I have used Paint.NET for picture editing for over 10 years now, starting when it was a WSU project when Rick Brewster was a Microsoft mentored student there. I support a number of websites, and have a family photo archive. Paint.NET is awesome and I can do pretty much anything I need to do with it. The simple stuff of course, rotating, cropping, adding text or lines or fill, fixing minor photo errors, getting a bit creative. And now and again a few more advanced things like "photoshopping" someone into a photo is fairly straightforward. I am deeply grateful for Rick Brewster and all his work on this. And I am thrilled he has plans far into the future for Paint.NET.
I have been using Gmail for many many years, and almost never delete an email. However, I read them all. The Gdrive is nice for sharing videos and storing files I want to reach from elsewhere, and the calendar is one of the best out there. I share calendars with several, and having them all show at once on the same display is super. The way Google automatically routes emails to specific folders works very well for me. I rarely delete an email (mostly just delete spam), and gladly pay Google $5/year for extra space to hold my 27,000 plus emails. If you ever sent me an email, I can find it years later. Comes in handy, both for personal emails and for critical data received from businesses.
I too have made an edit to an article about lava caves in Washington state. I had explored those caves many times, and knew some elements of the article were just wrong. I edited those portions so they were correct, and it stood. I think Wikipedia is a modern marvel, and I turn to it often. And I too never bothered to register, so I am among what I assume is a vast army of unrecorded editors.
Chrome will n-e-v-e-r support an in-browser FTP capability. So I am with Firefox forever, as long as it supports such features as FireFTP! I maintain websites, and it is such an incredibly easy tool to use, no extra steps, just two clicks and I'm connected via ftp to any of my websites. I use Chrome sometimes, but Firefox is my BFF because of FireFTP!
As long as Firefox has FireFTP extension working, I will be staying with Firefox. If any of Firefox's upgrades permanently breaks FireFTP, then I will be shopping for a new browser. Edge does not support in-browser FTP nor does Chrome. If none ever do, then it may be Chrome or a Chromium offshoot in the long run. Edge seems born to make MS money from me, so I doubt I will use it. I realize Chrome is the same way:). I support a lot of beginners, and I usually configure their Windows 10 systems to use Chrome, with the bookmarks bar and home page turned on. As someone pointed out, releasing/pushing Windows 10 when Edge was "such a turd" pretty much killed Edge.
Not necessarily true. I have HATED automated phone trees put in place by banks, say for example. They are so frustrating and useless I always try to find the fastest way to get a real human. BUT, the last time I called my bank for a tricky problem (I wanted to reset the PIN on my debit card), in fairly short order the automated phone tree had reset my PIN on my debit card!! I was amazed. And, for a moment, I loved phone trees.
Once the AI behind phone trees approaches or surpasses humans in providing the right answers to tricky problems, people will be fine with them. Up until now, you couldn't even call phone trees "AI". They just followed a preset algorithm to solve the simplest of problems (your balance). But as true AI gets involved, and they really can solve problems quickly, the industry will turn on a dime. And people will no longer be needed.
Commodore 64 or Windsurfer?? I guessed how many 1 inch cap bolts fit in a Midas Muffler, and won an O'Brien Windsurfer. I debated all winter whether to sell it and buy a Commodore 64, or sail it. In the spring I finally decided to try sailing it. I fell in over and over and couldn't stay up, so I sold it and bought a Commodore 64. It was minor fun for about six months, when I had a serious break in my arm and was off work for two months. During that time, I discovered a Commodore 64 club, and the wonders of pirating games and disks. A whole new world opened up thanks to the wonderful club members! I became very proficient at compiling six games per disk, and writing basic programs to create "menus" for my kids. The menus were a screen with numbers 1 thru 6. Just press a number and a game started. Behind the scenes, I remember having to learn all sorts of tricks with Basic to get the games to work, peeking and poking this, sys'ing that and emulating keyboard keystrokes for the other. I programmed several dozen disks. I remember acquiring an AWESOME program at one of the C64 users group meetings that would copy a whole disk in ONLY a half hour. It seemed like total magic! My brother got a C64, and even my retired Dad got one, and had great fun making newsletters for his Lions Club with it. He even scanned in cartoons and substituted his club member's names for the captions. Pretty advanced for a 70 year old in the 1980's. I had enormous fun with the legendary Commodore 64, programming in Basic, spending countless hours with programs like Simons Basic, The Print Shop, Logo, the MultiPlan spreadsheet and the Music Construction Set. The expertise I gained with the C64 led directly to a computing career at Boeing. It took many years to subdue my love of pirating (I'm not fully over it). We shared our discoveries in those days with glee and abandon. With a great turn of irony, I later became a fairly accomplished windsurfer.
