Nerdzapper

My laptop came pre-installed with a demo copy of Microsoft Office 2007, which was set to expire after a month. I’ve got Office 2007 at work and think it’s fine once you get used to the interface.  However, once the trial period expired on my home laptop, I decided I really didn’t need Office 2007 and furthermore didn’t want to pay for it. In summary, I have Office 2007 at work and Open Office at home.

During my lunch breaks at work, I do a little fiction writing.  Nothing too spectacular, but it keeps me entertained.  Normally, if I know I’m going to want to work on the piece at home I either upload it to Google Docs or make sure I save my word document as a .doc rather than .docx (the new office format).  As you can guess, I forgot this time and saved as .docx.

Once I got home, I double-clicked on my file and it launched Word 2007 (it of course told me my trial had expired).   I cursed my stupidity, opened Open Office and tried to open my file.  Of course Open Office can’t handle the new .docx format.  No problem, I thought. Then I opened Word 2007 again (it again told me my trial had expired, I need to uninstall)  and tried to copy my text and paste it into Writer.  It turns out that one of the functions in Word that is disabled when your trial runs out is the Copy function (including Ctrl+C).  I could see the text, but do nothing with it.  I wound up re-typing the entire thing. In other words, Microsoft owned my content.

Not only did this make me mad, but it turned me off from buying the product.  I think I’ll just stick with Open Office for now.

Here is the headline from an article I read the other day:

Turns out Neanderthals had good oral hygiene

That is a very interesting headline. It brings to mind those Geico cavemen brushing their teeth before heading out to catch a ball game. Did they just brush or did they floss and use mouthwash, too? Did they brush before heading into the office before their highly advanced society collapsed back to the stone age.

Let’s press on. From the article:

The teeth have “grooves formed by the passage of a pointed object, which confirms the use of a small stick for cleaning the mouth”

Interesting what you can figure out from a couple little grooves in some 63,400 year old teeth. That must have been quite a few teeth they had to look at.

Well, actually it was just two molars.

Now that is quite a bit of extrapolation. I’m counterclaiming that nervous Neanderthals rubbed small sticks against their teeth as a way of self-soothing. The evidence clearly supports my claim.

If you really read the article, you can see that the scientists found a couple teeth and some other animal bones. They are pretty excited about the teeth because they are the first teeth that have been found in the area which is a pretty cool find.

However the headline jumps to a much stronger claim than is presented in the rest of the article.

Who cares? All of us should. With sites like Reddit and Digg gaining popularity everyday, headlines are often the only part of a story that we hear. Almost every night my wife asks me if I read some article that she read on the internet. I frequently am able to say, “Not really. I just heard a little bit about that.” That little bit is often just a title that I read on some site linking to an article that I didn’t bother to read.

I expect headlines that people submit to those voting sites to sensationalize the article. But sites like Reuters really should be careful with that especially when the article is about some kind of scientific research.

Technorati Tags: science, headlines

In addition to my love of technology and love of things for free, I also have a love for books. Today I found a site that in a way combines all three (link via the excellent entertainment blog Pop Candy). The site is called Wowio, and they offer free legal book downloads (.pdf format). These books include ones that aren’t in public domain.

For example, several of author Kurt Vonnegut’s novels are available on Wowio. In fact, I signed up for the site today and downloaded his book Slaugherhouse Five, which I’m enjoying already.

You may be wondering how they can offer books for free on the site. I was. According to the site, “WOWIO is a new kind of online bookstore that enables readers to download ebooks for free, using commercial sponsorships to compensate authors and publishers”. In other words, advertising.

Signing up for the site is pretty simple, though you do have to give them some information. You can either give them a non-anonymous email address, a credit card, or a scan of an ID (driver’s license or whatever). I opted for the email address option, though I couldn’t use my gmail address. It had to be a non-anonymous email address.

Once registered, you simply add the books you want to your queue and download them. There is a limit of three book downloads per day, but that isn’t a big deal for me. I can’t envision myself reading more than three novels in one day.

This really makes me wish there were an affordable e-book reader available. A pda is an option, but the screen size is just to small. Reading on a laptop isn’t too bad, but not the same as reading a paperback in bed. The Sony Reader seems pretty cool, but at $299 it has a little too much proprietary crap going on for my tastes. Supposedly Amazon is planning an e-book reader, but those are supposedly going to be in the $300-400 range. I guess I’ll have to live with reading on the laptop for now.

