A circuit board for the masses: the Arduino microcontroller. Photo: James Day

For anyone who as ever been out looking for a little microprocessor to help you do something better, this is a heavenly gift.  You can modify these plans at low cost to engineer your new device.  And lots of folks already have!  Without licensing fees! 

Arduino gadgets: WineM coaster; Snail Light Seeker; interactive embroidery with conductive threads; and Botanicalls, which tells you when your plants need water.

Can this be the wave of the future?  I certainly appreciate a product that is patented and rigorously tested.  I doubt I’d be interested in an open source automobile, but for some things, open source is really going to catch on.  All of my websites are run on open source software  (WordPress) programmed in open source languages (php).  I would love to have inexpensive devices tell me when my kids have left the lights on in their room and turn it off for them.  How about a wireless device that makes sure your plants always have the right amout of moisture?  Automatic curtain closers?  I could go on.  Clearly,  there is room to grow in this market and it may just be the home tinkerer who comes up with the next great device that changes our lives…via open source. 

Read more at Wired

The Leading Role - aka the victim

I love the Internet. The things you can find, the ideas people have. Deviant Art has a way of pulling together some interesting talent. But it takes some time to go through and find the gems. I wish I could build animation like this.  This is truly one of the gems. Great action, cool story line, perfect blend of sound effects… I can’t wait to see the sequel!

The Plot:  A bored animator decides to create a stick figure that he can mangle, maim, and otherwise torture.  But the stick figure, aka “victim” wants no part of this.  The stick figure leaps off the animation work area and wreaks havoc with the menus pulling a few tricks of his own. Watch the movie to see how this turns out!

Animator vs Animation

D

P.S. Interested in making your own flash movies?  Of course there is the tried and true Adobe Flash CS4 Professional, but have you checked out Swish?  I recommend starting with Swish Max.  Get the free download, check out the lessons online, look at the samples, and enjoy programming your own Flash movies!

Don’t get me wrong, these are all great uses of the computer, but you don’t need a high-powered computer to do these activities.  Cell phones are now very capable of handling these functions.  It all boils down to the software.  Can you program enough lines of code to make the computer interact at a higher level?  Can we get semi-autonomous machines that control the light in our house, turn on the lights when it gets dark, control the temperature in the house etc…?

But I digress.  This post is about not being able to keep up with the changes on the internet.  Recently, I discovered Chrome when I downloaded Google Earth.  I also found CoolIris when I was looking for a plugin for Lightroom.  I just signed up for Facebook and have been wondering who else I might know with an account.  I just updated the underlying software for this blog.  I am now using WordPress ver 2.7.

Change is great.  I like the new features that come with new toys.  And with the exception of Lightroom, all were free!  How does this work?  Who is paying for these programmers to pay their rent and electirc bills?  Again I digress.

Chrome is great.  I like being able to search by typing directly in the address bar (I just discovered that IE also allows this…funny I never noticed before…) Hard to keep up.  I like the graphical display (a mini page shot) in Chrome that shows the sites you visit most frequently.  Cooliris is neat but a little disorienting.  I feel like I’m on a boat in the ocean with gentle waves lapping at my boat….I couldn’t stop the screen…it keeps moving a little after your mouse stops. (Turns out you can turn of the gently scrolling feature to make it feel like you are on terra firma). But again, a neat graphical represenation of your searches on a huge wall that spans left and right as far as you like.  Much more fun to search this way than with the simple text responses from google.  But alas, something is missing and I gave up. Too much splash and not enough content….But a step in the right direction.

Google Earth is a great way to view the world.  Wonderful mapping and 360 pictures are eerie.  It is fun to jump into pictures and see where I am jumping.

Lightroom is finally working well for me and I just wish it could handle video images.  Now that the Canon 5D Mark II DSLR can take video (probably not its claim to fame, but it appears game-changing to me), it seems appropriate to have Lightroom pick up the marker and move the ball forward.  Now anyone can use high quality lenses to make movies on a Digital SLR. Wow.

