great eclipse pictures

The longest solar eclipse of the century - The Big Picture - Boston.com

A very useful Firefox plugin

KallOut - Search Faster in Firefox :: Add-ons for Firefox

great pics of Mercery Messenger mission

Mercury and MESSENGER - The Big Picture - Boston.com

nokia n810 gps fix

I've read a lot of negative reviews regarding the inbuilt gps on the n810, and I have to say I agree with most of the criticism. However I found a solution that stabilizes and more importantly, adds a lot of reliability and consistancy to the gps. I installed the program carman, and it comes with it's own control manual entry. Clicking on that brings up the normal gps icon in the tray, as well as a new carman icon. However what I found that was so great about this icon, was it stabilizes the gps, as well as offers it's own gpsd server functionality. So that simplifies matters, a lot. The gpsd app that is in the apt-get tree had a very nifty icon with satalite positions and strength, however it was in no way compatable with the gps inbuilt into the control panel. However, many programs look for gpsd before the native gps service. Basically, you could be running one, but not the other. Needless to say, I spent many minutes standing outside with my unit in my hand waiting for a fix, which was never going to come. But with the carman icon, it offers up fast timely gps information to every single gps app I have going (all of them, right now). Today it was almost completely cloudless, a very beautiful day, and oftentimes inside buildings I was getting a good gps reading, and just stepping outside both gps apps I was using to track instantly got a great fix.

I went ahead and ordered a $45 bluetooth gps dongle that supposedly finds a fix very fast and is better than the inbuilt n810 chip, and I'm looking forward to testing and comparing. However, simply by installing carman I found the n810 built-in gps to be surprisingly functional.

Running 2 gps tracking programs with realtime map information and a last.fm radio player streaming from the dun bluetooth on my cellphone, I had 3 hours of fun laundry/walking around town. Guess if I want to do a 4-5 hour walk I'm going to have to figure out a way to conserve battery life. Can just use sansa for music, only 1 gps app, and like hardly ever use n810, but still having a load of fun with n810 it's a pretty nifty little thingy-bob. 3-4 hours battery life is pretty decent considering. Also you can underclock the cpu to save even more power. In any case, thought I'd do a little write up because I haven't read anywhere about anyone having installed carman and it fixing all their gps woes. To the contrary, mostly seen people discounting the internal gps. I will try to write up a little comparison once my helix bluetooth gps unit arrives.

a windows port of one of my favorite linux utilities

Use this program all the time under the name kdirstat.  I had found other "comparable" windows programs 5 or 6 months ago but it never occured to me to see if my favorite kde utility for this purpose had a windows port.  Am glad I checked, it's not only comparable but it adds very usable features and some visual upgrade too.  That being said I've been a little out of the linux loop for awhile.  But still this was a great surprise today.

One thing I can say which I was surprised was, was it's speed.  Other free windows utilities did something similar but very basic.  And took waaay longer.   Like I found it more worthwild to switch back to other thing I was doing and just forget about it and come back later.

But nope, this program is soo fast.  Much Much Much better than anything else I've seen.  And is exactly like the program I have preferred on Linux.  I guess I really have sold my soul to Microsoft, recommending good ports from Linux to Vista :)  Is least of my worries so :)

Ya but this is better.  It may be in linux port or not now, I don't know but.  In this version you can easily choose any 2 or more local drives, even if 2 of them are smb shares off my "main" computer even after all these months, my old faithful linux with all the diskspace.  It lists those drives as local and the way I finally got those shares set up it really is local.  But this windows version (and hopefully new linux versions) let you just choose them and it puts them all in it's visual representation.  It's better than a pie graph, but it's not a line chart or something.  It really is neat, you should try it if you want to see a visual representation of how big your dirs are compared to the whole mass of the diskspace you scanned, especially compared to other things.  With nice color coding and some shiny effects.  Highly recommend either Linux (kdirstat) or windows (windirstat).  Very useful utility!


WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics

great vista tweak

Well I tried to upgrade to 8 gigs of ram but stuck with 4, unless I get entirely new ram (single channel)...but even with 4 Vista runs pretty smooth!  I was playing with NVtweak and in advanced they have an option to put your windows system into memory instead of running off disk....  All I have to say the difference is instantaneous, and seems much much snappier!  (I have 4 gigs of dual channel corsair ram 2x2 I need to put on Ebay, btw, if anyone wants any).

Also if you have Race Driver Grid: be sure to download the third party launcher, because it lets you run in a window, as well as has options to use all 4 cpu cores instead of the default 1, and also lets you set it to real time priority.  Grid was already by far the best looking game I have, with super fast frame rates, with everything maxed out.  So I can't really tell the difference, but I guess psychologically it matters! :)   Unreal Tourney 3 also another super fast-frame rate game.

end of civilization

Young people prefer the sound of highly compressed MP3s to uncompressed audio, study shows.

I apologize

congratulations, you have won.

you fought off calling me for a

whole year to prove your point.

but i'm tired of shouting out in the night.

my pride is packed away and i

i apologize for being cruel

when i should have been kind.

i'll be right by.

we'll be so happy together tonight.

i apologize for being cruel

when i should have been kind.

i'll be right by.

and we'll be happy together tonight.

you found a garter belt on my nose.

i warned you.

my cyrano similarities

lose touch wehen i drink too much.

bye-bye, i kiss the bottle good-bye, forever.

i know it's made a fool of me,

i'll try to reconcile.

i apologize for being cruel

when i could have been kind.

i'll be right by.

we'll be so happy together tonight.

i apologize!

i apologize for being cruel

when i could have been kind.

i'll be right by.

we'll be so happy together tonight.

i apologize for being cruel

when i could have been kind.

i'll be right by.

and we'll be happy together tonight.

maybe the best book

Crucial Pop: Forgotten Lore

There's other books I'd recommend as highly as this one.  However,
this is really a amazing book and it's sequel offers an ending.

:)