Category Archives: Tech Toys

A Day in the Life — Day 11

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Windows™.

Sheesh.

Gmail has been nagging me.

“You are using an old browser which will soon be unsupported. Upgrade to a modern browser, such as Google Chrome.”

Rats. !@#$%^. Growl.

I “upgraded” Internet Exploder, Microsoft’s flagship browser, from version 9 to version 11 last night. Had to leave the Patio Stone running overnight because, after 20 minutes, it still had not shut down. It took 10 minutes extra to boot up while it “configured your updates” (I’m thinking it downloaded and installed every nonessential patch I’ve thus far successfully ignored) this morning.

So far, my desktop clock gadget it missing and won’t reinstall. I don’t know what else became FUBAR. There is a forum post about “Windows 7 gadgets disappear or display incorrectly after IE 11 upgrade.”

Windows 7 is the most prevalent operating system on computers around the world.

Apparently Microsoft tested IE 11 on Windows 7 at the standard screen resolution (only) and it works fine. Microsoft forgot many of us have set the display to medium (125%) or large (150%) fonts because we have high resolution big screens.

IE screws up everything but standard screen resolutions.

When the clock disappeared, I tried adding it again and again. Each of the clocks was actually there but was just not displayed.

The core fix is to change the screen font size to the default value. While that makes the gadgets appear again in the right location and without display issues, “it may also reduce the usability of the system.” Ya think? Alternatively, you can hack Windows.

!@#$%^ Microsoft.

I.E. looks marginally crisper.

“Why does Microsoft call the clock a gadget?” Liz Arden wondered. “Everyone else refers to little helpers like this as ‘widgets’.”

Ooo ooo! I know. Why not make up a word?

I started at the beginning of the alphabet and tried bidget, bodget, and budget but those didn’t work. We need a word that identifies the source (Microsoft) as well as how will the widget works.

Microsoft could call it a cludget!

By the way? I now have a battery operated clock on my desk again.

 

Liftoff

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It was never a sure thing with the leaden skies and incipient rain and lightning so when we went Red for upper level wind conditions, we were all worried.


The hold was short and the United Launch Alliance Atlas V with the second MUOS satellite aboard lifted off at 9:00 a.m., 44 years after Apollo 11 passed behind the Moon and fired its engine to enter lunar orbit. This was my first in-person launch. WOW, what a birthday present!

“The U.S. Navy’s Mobile User Objective System (MUOS) is a next-generation narrowband tactical satellite communications system designed to significantly improve ground communications for U.S. forces on the move. MUOS will provide military users more communications capability over existing systems, including simultaneous voice, video and data – similar to the capabilities experienced today with smart phones.
“MUOS satellites are equipped with a Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) payload that provides a 16-fold increase in transmission throughput over the current Ultra High Frequency (UHF) satellite system. Each MUOS satellite also includes a legacy UHF payload that is fully compatible with the current UHF Follow-on system and legacy terminals. This dual-payload design ensures a smooth transition to the cutting-edge WCDMA technology while the UFO system is phased out.”

The United Launch Alliance (a joint venture of Lockheed Martin and Boeing) has three expendable launch systems: Delta II, Delta IV and the Atlas V. These vehicles have carried payloads such as weather, telecommunications and national security satellites, as well as deep space and interplanetary exploration missions for more than 50 years.

Yipee Ki Yay, Baby!The Atlas family isn’t quite the ground pounder that the Saturn V was but it was still enough to lift John Glenn into the first American orbit.

And pound the ground it did.

More than 300 Atlas launches have been conducted from Cape Canaveral and 285 more from Vandenberg.

Once upon a time, not so many years ago, we huddled around our television sets and watched every launch.

I drove down to South Puffin from North Florida last night through a bodacious thunderstorm that stalled all flights out of Orlando and knocked out the Internet and the cash registers at the gas station I sheltered in. They couldn’t even take cash for gas.

