work for a few more. But I can’t help but wonder if I’m either too eager, too small a demographic for anybody to care about, or simply looking in the wrong direction for progress as these (to me) obvious gaps in application offerings hang out there well beyond the point where I’m willing to wait to use the associated products.
I recently purchased a Western Digital 250 Gigabyte hard drive that I was going to just add to my existing computer system to augment the existing 100 Gigabyte drive that came with the box. But when I opened the package I saw that they had included this cool utility that would copy everything over to the new drive and even make it the active partition.
Since it would leave everything intact on my existing drive I decided to give it a try. I’m from an era where such utilities seldom live up to their promises and so I tend to be pretty hands-on in these cases and do everything manually. But I have a full backup of my data on two separate physical devices over and above my current desktop so I thought I’d go for the gusto.
Electronics today are so forgiving, I originally didn’t bother to change the jumper settings on the new drive ’cause I wanted to see what would happen if I added it to the slave end of the HD controller ribbon cable. The original HD was set up as a master and I figured I would get a bit of grief from the system by not manually setting the jumpers but I was pleasantly surprised by when everything came up just fine.
I installed Western Digital’s “Data Lifeguard tools” and saw the option to copy the info over to the new drive.
It wasn’t 100% obvious to me from the wording what was going to happen, but with two or 3 simple clicks I initiated a process that would partition my drive (one big ol’ partition for me), Format it with NTFS, copy over my data and then set it up as a primary, bootable partition. It seemed a little too good to be true.
It took a while to copy over all my data, I had about 88 Gbytes of data on the existing drive, so I just let it go overnight and resumed work in the morning.
The next morning, I decided to do things right, powered off my machine, properly set the jumpers on both drives, plugged the correct drive to the correct part of the ribbon cable and turned the machine back on. It started flawlessly. Here I am a week or so later and I’m at the point where I’m just about willing to blow away all the data on the old drive and start using it for other purposes. Mind you, with an additional 150 Gbytes on the new drive, there isn’t overwhelming pressure to do so.
Since I don’t run with a swap file, there was no need to point it over to my newly underused 100 Gbyte drive, but I did decide to completely uninstall and re-install Google Desktop search and then put its index files on the lesser used drive.
Some caveats that bear mentioning. While everything supposedly came over to the new partition, and most of my applications work perfectly you should be aware of the following quirks that I’ve found so far.
Activewords, Roboform, and iTunes all required reactivation or reauthorization even though nothing had *really* changed on the machine. This did surprise me somewhat. Activewords was automated and straightforward. Roboform claimed that I had exceeded 3 computers (I only have/use it on 2) and would need to purchase additional licenses – a quick email to their tech support resolved this with no hassle at all. iTunes warned me that I was now authorized on 3 out of a possible 5 computers. Apparently there is no way to singularly deauthorize a computer I will have to wait until I hit 5 computers authorized and then a button is supposed to appear on my account page that allows me to deauthorize all computers and start again. Not esthetically my favorite solution but at least I know there is a way to clean things up eventually.
I use Activesync to keep my iPaq synchronized with Outlook. This suddenly stopped recognizing that Outlook was installed. I was using Activesync 3.7 and so decided to upgrade to the latest version (4.2) to see if that would help. Uninstalling the old activesync and installing the new one yielded the identical results. So I uninstalled Activesync, used a cleanup tool provided by MS that would wipe out the Office registry entries (figuring these must be somehow dependent on my physical disk) and “repaired” my MS Office Professional edition and then reinstalled activesync again. No dice.
The eventual solution was to uninstall Activesync, fully uninstall MS Office, then reinstall MS office being careful to install the collaboration tools for Outlook. Then open up Outlook to make sure that it was working properly (even with a full uninstall pretty much all of my office settings stuck around which made me wonder what you’d do if those were causing your problems) and then install Activesync. Then everything was fine.
Then, while using google to register an account I found that the Quicktime plugin was not working in Firefox. I tried to just install the standalone version when I found that the Apple updater actually had my version at 7.1.4 while that available on Apple’s website was only 7.1.3. Go figure. So a repair of Quicktime resolved this problem.
Finally, even though all of my shares showed up on the new drive and looked OK under properties, I could not access them from the other computers in my house. I’m using XP Home on this machine. All I needed to do there was to to open the folder’s properties, chose the “Sharing” tab, uncheck the “Share this folder on the network” checkbox and immediately recheck it and click the “apply” button and the system chugged through all the files and folders setting the appropriate security and they worked fine.
So, as usual, not exactly something that you want to tackle if you’re nervous or unsure about PCs but much less effort than was required even 5 or 10 years ago. My little system is up humming and working fine.
And without Tom Cruise, thankfully.
Check out this YouTube video of a prototype workstation. The way the guy is interacting with it is exactly the way we should be using computers… I’m very excited for the future.
I suspect that the real future for the keyboard for the foreseeable future will be one that is physically rendered in addition to being graphically rendered. By this I mean that you will be able to feel the keys, either through some localized stimulation or through gross alteration of the screen, so touch typing can remain a reality.
