Category: FWIW

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WWW=Wacky Windows Weirdness

Been over in the Ubuntu side of this computer for a couple of days. “Housekeeping” and other stuff best done from there. Exporting the T-Bird address book I have there into T-Bird Portable, etc.

So, I decided to reboot in Win7 Beta. Weird stuff going on.

1. I was just on an Ubuntu session and all was well, but now the keyboard/mouse are acting weird. Kyboard droppng letters typed (Yp, just like now) and mouse acting herky-jerky. I do NOT have capslock on at any time (disabled the key mechanically), but sometimes, the SHIFT key sticks.

2. Have already had to re-register keyoard/mouse twice–hardware rnegotiaaaae. Again.

3. Can CLCK start orb, but nothing in it s clickable .

No, I have fresh batteries in wireless input devices, and besides, they were jst working fine in Ubuntu, a few minutes ago.

TOO WEID.

(All typos in this post apparently caused by Windoze Weirdness.)

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R&R

About halfway through just the first of my Saturday projects. Means I’ve left the easy one (pretty easy but tedious and messy plumbing project in the basement) for last. Right now, taking a break. Who’d-a thunk snaking RG6 cabling could generate so much sweat? Yeh, finally getting around to rationalizing the CATV/internet access cabling inside. Have been running off two “not the greatest solution” splitters for several years now. One is a pretty decent splitter “donated” by our cable guy–OK, but not ideal. The other a better one but in the wrong placement in the topology map.

Drilling holes, snaking cables, swapping out splitters: in the end, best splitter a 1-2 with one cable going straight to cable “modem” (via a very nice quad RG6 cable) and other going to a multi-Ghz 1-4 splitter for the TVs (including this computer). Have to build a short quad RG6 cable for that one, but have nice quad RG6s for the four TVs.

Later… (much later) I need to figure the “TV over RJ-45” for using this computer as a media server and the modded (almost finished–cobbler’s kids and all that) XBox as a media director to go to a lil 25″-er in our bedroom.

But after the 2-1/4-1 switch and rerouting of CATV cabling… plumbing gig! Yay! *heh*

Update: I can retire these tasks now. Nice. Means tomorrow evening (after Chuck–*heh*), I can start in on another project.

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Economic Education: Mac vs. PC

Sometimes tough economic times do wake folks up a bit:

Mac Sales Growth Falls Below PCs

At U.S. retail, Windows PC unit sales were up 16.6 percent year over year in January, while Mac sales fell 5.5 percent. In October, when Apple launched snazzy, new MacBooks, Mac unit sales rose 27.2 percent compared with 5.7 percent for Windows. The major difference for the two months between: a rapidly eroding U.S. economy.

The article includes Mac apologist comments about folks fleeing “value” over the issue of “price,” but that’s a bogus argument. Sure, there are times when a luxury Mercedes is the right car for the job, but if all you’re doing is getting to work and back, trips to the grocery store, etc., then a MOR Toyota or even Saturn is just as good.

But the quality difference between a $500 PC and a $1,000 (or usually more) Mac just isn’t as big as the Macultists argue. And the PC platform is still much, much more flexible and has apps that are just as good–even sometimes better–than the Mac platform has available, no matter what phanbois may say.

Personally, I’d rather have the difference in price to spend on more software and peripherals, but that’s just me. Folks who’d rather spend more to use a Mac can still do so, and that’s fine with me too. But apparently, more buyers of computers are seeing the value in having more money in their pocket for other things at the end of their computer purchase.

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Who’d-a Thunk It?

There’s a kind of hush all over twc today. The unthinkable has occurred. A decade and more has passed since the last such “once in a blue moon” event has come to pass.

I have a doctor’s appointment.

*yawn*

Yeh, yeh, I’m too lazy and impatient (and easily bored) to manage my blood pressure consistently with (regular) exercise and slow breathing exercises, though the slow breathing exercises alone pretty reliably bring my blood pressure to within normal range. Have a mole that’s undergone a dramatic change this week. Really ought to get a PSA done. (Old–and I do mean old: a year older than I–college roomie has pressured me to do this ever since his prostate cancer, so all right already, Dave! Yeh, go figure. Roomies with the same name. We had answering the phone down pat. “Speaking.” *heh*)

Little things add up, I guess. I can put up with a knee killing me when I walk regularly. Missing sleep I can work around. All the other aches and pains of encroaching age are just background noise–kinda like my tinnitus. But my laziness and impatience are incurable, so it’s off to the doctor I go to tell ’em to gimme some pills, etc.