"Red Notice" is a must read! This very current auto-biographical book by Bill Browder, millionaire financier, lays a foundation and then turns into a page turning deadly American-Russian thriller. When you are done reading it, you have a clear and very chilling view of Vladmir Putin and his coterie of murderous oligarchs. It is even more relevant given the ascendancy of Trump, and the Russian's desire to have sanctions lifted. The book tells a story of billions looted from the Russian economy, of murder, and of the consequent birth of the US congressional Magnitsky Act, authorizing sanctions against Russian oligarchs. I read a lot, and this is the most amazing book I've read in a long time! I bought a dozen copies for my friends, and I've never done that before! The author wrote it as his best shot at not getting murdered by Putin, as it would now be obvious to the world who did it.
My Brother laserjet (HL-L2360D) has a "setting" which will override the "cartridge is empty" message. That is to say, it will warn that the cartridge is empty, but it will keep printing forever. That is good, as shaking the cartridge and keeping an eye on it gives a few extra weeks worth of printing. It is not an obvious setting, but it is there!! Of course, a day will come when the printing starts to get light, and then of course, need to change the cartridge. But I am happy to take responsibility for a few wasted "light" pages in order to get many weeks more out of a cartridge than the warning claims.
I video plays, variety shows and other presentations put on by the members of our community, and burn the videos to DVD's playable in DVD players, so that the recipients can watch them on TV. I feel badly about using DVD's because the videos are at least 1920x1080 (and 4k capable), so they are dumbed down to 720x480 for the DVD's. But people like to play them in their DVD players and share their activities with their families, so they are very popular. I am planning for the future to switch to Blu-Ray, or even flash drives, but few in my group have Blu-Ray disk players yet. I have a printer which prints an image on the DVD's, so they look very spiffy, though I distribute them at cost. It is a fully volunteer effort. I might add that I use the PowerDirector video editing software which is wonderful for a non-professional, an unpaid plug:).
I "upgraded" my very fast Windows 7 laptop to Windows 10. I have an HP 17" Envy laptop with I7 8-core cpu and a 256 GB SSD (with 1TB HD). Under Windows 7, I always got a phenomenal 20 second full boot! After upgrading to Windows 10, my boot dragged out to over 40 seconds, and continued getting even slower. Worse, simple screens like the File Explorer or my photo editing program (Paint.Net) would take 15 or even 30 seconds to load. Under Windows 7, they had just snapped open. After several months of being disappointed by the deteriorating performance of my upgraded Windows 10 system, I bit the bullet, and went through all the hassles of a clean install of Windows 10 (downloading the ISO, reinstalling all my programs and data, etc). WOW!!! I got my 20 second boot back, all my programs just snap open, etc. Goes to show, the old wisdom that a "clean install" is just better than an "upgrade install" really applies to Windows 10 as well. This is significant because I will wager the vast majority of of Windows computers out there that were "upgraded" remain in the "upgraded" state, that is, very few (because of inertia or lack of know how) will have done the extra step of a "clean install". This would mean that the vast majority of upgrades are likely having a slightly to significantly inferior experience with Windows 10 than they would with a clean install. And most won't even realize it. This is admittedly a problem that will disappear automatically, as machines wear out and new ones come with Windows 10 installed. But it still affects tens of millions of folks.
I'm a retired computer guy, and I support a couple of large communities of retired folks, basically old people with computers. Naturally most got upgraded to Windows 10, whether by choice or by MS trickery. I have developed a standard protocol after which Windows 10 operates much like an improved Windows 7, and it works very well, and is less confusing for my customers (and me:)).
* Local Account - Ensure a local account, preferably with no password, boot straight to desktop
* Install and configure Chrome (or Firefox) - Add ad-blocking, turn on and populate bookmark bar, make friendly for user (I use "Disconnect" and "Ublock Origin")
* Install Classic Shell - Friendlier Start Button
* Install Spybot Anti-Beacon - Turns off a lot of Windows telemetry (fancy word for spying on the consumer's dime)
* Hide Cortana and unpin Store from the Task Bar
* Install old Windows 7 style Games - Available from 3rd party sources, Spider Solitaire anyone?
* Turn off as much of Quick Access as possible, and unpin what's there, and change the Options to default to "This PC" instead - QA is not controllable by the user, try to remove a dead link, I couldn't. Using "This PC" is dead reliable.
I've been Using Joomla since the pre-Joomla 1.5 days, so have seen the arc of development. The current 3.5 version is light years ahead of the 1.5 era, especially in terms of the user experience and upgrades. I am a retired computer database admin, but do not have MySQL or PHP skills. If I was well experienced in those two languages, I might be a lover of Drupal. But without PHP background, Drupal is daunting. So that took it off my plate. I rarely get into the PHP code, though I've dabbled in replacing a line now and then. Mostly, I use and revel in the menuing system, which like Wordpress, lets the entire edifice be managed.
