mcgees.org

[link]

After my discovery that notebook PCs cannot swim, followed by difficulties with the power regulation in the outlet I was using at home, followed by buying a new PC, followed by that PC being stolen from my truck, followed by getting a new PC donated from a good friend, followed with tons of compatibility problems with Ubuntu, followed by the running of the bulls in Pamploma, followed by assorted escapades involving peanut brittle, Daniel Boone, and a titmouse named “Slinky”, I am back online, albeit with a really lousy video card, and shuffling through all my accumulated emails.

Your patience is appreciated or, failing that, please resend urgent messages if I didn’t respond the first time.

I heard a segment on public radio about the perfume industry and the changes it is undergoing.  Apparently a new class of perfumes don’t smell like great perfume, they smell like the person him/herself smells wonderful.  There was a bit on a perfume designer who can allegedly duplicate any aroma: he made a perfume that smells like snow for his daughter.

Who the hell would want to smell like snow when Weird Fragrances exists?

Presumably for the Jones Soda crowd, you can smell like, well, simply weird shit.  Like burning rubber.  Or crisp banknotes.  Magazines.  Fireworks smoke or (aargh) an ashtray.  As of now, you can request a free sample.

Oh, and if anyone remembers the details on that public radio segment, or the book the interviewee wrote, let me know.

Update: This may just be a spam trap.  I have received huge amounts of spam to an email address used only to register on this site.  I haven’t checked my mail yet, so I don’t know if the free samples exist or not.

Yeah, that’s the best title I can come up with, let alone coming up with two jokes (no one has commented yet on the double jokes in the post titles and URLs, which means — although I’m still likely funnier than Dane Cook — that it’s not really working.)  Cut me some slack.  You’re reading at a reasonable time.  It’s 01:00 for me.

No, I’m not in Ubuntu yet.  I still have to [illegal] a bit more.  So, a parting thought: I’m giving up some stuff in fleeing Redmond.  Like any abusive relationship, it wasn’t all bad.  There are some things I’ll miss.

Three, actually.  Homebase; Quicken; and Windows-Tab.

Windows-Tab is Irene-Jacob-sexy.  Damn.  It is the coolest fucking thing in the world.  If there is not a KDE clone of it, I’m going to have to write one.  It would be good to keep my coding neurons busy, anyway.  Do they even document this?  Are you on Vista (you poor sod)?  Hold down the Windows key (which has euphemistic names in other PC OSs), and hit Tab.  Oh.  My.  God.

Why isn’t a Quicken replacement available on *nix?  I don’t know.  Maybe nerds don’t want to admit that they can’t figure out double-entry accounting to a sufficient degree to use GnuCash.  And a substitute for Homebase?  Robby’s doing an unbelievable job with Tellico, and he’s even incorporated some of my code as well as written an export template geared towards booksellers at my request (not sure which shows greater benevolence.)  But Win-Tab?  It’s not going to displace Katee — but it might well show up in my dreams.  I can’t wait.

Once, there were desktop computers.  These were so unwieldy that they redefined — upwards — the acceptable size of a desk.  Many people just put them on the floor and stumbled over them.

Then came laptops.  These were just about the right size for a the top of a desk.

Then notebook computers.  These were almost small enough to fit on your lap.

Then there were handhelds.  Handhelds were about the size of your average paper notebook, just heavier.

So when computers were finally shrunken to a size you could accommodate in two hands, they were palmtops.

I don’t think this is too techie for most site readers.  Egads.  It’s not 1 April, so I’m taking it at face value.

Like the article at that site (with which I’m unaffiliated)?  Not to belabor anything, but if you do, click some of the ads.

Reading Gould just now, I ran across the word molluscan meaning pertaining to a mollusk.

This is so cool.  I haven’t been so excited about an animal adjective since cygneous.

Now I have to quickly learn how to program a TWAIN driver so that I can release a Linux scanning program called MolluScan.  It will, of course, need hooks into the Nautilus file browser, but I can skip having to write OCR functionality into it because no mollusk — not even a cephalopod — can, to the best of my knowledge, read.

(Yes, this is a joke.)

Hope this helps someone.  I just upgraded Firefox in Hardy Heron (Ubuntu Linux).  Transition was smooth, except that I could no longer log in to Gmail.  I would try to log in, but it would just send me back to the login page, rather than take me to my Inbox.