Putting a crimp in my day, though. *grumble, grumble, gripe, complain*

Oh, well.

Hey, maybe I can get the doc to take a look at my cat who’s losing weight at the same time, you think? 😉

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*d’oh!* Moments from America’s Third World County

So, for the past several days, the “nag bar” insisting that I upgrade WordPress to 2.7.1 has been a big yellow distraction. “Been busy,” I told myself. Truth? Been lazy. Spoiled by the “Automagic” Upgrade plugin I’ve used for the past year or so, and so, when automatic upgrade failed drmatically on the first two tries, I thought to myself, “Self, just upgrade whenever ya have the time and mental spizzerinktum (plenty of good, fresh COFFEE!) to do it,” knowing full well that what I meant was, “When is someone gonna fix the plugin?!?!” *heh*

This ayem, with plenty of coffee in me, I started the lil trek to backup twc and manually install the upgrade when… “Hey! Why not search on the error message?” *d’oh*

Oh. The plugin I’d used for the past year is incompatible with the built in WP Automatic Upgrade function in 2.7!

Disable plugin. Upgrade automagically. Done. Actually fewer clicks than with the plugin. Got an error message, but blog appears to be working fine, I see no weird anomalies. Go with it.

*sheesh!* Found another thing I Do Not Like about Win7. GREATLY disliked same thing in Vista. It’s a little thing, but one of those little things that make life easier for lil ole me. ALL toolbars seem to be ONLY “sprouted” from the taskbar. Now, from Win98 through WinXP it was easy-peasy to create a SEPARATE custom toolbar on ANY side of ones desktop, just by dragging content there and dropping it. In Ubuntu, it’s easy to move the placement of the two built-in toolbars (not as easy as in Win98-XP, but easy. Easy to specify a new toolbar on any (unused) side of the desktop, too.

Not so with Win7 or Vista. *d’oh* (I’d seen this already with Vista but hoped against hope for a different behavior in Win7) Want a separate toolbar completely unlinked to the taskbar? Go fish. For some add-on app to enable that.

*feh* Me$$y$oft ‘s not even channeling Apple well with this one.

Another negative check mark.

*sigh* And I so wanted to like this OS. Really. OK, so I still mostly like it. But it still has too much Vista in its bones n blood. Oh. *duh*

I don’t have full access to my Ubuntu drive from Win7. Funny. NTFS drives aren’t a problem to access from Ubuntu…

Another negative check mark, I suppose. Oh. Well.

Have I mentioned enough times how much I hate, hate, hate Windows’ DRM crap? No, I have not. Not enough times at all, at all.

Oh. Well. There are ways around it.

*d’oh!* Need some OS relief! VMs to the rescue?

Later today (or this evening), off to VMWare to pick up a copy of VMWare Server so I can install a few more OSes on this drive and see just how well Win7 works with VMWare Server hosting other OSes. Should be interesting. Let’s see… what do I want to install? WinXP-64, Win2K, Win98, Suse Linux, Ubuntu, PCBSD and maybe an on-disk Puppy Linux? Sounds about right. 10-15 GiB disk space (with room to grow if needed) each should make ’em happy enough. See how VMWare Tools work here.

Oh! Another *d’oh” moment: why haven’t I installed some “Will only work in Win98/95” apps in compatibility mode, already? Needed to be fully caffeinated, I guess.

Here comes the last version of Encore I was really happy with… sometime after the VMs are installed. One in the Win98 VM and another in compatibility mode in Win7. Let’s see which one really works, eh? (Now, where did I put my midi controller/keyboard when I was cleaning off my desk… )

[Addendum] Habañero peppers are pretty hot, my lunch is telling me… *d’oh* (But *yum* too.)

About time I got back outa here. Almost time for my Wonder Woman to drop in for her lunch (long weekend for her starts today). Booyin’ now. Buh-bye!

