The joy of coincidence

I received an e-mail from Bob of Stormbringer’s Thunder blog who wanted to share the joy of coincidence: we both use Blogger and both use the same Blogger template. Okay, no coincidence there as there are probably hundreds (or thousands?) of other bloggers using those same tools. The funny part is that we both posted about how we love PortableApps.com on Monday (mine, his).

Maybe this is proof of the Infinite Monkey Theorem in action? 🙂

Take your apps with you

I bought a Corsair 2gb Flash Padlock last August after hearing Steve Gibson and Leo Laporte talk about it on the Security Now! podcast (episode #106). I use it primarily for shuttling files back and forth between my home and work computers (in a TrueCrypt container), but have also configured it as a bootable device so I can run the Ultimate Boot CD from it (which is handy when I’m asked by friends or family to work on their broken computers).

Some other neat things I keep on it are the portable applications from PortableApps.com. You simply download the PortableApps Suite (or the individual applications you want) and then install them onto your USB flash drive. No information is written to your local PC’s hard disk … everything is encapsulated on the flash drive. You can now plug your flash drive into any PC and run your applications without worrying about having to install them locally, or leaving any personal information (say, browsing history) behind when you’re done.

I keep the usual portable suspects on my Corsair: Firefox for web browsing, Thunderbird for e-mail, Pidgin for instant messaging, PuTTY for SSH connections, etc. Those are all available for download and install from the PortableApps site. However, you can also add your own portable applications and have then run from the PortableApps custom start menu.

For example, I’ve added TrueCrypt, JungleDisk, Bucket Explorer, and mRemote to my personal portable utility arsenal.

Keep in mind that not every application is automagically portable: it needs to be specifically coded to not use any local PC resources (like .ini files, the registry, etc.). So you can’t just dump a program into the PortableApps directory on your flash drive and expect it to work. Do your homework (i.e., search Google) though, and you’ll find plenty of portable applications out there.

Start building your own utility belt today!

Can Wii get Fit?

I pre-ordered Wii Fit through Amazon back in mid-April and today it arrived on my doorstep. I spent about 45 minutes this evening learning my way around the balance board, doing the initial Body Test, and checking out some of the included games.

Wii Fit doesn’t mean We Fit: this is strictly a single player game. There is a 2 player jogging game, but the second player is a guest so they can’t pick a Mii and it doesn’t count towards their Wii Fit credits. I was also disappointed to read in the balance board guide that only one board can be associated with a Wii at a time. That means no multi-player games with multiple balance boards (think We Ski). The jogging game uses the Wii remote only instead of the balance board, which is why it can support multiple players.

Now, I’m not that sure of how the Wii Fit Age calculation works, or how “accurate” it is. During my initial Body Test (in which you enter your age, the balance board measures your weight, and then makes you do a few balance exercises), my Wii Fit Age was calculated as 51! When I tried it again after 30 minutes or so of playing the games with the balance board, my WFA dropped to much more palatable 31 (and it also said I had lost 1.5lbs). Oh, and don’t expect Wii Fit to sugar-coat your physical fitness status … I didn’t mind it saying I was overweight (I knew that), but then it adjusted the size of my Mii accordingly, adding a little paunch around the middle! 😯 I’m just saying be prepared for the (ugly) truth.

After the initial Body Test, Wii Fit walks you through setting a goal and timeframe to reach it. Since my BMI was calculated at 25.98 (22.0 is considered normal), I set a goal to lose 10 pounds in 2 months. Adding the Wii Fit Channel to the Wii home screen allows you to “weigh in” using the balance board without actually having the Wii Fit disc in the drive (the Wii Fit channel uses 106 blocks of memory).

For a game that comes with a cool new peripheral, why does it involve so much use of the Wii remote? You pretty much have to keep it in your hands at all times to keep pressing the A button as you progress through the various intro/info screens. This makes some of the balancing activities a little difficult. During the running game, for example, you’re told to put the remote in your pocket. After you do that, it asks you to press A a few more times! I was hoping the balance board could act like a wireless controller, similar to the dance pad in Dance Dance Revolution.

One more negative (last one for now, I promise!) is the lag time between exercise activity. It takes way too long to go from one workout task to another. After finishing an activity (say, ski jump) there’s some extra animation, then the high scores list, then your Wii Fit credits go into the bank, then the prompt to Quit or Retry. If you quit, you’re back at the activity selection menu where you have to select a new activity, then go through the intro of that, which might involve a few A button presses before it actually starts. They really should have included a “playlist” feature to throw a bunch of activities in sequence to keep you moving (again, I’m thinking here like the workout programs in DDR). Maybe it’s in there … I haven’t explored everything yet.

The games I tried (under Aerobics and Balance) were fun, though hard to initially get the hang of. The balance board is very sensitive, so in some of the games you have to be careful to lean slowly and not in quick, jerky movements. I like the ski slalom and ski jump games, the tightrope and soccer ball ones I found more difficult. The best workout one I’ve tried so far was the running-in-place (it’s fun to watch all the other Miis wandering around while you run by).

