19. October 2008 by Gene.

It’s sad when web-based entities, especially the ones you like, betray you so fundamentally that you can never recover the warm feeling you might once have had for them. The two most flagrant examples of this recently are Facebook and Flickr.

In both cases these F-sites forced a new homepage interface on their members. In both cases they first offered a preview of the coming new design and supposedly were open to feedback. And in both cases, from what I can judge reading the comments, the majority of members hated the new design. This appeared not to have been the kind of feedback that the F-sites wanted or paid any attention to.

Not all members of course. Some liked the new design, or said they’d got used to it, but however you cut it, loyal users have been subjected to one of the worst sins a website can commit: forcing regulars to change how they use the site, with no recourse and no option to bring back the old look or use it as an alternative.

Facebook always baffled me anyway. A lot of it never made sense but I learned how to quickly get to what I wanted to see and I wasn’t forced to look at all the stuff that held no interest for me. After the ‘Facelift’ nothing made sense. And a whole bunch of stuff that didn’t interest me was all over my home page. Perhaps it could be customized away, I don’t know, because I made a decision to leave. I had some acquaintances I really like on Facebook, but no close friends so it was easy for me to pull the plug and lose a time-sucking site in the bargain. I deactivated my account.

The Flickr change bothered me far more. In fact, the Flickr change incensed me. The overwhelming consensus of the comments I’ve read — and I’ve read many — is that the new homepage sucks. And there’s no customizing it to work like the old page. The biggest source of grief was the decision made by someone to combine comments on your photos with the comments you made on the photos of others. Previously these were two independent functions.

Flickr did add a lot of filter options that you can tweak to regain somewhat the previous functionality, but it’s not a toggle. You have to select a bunch of things each time you want to do look at comments one way or the other.

The homepage, like that of Facebook, is now cluttered. The net result, as I said on Flickr, is that it makes me no longer want to visit the site. And I was a seriously active Flickr user — posting frequently on groups (some of which I created), adding photos almost daily, and commenting on those of my friends and contacts almost daily. I loved the exchange and sense of community.

So, what do I do? Acquiesce? Accept the new interface and simply get over it? Indeed that’s what Flickr management counts on — your friends are there, your photos are there, a large part of your Internet social dynamic is there. You won’t leave. They count on it. They’ve got you by the proverbials. I don’t want to leave my friends and contacts, but damned if I’ll just acquiesce.

Not that Flickr is going to care, but my decision, for now, is that I will participate far less frequently. I will post the occasional photo, but I’ve just taken out a Smugmug account and will post most of my new work there, with a link to Smugmug on each of my occasional Flickr postings. I will comment very little on the work of others because following the comment stream has become too painful. And I will no longer reward Flickr financially. I intend to delete most of my Flickr photos, move them to Smugmug, then revert to a free account, rather than the paid Pro account I currently have.

This is what a badly designed, forced new interface can do to a loyal user. How do these interfaces come about? We will never know for sure. There are some expensive and persuasive industry consultants who are skilled at convincing the brass that unless their site now has x, y, and z Web 2.0 features (which they can help with), they will fall hopeless behind and will lose membership. I suspect there is some of that going on. Have you noticed how much the new interfaces of the social networks have started to resemble one another? I think it’s more than coincidence at work.

Another possible scenario that pains me to think about, at least at Flickr, is sheer design incompetence. I’ve read that the lead programmers and founders of the site have moved on. Perhaps their former juniors are now in charge and have been itching for a long time to put their stamp on things. Except, if this is what happened, they don’t fully understand the original vision or how the site should work.

Whatever the reason, we’ll never know. One thing is certain though. I will hit on them for this change at every opportunity and to any ear willing to listen. It will have no effect on them, but it will make me feel better. I hate corporate stupidity and I’ll go down fighting and resisting it to the best of my ability. I refuse to reward them with sheep-like acquiescence.

Posted in Technology, Photography | 5 Comments »

7. October 2008 by Gene.

I enjoy technology as much as the next techie, but there are times when it can conspire against all known logic.

Last week my Palm TX decided to call it quits, just after its warranty expired. These things happen so I wasn’t too upset. I suspected the problem was nothing more than a dead battery. I’ll get a new one from eBay or an online battery store, I thought, until I read up on what replacing the battery entailed.