It is worth mentioning that Wordpress is the most popular CMS in the world, at 26.4% of the entire Internet (gazillions of sites), that Joomla is second at 2.6% of the entire Internet (millions of sites), that Drupal is third at 2.2% of the entire Internet (millions of sites),and the rest come in at or under 1%. Wordpress is a blog-specific CMS, while Joomla and Drupal are general purpose CMS's.
If I were upgrading a 1.5 site to a current 3.5 site, it depends on how complex the site is, specifically how many articles. If less than 100, I would do it manually, and copy each article by hand. Larger than that, and I would use a migration tool. Look here: https://docs.joomla.org/Joomla.... That being said, I have wasted a lot of time on migration tools, and I usually opt for a manual rebuild. Ultimately, it is faster and much cleaner. Think of a Windows "upgrade" vs a Windows "clean install". Similar experience. Easier but clunkier:).
What I love about Joomla 3.5, over 1.5 is that the upgrade process has gone from ugly to good. In Joomla 3.5, you simply look in two places, the "Joomla Component" to upgrade the Joomla Core, and the "Extensions/Update" manager to upgrade all extensions. To upgrade, simply click the "Upgrade now" button, and "Voila", the upgrades are completed within a few seconds. Light years ahead of the manual processes needed in Joomla 1.5. This means ongoing administration is quick and simple. It is worth mentioning too, that Joomla 3.5 is completely designed to be automatically scalable from Smartphones to Tablets to PC's, where Joomla 1.5 was strictly PC's.
Manually, I would first create an empty 3.5 site. I would then install a current template and try to configure it to look as much like the original as I could. This actually will be the hardest step, and the most artistic. Then I would first create and copy over all the articles and categories as needed, then later the menues. The BEST way to copy articles is to switch to the HTML view, and copy the pure HTML code. Trying to copy the wysiwyg view is never satisfactory. Articles can be copied at the speed of CTRL-C, CTRL-V, which is pretty fast. Then I would create the menu structure and assign the articles and categories, as in the original. Finally, I would examine all the addons, the components, modules and plugins that were added to the original. It will be necessary to find the 3.5 equivalents. Install each one, and configure it as close as you can to the original.
I usually copy the images for the "image" folder lock stock and barrel to the "images" folder on the new site. While Joomla 3.5 does away from the need for the "stories" folder (it was required in Joomla 1.5, not needed but ok in Joomla 3.5), it will still be true that the copied over articles all point to the "images/stories" folder. So unless you want to modify every image link in every article, you can just leave them as they are.
I might add that the two extensions that I always insist on are the JCE editor component and the Akeeba backup component. Both are free, and superb. Good luck however you go.
It came as a great surprise to me when a friend who had become totally blind was using an iPhone. The smooth featureless surface seemed the last thing that would be useful to a blind person. But there is a whole subculture of apps for the blind for the iPhone, which, "surprise", were voice activated. He could use the phone to navigate the streets in his neighborhood when going for walks. He could order books for the blind over the phone, delivered to the phone, and listened to over the phone (using Bluetooth headphones). An amazing app is called "taptapsee", to identify objects. He just pointed the phone's camera at an object, double tapped the phone, and it spoke the name of the object!! Another app lets the blind person leave "notes" for himself. There are apps that will tell him what color an object is, using the camera of course. With one amazing app, he can point the phone at paper money, and it will tell him the denomination! I don't know if Android has all these capabilities, but why not? (A funny thing happened with my friend. His iPhone went completely blank, ie, the surface display refused to come up. This didn't bother him, but his wife couldn't see what was what. Turned out that it is a "feature" of an iPhone that if you triple-tap the surface, it will turn the surface display off! Took two trips to the Apple store to discover that one.) Bottom line, there are ten times as many apps for the blind for the iPhone than for the Android. (I counted 125 apps for the blind for the iPhone on one site, and could only find a dozen or so listed for the Android - a quick and non-scientific search:)). I seriously hope this will be the beginning of a surge so that Android can catch up. I am a very happy Android user, myself.
A built in ad blocker would be the ONLY reason I would ever try Edge. It seems designed to sell MS products and ads. I will remain forever wedded to Firefox, and if it goes away, then Chrome. With good strong protection from tracking and ads of course. I am of the belief that ads try to replace my own reasoning with the reasoning of the ad. I find it intrusive and offensive, unless I have sought out the ad.
My uncle (Willard Matthews) was one of the design engineers during construction of the BART system. This is a completely non-BART related anecdote, but as a young man I spent the day the US landed on the moon (July 16, 1969) at my uncle's house in Oakland, California, and we were mesmerized watching the moon landing. It seemed such a magical event. For folks who weren't fortunate to watch that, one of the great uncertainties was whether the astronauts would simply disappear under countless feet of regolith fluff. They didn't, but it was a great unknown until they actually landed. He was very proud of his work on BART, and remained with the system as an engineer for his entire life.
