Category: Geek Stuff

For years, laptop users who wanted to check the overall health of their laptop battery in Windows had to hope that their OEM included some kind of monitoring software on the OS install, or had to track down a utility from the third-party vendor.

Happily, Windows 7 has a built-in way to check the overall health of your laptop’s battery. It’s not very elegant, and it’s kind of hidden, but it’s a way to know how well your battery is doing:

1) Fully charge your laptop’s battery. It doesn’t matter if you do the remaining steps with the laptop on AC or battery.

2) Click on the “Start” button and type “cmd” (without quotes) in the “Search programs and files” box.

3) Right click on the “cmd.exe” icon in the Start Menu and choose “Run as administrator”.

4) At the command prompt, type “cd %userprofile%/Desktop” (without quotes) and press the ENTER key. Note that the next step will create a report as an HTML file on the desktop; if you want the report in a different location, change to that location instead of the desktop.

5) At the command-prompt, type “powercfg -energy” and press the ENTER key.

The command-prompt will say “Enabling tracing for 60 seconds” and then “Observing system behavior”. After a minute or two, the process will complete and you’ll see a file named “energy-report.html” on your desktop (or wherever you decided to save the file). You may exit the command prompt by typing EXIT and pressing the ENTER key.

Open the “energy-report.html” in your favorite web browser, and scroll towards the bottom of the report. Look for a section called “Battery Information”:

See the two entries called “Design Capacity” and “Last Full Charge”? This tells us how much capacity the battery was designed to have, and how much it actually reported the last time it was charged. I don’t know exactly what units the report measures, but if you divide the “Last Full Charge” by “Design Capacity”, you’ll get the overall percentage your battery is charging to. In the screen cap above, you can see that the battery on my netbook is around 92% (44820 / 48840 = .9176), so that’s pretty good. Once that number gets below 50%, it’s time to replace the battery.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering how the metric system, a system of measurement used almost everywhere in the world except the United States, and which appears to be in no danger of being replaced any time soon, can be “retro”. Well, for Americans of a certain age, it certainly seems like a retro tech.

The United States has toyed with the idea of the metric system since… well, forever. In Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, Congress is given the power to “fix the standard of weights and measures” for the nation. And, in 1789, the first Congress looked at a proposal from Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who decided to ditch the English system for a decimal system of his own making. It was very similar to the metric system… however, the big shortcoming of Jefferson’s system was that although it adopted 10 as a base unit, it had unique names for each individual unit of measurement (so no centi- or milli- prefixes). What’s worse, Jefferson’s system used existing names for his new units. The basic unit of measurement of the Jefferson system was the foot, which was subdivided into 10 inches, which were further subdivided into 10 lines, with each line subdivided into 10 points. And the less said about his long distance and volume units the better.

At any rate, Congress looked at Jefferson’s system and half-heartedly liked it. But no academics or powerful businessmen advocated for Jefferson’s system. Many in Congress saw Great Britain (and, by association, her Imperial measurement system) as America’s most important trading partner. Many Federalists (the main political party of the time) disliked France generally and were deeply suspicious of anything French. And since adoption of Jefferson’s system could cause mass confusion, at least for a time (“Is that an English foot? Or a Jefferson foot?”), Congress let the whole thing die.

America flirted with the metric system from time to time, but the metrification of the rest of the English-speaking world in the 1950s and 1960s led to ever louder calls to adopt the metric system. The end result was The Metric Conversion Act, passed by Congress on December 23, 1975. It declared the metric system to be “the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce”. Unfortunately (or not), the act lacked any means of enforcing this. People and businesses were free to continue using customary units.

Continue reading “RETRO TECH: The Metric System”

Filecloud.io is one of the most popular cloud services for sharing files. The only problem is that, at some point in the past week, the site owners have changed something so that every time you go to download a file, non-premium members get the following message:

you need to have a premium account to download this file

Bummer, right? Well, there is a workaround for this, although it requires a free Filecloud account and takes a few steps:

1) Create a free Filecloud account (if you haven’t already). Make sure you’re logged in for the next steps.

2) Copy the full URL of the file you want to download (e.g., http://filecloud.io/1a23b4cd).

