Whatever I want to talk about.
Well I’m using OneNote 2007 from Microsoft to organize a ton of data. OneNote is basically an organizer, or a virtual notebook. It’s fully searchable, very reliable, and understands Ink technology. It will also handle voice recording, and have a GREAT feature list. I think that this app is second only to Outlook.
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It’s almost cliche to blog an entry about 9-11 today. It has been seven years to the day since the attack, which has been called “Our Generations Pearl Harbor.”
I’m still angry, and I’m outraged that some people want to make peace with these animals.
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A few years ago I bought a pallet of “retired” computer junk from the University of Missouri.
This pallet contained 4 SGI Indigo 2 Extremes, 5 NeXT stations, and a Cube. It also had a few laser printers on it.
Note: I sold everything but the best SGI machine, and a working HP LaserJet 4. I’m still trying to find a cheap OS for the SGI, but that’s another story.
Now, this LJ 4 used to be at a nurses station at the UMMC. It had been retired not because it was worn out, but because the plastic was yellowed from age. It also had a JetDirect card in it, which made it instantly useful to me.
Not hoping for too much, I plugged it in, set it up, and fired off a test print.
Perfect. No problems. I checked the toner cart, it was full. FULL!
So what brought this up is that I just went to the old office that I moved OUT of and picked it up, and brought it over here. I’m going to try to get it to spit out a page count for me shortly, and I’ll update that here.
UPDATE: Only 373,506 pages printed. Only.
This printer actually cost me negative dollars. I made money on the stuff that I sold from the pallet, and a customer threw away a broken one and gave me an extra toner cart for it.
HP LaserJet 4
Introduced: Oct 1992, List Price: $2,200
To summarize:
Holy Heavy Printers, Batman! They don’t make printers like this anymore!
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Ok, I thought that Windows Live Writer, a free offline blog environment from Microsoft, was just a stripped down version of Word.
It might be that, but it’s a lot more.
True WYSIWYG authoring. It even grabs my Wordpress theme from the blog, and displays it as I write.
Allows posting, editing, and uploading pictures from within the environment.
Supposedly allows me to insert Windows Live Maps directly into the blog entry.
Compatibility: According to Microsoft’s Live Writer Blog, the program supports “Blogger, LiveJournal, TypePad, WordPress (and many others).” It works really well with WordPress, which is what I use on this site.
So far this is the absolute best piece of offline blogging software that I’ve tried.
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Microsoft Word has “excellent” blogging features, or so they say. So this post will be made and edited in Word, including a picture upload function, which is why I inserted the above pic of yours truly.
Blogging with Word is very attractive for several reasons.
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Flock | the Social Web Browser
Well, I’m starting to be impressed. First of all, it’s friendly to set up. It gives you prompts for various things, like setting up your Facebook, Gmail, Digg, and other accounts. It bills itself as a social browser and it’s not lying.
I noticed a blurb about Flock being chosen as the number 6 best product of the year by PC World. I have that issue, which is July of 2008. This is pretty good for a product that is free.
To blog, you just set up your account info, and whenever you find anything you want to right about, you right click and select Blog This. It doesn’t get much easier than that.
It also stimulated me to log into the various accounts that I don’t normally use, like Flickr and Twitter.
(I just had flock crash. Doesn’t bode well.) However, it has been mentioned that it might be a little buggy. Also I didn’t get the latest and greatest, I downloaded the default 1.2. According to the Flock Blog, there is a beta release using FireFox 3, which could be good. I’m still not really that happy with some things that FireFox 3 is doing, it seems to lose it’s mind and become static frequently, but that’s not really got anything to do with Flock. If I decide to keep using Flock, I’ll grab the 2.0 beta.
There should be a little bit better documentation on how to set up a self hosted blog on the front page. It also recognized my blog platform at TypePad, which, of course, it’s not. Guess I’ll see how it posts, I won’t be correcting any errors during the review process.
Twitter support and RSS are excellent. It also likes Yahoo! and Gmail. Digg integration is cool, very cool, even though I consider Digg a bag of fail. I don’t see political commentary from “random users” being that useful, and I also don’t like how articles are weighted.
But I digress. The integration and the editor are both nice, even if I consider the editor to be stripped down a bit.
So let’s post this and see if it blows up!
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I don’t like using the web editor built into Wordpress. It works well, but it’s still a web app. I don’t like the look and feel, I want something more along the lines of a word processor. Besides, how many times have you hit publish and watched your post disappear?
I also tend to write in bursts, so to speak. I’ll compile a list of topics that I want to write about, and sit on them for a few days. Then in a spate of mental illness symptoms, I’ll throw four or five together. But since I don’t want to just flood my blog, I like to keep them “local” and only upload an article once a day. This ain’t twittr, you know. 
