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Mac OSX

I had a realization today.  I really like osx.  I think the operating system as a whole is just pretty good.  I am not used to it and it would take me a good long time to learn all of the shortcut keys that are available, but on a whole I like it.

The downside I found with the operating system is the supporting programs.  Things like email, photo editing, media players that are everywhere for Windows seem to be a bit harder to find in OSX (especially if you don’t use it much).  And even programs that are ported over from windows *cough* Entourage *cough* seem to be crippled compared to their windows counterparts.  Sure all the best programs are made straight from Apple themselves but what if you don’t like iphoto, imovie, and *gasp* itunes?  You really don’t have vary many other options.

Then I got to thinking, 90% of the problems I run into on Windows are… the supporting programs.  Sure there are TONS of everything available but a lot of the time they are half assed or not updated.  I would say supporting programs is what makes both OSX and Windows suck.  OSX because the lack of programs and Windows because of the overwhelming amount of crappy programs (some of which are Microsoft’s doing).

Then I move over to using Linux.  In Linux there are lots of options, except for video editors, and the programs are updated a lot, for some every day.  But then I run into the problem  that every time I turn on my computer I have to do updates before I use it.  Yes I know I don’t HAVE to do updates but I have this compulsion of running the latest/greatest.  I feel as if I am missing out on something if I am not beta.  In a sense I really would be.  I am running the latest beta Ubuntu with a beta Compiz Fusion and I just recently took off the beta video driver I had.

When it comes down to it operating systems are only as good as their supporting programs.  If you make the greatest operating system in the world with no holes and more usability than you can shake a stick at, it is still just a operating system if you don’t have programs.

Kinda reminds me of the current video game system race…

Boot a computer AS a USB disk

I am looking for help and the internet seems to be the best place to look for this kind of thing.  I would like to be able to boot my laptop (off a cd or usb disk) and have it show up as a USB disk on another computer.  I would have a male to male usb cable that will autodetect the slave computer on the master computer but I need to be able to have the hard drive on the slave computer accessible on the master computer (for at least read privileges).

If anyone knows of software that may make this possible please email me or leave a comment below.  I am very interested in this for work/recovery.

Synaptics TouchPad Driver

I’m not sure what to think of this but they are obviously trying to tell us something.

read more | digg story

Download/How-to overload

I found a great new site this past week. Howtogeek.com is a site that was developed to show you how to do a whole lot of things you never really thought you would want to do. At least that is what it is for me. Things like getting a Expose Clone for Vista to customizing your Vista logon screen. Or a few things I found that can even improve productivity like adding “Copy to” or “Move to” dialogs to the right click menu or Disabling delete confirmation. All I have to say is they defiantly made the cut to make it on my RSS feeds.

Download Squad also came through and showed me how to remove unwanted programs and improve battery life with vista. I haven’t used either of these yet but they are still pretty nifty. I have been wanting to try out adding folders and applications to My Computer but with howtogeek rolling out so many tools I haven’t really messed with it much. One thing I have tried and really like is the ability to upload youtube videos directly from my cell phone. You have to register your number first but after that all you do is send the video to YTUBE and it will be ready for you once you get to a computer. If you have a nifty phone that can view youtube from your phone you can just as easily view the video after a few minutes wait.

Finally Lifehacker had a neat (and not very useful but cool) tutorial on how to hide a file in a jpeg image.  I have seen this before but it is always nice to link to at least one.

Hopefully I will have more stuff for you guys in another week or so but work has been really busy and I haven’t been home much.

Vista Downloads, and other stuff

Download squad has been kick’n it into high gear with some great downloads. First lets start with Vista tools.

There is something about programs that don’t need to install in order to run that I just love. Vispa is one of those programs. It is similar to TweakUI for Windows XP but it doesn’t quite have all the cool customizations. It still has enough customizing to hold me over until something better comes out. Stardock TweakVista has a few more options but it is a paid program. Or at least it will be when it comes out of beta, so grab it now. CyberNotes also has a pretty neat walk through on making your Alt-Tab icons bigger. I have not tried this one myself yet but I plan on doing it once Vista is fully reinstalled for me.

The last few tools are kinda random but still great. Angry IP Scanner is the first one and it does just what you think it does. It can scan for IP addresses easily with a pretty decent GUI. Add Remove programs in Windows XP is only good if the program is listed. If it isn’t there you are left in the dark. Fortunately there is a dll file that lets you get a lot of the hidden programs back on that list. Finally here are some great icons for free.

That is all I got for now so enjoy.

Browser speed results

I watched the Apple keynote yesterday and I was not impressed. That is not the point of this post though. I wanted to do my own tests on browsers and see for myself which would be the fastest (since Steve claimed Safari was the fastest). I tested Opera 9.21, Safari 3.0, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 2.0.0.4 (no Add-ons), Firefox with fasterfox 2.0.0 enabled, and Firefox 3 nightly build (alpha 6) and I used WebWait to conduct my tests. All results were the average of 5 loads with 60 seconds wait time between refreshes. I tested by loading Microsoft.com, Apple.com, GetFireFox.com, Digg.com, and Slashdot.org. Before each test I made sure that all cookies and cache was erased and that the browsers were as freshly installed as possible. (with a few of the browsers they were fresh installs). Here were the results I found.

This is the test results I found. I did not know which browser would win and I really did not care (It won’t stop me from using FireFox). If you do not believe my test results please test it yourself on your own computer. I ran all of these tests on a Windows XP machine with a P4 HT 3.2 with 1 GB of ram. The internet connection is at my work (more bandwidth than I know) and all tests were done within the same 4 hour block so all traffic on the network should be about the same. Leave a comment with how you feel about browser wars or the results I found.

