zen.org Communal Weblog

Dear Senator Snowe,

My wife and I have a home in Islesboro, and thus are in your constituency.

We are very grateful for your decision to help make a real step forward in the repair of the American health care system. Your efforts are a perfect example of the bi-partisan system needed by the citizens of the Unites States to maintain a functional government. Behind the drama constantly surrounding everything political is a selection of representatives who remember why we come out to vote.

Thank you so much for taking a stand. Our boys, ages 7 and 2, are two examples of the people your choice is going to help.

Sincerely,
Brendan and Elana Kehoe,
Islesboro, Maine

My Sony laptop (VGN-TZ398U aka PCG-4P2) has the horrible habit of forgetting about its wireless device when I put it to sleep/standby. When it wakes back up, I have to go through crazy steps to make it work again. The laptop is running Vista Service Pack 2, though Vista as shipped on the laptop had the same problem.

A while ago I created a batch file which I could right-click an “Run as administrator” to make the device magically work again:

rem Restart the wireless interface, needed on vaio vgn-tz398u after
rem sleeping. Run as admin.
rem
rem cf http://www.wlanbook.com/enable-disable-wireless-card-command-line/ for an alternative using DevCon.
netsh interface set interface "Wireless Network Connection" disabled
netsh interface set interface "Wireless Network Connection" enabled


But this has been a royal pain. Then I found the answer in a post “How do I get a Vista laptop over its wireless quirk“:

In your Device Manager, open up your network card and go to the Power Management tab. Uncheck (what should be) the first option, “Allow the computer to turn this device off to save power.” This will stop the connection from being dropped whenever the computer goes to sleep/standby. Many wireless cards don’t let you do this, but most, if not all, wired NICs can.

My thanks to the user niles on that site who had the final real fix for me. It’s working like a charm!

I’ve got a bunch of photos I’d like to adjust to get rid of the redeye effect. A bit of searching found a few different tutorials on how to accomplish this in GIMP. But the effort is just plain nuts…you’re doing an awful lot of clicks and menus and finding your way down channels and tunnels … you’d never find the rest to do what should be a point-and-click sort of thing. (For those of us not using expensive commercial packages which have that…)

Because of a great howto, I discovered Digikam, a free KDE package which is perfect. You select a picture and click Edit, then select the region around the eyes. Click Enhance->Red Eye to see a popup showing both the original and, next to it, the fixed version. It’s perfect. Click OK, then Save, and you’re done.

I’ve found more often than not my attempts to log into my desktop (which is running Ubuntu Linux) have me staring at a black screen with a white cursor, waiting forever for the login window to come up. It appears this is because an uber-indexer, trackerd, is swallowing up all sorts of CPU time.

There’s no elegant way to disable it. I could kill the process, but that’s only usable until the next time I reboot the system or log off and log back in. So instead I had to do System -> Administration -> Synaptic Package Manager and search for “tracker” (not “trackerd” which doesn’t get it). I right-clicked on tracker, selected Mark for Complete Removal, and clicked Mark to accept that both of the packages libtaskbar-tracker and tracker-search-tool would be getting unistalled too. A click of Apply and then Apply again finally got rid of it. I quit the Synaptic Package Manager, my therapist to help me get away from this constant frustration.

Now if I walk away for more than five minutes, the screen saver will come on…but the idle system won’t give trackerd the ability to work it into the ground, in lieu of any other practical use of the system. Like, say, its user trying to actually use it.

I have some documents which have to get to the US as early as possible next week. FedEx in Ireland is really picky to begin with, and on a Saturday even has their office closed—and their phoneline hangs up on you if you even try to listen to their office hours. At best, we’d be driving up to Dublin Airport to give the package to them to fly out. Skip FedEx and try DHL — no answer. Gah. This is after I went to An Post in Dún Laoghaire at 3:45pm to try to use their courier service to send it out. The lady said their guy had left at 4pm (it wasn’t even 4), and the best they could do is delivery in 4-5 business days. WEAK.

Unless we could figure out something else, a hunk of the weekend was going to be spent scanning in about 150 pages and then

Our friend Helen, who works in TV/film, suggested a courier company called Wells Cargo (a fun name if you’re from California). I emailed on Saturday morning, and less than five minutes after I’d sent my mail, my mobile phone rang. There was your man asking for some details, and able to have someone collect before 8am on Monday—for delivery to our accountant in Florida on Tuesday. And I can pay them with PayPal.