I also like to review my articles several times before I post.
In the next series of posts, I am going to try out various blog software simply by attempting to use it. I am only looking at inexpensive or free products at this time, and I haven’t got my Mac setup, so this will all be done on Vista Ultimate. Let’s face it, unless you are “high endy” you ARE NOT making any money with your blog.
Check out this other article I found here about various blog tools.
BlogDesk, by Johannes Oppermann
Windows Live Writer, by Microsoft
Ecto, by somebody that needs a better webhoster. As of 09:31 CDT on 19 June, Ecto’s main site is down.
Flock. It’s riding the line between online and offline as it’s a browser based on Mozilla.
So I guess that’s a good start for this series.
-j-
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Back in the old days, Usenet was a huge part of using the Internet. Usenet is VERY pre-world wide web, you know, it started out way back in 1980 as a varied collection of “discussion groups” that propagated throughout the Internet by copying itself, or syncing, throughout the various public, college, and government servers. (You can read about the history of Usenet, here.)
Each topic for discussion is called a newsgroup, and you use a utility called a newsreader to read the articles.
If you can think of something to talk about, there is probably an existing group already talking about it on usenet.
This is not all good though. Illegal software, music, and porn are oft times traded on the usenet network. It is basically an un-moderated network, although each server admin has the ability to lock out both groups and or posters.
It was predicted with the wide public availability of the Web and it’s various types of web based forums that Usenet would be coming to an end, “real soon now.”
Sort of. A lot of casual users did in fact migrate to the web. Hardcore newsguys still struggle through the huge amounts of available data.
Time Warner, Sprint, and Verizon have all announced that they will no longer be offering Usenet access. I think that this decision stems from the fact that New York Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, has targeted over 80 newsgroups that contain child porn and is trying to get ISPs to filter. Rather than filter out those groups, in my opinion the above ISP’s have probably decided that it’s not worth the effort to maintain a service that they are offering free to less than 2 percent of the user base. Legal and resource issues both are probably contributing to this decision.
In fact, according to an article in Network Performance Daily:
Even so, removing the entirety of USENET seemed like overkill if the issue was a handful of groups, and there are certainly free speech implications. So we talked to Jeff Simmermon, Time Warner Cable’s director of digital communication. Simmermon said that the decision to eliminate newsgroups from their service offerings came down to three factors: “a. Very few customers use them; b. the technology is outdated; c. the risk is not worth the reward.”
I agree with the very few customers statement. Usenet is a niche market. Most Internet users don’t even know what usenet is, let alone how to use it, or even that it is there to use.
I don’t really think the technology is outdated. Internet message boards have been saying that “We are the end of usenet” for a while. I don’t agree. Apples to oranges.
According to the above article, as long as an ISP does not edit the service it is NOT responsible for what is on that service. Usenet is a common carrier.
However, what a lot of blogs have been saying is that these ISP’s are going to be blocking usenet access. This is NOT true, at all. They will no longer be offering the service to their users.
Just another reason to get a usenet account thru GigaNews. Sign up, get me a referral credit. It’s fast, uncensored, and easy to set up with any newsreader that you want to use. Be aware, however, that Usenet does have a steep learning curve.
Stay tuned for more articles talking about the wonder that is usenet.
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Vista Ultimate, the 32 bit version. Oh yeah, it only supports 3 gig of ram. For most people I guess this is fine.
However, my biggest issue is running out of ram and going in to swap, and explorer.exe taking up 2 gig of ram by itself.
I was sorting some articles that I had stored, and kept running into the dreaded not enough memory to complete error messages.
I imaged the machine, blew it clean, and installed 64 bit with sp1, it’s very stable. I think that installing sp1 after the fact wasn’t a great solution. I have read several articles that it’s better to either install clean with a slipstreamed vista sp1 disk, use a disk that already has sp1 included from Microsoft, or service pack immediately after installation.
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Well I THINK I posted before that I was using 64 bit Vista Ultimate on my main desktop.
I like having 8 gig of ram. I like 64 bit for the apps that are, well, 64 bit. (Not that many, realistically.) And I really like the interface changes to Windows, too, as well as some of the more well thought out features of Vista Ultimate, like the Backup Status and Configuration applet.
What I didn’t like was the instability, which seemed to have a lot to do with multi-media. Specifically anytime the machine used any advanced sound stuff. Like it’s X-fi card. And the fact that the Adobe CS3 Software that I spent so much for a license for, had issues. Like Distiller not working reliably.
Perusing a back issue of Maximum PC, which you can actually download and read in PDF format, Will Smith has also come to the conclusion that I have. It’s just not worth the hassle.
Back to 32 bit Ultimate I go, probably until Windows 7 happens in a few years.
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