“While there is really no reason for this speed today… ”
Siwwy wabbit: speed’s a weason aww on its own.
🙂
Stolen Thought
“People get just exactly as much government as they are unwilling to oppose.”1
Janet Napolitano Rides the Short Bus to Reality…
…taking the slow route. The REALLY slow route.
Fox News: Janet Napolitano admits Fort Hood massacre was “Violent Islamic Terrorism”
Well, duh, dumbass. What was your first clue, Sherlock? It’s closing in on four months since Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 and wounded 30 at Ft. Hood while shouting Islamic B.S., and Janet Napolitano is just now figuring out it was an act of Islamic terrorism.
[audio:What-a-maroon.mp3]With people like this in charge of national security issues, the Islamic savages only need to be smarter than the average first first grader. Heck, illiterate morons outclass our Homeland Security chief.
I repeat:
[audio:What-a-maroon.mp3]Minor Improvements
Anyone recall the 2000 Census “long forms”? Nightmares for respondents and for Census workers, too, I should imagine.
There’s some small improvement in the Census questionnaire that is to begin being mailed out March 1. Only 10 questions, apparently. Download a pdf the Census Bureau has available for review here.
The only question I found really offensive was the question on race. Somehow, I suspect that if I checked “Some other race” and wrote in “Human” that I’d receive a visit asking for clarification… *heh* The phone number question? It’s not as though getting my phone number from a reverse directory is impossible, although in 2000 it would have been a problem (since we didn’t get “real” street addresses on my street until 2005 or so, IIRC).
“Of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of carpenters and kings… “
IOW, this is yet another post avoiding politics and current events. Oh, I suppose I could revert to “Kipling Tuesday” and let his ascerbic words on “current events of yore” stand in stead of my own poor commentary, but I just don’t feel like doing that today.
Instead, how’s that browser war going for ya?
*heh*
I’m still down on Internet Exploder and every version of Chrome I’ve given a shot at my eyeballs. Safari and Firefox are about dead even with me on the scale of “so-so-to-lukewarm” and the newest Opera has some “features” that were initially a bit off-putting.
Yeh, how’s that for a surprise? Me, issuing a mini-micro-nano-pan of any version of Opera. Well, the latest Opera 10.50 beta had me ticked off for a bit when the menu bar was AWOL. That meant accessing all sorts of functions from erasing private data to customizing keyboard shortcuts were hidden. I guess that’s fine if Opera wanted to be Chrome, but it chapped my gizzard. Oh. Accessible–mostly–from the new “Opera button” on the left side of the Tab Bar, but only mostly. To get the full spread, I had to use that “O” button to reinstall the menu bar. It would certainly have been nice for Opera to have noted that lil “feature” somewhere on the “New Features” page that is linked to on the “Starting Opera” page that is loaded on the first start of the browser, but no, had to dig and fumble around for it. An astounding misplay by Opera Software.
Still, once I had access to importing my bookmarks and had recustomized some things, the 10.50 beta did seem to be just the ticket to wipe out the bad taste of other recent browser tryouts. For a wee taste of just one feature that Opera still maintains that is at least an order of magnitude better than other browsers I’ve tried to like, here’s a screen shot of one of the multi-tabbed “Preferences” dialogs with a drill-down mini-dialog popped up:
Of course, the multiple, granularized preferences dialogs available in easy-peasy GUI format from within the browser are just the tip of the iceberg in Opera customization. Since it also uses easily-edited ini files, it’s even more customizable that way. And, of course, additional tweaks are available via opera:config typed into the addressbar. Multiple power levels of customizing available multiple, easily-accessed (once the “menu button for dummies–or Chrome-Firefox-Safari-Internet Exploder users”–is deactivated *heh*)
And wide-ranging customization via features already built into the browser is just one of many reasons I prefer Opera over its imitators. *heh*
Windows Command Line Tools for Users
I’ve used the command line less over the years, since the “good old days” of DOS filtering all the folks who could NOT manage linear thinking were filtered over to Mac. But eventually the laziness inculcated by easy-peasy GUIs managed to dull my command line “skilz”… making my relatively recent increase in use of ‘nix boxes more challenging for quite a while.
Still, I do use Windows in various incarnations a lot. But keeping command line skills from rusting has been a challenge. But since so very many things, even nowadays in the easy-peasyest Windows GUI of all, Win7, can still be best done at the command line, it’s a useful skill set that any moderately advanced Windows user ought to never let fade. Here’s a really great reference to help out in that regard: a command line reference for Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Vista. Really useful for Windows users to have, IMO.
And here’s a fun little trick using one of those commands to cut one mouse click off a reboot. *heh*
-
RIGHT-Click on the desktop and select New>Shortcut
In the Text box, type
shutdown /r /t 30
OK your way out (naming the shortcut anything you want)
The “30” is the time in seconds to reboot from invoking the command. You can, of course, set it to other time in increments of one second.
There, now instead of CLICK-ing Start>Shutdown(arrow)>Restart, you can simply CLICK on Show Desktop>Restart (as I named my shortcut). Or, if you wanted to save another CLICK, just put the shortcut on your Taskbar. (In Win7, RIGHT-CLick>Pin to Taskbar.) Then it’d be a one-click reboot.
