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Steve Brinich
07 May 2008 @ 09:10 pm
It's The Coverup That Gets You...  
Federal Agents Raid Office of Special Counsel

Nearly two dozen federal agents yesterday raided the Washington headquarters of the agency that protects government whistle-blowers, as part of an intensifying criminal investigation of its leader, who is fighting allegations of improper political bias and obstruction of justice.

Agents fanned out yesterday morning in the agency's building on M Street, where they sequestered Office of Special Counsel chief Scott J. Bloch for questioning, served grand-jury subpoenas on 17 employees and shut down access to computer networks in a search lasting more than five hours.....

Essentially, the news item is a dismayingly familiar tale of (alleged) malfeasance of office and abuse of power. The part that grabbed my attention, in a pointing-and-laughing sort of way, is:

...During the probe, Bloch hired the technology service Geeks on Call to erase his computer hard drive and those of two aides, giving rise to new allegations that he was obstructing justice....

I have a mental image of a petty crook confident that he can't possibly be caught because he saw some clever trick on TeeVee.
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Current Mood: cynical
 
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Steve Brinich
28 April 2008 @ 08:30 pm
Computer Oddity & Metro Grumble  
I woke up last night and found that the desktop had shut itself off. My three working theories were:

1. Some oddity caused during installation of ActiveStinc (and ActiveSync Toggle to address the fact that, no, I don't need it using up computing power 99.9% of the time) to enable direct connection of our Wings and the desktop (until now, we've only used the laptop for that purpose).

2. A fan/heating issue.

3. Power failure caused by UPS failure or feline intervention (the big red power button is on top of the UPS unit).

It didn't give any of the "Windows did not shut down normally" messages that would result from a crash or power cut, which leads me to suspect #1. However, it seems to have stayed on all day after my reboot this morning.

As for why I'm here posting this instead of off with Three Left Feet -- apparently the northbound Yellow Line trains weren't running even to the usual lackadasical schedule, and the information board didn't indicate any coming for at least the next 15 minutes (i.e. about the time my last good "bail and make my way home" window closed).
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Steve Brinich
18 April 2008 @ 04:39 pm
Reading On The Phone  
I've been playing a bit more with adding documents to my T-Mobile Wing. So far, it seems to handle Word docs much better than the old PDA (especially documents with pictures).

One odd thing I've noticed is that the "wrap to window" option has an odd little bug that causes a superfluous horizontal scroll bar to appear when an open document begins with exactly one paragraph of text followed by a picture wide enough to require down-scaling to fit in the window. Once I noticed the pattern, the word-around was fairly obvious ("It hurts when I do this." "Don't do that!")
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Steve Brinich
21 February 2008 @ 10:01 am
Disclaimer Madness  
While doing some monitor shopping (like window shopping, but without having to get up and walk) for a case for my Wing, I stumbled upon a listing that stated at the end of the various bullet points:

* Phone not included.

The sad thing is that there probably are people out there who would feel ripped off (or claim to feel ripped off and launch a nuisance lawsuit) if they didn't get a new smartphone as part of a $15 purchase.... 
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Steve Brinich
26 January 2008 @ 07:41 pm
LJ Mobile Glitch  
I managed to post a couple entries with just an image, apparently by putting it in a directory used by LJ Mobile. Sorry if I spammed anybody's Friends page before cleaning it up.
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Steve Brinich
26 January 2008 @ 01:08 am
Test LJ Mobile  
Testing LJ mobile.

Edit: Now that I've confirmed that the post made from the Wing showed up, extending it and shifting it from private (just to avoid spamming people with a contentless test post) to public. After some initial problems, ActiveStync seems to be behaving itself.
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Steve Brinich
23 January 2008 @ 12:20 pm
More Wing Stuff  

So far, I've managed to set up the basic phone functions on the Wing and get the old address book transferred (by cable -- I haven't been able to get Bluetooth sync to work. Based on what I've been able to find online, I might need to install XP Service Pack 2 to get the drivers for Bluetooth ActiveSync).

During the bus ride to work yesterday, I discovered that quite a few of the neighbors seem to have unsecured wireless networks. I think I'm going to need to turn off WiFi when not actually in use in order to save the batteries.

So far, battery life seems OK; it was down to a bit over half this morning after being charged yesterday. However, when I took it out just now, it was unusually warm and down to 15% -- the most likely explanation is that I put it away without turning it off or locking down the touchscreen, and some intensive process or other started and kept runnning.

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Current Mood: geeky
 
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Steve Brinich
22 January 2008 @ 10:10 am
Wing-ing It  
After a bit more research, [info]starmalachite and I ended up deciding to renew with T-Mobile and get a pair of Wing phone/PDA units. It's a bit too early to judge how the battery life will hold up under our typical use pattern (when he showed us his Wing at GAFilk, [info]partiallyclips mentioned that he has to recharge it fairly often, but he uses it rather heavily); other than that potential issue, it's working out well so far.

As I was transferring and reorganizing my phone directory, I found a half-forgotten listing for "MORON". After a moment, I recalled that entering that number and setting it to a null ring was a workaround to banish some nitwit who couldn't wrap his head around the concept that there was no "Ernesto" here, and there still would be no "Ernesto" here no matter how many times he called the same number.