3) Go to any Filecloud page and click the “Tools” button in the upper-left corner.

4) Click the “Clone files” link.

5) On the next page, paste the URL from step 2 into the “URLs” box and click “Continue”.

6) On the next page, click the file name. You should be sent to a new page which will allow you to download the file normally.

As the site says, what’s happening is that you’re copying the file you want to download to the “public” section of your own account. So you probably don’t want the files sticking around any longer than necessary. When you’re done downloading, click the Filecloud banner in the upper left of the screen to go to back to your account settings page and delete the files from your account (I just CTRL+Click the file(s) in step 6, so the new download page opens in a new tab, then close that tab when done and go back to the original tab and delete it from there, but that’s just how I roll).

I have no idea how long this workaround will last. I tried it just now, and it seems to be working, though.

UPDATE: There has been a change in how Filecloud handles file imports that you should probably know about. If you import a file into your account and immediately go to download it, you may get a “blank” page instead of the file download page, Just wait several moments and try again. I think (but do not know) that Filecloud’s servers are actually copying the file to your account, and I guess there’s some sort of queue for the file copy to take place. It can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 2-3 minutes for the file to be able to be downloaded from your account. It’s unthinkable to me that they wouldn’t use Single Instance Storage, but that appears to be the case.

PRO TIP: on Sunday nights (a big downloading night for me) I usually open a Notepad++ window and go through each post and copy the Filecloud URLs (on a single line) to the Notepad window. That way, when I go to import the files, I can do all of them at once. And once the first file is available to download, the others will certainly be ready by the time the first download is done.

This story is from the Old Stuff Archive. I’m going through the archive and re-posting a bunch of old items that didn’t make the cut when I migrated this site from FrontPage to WordPress. Enjoy!

Some people are under the misguided impression that IT jobs are “glamorous” and “exciting”. They’re not. I was once hired by IBM to answer phones for their internal Y2K Help Desk. Initially, the job kept me pretty busy: my coworker Janette and I were getting a fair number of calls. After a few weeks, though, the calls really died down.

Since Janette and I were contractors, we were treated lower than dirt. And because the site was originally owned by GE Financial and had only recently been sold to IBM, corporate paranoia ran amok. We had to give our driver’s licenses to the security guards every day to get our “visitor’s badge”. We weren’t allowed to have a company email account. The firewall blocked access to 99.99% of all interesting content on the Internet. We were relegated to sitting in the training room and had to use the PCs there… and were not allowed to customize them at all. In fact, there were originally three of us, but one guy was fired for – I kid you not – moving the taskbar to the top of the screen. Because of all this, if our phones weren’t ringing we literally had nothing to do. And when the calls died down, I started to go a little crazy.

To explain it to others, I kept a diary for a day. This entry is from September 1st, 1998 and is absolutely true. Enjoy my insanity!