The TX battery is soldered onto the TX system board. I could get a replacement battery from eBay for $15, but I’m not very good with small objects and I was nervous about the task of taking the TX apart. But soldering on top of it? I’m an absolute klutz with a soldering iron. When I was a boy scout I attempted to put together a small shortwave receiver from a kit. When I plugged it in, it spit, sparked, and splatted before imploding. The smell of charred, melted resistors and capacitors permeated my bedroom for days. I’ve experienced soldering-iron avoidance ever since.

Okay, says I, I’ll maybe send it to Palm and let them fix it. A little research showed that they would indeed fix it, for $150. Hmmm, that’s halfway to the price of one of the new ultracompact portables running Linux or XP. It didn’t seem like a winning strategy.

Keeping my equanimity very nicely, I decided to relegate the TX to my ‘history’ bin, and start using the Dell Axim X50v I used before I had the TX. It had much better battery life, the battery was user replaceable from the outside, and it had some nice features, such as Word and Excel built in. I wasn’t as fond of the ThinkOutside Stowaway BlueTooth portable keyboard though, mainly because it only has three rows of typing keys. To type numbers and symbols requires holding a blue or  green function key down first.

I’d used it before and assumed I could get used to it again so I charged the unit, reconnected the Windows cradle and attempted to install the  required driver for the keyboard. Every time I tried to install it, the keyboard control program would install but the critical driver itself would not. The error message said try again, so I did, about a dozen times, with no joy.

Because the unit had lost all its loaded software when the battery died from non-use, I thought maybe I’d applied an upgrade patch at some point. I roamed the Dell site and found two upgrades I duly installed. Then experienced another half dozen failed attempts to install the keyboard driver.

ThinkOutside, the company that made the Stowaway keyboard had in the intervening time been bought by another company, and that company no longer lists either ThinkOutside products or support. No knowledgebase to tap into. The keyboard has been orphaned.

At this point I actually thought about purchasing one of those nifty ultracompacts, like the Acer Aspire One, but I already have a 2-lb Neo that is fine for writing. Its only drawback, which is shared by ultracompacts, is that toting it around requires either a shoulder bag or backpack. In order to keep my photo walks light on weight, I prefer using a PDA with keyboard that will slip easily into a belt pack.

Unwilling to admit defeat, I dug deeper into my history bin, where I pitch bits of electronics and other things I can’t quite bear to throw away. There in the drawer was my old Palm IIIc with original Palm Portable Keyboard. The cradle was there too. I looked in my software archive CD folder and found the keyboard driver. I even had a copy of Palm Desktop 4.1, the version that always worked flawlessly with the IIIc.

Okay, I knew I was retrogressing but I needed a portable writing machine and didn’t want to buy a new one if I could get by with an old one. Besides, I recalled the Palm IIIc as not being all that bad.

I deleted the more recent Palm Desktop that came with the TX and installed the old 4.1. No problem. Then I installed the keyboard driver. No problem. It went right into the Palm Desktop which said it would stuff it into the Palm IIIc next time I synchronized.

The IIIc was finally charged and ready to go so I pushed it onto its cradle and looked for the serial port on my Dell portable. Right. No serial port. Old technology I guess. I looked at my Dell desktop. No serial port there either — just a honeycomb of USB ports. That rang a bell, so I went back to the history bin and found it: a USB-to-Serial converter. By gum, the driver for this was in my CD archives.

It worked. Everything sync’d and I had a working Palm IIIc with folding keyboard. Looking through my software archives I found the PalmOS text editor I once bought, called QED. Then I found the  registration key. It registered and I had an excellent little editor ready to use.

I grabbed a copy of eReader for the Palm and downloaded a few interesting eBook titles from ManyBooks.net — a great site for reformatted Gutenberg Project texts. I was feeling grumpy so I downloaded some H.L. Mencken.

Yesterday I used the combo for the first time and at first I thought I wasn’t going to be able to see the screen. To call it as dim as George Bush might be an understatement. Then I remembered to set the default font to bold. Voila! Suddenly I could see it as well as I see my Neo. And the keyboard? Mon ami, le keyboard, c’est douce. It’s the best full-size keyboard of any folding keyboard I’ve used. I’d forgot how fine it was.

