Homepage
Music (down)
Design

Friday, January 02, 2009
Using Synergy
As I've mentioned, I now have a MacBook sitting on my desk. I use it to check for Mac browser errors, to have a portable workstation that can handle Adobe CS3 applications and (when not doing those things) to have a monitor dedicated solely to email and my boss' chat window.

Synergy is a program that lets me use one mouse and keyboard to control both computers. It's a small geek miracle - I just move my mouse over to whichever monitor I'm working with and it works. It even correctly copies and pastes text across computers.

It works by having one computer acting as the host - this is the computer with the mouse and keyboard you want to use. The other computer(s) are clients and get the mouse/keyboard information over the network. This does mean that if the network is being used very heavily, the mouse or keyboard will be a bit spastic, but in general it works fine.

The PC client is downloadable here, and the Mac downloadable (called SynergyKM) is here.

Today I figured out the last, small piece of the puzzle, which is that Macs use a different set of 'alternate' buttons: fn, control, alt/option, and command (as opposed to the PC's ctrl, option/windows, and alt). Synergy can switch the keys around so that 'copy' is still ctrl+c (instead of alt+c, which is confusing when you're an old-school PC user who uses a lot of keyboard commands).

To correctly configure a PC host/Mac client, do the initial setup (well-explained here). Then, click on Configure under "Share this computer's keyboard and mouse (server)" option. Click on the host computer under "Screens" (or just double-click the one you want), and set Ctrl to Alt, and Alt to Ctrl. Simple.

For Mac server/PC client instructions, click here.

Labels: , ,

posted by Steve @ 1:00 PM   0 comments
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
It's White!
My very kind boss has given me something I may or may not deserve, but appreciate nonetheless - I now have a MacBook on my desk. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool PC guy. I have fairly strong criticisms of Apple in general. I've long considered Apple to have a problem emphasizing form over function. But now I'll be using one every day, so perhaps my bias will change.

I rather doubt it, but it could happen.

The point of the laptop was two-fold: it allows me to check for Mac browser errors (which are rather difficult to troubleshoot when you don't have a Mac) and to allow for on-the-road work. This will mean that come Christmas break, I'll be able to work if there's an emergency and I'm hundreds of miles from my home computer. I can't decide if this is a blessing or a curse.

My first impressions have been favorable, though of course there is a learning curve to be dealt with. I've always liked many of Mac's design features - they are, after all, a big selling point on these machines. I've always enjoyed small, practical design improvements and Apple has long been very good at that. My favorite improvement on Apple laptops over traditional PC laptops is the power connector. Rather than a small plug, Apple laptops have a small magnet that attaches to the side of the laptop. This means two things - first, it's easy to attach and detach, and secondly that if you trip on the cord, it pops right off rather than sending your laptop crashing to the floor from the table. On the other hand, I still have no idea why Macs absolutely insist on having one mouse button, even when every bit of software written since 1996 assumes the user has one.

Stubbornness not an admirable attitude in computer hardware, guys.

Labels: , , ,

posted by Steve @ 11:46 AM   0 comments
Friday, November 21, 2008
Rachel's computer
Rachel got her Christmas present a few days before Thanksgiving. A year ago, she got a Prius and this year I managed to deliver in a similarly spectacular manner (albeit less expensive by two orders of magnitude): a very tiny ASUS eeePC 900HA mini-laptop.

Rachel had inherited my old computer (Baby Beast) when I bought my current, incredible computer (Black Beauty). Unfortunately, it kept losing track of its boot drive, and only occasionally worked. The whole point of her going part time was to get her to focus on researching the notion of building her own business (in crafts or books) and writing her stories. She couldn’t do either without a computer, and I couldn’t just lend her mine since I work on mine.

Well that and I don’t like other people being on my computer. I won’t justify it; it’s neurotic.

I have to admit that I got the idea from PC World. Dad had gotten me a subscription and it had an article on laptops that were larger than the truly tiny palm-tops, but smaller than the briefcase-sized standard laptops. The ones they reviewed were all similarly-specified, but one of them was a mere $350. It also was as powerful as Baby Beast. That pretty much decided it for me.

I had a great deal of fun teasing Rachel that I had bought her a relatively expensive present – and that she would be getting it soon.
The day it was scheduled to arrive (and did), Rachel worked a mid shift at work, and I made sure to tell her it would be delivered in her absence. I’m rather glad this happened, though, because it gave me a bit of time to install all the various bits of software she needed.

This wasn’t quite as straightforward as with other laptops – this one doesn’t have a CD drive. I came up with a good solution fairly quickly, though: I used Nero to create a CD image, copied that onto a thumb drive, and used Daemon Tools to emulate a CD. Done deal.

It’s nice having a very slim (literally and figuratively) computer around. It has MS Word and Outlook, Trillian, Winamp, Firefox, Avast!, DisplayFusion, KeePass, and the printer, Bluetooth, and scanner drivers.

It boots within a few seconds and doesn’t really need resetting.

I even managed to set up my phone as a modem for it, which means it can surf the Internet anywhere I have a data connection for my phone (which is basically anywhere within 10 miles of any metropolitan area).

Glee!

Labels: , , , ,

posted by Steve @ 10:33 PM   0 comments
Friday, October 31, 2008
The In Box
There's something truly gratifying about clearing out one's email in-box. The one I have at work hasn't been emptied since I got the thing (it bottomed out, once, at 30 emails; it usually hovers around 70-80), but my own personal in-box doesn't see as much action anymore.

So I spent a few hours sorting and deleting about 1,100 emails today. Wow. Now, of course, I have a list of things to do that a bunch of those were supposed to remind me of (checking the electric bill, sending stuff to people, checking in on old friends, and so on), but at least the in-box is clear.

Well, the electronic one. My physical in-box has all sorts of things in it, but thankfully not 1,100 things in it. Tougher to ignore when it is right there on my new awesome desk.

For now.

Labels: , , ,

posted by Steve @ 12:29 AM   0 comments
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Credit where it's due
I don't reset my computer very often -- I usually leave it on to make major backups or downloads at night. For that reason, and because I have Vista Ultimate, I install updates nearly every time I reset. This most recent time, it installed 19 updates.

And suddenly, everything that has giving me trouble over the last year or so works.

Two things particularly had given me so much trouble during the installation process that I gave up on them. The first was a panel of card readers on the front panel of the computer. When the computer was originally planned, I was going to have a ton of fans. It proved to be impossible to fit them all into the medium-sized case. The panel I bought is a Sunbeam 5.25" panel that has slots for SD, CF, SM, and MS cards, 2 USB, 1 Firewire, 2 SATA, and various media connections. Crucially, it also contained a temperature gauge and fan speed dials.

Of course, I use the fan speed and temp gauges, but the cards wouldn't work. Today, they do. So I no longer need to use my USB adapter just to copy things onto my phone mini-SD card! Hooray!

The other thing is my Palm -- it always refused to sync, even via Bluetooth, with Outlook. Now it does. I tried it on a lark - what I felt was a futile gesture ended up being perfectly productive. Now I just need to actually get my contact list back up to what it used to be, and start using my calendar again.

I'm almost there. The organizational Nirvana of creating an item on my calendar on my phone, coming home, and seeing it in Outlook is near...

Labels: , , , ,

posted by Steve @ 9:33 PM   0 comments
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Black Beauty Runs!
I've spent so much time messing with my computer, and under such stress while doing it, that my biceps are sore. I worried so intensely, I slept about four hours of the 72 between Saturday morning and Monday. I freaked out so bad, I gave myself a cold.

My computer basically forgot where Windows was. After backing up everything onto an external hard drive, I spent three days trying to install Vista. I failed; the RAID setup was impossibly screwed up.

Sean, who recently inherited my mantle as "friend who knows a lot about computers," came down to Tucson on Thursday for the SuperBowl to hang out with his friend Andy. He came down early to help me out. That day, the Spurs played the Suns, Obama debated Hillary, and I was praying to turn my $2000 paperweight into my means of doing my job again. I was pretty nervous on Thursday afternoon.

We completely disassembled the machine, used some isopropyl alcohol to clean every connector. We then put it all back together - Sean did a dynamite job with the wire cleanup - and fired it up. After a few hours' work, it was running.

