Computer problems?
by Tim Faircloth on Apr 27, 2007, 1:55 pm
When is it time to buy a new computer?
When I clicked the Reddit link from my news reader, I thought it was a serious article. By the end I was laughing my ass off.
The sad thing is that there are people out there that just take a shotgun approach to computer problems — “This one’s slow. Looks like it’s time to buy another one.”
Meanwhile, tech-savy geeks that need processing power — for games or serving or whatever — have been using the same computer for years. Why is that?
We buy quality. We do our research. Celeron processors suck, so we don’t buy them. You can spend $300 and get a passable computer that will be obsolete in a week, or you can spend $2,000 and have a computer that will run great for years to come.
We buy with the intent to upgrade. Right now that 2 GB of RAM looks good, but what about three years from now? How far can I upgrade my processor? How many hard drives can I put in this thing?
We build them ourselves. Dell has some nice computers, but they use proprietary parts, which kills any chances of upgrading. Want to buy a new AGP card for that system you bought a few years ago? Too bad unless you want to buy one from Dell at three times market cost. Building a computer may actually cost more than buying a pre-built machine from someone else, but it’s worth it in the long run. It’s fun, too!
There are limitations to building. If you want a Mac, you’ve got to use Apple certified parts… and I don’t think Apple sells kits (I could be wrong, though). If you want a laptop, you can find several tutorials about building a DIY laptop, but the technology just isn’t right and it’s just too expensive (also, who wants a monstrosity like the laptop in that second link?).
Site Weirdness
by Tim Faircloth on Apr 25, 2007, 7:15 pm
Sorry for the RSS weirdness. I realized I had the newest articles at the bottom instead of the top, so I reversed it. I wouldn’t be surprised if your reader decides that all 25 stories in the feed are new.
Then again, I’ve only got two subscribers. One of them is me, and I have a good idea who the other is. Hopefully the whole thing will go unnoticed.
I’ve also noticed that my nifty corners don’t work anymore. I wonder what’s up with that.
Offensive Content (and the dragon in my garage)
by Tim Faircloth on Apr 25, 2007, 2:56 pm
80 Percent of Blogs Contain “Offensive” Content
I think I’ve used a few curse words, but for the most part I think my site is clean.
Then again (as the article points out), “offensive content” is not exactly defined. Perhaps this blog would be deemed offensive because I don’t mind using a curse word every now and then. Maybe a large portion of the blogs thought to be offensive were flagged because of militant religious beliefs.
Damn. Now I’m going to jump on a tangent and talk about that.
You know what makes me mad? Atheists. No, let me correct that. An atheist is someone that has no belief in any god. Anti theists are the ones that annoy me, particularly militant anti theists.
An anti theist is someone that actively rejects the belief that there is a god, and a militant anti theist will call you stupid for being a theist.
Some time ago, I read Carl Sagan’s “The Dragon in my Garage”, in which Carl Sagan states “what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? … You’d wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me.”
Before we continue, I want you all to know that I’m a theist. There’s a dragon in my garage. I know it’s there, but I can’t prove it. I’m no hypocrite though; if you don’t believe it’s there, that’s fine, I won’t try to convince you. Just know that I’m just as firm in my belief as you are in your (lack of | rejection of) belief.
I also don’t think I’m a better person than you because it’s there, but I’m certainly not any less of a person.
Let’s say I told you that this world is not real. Everything you see, hear, feel, or smell is a hallucination. It’s all a complicated dream. How would you convince me otherwise? Nothing you could say or do or show me would prove that reality is in fact a reality. You have no viable proof, but you believe it anyway.
So tell me — what’s wrong with my faith in something of which I have no proof as long as I don’t treat you any differently because of that faith?
Better Gmail
by Tim Faircloth on Apr 17, 2007, 4:40 pm
Just thought I’d give props to the folks over at Life Hacker for their Better Gmail Firefox Add-on. Now gmail acts more like google reader.
They also have a few other tips to improve your gmail experience.
Staggering Statistics
by Tim Faircloth on Apr 17, 2007, 1:50 pm
Today I ran across a page with visual representations of staggering statistics.
I did a little research and confirmed most of the numbers… at least those that I could find quickly with a google search.
