Geeky

Windows 7 and Microsoft Security Essentials

It isn’t a Windows 7 launch party, but it’ll do for now.  I picked up a copy of 7 from the University tech store and ordered a new computer online for MrsDoF to put it on.  She’ll have an Intel Dual-Core, 2gb, 500gb, and Win7 for total cost about $290 including shipping and tax. 

She’s got XP now - we skipped Vista.  If she doesn’t like 7 then she’ll be learning Ubuntu. 

But assume she’ll like 7; anybody have any thoughts on Microsoft’s new “Security Essentials” suite?

Posted by George on 10/22/09 at 08:59 PM
Geeky • Software • (7) Comments • Link

Getting a bit more serious about Picasa

Picasa (Google’s picture service) has a lovely Windows application, which will try to run in Wine in Linux.  But I really prefer to explore native Linux apps if I can - it seems like cheating not to figure them out.  So this is an attempt to upload photos to Picasa using F-Spot:

From photo album biosphere

This picture is from last week. I set down my coffee to take the picture, of this dormant hornet.  I’m an endotherm wearing a jacket, but he had no such advantage.  He just had to stay there and get his picture taken like a chilled little bug.  (Click through and open the full-size version.  His wings are really quite lovely)

Posted by George on 10/01/09 at 08:33 PM
Geeky • Photography • (8) Comments • Link

Grip shifters; just say no

Have I mentioned recently how much I hate grip shifters?  You know, those twisty bicycle handgrips that shift gears while you wreck?  Trigger, thumb, and plug shifters are much safer and as a bonus, easier to work on. 

There may be some kind of super-high-quality grip shifters I’ve never seen before, but mostly they just seem like something that a marketing expert thought of for low-end and low-mid-range bikes. A “sounds like a good idea until you think about it for ten seconds” kind of thing. And they make a ten-minute cable replacement into an hour-long ordeal because the cheap plastic parts cracked and I had to dig around in my spare parts buckets.  Fooey!

Posted by George on 08/17/09 at 08:31 PM
Geeky • bicycling • (2) Comments • Link

A major disagreement with F-Spot

Sometimes I’m a little (or a lot) slow-witted but there’s something I just don’t get: Why the hell can’t I rename photos in F-Spot? 

Could anyone explain it to me?  Is there some reason why I shouldn’t want to rename photos in F-Spot?  It’s the best-known photo management software for Linux, and yet it lacks what seems to me an extremely basic function.

I seem to remember a similar disagreement with Picasa. 

Posted by George on 07/11/09 at 09:57 PM
Geeky • Software • (2) Comments • Link

Software installation in Linux is difficult

Suppose you want to play the game “Hearts” on your computer.  And suppose, like me, you were cheap and wanted to get it for free.  Lucas sent me a screenshot-by-screenshot comparison of the installation on a Linux machine vs. a Windows machine.  It’s a joke written by a popular operating system.  (Hint: Linux plays the straight man.)

And that’s congruent with my experience too.  At work I’m building four Windows platforms that we’ll Ghost out to hundreds of machines.  It’s time-consuming to ferret out all the Windows ‘annoyances’ and create a build anyone would want to use.

But this evening, I came home and decided to rebuild my Linux machine.  I booted off the CD, made a few choices, and went upstairs for dinner.  After the meal, I made a few more choices and wound up with a ready-to-use machine.  My total keyboard time investment?  About twenty minutes.  Try building a Windows machine in twenty minutes.

Posted by George on 07/02/09 at 10:11 PM
Geeky • Software • (11) Comments • Link

Banned with extreme prejudice

Got up this morning to find spamming in progress - multiple comments from the same IP address about someone’s business on unrelated posts. 

Seriously, what?  That’s like walking up and stapling ads to the front of my house; don’t be surprised if I release the hounds.

Posted by George on 06/09/09 at 07:23 AM
Geeky • Blogging • (0) Comments • Link

Product review: Acer One netbook

This refurbished Acer One netbook from Tiger Direct arrived just before I was hospitalized a month ago, so I haven’t had much chance to look at it until yesterday.  For the $230 I paid, it’s a darned impressive little computer.

