The Dumb Get Dumber

I was sent this by a friend:

I don't watch Fox News (which is more opinion and show biz than news) because it makes me apoplectic, and I can't reach through the TV and slap people like Palin...

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2010/06/palin_call_in_the_dutch.php

The US' First Amendment is the Right to Free Speech.  It is a good right to have (that we here in Australia don't have, by the way).  That's what allows the dumb to keep oozing from Sarah Palin's mouth.  I respect her right to be dumb and still exercise her right to the First Amendment, but I *wish* she'd just go back to shooting foxes instead of speaking on Fox.  :)  (Yes, that's a bit of literary looseness there, but you get my meaning...)

Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Holding Your iPhone 4 Wrong

The skivvied control freak, Steve Jobs, seems not to understand that poor design (on his part) is truly poor design and that the antenna placement on the new iPhone 4 devices was poorly thought out.  A normal right-handed person holding the phone can easily bridge the two antanna that use the external metal strips, dropping reception down to the point that it may be lost altogether.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Can't Write With Your Finger?

Do you have an iPad (or even an iPhone, I suppose) and want to doodle?  Or have a client sign a work order, purchase order or something else equally useful?  Do you *really* want to do this with a finger, or a pen?

Well, Ten One Design have released 2 styli that will work with the capacitive screens on the iPad and iPhone.  Their Pogo Stylus and Pogo Sketch are able to let you use the iPad like a real tablet.  They both allow you to draw, sign and otherwise write on your iPad with a normal pen-like device.

Also, there's the Capacitive Styra that also does a similar job, with the added bonus of a real pen cartridge in it as well, for those folks who occasionally need to go old school and use paper.  :)

Dagi in Taiwan has a few different models that look rather interesting, too.

Another option, of course, is to cut off someone's finget and mount it on a stick, and as we're in the Australian Winter right now, that's an option - but this would be an issue during the Australian Summer, I'd think.  :)


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Woolworths and Visa/MasterCard Debit

Woolworths has decided to limit the way we can purchase goods from them - they no longer accept Visa Debit nor MasterCard Debit transactions - you need to use EFTPOS or cash.

Woolworths is claiming that the 6.6c/transaction they are charged for this is high and unnecessary.  This is the same amount (afaik) that they are charged for the use of a Credit Card and really close to what they are charged (again, afaik) for EFTPOS transactions.  Have you seen the merchant fees on an Amex Card lately?

Does this make me want to buy goods from Woolworths?  Nope.  We have an Aldi as close to us as Woolworths is, and until they start dictating how we can buy goods from them, I'm going to be relocating my Woolworths purchases to Aldi.

The 6.6c/transaction they save will never be offset by the loss of money from all of my goods purchases, nor those many others who are doing the same thing - vote with your wallet!


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Mapping SkyDrive Folders As Network Drives In Windows 7

If you have a Windows Live SkyDrive account and wish to use it like any other network device, you can map it to a drive letter.  Using Windows 7, this is how you can do this:

Office 2010

1. Open a blank document in word 2010
2. File, Save & Send, Save to Web
3. Sign in to your Windows Live account (if you've not already saved the credentials in Word 2010)
4. Choose the SkyDrive folder you wish to save to
5. Click the "Save As" button
6. You will see the URL up the top - click in a blank space and copy this URL, which will be something like https://foobar.docs.live.net/15eec001f00dcafe/Documents which we'll use a little later


Office 2007 (and maybe Office 2003 - too old for me to try)

1. Sign in to Live SkyDrive and upload a Word document to your Documents folder
2. Click on the uploaded document, which will open it for viewing in the Word Web App
3. Click the Open in Word button up the top left of the page
4. Sign in to your Windows Live account
5. File, Save As and you will see the URL up the top - click in a blank space and copy this URL, which will be something like https://foobar.docs.live.net/15eec001f00dcafe/Documents which we'll use next


Mapping The Drive Letter In Windows 7

1. Open Windows Explorer (or My Computer), right click on Computer or Network and choose "Map network drive..."
2. Choose the drive letter you wish to use and then paste the URL into the "Folder" box, ensure "Reconnect at logon" and "Connect using different credentials" are both checked then click OK
3. Enter your Live ID username and password in the Windows Security box and choose "Remember my credentials" if you want Windows to remember them instead of having to type them in each time you log in to your computer and first access the SkyDrive folder


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Office Web Apps

Microsoft's Office Web Apps are nigh.  I've been playing for a while now with Word, Excel and PowerPoint docs saved to my Live SkyDrive (25GB free, online storage) and it works reasonably well.  A document saved to your SkyDrive online storage can be viewed in SkyDrive using Microsoft Office Web Apps and can even be edited online.  If you want, the document can then be opened for more powerful editing in Word/Excel/PowerPoint 2010 (or 2007 or 2003) if it is installed on your desktop.

