Nerdy Geeky – Page 4 – Thought Patterns Archive

Three Month Tour

Posted on 05/26/2011 by PaulaO

NASA today officially declared Spirit dead. I am sad, really sad. Spirit, along with Opportunity, landed on Mars over 6 years ago with a mission plan of 3 months. Spirit would still be going except he got stuck and couldn’t get into position to keep enough power to last through the bitter cold Martian winter. After over an Earth year of no contact, they ceased attempts to get him to contact.

Spirit last communicated on March 22, 2010, as Martian winter approached and the rover’s solar-energy supply declined. The rover operated for more than six years after landing in January 2004 for what was planned as a three-month mission. NASA checked frequently in recent months for possible reawakening of Spirit as solar energy available to the rover increased during Martian spring. A series of additional re-contact attempts ended today, designed for various possible combinations of recoverable conditions.

(…)

Spirit drove 4.8 miles (7.73 kilometers), more than 12 times the goal set for the mission. The drives crossed a plain to reach a distant range of hills that appeared as mere bumps on the horizon from the landing site; climbed slopes up to 30 degrees as Spirit became the first robot to summit a hill on another planet; and covered more than half a mile (nearly a kilometer) after Spirit’s right-front wheel became immobile in 2006. The rover returned more than 124,000 images. It ground the surfaces off 15 rock targets and scoured 92 targets with a brush to prepare the targets for inspection with spectrometers and a microscopic imager.

“What’s really important is not only how long Spirit worked or how far Spirit drove, but also how much exploration and scientific discovery Spirit accomplished,” Callas said.

As some one else said before I could (dangit!):

So long, Spirit, and thanks for the data.

Keyboard Revisited

Posted on 04/14/2011 by PaulaO

So I’ve had this keyboard for a while now, the Kinesis Freestyle (I wrote about it a while back). I’ve almost gotten used to it and can now give a decent review of it.

For one, the keys being separated is weird. It truly feels as if each hand is doing its own thing. I mean, they’re doing the same thing if they’d been on a single keyboard piece but for some reason, it feels really weird. It took longer to get used to than I thought. I have slowly been putting them further apart, trying to find that placement as well, but the further I go, the more I have to relocate my hands on the keys. Weird.

Instead of resting on the keyboard like usual, my hands kinda float over them. I really really hate the placement of the backspace and delete key. I’ve slowly gotten used to the backspace location but I have to stop and look to find the delete key. The home and end buttons are odd too but I don’t use them that much. I do miss having a keypad. I’d just started to enjoy it now that I am using a desktop and now it is more like using a laptop again. Sigh. I am a touch typist and have realized, with this keyboard, that I am having to relocate my hands to the proper place. I have gotten into the habit of twitching my index fingers to make sure they are on the F and J keys (the ones with the bumps) whenever I stop to think or first start typing. It is almost like learning to touch type all over again. I am constantly hitting the / key when I want the . one. Which is probably why I know the backspace key location so well!

I’ve also been surprised at the horizontal angle my hands feel the most comfortable with. The left is not much different than before, straight on. A little turn (top toward the right) but not by much. The right one, though, wow, what a tilt. The top is really angled toward the left. That shoulder is my loosest and tends to splay outward so that is probably why. But it is strange to see it revealed this way. The right one is also more forward and the left is closer to my body.

I’ve tried the different ‘tenting’ angles. I don’t like the full one so far but I’ve not used it that much. I switch between the lowest and the mid one. (can’t recall the actual degrees). The left hand likes the midrange tilt. The highest one makes the hand hot faster. And that’s the other thing. My left hand gets very warm the more I type. No clue why. I need to ask my PT friend if she knows. The right one may eventually like the highest tilt but, like I said, I’ve not used it much. I am finally starting to type more lately and will do another review later.

In some ways, the keyboard seems solidly made. But in other ways, it feels cheap. Could just be the keys themselves and how they react to pressure.

I keep the mouse between the two pieces. It fits nicely, even when the pieces are fairly close together.