A number of other parameters can be invoked to custom tailor just about whatever shutdown behavior you want to invoke.
And that’s just one of an abundant alphabet soup of powerful (OK, sometimes just fun) command line tricks at your fingertips. Batch files are a great way to automate some everyday maintenance using command line tools as well, but without a lot of time drilling those commands (and all the available switches) into one’s brain, OR a good reference like the one at M$TechNet referenced above, simple tools to simplify one’s life are not that simple to come by. *heh*
“Reasoning” from The Church of Anthropogenic Global Climate Fright
The warmistas seem to begin with “It’s all George Bush’s fault” and end with the heat death of the universe.
Oh, yeh. Makes sense. When heard by folks who’ve stabbed their own frontal lobes with a screwdriver enough times.
Just sayin’.
Continue reading ““Reasoning” from The Church of Anthropogenic Global Climate Fright”
Micro-Mini-windows Tip
If your computer is running Windows 7, you may have noticed that the command line trick for verifying system files that’s been around for a decade–sfc /scannow typed in a run dialog–needs something more to work, now.
Open a command prompt with administrator priviledges:
Start>Search: cmd
Right click on the command found and select, “Run as administrator”
(Vista’s a tad different and I’m just not going to mess with it. If you have Vista, upgrade. No, seriously. I have no help for you. Figure it out on your own.)
In the command line window, type
sfc /scannow
(Note the space between “sfc” and “/scannow”) And press Enter.
It’ll run as it always has, verifying that your system files are uncorrupted. If it needs to replace one, and you’ve not placed the installation files on your hard drive and edited the registry to make Windows aware of where, you may be asked to place your installation DVD in your optical drive if a file needs to be replaced. This isn’t all that common, though, since Windows caches copies of most essential system files.
Oh, if you’ve been a Windows user for more than a decade and haven’t discovered the “sfc /scannow” command before now, just pass this on to the 13-year-old who maintains your computer for you. *heh*
I really need to put a tip jar on my sidebar… 😉
A Spoonful of Sugar
With all the hectoring of those who oppose his attempts to impose his will that The Ø! has been doing recently, I thought I’d give him a little political advice… not that he pays any attention to “the little people”…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5IW9wK_HNg
WTV Files: A Better Way?
OK, I’ve been right-clicking on Windows Media Center .wtv files and selecting “Convert to dvr-ms” one at a stinking time so I can then convert that to a format that’s able to be written to a DVD for playing anywhere, and it’s gotten old already. Yeh, yeh, call me lazy. Call me doubly lazy, since I could just set up another external drive (but make it a humongous 1.5TB drive, cos the files are about 3GB per hour of recorded video) to store the things on. But. keeping wtv files isn’t in the cards for me anyway, since some programs also record with DRM junk that voids the recording after a given period of time. Not appreciating DRM. (Anti-DRM: I still have some old Tom Baker “Dr. Who” episodes on VHS. No making unplayable by remote DRM management for those puppies, and I’m NOT accepting it now for new recordings.)
Dug around, and other folks feel the same way. Here’s a possible solution: WTVWatcher. I’ve scanned the thing for malware every which way from Sunday and it has come up clean so far. Does it work? Well, yes, it does. It watches the folder I specified (NOT my Recorded TV folder, another one where I put recordings I want converted), and then automagically converts whatever .wtv files are in the folder to dvr-ms. From there, I can convert the dvr-ms files into whatever I want to burn to optical media. Heck, for the shows that are going to be viewed on the old analog TV, that can even be avi onto CD! It’s as good as old VHS…
WTVWatcher uses the WTVConverter.exe app that’s included in the \\Windows\ehome folder where WMC resides. It’s the same app that’s invoked when using the right-click>convert to dvr-ms context menu schtick, but the script just automates it by watching the folder specified by the user and converting any and all .wtv files there. Easy-peasy, and seems to work just fine.
One word of caution: when the thing converts .wtv files to .dvr-ms it also automatically deletes the .wtv files. For me, this is a good thing. YMMV.
Additional thought: I had attempted to use WTVConverter on one .wtv file and kept getting a “WTVConverter cannot convert the file from wtv to dvr-ms… ” error, and this whether I attmpted to perform the conversion via the RIGHT-CLICK context menu or via the command line. But this lil script that uses WTVConverter to do its work churned right on through the file and produced a usable dvr-ms file. Strange. But good.
BTW, I hate commercials, so…
Trying out LifeExtender to remove commercials from dvr-ms files. I’ll drop back by to comment on how it does its job. It was written for Vista, hence the tailoring for .dvr-ms files, and hasn’t been updated for almost 2 years. I hope that’s because it works just fine the way it is. 😉
Update: OK, LIfeExtender (so-called, because it gives one back the minutes that commercials steal *heh*) does work, and as far as I can tell hasn’t caused any video loss, but be warned: it’s a slow process. I had to just let it run while I went on and did other things, but it took several hours to scan and remove commercials from 10 programs–all but one just one-hour programs. Do note that LE isn’t perfect. It glitched up a tad on one episode of one show, inserting 20 minutes of blank screen, though none of the show was lost, and every now and then, tiny pieces of commercials remain. Still, it’s a heck of a lot handier than editing the files manually.