Taking a Break While Computing, Filemenu Tools, Air Hogs and R/C, Spyware

So here we go, a new year is almost here. I'm not much for New Year Resolutions, but I could stand to loose a little weight - especially after all the great foods, desserts, and candies I've eaten this Xmas. Wow. But I figure if I only indulge myself a few times a year - well, what's life without that?

The thing is I don't agonize over it, with me it's not a matter of health, I've just got a few extra pounds here and there. I guess what bugs me the most is other people; especially the rude ones. Since when did it become polite or accepted to go up to people you know and tell them they're fat? I'd have to consider that a fundamental character flaw, and usually a sign of the person's own insecurity and whatnot. Sometimes I think people are getting ruder and less polite.

Ah well. You know, when I was young I could drop weight in no time, if I felt I needed to. But, as I'm sure anyone reading this knows, when you get older it's much harder.

Fortunately I have lots of space to walk and hike in, and I find that with some internet, computer, and design problems and mental blocks can be overcome by simply getting outside and doing something else. With me, it's a sure way to get past pretty much anything along those lines.

And I have this problem a lot. I don't think of myself as an 'artitistc' person, so when I sit down to design a webpage or a CMS design or a graphic or logo for someone; I sometimes have a hard time whipping up a completely new idea. And I'm really aware of trying to make sure the websites I do for people aren't similar to each other, or generically alike. It's good for troubleshooting problems too, nothing like a little fresh perspective. And heck, it sure applies to other problems too, not just computer-related.

So I find that getting out and doing something completely is integral to what I do, and with a house this old there's always something to do in the maintenance and repair side, at the very least. Plus, it's always good to get up and exercise a bit once in a while anyway, for the body as well as the eyes and the mind.

There's times when I find that hours have went by and I haven't moved anything but my two hands.

Occasionally I will set my reminder program (Kana Reminder - http://www.kanasolution.com, nice free program that not only pops up reminds but can run programs on schedule, one-time as well as recurring) to remind me to get up and walk around and do other things, take a rest.




Here's a good time-saver and addition to Windows XP, and one that's not memory-resident (okay, so I have a lot of memory and processor power at present - but who wants twenty different programs running ALL the time when you don't need to?).

FileMenu Tools, which can be found on the website - http://www.lopesoft.com/ This program lets you customize the context menu you get when you right-click a file or folder in Eplorer or a file dialog, etc. You can customize (or delete) context items for filetypes, folders, and devices as well as customize your 'Send To' menu.

Kinda handy, but there are a lot of programs that do that; you may be saying. Like Fast Explorer and Shexview.

The difference is this program can also add it's own built-in and pre-made additional right-click context commands for various programs, folders, etc. The things that MS left out.

You can mix and match too, and even create your own context items.

For example - how many times have you wanted to be able to quickly copy a file path, or a filename, or have a quick find and replace right there on your right-click, or a batch filename renamer, or wanted to delete a locked file, or run a program with parameters, or wanted a military-grade file shredder? More options then I can list here.

You can do all this and more with this program, definitely worth checking out if you're a tweaker or a file system power user. And it gets called only when you right-click, so it's not memory resident.

Great program - FileMenu Tools from http://www.lopesoft.com/ Possibly might work on Vista, but I haven't specifically tested it.




I've always been interested in flying, as you know if you have read this blog before.

For Xmas my wife got me one of those Air Hogs r/c helicopters. You know the ones - very small, hard to destroy. They're what you might consider an entry level to larger r/c models or a way for a person to cheaply learn some of the dynamics of flying. Plus they're great fun, and a good toy for kids and adults. You can't really hurt much with them.

There are a lot of principles of flight involved, even if you can only fly it for five minutes before recharging.

Inside, there seem to be a lot of miniaturized electronics that wouldn't have been possible on a commercial scale a short time ago. Basically everything is on a chip in the tiny helicopter, outside of the receiver LED and the battery, and it's all controlled by IR instead of RF, unusual for remote control devices. Another improved technology. Pretty amazing if you consider it.

