All About Information: 2010 Solo, Small Law Firm Conference
David Whelan's Blog
This is where I have tossed opinions, thoughts, random attempts using technology, and other jetsam that occurs to me. Is it a blog? It's as close as I've come.
Laptop Switch Benefited from Heavy Clouds
A recent acquisition of a Dell Latitude - and the decision to pass our netbooks down to our two grade school Netizens - saw me migrating to a new machine this weekend. It was made exceptionally simple thanks to heavy reliance on cloud and other networking resources. In fact, it's probably been the most straightforward new hardware switch I've made.
Image: Graur Codrin, Freedigitalphotos.net
Image: Graur Codrin, Freedigitalphotos.net
A recent acquisition of a Dell Latitude - and the decision to pass our netbooks down to our two grade school Netizens - saw me migrating to a new machine this weekend. It was made exceptionally simple thanks to heavy reliance on cloud and other networking resources. In fact, it's probably been the most straightforward new hardware switch I've made.
We have an internal network attached storage (NAS) device, so I had very little local content on my netbook. The small amount that I did have locally was either in my Dropbox folder or in my document folders. That content was easily dragged out onto the network.
One of the biggest hassles in the past has been transferring my Web browser settings. It usually meant significant time, after reinstalling the browser, recustomizing it so that I had the same tools and interface. Now that I am using Google Chrome - and fortunately enough, on the dev track - I was able to take advantage of the expanded synchronization. Once I installed Google Chrome 6 on my new laptop, it automatically downloaded all of my Chrome extensions, themes, and other settings.
As I mentioned, much of my other content was stored in a Dropbox account, so installation of that program caused everything to be downloaded. Another task completed. Other content I store is online in sites like Google Docs, or in Web mail applications. Although I occasionally use a local e-mail client, like Microsoft Outlook or Mozilla Thunderbird, I do it with IMAP so that all of my e-mail, folders, calendar, and contacts remain in the cloud as well.
I've wiped and installed software on 3 PCs this weekend, and it has gone incredibly smoothly. I've benefited from a lot of reliance on network storage for data and settings.
Creating a Book Cover Photomosaic
You won't ever see my photograph on the Web replaced by a small kitten or flower or baby's face, like some people do. But I have been thinking about having something less stiff than a standard cropped head for my avatars and profile photos on sites like Twitter, Gravatar, etc. That's why I was excited to see David Louis Edelman's post on his blog about using Librarything covers as a basis for a photomosaic. It's easy and can be done with any type of image folder, although his instructions are for the cataloging, book loving types.
Mr. Edelman's post can be read here and includes all the links you need, including a link to Librarything that will display all of your images. Right click on the page once all of your book covers have loaded, save as a complete Web page, and you're in business. The folder that contains all of your book covers will become your tile source.
I used Andreamosaic and the whole process, from installing the program to downloading the images to making the first mosaic was about 10 minutes. This is something I'd been meaning to do for awhile but it wasn't until we were in a U.S. government office and saw a nice photomosaic of Abraham Lincoln made up of Civil War photos that I was (again) prompted to do it. Here is my final mosaic, with no covers duplicated:
Watching DVDs on Lucid Lynx Ubuntu
I was recently watching a conference presentation that I had been unable to attend. When I opened the video file, Totem Movie Player showed the video and played the audio. If I moved or resized the window, the screen went black and all I had left was the audio. I found the same behavior when I tried to watch a DVD on my machine, and finally had to move to Kaffeine in order to get consistent video and sound.
The sound and video problem sounds like it's not uncommon although I couldn't find anyone who seemed to have the exact experience I did. The first thing I stumbled upon was that you need to activate the application that enables playing of restricted or encrypted DVDs. In my case, I already had libdvdcss2 installed but it wasn't active; this instruction page showed how to enable it.
That step enabled the playing of the DVD but I then found I had the same problem I'd had with the Web-based video: initially I could see the screen but then it would blank while the audio continued. In the case of the DVD, I could actually click on the black screen to activate the DVD menu but it didn't change the video issue.
I also added the Medibuntu repositories and the w32 codecs it offers. This appeared to be a solution for some Ubuntu-ites although it didn't fix my DVD problem.
After hunting for a very short while, I came across two things. First, that this problem (when it happens) may be an existing bug in the movie player, and so there's no workaround. Secondly, the alternative Kaffeine video player seems to be free of this problem. Sure enough, when I installed Kaffeine and played the DVD, I had no difficulties at all. Kaffeine was already in my Ubuntu Software Center, so need for the command line. I would have been interested to know if I'd installed Kaffeine first, whether I would have needed any of the other steps.
I went back to see if the Web version of the conference presentation was now fixed as well, and it seems to be fine even when playing in Movie Player. I may try to change my default Web movie viewer to Kaffeine but if Movie Player is fixed for the Web and I can invoke Kaffeine for DVDs, I'm in good shape.
Laptop Switch Benefited from Heavy Clouds
