"In a democracy (‘rule by mob’), those who refuse to learn from history will be the majority and will dictate that everyone else suffer for their ignorance."
I like other OSes, but Windows is the Big Kahuna in eyeshare, so naturally I share more Windows tips here than anything else for any other OS. Just the way it is. That said, here’s a lil tip for Windows users to help keep down the accumulated junk a Windows install just naturally crufts up with.
First run “cleanmgr /sageset:99”
Oh, right. Start>Run and copy-paste the above material found between the quotation marks–just don’t include the quotation marks. Win 7 users, just hit the Start Orb and paste it in the search field and hit enter.
Choose files you wish deleted, actions to be taken, apply, then close.
Then copy the text below, paste it into a plain text editor like Notepad and save it as a batch file. Replace “%username%” with your username. Place it in a “tools” folder or some such to use as desired or in your startup folder if that’s your preference.
The switches selected for the del command below are
f=force deleting of read-only files.
q=quiet mode; do not ask if ok to delete on global wildcard
s=delete specified files from all subdirectories.
c:
cd “C:\Users\%username%\Local Settings\Temp”
del /q /s /f *.*
cd “C:\Users\%username%\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files”
del /q /s /f *.*
cleanmgr /sagerun:99
Sure, cleanmgr will attempt to clean up TEMP files and Temporary Internet files for you, but it just does a so-so job. By including the first two “del” commands, you’re assured that those WILL be deleted.
Oh, you could also download, install and run CCleaner (“Crap Cleaner”), but even it doesn’t necessarily get rid of read-only files located in the TEMP and Temporary Internet Files folders. It’ll try, but…
From the otherwise excellent and usually reliable Windows Secrets newsletter comes this guffaw from the usually serious Fred Langa responding to a reader’s question about outdated browsers (with massive security holes) being required by the “feddle gummint’s” FAFSA web site:
First of all, it appears the site has been updated since your phone call. The FAFSA help page lists all the supported browsers, which now include IE 8 and Mozilla Firefox 3.5.4.
Second, consider the threat level: most browser security features exist to protect you against hostile sites that might try to stuff malware into your system or steal information from you. Why would the government need to attack your browser? If the government wants your personal information, it can get it quite openly through legal channels.
Oh. Wait. He was serious. “Why would the government need to attack your browser?” It’s not “need” that drives a “feddle gummint” bureaucrap to do anything, Fred. They pretty much do as they want, because they can. Government of the government, by the government and, especially, for the government shall not perish from the Earth, Fred… *sigh*
Frankly, I consider “feddle gummint” websites to BE malware, unless proven differently.
…so you don’t have to. That’s my excuse, and I’m sticking with it.
Calibrating the Clear Type tuning on a Windows system with an LCD screen that’s displaying text just fine? Stupid. So, what did I do? You guessed it. The Clear Type calibration tool uses a series of displayed text images for the user to subjectively choose between in order to tune the Clear Type display. What I got recently out of playing with that was a lesson in “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
At 100% in my browser (pick any of four), here’s an example of what “tuning” Clear Type using the M$ utility resulted in:
Ugly, eh? Makes me want to poke my eyes out. At 120% or higher magnification, the effect disappears, though. Still, now I have to reverse the “tuning” or automatically CTRL+Scrollwheel to a different magnification when such artifacts appear. *sigh* Just a warning to Windows users, once again: if it ain’t broke…
Fortunately, I can always browse just as well in another OS in a VM. 🙂
1. Think “happy” thoughts. (e.g.–“The guy who just cut in front of me and slowed down in 70mph traffic slowly lowered into boiling oil.”)
2. Smile at the world (and the world will wonder what the heck you’re up to).
3. Wear better-fitting shoes. (Or go barefoot. Sure, you’ll not be allowed in a McDonalds, but you are looking for a way to better your day, anyway, so that’s a win-win for ya.)
4. Avoid phones. (Don’t 90% of your hassles come from “miscommunications”?)
5. Uffda! Avoid “feeda“. *heh* (I once saw a graphic demonstration of the difference between the Norwegian expressions “uffda” and “feeda“–two guys walking; one pointed at the ground and said, “Uffda!” The other didn’t see “it” in time and said, “Feeda!” So, it’s uffda if you see “it” and feeda if you step in “it”… )
6. Be pleasant to idiots. (See the principle stated above. Uffda! You’ve been warned.)
7. Turn off the “news”. (Again, see numbers 5 and 6. *heh)
8. Eat some ice cream. (The joys of cold, sweetened fat!)
9. Take a nap. (There’s no problem that does not look better from behind closed eyelids.)
10. Laugh at life’s little “funnies”. (“So, two Muslim terrorists walk into a 230-grain bullet traveling at 830 feet per second… ” That’s both funny and economical! Don’tcha just love .45 ACP humor?)
Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to hide the bodies of those I had to kill
BECAUSE THEY REALLY TICKED ME OFF!
As a result of beating back some locusts (and getting my lunch eaten by others *heh*), this turned out to be a mostly good, productive but kinda quirky day.
Man! Was I ever a chatty cathy during the time working on the tail end of flooring and other projects Down South. Motormouth city, fer shure. (And yeh, I coulda had a classic SM-58 in my hand doing a monologue, for all the running off… gottachucleatmyself… )
Learned something freaky deaky about OS X. Installing a new hard drive (in a Macbook) and using an OS X install CD apparently does NOT automagically bring up a prompt to initialize the new disk. Have to open Utilities… Disk Utility in the boot menu to force recognition and installation of the drive. Strange. I’ve not run into that in other OSes hardly at all in the last 10 years. I guess Apple only wants geeks to install new drives in their systems. Can’t give an average user any obvious help. *heh* That Apple: always looking out for the users to keep ’em from doing normal stuff. *LOL*
Anyway, boy did I feel like an idiot when I looked over instructions someone had printed out for transferring all his data and software from one Macbook drive to a new one. I never even thought the system wouldn’t tell him he needed to initialize the drive. Silly me. I acted like he was doing the install on a Windows, Linux or BSD system. Live and learn.
Man, sometimes getting old sucks swamp gas. (Yeh, the gas can be a problem too.) Now, my good knee and good hip (on opposite sides, no less… of course) are the ones talking to me. Figures. Just when I get used to the pain in the others… 🙂
My Wonder Woman just got another rave review from her work for another course in her grad classes. Natch. She’s such a wiz! But heck, with a 3,000 word paper for her first month’s class and a ten page paper for this class, at this rate she should just have shot for a PhD, complete with thesis. *heh* Her EdLaw class has at least been pretty interesting. But it’ll be over by the end of this month, I think, and her next class doesn’t begin until April. Means she’ll have some “time out” (from course work, not from teaching) before Lovely Daughter’s wedding March 27. Nice.
Lovely Daughter home early tonight–by 8:00 or so. I guess she has a big day tomorrow between church and some sort of social activity tomorrow evening. Something about gathering to worship some really amazing pottery? I think she called it a “super bowl” or some such. I don’t get it. Seems like idolatry to me, but then I’m just an Olde Pharte.
Oh, well, I don’t suppose it’s much more idolatrous than what goes on in most churches on Sunday mornings.
Just hit my own personal wall. Going to hit the sheets before my head falls off my shoulders.
Microsoft Security Essentials popped up a warning a couple of days ago about an attachment to an email (see “Gullibility: Bad; Skepticism: Good”–yes it was that email–I received it multiple times). I decided to see how it handled it and told it to simply delete it.
It did. It also deleted ALL the emails in my inbox. Not to worry. First, most of my email is filtered into subordinate boxes and none of that email was touched. Second, I concatenate all my email accounts using GMail to collected from three different email servers, then I download everything from the GMail collection. So, all my email is already “backed up” there. Third, I use Thunderbird Portable and can (and do) back up my email again, weekly, by simply copying the Mail folder from the Thunderbird Portable folder to a more durable medium than the flash drive Thunderbird Portable runs from.
So, no mail was lost.
But, if you don’t have multiple backups and do run into a similar situation, don’t say you weren’t warned. 🙂
LomaAlta has proposed the “Top Ten Songs of the 1950s” with his numbers 7-10 listed here. While I don’t disagree with his list (“Top Ten” may well reflect popularity as much as musical worth) and I do agree that his list of songs contain pop songs of some worth, I’d have a different list. Yeh, even in my home with three sisters and a brother, I was the really odd one out. Their 50s (and later 60s) pop music didn’t appeal to me much. Frankly, during those early years, I was much more enamored of instrumental music, particularly classical (which did include some Classical,Romantic and Baroque)–very little contemporary music penetrated my hearing until my college years… when, strangely, my studies were focused on classical music training.
So, my list of songs–50s or othewrwise–is very different to LomaAlta’s–or most folks’ for that matter.
I’ll just my top five:
Number 5:
Of this performance… *sigh* I dislike some of Alastair Miles’ vowel choices, but the Baroque trumpet is just as nearly perfect as one could hope for, and my quibbles about Miles’ vowels are just that: quibbles. Definitely belongs in my top five best songs.