The adventure of getting a PDA with keyboard working for me again generated enough tension and swearing for one week, I thought. I wasn’t prepared for the boomerang headed my way from HP.

We bought one of those little HP PhotoSmart inkjet printers. A wireless one that connects to my wireless router and can be parked anywhere in the house. Nice little unit. I installed the HP software on my Dell Portable. It seemed sluggish but not bad — providing a kind of photo kiosk experience. Useful, I thought, for those times I don’t want to do serious editing before generating a print.

When I rebooted my laptop it took so long to boot up and connect I thought my wireless connection had failed. I rebooted again before waiting more patiently. Eventually it connected and I was back on the net. Neat. I tested the printer using the HP software and got a nice 4×6 colour print.

Then I tried Photoshop CS3. I have Photoshop set so that in addition to RAW files, ACR opens jpegs as well. I find it a nice front end for making basic editing adjustments before the image goes to Photoshop for fine tuning. Every time I was done with ACR and clicked Open, Photoshop would hang. Totally unresponsive to clicks or profanity. Crikey. I live in Photoshop — this was seriously discomforting.

I next tried Photoshop Elements 6 so I could edit an image and send it to the new printer. Same thing. When it went from ACR to Elements, it hung as utterly as Tom Dooley. I suspected the HP software. The time-honoured First Rule of Troubleshooting says “what was the last thing that was changed? Look there first.”

I opened the HP software again and saw it was now sucking copies of all the images from my hard disk into its internal database. Without my asking it to. Well shit. Last night I deinstalled all the HP software. As soon as it was gone and I rebooted, both versions of Photoshop worked again. Nice work, HP.

Today I re-installed the print driver only, despite the installation software’s insistence that I needed the other packages to get the most from it.  I rebooted and the startup times were normal again. Best of all, Photoshop worked.

It could have been worse. Instead of XP I could have been using VISTA.

Posted in Technology, Writing | 2 Comments »

26. September 2008 by Gene.

No stranger to film, I’ve continued to use film cameras alongside my digital cameras for several years. Since 2002, specifically, when I purchased a Canon G2 digicam — a purchase that changed my views of photography as profoundly as Galileo’s telescope altered mankind’s view of the heavens. There has never been as fundamental shift in the technology of photography since the invention of the craft. Even so, I didn’t entirely abandon the old ways.

Digital, for all its convenience and WOW! factor, has some drawbacks. Its ability to record images with a large dynamic range is limited compared to C-41 films, and not even close to the range B&W film can capture. Until very recently even DSLR’s suffered from excessive noise at higher ISO settings. This is still a serious problem for small-sensor digicams. Films have a grain structure that gets more pronounced in higher-ISO films, but grain is aesthetically prettier than digital noise.

These are known facts endlessly debated on Internet forums so I’ll not pursue them here except to say I love digital photography despite its costs and its problems. And I continued to love film, despite its inefficiencies, lack of convenience, and the often annoying physicalness of the medium. But my love of film has been waning.

The main factor pulling me back from film is my health. Cardiac problems have left me with less stamina and energy. This, in turn, limits the amount of time I have to devote to photography if I want to balance out photography with my other interests.

Less time to spend means more of that time gets spent on digital. There’s a big difference between going for a photo walk, coming home and transferring the results directly into my computer than in coming home and popping a roll or two of film into a drawer until I have time to develop it, scan it, or take it to a store to be developed and scanned, then getting it into my computer.

Another factor drawing me away from film is that since 2002 digital cameras have improved dramatically, with great improvements still to come. When faced with choosing a B&W or colour film for my Nikon F3HP, then deciding which ISO film is best for the day, or simply grabbing my Nikon D300 that can shoot colour and B&W, automatically set a good white balance and even automatically change ISO values based on ambient lighting, there’s not much incentive to take the F3HP.

When I do take the F3HP it’s simply because I enjoy using classic film camera bodies. I grew up with them, love their heft and feel, and enjoy their comfortable old-school aesthetic. The shots I get with B&W film can, at times, be better than the B&W’s I can get with digital. But not better 100% of the time and not better by a quantum leap. Increasingly B&W film is only marginally better than digital B&W and is often inferior.

Part of the reason for this is the improved sensor technology in today’s digital SLR’s. My D300 at ISO 1600 is smoother, with better resolution, than any ISO 1600 film I’ve tried. There is no 35mm ISO 400 film I’ve tried that produces images as clean as the ISO 400 images from my D300, and my D300 is not even state of the art when it comes to sensors.