07:55 – Entered building
07:58 – Logged in the phone.
08:00 – Unzipped a file that had some bitmap flags I was designing with MS Paint (why, yes I am a geek).
08:01 – Played with the flags with MS Paint.
08:12 – Bored with the flags, play a few games of Solitaire.
08:30 – Bored with that, and tired too! I think I’ll take a nap.
09:20 – A nearby phone rings, which wakes me up. Need a cigarette.
09:30 – Back, with coffee for me and Janette.
09:35 – ANOTHER quick game of Solitaire.
09:45 – Back to the bitmaps; made an English flag and a couple of others.
10:05 – Started drawing a castle with MS Paint.
10:33 – Yawn. Going for another smoke and a bathroom break.
10:41 – Back. Janitor left the bathroom closet unlocked – briefly considered getting high off Endust.
10:42 – Hmmmm. Bored with the castle – I guess I’ll start reading Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor.
10:50 – Woo-Hoo! The phone rings!
10:50 – Dammit! Wrong number!
11:35 – Read the first 28 pages of Wise Blood. Janette goes to lunch. Still no calls.
11:45 – Yawn again. Too sleepy for Wise Blood – back to Solitaire.
12:02 – WOO-HOO! A real call! A guy in Barrington, IL needs IDs created on the t2k4 mainframe!
12:05 – Through logging the call.
12:06 – Saw a commercial last night for a Carpenter’s CD; have “On Top Of The World” in my head – the Endust is looking better!
12:15 – Fuckin’ sick of Solitaire. Back to Wise Blood.
12:39 – Janette is back. Lunchtime!
14:01 – Omygosh! Another call!
14:18 – Well, that guy had the wrong number, only it took me 15 minutes to figure it out. For those of you keeping score at home, that’s still just 1 call.
14:21 – A maintenance guy comes in and fucks with a phone on the other side of the room. Leaves after 30 seconds.
14:25 – Maintenance guy comes back, picks up the phone, looks puzzled, leaves again.
14:26 – Mark comes in to say chat – he’s a guy who works in the NOC. I feel like a guy who just got off a deserted island….
14:42 – Mark leaves. I decide to write rant about a friend of mine that I’ll email ’round the world later.
14:50 – My friend Holly calls.
15:20 – Holly and I get off the phone.
15:32 – Holly calls back.
15:40 – Holly and I get off the phone.
15:43 – ANOTHER CALL! I’m getting carpal tunnel here! I log on to the mainframe and reset the ID.
15:45 – Finished rant, not in the mood to do my daily NT studying… Wonder where the maintenance guy went.
15:46 – Wonder if the Endust is still in the bathroom. Ah, never mind – back to Flannery O’Connor.
16:53 – No calls; I’m logging off for the evening.

Yep – eight hours and two phone calls that took a grand total of five minutes to log. We never used the same PC more than once and eventually I got so bored that I changed some of the hardware entries in the Registry so that in Device Manager all the hardware was listed as “another crappy IBM product”. I wonder if anyone ever noticed…

One of my best friends in middle school was a guy named Scott. As it turned out, both of us had family in Lawrenceville, the next town over. Since “Larryville” was the largest city in the county at the time, Scott and I often wanted to go there for the better movie theatre, the bigger arcade, or the cooler pizza place. And since one of us was sure to go there almost weekly, that person would usually call the other to see if he wanted to bum a ride to (my) grandparents’ house or (his) cousin’s house.

And so it was one day back in 1983. Scott’s older sister – Theresa, a Joan Jett lookalike – was driving the two of us to Lawrenceville for some reason, and she needed to stop at Treasury Drug (how’s that for a blast from the past?) to buy some… “lady products”. Scott and I wanted no part of her tampon purchase, so we goofed around in the “general merchandise” section of the store while she did her thing. And there, we saw the coolest thing ever:

It was called the “Aromance Aroma Disc Player”, and it combined the age-old act of scenting a home with the Compact Disc, the latest and greatest music phenomenon. We were instantly hooked, and both of us whipped out the $19.99 (or whatever) to buy one.

The “player” sat on your desk and plugged in to the wall. You turned it on and inserted a “scent disc”, which was a piece of plastic slightly smaller than a CD. It had a thick piece of waffle weave fabric inside which had been doused in a certain scent. The player heated the disc, which caused the scent to emerge from the player, and a fan gently pushed the scent into the room.

The discs, which came in digipak type sleeves, had enticing names, like “Fireplace”, “Seduction”, “Mountain Top”, “A Dozen Roses”, “After Dinner Mints”, “Ocean Breeze”, “Passion”, and (to show you how non-PC it was back in 1983) “Oriental Mystery”. But my favorite by far was “Movie Time”, which smelled like buttered popcorn. I enjoyed the other scents, but went back and bought two more “Movie Time” discs, since the discs only retained their scent for a certain number of “plays”.

The device was originally developed by Charles of the Ritz back in 1982. That company was started by a hairdresser named Charles Jundt in the 1920s. In 1916, Jundt took over the salon at New York’s City’s Ritz hotel, which later became the Ritz-Carlton. In 1919, Jundt (who was known by his well-to-do clients as just “Charles of the Ritz”) began selling cosmetics. In 1927 he introduced a line of fragrances. Most have been forgotten, but his most popular, Jean Naté, is still sold today. And Enjoli, another popular brand, was created in 1978, long after Jundt’s death.