My niece's boyfriend got one of these last year, an earlier model. He's a very exuberant guy, very intelligent and interested in a great many things. If he didn't live quite such a long distance away we'd probably be great friends.
Anyway, he too is interested in flying. After playing around with the Air Hog for a bit, he bought himself a medium-sized helicopter (see pic above), r/c of course. It's another incredible piece of electronics, with many more of the same principles of flying a helicopter then the tiny r/c Air Hogs.
He's even added a wireless camera to it (see above), and done some aerial footage with it even. Here's a Photobucket.com folder of images and video from both my tiny Air Hog and his larger helo. http://s53.photobucket.com/albums/g58/lectrichead/Helos/ (It was very windy so he didn't take his helicopter up very far.)

The technology is so impressive and the ideas behind it that the military even has or is experimenting with a backpack version of this with a terrain-following system.

Just like the space program; smaller and cheaper are the words of the day with unmanned units taking some of the place of humans. The possibilities are endless. Though there is no substitute for a real human, especially in space exploration...

I remember as a kid some of our ideas and schemes for adding cameras and video to flying objects, most specifically model rockets. There was a black and white (later color) nosecone that could be added to most standard-sized rocket tubes.

When I say 'we' - I meant my friend Pete. We've been literally friends since we were tiny kids. And both of us have had the same interests - technology, flying, airplanes, computers, science fiction. And that included attaching crap to something we could fly around, even better if it was a camera!

He has his pilot's license now, and we've went flying a number of times. There's nothing like flying in a small plane, versus a large one. And two dudes who have always been interested in flying, riding around in an airplane - nothing better.

I hope someday to be able to afford flying lessons. I'd have to say it is my first and one true love, over all my other interests. But it's a very expensive hobby, both flying in person as well as r/c.





I always figure the customer's always right.

No, wait - that's not true.

I make sure the customer gets what they want, even if I believe they are wrong. But I do gently let them know if I think they're wrong.

Like recently, a customer had a bad spyware problem. Many times with these hardy and tenacious pieces of spyware it may take a few passes, and the newer ones are getting much much worse.

But the person didn't want to wait or take any more time. Someone; friends, family, neighbor, whomever, suggested wiping the whole computer. The computer had no restore partition, so I was forced to start installing Windows XP from scratch and finding the appropriate drivers. Fortunately, in this case; Dell 's website allowed me to put in a number off the computer and find the specific devices that specific computer has, and download the drivers for it.

Dell's not one of my fav companies, that's for sure, but this sure is a nice feature and made the process much easier. Still, it was time-consuming to set everything back up.

And the worse thing is - without finding the initial problem and fixing it, and making sure it wasn't via a website they used, or a piece of software (that they probably will install again), or coming from another computer on their network - it might be all for nothing and the computer might be re-infected tomorrow

In an electronics class I took the teacher, a Mr. Docteur, a wily highly intelligent dude - always stressed that troubleshooting and finding the problem allows you to not only fix it, but prevent the same problem in the future, as well as learn from it.

Starting over, like re-installing Windows from a re-formatted harddrive, is the last resort in any situation. Especially when people aren't likely to keep backups and there may be another easier resolution to the problem.

Anyway, I've always tried to live by the troubleshooting idea rather then the "start from scratch" and I've found that it's always better to go in the direction, and keep the latter for the last resort. And there are plenty of times when "start from scratch" is the only way to do it.

But, as I said - the customer is always right. At least they think so until they lose something important...




Hope everyone reading this has a safe and happy New Year's. Don't drink and drive.

New Monitor, Simple Solutions when Troubleshooting DVD Players and Other Complex Systems, Hiding Your E-mail Address On Your Website, Interesting Website Usage Stats

Argh, been remiss here in posting, way too busy. Hmmm, I feel that I've said this before...

New Monitor

I just acquired a new 22 inch LCD widescreen monitor (the one on the right in the pic above). Very nice unit, large and bright.

But I wasn't supposed to have it until Xmas.

My wife ordered it from Staples and, well, they didn't package it in anything but it's original padded box, with a picture of it on the outside. Word to the wise; make sure it's gift packaged if it doesn't come re-packaged or if you're not sure.

Which meant the UPS guy handed it to me, and well - I knew what I was getting for Xmas at that point.

