This was a warning message that I was greeted with on my new laptop at work today when I was messing around with dual screens and setting their resolution. Funny how it thinks the resolution I chose would result in a “fuzzy display” is worse off then its suggested “squinty display.”

Thanks, but no-thanks… I’ll keep my “fuzzy display” setting.

A few weeks ago I had a need to uninstall some software from my XP laptop at work. I did the usual START / Settings / Control Panel / Add and Remove Programs, but it simply wouldn’t populate the list of applications no matter how long I waited.

I REALLY didn’t want to reimage my machine just because of this one glitch — let me rephrase that… I was NOT going to reimage my machine because of this one glitch! But I still needed to get a certain application uninstalled and I also didn’t want to have to manually uninstall it.

I dug around on Microsoft’s site looking for a KB article on the issue, but nothing I found offered any relief. Then I came upon CCleaner.

Not only am I able to uninstall my apps now, I can do so many other things, like… clear temporary files, URL history, cookies from IE, Firefox or Opera, but also clean out the Recycle Bin, MRU lists, temp files, and clean up the registry.

A very handy tool… and best of all, it’s freeware!

For those of you doing audio production, Adobe has released a great list of tips if you’re using Windows XP and Adobe Audition — especially the latest edition of Audition, 3.0.

However, these tips apply just as well for ANY audio production tool running under XP

Enjoy!

Courtesy of Jane’s E-Learning Picks, RoundPic is a nifty online tool that can quickly round the corners of images that you can either upload or point to an existing image already online. Once you have your image uploaded, you can then resize it, adjust the radius of the corners, and finally, download the final product.

For those who actively comment on blogs, you may find it difficult, as I do, to keep track of posts which you have commented on and wish to perhaps keep the conversation going.

The cure to this ailment is co.mments.com. This little service is awesome! You can track any blog posting that you want to follow simply by clicking on the bookmarklet that you add to your bookmarks bar. Even better, you can configure the service to send you an e-mail message when the post that your tracking has been commented upon.

Enjoy!

For those who listen to Victor’s podcast, the Typical Mac User Podcast, you might have heard me talk about this product — PodWorks.

Recently my 6 month old MacBook’s hard drive crashed…  and crashed hard!  Nothing was salvageable from the drive.  Fortunately, I DID have a backup of my important data, to include my iTunes Library.

I had backed up my iTunes library via rsync to a FreeNAS server that I had recently setup.  Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to get the on-board NIC of the NAS unit to run at 100Mb/Full-Duplex — it was stuck in Half-Duplex mode.  This was causing any transfer to take forever!  With a 26GB iTunes library, I was looking at a 16+ hour transfer to restore my library.

So I started looking at the concept of pulling my library back off my iPod instead.  Unfortunately, Apple only provides for a one-way transfer of your library EXCEPT for the case of purchased music.  If you hook your iPod up to another installation of iTunes you can at least transfer your purchased tracks to that library, but no podcasts nor any other content that you may have ripped from CD.

A quick Google search yielded a couple of hits — one of which let me to PodWorks.  I connected my iPod to my MacBook, fired up PodWorks and clicked on a single button (after I paid my $8 registration fee) to copy the contents of my iTunes library (on the iPod) back in to iTunes library.

45 minutes later I was then able to associate my iPod with this new installation of iTunes — which, of course, wipes the iPod clean to do so — and then begin the process of pushing the library back to the iPod.

In just under 2 hours, I was back in business.  Not bad for $8!

Pssst…  it also works with the iPhone!

Technorati Tags: Mac, iPod, PodWorks, iTunes

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We had an employee termination earlier this week. As is typically the case, upon the employee’s departure, there is a mad scramble to pick up the pieces to keep things moving along in this person’s place. One of the primary issues is access to e-mail.

In our case, the employee had saved most all of his e-mail to a local PST file keeping but about 2 weeks worth on the server. The problem was, he had password protected the PST file.

A quick google search indicated that PST file password protection really isn’t that complex. One of the first products that I located in my search was a utility called PST Password. Even better… it’s freeware!

I downloaded the utility, fired it up, opened up the protected PST file and it provided me with 3 possible passwords. The first one did not work, but the second one did. I was able to quickly hand this 800MB+ PST file back to the manager sans password and harmony was soon restored.

