Category: Computers, Internet & Technology

Taking steps to squash daylight-saving bug

For three weeks in March and April, Microsoft Corp. warns that users of its calendar programs “should view any appointments … as suspect until they communicate with all meeting invitees.”

Wow, that’s sort of jarring–is something treacherous afoot?

Actually, it’s a potential problem in any software that was programmed before a 2005 law decreed that daylight-saving time would start three weeks earlier and end one week later, beginning this year. Congress decided that more early-evening daylight would translate into energy savings.

Software created before 2005 is set to automatically advance its timekeeping by one hour on the first Sunday in April, not the second Sunday in March. That’s March 11 this year.

Chicago Tribune

Microsoft’s DST Help.

Techie stuff

Since January 8th NewMexiKen has spent more than 30 hours on my cell phone (my only phone).

Also, some may remember that I cut the cable cord a year ago. It’s still cut. I get along amazingly well on just the HD signals from the local network affiliates free with a 99¢ antenna. (It’s easy when you can see their towers from your TV.)

Eager to cut the Comcast cord entirely, I’m wondering if anyone has any experience with Verizon Broadband Wireless.

My iMac was a year old January 30. I love Macs more all the time but I am considering converting back to just a laptop (MacBook Pro). Is anyone interested in a year-old iMac (Intel Core Duo) with 1GB RAM, 250 GB HD, and 20-inch screen? It works with Windows. I’d sell it newly reformatted, just as if it came out of the box, which it would, because I have the box.

This information neither is, nor should be construed, as an offer, or a solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell. Just thinking.

Credit where credit is due

Took my Verizon Motorola cell phone to a Verizon store today. The connection for the charger had failed and I couldn’t get the battery to charge, wiggle the connector as I might (and I tried four different chargers). It was irksome because I am just seven weeks from a new free phone.

So I was pleasantly surprised when they replaced my 20-month-old phone with a nice new phone, albeit a refurb. No charge. Didn’t want me to have to buy a phone now and miss out on my freebie, she said.

Thanks Verizon. I guess Verizon never does stop working for us.

(Lost my ringtones, though.)

iPhone

With a few finger taps, Jobs demonstrated how to pull up a Google Maps site and find the closest Starbucks to San Francisco’s Moscone Center, where Macworld is held. He then prank-called the cafe and ordered 4,000 lattes to go before quickly hanging up.

Jobs demonstrated the iPhone’s music capabilities by playing Lovely Rita, Meter Maid, from the Beatles’ Sergeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band. The audience cheered, spurred by speculation that an announcement was imminent about a deal to sell Beatles songs on iTunes. But there was no such announcement, and Beatles songs still cannot be legally downloaded.

The New York Times

Apple stock rose 8% Tuesday.

A guide for switching to a Mac

NewMexiKen was frustrated at small things the first several weeks last winter when I switched to Mac. This would have been useful then. Maybe it can help some of you that have taken the plunge, or want to.

When I bought my first Mac a few short months ago, it took a while to figure out how to do all the stuff I already knew how to do on my PC. While it’s my job to spend time figuring that sort of thing out, there’s no need for you to waste your precious time figuring out the minutia of a new operating system. To ease this transition for all of the new Mac owners out there, I’ve put together a quick guide for Mac newbies making the big switch.

What follows is a round-up of everything that stuck out to me when I made the move to my first Mac. I’m still a dual-OS fellow, but after I’ve figured out the ins and outs of my Mac, it’s by far the place I find easiest to get things done.

A guide for switching to a Mac – Lifehacker

A reminder

“Never respond to or click a link within any unsolicited email message from a financial institution — even your own — no matter how official it looks. …” Walt Mossberg

What Mossberg is advising is, that if it appears your bank has sent you an email and provides a link, DO NOT CLICK ON THAT LINK. It may be a fraud and you could be clicking on a link that takes you to a site that looks just like your financial institution but is not — and you will be giving away your ID and password.

