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
This is based on a email I sent to Google’s support for the Browser Sync Firefox extension. All these issues I have been having since 1.0 of the extension, this is at least the third version and yet I still cannot use it on my desktop. Since I only have it installed on two computers, I really don’t know what use syncing is if the second one can’t update. I would uninstall it, but I keep hoping they will fix it.
The first problem is the extension cannot ever finish updating on my desktop. Second is, it leaves gigantic log files in my profile directory, there are currently a total of 1.6 gigabytes of BrowserSync logs in there for the last three days.
I have 90 days worth of history (yes I know that is nuts) in Firefox so do not want to attempt synchronizing history, but the extension’s settings dialog will not keep the setting of what I want synchronized after a failure and since it always attempts to sync on pressing ok and fails, I am constantly returned to the default settings. Once I set only cookies and saved passwords to synchronize and hit ok in the settings dialog, it begins processing but eventually gives “Settings change did not complete, please try again later.”
From looking at the log files, it appears BrowserSync is syncing everything even though I told it only to do cookies and passwords. The log file shows “Sync Failure - 403,Forbidden,Update exceeds single upload limit.” at line 286301 of the log file I attached to the email and shows tons of URLs from history I would prefer not to store online much less synchronize. BrowserSync should not be uploading stuff the user tells it not to. That is a huge privacy issue especially since the history is not encrypted. Yes I know nothing on the internet is truly anonymous. I think you can tell from my willingness to use Gmail or this extension, I am not a privacy nut, but I don’t want a list of everything I do online sitting in one place on someone else’s server.
The log of just one sync attempt is 24 megabytes which only took BrowserSync a few minutes to create. Their logging is far to verbose and uses way too much repetitive text. It is insane to have such large log files and certainly to keep more than the current one if they are this large.
The total logs on my laptop though are only 21 megabytes total. There I only have 30 day history and since it doesn’t keep failing, it doesn’t have to repeat the same stuff every time. But 21 megabytes is still a lot for log files being stored in your profile directory.
I am using Google Browser Sync 1.1.20060711.0 with Firefox 1.5.0.4 - Build ID: 2006050817.
Update: After playing with things some more, I finally got the sync to go through. I went through my cookies and deleted all but the sites I login to where cookies are useful. I also edited the extension’s preference manually in about:config to include only cookies and passwords. One or both of those solved the problem. Of course now that I was able to sync with my laptop most of the junk cookies got put back. But at least now things are finally synchronized.
I wish there was some way to view and edit what is stored online so I could clean things up. Or maybe even a way to specify which cookies not to sync. Though I do not think cookies are a major privacy issue, I still prefer not to make it easier on advertising companies to track me. Why synchronize stuff that isn’t necessary? While cookies are small, they still take up a bit of bandwidth to update.
So, it doesn’t really suck (once it is working). But I got you to read this post didn’t I.
July 21st, 2006
If there is anyone reading my blog, you probably were wondering if I got my new notebook on Monday like predicted. I did. I just have been so busy playing with it I couldn’t find time to post.
I really like the battery life. It is amazing compared to what I had before. I guess not buying an off the shelf, low end machine helps. I got the 8 cell primary battery and an extra modular 6 cell that fits into the DVD bay. Total estimated time seems to be between 8 and 6 hours depending on what I am doing. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t need to carry around the charger anymore unless I will be using the laptop all day.
The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth can easily be turned on and off using the function key. I kind of wondered about that since some new HPs had such nice wireless on/off buttons and I wanted to be able to turn them off easily to save power. Volume, brightness, and the other usual stuff is also available with the function key. But there is a nice built in popup display that tells you the level or other status information when you use these keys. There is even a battery and wireless status popup. And these are not Windows popups so no drivers or EXEs running to provide them, they are built in to the hardware and appear as a small blue box in the upper left corner.
Speaking of EXEs and stuff running, there was a lot of stuff preinstalled that I didn’t want. There were 14 tray icons worth of things running and I have now cut it down to 7 of those though 2 are only hidden. I could probably even drop the ATI , but I will wait and see if I ever need to use it for a while. There is also a “protected” partition on the computer where they put recovery stuff. I would much prefer that be on CDs and not taking up space.
I am happy with Windows Media Center, it is very much like XP Pro with a few multimedia additions which aren’t really useful to me, but the $100 lower price was really nice. Hopefully they keep that up for a while.