I was always taught to take any kind of mind-boggling statistic with a grain of salt. If you research, you can find that they are most often stacked in some way. I’ll give you an example.
My dad once saw a billboard that said “One out of every three children goes home hungry every day”, or something just as staggering. I’ll say it was one in three. He went home and did a little research on poverty levels in the US and found that the actual statistic was not near as staggering.
He did find out that one in every three children in public school accepted “free lunch” vouchers. Technically, there’s no way to prove a link between the free lunch statistics and the billboard, but he could find no other statistic about poverty that even came close. They may as well have had a blurb on the billboard that says “Support free lunch vouchers in public schools”.
So, do these free lunch students go home hungry every day? I doubt it. The billboard was made to shock the general populace.
As I said, I did a little research on the statistics found on the page (linked again so you won’t have to scroll back up). I decided to pick one statistic and post what I found.
“Depicts 29,569 handguns, equal to the number of gun-related deaths in the US in 2004”
I was greatly shocked by this number. My father once told me that a child was 10 times more likely to drown in a swimming pool that he was likely to find a gun and accidentally kill himself. I did a little research on drowning deaths, since random things my dad says are about as reliable as any given statistic:
Hmmm… It seems like good ol’ dad had it backwards, but let’s make sure. Here’s a bit of my research on firearms related deaths:
28,163 deaths were attributed to firearms in the year 2000 (scroll to section 7, “Firearms Statistics”)
Well, sure enough, just under 30,000 deaths, but you’ll notice that the number is broken down into three categories: suicides, homicides, and accidental. Note that the number of accidental deaths is very low in comparison to the total number — a mere 776 out of 28,163. That’s less than one accidental death out of every 36 firearms related deaths.
So it turns out dad may have been wrong, but he wasn’t far off. In 2000, accidental drownings outnumbered accidental firearms deaths by about almost four and a half to one. Technically, he may still have been right, depending on how many of the victims in each category could be considered children.
Just a little eye-opener there. Don’t believe every statistic you hear. Don’t buy into the sensationalism of incredibly large (or incredibly small) numbers. Get the facts first.
Disgusted geek
by Tim Faircloth on Apr 14, 2007, 7:49 pm
I was searching for OS X keyboard shortcuts on google when I ran into this page.
Yes, it’s old, but I felt like reading it… that is, until I read this sentence:
“For aesthetic’s sake, indent the setenv line by about three spaces.”
…and was instantly disgusted. That tab key isn’t just there for looks. Perhaps you could use it every once in a while.
ROT26
by Tim Faircloth on Apr 14, 2007, 3:34 am
Oh, and in case you didn’t notice the badge, this site is rot26 encrypted. I’m sorry if your browser doesn’t support it, but sometimes life gives you lemons.
I thought about supporting all ASCII characters (not just letters) and going with rot94, but it looks like such a thing would require a lot more coding.
Email clients
by Tim Faircloth on Apr 14, 2007, 3:29 am
I’ve recently switched to Thunderbird as my email client at work. It’s not the software that IIT recommends, but then again, neither was Outlook. Seriously, who chose Eudora as our official software?
In any event, since I’ve used so many email clients in my time, I’m going to share my thoughts on each one.
Outlook Express — I started using OE back in the days when it was bundled with IE for mac (version 7.5.1 — back in the day). Back in those days I had no idea what netiquitte was, and I actually used OE until I got to Tech and people started poking fun at me for using such a PoS client.
For years I used various Unix clients directly on the server. People made fun of me for using Pine, so I switched to Mutt, and I found out why people hated Pine. Pine sucks.
Fast forward a few years. I’ve become a System Administrator and I’m forced to use a client app since I recieve no fewer than 500 emails a day about bounced messages. Gotta hate being postmaster on two major mail servers.
Eudora — IIT’s “officially supported” software. We can’t afford to pay for any special licenses, so we have to run it in ad-supported mode to have any functionality. Eudora’s a piece of shit and it hogs bandwidth everytime it checks mail. I didn’t have it long before I decided to switch.
