Archive for August, 2006
My Tivo has been trying to record UFOs: Seeing Is Believing on National Geographic all month. I really liked the show, but I have seen it way too many times since May 2005 when it was new. I cancel it by changing the channel each time I catch Tivo recording it, but apparently Tivo really wants it. Now that it finally got the whole thing it should be happy for a while. It is nice that Tivo will attempt to get a suggestion again later if you change the channel, but if I keep canceling the same suggestion you would think Tivo would figure out I don’t want it recorded.
Update Aug 27: Today, less than a week later, I caught Tivo recording the same suggestion again. I let it recorded the whole two hours again.
August 22nd, 2006
The thought of a movie about snakes on a plane was just so stupid I was not going to see this movie. But I gave in Saturday. The reviews of the movie were not nearly as bad as I expected. It is frequently referred to as dumb B-movie summer fun. The idea just kept growing on me and when my friend called and asked what new movies are out I knew what we had to see.
It certainly is no award winner, but it is a very fun movie. The movie is a lot like an airplane hijacking movie except you can’t try to reason with snakes and you can’t shoot them all. Some of the advertising makes it seem like a horror movie, I don’t care for horror movies, but didn’t really see it as a horror movie. It is violent, gross, suspenseful, and sometimes scary, but if it wasn’t it wouldn’t be nearly as fun. Of course, if you suffer from Ophidiophobia you should skip this movie. Otherwise, if you need one last good summer movie, this is it.
No matter how stupid the idea is, “Snakes On A Plane” is such a good title that it has apparently become a new way of saying “shit happens” according to the Urban Dictionary. I doubt I will be using it, but at least I will know what it means if I ever come across it.
August 20th, 2006
I am not talking about when you accidentally erased your camera’s memory or it got damaged, there are already plenty of solutions for that. What I want is to fix photos that have somehow been corrupted. In my case, photos of my Grandmother’s 80th birthday were put on a bad CD (not by me). Not that many were damaged, but it has annoyed me for several years that I couldn’t recover them. Finally I thought I found the solution with PixRecovery.
Turns out it does little or nothing at least for my images. Looking into the files I can see why nothing could be fixed. The bad areas are mostly full of null characters from the bad CD read. At the time I copied them I attempted reading them in lots of different ways to recover anything possible. I did get several back or at least less damaged copies. I also ended up with a bunch more that showed damage so I presume the built in CD error correction was helping a lot. PixRecovery wasn’t able to do anything even with the less damaged files either, there was still a block of about 2000 nulls in a row even in the least damaged image. There just wasn’t anything to recover in those spots which throws off the whole rest of the image.
It is nice though that they provide a demo version so you can see if it works. I am sure for some people it must work. But since the full version costs $149.00 I am kind of glad it didn’t help. I only had a few bad images, but if it works for you and you have more than a few that need fixing, that is certainly worth the price if your photos are important.
Anyone know of any other solutions? Even realigning the blocks (and hopefully color) with a blank spot in the middle would be an improvement for these images.
August 19th, 2006
I got a call today (Saturday) from Gateway wanting to check to see if I was having any problems with my recent purchace of a Gateway system. I am having trouble with the left mouse button only working half the time, but I didn’t want to get into that at the time, it still kind of works anyway. When I have nothing better to do I will call tech support.
But the reason I am posting is because the main purpose of the call was not to see if I was having any problems and get them fixed. It was to try to sell me a warranty since mine was only for 90 days. Now I remember getting a two year extended two year warranty on this machine so I was a bit concerned. She then clarified that I do have the extended warranty, this warranty is for my antivirus. I asked why would I want that, she had no answer and quickly ended the call. Now I do think everyone needs up to date antivirus protection, but you shouldn’t be tricking people into keeping up their subscription. I don’t really like the McAfee Security Center that came with the machine, it is bloated (though probably less than Norton) and keeps bugging me about updating SpamKiller which I disabled. I have yet to even register so my update subscription is no where near running out yet.
I don’t have any other virus protection on my machine though so I probably should do that soon as the definitions it came with are aging quickly. I am pretty careful about what I download, my email is scanned multiple times before it reaches me, and I rarely use Office or Internet Explorer so I am not that worried. After the trial subscription does run out I will probably be switching back to AVG Free. It seemed to be working fine on my previous machine, though it never had the opportunity to catch anything. I like how non bloated it is compared to the main alternatives. Scot’s Newsletter has a pretty good review of antivirus packages and AVG (though not the free version) came in third. Scot’s first choice, F-Secure, does sound pretty good though and is probably worth a trial.
Now that I have had this machine for a while, I guess you might wonder how I am liking it. I still hate the keyboard layout, I keep hitting the wrong keys and it still throws me off when using other keyboards. I do really love the battery life though. And I am still very happy with my non glossy screen which Dell has returned as an option. I guess I wasn’t the only one who didn’t like the glossy screens. I just wish they had done it a bit sooner so I could be writing what I can’t stand about Dell instead. That would easily have pushed me over to buying the Dell. Though now that I have this amazing battery life I am somewhat glad I didn’t.
August 5th, 2006