Adobe Audition 3 (or at least the trial version) really wants to run as an administrator on Windows Vista 64-bit. Several hours groveling through possible resolutions from the Internets (including searching Adobe support) to diagnose the “exit on startup with the modal dialog box ‘Adobe Audition cannot find any supported audio devices. Check [...]
I finally disconnected the phone that was directly connected to the landline, which means Asterisk now decides when the phone rings at all and any voicemails get mailed to me as WAV files. This is much better.
I did have to tweak the voicemail settings so the WAV files were actually audible without turning the PC [...]
I dragged out a Cisco (Linksys) SPA3102 and finally got around to setting up Asterisk at home. The final motivation? Easy “routing” of annoying (800|866|877|etc|no caller id) callers straight to voicemail.
Despite being on all the “do not call” lists I still get too many (= some) unsolicited calls representing [...]
lesswatts.org has some interesting reading and references an interesting utility called powertop (which is available as a package in Ubuntu). It turns out there are some easy things to reduce the power used by a Linux server (or desktop or laptop, but I cared about the server) by a few watts here and there [...]
I’m fooling around with Sun’s VirtualBox — virtualization software that comes in both an open source GPL version and a “free for personal use” closed source version with some more features.
It seems pretty nice so far. It compares favorably with VMWare given the price. I haven’t done much with it yet, [...]
I haven’t really been using my TiVo since I got the HD cable box. The HD cable box is not great but it supports HD and my old TiVo doesn’t.
I like the TiVo UI — my series 1 TiVo served me well for nearly 8 years and it still works fine. [...]
Upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1 (finally). Maybe it all still works, too.
I just spent a bit reviewing a list of the feeds that hadn’t had any new posts for a while and finding a bunch that had moved. Instead of serving up a nice HTTP 301 with the new feed they instead had a post saying “Here’s my new blog, come check it out!”. [...]
Live Free or Die Hard is everything I hoped it would be.
Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface is pretty interesting.
The ubiquity of frustrating, unhelpful software interfaces has motivated decades of research into “Human-Computer Interaction.” In this paper, I suggest that the long-standing focus on “interaction” may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called “information software,” I argue that interactivity is [...]
I stumbled upon Programmer’s Bill of Rights. It has the expected collection of things a programmer should have at the workplace, including fast computers, nice monitors, good working environment, etc. One bit in the post and one of the comments got me thinking.
In the post:
In college, I ran a painting business. Every painter I hired [...]
Laughing at the native Californians reaction to a little chilly weather was amusing. This is ridiculous, though:
I had to beware of ice on the sidewalk while walking this morning.
I’ve disabled comments until I can take some time to Fix my comment spam issues. I have moderation on so the spammers aren’t cluttering up the site but they sure are cluttering my inbox/moderation queue.
Internet thugs make me weary.
The United States recently passed the 300 million people mark for population. I didn’t really think much of it last week.
A few minutes ago a thought struck me with great force:
Suppose some crazy, ridiculous, clearly nutjob idea was believed by only 0.01% of the United States population. That’s thirty thousand people. The same percentage of the [...]
I love reading. I read a lot. I’ve been reading about the new Sony Reader.
The device I want has to have paper-like readability in any light I can read a paper book in now. I don’t want to worry about battery life. Cell phones have reached this milestone – I rarely think about my cell phone’s [...]
Quick! Buy some companies before it’s too late! After all, paying lots of money for eyeballs is a strategy by itself.
It’ll be interesting to see how this new boom plays out. I particularly like the noise about how the YouTube purchase puts pressure on other companies to quickly make a “response.”
The full moon will appear nearly 12% bigger than usual tonight because it is near perigee. I noticed the moon last night and it seemed huge and it is thus interesting to learn that it does indeed appear bigger than normal rather than the usual illusionary bigness from being near the horizon.
Hooray, somebody finally cloned the parts of Copilot I wanted so I can use this technology to help family members without either paying for Copilot myself (not going to happen) or asking them to pay (happened a couple times but always felt kind of overpriced).
Lifehacker’s post UltraVNC Singleclick describes how to use it. It’s a version of the VNC [...]
I got a new work laptop. I finished moving everything I care about from the old laptop. All I wanted to do was flush the disk in the old laptop. I always try to clear a machine’s disk before releasing control of it — either by turning it back to [...]
ghostweather -> Berkun blog -> next-microsoft: Victimization ratio
Number of Problems you are powerless to solve
= Victimization Ratio
Total Number of Problems you are impacted by
Feeling powerless to resolve something you see as a serious problem sure is frustrating. What can one do?
Ignore it — the least likely to work out, since it’s still there [...]