Another key factor is that six years of Photoshop experience and learning have taught me how to make very good B&W images. Good enough to please me at least, and I’m the one paying my bills.

You can no doubt see where this is headed. The bottom line is that I’ve now shifted to digital for 90% or more of my picture taking. My film cameras have become little more than nostalgia toys to play with the odd time I want a change of pace from digital.

So with a considerable amount of psychic pain I’ve decided to sell most of my film gear, including my wonderful Bessa R3A rangefinder and lenses. As much as I admire them, they no longer serve a meaningful purpose in my work.

I won’t, however, sell all of it. I’ll probably keep my Nikon EM, Nikon FM2n, and a set of lightweight E series prime lenses. And a Minolta Autocord TLR. I started photography with a TLR and want to keep one around to use occasionally to revisit my roots. Hopefully the rest of my gear will go to younger, or at least fitter, photographers who will enjoy it as much as I once did.

Phew! I’m glad to have finally got that off my chest. Now I’ll grab one of my digital cameras and head out for a pleasant photo walk. See ya later!

Posted in Technology, Photography | 13 Comments »

22. July 2008 by Gene.

When is the last time you memorized a poem or a speech? Even something modest like Lewis Carrol’s “Jabberwocky” or e.e. cummings’ “Buffalo Bill”? If you’re like me, it’s been a long, long time. The last time I was required to memorize something for school was in the seventh grade, when each student in the class had to memorize and recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. As an undergraduate at university I would sometimes memorize poems simply because it was fun.

That was a different age. I wonder what a modern student would think if you were to suggest they memorize a poem. I suspect you’d just get one of those funny looks that says more eloquently than words how out of touch you are. Why memorize anything when you can look it up on Google in seconds?

Forget memorization then. When was the last time you read a long, important novel, say like Joyce’s Ulysses? If recently, good for you! Or how about a lengthy essay on a subject of interest. These are things I used to do but find I can’t do anymore. Memorization, lengthy reading of serious material — I find it too difficult to concentrate on anything for that long. I thought it was old age creeping up on me until I read the Atlantic essay, “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” by Nicholas Carr. When he described what was happening to him, I felt I’d met a kinsman:

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

After referring to some anecdotes about others who have confessed to similar states, including a blogger who admitted he had quit reading books altogether, Carr then cites Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Wolf says “We are how we read.” Worried about the style of reading promoted by the Net, she says that when we read online we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged. (see Carr above for additional material on Wolf)

This theme was highlighted again a couple of days ago in a Times Online article by Bryan Appleyard, “Stoooopid …. why the Google generation isn’t as smart as it thinks:
The digital age is destroying us by ruining our ability to concentrate”, that begins with a caution from David Meyer.

David Meyer is professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. In 1995 his son was killed by a distracted driver who ran a red light. Meyer’s speciality was attention: how we focus on one thing rather than another. Attention is the golden key to the mystery of human consciousness; it might one day tell us how we make the world in our heads. Attention comes naturally to us; attending to what matters is how we survive and define ourselves.

The opposite of attention is distraction, an unnatural condition and one that, as Meyer discovered in 1995, kills. Now he is convinced that chronic, long-term distraction is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. In particular, there is the great myth of multitasking. No human being, he says, can effectively write an e-mail and speak on the telephone. Both activities use language and the language channel in the brain can’t cope. Multitaskers fool themselves by rapidly switching attention and, as a result, their output deteriorates.

The article then lists a chorus of writers who are articulating concerns and fears about what is happening to our brains and our culture through widespread chronic distraction.

Some of this is likely hyperbole or outright fear mongering. Whenever a topic like this starts to become a swell, my skepticism kicks in. Nonetheless, there’s something in this I feel inside myself and that I don’t dismiss outright. I’m particularly concerned when neuroscientists can demonstrate the effects of distraction in the brain. Using a cell phone while driving, they’ve observed in lab tests, is on a par with driving impaired with alcohol.

Fortunately it’s not all doom and gloom. The brain is malleable. Just as it can be conditioned to be distracted, it can be trained to pay attention. We can be taught how to focus and concentrate. We can even learn to ignore the ring of a cell phone.