Number 4:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1pQ8cIi1Gpk
What list could be complete without Rogers Covey-Crump’s performance of Purcell’s “first” setting of, “If Music Be the Food of Love”? Most counter-tenors sound awfully artificial, but Covey-Crump captures this wonderful lil song almost to perfection (His “the’s” thud on the ear, but that’s a small price to pay for the rest of the performance). BTW, Purcell’s other settings of this text are also worth listening to, IMO.
Number 3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJCnqJJ9uRs
Bryn Terfel’s performance here is my favorite YouTube performance of this stunningly beautiful aria from Xerxes. Yes, another song by Handel. He really knew how to write a melodic line.
Number 2:
Regular readers here have already seen and heard this video multiple times. While the entire Die Winterreise song cycle stands as the single greatest collection of great songs for solo voice, in my opinion, and makes choosing just one an exercise in frustration, this song just grabs me more than any of the rest. Stunning. And, of course, Der Lindenbaum sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau–INarguably, the greatest baritone of the 20th Century, accompanied by Alfred Brendel, well, breathtaking is the least praise I can extend.
But what could edge that out? How about The Last Great Song ever written? *heh* Yep. From the 1926 hit opera, Turandot: Nessun Dorma , sung by the only guy who could squeak by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau for the number one spot as “greatest voice of the 20th Century”–Jussi Björling.
Number 1:
While none of these performances are “perfect” (Fischer-Dieskau, for example, was in his 60s and well past his prime in the performance above), all are great songs, performed by some of the best (and in the last two examples, THE best) voices of the 20th Century, well worth being included in anyone’s “ear conditioning” collection.
I probably have a few hundred other “best” or great songs floating around in my mind’s ear, but these might help put some of the “music” being pushed out to deaden folks’ ears today into some sort of perspective. BTW, Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte is pretty much devoid of great songs, but of you can get your hands on a recording with Fischer-Dieskau in the role of Papageno, you’ve found a treasure. Oh, it’s not rare; the treasure’s in Mozart’s music and the wonderful voice of Fischer-Dieskau.
And continuing the dissing of Apple’s latest bid to leech money from suckers, this article and discussion at PCMagazine’s site compels me to respond (here, because with a couple hundred W3C errors on the PCMag page, wouldn’t you know that one of ’em is making my comment submission fail). But first, the “official” Apple iPad intro:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDNVAgxOIew
Apple: “The best web surfing experience, the best email experience, the best photo and movie watching experience… ” And no, I did NOT add the emphasis. Just watch the thing. It’s in the original Apple video.
These claims are simply over the top, unsupportable, ridiculous. NONE of those experiences on a 9.7″ screen with NO keyboard and tiny lil speakers can be “the best” anything.
Also from the video, “…a screen THIS large…” *feh* As large as my usual 23″ widescreen I’m using to view this page? “Large” is silly. Large compared with a iPhone? Sure, but that’s not what 99% of folks use for their primary web browsing and email and video viewing experiences. For a reason. Actually, many reasons.
Contrast the iPad’s really minimalist feature set (designed to do almost nothing but sell more media from Apple) to something like the ASUS Eee PC T91MT Multi-touch (convertible, on the fly) Tablet Netbook. 32GB SSD (+500GB included online storage), actual keyboard and touchpad for real computing needs, USB, media card slots, WiFi, Bluetooth and more… for $115 less than the base 32GB SSD iPad.
Add 3G hardware to the iPad and bump it up another $130, but add the same functionality with an UNLOCKED 3G USB peripheral to the ASUS unit? Easily done for about $50. Oh, and did I mention almost unlimited inexpensive expandability for the lil ASUS via the USB ports?
What’s to like about the iPad in comparison to the lil ASUS?
Well, the chief “benefits” of the iPad seem to be paying (lots) more for (a lot) fewer features and being locked into the Apple Straight Jacket. Woo-hoo! Sign me up to blow more of my money for fewer features!
Not.
Caveat: I don’t own one of them–yet; gotta save those nickels and dimes, folks–but I gather from users that the first thing to do with one of the lil ASUS comps is UNinstall the preinstalled Touch Gate software, since it is just a hanger-on from when the comp was designed to be able to run XP with multi-touch. Win7 Home Premium (preinstalled) has all the multi-touch capabilities built in.
BTW, the lil ASUS unit has been in the channel since at least November of last year, and numerous tablet notebooks abound. So, tell me exactly, just what’s so new and ground-breaking about the iPad? Oh, the Apple book/media store? Kindle for PC, and Barnes and Noble’s eBook offerings alone top 1,000,000 in the ePub and pdf formats, downloadable without a B&N nook and usable on a PC, why! even on a lil ASUS (or any other) tablet PC with higher screen resolutions than the iPad.
Color me unimpressed with the iPad. Just another way for Apple to con suckers out of more money in the Apple Straight Jacket Store.