The best definition I've heard of ads is that they are the advertiser trying to substitute "their version" of reasonable thinking about a product (Wow, it's so incredible I have to have, like any reasonable person would!) for my own reasonable thinking. Most modern folks are so used to having their thinking hijacked by ads that they don't even realize what is going on. But when it sinks it, it is disgusting and immoral. I can do my own thinking, thank you. And I am good enough at Internet searches to find what I want when I want. So ad blockers are just preventing advertising from hijacking your thinking to their way of thinking. Good riddance! The personal cost to me of having my precious attention hijacked by advertisers is not factored into their thinking, but morally, it should be. I ought to be able to spend my attention where I choose, not where they choose.
PJ!!!! Live in Peace, and I worship the ground you walk on. You were such a light in the darkness, a blazing beacon, showing us the way, a rallying cry for sanity and clarity against the FUD from every evil corner of the world (SCO, Microsoft, etc, etc). You were the center of our world for years, and we miss you, but glad you are in the world! Thank you forever, and we all drink a giant toast to you, hear hear!!!:).
Just wanted to add that I also have been an everyday reader since the late 1990's. My deepest regret is that I couldn't remember my login from then, so I had to make a new one about 10 years ago. Darn:). I haven't made many posts, but love this site!!!! I agree with almost all the comments here on what makes this site so compelling. I like posts about FOSS, Linux, etc, and issues surrounding them. (Glad SCO died the terrible death it deserved!!). I enjoy articles about cutting edge issues and tech, and hope Slashdot lives long and prospers.
I'm a retired computer guy (71), and I do a ton of work for my senior citizen neighbors. I suggest a $20/hr "donation" to the R&R fund for me and my wife, for an hour or two of services that would cost them $80-$150 at any computer shop. If the person is really poor, or doesn't tumble that I accept "donations", then I just do the work for free. I go to their homes, and fix their problems (all over the map:). I am viewed as a local treasure by all the old folks I know, as most of them haven't a clue how to fix their problems. I don't advertise because I get enough by word-of-mouth to keep me as busy as I care to be, as I do other things too:). But if your parents have a retired computer guy in their neighborhood, perhaps they can establish a relationship with him/her. I would work for free, as I don't really need the money, but on the other hand, it gets old, and the $20 helps pay for a dinner out or a movie for me and my wife. She used to complain about my being gone, so I came up with the brilliant idea, I split the money with her. So if I'm gone for a 2 hour computer call, and I come home with $40, she gets half. Now when someone calls for help, she smiles and says, "off you go". Bottom line, a little bit of money makes everyone happy:).
You've made the point! The US gubmint realizes it can't do a thing about guns, that horse has left the barn. They don't want to repeat that mistake with drones, so if they get "registration" in place quickly, then they will be able to solve drone-related crimes in the future. I've been flying radio controlled hobby planes for years, and get that it is a widely spread hobby. But I also have a dread feeling that these fun toys, especially the newer expensive quadracopters, are simple to fly, very accurate, can be fitted with FPV (first point of view) cameras, and so can be sent on missions far out of sight with significant payloads. Witness the beginnings of crime with drones, where they are being used to drop payloads into prisons. We haven't had an incident yet where a terrorist has delivered a significant payload (ten pounds of C4 explosive?!), but technically it isn't all that hard. So maybe getting the ball rolling on registration will nip that in the bud. The BIG HUGE thing, is to do it without destroying a magnificent hobby. And the new ability to use drones for aerial videos is stunning, and countries all over the world will be encouraging this burgeoning new industry. I think a GoPro flying camera that tracks you as you mountainbike around or run a wild river is stunning! Or aerial views of our neighborhoods can make us feel like birds in the air. Wonderful. The US has to walk a fine line, not to destroy a goose that lays golden eggs, and yet be sure that goose won't be used to deliver weapons.
I think it is backwards to say "blocking ads is stealing". It is quite the other way around. When I want to watch a video online, or read an article, it is stealing from me to divert my attention to something I did not choose to see and which I have no interest in. That act of theft of my precious attention (I only have so much of it in my life, and it is MY attention that I have the right to direct as I choose) is an immoral act. We are so used to this immoral stealing of our attention that we have gotten numb to it. But that does not make it right. The immorality of advertising was a wake up call to me. I had never thought of it that way until I read a Slashdot article recently pointing this out: http://slashdot.org/story/15/0.... From that article: "Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted." Touche, advertisers!!! You can pry my adblocker from my cold dead fingers!
I am an old retired computer guy with a dozen Rubbermaid tubs of old photos, documents and film/video inherited from my parents that go back generations and are priceless to my family. My goal is to have a method of preserving both physical and digital resources in such a way that they are accessible in 50 years. I have photos that are over 100 years old, so that is a reasonable goal.
