Archive for November, 2006

Rejuvenate My System

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006

So I’m playing around with the random ThinkVantage software that came on this X60, and I find an option to “Rejuvenate My System”. Intrigued I click on it, and am greeted with the following message:

This option optmizes performance by defragmenting your hard drive and restoring your system and application files from a “known good” backup […]

X60 Arrives

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

I managed to score a tricked out Lenovo Thinkpad X60 through work, and it arrived today.
This thing is _*tiny*_. The top half is all screen, and the bottom half is mostly keyboard. Not even enough space for a touchpad.
The initial software configuration was disappointing. But I guess that’s to be expected form a new […]

Sitting straight up: not the optimal posture

Tuesday, November 28th, 2006

Maybe all the people sitting in front of computers all day know this already, but “according to this article”:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/11/061127112844.htm, sitting straight up is not the best posture for your back. They use a new kind of MRI to show that actually leaning back 45 degrees is better than sitting up straight. Slouching forward is apparently […]

Photos from Sonoma

Monday, November 27th, 2006

Just “a few shots”:http://puntium.smugmug.com/gallery/2171196 from our day-trip to Sonoma over the Thanksgiving weekend. I took RAW shots, and then was pretty liberal with _interpreting_ them in Adobe Lightroom, since I know Lightroom isn’t too great at reverse engineering the original colors for NEF files anyways.

Listening to Mozart helps with Allergic Skin Reactions?

Monday, November 27th, 2006

Smells of the Mozart Effect claims, but this one seems to have also have some scientific experiments behind it.
Apparently, listening to Mozart reduces “allergic skin wheal responses in atopic dermatitis patients”:http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0GDQ/is_1_29/ai_n6032933.
Sounds pretty out there, but there’s no harm in trying I guess. The same researcher, Hajime Kimata, has also written about how laughter, kissing, and […]

Back to Wordpress

Thursday, November 23rd, 2006

I doubt that anyone really noticed, but I switched back again to Wordpress.
This time the realizations were slightly different. The main reason is that I just don’t have the time to maintain four different looks for the four different sections that I had. Developing the look of one section takes enough time, having to do […]

Typing Videos

Thursday, November 23rd, 2006

On youtube, I found there are a few typing videos that demonstrate the use of some esoteric keyboards.

Happy Hacking Keyboard Pro 2
Another Happy Hacking Keyboard Pro 2
Kinesis Contoured Keyboard
Touchstream

Additionally, here’s one that demonstrates the “chatter” problem on a Majestouch keyboard (chatter is where the signal transition between a pressed and unpressed key is not clean […]

Windows Live Writer Test

Thursday, November 23rd, 2006

This post was written with Windows Live Writer 1.0 beta. It is a little client-side UI that works with wordpress, and lets you do a semi-WYSIWIG composition of a new post.

Consolas font

Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006

So I just found out about the new Consolas font from Microsoft that is being distributed with Office 12 and Vista. It’s a nice looking monospaced font that I think compares favorably with things like Bitstream Vera Mono on Linux, or Monaco on Apple.
Even better, you can easily use it on Windows XP. If you […]

Ordered

Wednesday, November 15th, 2006

I gave in. There’s no point obsessing about this forever. This evening after work, I drove down to the “User’s Side San Jose branch”:http://www.users-side.com and put in an order for the black “Happy Hacking Keyboard Professional 2″:http://www.pfu.fujitsu.com/hhkeyboard/hhkbpro2/.
It was a bit more expensive: about $290 after tax, (that’s compared to about $220 or so at […]