Very, very impressive. I’ve every expectation their guy will appear on Monday morning; apparently this company’s even in Elana’s rolodex from when she worked in TV production in Los Angeles.

We’re definitely gonna use them again. They so saved my ass I figure a plug is in order. 🙂

Elana and OE spent the night away last night, so Patrick slept on her side of the bed. This morning I happened to wake up before him (not a common occurrance, for sure). It was really cool getting to watch him sleep. I picked up my book and read for a little bit, then heard him start to make a scared, whimpering sound—in his sleep. A dog would have paws jerking in unison, the dream sending him running across a vast green field. Patrick said with his eyes still closed, “Dad, have the tables moved around in the office?”

“No, they’re still where they were,” I answered.

“Good. I want to keep the old table for a really really long time.” His movement settled, and he continued to sleep quietly for another 15 minutes or so before waking up.

Parenting can be so cool sometimes.

This morning I discovered Apple has made a seductive play on having your printer hosted on a Mac and shared on your network. Bonjour for Windows was a simple exercise of installing and then using its wizard on the Vista laptop to find the printer. It was added with just a few clicks. No more messing with finding the .PPD file, drivers, whatever. Pretty slick!

I put a bunch of shows from our MythTV box in Ireland, and want to copy them onto a Series2 TiVo in the US.

I got TiVo Desktop, paid $25 to make it TiVo Desktop Plus, and configured it the way I was told. But no matter what tricks I play, I can’t get it to actually start copying stuff—well, usually. I did “Add Video…” and picked a folder named “tivo-transfer” with two test mpeg show files in it. Once, and I’ve not yet figured out why, the Now Playing list showed “tivo-transfer” (with the description of the first show in that folder) in progress. Hmm. Meanwhile, the non-Plus approach of making it get a file from the “My TiVo Recordings” folder and selecting it on the TiVo itself worked.

For the moment, I just went into the TiVo Desktop -> Preferences and made it use the ‘tivo-transfer’ directory, then on the TiVo selected a bunch. It’s started transferring stuff (though it’d sure be handy if the “Transfer Status” display of TiVo Desktop, which shows files you’re getting from the TiVo, would also show transfers going from a PC back to the TiVo).

I submitted this stuff as a Feedback message on the TiVo website, but I’ve no idea if I’ll actually hear back. In that message I offered to help beta-test any development version they may have going which avoids this.

I’ve also tried the previous 2.6.2 version, but at least under Vista that blew chunks and wasn’t willing to get started.

Also looked at their support page, but no golden answers.

This is awesome: in a fully automated way, convert a Cobol application to its iso-functional Java equivalent.

Hmm, garbage collect my savings account?

You can telnet to 192.168.0.1 to get the HN7000S’s vxWorks command prompt; for username do brighton and password do swordfish. Or telnet to 192.168.0.1 on port 1953 to get the menu interface.

Browsers can use the HN7000S box as a proxy to get traffic accelerated quite a bit by configuring to use 192.168.0.1 port 87 as the HTTP proxy (In the past some things have failed when going through this, though, but we don’t have any notes yet on what those were.
). In the list of exceptions to using the proxy, remember to put 192.168.0.1 itself there, as well as ‘localhost’ and 127.0.0.1, at least. I added our local subnet as well with 10.9.79.0/24 so I can properly visit the various access points, etc.

If SSL traffic is so slow as to be unusable, try configuring your browser to use a proxy for SSL also: host is 69.19.14.10 and port 3128. It’s not necessarily faster under normal circumstances.

Make sure anyone using your connection has DISABLED any operating system updates on their computer. Laptops which download Mac OS X updates, for example, will slam you to exceed the 24-hour download cap and make you suffer for 24 hours at ~30kps cuz of the (un)Fair Access Policy.

To get at the advanced configuration page, point at the URL
http://192.168.0.1/fs/advanced/advanced.html

The status page at
http://192.168.0.1/sys_status/
has a Diagnostics Code value like
0000-0002-6400-0002
You can visit
http://192.168.0.1/cgi/execAdvCom.bin?Command=30&NoAutoRefresh=1&PrintMsg=Diag%20Code%20Analyze
and put in the code from the status page. This will give you an explanation for why each of the particular bits are set to make up that series of numbers, with the values covering the most recent hour, 1 hour later, and 2 hours later.