Now, the online Microsoft Office Web Apps aren't bad - they don't offer the full scale of features that the regular Microsoft Office application suite provides, but for a free, online, edit (almost¹) everywhere Office app that renders documents the same way Office 2010 renders them on your desktop, Office Web Apps is quite usable.

If you want to share OneNote documents between multiple computers - or multiple users - then you don't need to have a SharePoint site set up for this any longer.  I've not yet played with OneNote sharing between multiple machines nor users with Live SkyDrive as we have a SharePoint site, however I probably should, if only to test it out.  SharePoint offers more benefits than just sharing OneNote documents, but for smaller businesses who don't want or need to get a SharePoint site up and running, either locally or hosted, then Live SkyDrive offers OneNote sharing.

Do you want to map your SkyDrive folders to your computer(s)?  Well, have a read of this blog post for how to do this in Windows 7.


¹ Opera 10.53 fails to render any Word documents (at least - if it fails at that, I can't be bothered trying any further until they fix this), however it works fine in Chrome, Firefox and obviously in IE8.  I don't have Safari installed on my Win 7 box so I don't know what Safari support for Office Web Apps is like.  All the browsers I tested, aside from Opera (which is glacial compared to the others, by the way) also open the files for editing.



Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

More Conroy Lies

I recently blogged about iiNet's correction of Senator Stephen Conroy's lie that iiNet supported the Internet Filter (aka The Government Does Your Thinking For You).  Now, Senator Conroy is either as prone to lying as Tony Abbot is or he is as clueless about the way the Internet operates as Sen. Ted Stevens is.

Now, whether Senator Conroy simply doesn't understand the way the Internet works or whether he's actively lying about things and making up stories to scare people into considering his Internet Filter will do some good, comments like this (“[If] you were doing a banking transaction, or transmitting personal information, they could have hoovered it up, sucked it up into their machine”) (Gizmodo) are utter bullshit.

I read this earlier this week on the News.com.au website and was rather stunned to hear that sort of FUD coming from Senator Conroy.  But after more thought - and considering the FUD that he's spewing forth about his pet project - the Internet Filter - I'm not surprised.

And after reading a Facebook post by David Harcourt referencing that Gizmodo article, I felt that I also had to add some weight to this issue.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Symantec Buys PGP

Phil Zimmerman's PGP - Pretty Good Privacy - was developed in 1991, sold to Network Associates (McAfee) in 1997, put on hold by McAfee in 2001, bought back by PGP Corporation (made up of original PGP team members) in 2002 and has now been bought by Symantec.

Well, that's the death knell for PGP.  Symantec and their Shitas Touch - where everything they buy is dismantled and destroyed - will take it, break it and make it useless, slow, resource intensive and almost impossible to uninstall without a complete system format.  This seems to be what Symantec does best.

Farewell PGP - I knew you when you were young and viable!


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

iPad SIM Plan Comparison

Not that I can see a use for an iPad - no Flash, no multitasking, no camera... but for those who can, here's a comparison by Lifehacker on 27 May 2010 of the iPad SIM Plans that were available at that date.

Now, be aware that these plans will change often and widely and that your location and the location you'll use any mobile device will weigh heavily on the provider(s) you can consider.  Also recall that the iPhone 3GS, the iPad and the upcoming iPhone 4 are all quad band devices, so will operate on 850MHz (Telstra regional), 900MHz (Optus and VHA regional), 1800MHz (not used in Australia) and 2100MHz (Optus, VHA and Telstra metro) bands.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Even Mr Turtleneck Sweater Has AT&T Issues

Yup, that's right - even the Chief Turtleneck Wearer has both Wi-Fi and AT&T connectivity issues as you can see here.  It seems something "magical" was happening in the area...


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

BP's New Logo

It looks like BP - is that an acronym for Bad Planning, Big Problems, Blown Pipes or British Petroleum - are even deeper in the shit that they want to believe.  According to CNN, there's been new oil plume evidence discovered in the Gulf of Mexico, even though BP's CEO, Tony Hayward, claimed earlier that "The oil is on the surface.  There aren't any plumes."

It looks like people are being proactive (more so than BP is with capping this well) and offering BP a hand redesigning their logo to better represent where they stand today.  My favorite so far has to be this one, followed closely by this one.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Pied Piper Of Stupid People

There's a woman we all know of, who'd be a MILF if we weren't so concerned her level of dumb would be somehow contagious.  Sarah Palin - the woman who's clearly several ice blocks short of an igloo - has recently blamed extreme environmentalists for the ongoing BP gulf oil disaster.  The Huffington Post reports on her latest outburst of utter stupidity.