The solution: clear your cookies.  Edit -> Preferences -> Privacy -> Clear Now -> (Just “Cookies”) -> Clear Private Data Now.

I don’t need to write them.  I don’t need to embed them.  I downloaded some OpenOffice.org macros from the web, and for the life of me I don’t understand what to do with them.  In the morning, when pain meds have faded, it may be very clear, but, be a dear anyway and answer my question: “I have a .sxc file that I want to be able to use in any arbitrary OpenOffice.org Calc document, new or old.  What do I do?”

I can’t bring myself to actually post this on a support group, because this is “so obvious”, apparently.

The Moxi DVR is great.  Really, really great.  It took almost a decade, but a company finally came out with a UI better than that of my Series 1 TiVo.

One neat thing about the Moxi is the ability to add an external hard drive.  I tried adding a 750 GB Seagate FreeAgent Pro drive to the unit.  It is recognized, formatted, and ready-to-go.  Problem is, after a certain amount of idle time, it will stop functioning.  When you try to play a show on the EHD, you will get a prompt — twice, oddly — that says “Do you want to keep this episode?”, with “keep” and “delete” options.  Also, if there is no room on the internal hard drive, the unit will fail to record episodes, and in the “Canceled/Deleted Episodes” log, the (unhelpful) reason will be given as “Failed (No Signal)”.  If you go to “Setup”, then “External Hard Drive”, select “Disconnect”, then physically disconnect and re-connect the drive, it works again.

The problem is that the Seagate EHD goes to sleep, and the Moxi cannot wake it up.  The fix is to connect the EHD to a Linux box via USB, and use sdparm to clear the “Standby” flag on the hard drive.  See the flags on the hard drive by typing:

sdparm -a /dev/sdX

where X is the letter assigned to the device (type “tail /var/log/syslog” after plugging in the drive to see what letter it’s assigned.)

To clear the flag, type:

sdparm -c STANDBY -6 /dev/sdX

The “-c STANDBY” clears the “Standby” flag, and the “-6” does it in six-bit mode, which is apparently required.

Answer for how to keep these drives from going to sleep was found at the blog My Slice of Reality.

For Firefox power users, Bookmark Toolbar space (the row under your address entry where you can visit sites with one click) is at a minimum.  Wouldn’t it be nice if there were just little icons for everything, as long as you knew what was what?

Favicon Picker to the rescue, replacing the works-only-occasionally functionality to add icons to your Bookmarks Toolbar.

If you are a superpowered user, you can get by on just icons.  So far, I need a little text prod, both as a reminder and as a slightly larger mouseover target.

Here’s mine, for now.  Hope you are inspired.

(A muffin to the person who figures out the largest number of the URLs corresponding to the cryptic icons and tags in my toolbar!)

When you place a bid on eBay, and it’s the high bid, the screen says “Hope you win!”

No they don’t!  They hope someone comes along and bids $500,000, and then another guy ups that.  “Hope you win!”  Gawd.

It’s that whole mentality of making computers seem more like people, like when Tellme says, in a concerned and slightly embarrassed voice, “Hm, I’m sorry, I didn’t get that” instead of “Please repeat”.  Or when — I am not making this up — my bank added the sound of keyboard keys clicking in the background to the recorded voice telling you they are looking up your account information.

Or — and this drives me up the wall — when charities use script fonts and blue ink on their solicitations, so it looks like someone personally wrote it with a ballpoint.  I can always tell, because there is not a single person on the planet who writes the two es at the end of my name exactly the same.  One is a transition letter, one is a closing letter, and they shouldn’t be perfect matches.  The next logical step would be to commission fonts that have n (five to ten) slightly differing letterforms for each glyph, all of which connect, and the software to randomly choose which one to render.  That might fool me.  Until then, if you send me a fake hand-written letter, you are not getting money.  Period.

The best free visual geographical traceroute application that works on Linux (lots of restrictions, I know) is here at YouGetSignal.com.  Even if traceroute is blocked by your ISP, this will allow you to bypass this by starting the search from DreamHost’s servers.

If you don’t know much about traceroute, read about it.  It’s a tool that needs to be in your arsenal, for everything from satisfying curiosity to diagnosing network failures to tracking down spammers.  You don’t need to be a poweruser to make use of it.