The mouse touchpad is pretty good, it is a bit smaller than my old HP, but not too small. I am not so annoyed by the horizontally undersized right mouse button anymore. It isn’t that bad, but the size and surroundings of the mouse buttons is a problem. The small size of both buttons is less a problem than the sounding. The area around the buttons and under the touchpad is smooth and clearly to the touch separate from the rest of the surface. The size of this separate area is just about the size of my HP’s buttons. Sometimes I repeatedly end up pushing this border area rather than a button wondering why it isn’t working.
I didn’t want to get the glossy LCD screen so I went with the old fashion style which Dell was not offering. The texture on Gateway’s screen though seems to cause some minor lightness distortion. It seems that solid light grey areas are lightly textured when viewed at the slightest from perfect angle (as in the edges of the screen when looking at the middle). It is very minor and most people probably would never know, but I do a lot of photo scanning and editing especially of black and white photos.
What I really hate about this laptop is the keyboard. I thought the mouse was going to be the big annoyance in switching, but the keyboard is certainly as least as important (if not more) if you do anything more than just simple typing. If you frequently use Home, End, Insert, Delete, Page Up, Page Down, Print Screen, or the left Control key and know where they are on a regular keyboard, you will hate this keyboard.
They flipped the laptop Function key with the left Control key. That is horrible. I have been using this machine for over a week now and 90% of the time I want to press Control, I miss and don’t realize it at first. You might think you can get used to it, I have started to. But that turned out to be another problem, lately when using my desktop I can’t hit the Control key without looking first. Not because I ever miss it, I just hesitate unconsciously preparing to miss as I always do with the laptop keyboard. It is driving me nuts.
Print Screen can only be accessed by holding down the Function key and then pressing the Insert key.
Down the right side of the keyboard from the top are: Delete, Home, Page Up, Page Down, and End. Home being next to delete means I have to hit undo frequently. And with End where it is, I have started to avoid using it, the mouse is easier.
Keyboards were basically standardized long ago for a reason. Just because it is a laptop doesn’t mean you can’t try to get close to the standard layout. On this laptop there is a one inch border along both sides of the keyboard they could have used to spread things out and do it properly.
With all these complaints, would I buy it again? Probably. The extra modular battery, non-glossy screen, and lighter base model were all important factors in deciding on Gateway over Dell. I still hate the keyboard and probably will be extremely happy when I replace this machine in a few years, but it is a really good one otherwise.
June 20th, 2006
Links to John Sadowski’s castle illusion seems to be going around all over the place lately. Not to be left out, I have to post a link as well. Really I just don’t want to forget the address, it is such a cool illusion. In one of my classes last year we covered some of the causes for optical illusions like this so it is very interesting to see how well this illusion works. None of the examples in the book were this cool. John even has a tutorial so I may try this out on some of my own photos someday.
More optical illusions with scientific explanations can be found here.
June 11th, 2006
I downloaded the public Windows Vista Beta 2 and gave it a try on my year old Athlon 64 desktop. I thought finally I would get to use my CPU to its full potential. It should be pretty fast. It was not. I am sure it is partly due to a lot of debugging code still in the beta, but I was surprised.
So far I was not able to try out the Areo Glass interface but the default theme was pretty anyway. My video card rates a 1 on Windows’ System Performance Rating even though it is a Nvida GeForce4 MX 4000 I bought last summer. It doesn’t support something that the Areo interface needs so gets a 1. For 2D graphics, they give the card a 2.0. The rest of my components are 3.3 or above yet my overall system gets a 1. That really adds up. It seems that the max number is a 5.9, but as faster hardware is released, the max number will go up.
I am not the only one unhappy about low overall scores. Computer manufacturers don’t like the idea of customers seeing how bad their brand new $400 system rate. Integrated graphics and slow components are not going to rate well. And guess what $400 systems are made of.
It seems like everything in Windows is moved just for the sake of moving it. Things might be more discoverable through menus and related topics, but things are not easier to reach. Getting to Classic Control Panel is not as easy as it used to be either. And the User Account Controls thing does come up way too often for the most stupid reasons.
Does anyone want to guess where the Undo file operation option went or how about Folder Options? Remember there is no menu bar anymore in Explorer. I gave up and went to Control Panel to get to Folder Options. Eventually I discovered both were under the Organize button along with Copy, Cut and Paste. Who do those options have to do with organizing?
There is no more Display option in even Classic Control Panel, it and a bunch of other stuff now make up Personalization. I would never have found it had it not been for the icon being very similar to XP’s Display. Even right clicking on the Desktop gives you this Personalization menu. Under it though, the first option is to the regular Display panel.