Anyhow, if you want some good, free, reading check out Wowio. It’s a pretty cool idea.

I have been in a few discussions recently about the worthiness of Microsoft Excel, Google Spreadsheets, and OpenOffice Spreadsheet.

My claim is that none of them have features that I need that none of the others have.

I keep jumping into the conversation at the point where people start championing the massive feature set of Microsoft Excel.  I ask them what features Excel has that none of the others bring to the table.  Instead of getting answers, the conversation switches to needing to use Excel because the office they work in demands it.

But I still haven’t heard which features these people need out of Excel.

For me, I can use all three of them.  There is nothing that I do that isn’t a feature in all three of them.  I prefer OpenOffice for anything that I plan on keeping since I spend about equal amount of time on Linux and Windows.  I like using Google Spreadsheet for quick throw away things.

So, let’s work on the basis that work/family/Dell will let you use whichever one you want as long as the features are there.  Which ones would that mean you can use?

Technorati Tags: Microsoft, Excel, OpenOffice, Google Spreadsheet, software

Countless words have already been written about the new iPod, but I thought I’d take some time off from writing about Microsoft (boo, hiss) and SQL Server (yay, what it’s a Microsoft product? I mean boo!) to regale you with my take on Apple’s new iPod Touch.

I’ll admit I haven’t really gotten what would posses someone to buy the iPhone, other than a sexy interface. I just couldn’t justify spending $600 (plus $50 or so a month) on a device whose primary function is to make phone calls and which locks you into a single phone company for two years. I’m happy enough with my MOTOKRZR, even though it doesn’t have any hip commercials devoted to it. Knocking $200 off the price doesn’t change anything for me.

The iPod Touch is different. Though it’s still expensive by my budgetary standards, $299 doesn’t seem excessive to me. After all you’re getting 8 gb of storage, Wi-Fi, and the sexy interface, all in a pretty cool piece of technology. Plus, you have no monthly fee. It doesn’t make phone calls, but I already have a phone for that.

I’m interested in what iPhone owners think about this. Would you rather have this than your iPhone? For the record, I’m glad Apple has decided to give iPhone early adopters $100 Apple Store credit, though that really just goes back to Apple.

I have posted this elsewhere, but it was too good not to post here. For all of you fans of old school games, there is a website that allows you to create your own authentic looking Atari 2600 style cartridge labels. The name of the site is Label Maker 2600, and I found the link on the ClassicGaming Site.

The site is very easy to use. All you need to do is upload an image file, type in some text, choose a font color (if you don’t want the defaults), and press the Create Label. The site will then display a logo that you can download. Here’s one I whipped together in a minute:

Anyhow, play around with it and let me know what you think. Now to brush up on my Assembly Language programming skills and create the game…

Let me first state for the record that I’m a Firefox user. I’m sure I’ve lost enough street cred by admitting I’m a Windows user. Honestly, my primary browser is Firefox. That said, I still have to support Internet Explorer in my day job.

As I’ve recently discovered,Firefox and Internet Explorer don’t handle the min-height property in CSS in the same way. For example, I manage a website at work that is stable for the most part. I didn’t develop the style-sheets for this site, but I know enough about what is going on. Recently, a user came to me and told me that when they did a print preview in Internet Explorer 7, IE would act as though it was going to print hundreds of pages, rather than the three that were actually there. In Firefox, everything is fine. After much headache, it turns out min-height is the problem. Anything above a min-height or 900 px or so and IE chokes on Print Preview.

For exemple, we have a div that contains most of the page and we have the following code (css in-line for demo purposes only):

<div id=”container” style=”min-height=1200px;”>

Firefox has no problem with this. If you do a Print Preview in IE 7, however, it will choke. If you change from min-height to height it will work. I’m not sure how standards compliant this is, though:

<div id=”container” style=”height=1200px;”>

Anyhow, if you’re having trouble with printing in IE, you might want to take a look at your style-sheets and see if you have any elements with a large min-height.

One of my projects now that I have a hard drive for it is to scan my CD music collection.  I’ve made it through about 40 so far and have been using Amarok to manage that music collection.

I’ve used iTunes quite a bit over the last few years and one of the first things I noticed with Amarok is that it uses some funky made up score system to determine how popular it thought the songs were based on my listening habits.  I’m not ready to give all of my soul over to the borgs quite yet so that was not going to cut it.

Fortunately, a normal 5 start rating system is available but it just isn’t turned on by default and I’m going to show you how to do it.