After months of research, I have become most impressed by a "museum" approach. That means, cataloging the media resources with a defined vocabulary--I chose the Dublin Core (www.dublincore.org). It means developing a way to link the physical media to any digitized versions, by assigning a numbering system ("accessioning" in museum-speak). And the most important thing I learned was to plan to save a text file with each digitized item, that describes it and contains the stories about it. For example, a photo titled, "Grandma Kayaking the Missouri River.JPG" would have stored with it a file named "Grandma Kayaking the Missouri River.TXT". The reason for this is profound! The associated text file is MOST likely to survive 50 years. No matter how software changes, text files are likely to be readable in 50 years.
The plan would be to open and resave all the media, say every 10 years, and update as needed. For example, JPG files might need to be updated to JPG2000, etc, etc, as new software is developed. A slightly sophisticated wrinkle is to actually store the text in XML or HTML format. So instead of having a line in the text file that says, "Title: Grandma kayaking the Missouri River", it might read Grandma kayaking the Missouri River. The advantage of this is that it makes all the text files "machine readable".
If this level of approach is interesting to you, then the best site discussing these issues I have found BY FAR is "http://archivehistory.jeksite.org/index.htm". This amazing site contains basically a 250 book on the subject that is amazing. It isn't immediately apparent how extensive this site is, but it is just wonderful. There is vanishingly little else of this quality out there, I've spent months looking. The Library of Congress has a "Personal Archiving" program, but it basically says just "scan well, organize folders well and backup well". That is good advice, but doesn't touch the bigger issues. For small museums there are cool sites like "www.omeka.org". I adore the "ATOM" project ("https://www.artefactual.com/services/atom-2/", but it is just over my head in sophistication. Here is a website that discusses 29 "free and open source" solutions to digital archiving: "http://www.ethnosproject.org/digital-curation-digital-asset-management-community-archiving-systems/". I have gone through and examined each of them, but they are just a bit over my head. I have found several projects in Australia to be very interesting, but again, not an exact fit for us "family archivists".
I have finally decided to "roll my own" program. I am building a Microsoft Access database that will catalog my media resources, and which will then automatically generate my "text" file for each resource, putting the text file in the proper folder, and containing the correct XML depiction of my Dublin Core description of my photos, videos, documents, etc, including the locations of both the physical and digital media. I have made arrangements with some computer science folks in my family in the next generation (nephews), to "inherit" my "family museum" effort, and to carry it on to the next generation. My whole point with the "museum" approach is that it creates an intelligible system that can be left to the next generation! If my Microsoft Access program gets lost over the years, it won't matter, because all the database information about the digital media will be stored in those amazingly simple TEXT files!!! Good luck in your efforts.
There is a bomb shelter built under I-5 near Greenlake in Seattle, that was built in the early 60's (ok, fallout shelter). It was touted, I believe, during the 1962 world's fair in Seattle. Here's a King5 video about it: http://www.king5.com/story/new.... It is a circular room with bathrooms under the freeway, with a small entrance. Later, it was used to issue driver's licenses. I got one there myself in the early 70's. Now, it is a grown-over place used as a City of Seattle municipal records storage center for a few years, and then abandoned. A massive cement structure like a bomb shelter doesn't go away, nice they can be reused in peacetime. What could be more peaceful than marijuana:).
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I have used Paint.NET for picture editing for over 10 years now, starting when it was a WSU project when Rick Brewster was a Microsoft mentored student there. I support a number of websites, and have a family photo archive. Paint.NET is awesome and I can do pretty much anything I need to do with it. The simple stuff of course, rotating, cropping, adding text or lines or fill, fixing minor photo errors, getting a bit creative. And now and again a few more advanced things like "photoshopping" someone into a photo is fairly straightforward. I am deeply grateful for Rick Brewster and all his work on this. And I am thrilled he has plans far into the future for Paint.NET.
I have been using Gmail for many many years, and almost never delete an email. However, I read them all. The Gdrive is nice for sharing videos and storing files I want to reach from elsewhere, and the calendar is one of the best out there. I share calendars with several, and having them all show at once on the same display is super. The way Google automatically routes emails to specific folders works very well for me. I rarely delete an email (mostly just delete spam), and gladly pay Google $5/year for extra space to hold my 27,000 plus emails. If you ever sent me an email, I can find it years later. Comes in handy, both for personal emails and for critical data received from businesses.
I too have made an edit to an article about lava caves in Washington state. I had explored those caves many times, and knew some elements of the article were just wrong. I edited those portions so they were correct, and it stood. I think Wikipedia is a modern marvel, and I turn to it often. And I too never bothered to register, so I am among what I assume is a vast army of unrecorded editors.
Chrome will n-e-v-e-r support an in-browser FTP capability. So I am with Firefox forever, as long as it supports such features as FireFTP! I maintain websites, and it is such an incredibly easy tool to use, no extra steps, just two clicks and I'm connected via ftp to any of my websites. I use Chrome sometimes, but Firefox is my BFF because of FireFTP!
