Ads for a Holyfield match during a tech support call?
Reason #7 that it’s sub-ideal getting your Internet service from your cable company, i.e. a company whose real profit motive is to sell you every possible communications service but mostly incoming video at old-school prices: you have to listen to ads for pay-per-view boxing matches when you’re on hold for customer support.
When using Citibank’s site to set a credit card bill to pay itself, I was forced to make the following declaration:
“By checking this box, I confirm that my browser is equipped with at least 128-bit security encryption, and my computer is capable of printing or storing a copy of my AutoPay Enrollment Confirmation.”
This got me thinking.
How’s that going to work for the new, increasingly popular breed of devices that abstract away or eliminate local storage (most smartphones including iPhones, tablets including iPads, iOS in general, and maybe ChromeOS)?
I mean, it’s not like you really need to store this confirmation, and for the other similar things that are undergoing a transition from paper to electronic storage (like the statements themselves) you could always download them as PDF and then re-upload them to somewhere made for actually storing documents like DropBox.
Still, there’s a disconnect here as everyone tries to move away from paper and storage at once.
I wanted to use my new remap-volume-keys trick to turn the useless volume slider on the Logitech DiNovo Edge keyboard into a scroll wheel replacement. (The volume slider is useless to me because, like in the story in the previous link, I’m using a digital sound output from this computer, and Mac OS won’t adjust the master volume on digital sound outputs. And while the DiNovo Edge has built-in scrolling support with a gesture on the touchpad, the touchpad is too small and the gesture is hard to perform and overall, I think the volume slider would be much more useful for scrolling.)
No luck so far though — USB Overdrive doesn’t see buttons on the DiNovo Edge at all, probably because it’s Bluetooth and not natively USB. And I tried installing Logitech’s own control software, which does allow me to customize the meaning of certain keys and gestures, but it doesn’t allow me to specify any different behavior for the volume keys.
For my home ISP I switched from DSL to cable some time back. My DSL provider (Speakeasy) had more friendly policies but their speeds just weren’t keeping up with what the cable ISPs offer.
However, their speed test site remains my go-to speed tester even when using other ISPs, and is perfectly willing to benchmark connections faster than anything Speakeasy offers.
Here’s a recent result of the speed test from my home connection. Every time I’ve run this, I’ve found it amusing that it ends with an ad for one of their services they think might appeal to you, even though in my case it would be 3x the price for ¼th the speed (charitably using the upload speed for comparison; the ratio for download speed would be even less favorable).
MKSTaskbarPlugin for VMware Workstation for Windows
I wrote this a few years ago and published it a few months ago — maybe someone will find it useful.
mksTaskbarPlugin is a DLL which loads both in the vmware-vmx.exe process (to get the screen image from the virtual machine) and the explorer.exe process (to interact with the Windows taskbar).
The result is that you can use extra space on your Windows taskbar to show a scaled-down, live-updating thumbnail image of your choice of VMware virtual machine running on the same host. This is useful for keeping an eye on long-running background operations like software installs in one VM while freeing up most of your screen to interact with other VMs or the host OS.
When creating my gravatar account, I was asked to choose a rating.
This surprised me for two reasons — first, gravatars have ratings? I don’t think I really want to see any X or even R rated gravatars. (And sure, preventing people from seeing what they didn’t want to see is the whole purpose of having a rating in the first place, except until they fed me this page, it hadn’t previously occurred to me that I or anyone else could should or would use gravatars for, er, X rated purposes.) Second, I thought that the ratings below X were trademarked by the MPAA, no?
If you don’t consider yourself a criminal, do you have anything to hide? Well, maybe:
For one thing, many Americans are criminals and they don’t even know it. Due to the disturbing phenomenon known as “overcriminalization,” it’s very easy to break the law nowadays without realizing it. A May 2010 study from the conservative Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers found that three out of every five new nonviolent criminal offenses don’t require criminal intent. The Congressional Research Service can’t even count the number of criminal offenses currently on the books in the United States, estimating the number to be in the “tens of thousands.”
Source: Ars Technica
I bought a pair of Beringer MS40 speakers for my Mac and connected them via an optical digital cable, and immediately the master volume control on the Mac became useless — as in disabled. (The speakers have their own volume control, a physical knob on the left speaker itself, which is slightly out of arm’s reach.)
For convenience, though, I miss having the software volume control, which I could change from the menubar, my keyboard, and a variety of other places. Sure, you get the best sound quality by using just one volume control (in this case, the one on the speakers) and leaving the rest set to maximum, but I don’t need that enforced so strictly; it’s useful having a systemwide volume setting under software control, and the resulting quality impact isn’t immediately horrible. (It’s not like the analog out has a fixed level just below clipping — it has a variable level! And Windows lets you vary the level of a digital output.)
A corollary to this is that the volume +/–/mute buttons on my keyboard (a standard USB keyboard, not from Apple) no longer do anything useful (they bring up the normal Mac OS change-volume overlay, except further overlaid with the international sign of the You Can’t Do That Here).
Anyway, that’s how it is and I can’t change it. But individual apps that play music, e.g. iTunes, do have their own software volume control. (With the same impact on sound quality that Apple’s trying to prevent me from inflicting on myself systemwide! But hey.) So if I can convince Mac OS to interpret the volume +/–/mute buttons as normal keys, not mapped directly to the now-useless master volume setting, but instead let me remap them as systemwide shortcuts for the iTunes volume setting, then I’d get back convenient keyboard control over music volume.
Can this be done? The Keyboard prefpane in System Preferences lets me add systemwide shortcuts to an individual app’s menu commands, like iTunes’ “Increase Volume” command, from any key combination it considers legal for such a shortcut, but it doesn’t notice me pressing the volume buttons, presumably because the part of the system that maps them to the master volume is intercepting them too early. (Can that be turned off?)
Update: USB Overdrive solves this. It’s got builtin support for recognizing every special key on my keyboard, and for changing iTunes volume; even if it didn’t, it would let me set weirdo keys to either perform some action from an extensive and customizable builtin list, or remapped to send some other key combination which could then be used in the system Keyboard prefpane.
I’ve updated my utility for importing notes from Palm Desktop into Evernote to take advantage of feedback and fix the most-reported bugs:
Download here: http://www.maddogsw.com/evernote-utilities/evernote-palm-importer/
I wanted a visual display of everywhere we went on our sabbatical — ideally a world map marked up with arrows indicating our route.
Looking for such a thing; the best thing I found was travelpod’s map display, which is a lot heavier than just a map (I didn’t really want to create a separate trip blog) but does the trick. (Google Maps and the other map sites I tried are great at showing routes for connected road trips, but not flights.)
So: this is the result, a map indicating our flights and destinations; I added a few bread crumbs with links to photos from each country we visited, but didn’t flesh this out with tons of words and photos embedded there like travelpod wanted me to.
As an aside, if you’re into this sort of thing, Apple’s iMovie has a pretty cool travel visualization feature whereby it can automatically show a line zooming from point A to point B on the globe, to connote travel as a transition between frames of a movie or slideshow.