The Suns lost a close but terrible game to the Spurs, Obama did very well in the debat, and my computer is running. Two out of three ain't bad.

It turns out that a particular Windows update killed Windows. Now everything is back, backed up several ways, and my only complaint is that working on this until 6 AM has messed up my sleep schedule. January, a hard month, is over. Super Tuesday is coming up in a few days. I feel like I hit the reset button on my own health and mental state.

Labels: , , , , ,

posted by Steve @ 6:11 AM   0 comments
Hive Mind vs. Groupthink
In general, I like Microsoft Vista. They made a lot of changes that obviously needed to happen, added a bit of chrome, and generally it works for me. Now, I realize this is because my computer kicks ass: two dual-core 3GHz 64-bit processors, 4GB RAM, two RAID arrays totaling 1TB, and a pair of 512MB video cards connected to a pair of flat monitors.

Yeah, I know.

The trouble with Vista, though, is often that it's new: compatibility and configuration are a bit harder. I had this problem when I couldn't figure out why my video card wouldn't display higher than 1024x768 (I prefer 1280x1024). Thankfully, there was this little article on softpedia, describing the symptoms exactly and how to get around it.


Apart from the incredible convenience of the article, it's remarkable how specific the article is. This is an example of how the Internet allows for group thinking that isn't hampered by "groupthink." The first time I saw this potential was way back in 2001 when the movie A.I. had the first really successful alternate reality game (later named by its participants The Beast). The game was impossibly difficult for any one person - it required people to work together. Unfortunately for the developers, their own puzzles (which required knowledge of dozens of languages, expertise in chemistry, physics, philosophy, programming, and other sciences) would be solved within minutes by the thousands of people who worked on the solutions. Inevitably, someone in the Cloudmakers (as the participants named themselves; the website is down but the link goes to the Wayback Machine cache from 2002) knew how to solve the problem.

I love this concept: the Internet allows communication between people. People are generally inherently capable. MIT created "Fab Labs" that were able to create most anything (3-d printer, circuitboard printers, etc.). 3 students at MIT are doing their theses on the work of six year old villagers in Africa, who had better basic designs than the engineers in the U.S. Harnessing the total knowledge of a huge group of people is something that, if it can be done efficiently (i.e., with a minimum of groupthink), would be as massive a step forward as the Industrial Revolution.

I'm pretty glad to be alive sometimes.

This dissemination of information isn't limited to merely solving technical problems or riddles. It has also been suggested by Scott Adams (who writes Dilbert) that if a massive e-mail pen pal initiative among all nations would make it vastly more difficult to go to war:
"You might support your government in a war against a country full of people you don’t know. But would you support a war that has a good chance of killing your e-mail friend Phlubanakawahaha and his entire family?"
Also, if that family helped design your super-cool phone/lamp/radiator, you might think twice if you wanted to upgrade anytime soon.

Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

posted by Steve @ 5:46 AM   0 comments
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Not ma' fault!
I've had the longest blogging gap of the new year. I could have posted, but I've been dead sick. What's remarkable is that I actually managed to stress myself straight into illness. The stress source? My new computer, which ran fine for about three months with some weird RAID hiccups is now a $2,000+ paperweight.

Luckily, I managed to back up all of my work (both professional and personal) onto a new external hard drive, but I've been forced to go back to my old computer. This is a good machine; it served me well and it's now the wife's. It has all the programs I need to work. But it's really like stepping out of the Maserati and back into the Volvo.

It crashed on Saturday afternoon, and I literally attempted to reinstall Vista for three days straight, trying a bewildering variety of ways to get it to install, to no avail. I will be using Seagate boot disks to check the hard drives tomorrow, then I'll disassemble the entire machine (no mean feat given how packed the components are), and retry with my good friend, Sean. He's been kind enough to come down to Tucson to help out, though the trip also coincided with his SuperBowl plans nicely, so that worked out.

I pretty rarely pray; I consider it a bit presumptuous. But man, I am praying that I can get this thing working again.

One small bright side to these clouds is that I'm forced to sit at the computer with the recording hardware, so I've recorded a few more demos, and actually started re-recording Summer, which has been waiting for that treatment for about five years.

Labels: , , ,

posted by Steve @ 2:25 AM   0 comments
Saturday, January 19, 2008
Thank You, Wacom (Screw You HP, Line6, Palm)
Wacom has 64-bit, dual-processor Vista drivers for my old Intuos 6x8 tablet, which is at least 4 years old. Thank you, Wacom. You made my day.

As opposed to Hewlett-Packard, Line6, and Palm, who haven't bothered making a driver to use my photo printer, inkjet printer, flatbed scanner (all HP), UX1 input (Line6) and 755psmartphone (Palm). I can almost understand why HP didn't make drivers for their devices, as they're all 6+ years old, but you know, they're still perfectly willing to sell me the fuckin' ink for $36 a pop, so I think I deserve to use the ink after my OS upgrade.

Line6 and Palm, on the other hand, have no excuses for not supporting their wonderful but damned expensive hardware. When I shell out $1,000 for a phone and a guitar input, both of which were made after Vista was announced, I expect them to work.

So thank you, Wacom, I checked your drivers page more out of habit than an actual expectation that you'd make the drivers. Thank you.

Labels: , ,

posted by Steve @ 8:34 PM   0 comments
Friday, December 21, 2007
Ooh, Baby It's A Wired World
In the last few years, the file 'tag' has become very important - what's now called metadata. I don't know what the original file tag was; you could say that libraries were the first to extensively catalogue metadata, in that metadata is information about information. But certainly the most important one was the ID3, which was originally created for the MP3 sound file.

Way back when I downloaded my first MP3 file, in 1995, I had to create elaborate folder structures to sort out the organization. ID3 was a godsend. But then again, it was also a godsend when I got a 28.8 modem for my 486 66MHz, though I had to close all my windows in Windows 95 since the computer literally couldn't handle playing an Mp3. Simpler times, I guess. This was when Wing Commander II was very hot stuff.

Now that metadata has matured to the point where it is included in practically all file types, that information is being used to properly catalog, organize, and make sense of literally trillions of files. Some really cool stuff is being done with it.

Flickr organizes more than two billion images, and Facebook organizes four billion. Who knows what MySpace has. To put that into context, if you put those two billion Flickr photos into 200-photo, 1' wide folios, they'd stretch the same distance as a road trip from my home in Tucson to Milwaukee, or perhaps to Edmonton, Canada. For all of those sites put together, you're talking a third of the circumference of the planet.

Another site that's doing exciting with mass data collection is Last.fm, which collects data about the listening habits of many millions of people, though in my opinion they've not done as much as they could with the vast amount of data they've collected.

I mention all this because I've just posted the pictures I took at onto Flickr. I still have to tag and rate about 5,000 pictures in my archive, though of course I have no intention of posting all of them to Flickr.

I have already organized about 99% of my music collection, which primarily came from Maloney's when I was paid $2 an hour to organize their collection (of course, I also got to keep the collection, so it more than worked out for me). Unfortunately, Winamp really screwed me over in the data cataloging department: I'd been rating songs as I played them for about two years when it crashed (not being able to handle the 50,000 songs), and I lost the data. Rating music and pictures is tremendously handy when you have a lot of songs rated, because you can just pick a genre and minimum rating and hit "random." It's so wonderful because not only do you not have to DJ for yourself, but if you've been rating songs for a few years, you will hear songs you haven't heard in a long while.

I also still have many of my archived CDs to go through - and I guess if using Adobe Bridge is something I should do, I'll have to tag all those as well. I'm not convinced of its usefulness, though: I've had a system of directories going for quite a while now and even though I have about 90,000 (!) files in my photography, design, and music folders, I can find whatever I need in short order. So why bother tagging them all? Perhaps the best thing is to tag as I go, and figure that I'll have tagged anything I actually use over the course of, what, five years?

I keep telling myself that having all of this information organized will make me a bit more sane, and will make my general workflow faster. I suspect that the incredible amount of time it takes to organize all of it will take years to earn back in saved time later, but there's also an additional benefit of knowing it's all there. I've lost some good photos to trashed archive CDs, and hard drive failures. Ultimately, I justify all this work because of the peace of mind it brings me.