It’s so light - two pounds with the 3-cell battery - that it just about disappears in my backpack.  The keyboard is dinky but not difficult to type on.  I’d hate to write a novel on it, but it’s fine for blogging, note-taking, and email.  Battery life seems to be about two hours, which is fine for meetings and casual use. But you’d want the 6-cell battery for extended use without the (very small) power adapter. 

The screen is bright and clear.  At 1024 x 600, there’s not a lot of room for superfluous junk. This is significant because it seems to ship with every toolbar known to man already enabled, leaving you about eight pixels for content.  As Edward Tufte said, “The scarcest computing resource is not CPU cycles or hard drive space, but screen real estate.”  So you’ll be turning off toolbars and hiding the Start bar and stuff like that.  And remember, the F11 key is your friend.

It came with Windows XP home, but with a 106gb hard drive, you just know I’ll be dual-booting it with possibly Ubuntu Netbook Remix or Moblin, which is optimized to work with the Intel Atom processor. 

It also has a gig of ram, an SD card reader and a multi-card reader.  The wireless works fine and it seems to handle going to sleep and waking up easily.  There’s a little switch in front for turning off the wireless, so you don’t waste power connecting when it isn’t needed.  It has an external VGA output for presentations, an RJ-45 Ethernet connection, headphone and mic jacks, and three, count ‘em three USB ports, all on the right and left sides. 

It took me a while to get the trial version of Microsoft Office uninstalled - who needs it? - and all my favorite apps installed.  These include: Firefox, Google Chrome, FileZilla, Notepad++, Open Office, Foxit Reader, McAfee Antivirus, JKDefrag, the Cisco VPN, our university drive mapping utilities, XnView and Picasa. It runs all of them OK, not blazing fast or anything but not objectionably slow either.

Some irritations: it’s too easy to accidentally brush the trackpad and misplace your cursor; I sure would like an option to auto-disable it when an external mouse is plugged in. The fan runs all the time, though there may be a bios setting for that.  You might want to get a shorter cord for the tiny power adapter. Is it a substitute for a Thinkpad X-301?  Well no, but at something like one-eighth the price, I can live with that.

Posted by George on 06/05/09 at 10:40 PM
Geeky • hardware • (4) Comments • Link

Open Office saves the day

Y’know, jump drives aren’t totally reliable.  Their little bits go bad sometimes and the document you were working on becomes corrupted.*  This happened to a professor today, and several hours of his work was at stake.

Trying to retrace your steps from memory on a complex document that you are producing under deadline is no fun at all, and we have all been there.  I quickly copied the document to the desktop and tried opening it again.  Nope, Microsoft Word 2007 wanted nothing to do with it, not even with the “Repair” and “Recover” functions.  I opened it in Notepad++ and recovered at least most of the text, but the formatting was gone.

But I had one other trick up my sleeve.  Copying it to a network drive, I went back downstairs to the desktop computer in my office and opened it up in the Open Office word processor.  Almost all of the formatting was intact. I saved it again with a new filename and a .doc extension and emailed it back to the professor.

Not that it would work every time, but it’s worth a try. 

* (A couple strategies here.  First, “Save As” multiple versions of your documents as you go, like this: Mar09report_ver1.doc, mar09report_ver2.doc, and so on.  If the document is really important, copy to more than one drive - perhaps a jump drive and a network drive.  If it’s really, really important, burn it on a CD and take it offsite.  Also, every once in a while, burn the contents of your jump drive to a DVD, check that the copy is good, then reformat your jump drive and copy your files back onto it.  Keep the DVD as a backup.  And don’t use a jump drive for more than a year or so.)

Posted by George on 03/16/09 at 10:09 PM
Geeky • Software • (5) Comments • Link

Do you prefer that bloggers respond to your comments?

Alex at Blogging without a blog categorizes the different kind of blogger-responses to comments.  There’s the blogger who doesn’t allow comments, and bloggers who allow comments but seldom respond to them, and bloggers who make an effort to respond to every commenter.  With a few variations in-between.