It's a great monitor, and after some custom resolution settings for my video card (so things aren't stretched - the video driver itself had no setting for this directly, though it's control panel also had a custom resolution setting) I was having a ball. But from looking at other people's stuff too many people have bought widescreen monitors (when their computers didn't come with them) and everything is super-stretched on the screen, but they don't notice it or don't care or can't figure out how to adjust it. Same with TV's...

I have now moved my 19 inch CRT to the side as the second monitor, replacing a 17 inch CRT. The 19 inch CRT looks huge, like a tank compared to a Porsche. And I need to take the base off the CRT to even both of them up vertically (the CRT's base has always been a bit high).

If you haven't tried a dual monitor set up give it a try. And you don't need two video cards either.

In the following pic is a bit of a comparison between the CRT (on the left) and the LCD (on the right). Much better color, much brighter more vibrant pics on the LCD. And this is after twenty minutes of tweaking of the CRT to try and make it comparable to the LCD display.

To be fair though - the trusty old 19 inch CRT spent a good portion of it's life in Korea (where it was made, BTW).

On a side note - the "STICKY" text was something a friend of mine was working on, and made a good comparison for simple colors.

Simple Solutions when Troubleshooting DVD Players, and Other Complex Systems

Sometimes, even in something complex and uber-complicated as computers and electronics; the simplest solution is the answer. And I think that's something a lot of us forget.

A good example.

We have a very nice LG DVD player; it upconverts for our HD TV, has lots of options, and even reads memory cards (which we've never used, like that USB port on our TV).

One day a crossed-out menu item started appearing in the top right corner of the screen. It was very intermittent and sometimes we could watch an entire movie and not see it appear. Other times it showed up all of the time, blinking on and off, popping up and disappearing.

Our first thought was that a button on a remote was being pressed, maybe by a remote buried under a magazine or book (after all, we have a large number of remotes).

Having eliminated that my second thought was a stuck button on the DVD. But it's not that old, and we never use the buttons on top of it. That can't possibly be it, we thought!

But it was the most logical assumption.

I tried a number of things, including cleaning the DVD, different connections (maybe a bad HDMI cable as it seemed to be related to the resolution), etc.

We even called the manufacturer's help line, tried a bunch of things.

Predictably one of the things seemed to work while we were on the phone, we thanked the Indian girl and not more then twenty seconds after hanging up the crossed-out menu item showed up again.

Of course, both my wife and I assumed that that was the end. Throw-away equipment nowadays.

A little further investigation using various menus showed that what seemed to be 'sticking' was something to do with the resolution switching, as previously suspected. While on the set up menu it would cycle through the available resolutions endlessly.

We checked the remote once again - nothing holding the button down, not even pointed at it, I dropped the batteries just to make sure.

Of course, there's a duplicate resolution-switching button on the top. But we had never actually touched it. I fiddled with it, thinking if it was sticking that bouncing it up and down might make it stop or at least point to it being the culprit. It didn't seem to make any difference.

Again - no, it can't be just a bad button, it has to be in the electronics. We started looking around for new DVD players, possibly a Blueray (still expensive!).

But coming from an electronics background - I decided that it was at least worth a try to mess with the button itself, mechanically and electrically. I held out near-zero hope that this was it.

Half an hour later, after disassembling the offending device, I had disconnected the suspect button using a soldering iron and desoldering tool carefully threaded between the electronics.

With the button hanging by one connection I half-assembled the player and gave it a try.

No crossed-out item in the corner. A couple DVD's later and still no problem. I desoldered the last connection on the resolution button, buttoned everything back up and tried yet another DVD. Still no problems.

So now it works fine, sans the resolution-switching button on the top. Not visible as I left actual the plastic cover that was on top of the button inside, and if I wanted to I could get another button to replace it but - again - we never use those buttons.

I'm sure that most people aren't going to have the resources nor the knowledge of soldering that I did in this case.

But it is a good demonstration that sometimes the simplest and most common sense explanation, even in extremely complex systems, shouldn't be discounted like we initially did.

Hiding Your E-mail Address On Your Website

One of the most important things nowadays when setting up and running a website is hiding your e-mail address from spammers, yet still allowing people to contact you. And hiding it both from automated harvesters as well as those in third-world countries who are hired to manually grab e-mail addresses off websites.

The latter is a method where a moderately motivated person can get your e-mail even if it's encrypted with a piece of JavaScript or similar method. Which previously was one of the best ways to hide your e-mail.