And Facebook.  A neat idea, but can I have a system that allows me to “rate” my friends?  Not everyone comes to my house for dinner and so, everyone on facebook should not be allowed the same level of access.  I have acquaintences, and friends.  I have family and really close friends.  I should be able to rank my contacts to change how much of my Facebook they can access…Not everyone needs to write on my wall.  And those applications that are so neat…why do they have to access everything on my page (to include my friend’s information)?  I would love to try those apps, but if I play, all of my friends content is opened up to the app and then by extension, to google and search engines.   There should be a better lock for this…Maybe I’ll have to make my own “facebook” page… I think I’ll call it “myspatula.com”.  Cause you’ll be able to “cook up”  any scheme you like for keeping track of your contacts….

But I’m just dreaming on.  The more things change, the more humans stay the same.  Technology changes, but will these changes become permanent useful fixtures (like the car, telephone, or Internet), or just road markers on the way to something better (Disc Cameras, Cassette Tapes, Neckties)?  

People like their technology to be transparent.  The only people who brag about the size of their memory card or the number of pixels on the screen are geeks.  The rest of the world just wants to use their toys, watch their DVDs, and enjoy the fresh air….We don’t want to fight the technology, we just want to get by and have our lives be a little easier. But its hard to keep up with the newest gadget…. Got a new gadget you want me to try…Post a comment and let me know about it….

Eventually we will not wear ties.  But I digress…

D

And now that they have fixed the printing issue (was only occuring to a small, but distinguished group), it is truly a great place to print individual photos or standard photo packates.

BUT, Adobe has a long way to go to make this the software I would call near perfect. 

Here are my feature requests for this venerable and otherwise great software:

1. When I take a lot of photos, I like to print them out for the people in the picture.  So I’d like to see a feature where I can select a specific number of photos for each individual photo to be printed.  (i.e. 5 of #2, 4 of #1, etc.)

2. My still camera camera takes video.  My video camera takes still photos.  I’d like to be able to load both video and still images into the computer using Lightroom.

3. Lightroom does not have an effective tool to deal with duplicates.  And if you delete or move photos outside of lightroom, it gets confused.  I’d like an active tool to help me see where images are, if they’ve moved, if I accidently duplicated them–or even intentionally duplicated them (like to send an e-mail 2 years ago).  I’d like the tool to recognize the photo not only by the name, but by the content of the photo.  Identical images but one is inferior quality, smaller size etc.  Then let me cull this growing pile of duplicates with some automation!

4. Face recognition is neat. It is here.  Hello Adobe?

5. After upgrading Lightroom, it cannot find my card reader.  It used to open up automagically to import photos when I slid my cards into the reader.  I’d like Lightroom to notice this and turn the auto feature back on.  (I did it manually and it still doesn’t work…hmmmm)

6. I’d like a better system for swapping images and image libraries between computers.  I use two and would like to have access from both machines….Hmmmmmm.

7. Remote server. Planning on moving *some* of my photos to a remote server.  I wish Lightroom could handle two libraries simultaneously.  Why do I have to hard close out one to use another….Grrrrr.

8. The pop out/pop in menus are great.  Kind of….they keep popping in and out when I wanted to do something different.  Can we get some protectors to turn off the popping when we know we’ll be hovering the mouse in that general area?

9. When loading images from a card, I’d like to (in one step) apply mass Meta data.  I’d like to select x-y photos and tag them with “Tokyo”, then tag a-f with “Football”, and j-m with “Kids”, etc.  Why not at this stage?  Why do I have to tag all of the photos at once?  Come on Adobe…work with me…

10. Not sure why, but sometimes the filters are on the top of the page, sometimes a few are on the bottom.  Sometimes my favorite filters are there (pick, unpick, trash); and sometimes they aren’t.  Sometimes I can’t tell if a fiter is selected or not and I have to click it on and off to verify….can we fix all this so there is less guesswork?  

Lot’s more like this….but I think 10 is a good place to take a break….

Cheers,  D

http://commandwindows.com/

It was then I realized my pst file was 2.8GB.  Apparently, when the pst cruises over the 2GB limit, bad things happen (And I thought computers could work faster to make my life easier…why doesn’t Outlook keep backups, create updates, and properly allocate my pst so it doesn’t cause unrecoverable problems?)