As long as Firefox has FireFTP extension working, I will be staying with Firefox. If any of Firefox's upgrades permanently breaks FireFTP, then I will be shopping for a new browser. Edge does not support in-browser FTP nor does Chrome. If none ever do, then it may be Chrome or a Chromium offshoot in the long run. Edge seems born to make MS money from me, so I doubt I will use it. I realize Chrome is the same way :). I support a lot of beginners, and I usually configure their Windows 10 systems to use Chrome, with the bookmarks bar and home page turned on. As someone pointed out, releasing/pushing Windows 10 when Edge was "such a turd" pretty much killed Edge.
Not necessarily true. I have HATED automated phone trees put in place by banks, say for example. They are so frustrating and useless I always try to find the fastest way to get a real human. BUT, the last time I called my bank for a tricky problem (I wanted to reset the PIN on my debit card), in fairly short order the automated phone tree had reset my PIN on my debit card!! I was amazed. And, for a moment, I loved phone trees. Once the AI behind phone trees approaches or surpasses humans in providing the right answers to tricky problems, people will be fine with them. Up until now, you couldn't even call phone trees "AI". They just followed a preset algorithm to solve the simplest of problems (your balance). But as true AI gets involved, and they really can solve problems quickly, the industry will turn on a dime. And people will no longer be needed.
Commodore 64 or Windsurfer?? I guessed how many 1 inch cap bolts fit in a Midas Muffler, and won an O'Brien Windsurfer. I debated all winter whether to sell it and buy a Commodore 64, or sail it. In the spring I finally decided to try sailing it. I fell in over and over and couldn't stay up, so I sold it and bought a Commodore 64. It was minor fun for about six months, when I had a serious break in my arm and was off work for two months. During that time, I discovered a Commodore 64 club, and the wonders of pirating games and disks. A whole new world opened up thanks to the wonderful club members! I became very proficient at compiling six games per disk, and writing basic programs to create "menus" for my kids. The menus were a screen with numbers 1 thru 6. Just press a number and a game started. Behind the scenes, I remember having to learn all sorts of tricks with Basic to get the games to work, peeking and poking this, sys'ing that and emulating keyboard keystrokes for the other. I programmed several dozen disks. I remember acquiring an AWESOME program at one of the C64 users group meetings that would copy a whole disk in ONLY a half hour. It seemed like total magic! My brother got a C64, and even my retired Dad got one, and had great fun making newsletters for his Lions Club with it. He even scanned in cartoons and substituted his club member's names for the captions. Pretty advanced for a 70 year old in the 1980's. I had enormous fun with the legendary Commodore 64, programming in Basic, spending countless hours with programs like Simons Basic, The Print Shop, Logo, the MultiPlan spreadsheet and the Music Construction Set. The expertise I gained with the C64 led directly to a computing career at Boeing. It took many years to subdue my love of pirating (I'm not fully over it). We shared our discoveries in those days with glee and abandon. With a great turn of irony, I later became a fairly accomplished windsurfer.
"Red Notice" is a must read! This very current auto-biographical book by Bill Browder, millionaire financier, lays a foundation and then turns into a page turning deadly American-Russian thriller. When you are done reading it, you have a clear and very chilling view of Vladmir Putin and his coterie of murderous oligarchs. It is even more relevant given the ascendancy of Trump, and the Russian's desire to have sanctions lifted. The book tells a story of billions looted from the Russian economy, of murder, and of the consequent birth of the US congressional Magnitsky Act, authorizing sanctions against Russian oligarchs. I read a lot, and this is the most amazing book I've read in a long time! I bought a dozen copies for my friends, and I've never done that before! The author wrote it as his best shot at not getting murdered by Putin, as it would now be obvious to the world who did it.
My Brother laserjet (HL-L2360D) has a "setting" which will override the "cartridge is empty" message. That is to say, it will warn that the cartridge is empty, but it will keep printing forever. That is good, as shaking the cartridge and keeping an eye on it gives a few extra weeks worth of printing. It is not an obvious setting, but it is there!! Of course, a day will come when the printing starts to get light, and then of course, need to change the cartridge. But I am happy to take responsibility for a few wasted "light" pages in order to get many weeks more out of a cartridge than the warning claims.
I video plays, variety shows and other presentations put on by the members of our community, and burn the videos to DVD's playable in DVD players, so that the recipients can watch them on TV. I feel badly about using DVD's because the videos are at least 1920x1080 (and 4k capable), so they are dumbed down to 720x480 for the DVD's. But people like to play them in their DVD players and share their activities with their families, so they are very popular. I am planning for the future to switch to Blu-Ray, or even flash drives, but few in my group have Blu-Ray disk players yet. I have a printer which prints an image on the DVD's, so they look very spiffy, though I distribute them at cost. It is a fully volunteer effort. I might add that I use the PowerDirector video editing software which is wonderful for a non-professional, an unpaid plug :).