First, let’s see what the window starts off looking like:

To turn off the score and turn on the ratings, go to Tools - Configure Amarok.  In the middle of the screen, in the Components section, uncheck Use scores (or keep it checked if you want) and check the Use ratings.  Once the window looks like this click apply:

Now the main Amarok window should look more like this:

If you do not see a Rating column yet, right click on one of the other column headers, select Show Column and then select Rating.  Then start rating your music.  Take control.  Don’t give in to the machines.

Another feature of Amarok is the ability to assign labels to songs.  For the life of me, I could not figure out what kind of labels I would need.  Then I was listening to the songs I had ripped and noticed some skipping.  Wouldn’t it be nice to assign a “skips” label to those songs and come back to fix them someday.

Here’s how you would do that.

Right click a song and select Edit Track Information, click the Labels tab on the new window.  Any labels you have already created show up in the blue area.  The labels you want to assign to this song need to be in the bottom, white section.  So type your label (or select it from the blue area if it already exists).  It should look something like this:

You can type more than one label if you like.  Just separate them with commas.  Click Save & Close and then go create a smart playlist.  Your playlist should look for labels containing your label.  So try something along these lines:

Then you can right click on that new playlist and tell it to load and your Amarok music manager should show you all songs with that label.  In my case, I have three songs so far that I need to try to re-rip so far.

One last parting note.  If you are using Amarok and dig a little bit of classical guitar, check out Radio Stream -> Shoutcast Streams -> Classical -> 181.fm - Classical Guitar

For those not using Amarok, you can try this URL in iTunes or something that plays these sorts of things.  I’m not sure it works outside of Amarok, so if you try it, please let me know what happens:

Great Classical Guitar Streaming Channel

Someday, I’ll get around to plugging in my iTune Shuffle and see how well it handles reading/writing music with that.

Did you know you can get a Blackberry for $.01 at Amazon.com? Just head on over to the Blackberry page at Amazon and you’ll find several Blackberry models for just a penny. These deals even include free shipping!  Sprint, T-Mobile, AT&T, and Nextel all have models for sale at Amazon.

There is a catch, though.  In order to get these deals you need to purchase a new service plan.  If you were going to do this anyhow, and are able to afford the monthly data fees, why not get a Blackberry?

As for myself, I recently got the MOTOKRZR from Verizon with an extension of my service plan with them.  Maybe next time.

When I reinstalled Linux a couple of weeks back, I switched from Ubuntu to Kubuntu. No real firm reason, just a feel thing. Everything has been groovy since the switch, but everything was groovy before the switch, too.

I don’t print very often so it took me a while to find out that my install of Kubuntu did not have a driver for my Epson Stylus CX4800. When I set up the printer in Ubuntu, it was just a couple clicks on the next arrow and everything was set up.

Kubuntu knew that I was using the Epson Stylus CX4800. It kept telling me so on this screen:

When I click on Next however, the option to install a driver for the Epson Stylus CX4800 was not anywhere under the Epson list.

Rather then reinstall like I did when I had trouble with the NVIDIA graphics card, I decided to do some grasping at straws. I tried several things and it eventually worked. I can print again.

I’m not sure exactly which thing was needed, but here are some things that I know are currently happening on my computer.

These packages are installed:

• cupsys-driver-gutenprint
• foomatic-db-gutenprint
• ijsgutenprint
• libgutenprint2

I’m thinking the real magic was in this mess. I read a little about Gutenprint and Foomatic while trying to find an answer. So I gave them a shot. That didn’t magically fix it, but when I had to choose the driver, both options had Foomatic, Gutenprint, and ijs listed. If I remember correctly, installing one of them installs the others because of their intertwined dependencies.

Go get ‘em Adept Manager!

That didn’t quite seem to get us all the way working so I tried a trick that chejrw recommended in a comment on another one of my posts that (s)he said would have fixed my NVIDIA problem without a complete reinstall.

I edited the command to:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure cupsys

Then clicked through the options without changing anything. Lo and behold, the Epson Stylus CX4800 was an option when I tried adding the computer and is happily running on Kubuntu now.

Does anybody know what difference there could be between Ubuntu 7.04 and Kubuntu 7.04? I thought they were pretty closely related besides using Gnome versus KDE. So maybe the better question is what difference could there be between Gnome versus KDE that would result in printers working by default in one but not the other?

I’ll get around to testing the scanner part someday.