Automatically upload a folder’s photos to Flickr

Straight from digg is something I have wanted to do for a while but never took the time to figure out how to do it.

read more | digg story

It has been a while

I guess it hasn’t been THAT long since my last update but I have a few new things to through your way (actually my way because no one reads this).

First of all I don’t know if I gave a link to Ze Frank his show is simply awesome and his website is pretty cool too. To bad I found out about his show after he was done with his internship.

I had an idea this morning. Why doesn’t any company make a car stereo that can strip the vocals out of live songs (cd’s, radio, etc.) so you can sing your own tracks in the car. Really is that so hard? My Sega Saturn and Xbox can both do it.

How about a download! Pitaschio is seriously one of the best plugins for Windows XP I have seen (or at least tied with Tweak UI). Thank you downloadsquad for giving me yet another tool that I use almost every day.

I don’t have anything else right now but I have a couple of posts notes coming about my upgrade to knoppmyth R5F1 and my Kubunutu 7.04 install.

Windows workstation, server, firewall services

So at my work we have had problems with our HP laptops. We have recently switched from IBM laptops to HP laptops and have had nothing but problems with our newest model the nc8430. When we first started to deploy these laptops we would get what was known as the “svchost” problem. The customer would get an error right when their computer started and it would have some information that the svchost.exe process failed. This would sometimes cause the whole computer to lock up and sometimes it would be fine and they would just have to click “OK”. Our fix for this problem was to re-image the computer with a new image we had made and we just did that for every computer that came our way with this problem. A little time went by and we found out the svchost that was crashing was related to windows updates. Every first Tuesday of the month we would have more computers come in with this same problem. Our solution has still been to re-image the computer.

Lately, we have had computers that have services crashing. We first started noticing it when customers did not have sound on the computer. Of course this is what our customers noticed first. We soon realized that the computer also would sometimes not have the Windows Time service running. Through much Google searching and experimenting we found out that the computers would loose audio when the Server service would crash. This usually would then crash the Workstation service and in turn crash the Windows Firewall\Internet Connection Sharing (ICS) service. When we would try to start these services again we usually received a Error 5: Access Denied. It didn’t matter if we were logged in as a local administrator or the user of the computer. We suspected it was a problem with our domain but when we took the computer off of the domain it still would not work.

After 9 hours on the phone with Microsoft and 3 more images (one built from pre-SP2) we found the solution.

Symantec Norton AntiVirus! The version of Symantec we were running on all of the machines with the problem was 10.1.0.396. We uninstalled that version and installed 10.2 (really 10.1.5.5000 in XP and 10.2 in Vista) and all of our problems have gone away. I am making this post for anyone that is having the same problem. I have found countless forums with this issue and even a few sites that had other fixes for the problem (their issue was other software). I am making this post so hopefully Google will lead a few poor souls with the same problem this way and they can save themselves some time in trying to solve one of these two issues.

If this helped you out feel free to leave a comment below.

*Update* Looks like the problem came back. I am still working with Microsoft but for now updating to the latest version of Norton may only be a temporary fix. I am still working on the problem and will update this whenever we find the solution.

*Update#2* Microsoft contacted me last week with a fix for the problem. The article about the problem can be found here and the actual download for the fix is here. The best part is I have seen these steps before and they didn’t fix all of our problems so we ignored them. The upgraded Norton along with this patch is what makes all of our problems go away. Microsoft sent me this link on May 2 but the article was “last reviewed” on April 25th (exactly 1 week before). I asked our support tech on May 3rd if the article was just created and he said it was created on April 3rd. The article had been changed! The article also says it is at version 2.0 right now but the only thing that was changed was the “last review” date. I asked our support tech about this and he said if it was revised it would have 2 dates, one showing the the created date and one showing the revision date.

Either way, our problem is now fixed (at least it has been for a little over a week now). It looks like Microsoft created this patch just because of our 10 hour phone conversation and emails.

*Update#3* Looks like there is more to this little problem.  I noticed the patch that was given to us is now part of “critical updates” for Windows but it is a bit modified.  The version that is going out through updates is 3.0 and not 2.0 like we were given previously.  I found some great information over at the WSUS Product team blog.  Check out that link for the files you need for a complete fix of this problem.

Television resolution and the human eye

Audioholics had a interesting article about 1080p resolution and how the human eye can/can’t see that well.  There were some really interesting points on how human eye site is measured and what that means for television resolution.  A few points I got out of the article were:

• 20/20 vision means that you can read the eye chart (Snellen chart) from the same distance as average people, but 20/10 means you can read from 20 feet what the average person has to be 10 feet to read.
• A movie theater screen subtends a viewing angle of 30 degrees or more.
• The resolution of our eyes is 12 vertical lines per arc angle (one line per arcminute for 20/20 acuity) times 2.
• You can find the degree of your field of view your TV fills your eye’s by using the formula tangent x (half the subtended angle) = opposite side length (1/2 TV’s horizontal width in feet) ÷ adjacent length (distance you are from the TV) and multiplied by 2 (because your TV is twice as wide as the length we used).
• You can then find the resolution you can see by taking the degree of view x 2 x 12 (or whatever vertical lines your eyes can see).  This number will give you how many pixels you can see from the distance you are sitting (in the example it was 672).  This means that if they had a 720p 50″ TV and they sat 8′ away they still would not be able to see 1 pixel let alone if they had a 1080p TV.
• The source of the video is still what matters most in your viewing pleasure.

I found it very interesting and is a great argument against upgrading just for the sake of having a 1080p television.