Tweaking Vista, TV Converter Box Program, Bricked WT54G, Minifox for Firefox

Tweaking Vista

Vista. Yea, you've all heard of the problems or more then likely ran into them yourself if you got it on a new computer system or installed it.

I've been helping people with it, usually to get rid of it in most cases or live with it and learn it in others. But really I haven't had the opportunity to sit down with it and figure the in's and out's of it, on a deeper level.

My new laptop came with it. Of course, my first thought was to dump Vista and install XP. I'd dealt with so many headaches concerning Vista, and read about many more.

Well, no, I guess my first thought wasn't exactly to dump Vista - my first thought was to dump the incredibly slow and resource-munching Norton. I did that; which is pretty much mandatory with me. Norton, in any of it's present forms is a hulk of bloatware. It does it's job, especially for those who really need it, but there's many better alternatives.

So after that I set out to really get into the 'innards' of Vista and see if I could make it usable for a super power user like me, and maybe go a bit further for some of my customers then just making sure they know how to use it and turn off the standard crap that they don't need and slugs everything down.

After a week of tinkering I've sped Vista up tremendously; I've gotten rid of the idiotic pop-up messages that ask you questions all the time (like from the "User Account Control" [first thing I disabled] and the built-in firewall), turned off the useless sidebar (installed Rocketdock instead) and hungry real-time indexing, unselected some start up services that were totally unnecessary, put on a compatible firewall and anti-virus, and am delving into the other services that can be disabled. Black Viper, who you'll know if if you're a tech or a tweaking junkie, has some great stuff out. Absolutely required reading.

I eventually partitioned the harddrive and stuck XP on another partition, then repaired the freaky boot stuff that Vista uses (and the XP boot loader destroyed) as well as the MBR. The whole thing took a couple hours of playing around, though it's not that complicated once you use some of the various software made to make it easier. I wanted to figure it out myself though.

Now I have XP on it also, with a nice menu for dual-booting. Maybe Linux next.

But you know what? With the tweaks and such I don't mind Vista. It's not great, but it's not real bad.

There's a bunch of stuff it won't run, especially some of the higher level stuff. Things that you guys who maybe stick to using browsers and e-mail and Office might not run into. But I bet sometime you'll find something it won't run, at least until software is updated from each manufacturer/programming house.

Even with the tweaks the normal use of the GUI interface is slightly slower then XP on the same machine. Aero may be the culprit, but it's too damned pretty to get rid of (at least until I get sick of it - and then likely I'll turn off themes altogether; a great savings in speed and resources). And some programs seem to run slower, especially their interfaces which, again; may have something to do with the Aero theme.

On the other hand some things blaze while they go somewhat slower on XP. Math-oriented, those with high levels of processing for example. Celestia is a good demo - the 64 bit architecture of the machine as well as Vista makes the smooth rendering even smoother on this machine.

So, I plan on keeping it on my laptop - running alongside XP, but more then likely the primary OS on that particular computer. Why, oh why, did MS make such a crappy system out of the box with so many nonsense and wasteful and plain idiotic parts that could; easily be turned off to make it run better and easier and more user friendly.

My conclusions are fairly simple.

It's a crappy operating system in it's stock form. For those who don't do a whole lot with their computers they may not notice it much, or it may be a minor annoyance. More then likely a good percentage will really not want to switch at this point or may want to go back to XP (like so many already have and will continue to for awhile).

If you're into tweaking or have someone like me to do it for you; Vista can be hyped up, streamlined, and made much much more usable and faster. You really won't mind it as long as your favorite programs run on it in that case. Otherwise, avoid it for now.

TV Converter Box Program

We don't live too far from a good-sized city. Unfortunately the area is serviced by a somewhat disreputable and money-hungry conglomerate. You've probably heard of them if you live in this part of the country, and if you have you've probably heard the same problems with them.

We've only about six hundred feet from a cable line but the company refuses to run it to us. Scratch that - they'd run it for us; for thousands and thousands of dollars. We've tried for years to get them to.

On an earlier blog entry you'll see the set up I put into place using two of my hacked routers to span the distance between a neighbor and us, so as to allow us to share his broadband. But after awhile, though we had the system in place, we lost the interest in giving the money-grubbers a cent of our money - either for Internet or TV.

So we get our TV off the satellite (DishNetwork) which works tremendously well and has been digital for years. HD channels are also available but we've never gotten around to go with it as it costs a bit more.

But for local channels we need to receive them off-the-air. Our TV doesn't have an HD converter box nor integral tuner for it, even though it's compatible, and our local stations are simulcasting in both analog and HD right now, and have been for quite some time.