Technorati Tags: PST, PSTPassword, Freeware

I thought about titling it “The GOOD old days of computing” but they weren’t “good.”  Even then things were a struggle.  But there is still a fondness for those days.

The last few days, perhaps it has to do with my birthday — I don’t know, I’ve been thinking back on my career within IT and the computer field in general.  I started going back to how I became interested in computers.

It was all my buddy’s fault, Dave Wertz.  One day he showed me his new Tandy 1000HX. A sleek little machine with the keyboard and computer all as a single unit, topped off with a Color CGA monitor!  We sat down that day and began writing a Basic program that would caluclate the cubic inch displacement of an engine.  As we plugged away at each of those lines it all came back to me what my science teacher had attempted to teach me back in high school.  The lightbulb came on and I was now hooked!

Not long after that I picked up my first computer — A Tandy Color Computer 3, or more affectionately known as a CoCo3.  It was cool…  it had ROM Basic! I could now program in basic myself. Quickly I discovered that the CoCo3 just wasn’t going to cut it.

Next up was an actual computer — a clone Tubo XT10, 10MHz XT with 640K of RAM, a single 360K floppy, a monochrome graphics card, and a 2400 baud modem! On top of it sat a 13″ amber monochrome monitor.  NOW I was in business.

Even this became a hassle since I only had the single 360K floppy drive, but then another buddy of mine lent me a 20MB Lapine hard drive and another 360K floppy drive.  Booting off that hard drive made life SO much easier.

These are fond memories of my early days of computing.  Good in some ways, but nearly always a struggle at some point - a sign of growth.  Now days, my wristwatch could run circles around those first machines.  But I learned more on those machines than I ever would on my wrist watch.

Technorati Tags: Computing, nostalgia, CoCo3, XT, Tandy, 1000HX

Earlier today, in a fit of frustration, I decided to delete my Twitter and Jaiku accounts. Why? I was tired of getting “spammed” by my “friends” whenever one of them would post a new blog entry to one or many of their blogs. This “spamming” is a result of a utility called TwitterFeed where any time one posts to ones blog, the RSS feed is updated and TwitterFeed submits a tweet on ones behalf.

What ensued thereafter was a nice conversation, a point/counter-point discussion between myself and Mike McBride on this issue and what is wrong with these social media services and how they are being abused because of their lack of maturity as applications or services. We thought it would be interesting enough to share with everyone else.

If any of you use these services… what are your thoughts?

POINT: Kevin Devin

Silly as it may seem, I just couldn’t take it any longer. The posting to twitter every single blog posting was so redundant that it made me ill. As I mentioned in my conversation on the issue with Dean Jensen, there is NOTHING that I write in any of my blogs that is worthy of my “friends” needing to read, much less know about immediately. Getting the word out is one thing, but to your “friends” it is like preaching to the choir — how effective is it really? It effectively becomes spam at that point. I read blog posts in my RSS reader — I don’t need to be informed of each and every post.

So… since I’m unable to control it on my end, I’ve decided to simply delete my account. Now there is NO WAY that I can get irritated over this silliness. Sure, perhaps I’m throwing out the baby with the bath water, but I don’t think so. I can’t utilize these services at work where I spend most of my time anyway, so my participation was minimal to begin with.

I still have my pownce account… but it may fall victim to the same fate since it requires browser-only access.

I really think these social media tools are simply out of control. Too many “me too” services with one maybe two differentiating features. But all running amok. People be-friending hundreds of people and then using it to pimp themselves. The initial concept of “what are you doing” was cool. But it just seems it now overextends those boundaries and as a result… I don’t care for them anymore.

So… I’ll be available via e-mail or this list, and I’ll be watching my rss reader for things you post to your blogs. I think that is more than sufficient for the level of urgency any of these actions deserve.

COUNTER POINT: Mike McBride

Interesting. I can see your point about not needing to see blog postings, but at the same time, not everyone subscribes to my blogs with an RSS reader. Some people I’m friends with outside the tech world look at my MySpace profile, or other such services and are informed that I’ve posted something by the Twitter applet there. This is especially true of people who read my non-tech blog or are interested in Flickr photos, etc. They simply keep an eye on the Twitter feed, or a place where they can see the applet, to see what I’ve been doing, including what I’ve been posting. Unfortunately, Twitter and the other services don’t really have any way to direct something to the “public face” of my Twitter profile without sending a notification to my friends. That would actually be kind of a nice feature to have.