Overall, I like the keyboard. I like that my hand placement can be nearly anywhere, depending on how I am feeling and how I am using it. Ergonomic? Yes, definitely. Worth the money? Yes, definitely again. Recommend it to others? Only if you touch type. If you use the ‘hunt and peck’ method, you will hate hate hate this keyboard. But then, if you hunt/peck, you don’t need it.

New Toy – Keyboard At Last

Posted on 03/08/2011 by PaulaO

Several years ago (2005) I wrote an article on alternative keyboards. In that article, I briefly talk about a lot of different keyboards and the various options available. I also say that I will get the Kinesis Evolution with the desk mount option. Sadly, that particular keyboard was discontinued a short time later. However, Kinesis has several other very ergodynamic keyboards now.

First there’s the tried and true Contoured. Very similar to the Maltron ($825), the Countoured ($399) keyboards are very popular. But without being able to try one, I wasn’t willing to spend that amount of money.

I revisited the Kinesis website and was pleased to see that their Freestyle and Maxim were still being produced. I wandered over to The Human Solution website and did some more research. I was stuck between the Freestyle (true split keyboard) vs the Maxim/Goldtouch (split but attached to a base). I found an article about just that sort of decision and, based on that and in discussions with Elena, I decided to buy the Freestyle with the V3 riser thingy and the 20″ extension.

And it came today!

I have the riser thing on and I’m not quite sure if I like it. I didn’t go with the other kit, the VIP, because I knew that plastic on my wrists was going to kill me this summer. I have it on the 2nd setting (10 deg). My right shoulder is pitching a fit lately so I’m not sure which is to blame for the uncomfortable-ness. It will take a while to get used to it. I am a touch typist which helps I’m sure! Hunt/peck method with the keyboard split apart would be a major pain in the ass.

I just switched to the highest incline (15 degrees) and while my left arm is still quite comfortable, my right is not. I am fairly certain it is the shoulder and not the keyboard.

Anyway, there’s a few different things (besides the fact it is in 2 pcs on purpose?) about this keyboard.

It has some built-in macros. For example, it has cut, paste, and copy buttons on the left side. But I’ve used the right click and the Ctrl C/V/X for so long, I doubt I will easily switch to a button format.

It doesn’t have a keypad. It has a function key to access a keypad like setup (just like most laptops). Twice now I have hit that Fn key instead of the Ctrl key. Kinesis sells a “low force” keypad. But the price ($54) is outrageous compared to the $19.99 one I can pick up at BestBuy.

The Delete key (a writer’s most used key, second only to the Backspace) is oddly located. It is way up on the top row, well out of easy reach. That’s going to take some getting used to. On the left, with the copy and paste bound keys, is another Delete key. The Escape key is way up there as well but everyone is used to that.

I’ll use it for a few days then let y’all know what I think. And let me know if you want more or different photos of it.

(click image for larger version)

iPod Touch Stuff Again

Posted on 01/01/2011 by PaulaO

I was lucky enough to get the 4th generation iPod Touch for Christmas. I’ve had the 2nd gen for quite some time and love it. There have been updates to the “software” it uses but it could only do so much with what it had. This one, however, rocks.

Transferring over the apps and music was simple enough. Some bumps along the way but I think I have it figured out. This one comes with a camera, too, so I also had to figure out how to get the pics from there to my computer. Disgustingly simple, really.

Then I realized I had all my notes on the standard Note program. I tried to email them to me but for some reason, I get an error message. Then I remembered the newest thing for iPod Touch and the iPhone. Used to, if you wanted to transfer docs from the device to the PC or visa versa, you had to use a desktop program that may or may not work. Then Apple, in its wisdom, decided some of these transfer programs were illegal (especially the ones that actually worked). It was one of the big reasons why I don’t do much writing on the Touch. In one of the recent updates, transferring became much more simpler. Mostly.

To transfer the Notes from the 2nd gen Touch to the PC, I copied the text and put it into Notebook as a ‘note’ (vs a ‘book’), a writing app I tried. I used this one because it opened the fastest. Then I plugged in the Touch, opened iTunes, and went to the apps tab. Below the apps listing is the File Sharing. Any app you have that allows this will be listed. Clicking on the Notebook app listed the folder it uses to store notes. I selected the folder then the “save to…”. Viola! There they were. I plugged in the 4th gen Touch and went to the file sharing. I selected Notebook app, then the “add” button and added all the text files I had made (you can also drag-and-drop).