So nowadays it's much harder. The best way is to use a form for feedback, I think.

And let's face it - some visitors don't even have e-mail set up on your computers. They use web-based e-mail so when they click that "old-fashioned" e-mail link that normally opens a new e-mail message in your e-mail program - nothing happens or it opens an e-mail program that isn't even set up.

With forms your e-mail never appears anywhere readily accessible, and you can add additional fields, if needed, according to the uses of your website.

Works great, and highly recommended.

But, a real enterprising spammer might look at the source code of your form and get your e-mail off that. Very few of course, but it's still a possibility.

There's ways around this too, using CGI or PHP forms. But again, a quick look through the source code to find the PHP it's calling, and maybe a specialized program, will reveal your e-mail in it also. And again, there's more ways around that, but that's a subject for a different time maybe.

But a real simple way is to use a free form mail service instead of messing with it yourself.

Like this site - Email Me Form. It's easy and free, and works quite well. It also archives every form you get (and also can archive any spammer attacks, or mistakes by dumb users), has CAPTCHA as an option, and best of all even a spammer looking through the source code of the form page won't reveal your e-mail address, because it's not stored there. In fact, it's not stored anywhere on your site and can't be accessed through the emailform site.

The forms are nicely customizable and you don't even need to supply a page for your form if you don't want to - let them do it.

You can see a use of it at my Old Abandoned Buildings of Northern NY website, this one uses the form hosted at my site and processed through the Email Me Form site. Another example is the contact form that can be accessed at the bottom of my HDR (High Dynamic Range) Photo site - with the form hosted directly (a bit simple; this one) on the Email Me Form site and processed through there.

Great site, and if you don't like that one there's many more sites that will allow you to do this for free, or you can similarly keep it on your own site using various pieces of software and yet still hide your address.

Interesting Website Usage Stats

A stat counter is great for both seeing who is visiting your site, as well as targeting traffic via search engines and links.

I use the site StatCounter.com primarily, as they do an excellent job, though there are many nice free and paid services out there, as well as some great stuff you can host directly on your own site to do the same. Some will even show you real-time stats i.e. who's on your site right at that moment.

With this you can track individual IP's, where they are located, how long they stay on each page, what site they were on before your's and what site they go to afterwards, what OS and browser and resolution they are using, what keywords they used to find your site if they found it via a search engine, which search engine they used, the path they took through your site, and analyze keyword and site usage statistics as well as other points of data.

Invaluable for bumping your site up the search engines and tweaking Meta tags and keywords on your site.

Here's some interesting OS, browser, and resolution stats from one of my websites - my Jefferson County History site - during a certain time period. Just a side-note, not sure how visitors to my historical site compare to average visitors elsewhere.

270 54.00% MSIE 7.0 117 23.40% MSIE 6.0 70 14.00% Firefox 3.0.4 13 2.60% Firefox 2.0.0 8 1.60% Safari 1.2 8 1.60% Mozilla 5.0 5 1.00% 4 0.80% Firefox 3.0.3 2 0.40% MSIE 8.0 2 0.40% Chrome 0.2 1 0.20% MSIE 5.5

As you can see the various versions of IE still have the lion's share of visitors. No surprise here. The blank one is likely search spiders.

327 65.40 Windows XP 131 26.20 Windows Vista 16 3.20 Windows 2000 14 2.80 Unknown 8 1.60 Linux 2 0.40 Mac OS X 1 0.20 Windows 2003 1 0.20 Windows NT4.0

Nor surprising, I don't believe. XP continues to dominate even with new computers having Vista installed by default, for the most part.

212 43.89% 1024x768 139 28.78% 1280x1024 70 14.49% Unknown 29 6.00% 800x600 28 5.80% 1152x864 5 1.04% 1600x1200

A good 28 percent are using 1280x1024. Large screen monitors? Widescreen monitors? Do they like it that way or just never changed the default resolution?

	483 Enabled 17 Disabled

This one shows number of people who have JavaScript enabled and disabled. For security reasons some disable it, but so many websites use JavaScript for menus and other interactive pieces. I guess I'm surprised that even this small number of people have it disabled. It's a good example of why you should always provide alternative means of navigating your site.