While entering a calendar entry for Boskone, I noticed the lines:

Category: Conventions
Attendees: No attendees

I'm sure the concom will be terribly disappointed. 
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Current Mood: geeky
 
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Steve Brinich
19 December 2007 @ 06:48 pm
Microsoft Wireless Keyboard "Encryption" Cracked...  
...if you can call it "encryption". From the description:


Max Moser and Philipp Schrödel say that decryption was very easy because the devices use a simple XOR mechanism for encryption and the keys are only one byte long.


WTF? I know Microsoft has gotten a reputation for inept security, but that inept?
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Steve Brinich
11 November 2007 @ 04:11 pm
Blue Screens...  
I've been getting random crashes on the desktop. At first I thought it might be a problem with Exact Audio Copy, but they didn't always happen when (or even after) using it.

I resorted to a full data backup and restore to factory configuration, and still got a crash, indicating a hardware problem.

Opening up the box, I saw a memory chip holder that didn't seem to be quite properly engaged. I reseated the RAM chips a few hours ago and have been reinstalling/recopying stuff ever since; no crashes so far. (I did have a minor scare when a game install gave an error message -- turned out it wanted to open a Word document and I hadn't yet reactivated MS Office).
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Current Mood: aggravated
 
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Steve Brinich
09 November 2007 @ 07:54 am
Music Collection Progress  
I ended up switching to Exact Audio Copy, because it turned out to be easier to get it to neatly integrate FLAC encoding for fire-and-forget ripping and encoding. Also, it gives more information on potential timing problems during the rip (though it's always been a false alarm when I did a test rip and CRC checksum comparison).

I also had the idea of making backups on DVD-R with a cumulative index.
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Current Mood: geeky
 
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Steve Brinich
05 November 2007 @ 12:01 am
Minor Glitches and Floppy, RIP?  
My desktop appears to dislike connecting the external drive through a front USB port; I got a BSOD. I suspect that it might be a port power issue or resource conflict. Another ongoing issue is that the boot cycle stalls at the "searching for USB mass storage devices" stage unless the all-in-one unit (a Canon MP830) is turned off during the boot. On that one, I suspect a conflict between the memory card readers built into the MP830 and the ones integrated into my floppy drive.

If either or both of these are correct, disconnecting the card reader unit in the floppy drive might resolve the issues (the reader slots in the all-in-one are much easier to reach in any case). This leads to the question of whether it's worth bothering to buy and install a plain floppy drive; I can't recall the last time I used a floppy (including the one time my system had to be steam-cleaned and everything reinstalled from scratch and restored from backup for reasons unrelated to the above).

That raises my curiosity: How long has it been since anybody else actually used a floppy disk?

(I ended up disconnecting the MP830 and connecting its USB cable to the external drive to perform the backup, with no problems except the inconvenience. I may need to pick up a USB hub, if I can find room on my desk.)
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Current Mood: curious
 
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Steve Brinich
04 November 2007 @ 09:51 pm
Progress On Organizing The Music Collection  
So far, I've gotten a hundred-odd (with or without hyphen) CDs backed up in lossless format; I've paused to back them up to the new external hard drive (about a half hour, but can be done in the background).

I've also unearthed the batch of jumbo CD albums with the bulk of my filk and folk collections.
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Current Mood: accomplished
 
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Steve Brinich
02 November 2007 @ 08:16 pm
Organizing The Music Collection  
Inspired by a fortuitous find (a 500 GB external HD on sale for $85), I've finally gotten around to getting the various piles of CDs ripped. The plan of attack is to rip them with Audiograbber, convert them to FLAC (a lossless compressed format) to reduce the space needed for the master archive, and to convert files to MP3s as needed (or as Round TUITs are gotten) for routine listening.

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Current Mood: nerdy
Current Music: CD Drive Hum
 
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Steve Brinich
07 September 2007 @ 09:35 am
Poked In The i  
Eugene Robinson's column in today's Washington Post has what I think is an insightful take on the reaction to Apple's latest price-cut announcements (about which [info]thatcrazycajun and [info]scruffycritter commented):


Poked in the i
If I were an iPhone owner, I'd be hopping mad. I'd be iRate.....

But when chief executive Steve Jobs announced Wednesday that Apple was slashing the iPhone's price by a third -- meaning that owning a slice of the future now sets you back only $399 -- the iPhone Internet forums lit up with buyers who felt they'd been taken for chumps....

Occasionally, there's a real breakthrough. But mostly what we're getting from the purveyors of electronic devices are incremental advances and improved packaging. Jobs was quick to realize that you have to sell image along with the gizmo.

This time, though, he has failed to live up to one clause in his implied contract with iPhone buyers. The sky-high price was supposed to guarantee a decent period of exclusivity. For a time, if you bought an iPhone, you were supposed to be the envy of your friends. The ability to show off all the neat things it could do was your compensation for the fact that the iPhone didn't really change your life.

Eventually, you understood, everybody would have one -- as happened with the iPod. But after spending $599 for a cellphone, the aura of supercool should have lasted longer than a couple of months.

Sorry if you feel cheated. As the man said, that's technology.


I think that nails the underlying cause of much of the early-purchaser irritation.
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Current Mood: pensive
 
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