I like giving people a multitude of ways to keep track of my writing. That’s why there’s a choice of RSS feeds, notification email list, Twitter notifications, etc. It may seem like shameless self-promotion at times, but I’m not running ads or making any money off my sites at all. If I’m promoting anything, it’s making it easier for people to interact with and be part of the community that my sites, including FiT represent. Perhaps, as these tools mature, it’ll be easier to use them to do that, without constantly “pinging” friends with updates they already know about.

POINT: Kevin Devin

OK… so lets expand on that one. Not everyone subscribes to your blog via an RSS reader. So then that means they likely visit the site at their own frequency, no? Does anything you write require an immediate read? Those who look at your MySpace profile… same thing. They’re likely not monitoring an RSS feed, but again, anything requiring an immediate read?

Do you have any numbers of any kind to backup how many additional readers you are getting because of the twitter applet on MySpace? In comparison, how many friends are having to endure the spamming in pursuit of those additional readers? I guess it comes down to, does the end justify the means?

My point is, these services are being misused, IMHO. Sure, that is how things advance. Take podcasting for instance. RSS was not originally meant to carry with it audio enclosures, but with a little misuse of the technology, it became part of standard.

At this point in time, these services need to mature — BADLY. Most of them are having a hell of a time scaling making them somewhat useless to begin with. But what if all of these blog post notifications and pleas for people to go digg their latest blog entry were gone… how many true “what are you doing” messages would be able to get through?

There’s a fine line between “what are you doing” versus “look at what I did.” They are very close, but one is informational, the other is self promotion. I guess its the shameless self-promotion that is eating at me… it always has.

COUNTER POINT: Mike McBride

I don’t have numbers, it hasn’t occurred to me before to track who’s coming from the Twitter page. Of course, there’s no real way of knowing which of these folks might also use an RSS reader and simply see it on Twitter first, so any numbers I could give you wouldn’t necessarily prove anything. I do know people follow the links from Twitter. Not a lot, but some. I also know some people who normally don’t follow the child abuse blog have followed links from Twitter, I assume because the title interested them to take a look. Most of my “friends” on Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce come from the techie side of things, obviously, and most don’t subscribe to anything more than my tech blog RSS feed. Obviously, seeing posts from the other blog causes some of them to click over.

Also, there are some clicks that come from not my Twitter feed, but the “with friends” feed of some of my followers. Obviously, these may very well be people who are not familiar at all with my blog, and are being introduced to it through common Twitter contacts.

Are any of these new “readers” enough to justify, what is obviously considered by you to be, spam? Again, I don’t really know. I don’t really know how many people are that bothered by it as opposed to the number who find it useful either. I haven’t done the survey.

As to your claim that it’s “what are you doing” versus “look what I did”, is there really a difference? If I simply wrote “blogging” as my Twitter entry with no link, would that somehow change your opinion of the message? Which one is more informative, “I’m blogging”, or “I’ve written something about Twitter on my blog and here’s a link”? Is it self-promotion? Maybe a little. On the other hand, if I have an interesting article that I’ve read, wouldn’t the natural inclination be to share that on Twitter with a link, as opposed to simply saying “I’m reading something”? By it’s very nature isn’t something you’ve posted about something you’re interested in sharing? Why would it seem so odd to not only post to your blog, but let people on Twitter know that you have written something longer than 140 characters about it and where they can find it? It may be redundant to people who are already subscribed to that same RSS feed, but most of us have more than one RSS feed (tech blogs, link blogs, non-tech blogs, group blogs, Flickr, photo-blogs, Zoomr, etc.) so many of the things that show up on Twitter aren’t redundant even to RSS subscribers. (Unless of course, someone out there is actually subscribed to each and every RSS feed I produce, in which case I’d like to talk about a restraining order..*L*)

It’s true that none of these things require immediate attention. That’s the thing I like about Twitter compared to IM, the opportunity to put things out to the public and/or my contacts without having to put one person on the spot to respond immediately. It’s a tool to let you know what I’m doing, if I’m eating at a good restaurant, watching a good movie, learning something new, and no one needs to respond right away. If what I’m doing at that time doesn’t interest you, you ignore the tweet. If enough of them don’t interest you, you quit following me. If not enough of anyone’s interest you, I guess you quit using it, as you have. No harm, no foul. Everyone’s got that prerogative.