As most of you probably know eventually those receiving over-the-air broadcasts will have to be receiving it in HD as the analog signals will end next year.

What a pisser, huh? We have all this high quality TV equipment with a high quality digital signal but to receive a couple local channels we have to get them in a crappy analog signal, and will be out in the cold next year when they stop broadcasting in analog.

Like many areas, our local TV stations aren't carried by the satellite company as yet, otherwise it wouldn't be a problem.

So at midnight on January 1st I logged onto The Government's TV Converter Program Website and applied for a couple vouchers for converters boxes. Yes, they turned the site on at exactly midnight ;)

Unfortunately it seems that the general idea is for the government to supply these vouchers for the cheaper or moderately cheap boxes. In other words most will only take the digital HD signal and down-convert them to analog - at least it's looking that way.

What we want is a converter that takes the digital HD signal and outputs it into an equally good signal via any number of ways so that our TV can access that high quality signal. We'll have to wait and see what the boxes will really be capable of doing. My guess is they will at least have RCA cables and maybe S-video; better then analog.

This whole process though... Sure, the analog range is kinda splotchy and wasteful because our transmitters are much more precise now then when TV first went on the air. And the bandwidth being wasted can be used for bigger and better things. But I can't help but wonder about this whole thing. The explanations the FCC gives, well, I think a group of politicians are getting their hands royally greased in this whole deal by certain large manufacturers and services, while we; the taxpayer, take up the slack by helping to provide the vouchers and paying for converters our of our own pockets as a stopgap measure for those who receive off-the-air signals. What a boondoggle.

Bricked WT54G.

Ugh, out of the blue my WT54G V5 bricked on me. I'm going to try all the usual methods first, but I'm afraid that I am going to have to take it apart and do a manual restart. Great. Risky.

My WR54G V3 is still running strong on the Linux DD-WRT software (though I was writing a configuration and accidentally turned it off before it was finished. A simple reset fixed it, no problem.). But the non-Linux version seems to be pretty flaky on the V5, squished onto the smaller space as it is too.

Minifox for Firefox

For those who like to tweak Firefox and want as much screen real estate as possible check out the Minifox extension. It squeezes everything down, gaining you a few lines of space in your browser window, There's also a version for Thunderbird, though I haven't tried the Thunderbird one as yet.

Death Threats, The Gran Paradiso Firefox and Vista and Human Nature, Web 2.0 and My Concession - Rounded Corners

Death Threat

Hmmmm, this is a first for me. Yea, I've had people threaten me before. Both online and off. Yea, maybe some has said they'd kill me once or twice, but that's just people being dumb and usually isn't serious. But I've never had anyone e-mail me telling me that a friend hired someone to kill me, over some un-named offense I did to them.

Sure, it's spam or crap or something (though I didn't find any references to it anywhere as yet), probably fishing for people who reply (irately) so they can harvest the valid e-mail addresses.

But it still makes you stop and think, in general. Is there anyone in your life, present or past, who would actually pay someone to have you killed?

Nah, I don't think so. Me neither.

There's been a few fanatical religious nuts over the years that I've pissed off - those people are whackos. A few really bad fights, some physical (though I gave up that idiocy long, long ago when I was but a youn'in). And lots of people on the Internet who I've royally pissed off (usually people who don't realize the difference between real life and the Internet). But nothing anyone would hire someone to kill me for.

It would be nice to think that maybe I'm important enough, or pissed someone off enough, for someone to maybe hire someone else to kill me. Heh heh.

I sent it along to the abuse resolution of the e-mail service it came from, examined the header info for anything (not relayed), and put it out of my mind. Doesn't seem important enough to call the cops or FBI over. Though I do have my personal 'abuse resolution' method close at hand...

Adding Stuff to Blogger

Anyway...

Blogger.com is great. Sure; there's a lot of free blog sites, free webspace you can install your own blog software on, etc. But Blogger is probably the most popular and there's so many options and customizability to it that it's hard to beat. If you install your own blog software then you have to maintain it, add plugins yourself, submit it to search engines, etc. Other services might not be as popular and have less features.

I wanted to add a custom random quote to this blog (see above). I couldn't find a free addon or plugin that served up quotes in quite the right way to fit what I wanted. For example - no limit to the number of quotes I wanted to add, no ads or extraneous stuff like graphics. So I used a little script that I had that I had previously done a little mod to for using on local webboards. (Interesting side note - it's a little PHP script that converts text to graphics. Good for circumventing the stripping of more advanced HTML code when posting on a webboard. Makes you wonder what an enterprising hacker could do with the same method.)

There's any number of ways to add a script fragment to Blogger. Either use the layout editing function and add some HTML code or to add it directly into the template (which I settled on because I liked it better visually).

