I accidentally hit ctrl-H in our computer system today…..and it acted like backspace. I have never before run into a modern, GUI-based program where that would happen. Then again, I don’t recall ever trying it, either.
Category: Computers/Internet
Spec Check
I’ve been thinking about adding memory to the PowerBook for a while now, and for various other reasons we ended up at Fry’s last night. I figured, we’re here anyway, why not at least price the RAM?
Well, here’s a big fragging “Why Not:” I couldn’t remember the exact specs required. There was, however, a chart listing various laptop models, and the employees could look up requirements by model in the computer. The problem there was that I knew it as “the new 12″ PowerBook G4,” not as “Model A1010,” so they ended up (as near as I can tell) pulling up the specs for last year’s PowerBook (the 1 GHz instead of the 1.33 GHz). Naturally, the two models use different kinds of RAM.
When we got home last night, I cracked open the manual to compare the specs. Tonight, I waded through the Fry’s return line, and this time I brought the manual along — as I’d intended to do in the first place.
Everything went smoothly except for one glitch. The memory slot is covered by a panel with four size #0 Phillips head screws. I do have a size #0 screwdriver, and three of the screws came out easily. One of them refused to move, and the head ended up getting stripped somewhat. Eventually I was able to get it.
So, now the laptop has gone from having the smallest amount of memory at 256 MB (barring the ancient Mac clone in the closet) to having the most memory of all our computers at 1.25 GB.
XFN Updated
A new version of XFN has been released, with a few changes and a few new attributes. (XFN, the “XHTML Friends Network” is a simple way of adding information to a link to indicate your relationship to that person.)
New relationship types include kin and contact, expanding the family and friendship dimensions, and me. The primary reason to add me seems to involve linking together profiles at multiple social networking sites – Friendster, Orkut, etc., but it brings up an interesting question:
How do you handle a site run by more than one person? We’ve had XFN info on this page since sometime last year, and it’s worked, because we share mostly the same circle of friends. But we also have links to our individual websites. Should these both be marked “me?” Presumably not, since the separate sites wouldn’t represent the same person. Perhaps something to consider for XFN 1.2?
Why I chose Netgear
I should’ve written this up when we bought it, but there are two main reasons I went with the Netgear WGT624 router over another brand with similar features.
First: familiarity. Since I hadn’t researched specific models, I wanted a brand I knew or had used before. This meant Netgear, Linksys, or Belkin.
Belkin was out of the question. In fact, I was muttering about how I’d never buy a Belkin router, when I was approached by a Belkin representative who proceeded to explain about how much better their product was than any of the others. The problem is that Belkin lost my trust last year when they set their routers to redirect web requests to their own advertisement page. (Basically one every eight hours until you bought the filtering service or clicked on an opt-out link on that web page). Aside from the annoyance factor, there’s a lot of web traffic that isn’t actually trying to load a web page. It could be your antivirus program trying to download new definitions, or your news reader updating an RSS or Atom feed. It could be Windows Update. Sure, they eventually disabled the “feature”, but come on!
So at that point it basically a toss-up between Netgear and Linksys. The Netgear packaging was more focused on the networking capabilities, and the Linksys packaging was more focused on the parental controls, so I went with the Netgear.
Copyright law: All ficced up
We were having a discussion last night about the specifics of copyright law on derivative works, sparked by a ridiculous flamewar discussion thread on fan-made music videos. While it’s generally known that posting fanfic and fanart is illegal, we were speculating on when exactly these creations become violations of the law. Is it when you distribute the work? When you show it to a stranger, whether they get a copy or not? When you show it to your spouse? Turns out that unless you have specific permission from the copyright holder to use the specific work involved, it’s not legal to create fanart or fic at all, whether you show it to anyone or not.
This runs up against a belief of mine that I’ve termed “the Six-Year-Old Doctrine:” if, in order to fully enforce a law, authorities would need to prosecute a fair number of unwitting six-year-olds, that law is in need of changing. With respect to copyright and derivative works, every first-grader who draws a picture of Dora the Explorer or Barney or Bugs Bunny is technically in violation of copyright law. Realistically, no one is going to issue C&D letters to a classful of fans, or sue their parents for damages. Sadly, the owners of the depicted property do have that right.
Copyright law is quite black and white, but feels incredibly gray. And no wonder, with the fineness of the dividing lines between legal and illegal. Continue reading
A mute? (It got better)
Last week I started to notice Eudora’s musical you’ve-got-mail tones, very faint, at times that I got new mail. This was odd for two reasons: my sound was muted, and I’ve long since replaced the sound with the “Message for you, sir!” line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I assumed it was just coincidence, and the guy in the next cubicle had his email set to check on a similar schedule.
Well, it seems that mute doesn’t actually work on my Win2k box, at least not if it’s muted when I log in. The volume icon in the taskbar says it’s muted, the checkbox is checked, but it still sends sound to the speakers. Unchecking and re-checking the mute box solved it.
Now I need to figure out why it reset the sound clip. I did install a new version of Eudora recently, but it kept the rest of my settings intact. My best guess is that I moved the file a while back and forgot about it (since it’s been on mute for months), and Eudora, unable to find it, fell back to the default.
If I hadn’t turned the volume down so far, it would have been obvious. And I probably wouldn’t have bothered writing this.
Working Wireless
I am posting this from out on our patio. We ended up getting a Netgear wireless router that has its own built-in 4-port 10/100 switch and will hook directly into our DSL connection. What does this mean?
- It adds wireless capability.
- It can replace our hub.
- It can replace our router.
- We don’t need to find any more outlets or power strips. In fact, the end result is we’ve freed up an outlet.
- We don’t need to buy wireless cards for the computers we already have.
The AirPort Express looked nice, mainly for AirTunes, but we would have had to put it in the other room with the stereo anyway. And besides, none of Apple’s Airport stations have more than one LAN port – the assumption is you’re either going all-wireless or you’ve already got equipment for your wired systems.