Mar 30, 2010

Lawrence to become first city in Kansas to get smart electricity meters

Never thought I'd see the day. Maybe I can get some of that Google PowerMeter action now.



Lawrence to become first city in Kansas to get smart electricity meters: "Thanks to a $19 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, Lawrence will be the first city in Kansas hooked into the smart grid."

Mar 24, 2010

Mar 21, 2010

Paperless Office: It's All In Your Mind

A recent story on Slashdot talks about What is Holding back the Paperless Office? As I read through the comments I couldn't help thinking one thing: It's all in your mind. People talked about having to spread out documents on the conference table and distributing documents to the group for markup. Why can't they just bring up a copy on the laptop/netbook that everyone seems to carry to every meeting without ever using? Once people get past the mentality of having to hold onto a piece of paper we will have the paperless office.

Another person spoke about having to be able to put thoughts down on paper and how a computer would never take the place of quick drawings. There are existing tools that allow this to happen and they are improving every day. In fact, drawing or taking notes on a netbook or tablet PC is actually better in a lot of ways. How many of these drawings have you lost over the yeas? How many times have you thought, "Oh crap, where did I put that little piece of paper?" If you just train yourself to do this on your fancy netbook it wouldn't be an issue. And we would be another step closer to the paperless office.

Training people to use their minds differently isn't an easy thing to do. Old habits die hard. Especially when the new way of doing things isn't obvious. Modern office practices have been around for hundreds of years. Computers have been on the scene for just a few. It's only a matter of time but before long the only thing paper will be used for is art.

Mar 11, 2010

Save Disk Space in OS X: Monolingual

I am always amazed at how much space the Multi-Lingual files take up when installing OS X (let's not mention the print drivers). So why should I be surprised when I save so much space using this application? It managed to trim off 2.3GB in just a few minutes. That's not a lot in this era of 500GB drives but every little bit helps. That's a whole movie burned to disk!

I know I should be ashamed for using the default install in the first place. Like everyone who gets a new MacBookPro I was a little eager to start using it. The last thing I wanted to do was wait for a new install. Now if it was a new Dell it would be a different story. I have no qualms about booting right from a DVD when a new Dell shows up.

http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/

Thanks Tyler!

Mar 3, 2010

More Windows XP Problems, the F1 key?

Even though it's one of the most widely used operating systems on the planet, Windows XP has its problems. It won't be long before it goes the way of IE6 in recent news.


Microsoft Says, Don't Press the F1 Key In XP: "Ian Lamont writes 'Microsoft has issued a security advisory warning users not to press the F1 key in Windows XP, owing to an unpatched bug in VBScript discovered by Polish researcher Maurycy Prodeus. The security advisory says that the vulnerability relates to the way VBScript interacts with Windows Help files when using Internet Explorer, and could be triggered by a user pressing the F1 key after visiting a malicious Web site using a specially crafted dialog box.'