Usually, I make regular copies of this critical file, but somehow, I had just deleted the single backup copy of this file only hours earlier.  And due to its large size, the Microsoft Recycle Bin couldn’t handle it…it was deleted permanently.

No loss though, Microsoft includes a hidden file called ScanPST that checks the pst for errors, repairs it, and gets you back to work in no time at all.  Or so I thought.  I ran ScanPST. It found 60 errors and repaired them, but Outlook was no better.  It still froze just as it did before the scan and repair.

So I searched the Internet.  The hand-dandy know-all Internet.  Surely, some blog, some BBS, some forum has tackled this issue and some smart geek had all the answers I needed.  Most answers told me about ScanPST or even how to ask Microsoft for destructive software to truncate data from my file in case that is the problem.  But none of these really solved the problem.  I found no expert giving superlative pearls of wisdom on this subject.  I did find several companies offering software solutions to repair my PST in exchange for my money.  Of the four companies that I narrowed my selection; three had try before you buy software. One company appeared to be coming from Russia, two from India, and one had stores all over the world.  

I couldn’t find anyone who had rated these software applications, so I bit the bullet, and downloaded trial versions of the software:

• PST Recovery from India dissapointingly gave me a warning error stating it could not locate my Personal Folder.  This is after I navigated to the PST, opened the file and allowed the software to run for several minutes.  I clicked <O.K.> and the program continued to run…and run…and run….  At least, the task bar said it was running, but it didn’t tell me what it was doing.  After 30 minutes of undetermined behavior with the “processing” bar scrolling repeatedly across it’s little window, I shut down the program and uninstalled it. Scratch one.
• RecoveryToolbox, also from India quickly loaded up and automatically found my PST folder.  I selected the PST in question, and clicked on Next.  Within seconds, it had located my folders, and began giving me a running status on how many files, folders, sectors, blocks, etc. it had found and was in the processing of sorting out.  I let it run… for several hours.  It then asked if I wanted to recover the file as a PST or as .eml (for Microsoft Express).  I chose PST and it converted up to 5 e-mails per mail folder (trial version restriction).  I tested the sample and it all worked.  I went back to the website and paid the $50 via PayPal for this software. 
  At this point, I expected to open up the software, copy the serial number into a field somewhere, then go back to where I left off, and just export the rest of the folders.  However, once you load the Trial Version and import the serial number, you must exit and restart the program. And once you exit and restart, you must also re-import the PST from the beginning.  (Remember, this alone takes several hours for a PST of gargantuan size like mine…)
  So I let that process run again.  And now, after many hours, it asked if I wante to export my files.  I again saved them as a PST.  After 4 hours, I ended up with three PST files.  Each one about 1GB or less. 
  I figured that this was it.  The perfect solution to my problem.  Well…almost.  I did get back what seems to be all of my e-mails and even the folder structure.  What I did not get was a well laid out set of PSTs.  Let me explain.  Each PST has ALL of my folders and the entire folder structure.  What it does not have, is e-mail in every folder in every PST.  You see, in order to sort things out, the program built the folder structure, and then populated the folders until it hit the ceiling of 1GB.  Then it moved on to the next PST, creating the entire folder structure, but populating from where it left off.  and so on.  So now, it is up to me, the human, to physically open each folder and hunt for mye-mails.  And, I am likely to move them around so each folder is a continguous unit rather than an interrupted stream of thought.  This lack of organization makes this program worth about $12 to me.  But at least I have my e-mails back. But I’m still curious…   
• The International Software Company that has the 4th version (I can’t recall the company or the website…I’ll have to add that info later) charges $500 for a personal version of their software.  My e-mail is not worth $500.  It was worth $50.
• I found other software I’d like to try…but I think I’ll quit while I’m ahead.  At $50-$70 a try, this could be an expensive experiment…

If you happen to know of a better way, or have questions…just add a comment below… 

(Related: Inside Outlook Express has great information on Outlook Express.)