Upon thy belly shalt thou go….
Tabbloid (free service from HP) has very nice output and is simple to use.
Go to http://www.tabbloid.com/
Add your feed links, and enter your delivery options, including your email address. When your first issue is sent, there’ll be a link in the email for you to edit your settings.
“My Outsourced Life” (A.J. Jacobs, for Esquire) is still one of the funniest articles I’ve ever read. Go ahead; it’s a great read.
If you don’t have time to read it, you could have a “virtual assistant” summarize it for you. TimeSvr has “virtual assistants” for the low, low price of $69/month. For 30 days, that’s only $2.30/day for: “Unlimited basic Tasks on your behalf. No limit on phone calls, reminders, reservations, bookings. Up to 8 hours a month for complex time consuming tasks(long web searches, transcribing, etc.).” They’ll manage your contacts and calendar.
The first thing I’d do is schedule a daily wake-up call. Who wants to hear an alarm, when you could have some foreign college girl wake you up?
The second thing I’d do is offload my RSS aggregation duties. I have a number of websites I like to check, and I just hate poking through them. Copy the content into a well-formatted PDF and email it to me every morning. RSS is such a great idea, but all the aggregators suck. Honestly, can’t you just specify content to automatically be inserted into a paper/newsletter format? XeTeX plug.
That includes my email. The 4-hour-a-week guy who makes a living out of not actually doing anything has a guide for outsourcing your inbox.
That also includes my finances. List the prior day’s checking account activity. Stock prices. Weather forecast. Current house price on zillow.com. A daily newspaper of things relevant to me (and mostly only me). [Yahoo! Pipes can do much of this, but I'd prefer better formatting, and there are some things it can't do.]
The third thing I’d do (“up to 8 hours of time-consuming tasks”) is to get a monthly meal plan amenable to all parties familia. Aldi (I love Aldi’s!) has a great starter meal planner (the chicken corn tacos rock). The first month, I think, would pay for itself.
I might try it for one month….
ReconnAct has been updated, and now “adds support for all Windows client and server operating systems from Windows XP/2003 and up.” ReconnAct allows you to script events on remote desktop logon, disconnect, and reconnect, which is handy for things like remapping printers when a user reconnects to a session from a different location.
I’m not sure why, but Eventum doesn’t get much word of mouth. Eventum was developed by and is used by MySQL [now part of Sun] for their helpdesk needs. It’s simple to install, even if you need to patch it to use LDAP authentication. I have no gripes with it.
Dave’s famous recipe!
Following up on a previous discussion, I’ve gotten rid of cable TV. Installed an antenna up in the attic, ordered my $40/each coupon for two digital converters (at $60 per retail), and got Charter to cut the rate of my cable Internet to $30/month for six months, at which point they’ll offer it to me again, or I’ll go with DSL.
Getting rid of cable TV was one of the best moves ever. The local PBS station has 4 channels, and one of them is 24-hour kids’ programming. Channel 5 has a 24-hour weather channel. “Lost” will start up soon. I don’t miss one single damned thing on cable.
I intended to supplement my viewing with Blockbuster’s online program, paying $20/month for unlimited rentals, with three out at a time. That’s still $240/year. Cancelled Blockbuster online, and now we use Redbox. Just go to the website, pick a location and a movie, and pay $1 to reserve it. Walk in (McDonald’s), touch the “Online Pickup” button on the touchscreen, run your credit card through, and it chucks it out. It’s a great way to keep up with current movies, but you can’t, say, rent the entire “Nip/Tuck” series as you could with Blockbuster.
The flaw in the RedBox setup is that there’s only one touchscreen on the red box, so you may have to wait in line behind some insufferable asshats who are reading the synopsis of each movie. There should be TWO screens on the red boxes — one solely for receiving the movie, and one for the asshats to stand and browse and order.
Old setup was $140/month for cable+Internet, and $20/month for Blockbuster online. $160/month.
New setup is $30/month for Internet, plus $8/month for two rentals a week at RedBox. $38/month.
Happy about it, completely (except for the asshats).
I remember in the first grade in Mrs. Perkins’ class my eyeball had been getting looser and looser forever it seemed. It was time for recess and I opened a door too fast and it knocked my barely hanging-on eyeball out. Needless to say that night I put my eyeball under my pillow and the next morning there was a $5 bill under my pillow! My new eyeball grew in, and I spent the $5 playing 20 games of Pac-Man at the pizza place by the church. But looking back, I don’t know — is there really an Eyeball Fairy, or is it just some trick that parents play on their kids? I guess I’ll never know.
It’s amazing what pops up when you search for “nasal drain.”
Never touch, smell or buy cat litter again
The Problem
Multimedia performance over RDP on WAN links is suboptimal. Users will complain of the painfully slow rendering of Flash-enabled websites. Internet Explorer will block, so that you can’t scroll the browser window while Flash images are being rendered.
If you’re the Fed and can print your own money, Citrix’s Speedscreen Multimedia Acceleration can help.
Provision Networks, owned by Quest, has an RDP optimization pack forthcoming.
Microsoft acquired Calista Technologies in January ‘08. Calista’s technology looks impressive and should dramatically improve multimedia performance. With Virtualization all the rage these days, if you can’t display a training video or browse websites, it’s pretty useless, whether you’re using Terminal Services or just XP/Vista via VDI. I myself prefer Terminal Services with Softgrid/App-V, which abstracts everything.