There is still no Internet Explorer icon on the desktop (as in XP with the new style Start Menu) and until I first ran IE, it wasn’t in the Quick Launch area either. Yet, we still have the Recycle Bin at the top of the desktop. Which do you use more, the internet or the recycle bin?
You can still get the Classic Start Menu which as in XP, puts more icons on your desktop. Using it, I now get Computer (renamed My Computer), Control Panel (why on the desktop?), my name (this is the root of my user folder rather than My Documents which does not get a desktop icon), Network (renamed My Network Places), and finally the Internet Explorer icon. Now I have 8 icons on my desktop, taking up 80% of my vertical desktop space which is set at a tiny 1280×1024 resolution.
It would be nice if they could combine the classic style Start Menu with some of the search features of the new Start Menu. But is it really a start menu anymore if it doesn’t say start? In the default theme, it is just a Windows logo. How are we supposed to tell people click on the start button? What do we call it now? Windows logo button? If we are helping people out that need help finding the start menu, it is hard to predict whether they will even recognize the Windows logo.
I also found that when you shutdown from the Start Menu (which is identified only by a power off symbol) you go into sleep mode rather than power off. When I turn something off I like it off. Of course, it gets worse, the machine appears to try to power down to sleep level, but once it gets there, it instantly wakes up. And how can it get worse? My wireless mouse is not recognized when it wakes up. A popup balloon says a USB device is not recognized. Of course, pulling out the wireless receiver and reinserting it makes the mouse work fine again.
I then went hunting for the way to make that button really shut down my computer. It was a long hunt. I don’t remember where I eventually found it, but it was under a deeply buried button named advanced something. Shortly after that I realized, by clicking the side arrow next to the Shutdown and Logout buttons, I could choose from all the usual options. But still is sleep a good default choice? Hopefully that is not the default on laptops. You need to conserve all the power you can on a laptop.
I was also impressed to discover that by default you are running 32 bit Internet Explorer. I had read that the 32 bit version was left for compatibility with older plugins and maybe embedding but didn’t remember it was the default. Why should I have to specifically go hunting for the 64 bit one? If you start IE from the Quick Launch or where it is listed at the top of the the new Start Menu, you get the 32 bit version. And there is no sign of IE 64 bit unless you look under All Programs. Only under the Classic Start Menu is it easily visible right next to the 32 bit version. But what normal person is going to understand the difference? They both look the same.
Notepad had a major upgrade, it now has an optional status bar showing Line and Column numbers. Wow. You can’t get better than that. Well, I guess you could, but it would require a tiny bit of effort and then you would put out of business all the notepad replacement programs. We know how MS doesn’t ever want to put other companies out of business.
They got rid of my favorite mouse cursors, the animated hourglass ones. I hope they will come back with the final release.
I wanted to see what some files looked like in Vista so I went to my XP Documents and Settings folder. I don’t remember what it said, but I wasn’t allowed in at first. It offered to do something and stupidly I said ok. I have no idea what it was doing, but now I can access my XP documents. I worried it was screwing up my file permissions and I wouldn’t be able to log into that account in XP anymore. Turns out whatever was happening didn’t cause a problem that I have found yet. My username and password for both XP and Vista are the same so maybe that had something to do with not screwing everything up.
It took me about an hour to install it which wasn’t bad for taking up most of an entire DVD. I have really wanted to give it a try for a long time now so it was worth the wait. I knew there were going to be things I didn’t like in Vista. There usually are in new versions of Windows. But I didn’t think it was going to be this much. I no longer think I will be an early adopter when it is finally released. Eventually I will give in of course (since I can’t stand using Linux as a desktop system). It was pretty and fun to try but that is about it. I am sure the speed will be greatly improved by the time it is released, but that was the least of what annoyed me.
June 11th, 2006
Wow, my computer is finally one the way. I guess Gateway either doesn’t update their order status page very well or they put these things together super fast with little testing. Just yesterday it said my order was still being processed. This morning it was on its way from Shanghai, China and has already arrived in the US. However, its current location is in Anchorage, Alaska. FedEx’s estimated deliver is Monday and the weekend should give it plenty of time to travel down here. I still want it now, but I can probably survive till Monday.
June 8th, 2006
It has only been three work days since my laptop order, but what is it still doing in “Order Processing?” The estimated arrival date is June 14. If I ordered a Dell today, the shipping date is June 15 with 3-5 Day Delivery. But with Dell, I know systems usually ship much faster than the estimated ship date. According to Dell, their order processing, only takes one day.
Now I am looking into desktops. My mom’s computer died. Maybe I will try HP this time.
June 7th, 2006
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