computers

My mom just sent me the following text message:

Attempts to contact my mom via her cell phone have failed. Unfortunately even if I could get her on the phone, the only advice I could give her — after over a decade of working in the computer industry — is to maybe try to shake the liquid out and blow-dry it.

When the revolution comes and the computers try to squash humanity out of existence, hopefully some of us will remember their Achilles’ heel: ill-placed cups of coffee.

If you’re sitting there with a new computer and scratching your head trying to figure out how to get all your music from your iPod and iTunes library on your old computer, scratch no longer! This is how you do it.

Update: And if you want to get your playlists on your new computer, you have to do this.

And you should also read this tip on Keeping iTunes Organized!

This Is a Call

Can any of my beautiful readers recommend a good link for connecting PCs? I’m looking for some sort of PC-to-PC software. I have a USB cable designed for PC-to-PC communications, but the software provided is chunkus blowus. (That’s Latin for “blows chunks”, of course.) I’ve been searching Google and NoNags but I haven’t been very lucky. Most of the stuff out there looks like it was programmed for Windows 3.1. Anybody out there running their own little home LAN? It’s got to be possible without buying a router or needing CAT-5, right? Can’t I just do this with USB? (And don’t go telling me to use Microsoft’s built-in Direct Cable Connection because I don’t want to have a computer listening and a host and a guest and all that.) I just want to be able to share files, actually; I’m not even really concerned about sharing printers and / or an internet connection. Help!

OQO: Ultrapersonal Computing. This looks really, really cool. It’s tiny. It’s wee. It’s running XP. Amazing.

(Note to OQO CEO: Find model with nicer hands and / or cleaner fingernails.)

There’s a good little tutorial on How to Buy RAM for your PC at Amazon.com.

Life began with direct coding on bare, carbon-chemistry hardware, like amino acids and proteins. Higher programming languages, like DNA and RNA, evolved gradually. Computers began in a similar fashion, with programmers coding on to the bare machinery of their circuits. Higher programming languages have followed, each generation more powerful than the last.

There is, of course, one big difference between biological and machine evolution. It took life billions of years to evolve the information-processing skills that lie behind the evolution of the human brain. Computers have made giant strides in half a century.

- more on Artificial intelligence

Tragedy.
My computer is dead. The power supply. This is a sad day. All is lost, lost.
You probably won’t see anything new here for some time. No eMail either. There were several (dozen) awaiting replies, I know. Sorry. I’ll write as soon as I can.
Crap.

My computer has been misbehaving lately. It seems to be crashing constantly and the performance has been muddy. A few days ago I downloaded Cool Beans System Info, a nice little app that displays free RAM and processor usage. I realized that even though I have 256 MB of RAM, it seems like it’s all being used, all the time! It hovers around 80% if I have Outlook and IE running, and closing one or the other only brings me back to about 60%. Obviously there’s some leakage.
First I found MemTurbo. This little guy sits in your system tray and watches your RAM usage. If it dips below a certain level, the app tries to “scrub” your RAM to free what’s being wasted. It works pretty well, even with its odd DOS-looking progress bars. It’s shareware, though, and I doubt I’ll shell out the cash to keep it after it’s run through my free month (or 20 uses or whatever).
So then I looked around at NoNags and found RAMpage. This guy works just like MemTurbo, but it has the added bonus of being freeware. I’ve been using it for a few days and highly recommend it.
I also finally grabbed Microsoft’s TweakUI. If you haven’t downloaded this one yet, go grab it now. It lets you configure a slew of OS options that will make your computer so much nicer.

This is one of my favorites from a long list of computer error messages in haiku:

Yesterday it worked
Today it is not working
Windows is like that

[click to continue...]

For some reason I cannot FTP or SMTP to davidgagne.net from my office. I know you’re asking, “David, what does that mean?” It means I can’t upload anything to my site from work (no new songs!), I can’t send eMail through my davidgagne.net account from work, and I can’t modify any of the files at davidgagne.net from work.

I think, for some reason, my company is blocking ports 21 and 25 from my desktop. It doesn’t really make much sense, from a security point of view. I can kinda understand why they would kill my FTP access, but why stop me from sending SMTP but not from receiving POP? Are they worried that I’m going to send a virus from work, but not that I might receive one here? Who knows?

Yesterday I thought the problem might be with Dreamhost, but they told me that there is nothing wrong with my eMail or FTP. Then I realized that I could still FTP through Blogger and greyMatter, and that I can eMail and FTP from home. So the culprit must be something done by the administrators of my office network connection in Kentucky.

You don’t even care, do you?

You simply must visit AOLiza. I was in tears. You can read all about it at the site, but basically here’s the story: A guy took one of the original artificial intelligence programs (ELIZA) and connected it to an AOL instant messenger account. The account sits on line and people attempt to chat with it because they think it’s a real person. Some of the recorded conversations are laugh-out-loud funny.
[click to continue...]

I caught AntiTrust on the plane last week. I liked it, if for no other reason than it was probably the first movie I saw that didn’t have things like “EMAIL!” flashing on the monitor when someone received a message. It’s a pretty good “computer” movie. And Tim Robbins is an excellent actor, meat. Props to Tom for making the banner.

Someone in Australia invented a combination keyboard and mouse that looks like it would be a pain. I don’t know how quickly I could adapt to using one since I’m not a true touch-typist. Hmmm …

“It’s a type of brain dysfunction,” said Toshiyuki Sawaguchi, the university’s professor of neurobiology. “Young people today are becoming stupid.”

And … in a completely unrelated story … Doctors amputate first human hand transplant: Hallam said for the first year, the right hand - which had belonged to a French motorcyclist killed in an accident - had functioned well.
link via Harlan