Coming soon, to a computer near you

Installing a new operating system on my computer - ‘Innuendos 7′.

I don’t care for the way it uses a winky emoticon when it asks me to insert a boot disk.

Spring Fever

Does the Spring Fever make one shop compulsively? If so, then that’s probably what I’ve got. In just the last two weeks I’ve bought:

5 new cycling caps (what the Hell, they’re cheap, right?)
1 “new” CPU (another 3.0G/512K/800Mhz Pentium 4)
&
Yet another video card (for a thus-far unsuccessful attempt to run CUDA on Kubuntu).

At least they’re all fairly small (<$50) purchases, so I guess it's not so bad. It’s not like I’m buying new bikes or fancy new wheelsets (yet).

Handy mp3 software

Last night I spent an inordinate amount of time equalizing the volume of the (1500+) mp3’s on my Sansa. If they all lived together in one directory, I could have knocked it out in no time and just let the software do its thing. However, being the obsessive/compulsive neurotic that I am, they all live in separate directories, sorted by artist, then by album. Anyway, I finally got it done and I’m thrilled with the results. No more wild fluctuations in volume level from song to song. The software I used to accomplish this is MP3Gain. It’s freeware and it:

does not just do peak normalization, as many normalizers do. Instead, it does some statistical analysis to determine how loud the file actually sounds to the human ear.
Also, the changes MP3Gain makes are completely lossless. There is no quality lost in the change because the program adjusts the mp3 file directly, without decoding and re-encoding.

MP3Gain most definitely earns:

I Can’t Resist a Bargain

I’ve got a laptop that I’ve had for, I don’t know, maybe 7 years. Anyway, lately I’ve been thinking it’s probably time to upgrade the operating system from Windows 98 (I know! crazy, huh?). A while back I set it up to dual-boot with Kubuntu 8.04, and that really served to highlight just how dated Win98 is.

So, I’ve been seriously debating ditching 98 altogether and just running Linux, or possibly installing XP. Last week I was perusing eBay and came across a pretty sweet little IBM NetVista box for sale; 2Ghz P4, 512M of Ram, a $71 ‘Buy it now’ price (+$20 shipping) and best of all, it came with XP Pro installed. This set the wheels to turning;
I’ve got an XP Pro CD, I could use this computer’s activation key, install XP on the laptop, install Linux on the new ‘puter and add a new member to my computer minions, all for less than I would have paid to buy XP for the laptop (and with no “piracy” issues)!
Done, done, and done!
I just finished installing XP Pro on the laptop, activating it with Micro$oft, and updating it to SP3. The “new” NetVista is contentedly crunching numbers for BOINC, and I feel like a frugal demented genius… or something.

Shareware for the Color Blind

As I’ve mentioned here before, I am colorblind, and as I said then, it’s not really something I like to bring up.

I’m mentioning it now because I’ve found an awesome shareware utility that is absolutely indispensable. I don’t know how Ive gotten along without it! Years ago I found eyedropper, a handy utility that lives in your system tray, ready to tell you the color value of any pixel on your screen in RGB or Hex. Handy for matching colors and such, but less so for actually identifying colors.

Now I’ve found What Color, a tiny little utility that tells you the color not only in RGB and Hex, but also in plain english. For me “166,204,227″ is much less helpful than “LightBlue”. Optionally, it can also display the color’s position on a color-wheel; also quite helpful.

‘What Color’ will be a permanent resident of my system tray. If you, or someone you know, has some level of color blindness it’s worth a look.

‘What Color’ earns a resounding: