Tag: musings

Squirrelage pt deux

Sophie was all excited to go outside and proceeded to run about back and forth near and under our pear tree. A few minutes later I went outside to see what she was up to and found her at the base of our pistachio really quiet and really excited.

Squirrel

I cheered her on and got some video, which I’ll post on the main gallery later, and eventually the squirrel made a break for it. Unfortunately Sophie wasn’t fast enough and the Squirrel made it to the roof where she proceeded to taunt Sophie with squeaks and tail swishing.

The Cathedral in Cartagena de Indias

CathedralPhoto_thumb[3]

This is the picture that I mentioned in my previous podcast. Susan took it around sunset and once we got home played around with it in Picture Publisher (yep, she still uses it).

Larger versions and a close-up after the jump.

Continue reading The Cathedral in Cartagena de Indias

iTunes is evil?

That was a user name I saw recently in a public forum.  I suspect they chose that name because iTunes has a thick layer of DRM covering it from end to end and that particular person is rabidly against DRM.  I know how they feel.  Granted, there are a few areas in iTunes where you don’t have to accept a pair of handcuffs just to listen to some good music but those are still rare.

Thing is, iTunes isn’t evil.

If Apple hadn’t started sleeping with the record companies and accepted the DRM handcuffs we still wouldn’t be able to buy single tracks of music at $1 a pop.  The record companies are still too attached to the "album" as a measure of performance.  They still don’t get that buyers have never wanted a disk that’s 50% crap just to get the few good songs.  If people had been able to consistently buy singles back in the 60s they would have.

Apple’s no saint here but at least they were able to force something basically good down the throats of the record companies.

So iTunes/Apple is a bit of a slut but not evil.

Seeing yellow printer dots in my mind

I’d heard that several laser printer manufacturers had started encoding information onto every color page printed on some of their printers but hadn’t realized just how many were doing it.

There are dozens of printers that carry information that you can’t see and didn’t authorize.

http://www.seeingyellow.com/ from MIT is urging people to contact their printer manufacturer and request information on turning off that "feature".

Perhaps not everyone will be ratted out to the SS.

SP-USB-MIC-1 Microphone

As some of you have no doubt read, the audio quality coming out of the built-in Fujitsu T4215 microphone is bad at best. There is frequently a lot of noise even at low recording levels and the “Intellisonic speech enhancement” is completely useless, turning all speech into something that sounds like it’s been recorded underwater. I finally gave up trying to make it work and bought an inexpensive external mic and was still getting too much distortion and the mic sensitivity was too low so I decided to give the SP-USB-MIC-1 microphone from The Sound Professionals a try. I’d seen one recommendation for it on the web but it appeared that people weren’t gushing about it. It actually seemed like not many people were using what some people call “external sound cards”. Either that, or they just weren’t talking about it. Continue reading SP-USB-MIC-1 Microphone

SpeedScript beta for Tablet PC

I heard about SpeedScript on jkOnTheRun and it looked intriguing enough to try. A faster keyboard is definitely something I’d like when I’m in slate mode and can’t avoid "typing". I hate flipping my T4215 screen around when I’m grooving in slate world.

Unfortunately I’ve found some bugs and design flaws that are keeping me from using the program. I sent these to the makers of SpeedScript but haven’t received a reply so off they go to blog world.

  1. It appears to be designed for lefties that write with the pen pointing from upper left to lower right? As a righty I find that a fair amount of time the button I need is covered by the pen or a finger.
  2. No way to customize the program? I couldn’t find any way to change any settings of the program.
  3. The included demo shows stylus pointing straight up and down. Who writes that way?
  4. Doesn’t save the startup position. I really wish it would save its position when shutting down and come back up in the same place. Its default location of the lower-left corner of the screen and partially covering the start button isn’t convenient at all.
  5. Frequently it doesn’t work with remote desktop. I use RD a lot as I move around the office and maintain a connection with my main machine and SpeedScript often doesn’t seem to even know it’s running.

Unfortunately these all added up enough that I haven’t been using SpeedScript. I’d like to. It looks promising but it’s just not quite cooked.

Extortion

That’s what the music industry loves.

They get you when you buy blank media.

They get you when you buy a CD (don’t share those songs with your friends because we’ll come after you and ruin your life).

And they get people who may or not be making any money from playing the songs.

From Florida comes the story of tavern owners being shaken down for having live music or even just the TV on.

Continue reading Extortion

ON 2007 search bug

image

There’s an interesting bug in ON 2007.  The ink recognition when doing a search is subtly different from the recognition when writing normally.

Earlier today I was searching for "Lon" and ON came back with a hit on "Contact".  You can see in the image that when I created this page, ON correctly interpreted my writing as "Contact" but matched "Con" with "Lon" when doing the search.  Huh?  How many recognizers does the program have?

Click on the image for a larger version.