Outlook — I had heard a lot of stuff about both Outlook and Thunderbird. I decided, since we have a license for MS Office, that I would go with the more “professional” (laugh!) client. Outlook’s a piece of shit too, but I have to say it’s better than Eudora. It certainly looked nicer, too. I still had one big problem with Outlook, and several small ones. It took 5 minutes to start up on my crappy work computer. It was a memory hog. Mailboxes often got corrupted for no reason. Making a filter required going through five “click next to continue” windows. Configuration was a bitch because there were four zillion options that no one used. Jesus, Microsoft, do you just take good ideas and say “How can I make this less convenient for my customer?”
Thunderbird — Jury’s still out since I’ve only been using it a few days. I like the fact that I don’t need third-party software to properly format an email. The preferences are nicely organized, and It has the same “professional” feel as Outlook. It’s got a few quirks though. For instance, it does have a “junk” filter, but it doesn’t do anything with messages it marks as junk… it just tags them. “Hey, this message is junk, but I think I’ll leave it in your inbox for you.” Thanks, Thunderbird. Of all the mail clients I’ve used, though, TB is my favorite.
Factor Clock
by Tim Faircloth on Apr 14, 2007, 2:58 am
If you’ve been reading xkcd, as I know many of you probably have, I’m sure you’ve run across this humorous comic.
Well now you can all put away your calculators, because some one has done all the work for you. I give you… the Factor Clock.
Mile markers? Damn, I wish I were that much of a math geek.
Infinite loop
by Tim Faircloth on Apr 11, 2007, 5:29 pm
Much apologies to Wellington Grey for ruthlessly stealing his image, but I thought it defined my life so well.
Why are you walking funny?
by Tim Faircloth on Apr 6, 2007, 11:45 am
When I was at Middle Georgia College, the checkerboard tile floor in the post office was off by about thirty degrees. It drove me nuts.
…and yes, the worst part is when the cracks in the sidewalk are out of sync with your stride.
Outlook Quotefix
by Tim Faircloth on Apr 4, 2007, 9:04 pm
I’ve actually posted this to my Slashdot journal (and Daniel has posted about it before), but for some reason I feel like it needs to be revisited.
I’m forced to use M$ Outlook at work. It’s better than Eudora, but it’s no gmail. The main problem I have with it is the way it formats outgoing mail. It’s horrid. It defaults to rich text (which I hate anyway), and it forces top-posting* on a reply.
That last one’s a major difficulty for me. For some time I had to manually move my signature to the bottom and delete the extra space at the top, but not anymore. I got Outlook-QuoteFix.
QuoteFix solves a lot of problems, but It’s very picky about your Outlook configuration… which probably needs a bit of tinkering anyway. Lucky for us all, there’s a configuration walk through on “Dan’s Mail Format Site” (not the same Dan as above). There’s a lot of info on Dan’s Mail Format Site about email that inquiring geeks want to know, so perhaps you should take a look at it.
* - “top-posting” is the practice of putting your text above the text you’re replying to. It interrupts the flow of the conversation and generally looks bad.
FireGPG
by Tim Faircloth on Apr 3, 2007, 2:36 pm
Ever wanted to use GPG with webmail?
FireGPG is the Firefox Add-on you need. It’s still in the Release Candidate stage, so expect a few bugs.
Leftovers from April Fool's Day
by Tim Faircloth on Apr 2, 2007, 7:33 pm
I’m posting this to remind all you system administrators out there to remove your links to that gag version of “ls” that I know you all put out there for your unsuspecting users.
There’s nothing more harrowing to a user than finding that his files are (seemingly) missing when he logs onto his account on April 2nd.
Wireless power
by Tim Faircloth on Apr 2, 2007, 6:33 pm
I just read an article about a device that powers small devices without wires. It doesn’t provide enough juice for you to run your laptop or desktop computer, but it can charge your cell phone.
I’ve seen several articles about wireless power over the past few months, but I’ve yet to see any demonstration of a device that provides power without wires, or even a picture of a prototype. I feel as if I’m chasing a ghost. Will this technology ever reach the common market?
Don’t get me wrong. There was a time that people thought CPU frequencies would cap at 1 GHz. There was a time when 8 MB of RAM was enough to run anything you want. It just took time for the technology to filter down to the public.
Oh well. Until wireless power is available to everyone, I guess I’ll have to keep plugging my cell phone in instead of just throwing it on my desk.