But when I checked the device, none of the files were listed. I think it is because Notebooks uses a folder. You cannot open that folder and put the files directly there. If you select the folder then the ‘add’, the files are not put in the folder that way either. This time I tried DocsToGo and it worked. I will probably leave most of them there and only copy/paste over the ones that I use the most. Otherwise, I will just view them via that program.

Now, how to transfer over the ebooks…..

Jesus Saves

Posted on 12/31/2009 by PaulaO

There’s an old joke about the devil and Jesus seeing who could write the best program within a certain time frame. During it, the power goes out. When it comes back on, they get back to work and, of course, Jesus wins. Reason why? Jesus saves (his work).

If you need that ‘splained, well, I dunno.

Anyway, normally I am a big believer in using “autosave” when I write. I use OpenOffice.org which has this feature. Yesterday, I was writing like mad. Had about, oh, four new pages done. And for some dumbass reason, my laptop rebooted.

Insert silent cursing, silent staring, silent rage. Silent because it was at night and Precious was asleep. Had it been the daytime hours, well, it would have been loud and it would have scared the dogs.

OpenOffice has a lot of different options in regards to saving your work. One of them is “always create a backup copy” and the other is “save autorecovery information every” and there’s a drop down menu with time choices. The backup option is not an automatic save option. What it does, basically, is when you tell it to save, it first puts the old copy somewhere then saves the new copy. So if when you last saved and was on page 42 and this save is on 52, the 42 page version is saved somewhere and the 52 page does the usual save thing. AutoRecovery, meanwhile, sets aside copies of the current document at the time interval you specified. If, for some dumbass reason your computer reboots, when you next open OpenOffice.org, it will give you a menu to auto recover that document (and any others you had open at that time).

This has saved by cute butt cheeks many times. My Dell had a series of fits where it would randomly lock up and I’d have to unplug it and take out the battery. Back then, I had the timer set to 5 minutes. I was also writing a lot back then and in 5 minutes, that could be several hundred words lost. But the autorecovery is annoying because when it is doing that, the program momentarily pauses. You can’t enter text. It royally messes up any writing flow you had going. So once the Dell got over its fit, I moved it to 10 minutes. Then when my writing started to be so sporadic, I changed it to 20.

I suppose it is a good thing that I just moved it back to 10.

And speaking of saving, I also realized I’d not done any backups in a long time. I used to be quite religious about it, even making backup copies of my WIP folder in several places. That is on my agenda for today. That and take over the world.

Oh, and I can’t believe I never announced this! On October 28, 2009, OpenOffice.org 3 was downloaded for the 100,000,000th time (that’s one hundred million) since it was released just over a year ago.

Music To Write By

Posted on 12/02/2009 by PaulaO

I have a writing playlist and recently expanded it on my iPod Touch (57 songs). It is very eclectic. None of the songs are ones I want to stop and listen to the words (like Pink’s Glitter in the Air) or force me to stop and sing along (like Sweet Honey In the Rock’s Would You Harbor Me). It has Bonnie Raitt, Pink Floyd, Sheryl Crow, Pink, Paul Simon, Barbara Streisand, Billy Joel, ZZ Top, Reba McEntire, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Eric Clapton, and Tracy Chapman. I’m not finished putting it together yet. I didn’t put any Jeff Healey in there but, like Clapton, I have to be careful which ones I use or I find myself doing the air guitar thing.

Does anyone else listen to music while writing?

New Math

Posted on 10/19/2009 by PaulaO

The receptionist person where I go for PT has 2 kids, one of whom is in, I think, 4th grade. She’s entertained me several times with the tough homework her kid brings home. Like:

What do the following have in common?

assess
banana
revive

There were others, but I can’t remember them. Anyone know the answer?

Last week or so we discussed math and how they are currently teaching division.

Here’s how I learned to do it. 12 into 16, then 12 into 36.