Works well, and it serves up a random quote every time a visitor accesses the blog or an entry on my blog (try reloading and you'll see).

Blogger's great, and gotta thank them and Google for providing this for free. And while I'm at it I'll thank Wikipedia - while there's some issues there it's still a tremendous resource.

Gran Paradiso, Vista, and Humankind

Trying the newest Firefox, version 3 Alpha Gran Paradiso (named after a group of mountains in Italy). Looks about the same visually, so far not seeing much in the way of speed increases in the faster rendering engine. And iffy on whether it's improving the memory leak problems. But I just started trying it, so I can't give you a real review as yet...

Firefox - a great idea. Make something fast, compliant with WC3 standards, open source (an amazing idea), customizable as hell, and let it compete with Microsoft's tired Internet Explorer. Netscape and Opera just never got the market share that Firefox is getting, for whatever reason; neither did the original Mozilla suite.

But unfortunately, as happens with so many human innovations, great ideas get out of whack.

Firefox has been heading toward the inevitable bloated, slow, leaky application. Same with Thunderbird.

They're hard to beat, though. But some people see problems right now. Though I think some of the memory leakage problems (at least from my testing) seem to be from bad addons (extensions for you old-school Firefox users, of course) or interactions between okay addons and Firefox or with other addons.

But it's bloating, and there's alternatives based on the same rendering engines. Like K-Meleon (somewhat scaled down, faster, and a more tweaker-oriented version).

This is a direct parallel with the Windows platforms and it's development over the years.

Someone had a great idea for a GUI operating system, and someone else took it (stole it some would say - I'll leave that discussion to others) and improved greatly on it. Then turned around and made it a bloated, skewed, generally messed it up..., uhm, mess..

We, as human beings, tend to take great ideas and improve on them, then at some point screw them up.

But going back to the original idea of someone taking someone else's good idea and improving on it - who's the biggest innovator? The guy who has the initial good idea but can't quite implement/distribute/boil it down/make it come together in the best way, or the guy who takes that person's great idea and makes it workable and practical? I don't know, probably both.

Personally, I've rarely been the original innovator of ideas; but I'm damn good at taking a good idea and making it better and improving on it. Usually in my case I then hand it off to someone else and they sin turn crew it up.

At some point Vista is going to be fixed and supported and accepted. But right now there's a lot of negativity. Could Firefox go this way for new versions?

I remember when Windows XP came out, some of the same concerns about it were voiced by experts and normal users alike that are being put out for Vista, but on a much smaller scale. Now XP is a very stable operating systems and well-supported, for the most part. Vista's getting there, yet with some major problems along the way and issues to resolve.

I still don't have one computer system in my home office with it installed and, for the most part, I'm still recommending customers stick with XP unless they are buying a new computer (and even then in some cases not...).

I certainly didn't wait impatiently for Vista like I did with XP.

Yea, maybe I'm kinda a geek but when your field of work is computers something like the release of XP tends to make a lot of changes in how things work in that particular field.

And, in an only-slightly related note and fairly tangential note- I've noticed that many of the ones who call me a geek are usually the very ones who can barely get away from their computers long enough to work or sleep because they have to get back on the local webboard to create gossip/read gossip, or whatever. Fill in the blank - you know the kind of people. People living in glass houses, etc.

I try to be a fairly well-rounded person with many, many interests. Usually the ones who tend to throw out the term "geek" are a "geek" themselves, maybe not in computers but in some narrow band of interest. Ah, human nature again.

Fog

A quick shot with the Canon. My first couple shots came out a weird textured pic, because the fog was so dense the flash reflected off them. I didn't want to turn off the flash completely so I used the option to back it down a percentage - another nice feature.

Web 2.0 and My Concession - Rounded Corners

Argh. The whole Web 2.0 concept. It's basically a name for some Internet-related ideas that have been evolving for many years (many of the basic ideas of which have been around since the beginning). Many of the so-called concepts behind it have been things that a lot of us have been trying to do for years. For example - making websites less static and more interactive with the visitor.

I think a good symbol for naming something that's just an natural evolution - is the Web 2.0 logo creator. This started out as a joke and a spoof of the whole thought behind Web 2.0, only to get used by a large number of people who actually are putting these logos on their websites (not that there's anything wrong with how they look).

Funny, and again - goes back to human nature... We're such strange and funny little pieces of meat, aren't we?

Back to the point of my posting - my newest little concession to the whole Web 2.0 idea is on my Old Abandoned Buildings of Northern New York site. I converted all of the picture thumbnails from square thumbnailed pics to ones with rounded corners and drop-shadows. Looks nice, no matter what you call it.