I wasn’t sweating nearly as much as after 30 minutes of DDR, but I’ll give Wii Fit a chance. I’ve got my goal set for the next two months, let’s see how it goes …

WIJFR: Mission

What would you do if, through an unexpected twist of fate and time, you came face to face with Jesus of Nazareth? In the flesh. A living, breathing, three-dimensional figure with a disconcertingly casual manner. When you had pinched yourself to make sure that you weren’t dreaming and found that he was still there, would you turn your back and walk away – or would you try to find out what he was doing so far from home?

“Mission” by Patrick Tilley has been in my personal library for almost 20 years. I bought it at a used book sale at the Porter Public Library in Westlake, Ohio in the late 80s on a total whim. I can’t remember why my teen-aged self would have purchased it: it’s a nondescript blue and gray hardcover novel, about an inch and a half thick, with no dust jacket, just the words MISSION and TILLEY printed on the spine in gold leaf. There’s no synopsis page in the front, no “about the author” page in the back, nothing to clue my young self into what the book was about. I must have opened it and flipped through a few pages, but I can’t remember what I would have read at the time that made me buy it, but I did. It’s an amazing story, and has apparently turned into a cult classic during the two decades it has sat on my bookshelf …

“Mission” tells the story of Leo Resnick, a Manhattan lawyer who finds himself in the middle of an eternal struggle between cosmic forces of the Power of the Prescence (good) and ‘Brax (evil). And it just so happens that one of the foot soldiers on the ground (Earth) in this war is a Celestial who ends up trapped the body of one Joshua of Nazareth (who we’ve come to know as Jesus). I think “Mission” qualifies as science fiction: there are aliens, space ships, time travel, mystical powers, etc. but it also contains an extremely healthy (and detailed) dose of religion. And not just Judaism and Christianity … all religions. Tilley does a masterful job of weaving his story through history and religion, explaining almost everything in the Bible as we learn the Truth through Leo’s experience with The Man (as he calls him).

I can see religious people possibly being offended with the topic. After all, when it comes down to it, Jesus is a stranded space alien trying to get back home. Tilley also takes a few good shots at organized religion in general. But you have to remember this is fiction: any good story is better when it’s woven into real events (like what the movie “Stargate” did with Egyptian mythology).

In a neat juxtaposition, I started reading this in mid-April, shortly after Easter. So the events in the book were corresponding with current real-life dates and events (at one point, it was May 5 for me and I was reading about May 5 in the book). As with any good book, the twist at the end is the best and made me wish it wasn’t over.

In doing some Google searching while writing this, I’ve learned that apparently this book is now hard to find in-print. I guess I should hang on to my aging first edition for a bit longer … I might want to read it again in another 20 years.

ThrEee weeks later

So it’s been three weeks since I got my Eee PC. Is the honeymoon over? Nope!

I’ve spent the past three weeks carrying (and using) the Eee almost everywhere: taking it to work, having it in the car (in case I’m somewhere with free WiFi), etc. Even now I’m kicking back on the couch watching “CSI” and using it to write this. I’ve pored over the wiki at eeeuser.com, read and posted in the forums (the community there is awesome), and spent time customizing and tweaking the Asus-installed Xandros Linux to my liking. Thus far I’ve:

  • upgraded to 1gb of RAM: it took me longer to order the 1gb DDR chip than it did to actually install it (see here for a video of just how easy it is).
  • customized the interface: using tools like Theeemer, Tweakeee, and EMEditor, I’ve changed the default look-and-feel to something a little slicker looking (see the screen capture at the top of this post).
  • installed more applications: I’ve got TrueCrypt so I can access the encrypted volume on my thumb drive, JungleDisk to get to my files backed up with Amazon’s S3 service, and Maelstrom for a little entertainment.
  • configured it for work purposes: using the PPTP Client I can VPN into the corporate network and then login to my servers with rdesktop or run applications through Citrix.
  • gotten pretty good at accurately typing on the keyboard
  • played around with eeecontrol: this utility lets you increase the front-side bus speed (and thus get the CPU back to its normal 900MHz speed instead of the Asus-underclocked 630MhZ). I really haven’t had a problem with the Eee’s performance so I’ve left it alone for now. I still run eeecontrol in the tray, though, so I can watch the fan speed and temp.

It wasn’t all smooth, though. I had a real problem initially getting onto my wireless home network. It turned out that the default wireless driver/script doesn’t like spaces in the WPA key. Once I removed the spaces, the Eee connected just fine (and then I had to fix the WPA key on every other wireless device on the network). After that, I still had problems connecting to the wireless at work (which also uses WPA). Switching to the madwifi driver seemed to finally help in that regard (though I still get the dreading “Pending” status now and then).

The other difficulty was getting wireless printing to my Epson AcuLaser CX11NF working. The test page would “print” according to the Eee, but nothing would happen on the printer. It took some research, but I finally got it working (see my thread on the eeeuser forum for details).

