The Value of a Hacked PC

Why you need to keep your computer safe, even if it is a bother.

DTXTR helps you decipher txt msgs

"Do you feel lost when you read abbreviations and acronyms on Twitter and other web sites because you have know idea what PMIGBOM* stands for? DTXTR can help."

Files Over Miles does simple, direct transfers in your browser

Browser to browser file transfers. Hmm!

Don't Clean Dishes Before Putting them in the Dishwasher

My (really old) dishwasher's manual even says this. But it's hard to break the habit.

In praise of FrontPage

I like Microsoft FrontPage. It's good at building and managing websites (especially with multiple people doing the work). It can do things no other site management software can do (which is something I ask when other people talk about Dreamweaver, CMS systems, etc.).

I work for a company that builds most of its intranet with Microsoft FrontPage. I build and manage internet sites with it.

FrontPage put website-managing capability into the hands of people who were unable or unwilling to learn to code everything by hand. There's a lot to be said for the WYSIWYG interface. It's great if someone can code up a site with Notepad, but it's not the only way to do things, or even the most efficient.

A couple of our local school websites that I manage, formerly with FrontPage, have been converted over to a CMS system, and it is *not* a good change. The sites are much slower even for browsing, and editing is very, very slow and clunky, and I can only do a small subset of the things I used to do before. It is not progress.

The Science News Cycle

"Jorge Cham of PhD Comics (which stands for Piled Higher & Deeper, if you must know) nailed it with this cartoon panel, The Science News Cycle, about how a scientific finding gets exaggerated and distorted as it trickles down through "The Internets" and the media."

Desktop Linux For The Windows Power User

"This article will walk you, the Windows power user, through the Ubuntu installation process from downloading the CD image to finding help online. "

How to change the Ubuntu login screen

"This brief tutorial will guide you through changing the Ubuntu login screen, and provide a few resources so that you can download some additional themes. "

A microwave I wish I hadn't purchased

I can't find this thing anywhere online in order to post a review there, so I'll put this here in case anyone searches for it and I can do them a favor by letting them know some facts about it.

I purchased an Oster model OM1201E0VG microwave a few months ago, after our existing microwave broke, then another model I ordered on-line arrived broken (the door had to pulled open with two hands and then wouldn't shut, lots of fun shipping *that* one back!), and then the first one of these I bought at a local Target was dropped during shipping and had one corner caved in, and at the time my life was very hectic so when I finally got one that worked by exchanging it at a Target in another city (each store only had one), I was willing to just live with it, because you have no idea how much you use a microwave until you go a week without one.

Anyway, here's what I imagine the R&D guys talked about when coming up with this model:

• "Let's give it a light inside, but let's not have the light turn on when the door is opened, but only work when the food is cooking and your view is almost completely obscured by the mesh in the window!"
• "Let's help our customers realize when they've opened the door by having the beeper beep when they open the door, you know, because they might not realize they were opening the door without that extra audio cue."
  "Good idea! Let's also not allow any change in beepiness, as some other models allow via special control panel keypresses, and just in case some end user wants to make his home a little more serene by unhooking the beeper, let's use security bolts on the back of the unit so he can't open it."
• "Even though this is a standard 1000-watt microwave oven, lets have it use so much power that it sends any computer UPS in the house into battery mode when anyone heats anything up."
• "Finally, let's give it a Timer function, but with a twist: after the timer is timing for a bit, let's have the countdown display stop displaying, so people never know how much time is left; and let's make the end-of-timer-time indicator noise be just one single beep!" "Good idea, there's got to be a market out there for people who don't really care when the timer go off!"

My inability to find this thing anywhere on the internet gives me pause. And the support website, as listed in the manual, is dead (http://www.osterliving.com/; WHOIS says the domain is registered, but has no site associated with it).

To be fair, there are a couple of good features:

• it has an actual handle, one of the things we looked for, because you can control the opening and closing much better (and do it more gently/quietly).
• if you heat something in it and forget to take it out, it will triple-beep at you to remind you after a minute or so.

But the negatives outweigh the positives. So much so that we've just replaced it with one of those barely-bigger-than-a-plate models that probably cost $40 new (we got it at a garage sale). It works much better.

Fixing a blank screen in Ubuntu 9

After installing Ubuntu 9 on an old laptop, I found that the computer would boot to a blank screen sometimes, because the video adapter or monitor couldn't handle the resolution being attempted. There are two methods I've tried to fix this.

