Blue Probe

I like to go back to a fresh install every now and then.  Especially with kids who load up junk/spam/Adobe on our family PCs.  I recently  went back to Windows XP SP3 on an old Dell.  I then jumped into Windows update.  Only 105 updates to go – OUCH.  Did I mention how much I love the Chromebook?

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On our development W2K3 box we sometimes run out of space.  I use SpaceMonger to map out where the space is being used and have sometimes found large hunks of junk in a users recycle bin.  Now it’s just a matter of finding out who.  SpaceMonger will show a path like:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList\S-1-5-21-1384440006-404362789-3620623192-2690

But to determine the user, you must go to the registry (HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList) and look for that SID in the ProfileImagePath.

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“Can we heat our daughter’s room with it?”, was what my wife asked when I told her I was going to build a Vibrobot.  No – sorry.  But as I child I loved Legos and electronic kits.  Probably because I never had any.  But why should that stop me now.  So here is a cool project for you.  Build a solar powered robot.  Ok, so it’s not a “real” thinking robot, but it is self contained and cool none the less.   I saw this cool program called Make Magazine on TV and they were putting together these Vibrobots.  A company called Solarbotics out of Canada can help with the parts, including the 1381 Symet Solar engine.  It has some cool electronics, and reminds me of the movie I saw about the guy who invented intermittent wipers.  So the solar cell loads  up a capacitor, a diode (1381?) trips and sends the stored electricity to the motor (cell phone vibrator) and then closes back down when voltage drops allowing the capacitor to load up again.  It’s a great little novelty as there is not much to it and clearly no battery.  Plus it may just sit on the kitchen table for a spell before it decides to move, catching unsuspecting guests off guard.

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Each child this year seemed to have a Christmas list that included a Mac Book and/or iPad.  Since the budget is nearer to stone tablet and chisel this just wasn’t going to be their year.  However, I did manage to get a used Google Chromebook for $150 off of Craigs List.  AND I LOVE IT!  I am completely sick of having to remove all the crap off of my wife’s computer after the kids have been on it.  Watching them launch some girly dress up game out of China just gives me the willies.  And that’s where this little CR-48 shines (I bought the original beta Chromebook, not the newer Samsung/Acer model).  The Chrome OS is a complete sandbox.  You can’t pull anything down which will kill it.

Also, the little buddy has a 20 GB SSD drive so it boots in 8 seconds.  This is truly remarkable, and makes the Chromebook that much more usable.  How many of you when looking for a bit of info, say a move time, have walked by your Win7 laptop and searched upstairs and then down for the tablet which is always on instead of booting your Win7 laptop.  We just aren’t willing to take the time.  It is a waste.  However, grab the Chrome book, pop the lid, push on, and by the time you’ve adjusted the screen it is up and running.  Plus 8 hrs on one charge.

The downside is the need to be connected to the internet to do anything.  There is offline notes and Gmail, and I bet GDocs soon.

My oldest is in 9th grade.  Her school has Google accounts for each student.  They work in Google Docs and Presentation.  This is perfect for the student.  And if another child is using the Chromebook, then the first child need only jump on Mom’s computer and pull up her work in Google Docs to continue her work.  Love that cloud.

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I was tentative about the purchase as OOMA wants the cash up front (appx. $250) whereas Vonage just wants $26/month.  However, I’m 2 years into it and loving it.  Each month I pay the normal phone tax of $3 and that is it.  The service is rock solid, the voice quality is awesome, voice mail (check online) and the extra $250 I saved by not going to Vonage was stuck in other toys.

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YouTube is full of How to open Western Digital… but things have changed.  In an external USB drive enclosure there used to be a plain old drive with a small circuit board plugged in the back.  I found a closeout 1.5TB at Target for cheap and picked it up to put in my Media PC.  oops – the circuit board is now completely integrated with the drive enclosure.

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I kept failing installing the JBOSS tools into Eclipse. I even tried downloading the archive to install from https://www.jboss.org/tools/download/stable/3_2_GA. The problem was Java 1.7. Even with my classpath and JAVA_HOME set to point to Java 1.6, there was still something out of whack (java –version would show 1.7). Stopping Eclipse, and uninstalling Java 1.7, proved to be the solution. Here is the error:

An error occurred while collecting items to be installed

session context was:(profile=epp.package.jee, phase=org.eclipse.equinox.internal.p2.engine.phases.Collect, operand=, action=).

Comparison method violates its general contract!

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I always think the market leader (aka Vonage) in any geek related product is just milking its gorilla game position, and so look for that hungry edge play.  In this case Ooma.  I did my standard Google due-diligence and searched on “magic jack sucks”.  26,000 and counting…  But the Ooma, not so much.  I use it as a 2nd line in my house strictly as my home office phone.  $250 for the initial box.  Quality has been fantastic.

“ooma sucks”, by the way, only gave 200 hits.

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Our company does not have a full SIP phone integration with with Microsoft Communicator.  It is used for presence and IM.  In Outlook, I like to use the Dialer (as I have my laptop modem plugged into my Phone {which is plugged into OOMA – yea baby!}) to save all those seconds.  However, if MOC is running, then when I launch the Outlook Dialer, it pops up MOC and tells me that feature is not operational.  Here is how to use the plain old TAPI dialer.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Call Integration – then add TAPIOVERRIDE as a DWORD=1.  You may have to add the key Call Integration.

Question:  If you know how to allow MOC to use the dialer, let me know.  i.e. if I right click on the presence indicator and choose call, I want it to launch the Outlook Dialer.

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I started down the path of saving window size settings in the application settings. The fact that I was repeating the same basic info for each form led me to investigate using a custom type to encapsulate this info. The custom type you want to save will have a couple of properties on it, but when you add it to the application settings, you just configure 1 setting. I couldn’t just use the utility to add my type, I had to edit the file. Here’s the steps:

1) Update the settings.settings file

2) Make your custom type [Serializable] – don’t forget to make the class and properties public

I created a custom type to save window settings. With the following signature for the save settings method:

public void SaveSettings(Form aForm)

I was then able to use the following to save my custom type and its properties. Notice that I use the Default[string] method instead of designer created method like Default.MainForm

Properties.Settings.Default[aForm.Name] = this; //Save my custom type

Properties.Settings.Default.Save();

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