On M$ Windows, for historical (8.3) reasons, it’s called tracert, apparently, or maybe pathping.

I gave you the StumbleUpon “wrapper” page.  As discussed in 2006, it’s a system worth using.

OK, let’s run down my week so far:

1. Wife left me and took Niall (my fault)
2. Got dropped from the interview process of the job for which I was applying (my fault, essentially)
3. Worker’s Comp claim was denied, so I will have to sue the WC insurance company (not my fault)
4. Ditzy HMO doctor whom I saw twice while out of work due to work-related injury claims I never told her I was off work, and refuses to sign my disability slip (fuckin’ not my fault)
5. Paid over $100 (that I didn’t have until friends opened their wallets) to file my taxes (my choice)
6. Ran out of meds (that said ditzy doctor forgot to refill) and for which I don’t have insurance anyway (not my fuckin’ fault)

So, today:

7. Computer crashes (shit happens)

You’d think with my whole professional and educational life spent living at the whims of computer hardware, I would have a top-of-the-line backup system in place.  You’d be wrong.

I fixed it.  The computer, and recovered the data.  It took some effort, but I did it.  I’m doing a full backup tonight.

Next step would pretty much have to be “blindness”, right?  I’d say “death”, but that’s not always seeming like such a bad alternative this week.

Ten years ago, I had an inkjet printer (it was a Canon) with amazing mechanical registration: you could print a document, take out the paper, put it back in the tray, print the same document on top of it, and you couldn’t tell!  Everything was perfectly aligned, to the sub-millimeter.  This was a sub-$100 printer.  So I know this technology exists in consumer-ready form.

The other piece of my idea is OCR software.  Again, what I need from it is far less than what is available right now.

What do I want?  I want an all-in-one scanner/printer doohickey.  Take a form — any reasonable size — and feed it through the document feeder.  The hardware would scan it, the software would identify the fields where one needs to enter text (they will usually be underlined or have boxes for each letter) and then allow you to type, like those fill-in PDF files.  You would type the text you want on the form, feed it through the document feeder again, and, Bingo!  It would print out your answers, perfectly legibly, onto the empty form.  It would size its font and everything to be just right.

I thought of this in college, years ago.  I’m tired of waiting for venture cap to make a fortune building this myself.  I just want someone to build it now.  Take the idea.  Make your million bucks.  Just charge less than $200, and I’ll buy at least one.

Please.  Now.  My handwriting’s getting worse as we speak.  Build it now.

Here is the best way to do Avery labels in OpenOffice.org (much better than the built-in method.)  Note the instructions on how to copy from one cell to every cell.  Even easier?  Put your cursor in the cell you want, press Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C, then, above each column where you want the labels inserted, click the mouse when the down arrow shows, and hit Ctrl-V.  Don’t do this in the spaces between the labels.

Here is where to get the best templates for Avery-compatible labels for OpenOffice.org.

To find which template to use, look at the top of the labels sheet (that one was hard for me).

Here’s where to get OpenOffice.org (like Microsoft Word, for free).

I used to be pretty decent with graphics programs, at least to do image manipulation.  Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, The GIMP, whatever.  Then the whole thing with layers came in, and I’m just fundamentally missing an idea.  I think it would take someone about five minutes to teach me the entire concept that I’m missing, the name and nature of which I don’t even know.  Things that used to be simple, like outlining a selection and dragging it to somewhere else on the image, seem impossible now, especially in The GIMP.  There’s not even a classic “hand” tool for moving stuff around.  Anyone want to teach me?

I literally laughed out loud.  More of a bark.

I needed some help with a PHP function.  I typed php help in Google, and the first match was phphelp.com.  Pretty obvious, I guess.

And under the heading “How send mail using the mail function”, I get this.  Seriously, look at it.  Looks like I’m going somewhere else for help.

If you don’t know of them, and you use Firefox, I’ve been remiss in not exposing you to Greasemonkey scripts.  They are little bits of JavaScript that do cool things to the way sites are displayed.  Install Greasemonkey through the previous link, then try Gmail Beautifier, Google Search Results Ultimate Makeover, and, if you use WordPress, Akismet Auntie Spam.