I don’t know about reading Ulysses, but I think I’m going to go off and memorize a short poem, or a favourite song lyric.

Jennifer Anderson. “Neurology Study: Brain Too Slow For Cell Phone Use While Driving”, Ergonomics Today.

Mark Bauerlein. The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30). Tarcher, 2008.

Maggie Jackson. Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, Prometheus, 2008.

Sharon O’Brien. “Improve Your Concentration with Brain Fitness Activities”, About.com: Senior Living.

Posted in Health & Wellness, Reading, Technology | 8 Comments »

24. May 2008 by Gene.

Upgrades can be annoying. Some are smooth and well tested while others are more of a setback than an upgrade. Some, like Microsoft VISTA, are an outright disaster. We brought in VISTA on Marion’s new laptop with lots of CPU horsepower and 3GB of RAM and gave it a three-day workout. Drivers broke. Some software didn’t behave well. Worse, we didn’t like the new interface at all and the OS was highly intrusive, as in “Do you really want to do that?” messages popping up frequently. It wouldn’t do wireless at all with my home setup of WEP 128-bit encryption, something that’s never bothered Boingo. Of course Boingo (at the time we tested) wouldn’t run in VISTA.

So, we “upgraded” to XP. Windows XP may not be sexy like Mac OS X, or cool like Linux, but in recent times it’s become very stable and driver support for third-party products has been excellent. It also runs faster with fewer demands on resources. Do we require 64-bit computing for a home PC? I think not.

With XP and Boingo Marion was back on our home wireless net and we managed to replace all the Dell drivers with XP versions. Things were good again.

Good, that is, until Google decided to “upgrade” Gmail. This one really hurts. I’m a big Gmail fan and converted years worth of Unix mbox-format email that I uploaded to Gmail. Now I have my entire email archives online, as well as all my mailing addresses. I like Gmail’s workstation independence and the ability to access anything from any terminal or workstation with Internet access. This has proven highly useful on trips, not to mention just moving from machine to machine in the house.

But lately what I get mostly is a progress bar saying “Loading username@gmail.com”. I’m not sure what Gmail is attempting to do during this interlude, but most of the time it fails, starts over, fails, starts over, repeating this cycle until it either works (perhaps 20% of the time) or I get fed up and click on HTML Version. The HTML version works of course, but is missing many of the niceties of the full version.

There’s an option for setting HTML as the default and I’ve used it several times. Missing the extended features though, I pop back to the advanced version once in awhile, and once in awhile it works. When it works, there’s an option of using the “Previous version” of the advanced interface, but no way of setting it as the default.

Despite looking around the Gmail website and the Help sections, there is no acknowledge of this problem or any fixes offered that I could find. A Google search (how ironic) took me to a post that suggested nuking all the current cookies in your browser. My browser is the excellent Firefox browser from Mozilla. I don’t know if this “Loading …” problem exists in Microsoft Internet Explorer because I don’t use it.

So, on my desktop machine I nuked all my existing cookies and, sure enough, Gmail loaded and worked. For a day or two. Then it went right back to being unable to load. By nuking all my cookies I lost all the auto-logins to my discussion forums which was a serious annoyance given that the suggested solution didn’t work.

Up to that point the new interface software had worked fine on my Dell portable, but soon it too stopped being able to load. No way was I going to nuke my cookies again.

So, what’s up with Gmail? I’m not running anything unusual on any of my systems and all my Gmail use has been in Windows XP, a stable, known commodity. I can only surmise that the new interface got pushed out the door with inadequate testing. Perhaps with some serious programming flaws.

It’s things like this that can make the word “upgrade” a dreaded word among computer users. I hope Google fixes its problem or simply admits the problem is widespread and offers an option to make the “Earlier version” of the Gmail interface a default setting while they work on fixing the new one.

Sheesh!

Posted in Technology | 13 Comments »

10. May 2008 by starbuckguy.

I’m sitting on the front deck, sipping green tea, on the warmest day we’ve had so far (around 18C or 65F). It’s a delightful temperature for walking, sitting, and, I suppose, photography, though I’m not doing much of that. It’s been two and a half weeks since my surgery (double-bypass), and I couldn’t have picked a nicer time of year to recover, even though it wasn’t planned.

