Geek Practitioners Blog

Web Worker Daily remains a source of great content, but I hate their new design enough that I’m not sure I can call it my favorite anymore. Not only does it not fit the name neatly as the old design did, but as is so common, the featured content panel across the top feels like an obstruction getting in the way of my perusal of the posts.

I got over the redesign of Ars Technica that I disliked almost as much, but in their case the content has also slipped a bit since.

I also like to check out The Register, which for me predates almost everything I read online, and ZDNet Tech Blogs daily. Once in a while I also peruse ITtoolbox Blogs. Everything else is on a no more than once a week basis.

You would never know it by the Middleboro PTA’s current online calendar, but there will be a craft fair this Saturday, December 1st, at the Burkland School cafeteria. The school is on Mayflower Avenue, which is right off the main drag of route 105, near the lights at route 28. SouthCoastToday.com actually does have mention of it buried here:

HOLLY DAYS CRAFT FAIR: Sponsored by the Middleboro Elementary P.T.A., 9 a.m.-2 p.m., Burkland School cafeteria. Proceeds from the fair and sales of the ornaments made by the children will be used to purchase books for the elementary schools libraries.

Deb will be in it, so if you’re local enough, you should go buy stuff from her there. Heck, you might see stuff you like at one of the other tables too. The proceeds they mention above are the table fees. We’d love to make back the table fee (which is an amusing term given that you have to supply your own table), though that shouldn’t be that hard.

If you’re not local, now is the time for Christmas shopping online. Deb has created the coolest snowmen to put in the shop, including so far Kris K. Snowperson and Monica Snowperson, with more to come. Including Jeremy Snowperson, who came to life while I was typing this post.

Bookmarks make great little gifts. So do her popular coasters. There are also dishcloths and towels, facecloths, creatures and aliens in addition to the snowpeople, coin purses and card wallets, and you can make a gift card extra special by using a gift card cozy (holder).

Deb has made a pile of awesome stuff you won’t see in the online shop unless it doesn’t sell in the fair, after which it will filter onto the site. Some of what is currently in the shop may be available at the fair.

It’s worth remembering that Deb does custom orders or variants on existing products. For instance, this tic-tac-toe game was inspired by the original. This drawstring pouch was inspired by this blue drawstring pouch and this small rainbow drawstring pouch. This custom set of eight coasters was inspired by other coasters done in sets of four. I know I’m showing you a lot of sold items, but they are great examples of what is possible.

So if you are in the area Saturday, come on by the fair and see some of Deb’s cool stuff in person, but otherwise check it out online.

Crossposted from Blogblivion.

Hi Jay. You said okay to a test.

This is a test post from a Blackberry.

I hooked our new scanner/printer/copier/fax up today. It was delightful to be able to locate the fact that installation files were available for Windows Vista and download them from the company painlessly. The CD said everything through XP, so I was mildly concerned, but they’re working through their product line and released this one way back in March.

Apart from the fact that we have kids and limited space, it was pretty smooth. I hooked it to the Vista machine because that was where the device would fit in the room. I still haven’t setup the fax part, or programmed the date, but I’ve done so on similar machines for other people and it should be no big deal.

I made a color photocopy of Sadie’s drawing that included an apparent intentional stegasaurus in one corner, and Deb didn’t realize I was showing her the copy when I took the two of them to her with the copy on top.

This should be handy. I can start scanning in old photos I don’t want to lose, for instance. I can make printouts, even if low quality, of pictures of the kids to give the relative heathens who aren’t online.

I also have projects in mind like scanning in old handouts and training materials some of us created for VB support way back when.

The latest edition of Carnival of the Capitalists is over at Welcome to Help, despite not being quite ready for primetime.

I fired up the Vista machine again, after a couple days off from it. My plan was to see how well it did playing a DVD out of the box. The answer: Excellent. I played a couple segments from Serenity. It would be perfectly viable, if I wanted to watch something nobody else did, for me to watch it at the computer, with a headset or in a closed room to avoid sound overlap. Since the sound quality of the machine is amazing for having $5 cheapo speakers, all the better.

It finally prompted me to activate, then disappeared the prompt. In XP you could easily locate a shortcut to bring up the activation screen. In Vista, as far as I could tell there was none. I typed “activate” and searched in the help center, and the third item listed in the results was that activation link. Had I not gone looking, apparently I would have had to wait another week for it to prompt me again, and would have had to try not to let it get away. Beyond that, it was completely uneventful.

