Category: computers
Overstream - caption your videos!
Overstream allows you to caption YouTube, Google Video, MySpace Video, Dailymotion, Veoh and Megavideo videos:
(Full Post)Rocket Science
About 500 people did the race yesterday. We had real numbers and everything. This morning I called the lady who was in charge of the race:
Me: “Hi, I’m interested in the results of the Turkey Trot.”
LICOTR: [silence, followed by paper shuffling] “The such and such team won.” (I didn’t even pay attention to what she [...]
Outlook 2003 - 24 hour clock, multiple time zones
Since everyone who sees my Outlook calendar seems to be amazed by this, I’ll put links to the instructions here.
I’ve been working satellite operations, where everything is in UTC. I’ve been working weird hours, and frequently am unable to subtract six from a current (or future) UTC time. So I set up my calendar to [...]
By Request
There are a couple of things in the request queue:
Derrick Parkhurst of Iowa State University is looking to publicize his IPRIZE initiative “to create better tools for disabled users to interact with computers. In particular eye movements have been shown to be an effective human computer interaction technique for individuals with motor disabilities.” It looks [...]
It’s a bad world out there
I read somewhere that an unprotected Windows machine on the internet takes about 20 minutes to get infected.
Last week my hard drive died. I got a new hard drive and ran IBM’s Rescue and Recovery on it, which basically restored it to factory defaults.
I figured the next Good Idea would be to run Windows [...]
Email Meisterin!
I am feeling like the email Meisterin!
One of my domains has a lot of email aliases. Naturally, they attract a lot of spam.
I was kind of lackadaisical about it because my email provider has such terrific spam filtering that I rarely see spam in my inbox. But some of the addresses that these aliases forward [...]
New Toy
I’m playing with my new toy, the Stowaway Wireless IR Keyboard from ThinkOutside. I’m using it with a Palm TX.
It’s bigger than the Palm itself, about 4 x 6 x 1 inches in its cute little zippered case. To use it, you lift the top up to form a stand for the Palm, then [...]
Laptop Happiness
The F5 key on my laptop has been wiggly for months, and last week it gave up the ghost and fell off. So I did what I had been putting off - I called IBM Customer Service.
Imagine my amazement - during the dizzying space of 12 minutes, my call was answered, my vital statistics were [...]
Urban legends
What is the matter with some people? Intelligent, adult women who run their own businesses, manage jobs and children, are allowed on the road with a large motor vehicle, who forward these stupid emails. And not just to a few friends, but to every mailing list they are part of?
Can you tell I’ve been moderating [...]
Fun with del.icio.us
As always, way behind the rest of the world.
I got frustrated maintaining bookmarks on multiple computers, and trying to keep track of my blogroll. del.icio.us to the rescue.
It also prodded me to finally incorporate my static pages into WordPress. I had been resisting because I really didn’t want to update the pages. A lot of [...]
Free the browser!
For those of you who didn’t notice this earth-shaking event, Opera is now free. Even though my kids are now using Firefox, I am still stubbornly stuck to Opera as my favorite. So go try it.
(Full Post)Regendered
This is pretty cool. Via Misbehaving, a gender swapper for websites. Put in a website address, and you get the site with “him” and “her” switched. Makes for some interesting reading.
(Full Post)Disaster or Opportunity?
My hard drive at work died while I was on travel, and the backups I’ve been doing so meticulously don’t seem to exist any more.
Losing your hard drive is either a disaster or an opportunity. On the one hand, it’s a pain to reassemble all the tools I need (all right, want). Need to edit [...]
MIA
It’s been a very busy couple of weeks.
My software project just finished FQT. It was scheduled to last 5 days. We’ve been doing dry runs of test procedures for the past 4 months. We had one last minute bug fix (literally last minute - 8:30 am Friday, with FQT beginning Monday).
We lost Day 1 re-releasing [...]
Programming
Big Perl weekend. Still trying to wrap my mind around LIST contexts, and feeling pretty stupid. I re-wrote my shell script in Perl and added hooks to put in some pcli (if I ever figure that stupid thing out) and for the database interface, rather than trying to drag files over to a Windows machine.
It’s [...]
Fun
I just had my first totally fun day at work in months. Why? Most people were on vacation, I did absolutely no managing, instead I spent the day cobbling together a MySQL/PHP/shell script application to automate validation of our integration tests (which almost works).
The trouble with programming is that it is a deep and narrow [...]
Installing Apache and friends
A really useful guide: Install & Configure Apache with PHP, JSP, MySQL, and PHPMyAdmin on Windows 2000/XP.
(Full Post)Browser Frustration
I updated Opera to 8.0. Some changes for the better, some not. Blogspot blogs now correctly display both columns (in 7.x, the content appeared on top, the navigation column appeared below).
Google Groups don’t work, though. I don’t think it’s a function of the Opera upgrade, they didn’t work in Opera 7.x either. For a long [...]
Power
The power subsystem engineer on my satellite at work has a poster on his office door:
Power - Everything Else is Just a Load!
Last weekend I helped my friend L set up her new computer. She’s moving from an old, virus- and spyware-ridden Windows Me system. She is very foggy about how she connects to the [...]
Miscellaneous
Getting the Story Right: Adventure Travel Without the Pity Factor, from Scott Rains. Why Dangling Wheelchair is not just an example of the “Disabled Hero’s Welcome” genre.
The bookmarklet solution to the password problem, from Simon Willison. I’m using Password Agent on a USB memory stick, but this looks interesting as well.