I think you and I can agree that these services need to mature, fast. I would love to be able to promote the stuff I’m writing without drowning my friends in updates. Pownce has a group feature that could, eventually I think, be used to do exactly that. Unfortunately, they haven’t implemented a way to post to the public, and not notify your friends. They also don’t have a mobile interface, as you pointed out, that is a severe limitation.

I’m hopeful that these services can mature to the point where we’ll all find those new ways to use the technology, on both ends. As a promotion tool, but also with tools to filter out and only receive notifications we choose individually. That’d be nice…

I believe the very first FiT tip that we published here in audio form was a bit about a litle FREE utility to recover data on Smart Media Cards called PC Inspector - Smart Recovery.  Interestingly, back in April of last year I mentioned it on ITT as having saved some photos then.

This time, however, I had a few circumstances that made me wonder if this would be possible this time.  First off, I had just finished taking some shots of the neighbors and their fireworks.  There were a couple of shots that I was especially interested in as they were extended exposure shots using my tripod and remote shutter release.  To my surprise, when I went to process the images, the card showed that it was empty.

Immediately, I thought of the Smart Recovery tool, but I knew it was a Windows only tool — I’m using a Mac.  However, fortunately, I also am running Parallels and have an instance of Windows XP in a virtual machine. Now the question became, will the Smart Recovery utility recovery my data from a Compact Flash card?  It lists SD cards and other flash-based media, but not CF.  Fortunately, it DID state that it could recognize Canon RAW image formats (.CR2).

So I downloaded the tool, mounted my CF card in my card reader and ensure that my XP VM could see the card and then turned Smart Recovery loose on the drive.

The entire process took over 5 hours to complete a thorough scanning of the drive and in the end, recovered over 300 images that had been previously erased (on purpose) and in there were my handful of firework pics that I REALLY wanted.

Transferred the image that I wanted over to my external drive I use to house my RAW images, and I was good to go.

To ANYONE with a digital camera of ANY kind…  I highly recommend this utility.  This is not the first time it has saved my butt, and my cousin even used it to save data on her MMC card about a month ago as well.  You just can’t beat it for a freeware utility.

Technorati Tags: PC Inspector, Smart Recovery, SD, CF, RAW, Canon

For those sitting on the fence on whether to bite the bullet and purchase Adobe Photoshop Light Room, now would be the time to make that jump. I already liked LR 1.0, but one of my greatest complaints was the inability to utilize multiple catalogs, or databases. I prefer to use my laptop for immediate processing and then archive to another catalog on an external hard drive. 1.0 made this endeavor a MAJOR pain in the butt, but 1.1 fixes all that. Now, if your workflow incorporates the use of a laptop for field work and a desktop for more permanent processing and storage, you’re set.

If you’re STILL unsure, go grab a copy of 1.1 and evaluate it for 30 days. Trust me, you’ll love it if you are at all serious about your photo processing.

Technorati Tags: Kevin Devin, Photography, Adobe, LightRoom, DSLR

Over on In the Trenches, we’ve spoken very highly about PSTools from Winternals, now owned by Microsoft. One of the early concerns was that the FREE tools would go away, but Microsoft has stated on a few occassions that this would not be the case. But what about the for-fee products that used to be offered by Winternals? Well, Microsoft is now releasing those tools, like the Administrator’s Toolkit, with a new name — Diagnostics And Recovery Toolset (DART).

If you’re curious as to what Microsoft has done to the suite of tools, go check out your own 30-day eval copy.

[Courtesy Kurt Shintaku’s Blog]

Here’s one for all you folks who use Flickr. Eric Appel has created a nifty little tool for creating smart sets of your Flickr pics, aptly named, SmartSetr. Below is a quick screencast on its use.

Give it a try for yourself!

 

 Podcast Video [3:30m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download