Citrix and Provision Networks price their products like this is 1998, instead of 2008 — they’re priced way out of their range.
Having the Calista technology delivered by Microsoft is what’s preferred, but there are no public details or roadmap.
Cheap Solution
So, the cheap, sure-fire way to improve browser performance for Flash-enabled websites is [as many individual web browsers have done]: just block Flash. It’s all crap anyway. Annoying. Zero-content. Distracting. Even if they’re on business-related websites, they’re mostly useless.
Set your browsers to use a Squid cache, as a general rule.
Then use AdZapper with Squid, to block egregious ads, including Flash. When a .swf file matches a given regex, a blank .swf is substituted for it, showing just a white box. AdZapper is ridiculously easy to install, being a Perl script with a few content items (fake images, Flash, mp3).
Then, if you’re using Internet Explorer, load IE7Pro to block the remainders and let the user selectively enable them. Firefox users can use FlashBlock.
This solution is quick and cheap.
I saw in Popular Science today that someone (Logitech or Kensington?) has a wireless keyboard with a battery life of three years. Pretty good. And then I thought, why not just use the energy of the person pressing the keys — I’d think there’s enough force applied that it could keep a battery charged for the short bursts of transmissions. Too, why not set a mouse on rollers and use the energy of moving the mouse around? Looks like someone already thought of the mouse.
I’m 35 and part of “Generation X” — the group of something-somethings who weren’t supposed to have any ambition other than paying for the Social Security and debt of the Selfish Generation.
The current generation, I dub “Generation Nod.” They are forever looking down. At the phones. Texting. Playing portable games. They never look up. An enterprising sociopath could rob an entire generation by just clubbing them — they’d never see it coming.
Choco 2.0 is out. Open-source constraint satisfaction, written in Java, and business-friendly BSD-licensed.
It’s the Holy Grail of computing.
MsRdpClient.AdvancedSettings2.BitmapCacheSize = 48000
MsRdpClient.AdvancedSettings2.BitmapVirtualCacheSize = 48
Might as well use the cache — that’s what it’s there for. Like Vista’s Superfetch, or XP’s prefetch, or precompiling JSPs, or what have you.
For example, to load up your squid http proxy cache, just run:
wget -r -nd -H –delete-after http://your.portal.company.local/
or
wget -r -nd -H –delete-after -i some_file_with_URLs.html
wget’s –no-cache will force the proxy to download fresh copies, too. Try loading popular pages.
Just saw a Coke commercial that said if I have had a Coke within the last 80 years (which I have), then I’ve had a hand in making every Olympic dream come true. I’m going to add that to my resume.
My uncle taught me how to play chess when I was 5 or 6, but I didn’t stick with it and only played occasionally in the 30 years since. My neighbor got me interested in chess again two or three months ago, so I picked up a copy of Chessmaster and sat up playing quick 10 minutes per side games against the computer.
So my neighbor and two of his brothers and I drove from St. Louis over to Kansas City to play in the KC Open ‘08 at the Kansas City Chess Club. I was afraid of being pumelled, but if I waited until I was comfortable it’d probably be another 30 years. I wanted to see how I’d compete, given I was more or less at the same skill level I’d have been at at 6, if I’d have hunkered down.
Didn’t do too bad, and had a grand time. I thought it would be a complete waste of time to spend six hours on a single chess game (my longest only took three hours); six hours is four full-length movies, or one or two good books. A decent nap, too. Contrary to my expectations, my three-hour game was by far the funnest; it was actually enjoyable. It was the only game I lost, but I reviewed and caught my error and promise to never pick capture an unpassed pawn over a passed pawn.
Hung out at the Argosy Casino afterwards Saturday night and spent exactly $20 on beer and quarter slots. Went back to the hotel and tossed and turned. Woke up, ironed my clothes, and went to the lobby for a ‘continental breakfast’ (“How can we feed an entire building for $15?”). Came back to my room, opened the door, and was greeted by a pretty big spider sitting on the ironing board.
Played two games Saturday and two Sunday. Won 3, lost 1. USCF 1421, provisional. Hope to do better with some more study and lot more sleep next time.
The Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth’s Spreadsheet Engineering Research Project publishes some interesting research on errors in spreadsheets, including causes and financial impact (“Among the remaining 70 confirmed errors, the largest error was $100 million; however, 9 of the 25 spreadsheets tested had no errors at all.”). Collection of stories.
Apparently, it’s a myth that “[t]he fluid from the resulting [poison ivy] blisters [spreads] poison ivy to others.” All the same, please don’t get your poison ivy blister juice on me.
Sick of cable. Sick of paying for cable. Sick of the worthless shows on cable. Sick of entire swaths of channels on cable. Blockbuster’s deal is fine — $20/month for 3 movies out at a time. For regular TV, the only shows worth watching are House, Lost, and Family Guy, and I’m going to get them over the air. I have to switch my Internet access to AT&T DSL first. Goodbye, cable!
Now, per month: $100 for cable. $40 month for cable Internet. $20 month for Blockbuster. ($160/month)
Later, per month: $0 for TV, $25 for AT&T DSL. $20 for Blockbuster. ($45/month)
Difference: $115/month. $1380/year. After-tax money, obviously.