The sky has changed. Until today, the sky had an April look to it with its deep blue and not quite fluffy clouds. Today the sky is a little paler and fluffy cumulus clouds predominate, looking very Mayish. The trees are pushing out leaves and our bleeding hearts are in bloom. I’ve seen quite a few migrating warblers, kinglets, thrushes, sparrows, a pair of towhees, and yesterday, a Baltimore oriole. The robins are already nesting with the male robins singing to mark territory and, I suspect, for the sheer joy of singing. What a lovely time of year.

My recovery is going well. My ribcage is healing and I’ve had minimal soreness and pain from it. My walklets have now extended to 8-9 minutes each, 3 or 4 times a day. I put my back out today and had to call the cardiac ward to find out if I could take any muscle relaxants. The nurse on duty reviewed my meds and didn’t see any problems so I’ve taken a couple. Bad timing, but it hasn’t prevented me from walking, even if I walk with a pronounced stoop.

My friend Marty stopped by for a visit today, and I’ve had visits in the past few days from Richard and Dave as well. It’s fun to see them and catch up on their news. I tire a little, but not as much as I thought I would. I think that’s a good sign.

Marion has been doing a super job of looking after me. She makes all the meals and does all the cleanup, except for the little bits I can now do. I dislike it that she has all the responsibilities, but our roles were reversed when she had her hip replacement a bit over a year ago now. Perhaps it evens out.

Our son Trevor, who decided to learn to ride a bike just a few weeks back, at age 23, is now taking healthy bike rides almost daily. He bought a bike that we intended to share, but when I tried riding before my op, I had strong angina pains whenever I rode up any grades, even gentle ones. My goal is to be riding a bike by mid summer and taking longer bike rides along the lakeshore by autumn. With luck, the angina will no longer be with me.

I’ve not done as much reading as I thought I might but I’ve been watching some new lectures. We purchased two more courses from the Teaching Company: The Nature of Earth: An Introduction to Geology, by Professor John Renton, and Understanding Genetics: DNA, Genes and Their Real-World Applications, by Professor David Sadava. I’ve started with the geology course, to help fill some gaps in my understanding and appreciation of that side of natural history. It’s very interesting, though I doubt I’ll be very good at remembering many of the mineral names. The reintroduction to chemistry is a stretch as well. Good brain food, this.

I have Skype working fine on my Dell portable, using my new headset, on the Windows partition anyway. I’ve been unable so far to get the mic working in Ubuntu Linux. I’m not up for a challenging troubleshoot right now, so I’m booting into Windows more often than I like. Yesterday I had a 30-minute conversation with my friend Tim in the UK, using Skype. My brother Jim and I use it regularly. He lives in Russellville, Arkansas.

As always I’m enjoying my technologies. The iPod remains a favourite, especially for podcasts. We finally upgraded our TV to a digital LCD and we’ve enjoyed some movies and TV shows on it, though we find little to watch on live TV. My Dell portable in wireless mode allows me to avoid climbing the stairs to my office where my desktop computer resides. For photography I’ve installed the Windows version of The GIMP to match the version I use in Linux. I’m not certain whether or not my Photoshop CS3 license allows me to use it on two machines. Fortunately I’d already taken the time to learn The GIMP fairly well and I enjoy using it.

And of course there’s my little lightweight Alphasmart Neo, the little text machine I’m using to type this. It runs something like 700 hours on a set of AA batteries. It’s not fancy, but it has a great keyboard and is a writer’s dream.

I’m a lucky person. My health will be restored and modern medicines will keep me operative for a number of years to come, barring accidents and other complications. A century ago I’d probably be dead by now from my cardiac problems. I never take life for granted.

This has become a ramble but sitting out on the deck in this lovely weather as I’m healing has made me want to write. I hope you don’t mind.

Posted in Health & Wellness, Technology | 4 Comments »

29. December 2007 by starbuckguy.

Sandisk Cruzer

Originally uploaded by StarbuckGuy

As thumb drives go, I rather like the design of the Sandisk Cruzer. It uses a slider to push out or retract the USB connector so there’s no cap to misplace or lose. The price has been dropping steadily on them and I found a nice little 4Gb unit in Staples yesterday for about $30 Cdn. Since I’d been wanting another one (I gave my first one to Marion), I added it to the pack of Sharpies I’d come in to buy.