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Weird Eyes?

I use this lil bmp file, tiled, as the desktop background in a Win2K VM I run fairly often, hosted on this Ubuntu box:

coffee_bean

The fun thing about this lil graphic on my background is that when I look at it just so, my desktop appears to become three-dimensional, the background “recedes” an apparent two feet or so (to about where the wall is behind my display) while the icons “float” on the surface of my monitor. Move my head and the background appears to move… while the icons stay still.

Weird eyes or just an interesting optical illusion?

I’m going with weird eyes for now.

😉

Anywho, it’s kinda relaxing for these old eyes to ALT-TAB over to that Win2KVM and just let ’em rest in 3-D comfort for a while. A “2/3-yard stare” instead of a 1,000-yard stare” kinda thing.

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Maleable words

So, after two–regularly scheduled–days off, Son&Heir drove in to work on (state) roads that are clear of ice. That our street, and the streets connecting to the first state road here around America’s Third World County Central, are still sheet ice covered with packed snow is immaterial: he can drive on three day old stuff like that. It’s a 30-minute drive, but traffic’s usually only bumper-to-bumper for about 2.5-3.0 miles of it, so it’s not too bad.

Of course, fellow “workers” who live right down the street from his place of employment “couldn’t make it in” and so he’s alone at work today.

He says he now knows why that town’s motto is, “Come to visit; come to stay”. Because the roads are so bad you can’t get out. I’m thinking it may be another reason: because staying too long makes folks too stupid and lazy to find a route out.

Interesting motto. Lots of ways it could be read…

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Deliverance!

Some few of y’all may recall the saga of our “bad neighbors”–multiple calls to the police/sheriff’s department for rowdyism, driving over our lawn with their trucks, dogs running loose, late night-early morning loud, drunken parties on their front lawn, racing down the street, etc.

They’re finally gone. A new couple has moved in. Don’t really know him past “Howdy” but she’s a teller at the local bank and has been for about eight years. Stable, nice folks. Greeted me by name when I took a couple of small baskets of cherry tomatoes over to see who’d moved in (even if they’d not liked tomatoes–they do–it was a good excuse to drop by, ya know?). They moved in while I was having a busy schedule over the past week out and about, so I didn’t get to carry any furniture, as some of our neighbors did when we moved in 15 years ago. Bummer. So a few cherry tomatoes were the least I could drop by, eh? Yeh, yeh, I shoulda baked bread or muffins or something, but when I took a cherry pie to the gals at the bank (yes, even the manager’s a woman) I didn’t bake it myself. Baking’s not my gig.

*whew!* Hail and farewell.

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It’s the Little Things…

Interesting week. Little things, mostly compy-related.

My dad–aged 85–called up with a boot issue. Pretty smart guy sbout this stuff, especially for someone who spent better than 70 years before ever even being exposed to using one of the things. Followed directions well and we traced the problem very quickly to a dead CMOS battery. Sent him pictures, a diagram and instructions and he was cool with the whole thing, *heh* Gives him a reason to play with his grounding strap.

On the other end of the spectrum, the guy that was on the other end of the line when my dad first called is clueless about computers. I picked his up the next day. His WinXP install was well and truly trashed, and the only real fixes were to either hope a repair install fixed things or a complete reinstall. Since he didn’t have the original WinXP install CD, I dug a lil further. Yep. Was not going to shell out one of MY licenses to reinstall Windows (his “license” was… apparently a lil hinky). When the repair install failed, I eschewed attempting a reinstallation using the product key it’d been installed with and just installed Puppy Linux for him, since he insisted all he used the thing for was surfing and email–and there was NOTHING in any email store for any email client, so he meant all webmail.

[Edit: his response when I got it back to him and set up: “It’s never been this fast!” Of course not, it was dragging one of the Queen Elizabeth’s anchors (WinXP) behind it all the way… Even his online java gaming was faster. But, a caveat for folks who do need java/java plugins. Installing/enabling java/java plugins is not all that straightforward in Puppy Linux and involves a LOT of typing at the command line, although some of that can be relieved by some creative mousing–something I was reduced to because of my typo-laden command line “skills” *heh* Still, dragging a plugin or executable to create a hard link where one is needed is easier than typing a long string into the command line and avoids easily-created errors, so I’m not ashamed to admit doing it. 🙂 Configuring browsers to use java after all the background installation and links to plugins has been done is a trivial task, though.]

