Monday 10/31/05
The week after I buy a couple beefy new UPSs, Puget Sound Energy hits me with a 10.5 hour outage that no UPS on Earth could cover. Bleah.
The good news is, I bet they fixed whatever-it-was that was causing the occasional local blinks. The bad news is, I may not end up needing the beefy new UPSs I just bought...
By the way, an APC 500 VA UPS will keep a Power Macintosh G5 dual 2.5 GHz running for approximately... two minutes. Yay. Ah well, it's enough to cover the blinks, which was my main concern.
Saturday 10/29/05
Last month I got a Fujitsu Lifebook P1510D, an ultraportable (2.2 pound) notebook computer with a touch-sensitive screen that swivels around and folds flat backward tablet-style. However, it's not a "true" Tablet PC (no active digitizer) so there's no easy way to right-click. No button on the stylus and since it doesn't have WinXP Tablet, no software option to right-click when you tap and hold.
The passive digitizer is, on the whole, a feature as far as I'm concerned because it means you can easily click things and drag windows around with your fingernail, even when the machine's in notebook configuration. You don't get pressure sensitivity and there's no way for the screen to tell where you're pointing without clicking, which means no Alias Sketchbook, but I can't draw so that doesn't matter to me. Plus if you lose your stylus it's cheap to replace since it's just a bit of plastic. So, no foul.
Fujitsu's solution to the lack of right-click functionality is a task bar icon that you tap to make your next tap a right-click. This is pretty much exactly as inconvenient as it sounds and it's the only thing about this machine that I don't absolutely love.
I Asked MetaFilter to tell me the name of a program that would bring tap-and-hold right-clicking to my machine. They came up blank. (A perennial problem for me and AskMeFi. Apparently if I can't figure something out for myself, nobody else can either. I hasten to add it's not the site's fault; I do ask some damn obscure questions.)
I decided to see if I could at least program one of the hard buttons next to the display to right-click using what we used to call a "macro program" in the old days -- something that could record and play back user mouse actions and keystrokes. I did find a free, capable macro utility, AutoHotkey, which could easily generate the required mouse click with one line of script, and could even compile it to a standalone EXE. (Amusingly, that EXE is 180K, larger than an Apple II floppy disk.) Unfortunately I had forgotten that Fujitsu doesn't let me assign the hard buttons to launch applications. The hard buttons are hard-coded to PageUp/PageDown (which is convenient when you're reading, so again, no foul) and you can only reprogram Fn + hard button to launch programs. That's even less convenient than the taskbar icons.
So I was stymied. Still, AutoHotKey looked cool, and I started digging around a little bit to see what it could do. And discovered that one of the "showcase" scripts that comes with it is a mouse gesture interpreter. You hold down the right mouse button, draw a shape, and the script runs a corresponding subroutine. The source code for it is all there.
Wait a minute. AutoHotKey can trigger scripts when you click a mouse button? I wonder if that applies to the left mouse button... I mean, it would be kinda weird to trigger a script that way, but you never know...
Long story short: I can use AutoHotKeys to trap the left mouse button and have the script generate a right-click if I hold the stylus down in the same spot for a while, but pass through the left-click otherwise. There were some exceptions I had to work out (for example, how to make it NOT deselect a selection if you tap and hold on it -- you might think you want to always pass through the initial left mousedown, but you don't; also, if you drag something out of a window, you probably don't want to right-click if you pause in the middle of the drag) but in the end, I was able to get the script to work just the way I wanted. The performance is fine; it's not sluggish at all. And of course AutoHotKey let me make it into an EXE with a tray icon that has its own little context menu.
That's right. I've just written my first piece of Windows software. Which feels kinda weird for a longtime Mac nerd like me. Still, I have to say, writing scripts for AutoHotkeys feels a lot like scripting OneClick for the Mac, which was a favorite of mine back in the day. Except it's all free. Even the compiled EXEs are free to distribute or even to sell. So...
Download: SoftRightClick for Windows. By me.
Sunday 10/23/05
I was in the Bellevue Barnes and Noble the other day and discovered that they had How To Good-Bye Depression in stock. More than one copy, in fact -- turned out. I was struck dumb for a good minute.
Perhaps you don't understand why I was so amazed. This is the notorious book by a Japanese author who, in English I can describe only as unmistakable, advises us that a surefire cure for depression is... well, the book's subtitle says it all: to constrict one's anus 100 times every day. A choice quote from the book: "Besides shooting out a big blank from your buttock, you can feel as if your root chakra leaked sweet hot mucus." Um, yeah.
Just the fact that the book exists is bizarre enough; I found out about it some time ago and had a good laugh. But to find it stocked at a brick-and-mortar bookseller, lurking where it may pounce upon the unsuspecting passer-by who just wants a book about Prozac -- all I can say is that someone at B&N has quite a twisted sense of humor.
Thursday 10/20/05
Jed's Other Poem: an unsolicited music video in Applesoft BASIC. Seriously.
Tuesday 10/18/05
The BBC announces Torchwood, a Doctor Who spinoff for grown-ups. (Not that grown-ups can't enjoy Doctor Who in its own right!) It will be helmed by Russell T Davies, who produced the 2005 series of Doctor Who starring Christopher Eccleston, and will feature the Captain Jack Harkness character who appeared in several episodes of that series.