I had realized I could now create DVD collections of pictures and, aha!, all the movie clips I’ve taken, from the 30 second ones with no sound on the original camera, to the ones that can be hundreds of megabytes on the new camera. Even better if I could edit them as needed. But wait!

The new camera make Quicktime movie files. I would have to get those out of that format.

Any opinions on video converters? Or editors for that matter? I can try this or that, but thought I’d see if anyone who has used any might have opinions.

I also had to install Quicktime even to play the videos on the Vista machine. When I double-clicked and there was no association, I used the “look on the internet” option for the first time ever and was impressed that it came right up to a screen for downoading either Quicktime or the Quicktime and iTunes combo. Since I’d planned to install iTunes, I went with the latter. Which went fine, but what a pain, all the screens you have to answer to install and then run it the first time.

Anywho, I came back to the old computer to post this, emphasis on the video conversion question, and to check the settings for newsgroups from Verizon, so I can add that in Windows Mail.

And in the process of showing Wayne Vista and geeking out some more, I noticed that in DOS the hidden folders that can’t be accessed and are in some cases obviously for backward compatibility are labeled [JUNCTION] instead of [DIR]. They are NTFS junction points, which act like folders (or files) but are pointers to other folders (or files). Also, I had set Explorer to show hidden files and folders, but for some reason that didn’t cascade to the user profile folder, so explicitly turning that on made the hidden stuff visible even from Vista in Explorer.

There is a switch for DIR that shows just junctions, so using /AL and /S redirected to a text file with > will give you a list of all of them on the machine.

There’s also a DOS command, MKLINK, for creating junctions. Who knew.

It’s NTFS security that makes the junctions inaccessible. They don’t need to be; they’re shortcuts to something you can get at elsewhere.

Very cool.

I finally tried some of the old DOS games on Vista.

Most of them demand to be in full screen mode.

Vista doesn’t support full screen mode for DOS, which I already had found but forgotten. I am used to clicking Start, Run, typing CMD and then if it’s a window, pressing Alt-Enter to make the DOS window full screen. I’d tried that and gotten the message.

I was able to use my first DOS game ever, Tetris. I first had to delete the PIF associated with it that had copied along from the other machine, as that specified full screen. Made sure I deleted those for all the others as I tried them, but for those apparently full screen is native.

The Tetris game is so old that it assumes you won’t have arrow keys on your keyboard, and makes it possible to play on the old 84 key keyboards by using J and L as left and right, K as rotate, and M as drop. I originally played this on my 286, with an EGA monitor and MS-DOS 3.3, in 1990.

It will run in a window on Vista, but it’s very slow. Slower and jerkier than it ever dreamed of being on the 286. Freaky.

A couple pinball games, Wolfenstein, Commander Keen 4, Doom… none of them are capable of running on Vista, period, because they all want to go full screen when they launch. Keen at least brings up the intro screen, but “press a key” makes it launch for real and go full screen.

The good thing is I wasn’t expecting much, and I could easily have a dozen other machines for DOS games if I wanted. There are some on the computer in Sadie and Valerie’s bedroom, though we were using it mainly for a keybanger for them. It’s been off a long while because it got noisy; maybe a dying CPU fan, or even just a wire hitting. I’ll have to remember to look at it. Meanwhile they’ve been using the AMD 400 and banging on a word processor instead, having a blast, and getting annoyed when I hook the Vista machine to their monitor. Cute.

On another note, I installed Gimp. It tells you right up front that using it may lock up your computer so you should disable hyperthreading. How nice of it. It feels too complicated, and in at least some case is, compared to PSP 5, but it can do what I need to do readily enough, and I might even get used to it. I suppose if I were to have a look at what Corel has done to Paint Shop Pro, I’d find that overcomplicated too. Meanwhile, Paint appears to have been improved. At the very least it supports more file types. I’ll have to make a point of using it enough to see if the features have expanded otherwise.

Not much more to report. A lot of my dabbling the past day or so involved the old machine. I did install OpenOffice.org on the new machine, and I let it install updates and the lame Ultimate Extras that were available. I’ve backed up craploads of stuff from the 2000 machine.

