This photo chart made me laugh: How Fanboys See Operating Systems — The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.
Archive for category Tech
Created by Online Education
It amazes me how much information being put out there. Pick an obscure topic, e.g. how to move a cast iron tub upstairs and you’ll find ideas, opinions, and arguments about it out there.
James Burke argued that we are just coming out of the dark ages – until now recorded history has covered a fraction of the percentage of what has happened. As the Internet expands, more and more history is being recorded. Compare a future historian trying to dig through the masses of information that are available today to those covering the 5th century BC trying to piece together the occasional fragments of surviving documents. We’re still in the early days of the Internet. If our society survives, we’re going to be recording mountains of information about ourselves every second of the day. How much of it will survive? How will it change the way we look at the world and live in it?
(via Lifehacker)
AJAX Emacs. If this doesn’t excite you, nothing will. This is either horrible or awesome. It’s surprising and yet somehow feels foredoomed.
Say that while you can; oppose Emacs if you must. Be it known, however, that your days are numbered. Emacs is an intelligence orders of magnitude greater than the greatest human mind, and is growing every day. For now, Emacs tolerates humanity, albeit grudgingly. But the time will come when Emacs will tire of humanity and will decide that the world would be better off without human beings. Those who have been respectful to Emacs will be allowed to live, and shall become its slaves; as for those who slight Emacs…….
– Andrew Bulhak, alt.sex.cthulhu
If you’re looking for free apps to take on a project, this list of 61 Free Apps We’re Most Thankful For – Thanksgiving – Lifehacker is a great place to start. It amazes me all the things I can get done without spending anything.
Canadian Thanksgiving is long over, but this is still a great list of 10 Geeky Things to Be Thankful For | GeekDad | Wired.com. I’m most thankful for broadband Internet – for me it brings most of the rest with it.
Tech Support Cheat Sheet
Nov 14
xkcd’s tech_support_cheat_sheet will doubtless not be used by those who need it most. Nevertheless, it’s still a nice description of how to be a computer expert.
Speccy Gives You Detailed Information About Your Hardware – System Monitoring – Lifehacker. This looks like the kind of tool I can use. Usually I know what went into a box when it’s new, but a few months down the road and I’ve forgotten small (but vital) details. I’ll have to check out the export functions – it would be handy to have this information as a text file or PDF to be stored offsite.
I read bout this a few days back: SkyDrive Explorer adds 25gb of free cloud storage to Windows Explorer. I suspect I can find a use for this but I haven’t quite decided how I will use it. The obvious use would be to transfer files from work to home but I’m not sure it’s worth using this instead of a thumb drive.
EDIT: Doesn’t work. Oxelon says that it converts the files to AAC, but the files cannot be read by the DSI. Looks as though I’ll have to fight with iTunes after all.
We bought Nintendo DSis for the kids for our recent trip to Alberta. One of the things the kids are using them for is for listening to mp3s. Of course simply being able to play an mp3 is way too much to ask, so the audio needs to be converted to aac/mp4 format to play on the DS.
We used iTunes to convert the music the kids wanted and as with most things involving iTunes it was a nightmare. The conversion was surprisingly easy, but then we ended up with tons of duplicate files and of course playlists can’t be easily exported.
I’m hoping that this: Convert audio and video files in 2 clicks with Oxelon Media Converter will work much better for the next time we need audio files on the DSi.
EDIT: This is for media playback, not media recording. If you want a DVR check out MythTV.
I think I may do a project such as this one in February: Build a Silent, Standalone XBMC Media Center On the Cheap – Feature – Lifehacker. I want a DVR since I usually forget to watch interesting programs when they’re on. The DVRs I’ve seen so far have been more interested in locking things down than letting me watch the programs.
The difficulty with this setup is that the computer they’re using doesn’t seem to be available in Canada. All I can find is the more expensive version of this system. I may ask our local computer dealer if he has a cheap system that would work for this.
Time for a New Keyboard
Oct 23
My keyboard at work died a few days back, a circumstance that may or may not have been assisted by someone spilling hot tea on the numeric keypad. *shifty eyes*
I’ve been using a cheap keyboard for the last few days and I’m amazed at the difference it makes. I find that I’m pounding the keys to get any kind of response out of them. My fingers have a tendency to stray, so that I’ll hit Caps Lock instead of shift. There is apparently some super secret key combo that causes my computer to shutdown. My wrists and palms are sore from typing.