The ownership history of Charles of the Ritz is long and complex, so I won’t go into it here. But in 1972, the company was purchased for $100 million by pharmaceutical giant E.R. Squibb (now Bristol-Myers Squibb). It was during this time that the Aromance Player was developed. At some point, the product was sold to Remington. I know this because, in researching this article, I noticed that there’s a distinct physical difference between the early Charles of the Ritz models and the later Remington models. My version, pictured above, was made by Remington. Earlier models had an angled front and for some reason remind me of cylons from the original Battlestar Galactica series.

I miss my old Aromance player. It sounds silly, but the idea of sliding a disc into a player seemed so Space Age at the time. And while technology could greatly improve such a device these days, the underlying desire for what it did never really went away.

In case you missed it, Microsoft is overhauling Hotmail. The new service, Outlook.com, features a spiffy Windows 8-inspired interface and will eventually have tight integration with Skype, Office Web Apps and SkyDrive (the service is still in “preview mode” and many of the new features are incomplete).

One of the coolest features of the new service is that you can create multiple aliases for your account. Say you created your Hotmail account 15 years ago, back when you were in college. And, like a bad tattoo, you picked an email address that’s slightly embarrassing today, like ChumbawumbaFan4Ever@hotmail.com or SchlitzChugger@hotmail.com. Now you can add a more professional alias to your account, like name@outlook.com (live.com and hotmail.com domains are also available, but are pretty picked over by this point). So your friends can continue to email you at the old address, but you can also send and receive mail with your new name@outlook.com address as well.

If you’d rather just rename your account altogether you can do that too. In that case, Outlook.com will make your new alias permanent, and you’ll have to log in with the new address. Outlook will retain your old address as an alias, so you will still receive mail addressed to the old account.

But what if you don’t want your old address? What if, like me, you used your Hotmail account just enough to get a lot of spam, but not enough to really care about any email you receive there? In my case, I used my old Live account mostly to sign up for free music downloads. So the only things I ever got at that address were newsletters from bands I might (or might not) care about these days, and a bunch of spam. And the spam from the Live.com address was clogging up my new Outlook.com account. Can’t I get rid of the old Live address and start fresh with just the Outlook address?

Yes, although the feature is hidden because it hasn’t been transitioned from the old service yet. To delete any alias from your account, login to your Outlook.com account and do the following:

1) Click the “gear” icon in the upper right corner of the screen. Choose “Switch back to Hotmail” (you may be asked to provide feedback as to why you’re switching back; click “Skip feedback”).

2) Click on your name in the upper-right corner and choose “Options”:

3) Click “Email Addresses” under the “Account” section:

4) Click “Remove” for any addresses you no longer want.

5) Sign out of Hotmail, then sign back in at Outlook.com to go back to the new UI.

Aaaaannnddd there you go: a new Outlook.com account, minus the old Hotmail or Live address that was getting so much spam. I was receiving 4-5 spams a day from my old address, but haven’t received one since I got rid of my old address last week!

SPOT stands for “Smart Personal Objects Technology”. SPOT devices used FM radio waves to sync to a time server and receive updated information, like sports scores and weather forecasts. Microsoft, who developed the technology in 2003, hoped that the small devices would take off not only in watches, but embedded in devices like coffeemakers, alarm clocks and weather stations.

SPOT devices had numerous flaws.

For one thing, the most common implementation of SPOT – wristwatches – were butt-ugly. Seriously: the watch pictured above is one of the more attractive SPOT models. If you’re old enough to remember those giant multifunction Casio digital watches of the early 80s… well, SPOT watches were just an updated version of that.

Secondly, most SPOT watches needed to be recharged every couple of days, making them absolutely useless for things like camping. What’s worse, the charger dock included with most SPOT devices was bulky, making it inconvenient for travel. Most watches run for 18-36 months between battery changes, and a watch that needed to be charged every two days seemed a huge step backwards.

Thirdly, SPOT devices were only receivers not transmitters. So they could not actively seek information. Once you bought a SPOT device, you went to a website and set up preferences for your preferred location(s) and sports teams. Data would then be pushed to the watch at intervals. If it was late in a game and you wanted an updated score now, you were out of luck. Or if you wanted to see the score for some other sports team, you had to use a computer to log in to the SPOT site and update your preferences (and then wait for the next update cycle for the data to actually arrive at your watch). At that point, you might as well have just gone to nfl.com directly and gotten the score there.

