www.lobrecht.com :: Rick's Rants

I made the mistake of showing this to Trey

2008-12-21T12:53:19.0269811-06:00

Now he wants to build a Hoth diorama with Legos.

Awesome job brickplumber.

Very cool HD video of Jupiter and one of its moons taken from the Hubble telescope

2008-12-19T11:33:50.9312128-06:00

"this movie shows Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, as it ducks behind the giant planet. Astronomers combined a series of images taken with the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 aboard NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to make the 18-second movie. The 540 movie frames were created from Hubble images taken over a two-hour period on April 9, 2007."

Very cool.

Well this is something we didn't plan on

2008-12-12T16:34:33.3857865-06:00

Today our roof is being resurfaced (another Ike remnant.) Ok, it's noisy, something we've combated by running a bunch of errands and not actually being here much. But we didn't plan on the TV not working. Our satellite dish is sitting on the ground in the back yard. I'm guessing I'll have to call Dish Network before we actually have TV service back. Trey's not terribly happy that he's going to miss Clone Wars tonight. Luckily they reshow it on Sundays.

What lens?

2008-12-12T06:33:48.7606782-06:00

Carl has been pining away at lenses over the last week due to the fortune of getting a rather nice Amazon coupon. The unfortunate thing is he can't figure out what size lens to get. Not that I think that our photographic usages will be similar, but just as a point of comparison, I decided to see what lens length makes sense for me. Using ExposurePlot, I analyzed all the photographs we've taken since April of this year. This plot shows the 35mm effective focal length of both our D70 and SD630 shots.

click for larger view

Obviously this is somewhat skewed by the selection of lenses we have 18mm-70mm and 18mm-200mm actual on the D70, and 35mm to 105mm effective on the SD630.

I've also uploaded the chart for Aperture, which is also interesting.

The Ultimate in Productivity?

2008-12-09T13:12:10.9001475-06:00

I found it very strange to see this in my list of recommended books on Amazon’s home page. Clicking through on the “Why is this recommended for you?” link pointed out that this book is written by David Allen. No, it doesn’t appear that it is that David Allen, but obviously Amazon doesn’t know that.

How did I miss this feature?

2008-12-08T14:09:30.7337865-06:00

I spent a bit of time importing some of my old OneNote notebooks into Evernote today. There were some notes that worked well, but some didn't work quite so well. I imported everything into Local only notebooks to ensure that I didn't blow over my 40MB allotment for the service. This caused me to head to the Evernote forums to answer some questions, and I stumbled across something really cool.

The Windows Evernote client has the ability to watch a folder, import any new files which get created or copied into that folder, and optionally delete the file after it gets imported successfully. This is huge. I'm not sure how I want to use this yet, but I'm pretty sure I will be using it quite a bit, now that I've discovered it.

Now WoW has better security than your bank

2008-12-07T20:31:08.4746241-06:00

Apparently it's old news, but World of Warcraft has the option of using a one time password token for their login. US banks were required to implement two factor authentication, with mutual identification, but I'm not aware of any who implemented anything involving tokens. My bank uses secret questions plus a special image with a description. It doesn't make me feel any safer.

Lifehacker poses the question, "Would You Pay $7 for Two-Factor Online Banking Authentication?" I think most of the people are saying they would pay $7, and I saw at least one poster who said he would even pay $7 a month for the feature.

I'd definitely pay $7 (well $14, since Mary would need one, too). I'd love to see Verified by Visa use the same token and more web vendors use Verified by Visa.

The unfortunate thing is that banks have no incentive at this point to implement these kinds of systems. They have very little liability, and the cost of what they are liable for is obviously cheaper than implementing reasonable security. I assume that the governments in Europe (where most banks have tokens or other two factor security plus smart card based cards) must have forced the issue at some point.

Here's to hoping that our banks implement stronger security some day soon.

Live Mesh Updates

2008-12-05T09:13:22.9647230-06:00

If you follow my Google Reader Shared Items, you probably saw the Live announcement that there would be Mesh updates today. I awoke to the Mesh icon in the Dock on my MacBook bouncing away, wanting to update. The update wasn’t automatic, and due to my not running as an Admin, and the application already existing, it actually took me logging in to my Administrator account (it seems that the Authenticate message got trampled by the do you want to replace this item message.) Everything seemed to go smoothly. The Mesh application remembered my credentials, and seemed to connect with no problems.

Connecting to Live Mesh with my Windows Mobile device prompted me to download an update as well. The install went fine, however I did have to relogin to get logged back in. Even though there was no indication that a Soft Reset was needed after the install, the log in process for Live Mesh never finished until I soft reset my phone.

I’m still happy with the Live Mesh preview. Files are syncing as they should, and performance seems to be pretty good. I’m still confused as to the positioning of Live Mesh, Live Sync (formerly FolderShare), and SkyDrive. I need to write that blog post.

Spooler SubSystem App has stopped working

2008-12-04T08:25:49.4703281-06:00

Every time I boot my machine, I get the following:

Of course “Check online for a solution (recommended) doesn’t seem to do anything. When I check in Services the Print Spooler service is stopped.

The workarounds I can find via Google are all pretty brutal (restarting in Safe Mode to delete printer drivers and registry keys by hand.)

Yuck

Huh?

2008-12-03T13:53:56.3658228-06:00

I was just installing Cygwin on my new Vista laptop, and at the end, I got this message:

Of course the “What settings are applied?” link was less than helpful.

Productive! Magazine

2008-11-29T08:59:53.1318795-06:00

I juse finished reading the new FREE Productive! Magazine download, a digital magazine about David Allen's Getting Things Done. The content was good, but reading a PDF formatted magazine on my 800 pixel tall MacBook screen was a total pain. I will continue to read the content, because it seems like its worth it, but I may have to start printing it out (which isn't terribly green.)

Happy Thanksgiving

2008-11-27T07:45:22.0634688-06:00

To all my US reader(s) have a Happy Turkey Day.