I’ve always loved comments.  In school, I never cared what grade I got on a paper; what did the professor write?  And now that personal computers have been invented, an Internet and World Wide Web created, and blogging popularized, I have not changed.  I love it when people comment.

I’ve always regarded the comments’ section as “Your turn” and tried not to interject myself too much there.  But now that I think of it, I do enjoy the responses of other bloggers, and of other commenters, to my comments.  It’s what keeps me coming back to a thread.  When you leave comments on a blog, what is your preference?

(H/T Coturnix)

Posted by George on 03/01/09 at 06:40 PM
Geeky • Blogging • (10) Comments • Link

Changing of the (handheld devices) guard

When designing a web page, it used to be necessary to have a separate style sheet to accommodate handheld devices.  Usually this was called handheld.css and linked in the header.  I’m just wondering; is that really necessary anymore?  New handheld devices like the iPhone seem to render web pages from the same .css file that any other browser uses. 

Posted by George on 02/16/09 at 03:54 PM
Geeky • Design • (9) Comments • Link

You can’t ride all the time

When it’s just cold, and the streets are dry or only a little icy, riding a bike is pretty easy.  (Ski goggles help a lot.) Ice is slipperier the warmer it is. After an ice storm, unless you have studded tires, forget it.  Riding on a half-inch of snow is easy, but when it gets to two or three inches, it’s a real aerobic workout.  And automobile tire tracks can throw you.

Whenever you ride across a really icy patch, ride straight; you can’t apply very much Δv.  This requires planning ahead so you can make changes in speed or direction after you are back on relatively dry pavement.

And if it’s dark, don’t make automobile drivers guess where you are; they may not make the effort.  Bike lights are cheap and better than ever.

Massbike.org says; “There are lots of reasons why riding in the winter is not as crazy as it sounds…”

Posted by George on 12/16/08 at 09:49 PM
Geeky • bicycling • (1) Comments • Link

Ubuntu 8.1 impressions

I just installed Ubuntu 8.1 on my laptop, a Lenovo X40 with a P4 processor and 1.5 gigs of ram.  Short version: “Wow!”  It is smokin’ fast and kitchen-clean.  No hardware problems at all and it picked up wireless networks right away.  And Gimp 2.6 is quite an improvement, if for no other reason than they got rid of the dopey dog.  (Well, it’s faster too).

My home desktop machine is going to be upgraded, pronto.

Posted by George on 12/09/08 at 10:12 AM
Geeky • Software • (4) Comments • Link

Mechanical geek quiz

I am cleaning out the garage to get ready to make some home repairs.  Before I throw out this old oil pump, tell me…
Which way will the bottom gear have to turn, to move oil from the left chamber to the right chamber?  Clockwise?  Or counterclockwise?
The winner gets to right-click on the picture and download his very own .jpg of an old oil pump.  It’s an extravagant prize, to be sure.

Posted by George on 09/24/08 at 11:51 AM
Geeky • (6) Comments • Link

Henri Cartier-Bresson in Chicago Tribune today

It’s incredibly cool that the Chicago Tribune published a full-page article on Five things to know about Henri Cartier-Bresson today, and it is a nifty article as far as it goes.  But never once did they mention “The Decisive Moment”, the fundamental concept in HCB’s photography.  It would be like writing a full-page article about Ansel Adams and not mentioning the Zone System, or about Eugene Smith and not mentioning his courage as a photojournalist.

But you can see the entire film documentary; The Impassioned Eye online in 10 parts at the Rollfilm blog.  Hear Cartier-Bresson say (in French, with translation) that photographers should “aim well, shoot fast, and scram”.  Hear his comments as he sheafs through his photos.  Learn about him seizing the moment from the stream of events, with his tiny Leica camera. Enjoy! 

Posted by George on 09/21/08 at 11:05 AM
Geeky • Photography • (1) Comments • Link

Rainbow around the sun

Saw this as I walked out of the building on my way to lunch today

And I mean, I saw exactly this because it was necessary to cover the sun with my hand, to see the rainbow.

Posted by George on 09/19/08 at 01:12 PM
Geeky • Photography • (4) Comments • Link
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