Category: computers suck

compose yourself!

Just one of the things that I really, really hate about Windows is its lack of a sane way of entering accented characters. People are forced to do is remember arcane character codes, like Alt+0235 to get ë. I’m sorry, but I don’t get why one should need to remember these numbers.

Suns have a Compose key, that works conceptually a little like backspacing on a manual typewriter. To get e-umlaut, you type Compose + “ (either together, or one after the other) then e. It’s a system thing, and it works in all applications. A table of compose key sequences shows the huge range of special characters you can access in this way. Most Linux machines support this too; I have right Alt bound as the Compose key.

I need the same facility for Windows. An MS tech staff blog entry basically hints that it can’t be done. But it is being done, admittedly half-heartedly, by MS-Word; if you search for accent in the Help, you can find Insert an international character by using a shortcut key. Word has done this for years, so why isn’t it in the OS?

the old laptop / a new kernel / a new laptop!

Upgraded the Thinkpad T21 to kernel 2.6. Fairly painless, and things look like they are moving more quickly.

Major annoyance is the T21’s built-in 3Com mini-PCI ethernet/modem. It seems to hate all the power-management goodies that ACPI gives, and will only work under the older APM. It seems the solution is replacing the 3Com board with the Intel PRO/100 SP mini-PCI board, and all may be well.

Industrial Flower Factory

Cool name, cool idea. Industrial Flower Factory make low power draw, small footprint, low noise computers. I reckon that my hulking old AthlonXP is one of the major power draws in the house, and it certainly creates the most noise pollution.

IFF’s machines are a little pricey, but when they’ll save so much of your hydro bill, that’s got to be good. They’ll also preinstall Linux, which make me happy.

bad cables / wasted power

Don’t be tempted to use the enormous heatsink assembly on an Athlon XP to support the power loom from the PSU. I did it last night, in an attempt to free up the airflow (and noise) from the CPU. Mistake. It flexed the mobo enough to unseat the CPU, causing wacky power-up errors (with no diagnostics, since there was no CPU to be seen).

I’m getting kind of sick of wasted energy in computers. That’s partly why I’m building a fanless mini-ITX system. It’ll have all the power I need, while being small, quiet and unobtrusive.

PHPFileExchange

One of my WindShare colleagues was extolling the virtues of xdrive. It looks pretty neat, but I already spend money on hosting, so don’t want to duplicate the effort. I wonder if PHPFileExchange — a free, server-based file repository system — will work from here.

slow build

Over the last few days, I’ve been building Gentoo on a Via EPIA-800 mini-ITX box for Senen. It’s very small, pretty quiet, but not very fast. It should do well as a PVR, though.

gap delete bummer

Annoying bug in the iRiver 1.65U firmware for the H120; if you have Gap Delete enabled and play a short track with a few seconds of silence at the end, you lose a short section of the audio. It really ruins Ivor Cutler’s 1974 album Dandruff, where Vein Girl and The Painful League get the ends snipped off. Without Gap Delete, they play fine.

clipping

Dang, but did my Of Montreal recording from last night come out clipped. I blame it on:

  1. naïve user
  2. no level meters on the iRiver H120
  3. no ability to change the recording level in mid record with the iRiver H120
  4. my oldish Sony ECM-909’s odd habits

What I really need is a Reactive Sounds Boost Box; pricey, but nice. I wonder if Church Audio can do me anything cheaper?

But anyway, for now, here’s The Lollipop People‘s Fort Jesus [MP3].

failing to work just out of the box

Bloody iPod Mini. Catherine’s 10.1.15 eMac sees it, but iTunes says “No iPod Connected”, despite the obvious. It just sits there, flashing “Do Not Disconnect” from the USB port. iTunes 4.7.1 says it has iPod Mini support. So go on, do what you’re supposed to!

I’ve spent more time futzing with this crappy thing than any hardware on my Linux boxes. It’s just an MP3 player, it should just work.

atomic clock error

We have a Sharper Image Atomic Big Digit Clock with In/Outdoor Temperature. It picked up the standard time to daylight savings time shift perfectly yesterday morning.

This morning, though, I seemed to be running 10 minutes late. The clock was saying 06:56, when I was convinced it earlier than that. I check my watch; 06:46. Cooker clock, thermostat timer, microwave, NTP-synch’ed Linux laptop; all 06:46.

On resetting the clock, and letting it faff about for a few minutes while it listened to the NIST radio signal from Boulder, it got the time right. I guess there must’ve been a duff signal came through in the night. That’s what you get for blindly trusting technology.