I beat my Windows Mobile Solitaire for the first time today.  I scored 3696 points and solved the puzzle in 228 seconds.

In other news, my work XP notebook crashed today.  Hard.  It won’t boot in Safe Mode.  It won’t boot in Recovery Mode.  I’ll be playing Alt-F8 debugging games over the weekend so that I can be productive on Monday.

My question is, does Microsoft have a rebate or exchange scheme for these items?  Could I trade in my valuable Solitaire win for a machine that just, say, works?

Sweet baby cheeses.  I would have thought that devising theoretically-unsolvable Solitaire puzzles would be difficult, a problem beyond Microsoft’s grasp.  But I have now played 1.232 trillion games of Solitaire on my mobile phone, and have yet to win a single one.  Shenanigans!

The Cowon A2 is a portable media player (think juiced-up iPod).  I can strongly recommend it.  Key features:

• Mounts as a USB volume, so it’s Linux-compatible (as well as Windows and Mac)
• Has a 4-inch 16 x 9 (widescreen) high-contrast LCD display (much larger than the iPod’s)
• Plays a ton of formats, many more than iPod, including XviD and FLAC, as well as your normal MP3, AVI, etc.
• Can output RCA A/V, or record from any RCA A/V source (such as your DVD player, TiVO, VCR, camcorder, etc.)
• Ten-hour playback time on one charge
• Case folds back into a viewing stand.  Case is also really cleverly designed, to allow open access to ports, switches, buttons, and speakers.
• Ability to work as a USB host, so you can plug flash drives, digital cameras, and so forth into it
• Lots of features I haven’t explored yet: use it to read documentation, see lyrics to your songs as they play, graphic equalizer, tune/record FM radio, schedule A/V recordings

Wishlist:

• Wi-Fi connectivity plus web browser (via USB WiFi adapter)
• “Shuffle” toggle from within playlist browser rather than through Music Options
• Automatic recognition of letterboxed NTSC, to expand into full-screen 16 x 9

All these should be possible through firmware hacks.  I don’t know if anyone is working on it yet.

In Windows, the easiest way to convert DVD video to video viewable on the A2 seems to be DVD Decrypter followed by AutoGK.

The presumably-foreign spammer who keep asking me to go to their site to talk to a pretty girl have a list of names they are pulling from, apparently.  Clue: you won’t pique my interest by talking about a girl named Hellga [sic].

Bandwidth!  Bandwidth bandwidth bandwidth.  Now that I’m back to mental acuity, as it were, I need to look into how long I’m locked into my DSL and DirecTV contracts.  DSL is unacceptable.

I switched to DirecTV because my local cable company doesn’t carry Setanta.  But at this rate I’d rather have the bandwidth and download (read: steal) the matches.  I max out at 90kBps.  70 is more normal.  That’s all my copper can handle, living in what the phone company considers the boondocks (read: in the middle of a city).

Bandwidth!

My household ISP’s name resolution server is down.  Drat.  It has gotten to the previously-inconceivable place where I would rather give up electric lighting than web access.  If anything is a sign of the information age having arrived, this is it.

I can browse on my phone and access my email (all specialized GMail options are lousy on a phone, but that’s a story for a day when I can touch-type the account, rather than use a phone keyboard.)

More here and here.

T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com
Cingular: phonenumber@cingularme.com
Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
Nextel: phonenumber@messaging.nextel.com

where phonenumber = your 10 digit phone number

(Courtesy of tech-recipes)

Here is a graphical picture of my hard disk usage:

(click to enlarge)

The teal on the left is my ripped CD collection.  The red and gray in the upper right is movies.  Everything else is everything else.  And this is post cleanup, going from 90% usage to 76% usage.

My needs are outpacing hard disk space, even with the huge hard drives available now.  I think I need about a petabyte to be really comfortable.

(Image created with GdMap 0.7.5)

Google Book Search: Buy your books by the chapter.

ITunes model for books?  Will publishers go for it?

I got a web-enabled phone today and thls is my first mobile post.  The site doesn’t look too shabby on it either.

I am training myself on the handwriting recognition now.

In letter recognizer:

L ne qvlck brown aox jumlyfd over tre laz y dog.

In Transcriber:

i-re quick brown fit jumped over the lazy dog.

More work to come.

i-nequick R 71