2007 on The Total Token Vortex

best freeware lists

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 16:17:00 +0000

Here are some sites giving lists of some of the best freeware out there:

http://shellcity.net/ (see Dec.27, 2007 and onwards)
http://techsupportalert.com/issues/al_current.htm

Attention Economy

Sat, 29 Dec 2007 16:15:00 +0000

See these interesting posts:

good calendar maker

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 19:29:00 +0000

http://www.somacon.com/p352.php

Windows STOP messages

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 21:28:00 +0000

I just had Windows reboot out of the blue (no BSOD, just as if I pressed RESET). Looking at the system event log it seems Windows ran into trouble: Event Type: Information Event Source: Save Dump Event Category: None Event ID: 1001 Date: 12/11/2007 Time: 3:19:32 PM User: N/A Computer: SKYNET Description: The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x100000d1 (0x00000000, 0x00000002, 0x00000001, 0xba940dc2). A dump was saved in: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini111207-01.dmp. For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp. A useful website detailing the STOP codes: http://aumha.org/a/stop.htm Also of interest is the KB article on dealing with the minidumps: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/315263

Java links

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 18:07:00 +0000

Java 6

OpenGL in Java

Randy Pausch

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 17:15:00 +0000

Randy Pausch’s inspirational last lecture. Also see website. Randy Pausch is a professor at Carnegie Melon University which was recently diagnosed with pancreatic cancer (operated on, but the cancer returned), and knows he has only a few months to live. What wisdom would you impart to future generations if you were in this position? The lecture’s title is “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams”.

interesting ideas about achievement, success, life

Thu, 27 Sep 2007 16:53:00 +0000

In fact, many of the other posts are quite interesting as well on that blog. Definitely a blog I’ll be keeping an eye on, I find a lot of the author’s observations to be quite penetrating and mirroring my own experience and half-baked thoughts.

autonomy for space robotics

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:34:00 +0000

Just discovered that there is some research on robot automation, the Mars explorer type, but it is happening away from St.George campus. See:

flashing firmware for SonyEricsson Z710i

Mon, 24 Sep 2007 20:29:00 +0000

Turns out that the firmware for the Z710i can be flashed. This for example could alleviate the problem that Fido locks out the ability to use MP3s as ringtones. Even better, it seems the Z710i can be flashed with firmware for W710i, which is basically the same phone, but has nicer flash-based menu system and more advanced “walkman” music player (e.g., ability to fast-forward within a song). Here are some relevant links:

Adobe prevents normal.dot writes in MSOffice

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 13:53:00 +0000

Grrr… I hate applications that self-insert themselves into your tools. It turns out the reason my customizations to MS Word toolbars weren’t sticking was that Word was prevented from saving settings to normal.dot, which in turn was being caused by Adobe. See this link; the fix worked wonderfully.

the water charlatans

Tue, 28 Aug 2007 15:49:00 +0000

This post is a cautionary tale, and a snapshot of all the relevant information I gathered in the process. It so happened that one day I get a phone call from a company “that deals with water quality”, and they claim that Cathy has done a survey with them, and has won some prize worth over $xxx (as a “thank you”). They wanted to know whether they can swing by sometime, drop it off, and do a free water test for us. As Cathy wasn’t home, I couldn’t check with her whether this was legitimate, so I said, what the hey, come on over. I was interested in the water test because I was wondering earlier whether we were suffering from excessive hardness of water here, but that’s another story. 6:30pm, the representative shows up. Sets up in the kitchen a row of plastic drinking cups, as if preparing for an elaborate shell game. Each cup is made to hold water from various sources (distilled, tap, Brita filtered, and various bottled waters in our house). He pulls out an upright binder with what seems like “informational material”. Oh oh, red flags start going off in my head! First test is using a TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) meter. Distilled water obviously gets a very low reading. Tap water is higher. The readings for bottled water shoot up to 265. The “gentleman” claims that this reflects the amount of junk and pollutants in the water. In actuality, this is totally misleading. See here for a full skinny on TDS measurement. It’s a bit of a misnomer, all it really does is detect charged ions in water, most of which are from the (benign, or even beneficial) hard water salts dissolved in the water (Calcium, etc.) The 265 p.p.m. figure for the bottled water was meant to impress and frighten us, but inspecting the label for the bottled waters in fact explicitly states that the expected mineral content in the waters is about 290 p.p.m., so if anything, the TDS reading for these waters was in fact a tad low. I had a pretty strong sinking feeling at this point, that we’ve been conned into a sales pitch. The final touch was when the guy pulled out a precipitator test device for next round of testing. I’ve heard of these being used for scaremongering, and a quick check on the Net (I excused myself to grab my tea from upstairs) revealed to be the case, and also turned up this interesting tidbit (government forbade this particular company to do chlorine testing without getting certified; I presume they were scaring residents with yet more deceptive tests). Anyhow, in short, the company was Glacier Water Treatment Systems of Newmarket, Ontario. They sell water distillers for homes. Links explaining the bogus nature of the precipitator test:

interesting pages

Sun, 26 Aug 2007 05:28:00 +0000

humour: Ze Frank on St.Vallentine’s
rest of Frank’s site is also good (props to mjmcguff for the pointer)
cool online tool for unmangling Dvorak typing on QWERTY keyboard (handy if stuck at a QWERTY keyboard)
Microsoft guidelines on designing icons
an interesting post that couples AutoHotKey with Windows keyboard layout engine
(all?) books by Peter McWilliams; interesting and refreshing viewpoint on many things in life
Bradicon!, a cool tool where you upload a picture and it online generates an icon from it

modifying the 'look-in' buttons in standard file dialog

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 03:34:00 +0000

Standard file dialogs under Windows (2000 and higher?) have a set of five big buttons down the left side which you can click to be directly taken to the corresponding directories. It’s called the “Places bar”, and the buttons might be called “look-in” buttons. I went in search of how to modify them, as the default set was uterly useless to me. Here are interesting things I found:

notes: interesting Gothic III threads

Wed, 01 Aug 2007 12:55:00 +0000

General computer & Gothic 3 specific improvements (no fixes!)
INI Tweaks: How to make G3 look and perform better!
Improved performance tweaks
changing in-game font (helps some people with performance)
fire sound fix (see first post)

notes: Martin's sugs/research on startups

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 20:38:00 +0000

useful: CS course “Business of Software”: CSC2527F M6-8, M8
useful: http://paulgraham.com/
good read: Hackers and Painters, by same
good read (slides): The Long Tail, by Chris Anderson

hard water woes

Mon, 30 Jul 2007 18:17:00 +0000

I’ve been having issues from the start with my shaving brush quickly becoming hydro-phobic after one or two shaves. I suspect one of the main culprits is hard water, although apparently Markham/Toronto has decent water. Here is a site that gives the water hardness of various towns around the GTA: http://www.justwater.ca/town.html Also of interest is a forum post about “Calgon”, and water softener agents in general: http://www.mothering.com/discussions/showthread.php?t=68131 Here is the particularly interesting bit of the thread:

DemoCamp

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:27:00 +0000

I should go to one of these… DemoCamp Interesting blog post on the topic: post In particular, it mentions a thread being used to put together a “subway map” of tech companies in Toronto: thread

Sacha Chua

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:23:00 +0000

I didn’t realize that Sacha Chua has come to UofT, and is currently on the verge of completing her Master’s! Her blog is here: http://sachachua.com/notebook/wiki/today.php It’s been a while. Last time I exchanged emails with her is when she maintained the Emacs planner mode, which I used at the time.

link collection: posture

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:21:00 +0000

http://www.wikihow.com/Improve-Your-Posture http://www.bodymindandmodem.com/Basics/posture.html

interesting blog: academic productivity

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:09:00 +0000

http://www.academicproductivity.com/blog/

interesting series: Pmarca guide to startups

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 18:54:00 +0000

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid_1.html http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid_2.html http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid_3.html http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid_4.html http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/the_pmarca_guid_5.html

interesting blog: pmarca

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 18:52:00 +0000

http://blog.pmarca.com/ A blog by Marc Andreessen, of Netscape fame.