Sebring Race TrackI drove through Christmas and then stopped at Sebring. That fabled 3.7 mile, paved road course hosts the 12 hours of Sebring endurance race as well as the Chumpcar World Series, the SCCA Turkeytrot, the American LeMans, and dozens more races each year. It is one of the busiest year-round circuits in North America and held an event I missed this weekend. Still, I drove around, got directions from a very nice airport security fellow, and found my way to the SCCA compound. They welcomed me, even though I forgot to bring beer.

Then they invited me to come back up and flag.

Pretty darned good weekend!


Click here for the good launch photos.
 

Charge It!

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A small law office client of mine needs a new main office printer and has been hemming and hawing over leasing one that cooks dinner and takes out the trash (and keeping it for the next 11 years) versus buying one that they can afford to throw away when the warranty expires.

Meanwhile, every car dealer in the known universe trumpets cars for as little as $169/month [with “$3,499.00 due at signing” in very very small print]. Still, I was gratified to see that the re-designed Mercedes SL550 has lost some weight, gained some size, has great mirrors, and will now cost you a little more than it used to. $895.00 per month with $0 down on a low mileage 30 month lease. “Low mileage” means about 63 miles/month in car land.

Huh. For that I can get a Hyundai Equus!

Leases are often more expensive than we expect. The regular special offer for the Mercedes is $1,299/month for 24 months with $7,093 due at signing.

That’s just the intro.

Miami-Dade wants to assure that every student in their school district has a digital device. They’re not talking about cellphones or pocket Pacmen.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho plans to lease more than 100,000 devices — it isn’t quite exactly clear what they will get — through Bank of America Public Capital for $63 or so million. That’s about $12 million a year which the schools will pay off over the next six.

I’m thinking they have laptops and iPads in mind for students from kindergarten through 12th grade who wouldn’t otherwise be able to afford them.

“It’s unprecedented in the United States, this type of purchase,” Justin Bathon of the University of Kentucky’s CASTLE center on school technology leadership told the Miami Herald.

I love the idea of putting technology in student hands. My class at Stevens was the last the institute required to buy slide rules. Now college students are expected to own laptops and PDAs. The next gen will have implants.

There are just a couple of issues Miami-Dade needs to overcome.

  • Students need current technology. The first iPad was released on April 3, 2010. There have been five generations in those three years. Six years from now there may not even be an iPad.
  • A lease in which you own the product at the end ain’t a lease. It’s a purchase.
  • All taxpayers deserve equal treatment. If the kids in the back rows get freebies, it’s not fair to make the kids in the front rows pay the full freight. That’s an extra tax.

Mr. Carvalho is working wonders in Miami-Dade. He has cut $400 million from the nearly $4.3 billion budget and built the district’s reserves to more than $70 million. He cut the administrative staff by almost 600 people, pushing the most of them back into the classroom. Still there are 53,100 employees for over 400,000 students.

He can work wonders in technology this fall as well. Here’s how.

  • Call it a purchase.
  • Understand that, just like textbooks, electronic devices have finite lives. Unlike textbooks, electronic devices have far shorter lives.
  • Make a plan to buy and deploy 400,000 devices and replace them every 1-2 school years.
  • Replace all textbooks and all library books with electronic editions.

Surprisingly, that’s likely to cost [only] about twice as much as the current $63 million initiative and it makes a lot more sense.

 

Bell’s Blues: Phone Home

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“What the intelligence community is doing,” Mr. Obama told the crowd at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, “is looking at phone numbers and durations of calls.”

And I say it’s about time!

The Guardian broke the news on D-Day that the National Security Agency is collecting your phone records and those of millions of other Verizon customers. The order requires Verizon on an “ongoing, daily basis” to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its systems, both within the US and between the US and other countries.

This came on the heels of the demands for phone records from the AP and Fox News. The blogosphere erupted. The pundits erupted. The ACLU erupted. Fox News went ballistic.

We all need a calming breath.

I wrote about the problem back in 1997 but I knew about it in the 1970s. Everyone in New Jersey did then.

In New Jersey, Ma Bell charged “message units” for local calls. Here in New England, they changed the name to “measured service.” In phone company parlance, either name counts each instant of local phone use. Then they bill us.