My other minor nit is with the screen size. The 800×480 resolution means sometimes having to drag windows around with the Alt-left click trick in order to see portions that won’t fit on the screen. This also means that web sites that are designed for larger resolutions (like my daughter’s WebKinz site which is all Flash) involve a lot of dragging back and forth.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with my Eee. Asus has come pretty close to a hitting a home run with the cost, form factor and out-of-the-box usability. The new 900 model adds the 9″ screen with a slightly larger footprint but at the cost of a slightly larger price tag, so the original 701 series still seems like the better deal that hits the sweet spot.

(more photos of my Eee are posted here)

My first Amazon purchase … 8 years later

Today is the 8th anniversary of my very first Amazon.com purchase. On May 7, 2000, I placed my first order on the book-selling web site for a paperback edition of Neal Stephenson’s “Cryptonomicon.” At that time I had no idea just how much stuff I would end up purchasing from Bezos’ brainchild over the next 8 years.

Interesting side-note: I just re-read “Cryptonomicon” two months ago, shortly before I started this blog. I did so because before that I had read all 3,000 some pages of “The Baroque Cycle” prequel novels.

I highly recommend all four books. If you haven’t read any of Stephenson’s work, you should!

WIJFR: Redwall

Matthias, a mouse of Redwall Abbey, is in trouble, as are the rest of the mice. When Cluny the Scourge attacks Redwall with his horde, Matthias goes on a quest to retrieve the sword of Martin the Warrior, which he believes will give victory over the evil vermin.

My daughter and I just finished reading Brian Jacques’ “Redwall.” the first book in his 20-year old Redwall series. I read a lot of science fiction and fantasy as a child so I’m not quite sure how I never came across this saga until now. I think I heard about it mentioned casually on a podcast a few months ago and thought, now that my daughter had finished the Harry Potter books, it sounded like a good series to challenge her with (she’s in first grade) and something we could read and enjoy together. So we spent the past month reading a few pags a night …

All of the characters in “Redwall” are animals: mice, moles, badgers, rabbits, and other woodland creatures are the good guys, and the bad guys are the rats, weasels, ferrets, stoats, snakes, foxes, etc. You can see how the good/evil theme moves on from there. The mice are peaceful and share the bounty of the land with their fellow creatures at Redwall Abbey. The rats, led by Cluny the Scourge, are power-hungry and want to pillage, plunder, and loot. To save the abbey and his friends, Matthias must go on a quest to find the legendary sword of Martin the Warrior, the previous champion defender of Redwall.

It was a relatively easy read: some of the chapters were just a few pages, which made for a nice quick skim before bedtime. There are a lot of “dark” subjects though, particularly murder, that I was a little concerned about reading with a 7-year old. Like I mentioned though, she’s read all the Harry Potter books so she’s been exposed to those topics before. I did learn, though, to not necessarily end the bedtime reading on a Cluny chapter.

Since we had so much fun reading the first one, I’ve already ordered the next four in the series. We’ve got our daddy/daughter reading material set for the summer. Next up, “Mossflower.” Want to know more? Check out the Redwall Wiki.

Bags on WiiWare

My sister works at Incredible Technologies (the makers of Golden Tee) and sent me a link to an IGN article about their upcoming release of Target Toss Pro: Bags on WiiWare!

I had never heard of Bags until my sister started working for IT and even then never actually saw it until my brother’s college graduation last year. I actually got to play it (for real) at my company’s family picnic last fall. It reminds me of playing Toss Across as a kid, but apparently it’s all the rage across midwestern college campuses (I’m sure alcohol is involved there somehow).

WiiWare launches in the US in a few weeks … I thing Bags might be my first purchase.

Bullets are back!

I noticed yesterday, after posting my Vista rant, that my bulleted lists didn’t have bullets next to them. Doing some digging in the Thisaway (Blue) template I’m using, I found the following reference:

.post li {
padding: 0 0 4px 17px;
background: url(http://www.blogblog.com/thisaway_blue/
icon_list_item.gif) no-repeat 0 3px;
}

Putting that URL into my browser, I got this:

The image “http://www.blogblog.com/thisaway_blue/icon_list_item.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Doing a Google search, I found another Blogger user with the same problem … back in February 2007! No one had replied and I wasn’t able to either. I downloaded the file, which turned out to be 31k (a bit large for a small image like that) so I opened it up in a text editor and found, to my surprise, a template file that was apparently from the Ask a Ninja website! Not sure how that got in there. Just to see if anyone else had noticed this in the past year, I posted a new help question on the Blogger help forum (my prediction: no one replies/cares).

At any rate, I wanted to fix this, so I grabbed the icon_list_image.gif file from the Thisaway (Green) template and then modified it to a blue color to match my blue template. I put the image up on my own site, updated the Blogger template to point to it, and now the bullets are back!

If anyone else out there is using Thisaway (Blue) and would like the updated bullet image, you can right-click here and save it.