But here’s how her daughter is being taught to do it. You know that 12 will go into 162 at least 10 times so you write ten down. And you know 12 will go into 42 at least 3 times so you write 3 down. Then add the numbers on the right together and you get the answer.

How weird is that? In a way, it makes sense but not by much. Math is about breaking it down and putting it back together again. This way is about taking guesses and putting your guesses together when you’ve run out of them.

When I was in 4th grade, I had Mrs. Reel (shudder) for my math teacher. She didn’t like me because of a problem with my older sibling 2yrs prior. I didn’t like her, either. Anyway, she had me doing division in some sort of twisted way and I just could not wrap my brain around it. Instead of teaching me another way, she tried to force it on me. Didn’t work. Finally, I’d had enough and just could not do the in-class work. I leaned back in my seat and crossed my arms. She got mad, drug me outside to the hall, and beat my butt with a paddle. I’d barely sat down when the school secretary came to get me. This did not please Mrs. Reel one bit because her favorite “Watch The Idiot Do the Problem” toy was leaving. She made me wait until she wrote a note to my parents (it was my grandfather who had come to get me).

That night, my father whopped me again for being a snot then sat me down (how ironic) to have me show him how bad I was at division. I tried to show him, he got all freaked out, showed me another way, and in less than 5 minutes, I could do any division problem he gave me. He went to school the next day and ripped Mrs. Reel a new you-know-what. He was furious that she’d not even tried to show me another way. He had her give me any division problem and had me do it. I did it. She was floored and, sigh, mad at me again.

As a historical side note, my grandfather came to get me that day because my mother had become very ill. That day was the beginning of a new phase of my life. Mrs. Reel’s treatment of me was just a small part of a huge upheaval but I remember it better than the rest. Perhaps because it was something my young brain could grasp while the rest of it was chaos.

Mount Wilson Observatory

Posted on 09/02/2009 by PaulaO

Phew! After several days of nail biting, the Mount Wilson Observatory has been declared saved.

The fires in California have caused a lot of damage. In its path is/was the Mount Wilson Observatory and the 22 radio, television, and cell phone towers. Even the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) was threatened, although the fires did not get that close. Smoke was a bigger problem there and resulted in the JPL being left empty except for absolute essential mission staff. It is awesome that the fire fighters took such good care of the observatory and had made it a high priority. Not just were very very expensive equipment at risk, but also communication towers and scientific studies. We here in WNC witnessed the mess a down tower can cause. It was either during the Blizzard of ’93 or during Hurricane Opal that a huge tower went down. The support cables cleared several acres of trees when they snapped and whipped around. It took a long time to repair. Even longer for one of the local public radio stations to get back on the air with their original coverage. It was several years before they had a permanent solution to their tower problems.

I followed the news about the observatory via the Planetary Society’s bloggers.

(in chronological order)
The Station Fire is near JPL and even closer to Mt. Wilson
Station Fire update: Mount Wilson Observatory still there, but still under threat
Station fire update: Mount Wilson safe, ready for “another hundred years” of science

You can also find news articles at Google News.

Apps for Writers – Reviews

Posted on 08/15/2009 by PaulaO

Today I finally got a new router and finally got the laptop to working through it. I said some words, banged my head several times, plugged, unplugged, replugged, reset, called my brother twice, said some more words…you get the idea.

So now the laptop is attached to the net via wireless. Cool. Once I was certain I had that down and everything was working, I then went to work on getting the iPod Touch to also be on the wireless network. This wasn’t as painful but there’s a lot of info out there (better than I could find for the router) on how to do it. As soon as it was connected, I got to work on figuring out how Quickword and DocsToGo can be synced with the laptop.

Quickword was so easy. I opted to “mount as a drive”. At the bottom of the opening page is a URL (http://192.168.1.103:4242). You then go to the Network section of your computer and make the Touch a part of the network using that URL. It is easy and I did it the first time. Once that was set up, it is a simple matter of dragging and dropping documents in and out of its network folder. The other way, and is even more simple, is to enter in that URL into your web browser. Quickword can only read .doc (and I think .txt) so I had to open and save a document from .odt (openoffice format) to .doc. Then drag the folder into the other and boom, there it was on the Touch. However, and you knew there had to be, the Quickword app has to be open before it will transfer.