The only drawback to the Cruzer is that it has a U3 feature that complicates what should be a simple technology. U3 first mounts the thumb drive as a CD-ROM volume, then uses another drive assignment to mount the storage partition. I suppose it’s set up so, in a pinch, you can run some programs from it. The U3 stuff takes quite a while to boot up and adds yet more clutter to the desktop.

I simply wanted it to act as a dumb thumb drive. I guessed that someone would have figured out a way to remove the U3 partition and reformat the device to be more simple minded and I was right. I Googled a blog entry that showed exactly what to do (in Windows).

All that’s required is a simple download from Sandisk — a special reformatter program that removes U3. It’s small and works a treat. It took mere seconds to reformat the Cruzer as a dumb thumb using the U3 Launchpad Removal Tool listed on the Sandisk site.

I’m impressed with Sandisk for making this utility program available. Furthermore, while reading an FAQ on the Sandisk site, I discovered that the ability to remove U3 is built in to the U3 Launcher software for Windows:

Can I remove U3 technology from my USB drive? Yes. To remove the U3 technology from the drive, simply go to the U3 Launchpad and, under Settings, select U3 Launchpad settings and click Uninstall. This will completely remove the U3 Launchpad from the drive.

Kudos to Sandisk for designing a nice little thumb drive and giving the user the option of removing the “additional features”.

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

23. December 2007 by starbuckguy.

The more I think about it, the less I would need to have a beefed up computer these days as long as I used the resources on the Internet for most of my work. For me, the exception to this would be Photoshop CS3 which I use frequently, but even that could be dispensed with in a pinch.

Already I use Google Docs & Spreadsheets to store my text files and spreadsheets. I update them online, or squirt them up from one of my tiny electronic writing devices. I keep a cardio exercise log there that I update and use to fill out for the sheets I hand in at class for my cardio rehab program.

Blog entries, such as this one, are written directly into WordPress from the keyboard. The online editor is fine for this kind of writing and it offers interactive spell check to help me catch typos and misspelled words.

Most of my good photos go up on Flickr, which now offers an online photo editor for making corrections to colour, sharpness, contrast, sizing. A casual hobbyist could take shots with a digicam, look at them on the LCD, and select the best ones to load up to Flickr, fixing them up once they’re online.

With this in mind, those sub-compact notebook computers, or Internet devices if you prefer, such as the Asus eeePC, could be all the computer you’d need. It runs a variant of Linux that is invisible to the casual user. It offers wireless connectivity and a few basic programs, including a browser.

I’m even tempted to say you could almost do without owning a computer at all. Just book time on an Internet computer at the local library or rent some connection time at an Internet café. Talk about travelling light!

Of course, most of us would be unable to live without checking email several times a day or, if you use IRC or IM, being in constant contact with friends.

But a time is coming, and it could be soon, when the only computing device you might need is an iPhone-like cellular phone with embedded camera, MP3 and video player, browser, and an accessory Blue-Tooth folding keyboard to use for any serious typing.

Forget hard-disk failures and nasty Microsoft upgrades. Soon we’ll be nomadic, Internet-centric computerists doing our hunting and gathering via wireless hotspots.

Posted in Linux, Technology, Writing, Photography | 2 Comments »

4. December 2007 by starbuckguy.

Writing Machine
I have a passion for portable electronic writing devices. It began in 1983 with the purchase of a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100, later dubbed Tandy 100. By the standards of the day it was quite advanced: 32K internal RAM, modem software (via the serial port), MS Basic, calendar, text editor built in, and an amazingly typeable full-size keyboard. The display was a small LCD panel of 8 lines of 40 characters. Back then I was writing a lot for computer publications and I once estimated I’d written 100,000 published words with the machine.

The text files loaded, via a null-modem cable, into my Osborne CP/M computer and later my IBM PC. I used the Mod 100 for years beyond its relative shelf life mainly because nobody ever came up with a newer machine that duplicated its functionality.