Who counts those minutes? The electric company puts their meters where we can see them. When I pump gasoline into my car, the readout tells me how much in thousandths of gallons. I’ve always wondered why I need that kind of precision.

The phone companies have always hidden the counters.

It’s worse now.

According to the Pew Research Center, “91% of the adult population now owns some kind of cell phone … [and] 56% of all American adults are now smartphone adopters.”

Cell phones pay by the minute. Data users pay by the mini-bit.

Are you on a 300-minute plan? Maybe a 1,700-minute family plan?

Who counts how many minutes you use or how long the movie was? You? I didn’t think so.

All that data is available under FOIA. And that is the basis for a really really good lawsuit against these phone companies.

“Nobody’s spying on you,” Mr. Obama said, “we’re just monitoring your phone usage.”

Thank goodness for that. After all, it takes a crook to catch a crook.

 

“23 Hours Remaining”

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Warning: Tech joke ahead.

“I’ve gotten FAT.”

OK, that’s not exactly true, since I’m on NTFS and haven’t used FAT for years but I do have a lot of files.

I don’t make a living at photography but I do shoot to sell and that means I have what we call in the trade a “lot of shutter actuations.”

Three of my cameras since the 1980s really stand out: a Canon A-1, a Kodak DC-4800, and the new Canon 6D. Two of those are digital and I’ve scanned at least some of the film I shot before the turn of the Century.

That means my hard disk has gotten fat.

Every new photo from the new camera makes a 21MB file.

Some of those older photos are snapshots. Nice memories. Good for the refrigerator door. Not something I’ll put in a frame in the gallery. The rest are artistic or commercial.

I have probably 4,700 snapshots (there are about 10GB in 9,300 files) shot through 2000. The 3,800 images for printing or show from 2001-11 take another 16.7GB on the drive. I’ve never used 96% of those but I mean to.

2,127 shots in the 12 weeks since I bought the new camera, and another 300 keepers (576 files) out of those for 8.3GB. I’m ‘shopping and printing a far higher percentage of the originals than I did with any of the other cameras.

Assuming I might realistically keep 1,000 photos/year and print 200 of them, I’ll need 30 or 35 GB of new file storage each year just for gallery photos. That’s not as bad as I first thought but it’s still a lot to fit on my local drive so I went looking for online storage.

Google charges $0.085/GB/month for the first 0-1 TB which doesn’t sound like much until you multiply it by 12,000. Dropbox has an annual fee of $500 (OK, $499) for ½ TB.

Hmmm. Justcloud.com (something I’d never heard of), Backblaze (ditto) and a couple of others are under $50/year for unlimited storage with file versioning and more stars in reliability than Sugarsync or Carbonite.

Meanwhile, I ordered a 2 TB external drive because I need room for my next shoot. I did that because I still haven’t figured out how to install a non-RAID second drive in the second drive bay on my laptop. I’d RTM if Lenovo would give me one. I spent a while googling for one and nada.

The FedEx guy snuck the new drive onto the porch the very next day.

It’s amazing how 2 TB appears to fit in the same size box that used to hold 2 MB. The Quick Start guide has three pictures: one of de stuff in de box. One showing how to plug the wall wart into the wall and the drive. One showing the USB cable going into the drive and the computer.

I started copying files. Gonna take a long time.


Copying Files - 23 Hours Remaining

Copying 20,230 items in 792 folders (38.3 GB)
from Local Disk (G:\Original_Images) to External Disk (J:\Original_Images)
About 23 Hours Remaining

It turns out 22,163 (56GB) in image files of various descriptions transferred overnight the first night. 2,125 are in the dodged-and-burned-and-ready-to-sell category and the rest are originals.

This is becoming a gallery problem as well. About 180 of my fine art photos have moved over to the gallery.northpuffin.com site so far. I could have ten times that many online by the end of the year and that’s simply too too many for visitors (and buyers) to process.

The new camera can shoot production quality, HD video. I dunno what I’ll do if I start shooting video but I think my new hard drive will disown me.