Little Weed’s neighbourhood friend has an Acer Aspire 5742z-4403 that was not functional. It would simply continue to cycle the boot process. He had suspected that his hard disk was bad but did not know how to prove it. I had him bring it to our house. in the end I proved that his hard disk was defective, the machine did boot up with Ubuntu and was fully functional. After connecting to the network with an RJ45, with Firefox we verified the internet worked. Summary: The computer works fine, the hard disk needs replacement.
As a renter I get to try out a lot of new cars. This is somewhat disconcerting at times because if the UI is not intuitive, this causes me grief. I fumble around, trying to find a requirement, using my experience with other cars as my guide. This is common to not only cars but to any other object as well. One of the fancy features that almost all new cars have is the onboard entertainment system. Most have bluetooth connectivity. The car also have a myriad of independent computers, ranging from IR door unlocking to backup cameras. As a technologist I always wonder if these systems are secure. In the back of my mind I know they are not.
After installing Lubuntu on an old Dell, i was expecting a similar user experience from full Ubuntu with a Unity desktop environment, where I would need to spend many extra hours tweaking the install. Little did I know. Ubuntu is easier to install and use, by far.
My Lenovo w510 came with Windows 7, which I still want to keep. By adding another disk I could boot to the new Ubuntu disk, and then have a choice to stay in Ubuntu or boot to Windows. A dual boot install was required. There is a lot of help online about installing a dual boot using two disks.
Careless was I when I somehow inadvertently deleted Firefox from my old Google Nexus One, which has Android 2.2. No matter, go to the Google Play/Android market store and download it, right? Not so fast. It turns out as of Jan 2015 Firefox has dropped support for Android 2.2 and ARMV6 devices, and Firefox is no longer available for my Android version. Google Chrome for Android is only available for Android 4 and newer, so not available for me.
My first thought was “What the hell”? My Win 2k 2000 Printer server has not been touched for a couple of years, and today it started acting up, with a “USB Driver not Found”. What to do?
My HP P1005 Laserjet printer connects to my Win2k PC using USB, which has worked very reliably for years. Today I got messages like “Use Printer offline”, and nothing would print. In device manager I could see the yellow caution sign for USB driver support. What the hell? I had not installed anything on this PC for years.
The scene is an all too familiar one: A parent takes his/her kids to the park to play. The parent then gets on their cellphone to either talk or surf, leaving the kids to their own devices. The kids beg the parent to help them, all to no avail. The kid gives up and plays by him or herself. This is just morally wrong. Why squander the opportunity to spend some quality time with your kids, rather than give your undivided attention to a small 3″ x 4″ box? We are negatively addicted to our smartphones. All this observed in my predominantly Mainland Chinese community here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
As a WordPress developer you seem to be always looking for a new theme, something that will be fresh, new and novel. This is what brought me to use the EvoLve theme.
On the plus side the EvoLve theme is a free theme, available on WordPress.org, from a company called Theme4Press. The look is clean and uncluttered, something I can present and work with. I do like the home page slider options, which allow you to have up to 5 slider images. I also like the 3 front page content boxes that appear under the slider. They have large eye catching icons, some text and a call to action button for more info.
New to Android and java development I have started in the tutorials on http://developer.android.com/training/ but not without major issues. While the first 3 lessons went Ok, the fourth, “Starting Another Activity” simply would not run properly. Yes, it could compile without error, but when run it would abort, all without an error message. Here is where I found the solution, thanks to Hariharan.
The way we choose to live goes a long way to determining how long and how well we will eventually live. More troubling is that our choices are observed and learned by our kids, who then take on very similar choices and lifestyle. While kids theoretically have a choice, in reality they follow their parents, for better or for worse. This study from Active Healthy Kids Canada is really troubling, in that it points to what I call “Rich Country” disease, where here in Canada we have lots of organized sport activities, lots of proper environment and equipment, but not a lot of actual physical exercise. It would be more appropriate to have the best of organized sport, with great facilities, that results in the fittest, most healthy kids on the planet. This is certainly not the case.
If someone was to point a camera straight into your living room, most people would be horrified, and rightly so. This is a clear breach of our personal space and privacy. Yet surprisingly this is Ok in the online world. I am unsure why we accept this double standard, other than, “This is how it is and it should be Ok”? It is not Ok. At the very least we should acknowledge the level of risk to our privacy. I will try to assess our risk, here in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