1. when you start the computer, and see "GRUB loading" -- press ESC to get to the GRUB menu
2. choose recovery mode
3. arrow down to the xfix option: "Try to auto repair graphics problems"
4. resume normal boot

This has worked for me once, but for some reason, upon reboot (to write this entry so I could check the exact wording), the problem persists, and even doing this again won't help. So next I tried this:

1. when you start the computer, and see "GRUB loading" -- press ESC to get to the GRUB menu
2. choose recovery mode
3. choose "drop to root shell prompt"
4. at the prompt, type:
   dpkg --configure -a
5. then:
   dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
6. then you'll get a screen of blah-blah :-), and you should use the arrow keys to choose "Yes" where asked to use the "kernel framebuffer device interface"
7. click no for the keyboard layout question
8. hit the Tab key to choose highlight "OK" for the next question, and same for the rest of the questions
9. when you get back to the prompt, type EXIT
10. choose to "Resume normal boot"

Hopefully at this point all should be well... but you've reduced the video capabilities somewhat by not allowing direct communication with the video hardware. So you should look into figuring out what the exact capabilities of your hardware are, and changing your Ubuntu parameters to meet those limits. I have no idea,yet, how to do this.

Also, if your video system is not a separate card, but just a motherboard resource, be sure that you've told your computer's BIOS to devote as much RAM as possible to video (on my laptop, the choice was either 1 MB or 12 MB).

Removing a screensaver from Ubuntu 9

I'm a Linux newbie, but liking it a lot. However, having installed Ubuntu 9 on an old laptop, where almost everything else works great, I found one screensaver, JigglyPuff, that would lock up the system (meaning even after a reboot I couldn't enter the screensaver config to change it). I found that, to remove it, one has to enter into Terminal mode (from Applications/Accessories), and type (all on one line, with spaces between sudo and rm the last bit):

sudo rm /usr/share/applications/screensavers/screensaver.desktop

where "screensaver" is the name of the screensaver you wish to remove; in this case, the command is:

sudo rm /usr/share/applications/screensavers/jigglypuff.desktop

How to fix tooltips that show behind taskbar in XP

"One really annoying problem that I have come across often, but never bother to fix, is the fact that sometimes the system tray tooltips (when you hover your mouse over an icon in the taskbar) do not show up in Windows XP!" Method 4 works great.

Cable Industry Starting To Realize That They Need To Let Go Of the Box - Third party set-tops

"But perhaps it's time to examine the cable industry's lease model. Is having all of those logo-branded boxes on the balance sheet worth the pittance consumers pay to rent them? Is it worth dooming customers to a clunky experience when a third-party box could do the job better?"

Introduction to Wolfram|Alpha

This is a demo/introduction to the new WolframAlpha search engine (although it not quite, and much more, than a search engine).

The Hidden Secrets of Online Quizzes

Why those fun little on-line quizzes and facebook applications are dangerous.

Digitize Everything for Lasting Family Archives

"Furniture and buildings can be replaced. But what about old family pictures? Paintings your children made in kindergarten? Trophies? Award plaques? Objects passed down from previous generations?"

Font Squirrel: 300+ high-quality, free, commercial-friendly fonts

How to install Ubuntu in VirtualBox

How to install Windows 7 on a PC with VirtualBox

Fixing the mailto: problem in Firefox and Yahoo Mail

I was recently helping someone (using Ubuntu 9 on a laptop, which works great, after having switched from XP, which was having registry corruption, even after a wipe/reload), and one of the final cleanup issues was a problem he was having with Firefox and clicking mail links on web pages... the problem is that Yahoo Mail would display the full code of the mailto link in the TO: field, such as mailto:address@isp.com, or if the subject was specified in the link: mailto:address@isp.com?subject=ThisIsTheSubject and he'd have to clean it up before he could send. I finally found a mention somewhere that this happens when the person was using the old version of Yahoo Mail. I was able to reproduce both the problem and the solution on my computer. Switching to the "new" Yahoo email is the answer.

AppSnap

"AppSnap is an application that simplifies installation of software. It automatically figures out the latest version, downloads the installer and then installs the software in one seamless step." Good for restaged Windows computers... I'll be trying it soon, I'm sure.