One of the things I wanted to back up was my “cleanup” folder on the desktop. Long story…

I use my Windows desktop heavily for staging stuff. It’s where things download to by default. I’ll often put files I am working with there. And when installing things, they often create shortcuts on the desktop, wanted or not in the end.

Periodically, with the desktop completely covered in icons, I copy it all to a folder on the desktop named “Cleanup m-d-yy,” where m, d and yy are the numbers for the month, day, and two digit year. At one point I named the folders “stuff” rather than “cleanup.” When I do this, I will move the previous cleanup folder into the new one. Thus I end up with a directory structure that looks something like:

C:\documents and settings\jay\desktop\cleanup 7-5-07\cleanup 2-28-07\cleanup 10-6-06\cleanup 4-3-06\cleanup 12-26-05\stuff 9-29-05\stuff 6-28-05\cleanup 2-21-05\cleanup 8-14-04\…

To add insult to injury, then put long names of some of the files, especially rampant from saved web pages, but not limited to those. Can you guess what’s coming?

For some reason it lets you create that mess… then when you want to copy, delete, move or open certain files you can’t; path and file name have exceeded the system limit.

To back it all up, I couldn’t simply copy and paste the one on the desktop, because that would fail. On the new machine, I had a backup folder off the root and in it created a folder named cleanups. I had to create each folder, flattened to the same level, and carefully copy the contents of each folder, less anything in or under it that would be too long, all or most of which was expendable enough (as is much of the rest, but some isn’t and it’s a delightful archeology). That left me wanting to kill the monstrosity and being unable to delete it. I figured I might have to find a utility, else it would wait until the drive ever gets wiped. However, sometimes what won’t work on the machine will work connected from another across the network.

Sure enough, Vista allowed me to delete it. Then I copied back the flattened version… and Vista warned me when it detected one file to be copied that would be too long in combined path and file name on the target, allowing me to skip that file without aborting the whole operation. I’ve always thought Windows was kind of mindless in little things like that.

I didn’t run the rest of OpenOffice. I’ve used it before, and thought it was okay, but never warmed to it or used it enough to feel comfortable. The word processor is so much like Word, intentionally, and yet it always feels clunkier to me. I think some of the ways it defaults or tries to be not just like Word contribute to that feeling. It probably doesn’t help that I am so outrageously used to Word, having used every version and supported the product so extensively. At some point I will want to get Office 2007 for the same reason I got Vista, with that being its logical home. I downloaded Gimp but didn’t install it yet. I believe I only ever tried it, rather minimally, on Linux, and that was a few years back. I’m used to Paint Shop Pro 5, but I’ve used a lot of other graphics software and am not quite as stuck on one as I am with Word versus other products. And even with Word, there were other things I liked as much or better along the line. Before I went into Word support for Microsoft, I had used Word 2.0 and decided it was ugly and clunky compared to Ami Pro 3.0, in which I wrote the resume that got me the job supporting primarily Word 6.0, which in turn compared favorably to Ami Pro. WordStar 2000 was also a perfectly acceptable word processor. At any rate, I want to get used to it enough that I can help people with it if needed, as it’s a good alternative to bankrupting yourself buying the Microsoft equivalent.

One of the few games I ever got really good at was Monster Truck Madness. My CD long ago was lost (I still have the box, amazingly), but I had copied or installed it onto my old P200 such that I could play it without needing the CD in the drive. I copied that over to the Vista machine and to my amazement it ran beautifully and without question; far more smoothly than it ever did on older machines. I still need to try some of the old DOS games.

Let’s see…

The only other thing I can think of is that I noticed there’s a hidden ‘documents and settings” folder off the root, much as there is a hidden “My Documents” off the user profile. I assume both are legacy support, mapping anything that uses those paths by name to the current versions, named “users” and “documents” respectively.

I also noticed there’s an autoexec.bat and a config.sys, but no msdos.sys. Autoexec contains only a REM line saying something about it being there for legacy support. Weirdly, config.sys contains a single line:
Files=40

That’s an odd thing to be there, and come to think of it, that may have been after the OpenOffice install and put there by it, rather than being a default.

Okay, back to work. I’m trying to do a combined cleanup prior to company and packup of things in the office to make it easier to move furniture and rearrange things.