Also, as reported here, she recently tweeted this "thought":

Gulf: learn from Alaska's lesson w/foreign oil co's: don't naively trust- VERIFY. Livelihood affected by spill?Don't sign away remedy rights

And then, on the same page, is this reminder to Palin:

UPDATE: Many thanks to an emailer named Ben, who reminds me that for eighteen long years, that dodgy, not-to-be-trusted foreign oil company known as British Petroleum employed one Todd Palin.

It is amazing to see how little her mind retains (not to mention how little it can process).  She's dangerous - to her state (does she forget how well Exxon, a US company, has treated Alaska?), her country and to the rest of the world.  The sooner she and her money disappear from public view, the safer the rest of us will be.

Oh yes - Sarah Palin is hot - very hot. And stupid - very, very, very stupid. Which is *not* hot. Her stupidity significantly outranks her hotness.  Almost every time she opens her mouth, the amount of "dumb" that comes out is frightening!

(On another point, Sophie B. Hawkins' claim that "It was just before Earth Day 2010 when the when the BP disaster, a veritable "Chernobyl of the Ocean" and possibly the worst oil spill in human history, erupted.", at the bottom of the first Huffington Post article on Sarah Palin's latest outburst or utter inanity, is not quite correct - have a read of this Wikipedia article that lists the largest oil spilld in the world thus far and you'll see that the Deepwater Horizon oil spill (ongoing) even at upper estimates of the amount of oil spilled, is still well down the list.  It *definitely* has potential to rise higher, considering the ongoing ineptitude of BP to get the spill under control - however we'll need to see how much of Sarah Palin's dumb has really rubbed off on BP through her husband, Todd.)


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

HP ROK & Hyper-V

After some unnecessary grief between HP and myself, we've now both worked out there's a new way to enable Hyper-V support for HP ROK media.  Originally, there was a file on HP branded Server 2008 x64 media called D:\Sources\$OEM$\$$\system32\HPVirtualOSE.exe that was needed to be run after Hyper-V was installed that enabled HP ROK media to be used in a virtual guest.  That's now changed.

Now there's a file in the same place on the HP-branded Server 2008 x64 media called D:\Sources\$OEM$\$$\system32\HPactive.cmd that does the trick.

Nice of HP to let their internal support staff know about this.

Now we all know about it - so this should save everyone the grief that I just went through with HP, and it should save HP the same grief.

There's going to be an additional post detailing the Easy Start-up CD issues that exist on an HP ML150 G6, but I'll again wait until that's resolved before posting.  Just a heads up - if you're installing the 2nd Server from WSBS2K8 SP2 on an ML150 G6, you can't use the Easy Start-up CD to install it as the installation fails dugint the "expand files" section of the unattended install in the WS2K8 SP2 x64 portion - you will currently need to install this host OS manually, then manually apply all firmware and drivers and install the latest HP SIM.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

iiNet Does Not Support Conroy's Filter

Just because iiNet has been involved in the consultation process for Senator Conroy's "let's waste taxpayer money on something doomed to failure and which definitely won't come close to doing what it claims to do" Internet Filter doesn't mean they support it.

Last weekend Conroy falsely claimed that iiNet supported the Internet Filter, and here's what iiNet had to say in response to that false claim.

I'm *all for* protecting children from the nasty parts of the Internet, but I'm *dead against* Government-forced censorship - we're not China.  It is a parent's responsibility to bring their children up as they choose to, allowing or disallowing access to certain things - and the society will support or disagree with their decisions, moulding the society it chooses to be.  The Government SHOULD NOT enforce copyright on its citizens in a free country.

Not to mention that this filter will not stop people "stumbling" upon kiddy porn sites - there's no way anyone can stumble on these - they aren't available on the web, they are available through encrypted, secured channels, ensuring the lowlife scum that access them isn't easily infiltrated by police and other law enforcement officials.  The Internet Filter will play no part whatsoever in limiting child pornography, which is the claim as to the reason for its existence.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Mac Spyware

There's been more Mac malware discovered, as reported by PCWorld.  This is definitely not the first and will be far from the last!


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

More Roman Catholic Barrelscraping

If you wonder how low this Pope can go, then have a read of this and add it to what I've already reported and what else is out there - I don't know if there is any low water mark that this man won't actively sink below.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

Sinkholes in Guatemala

OK, back in Feb 2007, this sinkhole formed.  Just today, THIS sinkhole also formed in Guatemala!  Here it is from another angle.  And this after a volcano eruption a few days ago...
Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie

RIP David Houston

It is a sad day when we lose a good human being, and we've lost David Houston after a long battle with health issues and a really shit run of bad luck. David's work with SMB IT in Ireland and around the world will be remembered for a long time. His enthusiasm for the community will too.

He was a good friend, a great bloke, and will be sorely missed.

If you haven't already, please have a beer for him.

RIP Dave.


Regards,

The Outspoken Wookie