But the biggest problem with SPOT devices was that, by the time they finally came to market, everyone had a cell phone that could do anything a SPOT device could do (and more). So why pay Microsoft $59/year for SPOT service when you already pay Verizon $59/month for a phone that can do the exact same thing?

It’s interesting (to me) that the SPOT data specification allowed for more data than RDS (RDS, which stands for Radio Data System, is the technology that radio stations use to include metadata such as artist and song name; if you’ve ever seen this in your car stereo or iPod, RDS is what makes that happen). In 2008, after it was clear that SPOT was a failure, Microsoft pitched the SPOT tech to GP makers like Garmin as a way of pushing more traffic data to GPS units faster. Sadly, it was too late, and SPOT tech never gained traction. SPOT watches were discontinued in 2008, and the MSN Direct radio service was discontinued on January 1, 2012.

My dad loves gadgets. But he only seems to actually use a handful of them. Some of his gadgets just sat in a drawer for most of their lives, like the circa 1977 “portable” TV that weighed 35 lbs. Or the “check printer” that looked like a personal organizer and was supposed to keep track of your spending. It actually printed the payment details onto your checks (kind of like how Walmart used to just ask you for a blank check, the cashier would stick it in the printer and let it print the date, amount, etc. on it). But it was so much work to use that it ended up being useless.

There was one gadget I bought him back in 1989 that he actually used all the time… the Sharp Dial Master:

It was an electronic address book, memo book and calculator. It had a staggering 8KB of memory. But the cool thing about it (at the time) was that it had a speaker on the back. You’d scroll through the address book and find the number you wanted to dial. You held the back of the device up to the microphone of the telephone handset and pressed DIAL. The device would then generate the DTMF tones and dial the number. It sounds kind of silly in today’s world of smartphones, but this was actually pretty nifty back in the late 80s.

The problem with the device was that the “UI” – such as it was – was needlessly complex. My dad, born in the late 40s, didn’t grow up with electronic devices and isn’t a “computer genius”. But if you let him play with something, he’ll figure it out pretty quickly. But he always had to have me add new numbers or edit old ones on his Dial Master. And it would take me several minutes to remember how to do it. If you have a simple device, but have to go back to the manual to remember how to do something, your UI has failed.

So yeah… my Dad was a big user of the Dial Master. Which put him in unique company. Because you know who else used the Dial Master? Agent Cooper from Twin Peaks. You might remember this scene where he and Sheriff Truman interview Laura’s beau Bobby Briggs:

Cool.

I’m an IT guy, and I’ve seen my share of colossal failures in the workplace over the years. Recently there have been some “IT disaster” threads at Ars Technica and Reddit which got me thinking about my own disaster stories. Here are four of my favorite. Note that all but the last one come from the same job at a third-party IT company I used to work for.

THE RAID ARRAY FROM HELL

I was sent to a real estate firm to swap out a failing drive in a RAID 5 array. Thanks to the LEDs on each drive, I quickly spotted the drive I was to replace. I opened the RAID utility on the server to make extra-sure I was replacing the correct drive. The software verified that yes, the drive with the blinking LED is failing. I removed the old drive, put the new drive into the slide, and placed it in the array. The software recognized the new disk and asked if I wanted to rebuild the array. I clicked yes, and for the next 20 seconds or so everything seemed normal. But then the server BSOD’d. When I tried to reboot it I got the dreaded “SYSTEM DISK NOT FOUND” error message.

Come to find out, this server was one of the first my boss built himself after he started his company. For reasons only he knows, he installed Windows 2000 Server on to the RAID 5 array itself. Now this isn’t a “disaster” per se. The RAID software should have been able to rebuild itself without taking down the entire array. But installing an operating system onto a RAID 5 array is just something I’ve never seen done, ever. I’ve only worked with small and medium-sized businesses (SMB). In an SMB environment, you’d typically install Windows Server onto a regular hard drive or possibly a RAID 1 array. You then create the RAID 5 array as a separate disk to store vital data. And you do it this way because the operating system files just aren’t that valuable, and installing Windows on a standard (or RAID 1) drive is significantly less complicated (as a general IT rule, the fewer points of failure or complexity the better). If you have no idea what I’m talking about, imagine installing Windows on a regular hard drive, and putting all your important data on a heavy-duty, “guaranteed to never fail” external hard drive. If the Windows drive dies, it’s no big thing to go to Best Buy, get a new hard drive, reinstall Windows, then reinstall the external drive, right? Same theory, different implementation. And this real estate agency had tried to become as paperless as possible, so everything was on the server… which was now dead.