If your financial institution notifies you about something, access the information directly from a web browser, not through the email link.

Another Google feature

If you type the name of a current film into the Google search box, it will return, for example, as the top item:

Google Movie Link

The above is an image. Click on it to see the real thing. You can follow links to the trailer, reviews, and enter your zip code for show times near you.

How did we live before the internets?

If you’d bought $10 million worth of Google shares when they became available in 2004 — and kept them — you’d have $56.5 million in Google stock today.

Vista Wins on Looks. As for Lacks…

David Pogue looks at Vista. A few key points.

Windows Vista is beautiful. Microsoft has never taken elegance so seriously before.

If the description so far makes Vista sound a lot like the Macintosh, well, you’re right. You get the feeling that Microsoft’s managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, “Copy that.”

The visual and feature upgrades are nice, but for Microsoft, security was an even more important goal.

As a result, Vista has something of a multiple-personality disorder. Links for common tasks sometimes appear at the left side of a window, sometimes the right and sometimes across the top. In wizards (step-by-step “interview” screens), the Back button is sometimes at the lower-left corner of the dialog box, sometimes at the upper-left. Microsoft has hidden the traditional menu bar in some programs (you can summon it by tapping the Alt key), but not in others.

Pretty much precisely what NewMexiKen has noticed in my limited use of Vista (mostly on a Mac).

Google’s Hidden Features

Google is a great search engine, but it’s also more than that. Google has tons of hidden features, some of which are quite fun and most of which are extremely useful— if you know about them. How do you discover all these hidden features within the Google site? Read on to learn more.

Google Is a Calculator
Google Knows Mathematical Constants
Google Converts Units of Measure
Google Is a Dictionary
Google Is a Glossary
Google Lists All the Facts
Google Displays Weather Reports
Google Knows Current Airport Conditions
Google Tracks Flight Status
Google Tracks Packages
Google Is a Giant Phone Directory
Google Knows Area Codes
Google Has Movie Information
Google Loves Music
Google Knows the Answer to the Ultimate Question

Exploring Google’s Hidden Features

Girl Geek

Its the birthday of one of the people who helped invent the modern computer: Grace Hopper, born in New York City [one hundred years ago today]. She began tinkering around with machines when she was seven years old, dismantling several alarm clocks around the house to see how they worked. She studied math and physics in college, and eventually got a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale.

Then World War II broke out, and Hopper wanted to serve her country. Her father had been an admiral in the Navy, so she applied to a division of the Navy called WAVES, which stood for Women Accepted for Voluntary Emergency Service. They turned her down at first[;] they said she was too old at 35, and that she didn’t weigh enough, at 105 pounds. But she wouldn’t give up, and they eventually accepted her. With her math skills, she was assigned to work on a machine that might help calculate the trajectory of bombs and rockets.

Hopper learned how to program that early computing machine, and wrote the first instruction manual for its use. And she went on to help write an early computer language known as COBOL — “Common Business-Oriented Language.” She remained in the Navy, and eventually she became the first woman ever promoted to rear admiral.

The Writers Almanac from American Public Media

DIY Photo Books

Walt and Katie take a look at software for making photo books. Key finding:

In our test, MyPublisher, which runs on Mac and Windows operating systems, reigned supreme, though Apple wasn’t far behind. MyPublisher offers three book sizes, three cover materials, two ways to display a cover photo, an intuitive assembling software program and elegant layouts. Though Apple’s iPhoto books were a pleasure to make and produced some of the most artistically appealing books with 19 optional themes, iPhoto runs only on Macs, leaving out most computer users. And it doesn’t offer as much overall variety as MyPublisher.

Kodak’s books cost the same or more than those from MyPublisher and Apple, yet stood out as the most difficult to assemble and the least attractive. And because Kodak EasyShare Gallery’s book-making software lives online, it’s slower.

Did You Know This?