I "upgraded" my very fast Windows 7 laptop to Windows 10. I have an HP 17" Envy laptop with I7 8-core cpu and a 256 GB SSD (with 1TB HD). Under Windows 7, I always got a phenomenal 20 second full boot! After upgrading to Windows 10, my boot dragged out to over 40 seconds, and continued getting even slower. Worse, simple screens like the File Explorer or my photo editing program (Paint.Net) would take 15 or even 30 seconds to load. Under Windows 7, they had just snapped open. After several months of being disappointed by the deteriorating performance of my upgraded Windows 10 system, I bit the bullet, and went through all the hassles of a clean install of Windows 10 (downloading the ISO, reinstalling all my programs and data, etc). WOW!!! I got my 20 second boot back, all my programs just snap open, etc. Goes to show, the old wisdom that a "clean install" is just better than an "upgrade install" really applies to Windows 10 as well. This is significant because I will wager the vast majority of of Windows computers out there that were "upgraded" remain in the "upgraded" state, that is, very few (because of inertia or lack of know how) will have done the extra step of a "clean install". This would mean that the vast majority of upgrades are likely having a slightly to significantly inferior experience with Windows 10 than they would with a clean install. And most won't even realize it. This is admittedly a problem that will disappear automatically, as machines wear out and new ones come with Windows 10 installed. But it still affects tens of millions of folks.
I'm a retired computer guy, and I support a couple of large communities of retired folks, basically old people with computers. Naturally most got upgraded to Windows 10, whether by choice or by MS trickery. I have developed a standard protocol after which Windows 10 operates much like an improved Windows 7, and it works very well, and is less confusing for my customers (and me :)).
* Local Account - Ensure a local account, preferably with no password, boot straight to desktop
* Install and configure Chrome (or Firefox) - Add ad-blocking, turn on and populate bookmark bar, make friendly for user (I use "Disconnect" and "Ublock Origin")
* Install Classic Shell - Friendlier Start Button
* Install Spybot Anti-Beacon - Turns off a lot of Windows telemetry (fancy word for spying on the consumer's dime)
* Hide Cortana and unpin Store from the Task Bar
* Install old Windows 7 style Games - Available from 3rd party sources, Spider Solitaire anyone?
* Turn off as much of Quick Access as possible, and unpin what's there, and change the Options to default to "This PC" instead - QA is not controllable by the user, try to remove a dead link, I couldn't. Using "This PC" is dead reliable.
I've been Using Joomla since the pre-Joomla 1.5 days, so have seen the arc of development. The current 3.5 version is light years ahead of the 1.5 era, especially in terms of the user experience and upgrades. I am a retired computer database admin, but do not have MySQL or PHP skills. If I was well experienced in those two languages, I might be a lover of Drupal. But without PHP background, Drupal is daunting. So that took it off my plate. I rarely get into the PHP code, though I've dabbled in replacing a line now and then. Mostly, I use and revel in the menuing system, which like Wordpress, lets the entire edifice be managed.
:).
It is worth mentioning that Wordpress is the most popular CMS in the world, at 26.4% of the entire Internet (gazillions of sites), that Joomla is second at 2.6% of the entire Internet (millions of sites), that Drupal is third at 2.2% of the entire Internet (millions of sites),and the rest come in at or under 1%. Wordpress is a blog-specific CMS, while Joomla and Drupal are general purpose CMS's.
If I were upgrading a 1.5 site to a current 3.5 site, it depends on how complex the site is, specifically how many articles. If less than 100, I would do it manually, and copy each article by hand. Larger than that, and I would use a migration tool. Look here: https://docs.joomla.org/Joomla.... That being said, I have wasted a lot of time on migration tools, and I usually opt for a manual rebuild. Ultimately, it is faster and much cleaner. Think of a Windows "upgrade" vs a Windows "clean install". Similar experience. Easier but clunkier
What I love about Joomla 3.5, over 1.5 is that the upgrade process has gone from ugly to good. In Joomla 3.5, you simply look in two places, the "Joomla Component" to upgrade the Joomla Core, and the "Extensions/Update" manager to upgrade all extensions. To upgrade, simply click the "Upgrade now" button, and "Voila", the upgrades are completed within a few seconds. Light years ahead of the manual processes needed in Joomla 1.5. This means ongoing administration is quick and simple. It is worth mentioning too, that Joomla 3.5 is completely designed to be automatically scalable from Smartphones to Tablets to PC's, where Joomla 1.5 was strictly PC's.