WiFi at the Boulder library!
WiFi Internet Access: Available at the Boulder Public Library - an open hotspot, very cool. Now if they’d just get some comfortable chairs …
(Full Post)Registration idiocy
More and more online news providers are requiring subscriptions. Check out Simon Willison’s blog for some good discussion about registration. I was amused to discover that Lancaster Online requires its readers to be at least 4 years old (2000 - 2004 were rejected as invalid birth years), but less than 999 years old [...]
(Full Post)Firefox vs Opera
I’m getting a little annoyed with Opera (just a little). The main driver is the fact that it doesn’t display the WordPress admin screens properly.
I played with Firefox when it was Firebird, but wasn’t very motivated, so now I’m checking out Firefox again.
Opera things that I miss:
One letter keyboard shortcuts, specifically Back (Z) and Forward [...]
iBook!
Eldest Son’s graduation present has arrived. It is an iBook, the first Mac at our house. We are amazed and confused. Soon we hope to be elucidated.
(Full Post)Unexpectedly easy
The nameserver change went much better than I expected. The only way it could have been better is if the previous host had allowed me to hang on to the old account for a few days while the nameserver change propagates.
(Full Post)Rearranging
I have discovered the joy of subdomains. I’ve been moving everything around, and so it’s probably broken. Mostly, I’ve created a subdomain for things in development, which has really cleaned out my root directory.
(Full Post)Search strings
Some days you just get really lovely search strings:
#reqs: search term
4: bathroom photos
4: james christian pfohl moravian
3: accessibility consultant
2: wedding marimba music
2: journal backgrounds
2: new scientist multiple sclerosis mother
[...]
Perl
I’ve spent the last three days hacking somebody else’s Perl scripts (oh, and learning Perl), so I haven’t had much time to think about anything else.
I’m not sure I’m crazy about a language that lets you use variables before you declare them.
WhoIs Ultra
Unfortunately, WhoIs Ultra doesn’t seem to be very reliable. It’s reporting some available domains as registered, and it says that my domains (very registered, I assure you) are available.
(Full Post)Adventures in Markup
Can I just moan here? Most people have absolutely no f**ing clue about semantics. And doing tables in MS Word doesn’t help the situation.
(Full Post)The Agony of Dialup
Another weekend, another computer…
My sister-in-law could use a computer, and my husband reminded me that we have a brick of a laptop, a Toshiba Satellite 1605CDS, lying around the house somewhere.
I found it, dusted it off, and inventoried it. Windows 98, 475MHz AMD K6-2 processor, 160MB RAM, 4GB hard drive (I love how the spec [...]
Ohmigod…
Did you know that there were ATMs running Windows? And getting viruses? (Via Simon Willison’s Weblog, which has much more detail.)
I knew there was a reason I don’t have one of those cards.
Clean Slate
I spent the day re-installing WinXP on the kids’ computer, which had managed to get itself incredibly gunked up. The most irritating feature was the loss of the ability to log off, thanks to some maddening piece of software I actually paid for.
It took a couple of hours to interview each kid and figure out [...]
(Full Post)Fun with CSS
I spent some time today cleaning up one of my websites - every page has a different color scheme, and every page had a graphic title. I dreaded making new pages because I couldn’t always match the graphic.
So I converted all the graphic titles to CSS titles - I don’t like the way the font [...]
So Addicted
My email is down. Man, I’m so addicted, it’s pitiful.
Actually, I’m really pleased with my email provider. They did go down during the East Coast power outage, but gave everyone a free month’s service to compensate. Now they’re down due to a DB problem. I’ve had this account all year and this has been the [...]
And the Living is Easy
Still working on the wireless problem - I’ve moved everything pretty much back to where it was and upgraded the firmware on the wireless access point, and now I’m worse off than before - the computer has trouble even finding my access point. I did get a really long Ethernet cable, though, so that’s easing [...]
(Full Post)WMD
Find Weapons of Mass Destruction.
(Full Post)It’s not a Beauty Pageant
I’ve just put up the all redesigned Ms. Wheelchair America website. If anybody sees any problems with it, please let me know.
It is now hot. In June we had no 90 degree days, some sort of record. It was 97 yesterday and is supposed to be 95 today. It sucks, having to choose between picking [...]
Cables and MT
Last weekend I moved everything around, disconnected and connected everything, and tied it all up real pretty-like. This week, lo and behold, my wireless connection, previously steady as a rock, drops every 30 seconds or so. Little lights continue to blink and be happy, but my computer says the connection’s down. Very irritating.
So far I’ve [...]
Home Office Woes
The computers-in-the-family-room situation is driving me nuts.
We currently have one desktop computer, one printer and one laptop sharing a six foot table with the networking gear (hub, dsl modem, wireless access point) and miscellaneous other computer junk (palm pilot hot sync thingie, digital camera cables, etc). This mess is all cabled together in what seems [...]
Website Criticism Quandary
I need advice. An organization creates a website, using some sort of goofy software. It looks fine to the (non-technical) person who created it. When I look at it, the text and headings are all superimposed on one another, making it impossible to read. Turning CSS off doesn’t fix it; everything is absolutely positioned. I [...]
(Full Post)Creepy Computer
Twenty Questions: The neural-net on the Internet. What a creepy-good time waster!
(Full Post)Unix Utilities for Windows
GNU utilities for Native Win32, lighter weight than Cygwin. I’m a happy camper.
(Full Post)Geekiness
I am 30.76923% - Total Geek.
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