In any case, I'm very glad that I have a RAID configuration for my system with my new computer. I would just cry if I lost all this work I've done.

Labels: , , , ,

posted by Steve @ 2:14 AM   0 comments
Friday, August 17, 2007
Into the Flow
I actually made a flow chart because I couldn't mentally picture my creative work flow.

Basically, it came down to a decision of where to put what. The upshot of all of it is that...

I'm considering ditching MySpace for Facebook, mostly because of spam.
I've started re-designing the blog. Obviously.

For photographs:
I decided to start using Flickr as an online photo gallery, in addition to the portfolio (i.e., the very best) on my homepage.
Adobe Lightroom is being used to sort, tag, and process all of my photos.
MySpace/Facebook will have more photos than the gallery, but less than Flickr.

For writing:
Everything gets posted onto the blog, then the best stuff gets filtered into parts of the homepage.

For music:
Demos go on the blog, with a few really, really good ones making appearances on the main page.

I also decided on the home inventory program I'll be using (Home Inventory Deluxe). It has the ability to attach images to objects, which is important because I'm going to start scanning receipts and taking pictures of stuff. I want to know that if anything's ever stolen or dies with a warranty, I'm gonna get it replaced without having to screw around.

It stands next to Microsoft Money (finances), Mp3BookHelper (.mp3 file tagging), my Treo 755p and MS Outlook (to-do, calendars, phone, mp3 player) in my efforts to get and stay organized.

Theoretically, I'm going to start using CarCare, but I'm waiting until we get moved in properly (and I have all my paperwork ready to enter), and I get a massive tune-up on the Bug so that I can reset all the maintenance reminders to zero.

I am still looking for a good groceries-and-recipes program, though I'm not sure either Rachel or I are ready to start cooking, really. I also hope Winamp has a better media library next time around (and I'll be plenty upset if they don't keep my ratings).

I have so much organizing to do... stuff to write... before I have kids and so on, you know?

Labels: , , , , ,

posted by Steve @ 12:35 AM   0 comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
Exciting Event no. 12: Return of the Beeb
BB, my computer, has been resurrected. That, in of itself, is good news since it had my whole freaking new album as well as my old design work and my gigantor music collection. Some of those bits were backed up, but not really organized.

But the circumstances surrounding this rebirth warrant bloggage.

I had a program called Stellar Phoenix recovery software. Very nice stuff, didn't have the full version. Sean had tried to recover a hard drive of his by bringing it to Best Buy and giving them a bundle of cash. They got about half of it. He and I decided to go in and buy the program ($130). Worked great - we fixed my drives, and he got his working again to an extent Best Buy didn't touch.

Okay, fine, but why the blog entry? Because I hate messing with computers at this point. I can - I know how to - I've just been the go-to guy among my friends for years on this kind of stuff and it's a 'plumber's pipes are leaky' situation - when I'm done fixing others' computers, I don't wanna do mine.

In this case, I handed it to Sean - - and he learned what he needed to do and did it. I feel vaguely parental pride, and some serious relief I didn't have to do it. I have therefore bequeathed the majority of my computer junk to him - a half dozen hard drives, another half dozen CD drives, cases, etc., etc., that I didn't want to toss ('cos they really were useful for testing) but Rachel wanted gone and I didn't really like having ... especially cluttering up one of our rooms.

And yet all of this doesn't really justify a blog entry. What I'm most happy about is that Sean is finally getting into this stuff - taking the networking classes that pretty much gaurantee a $40k per year job, and generally getting his life together. And it's good seeing that happen to a friend.

A random thing - it's a good thing that I don't live near AZ and Tasha anymore, or I'd always be playing the Sims 2... as it is it can only be a one-hour fix every week or so, which is on the whole a good thing.

Currently playing :
The Sims 2

Labels: , , , ,

posted by Steve @ 10:20 PM   0 comments
 
About Me


Name: Steve
Home: Tucson, Arizona, United States
About Me:
See my complete profile

Previous Post
Archives
Links

Blogroll
.