The icing on the cake was that the owner, an attorney with zero sense of humor but a giant sense of ego, flipped out because… “[my boss at the IT company] told me that we didn’t need backups because of this RAID thing!” I tried explaining that RAID is not a backup, just a way to make hard drives more fault tolerant. But he seemed to be of the opinion that my boss told him otherwise. Which put me in a pickle. Anyone who’s worked in IT knows that you can say one thing, even in as simple English as possible, and clients hear another. So it’s possible that my boss said no such thing, but the client interpreted it as such. On the other hand, I knew my boss would tell clients anything he felt they wanted to hear to make a sale. Perhaps my boss was afraid that the client wouldn’t sign the contract if he added a $1,200 tape drive into the mix. Maybe my boss was planning to sell him some kind of tape or online backup later on. Whatever the case, I had a dead server and a highly pissed off attorney to deal with. And it wasn’t pretty. I took the server back to the office and rebuilt it from scratch – not installing Windows Server on the RAID 5 array this time. My boss claimed to have recovered more that half the data off the old array… but the recovery software only pulled the file names; the actual files themselves were just a bunch of binary gibberish. So the firm started over from scratch.

LESSONS FROM THIS ORDEAL: RAID is not a backup. Don’t lie to clients, and make them understand, no matter what you have to do, what they’re signing up for.

Continue reading “My Favorite IT Disasters!”

Poor Microsoft can never seem to get a break. Any time they mimic an existing product (like say, their Zune to Apple’s iPod) critics say they’re just copying someone else’s work. But when they do come up with something cool, no one seems to buy it. That’s exactly the case with Mira, a “Smart Display” device:

Here’s how it worked: the tablet computer ran Microsoft Windows CE for Smart Displays (thankfully shortened to just “Smart Display OS”). It was nearly instant-on, and it would automagically connect to a desktop PC running Windows XP via Remote Desktop. So you could be sitting at your desk working on something and suddenly decide to go sit on the downstairs sofa, or the back deck, or the big comfy bed. You’d bring your Smart Display with you and BOOM! in seconds you have your desktop on the screen, and can continue what you were doing.

While it was a really cool idea – hell, I still like the idea of a Smart Display… imagine a 19″ model with today’s thin hardware that could sit on a stand like a regular monitor until you wanted to leave your desk – the actual implementation of the device left a lot to be desired.

For one thing, the 802.11b Wi-Fi of the day simply wasn’t fast enough to allow wireless videos, and Remote Desktop didn’t have any video optimizations at the time. The touchscreen tech was subpar at the time. The battery life wasn’t nearly as good as a modern iPad or Android tablet. The tablet was as thick and heavy as a notebook, but was useless without a desktop PC to “mate” with. What’s worse, Microsoft desperately wanted vendors to sell them in the $500 range, but devices were introduced at between $1,000 and $1,500… at at time when a decent notebook with far more functionality could be had for $600.

But the funniest thing about the devices was Microsoft’s own licensing issues. Because only Windows XP Professional (or higher) allowed Remote Desktop connections, millions of consumers running Windows XP Home were out of luck. But even if you were lucky enough to run XP Pro, that OS only allowed a single session, meaning that once you connected to your computer with the Smart Display, the desktop would be locked and no one else could use it until you shut down the Smart Display device. And because of XP’s RDP limitations, only one device could connect to a PC at a time. So Mom, Dad, Johnny and Susie couldn’t use their Smart Displays at the same time… unless they had individual computers to connect to.

Of course, Microsoft probably could have fixed the RDP\licensing issues if Smart Displays really took off. But they didn’t. They were released in early 2003 and discontinued in December of that year.