Puppy’s ideal for him anyway, since the computer is a 700Mhz box with only 256MB of RAM and a 10GB hard drive almost full of programs he never used because they were “inaccessible” to the WinXP that’d been installed over Win98. I don’t imagine he’s got any complaint with running Puppy instead of WinXP, since WinXP had been installed over what was there when he got it from a dump.

Oh, finally got my first opportunity of 2009 to help my Wonder Woman down at one of her libraries, yesterday afternoon. She wanted to move her office computer to the other side of the room from her desk, but keep her monitor, keyboard and mouse on her desk. Easy-peasy. A looooong monitor cable extension (about 2+X the diameter of her original monitor cable, with a humongous amount of shielding, etc.) routed around the wall took care of the monitor issue. Since her office computer’s a Gateway (a very nice, very capable P4 that is several orders of magnitude better than the Dells the school system bought for student use in the libraries), I found her a nice Gateway RF wireless mouse/keyboard combo. Took more time moving and re-routing cables, bundling things up in wire loom, etc., than you might think, but at the end, actualized the mouse/keyboard and she was away to the races.

Fun. (Oh, I bought a second set for me, so I can slide back a few feet, put my feet up on my keyboard drawer and–with a lil “mousing table” nearby–set Opera to 200% and laze through an eBook. *heh* Places the monitor 6′ or better away from my eyes, but really easy easy to read that way.

*heh* I just love freebies. Someone asked me to evaluate using a DirectTV R15 receiver for an offlist purpose. It didn’t work out and I let ’em know why. Emailed me back: “Keep the thing.” Now I have a spare 160GB hard drive, pulled from it. Nice. And I know just where I’ll put it–as slave to an 80GB drive in an old 900Mhz system with 512MB memory. I’ll partition the things into 40GB partitions, I think so I can dual boot Puppy Linux and Windows 98. Maybe. I read an interesting article about virtualization with Puppy, so I might give that a shot. 512MB of memory is pretty slim to do virtualization with, IMO, but between the parsimony Puppy treats memory with and the relatively low memory needs of Win98, I might be able to do it.

Didn’t get to the P.O. until after 4:30 yesterday. I wonder what the package is that was too big for our box?

I’m running about 3-1 this week on answering machine messages on my POTS line as opposed to voicemail on my VOIP phone. Hmmm… If I dropped my POTS line, do you think more people would call my VOIP phone? I like having my messages emailed to me, since I’m almost always at a computer–either mine or someone else’s. I hate cell phone voicemail, and I keep my cell phone turned off ALL the time, unless I’m making calls, so my VOIP phone is “my” phone. Heck, I make more local calls on it than I do on our POTS line.

Oh, BTW, back at the Puppy Linux thing: installing Puppy Linux to a hard drive from the live CD is now a trivial operation. A little wizard just copies over the image from the live CD… though minus one critical element that must be “installed” separately, so booting that installation is something else. The GRUB (GRand Unified Bootloader) installation wizard isn’t quite as straighforward, definitely not “Aunt Tilly” ready, IMO. After a couple of tries using it, I just looked up the GRUB boot config file it had created and did a little editing to make the thing work. Notaproblem, really, but I don’t expect the “Aunt Tillies” of the world to go for that. Close, but no cigar.

OTOH, for someone who just surfs the web and does email, booting a live CD Puppy Linux session could be all the computer they need, and Aunt Tilly could handle that (once Nerdy Nephew ran the easy-peasy network wizard that does work well and shows her where to CLICK to install PET packaged software, in case she needs more than is in the standard installation).

Today: day of R&R and bumaround chores. First thing: pick up that package at the P.O. Then, grocery shopping, library and little things like that. Easy day. Maybe get an afternoon nap. I hope.

If I keep myself focused on the ordinary things of life, maybe I’ll not brood over the little things like The One being the very first newly-inaugurated president to skip out on the Salute to Heroes Inaugural Ball since it was begun 56 years ago… (h.t. MoreWhat) Whatabum.