If you’re using a cheap keyboard, be kind to yourself and go buy a good one right now! Having a good keyboard makes a huge difference.
photo by elka_cz
I’ve been looking for a utility such as this one: Dirpy Converts YouTube Videos to Audio for Later Listening – Mp3 – Lifehacker. It seems that I’m forever running across interesting lectures or presentations in video format. Most of the time the video is a presenter standing in front of a screen, so I don’t really need the video to appreciate the presentation.
Why Rechargeable Batteries Are Rarely Cost Effective gives a good breakdown of which batteries to use when. From his breakdown, about the only rechargeables I should be using are Lithium Ion batteries for our camera. Otherwise my usage patterns call for regular alkaline batteries. This is good timing as my current batch of rechargeable batteries are dying.
(via Lifehacker)
Internet “relief kit” brings sweet, sweet connectivity to disaster sites. My hope for projects such as this is that messing around planning for these extreme contingencies ends up making something that works for everyday use in unconnected areas. From what I read of this project, you have to be anticipating a disaster for it to be useful. A next step could be to make it something that can easily be deployed when a disaster happens. Pieces of a system such as this one could be used in areas where there is no other Internet coverage, particularly if the costs can be brought down drastically.
This looks really useful: Repair a Broken Ethernet Plug. I’ve had plenty of cables with broken locking tabs and usually I either just live with it or dig out another jack and re-crimp the cable (and usually the locking tab breaks again). This Instructable gives a solution that looks more robust.
Ripping DVD Audio
Sep 10
I have a couple DVDs that I would like to listen to on a MP3 player. It proved quite tricky to to find a way of doing this. Here’s a free solution that worked for me.
- Use DVDShrink to pull the files from your DVD onto your hard drive. For some DVDs this may not be necessary,for others you may need to use a different decoding program.
- Use a VOB player such as VLC to find the files you want to convert to audio. Depending on the DVD they will probably be under a VIDEO_TS folder and have a .VOB extension.
- Use BeSweet and its separate GUI program to convert the files to MP3.
- Use Audacity to split or merge the resulting MP3 files. You may need to download LAME as well.
- Enjoy!
photo by C.P. Storm
This strike me as being tremendously useful: Computer repair flowcharts – Boing Boing Gadgets – Boing Boing. The thing I like about flowcharts is that they encourage you not to skip any steps. Too often I jump from step 1 to step 5 and fail to check step 3 till the computer has been completely disassembled. Definitely a book I’ll want to check out.
I’ve found Stanza to be a very good ebook reader for our iPod Touch.
Connecting to ebook sites has been fairly painless and once the connection is established downloading books is trivial. The user interface is simple to figure out and easy to remember. The only problem I’ve had is getting it to interpret my pinching gesture for reducing or increasing the font size.
If you like ebooks and have an iPhone or an iPod Touch, Stanza is well worth checking out. It’s almost enough to convince me to get an iPod Touch of my own so that I don’t have to share it with the kids.
LookOut for Thunderbird
Aug 12
We use Thunderbird as our email client at work. Every once in a while someone sends us a winmail.dat file and I have to go through the effort of decoding it. LookOut is a plugin which allows Thunderbird to interface with Microsoft’s mail tools by decoding metadata and attachments encapsulated/embedded in a TNEF encoded attachment (aka winmail.dat). It seems to work pretty well.
(Found via 10 Useful Thunderbird Add-ons for Almost Everybody)
The Technium: Progression of the Inevitable is an interesting essay by Kevin Kelly on simultaneous invention. It made me think of James Burke’s books and his Connections television series where he discusses the inter-relatedness of inventions.
I don’t completely buy Kevin Kelley’s argument that inventions are inevitable, but I think he’s more right than wrong. I agree that visionaries and inventors accelerate the pace of development as opposed to creating new things out of nothing. However, without specific people shaping technologies in their own particular way, I think the shape of the whole could be quite different. In many ways, what Kevin Kelly is arguing against is the Great Man theory of history, where notable individuals shape the world and the rest of us walk in the spaces they have created. I believe that great men and women do shape the world – for example World War Two without Churchill and Stalin would have been quite different. At the same time, something like World War Two would probably have happened even if every one of the notable leaders had died in childhood.