Don't forget to get your region-free DVD player... the Beeb releases the DVD box set of the 2005 series on November 21.
Update: Ooooor you can just wait until next February and pick up the Canadian Region 1 release, which will include the Christmas special. (Thanks Matt)
Fortune's article on BitTorrent is a great read. Especially if you know someone with Asperger's Syndrome.
Monday 10/17/05
They got themselves some deals down at Fry's right now, and I've done taken advantage of 'em:
- One (1) 300 GB Seagate Barracuda, $90 after rebate
- One (1) 200 GB Maxtor DiamondMax, $70
- One (1) DeLorme Earthmate USB GPS receiver, $60 after rebate
- Fifty (50) Maxell 80-minute CD-Rs, $5 after rebate
I've been watching out for cheap hard disks; the 40 gigger in my Web server is starting to make that high-pitched whine that tells me its bearings are shot. Clearly it's time to move the 160 GB disk (which the new 300 gigger will replace) from the Mac to the Web box. The 120 GB disk (which the new 200 gigger will replace) will become a supplemental backup drive, or perhaps a hand-me-down for a friend who could use a backup.
Get Creative Inc. uses some photos on its Web site that may be familiar to regular visitors to this site.
(Yes, they got permission. This is the first money I've made from my photography, in fact.)
Saturday 10/15/05
Zoom in on insects with electron microscopy!
Friday 10/14/05
How to search the "invisible" Web.
How one man got over a million friends on a popular social networking site: Samy is my hero.
Rules of camera tossing: set a long exposure, point the camera in the general direction of something bright and shiny, and toss it into the air.
(I won't be tossing my 20D, thanks, but these are nice.)
MetaFilter is sorry. Or not. It's kind of hard to tell. And that in itself is pretty sorry.
Thursday 10/13/05
100 greatest cover songs according to DigitalDreamDoor.
Syntax across computer languages. Designing a new one? See what has come before.
Monday 10/10/05
Asetion keyboard layout: better even than Dvorak? Interesting.
I've recently been enjoying AOL Radio at work and here at home on the Windows box and the new laptop (they have a browser-based player that works only in Windows). It's kind of sucky if you don't have an AOL account, since there are a limited number of stations and the streams are low-quality mono, but if you do have an AOL screen name, you get pretty darn nice sound quality and a wide selection of stations, including an "all covers" station, one that only plays Yes songs (there are equivalent stations for three dozen other artists), plus a bunch of XM Satellite Radio stations. Not all of them -- for that you need XM's $7.99 a month package or an actual XM receiver to get their full station lineup over the Internet -- but you do get more than 60. XM's boasted "150 channels" includes traffic, news, sports, and talk channels, though, many of them local -- it looks like you get most if not all of the XM music channels -- the good stuff, in other words.
You can get an AOL account for as little as $9.95 a month. (You may not see this offered, but it's the plan I have. Call 'em up and ask for it. Actually, they may have even less expensive plans -- they used to have one that was $4.95.) AOL of course comes with seven screen names, and each of these can listen to AOL Radio. Which means you can share your account with up to six friends, and for less than $1.50 a month each of you gets unlimited access to AOL Radio -- plus of course the rest of AOL (over your existing Internet connection) if you want it. But it's a great deal just for the radio when you split it up like that.
Much to my shock, they released a Mac client for AOL Radio this past weekend. It had a bit of difficulty downloading the station list at first, presumably due to overloaded servers, but I finally got it going Sunday morning. And much to my further shock, it actually integrates with iChat to display the current track in your status message, offers a floating translucent notification of title and artist when a new song comes on, and -- get this -- it's AppleScriptable. It took me about 60 seconds to adapt my script that pauses iTunes when my screen blanker kicks in to support AOL Radio as well.
AOL Radio appears to be using Coding Technologies' AACplus codec. AOL owns Winamp, which plays AACplus streams; I'll bet the Mac AOL Radio codec is derived from that. I'd love to see iTunes and the iPod support AACplus -- you can get quite impressive quality from just a 48 Kbps stream. It appears AOL Radio is using 80 Kbps streams, however.
Sunday 10/09/05
Saw Serenity tonight. It was engaging and engrossing and it sucked me in totally. There were a couple of completely clever plot twists. I had got a pretty bad spoiler beforehand, but I was still shocked when the spoiled event actually happened -- somehow I'd forgotten.
Contrary to published reports, the original "Firefly" theme does make an appearance, albeit without any singing, if you sit in your seat long enough.
There were a few things that bothered me about it, nits I could pick. For one thing, someone needs to tell Joss Whedon that space is three dimensional. (I'll elaborate in comments if necessary.) For another, I kept expecting a certain character to break into plausible-sounding but ultimately wrong exposition about how numbers explain everything, and I found this bit of casting quite distracting. The character himself is pretty lame and cliche, really -- you've seen him before. You have also seen the part of the plot that involves him before, and there are no real twists to it either.
A good sci-fi flick. Not a great one. It doesn't have quite enough style and verve to get away with its plot weaknesses. Its $10 million opening weekend sounds about right to me. Still, it was a lot of fun and it sure was good to see that universe again. I'll probably buy the DVD.
Alaska Air has a new 737 -- make that Salmon Thirty Salmon.