Send a text message to 46645 (that’s “Google”; leave off the last E for efficiency). In the body of the message, type what you’re looking for, like “Roger McBride 10025” or “chiropractor dallas tx.” Seconds later, you get a return message from Google, complete with the name, address, and phone number.

Google’s 46645 text-messaging service can fetch much more than phone numbers. It can also send you the weather report (in the body, type, for example, “weather sacramento”), stock quotes (“amzn”), where a movie is showing nearby (type “flushed away 44120”), what a word means (“define schadenfreude”), driving directions (“miami fl to 60609”), unit conversions (“liters in 5 gallons”), currency conversions (“25 usd in euros”), and so on.

Every cell carrier charges for text messages — about 10 cents each, unless you have a plan that includes them. But Google itself doesn’t charge for any of this. It’s not only ad-free, it’s free free.

David Pogue, The New York Times

NewMexiKen tried “weather albuquerque” and got back current conditions and a four-day forecast in a few seconds.

Why do people still have landline phones?

Bits and Pieces

It’s been snowing early this morning at Casa NewMexiKen. Nothing much, just enough to cover the trees and shrubbery and be kind of pretty. That’s especially true if you can just sit here and look at it and not go out.

Yes, I did get the shower faucet fixed. Thanks for asking.

New springs and seats: $3.99
New handle: $10.98
Satisfaction of doing it myself: Priceless

I saw yesterday that the mascot for the Alamosa (Colorado) High School is the Mean Moose. Cool.

Some people have said to me, “Your Mom is from Japan and your Dad is from India, so that makes you half-Asian.” What continent do they think India is in? I mean, 20 percent of American schoolchildren can’t find Earth — on a map of Earth.

That’s comic Dan Nainan quoted by Joe Sharkey in a column in Tuesday’s Times, It’s Not Easy Being a Comic on the Airport Security Line.

NewMexiKen is really enjoying the mellow sounds of The Road to Escondido, the album by J.J. Cale and Eric Clapton. Cale wrote “After Midnight” and “Cocaine.”

I’ve learned there is a new and improved way to construct the code behind the layout of this weblog, so bear with me this next day or so while I make the change. This new approach includes modular inserts for the sidebars.

Cal Berkeley and, to a lesser extent, Stanford are offering speakers and even courses free online via podcasts. UC Berkeley on iTunes U has course lectures in history, psychology, geography, ecology, economics, computer science and much more. Stanford on iTunes U is limited more to one-shot events than classes, but still has an interesting selection. How did we live before the internets?

I read a short item in The New Yorker over the weekend about sugar and corn and ethanol. Really it’s about our convoluted government. Here’s a taste:

In the nineteen-seventies, Brazil embarked on a program to substitute sugar ethanol for oil. Today, every gallon of gas in Brazil is blended with at least twenty per cent of ethanol, and many cars run on ethanol alone, at half the price of gasoline.

What’s stopping the U.S. from doing the same? In a word, politics. The favors granted to the sugar industry keep the price of domestic sugar so high that it’s not cost-effective to use it for ethanol.

Oh, it’s worse than that. Go read.

And Ben Stein had an interesting column, In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning. An excerpt:

Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.

It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”

The Google Brilliance Applied to Newspapers and Local Media

Mark Cuban with some provocative (I think) thoughts on marketing. He begins:

The best example of this was when I bought the Dallas Mavericks. When I bought the team the conventional wisdom was that we were in the basketball business. That our customers were entertained by the beauty of the game. In reality our real business was “creating sore throats from screaming and sore hands from clapping”. Sporting events are pretty much the only place where a CEO will scream and yell while sitting or standing right next to a 16 year old with a Mohawk and pierced everything and then hi five him/her when something good happens for their team.

Google realized early on that they are in the traffic monetization business. They started off in the search business, but quickly realized that while continuously improving search was important, continuously improving search and page view monetization was more important.