I put in 700 mikes today and have my tent pitched just outside of El Paso, IL. It started out pretty cold (and foggy) so I had my handwarmers on, but around Madison and Chicago it was a toasty 95 degrees. I liked the terrain around Eau Claire the most--very pronounced hills.
A week ago I bought some new lead (graphite) for my mechanical pencil. Looking at the rack of refills, I realized my choice would not be simple. There are different hardness ratings, in addition to the sizes. I use 0.5mm. Summoning memories from my 8th-grade art class, I selected 4H as it was one of the harder options.
This selection of mechanical pencil refills has completely revolutionized my note-taking and homework-completing lives.
The message is clear: I love this 4H lead so much that next time I buy a mechanical pencil I will throw away the *** lead that comes with it and buy some sweet 4H lead refills.
After pounding my head at this off-and-on over the last five weeks (previously thwarted), I have mashed enough VBScript skills into it (my head) that I figured out how to script the pinning of items to the taskbar.
Set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")
Set objFolder = objShell.Namespace("C:\")
Set objApp = objFolder.ParseName("Notepad.lnk")
For Each verb in objApp.Verbs()
If verb.Name = "Pin to Tas&kbar" Then verb.DoIt
Next
For this to work, you need to have a valid shortcut Notepad.lnk in C:\. To do a pin to the start menu, replace “Pin to Tas&kbar” with “Pin to Start Men&u”. Yes, you need the ampersands, they are there as keyboard shortcuts. Right-click on a shortcut and push K and it will pin that to the taskbar.
I encountered an issue at work when we wanted to add some gadgets to the Vista Sidebar. Upon opening the Add Gadget panel, all of the available gadgets briefly appeared and then faded out, leaving a blank window.
This can be resolved by resetting the user’s Settings.ini file for the Sidebar. This is located at %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Sidebar. Just rename Settings.ini to something else after you close Sidebar (must be closed from system tray too), and then re-launch Sidebar. A new Settings.ini will be created. All of the user’s Sidebar settings will be reset, but at least they are now able to add gadgets.
I have been annoyed by needing to setup my taskbar pinned items every time I set up a new Windows 7 install, so really wanted to find out where they are stored. They are buried pretty deep: C:\Users\**Username**\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Quick Launch\User Pinned\TaskBar
So now I will be able to keep a copy of a bunch of shortcuts handy and just copy them in there. I'm thinking cmd, Notepad, Calculator, several Office apps, Irfanview, and Paint will be priorities for now.
Windows 7 is shaping up to be a pretty perfomant operating system. I've been ripping CDs in the background, which easily maxes out the processor on my 1.83GHz Pentium M. All the while I've been playing songs and browsing websites with no performance problems. Only just now when I added installing Acrobat Reader on to the top of all that did I notice some slow-downs (slight glitches in music playback).
Now you might say that this is no big deal, an OS should be able to do all of those things. But this is with 512MB of RAM, the afore-mentioned processor, and a crappy laptop HDD. So far I would say the performance is way closer to XP than Vista was on this machine. But the features are way better than XP. I'll try not to get too optimistic, but from what I've seen in the last few hours Windows 7 is going to be a hot item.
Sun's VirtualBox really irked me off, so here I am whining.
2019-10-26 - Using TT-RSS on my server now.
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I used to use Outlook for my RSS feed reading, and before that IE7. Outlook was definitely a step up from IE7 as I could group feeds into folders (Microsoft, Tech News, Other, etc.) and then just read all the articles in that folder one-by-one. However, it was annoying to have to change the location it saved the feed every time that I added a new feed; it would otherwise create a separate folder for every feed.
I re-did my Outlook setup a couple weeks ago due to losing Exchange connectivity, and figured out an easier way to set that up. I just let each feed create its own folder, and then set up a rule to move all RSS articles into a new "RSS" folder outside of the "RSS Feeds" folder that Outlook uses by default.
However, I just re-installed Windows Vista and found myself setting up Outlook again, but this time the Rules menu is not there. I think this is because I have no mail account setup. I can't get Outlook Anywhere to connect through 95% of the NAT routers that I connect from behind, including the one here at home. Outlook won't connect over Hamachi, and I didn't want to fiddle around with OpenVPN for the seemingly endless hours which that will eat up. So no Exchange setup in Outlook for now (believe me, I want to get this working so badly but can't figure out anything simple to do it).
Since I couldn't get my rules setup, I figured it might be time to explore a new feed reader. I have been playing with Drupal quite a bit at work lately and saw that it has a feed aggregator, but that did not meet my needs as it was simply a feed aggregator. By that I mean there was no way to mark feeds as read or delete them; it just took multiple RSS feeds and combined them into one.
After a few minutes of surfing the RSS feed reader list on Wikipedia, I kind of randomly decided to check out RSS Bandit. I went and checked out the RSS Bandit site and saw two things that immediately drew me in: it was written in .NET and it supported syncing to Google Reader.
So a quick download and install and it's up and running, and we get to the meat of what this article was really supposed to be: my initial thoughts on RSS Bandit.
The initial folder structure on the left is fairly straightforward. I promptly deleted all of the existing categories which was tedious. I added a Microsoft category and started adding feeds. The wizard for that is 5 or 6 screens long, which gets pretty annoying, but there are a lot of features that it packs in there so I can handle cruising through it with some quick mouse clicks.
Reading feeds is quite similar to Outlook: viewing a category (basically equivalent to an Outlook folder) will show all the articles in a message list/reading pane format. Read them and they are marked as read, and I also delete them. An annoyance is that when I need to scroll down in the reading pane the message loses focus so it needs to be re-selected before hitting delete. There are also some special folders (Special Feeds) setup for things like all unread items which come in handy.
The Google Reader syncing left me disappointed though. I had been really excited to have the ability to read feeds when online or offline, from both of my computers, and still have everything synced. I tried to set it up, but it created a whole new list of feeds and I didn't see any easy way to transfer over the feeds and categories that I had already setup on my local computer. The blame for not getting this working probably lies with me for not putting enough time into figuring it out.
But I quickly found that there is the option to store feed data on a network share. This would be almost ideal for me, as it is rare that I don't have my tablet PC with me and want to read some feeds, and I could sync my desktop with the share which I would have on my tablet. I have turned this on, but it has yet to put any data into the folder so I'm not sure what's going on.
A couple last sweet things:
I built a little shelf for my laptop right near my bed, and set my laptop up there. Then the network cable wasn't long enough (I don't believe in wireless that much) and I couldn't pull it longer because it was pinched between two pieces of wood. So I pounded upwards on the shelf with a hammer, and made the cable reach.
Yeah, I pounded on it while the laptop was still sitting up there (and running). Now it doesn't boot up.
It all works out in the end though...I just ordered a 32GB solid state drive. Merry Christmas to me!
I am probably going to start complaining a lot about Linux. I'm trying to learn once again because that is what my senior design project will be developed in.
Anyways, I feel some rage right now because I was trying to use the package manager Aptitude and could not figure out how to use the menu staring at me from the top of the screen.
I'm sorry, but your software REALLY sucks if I have to use Google for 10 minutes to figure out how to use the menu.
P.S. You press F10 to access the menu.