And I found out why. That URL? That’s for Quickword only. DocsToGo has a different port it uses so the URL ending is different. So unless Quickword is open, the network won’t see it, just like if a computer on the network was turned off.

DocsToGo wasn’t quite as easy. First, I had to download another software for the desktop. Then I had to add the device. Then I had to enter a code into the device. DocsToGo has a URL, too, although I’m not sure what it is for. The other software is simple enough, although I can’t seem to get the document on the Touch to transfer to the computer. I’m trying again right now and the transfer, if that is what’s happening, is taking a very long time.

The third app I tried, and may have actually liked, is called Notebooks. But it has a major flaw, in my opinion, and that is in editing. Here’s an example. I write this sentence: “Sitting in the waiting room, doing nothing but wait, is a pianful experience.” With DocsToGo and Quickword, I can put the cursor directly in the middle of the misspelled word and correct it. With Notebooks, just like the built in Notes, you can’t select the middle of a word. I can only select the end of the word and hit backspace. Rather annoying. I kind of liked its ability to stack a “book” within “books”. Meaning I could have a “book” named WorldBuild and inside it have books called characters, geography, archery, etc. But that annoying edit bit will drive me nuts far too soon. And I’ve tried software like that before and grew to dislike the dozens or more folders with bits of the novel scattered throughout.

As much as it pains me, I will (probably) be using Quickword. The syncing of documents is the easiest and requires no additional software. Now that I can sync, I will be using it to do actual editing in the form of writing bits as it comes to me then pasting it into a document either on the computer or on the device.

Podcasts

Posted on 08/10/2009 by PaulaO

Now for the podcast post. (gosh, that’s hard to say out loud!)

On my iPod Touch, I have started downloading podcasts. I subscribe to a bunch of them. Each time I sync the device with iTunes, it puts all the new ones on there. I had to mess with the settings for a while to figure out how to keep the ones I wanted on the device vs getting deleted because they were “old”. Basically, I keep the device setting (in iTunes) to manual.

National Public Radio (NPR) must haves: (and the average length)

Writing Related:

Misc:

the same place

You don’t need a player to get or listen to podcasts. I normally either listen to them directly from the website or I download them and listen later. That’s how I used to listen to ‘Wait, Wait…’. I sometimes listen to “Writing Excuses” and “Litopia” (they have a sidebar chock full o’ ways to subscribe/download to podcasts).

The problem with podcasts is that you are listening to someone’s voice. And the beauty of voices are in the ear of the beholder. There are some people I cannot stand. Carl Kasell, who does the “Wait, Wait…” shows – cannot stand his voice. The idea of winning his voice on my answering machine just is not appealing. I enjoy him, enjoy his sense of humor and style, but nope no way on the voice itself. Grammar Girl has a good voice and enunciates well (good?). I can listen to Garrison Keillor all day and enjoy every second of it. Except when he gets long-winded and I forget where he started. Some podcasters insist on putting loud music on before and after. “Writing Excuses” also tries to be funny. Which they usually aren’t. Which is why I don’t listen to them very often. Again, your mileage may vary and my opinion is just that: mine. Lorna has no trouble listening to Carl Kasell.

The good thing about podcasts is that you can listen to them at any time. On the way to work, while waiting at the drs office, etc. “Grammar Girl” is best listened to when you can take notes. “Wait Wait…” is best listened to when no one will look at you weird for falling down while laughing.

Just don’t let them pile up on your computer or device. I save “Writer’s Almanac” and listen to them all at once, usually a week’s worth. Same with “Grammar Girl”, although sometimes she fries my brain. And don’t get a ton of them. Get a ton at first then weed out the ones you know you won’t go back to often enough to make it worth the space on your drive. I’ve tried out a lot more podcasts than the ones I listed above. Some were just silly/stupid, some were loud and obnoxious, some were just not for me.

Again and as always, I would like to hear from others who do the podcast thing. And if you don’t, I’d like to know why. And no, I won’t ever do one. I have an awful voice and the accent would drive people nutso.