In the past year I’ve discovered AlphaSmart machines and really enjoy using my Neo, which resembles the Mod 100 quite a bit. It has a slightly larger LCD display, and it’s more readable in dim light, but it too has a magnificent keyboard. I squirt my files from the Neo into my Windows or Linux word process via a USB cable. Plus ça change…

While I love the Neo, I think I’m even more affectionate about my new Palm TX with its matching Palm BlueTooth wireless folding keyboard. The bright colour LCD display on the TX can be expanded and flipped sideways, giving a really good view of what’s being entered. It sits in a little holder that is stored in the keyboard and unfolded during use. Because I already owned a copy, I use WordSmith, an inexpensive text editor for the Palm. I also have it loaded with eReader and have several Gutenberg eTexts on the Palm’s SD card.

Typing on the folding keyboard is not bad. The only quirk is that the right shift key and the slash/question mark key are reversed. I’m a touch typist so I always get a surprise when I type a slash or question mark. For the rest, the keyboard is decent and because it’s a four-row keyboard, I’m not required to use a function key to type numbers.

I’ve become quite speedy with this little setup, and I can see it under nearly all lighting conditions. The setup weighs less than half a pound or so and I can easily carry the two components in my coat pockets. With this, and an ultracompact digicam in my belt pouch, I can bring my main two interests, writing and photography, with me everywhere I walk.

My relative success with PicoWriMo was largely because of this gear. The only downside I’ve discovered is that the BT keyboard drains the TX’s battery fairly noticeably. I doubt I could get more than 3, maybe 4, hours out of it starting with a fresh charge. But most days I write an hour or two at the max, so it’s not been a serious issue for me. For a more prolific writer, the battery life could be a show stopper.

Posted in Technology, Writing, Photography | 3 Comments »

25. November 2007 by starbuckguy.

When it comes to computing, I’ve become lazy. I call myself lazy because, like many of you, I do many things unrelated to computing, I have a family, and I am not interested in having to wrestle my OS or programs to the ground every time I want to do something with my computer. Of course if I were totally lazy, I’d simply use Windows or OS X and be done with it.

The reason I keep returning to Linux is that I sympathize with the goals and philosophy of open-source software. I’m also impressed by the talented programmers and writers the world over who have given so much of their time and talent to creating and documenting open-source projects.

Furthermore, I’ve always liked Unix. My first computer experience was with a dialup shared account on the University of Toronto’s Zoology Dept DEC PDP-11. Sitting at a 110 BAUD dumb terminal, I learned ed, nroff, and a handful of command-line utilities to manage files and directories. It was a heady experience I’ve never forgotten.

I’m an ex-IT professional, now retired. During my 20+ years working in IT I worked in all kinds of environments including CP/M, TRS-80, AppleDOS, early Mac OS, MS-DOS, Windows, OS/2, VAX VMS, AOS/VS, a tiny bit of MVS, and a number of Unix or Unix-like systems, including Solaris, SCO Unix, AT&T Unix, BSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, plus too many flavours of Linux to remember. My early favourites in Linux were Slackware, Red Hat, and Debian. I now use Ubuntu Linux.

I mention this mainly as background to remind myself that over the years I’ve done a lot of technical work and support, including programming, system administration, database design, user support, Internet infrastructure building, and even a bit of computerized typesetting. I don’t want to do these things any more. Instead I prefer to read fiction, take photographs with the cameras in my collection, enjoy my family, cook, go for walks, and do some writing. I don’t have time to hack at systems to make things work. I’ve become that dreaded thing: a User.

So this time around I freed up some space on my Windows XP workstation so I could install Ubuntu Linux and dual book my system. I tried Ubuntu once before and liked the ease of use it was acquiring. I hit it really lucky by installing right after the Gutsy Gibbon release (Ubuntu Linux 7.10). From what I’ve seen so far, this is a fine release for the lazy. Most things work correctly after installation without a lot of tweaking and reading. Exactly what I was looking for.

My Linux server in the basement, which I use mainly as an Internet server test bed for when I’m not feeling totally lazy, is a Debian system and I’m a fan of Debian-style packages. To me, Ubuntu is a slicked-up version of Debian for the masses.

Despite enjoying Linux, I’m not a zealot. In fact I’m pretty agnostic about operating systems and when I need Windows, I’ll be there. I use Windows extensively for digital photography and although I can accomplish some of what I do with photography in Linux, there’s nothing there that matches Photoshop CS2, Downloader Pro, or Irfanview.

Nonetheless, I’ll use The GIMP fairly regularly for casual work. It’s come a long way and I rather like it.

So, once again I step into the Linux world. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Linux, Technology | No Comments »