Manually, I would first create an empty 3.5 site. I would then install a current template and try to configure it to look as much like the original as I could. This actually will be the hardest step, and the most artistic. Then I would first create and copy over all the articles and categories as needed, then later the menues. The BEST way to copy articles is to switch to the HTML view, and copy the pure HTML code. Trying to copy the wysiwyg view is never satisfactory. Articles can be copied at the speed of CTRL-C, CTRL-V, which is pretty fast. Then I would create the menu structure and assign the articles and categories, as in the original. Finally, I would examine all the addons, the components, modules and plugins that were added to the original. It will be necessary to find the 3.5 equivalents. Install each one, and configure it as close as you can to the original.
I usually copy the images for the "image" folder lock stock and barrel to the "images" folder on the new site. While Joomla 3.5 does away from the need for the "stories" folder (it was required in Joomla 1.5, not needed but ok in Joomla 3.5), it will still be true that the copied over articles all point to the "images/stories" folder. So unless you want to modify every image link in every article, you can just leave them as they are.
I might add that the two extensions that I always insist on are the JCE editor component and the Akeeba backup component. Both are free, and superb. Good luck however you go.
It came as a great surprise to me when a friend who had become totally blind was using an iPhone. The smooth featureless surface seemed the last thing that would be useful to a blind person. But there is a whole subculture of apps for the blind for the iPhone, which, "surprise", were voice activated. He could use the phone to navigate the streets in his neighborhood when going for walks. He could order books for the blind over the phone, delivered to the phone, and listened to over the phone (using Bluetooth headphones). An amazing app is called "taptapsee", to identify objects. He just pointed the phone's camera at an object, double tapped the phone, and it spoke the name of the object!! Another app lets the blind person leave "notes" for himself. There are apps that will tell him what color an object is, using the camera of course. With one amazing app, he can point the phone at paper money, and it will tell him the denomination! I don't know if Android has all these capabilities, but why not? (A funny thing happened with my friend. His iPhone went completely blank, ie, the surface display refused to come up. This didn't bother him, but his wife couldn't see what was what. Turned out that it is a "feature" of an iPhone that if you triple-tap the surface, it will turn the surface display off! Took two trips to the Apple store to discover that one.) Bottom line, there are ten times as many apps for the blind for the iPhone than for the Android. (I counted 125 apps for the blind for the iPhone on one site, and could only find a dozen or so listed for the Android - a quick and non-scientific search :)). I seriously hope this will be the beginning of a surge so that Android can catch up. I am a very happy Android user, myself.
A built in ad blocker would be the ONLY reason I would ever try Edge. It seems designed to sell MS products and ads. I will remain forever wedded to Firefox, and if it goes away, then Chrome. With good strong protection from tracking and ads of course. I am of the belief that ads try to replace my own reasoning with the reasoning of the ad. I find it intrusive and offensive, unless I have sought out the ad.
You would think so, but Walter Cronkite who was the news anchor at the time kept bringing it up as a real concern. So we watchers were concerned :).
My uncle (Willard Matthews) was one of the design engineers during construction of the BART system. This is a completely non-BART related anecdote, but as a young man I spent the day the US landed on the moon (July 16, 1969) at my uncle's house in Oakland, California, and we were mesmerized watching the moon landing. It seemed such a magical event. For folks who weren't fortunate to watch that, one of the great uncertainties was whether the astronauts would simply disappear under countless feet of regolith fluff. They didn't, but it was a great unknown until they actually landed. He was very proud of his work on BART, and remained with the system as an engineer for his entire life.
The best definition I've heard of ads is that they are the advertiser trying to substitute "their version" of reasonable thinking about a product (Wow, it's so incredible I have to have, like any reasonable person would!) for my own reasonable thinking. Most modern folks are so used to having their thinking hijacked by ads that they don't even realize what is going on. But when it sinks it, it is disgusting and immoral. I can do my own thinking, thank you. And I am good enough at Internet searches to find what I want when I want. So ad blockers are just preventing advertising from hijacking your thinking to their way of thinking. Good riddance! The personal cost to me of having my precious attention hijacked by advertisers is not factored into their thinking, but morally, it should be. I ought to be able to spend my attention where I choose, not where they choose.
PJ!!!! Live in Peace, and I worship the ground you walk on. You were such a light in the darkness, a blazing beacon, showing us the way, a rallying cry for sanity and clarity against the FUD from every evil corner of the world (SCO, Microsoft, etc, etc). You were the center of our world for years, and we miss you, but glad you are in the world! Thank you forever, and we all drink a giant toast to you, hear hear!!! :).
Just wanted to add that I also have been an everyday reader since the late 1990's. My deepest regret is that I couldn't remember my login from then, so I had to make a new one about 10 years ago. Darn :). I haven't made many posts, but love this site!!!! I agree with almost all the comments here on what makes this site so compelling. I like posts about FOSS, Linux, etc, and issues surrounding them. (Glad SCO died the terrible death it deserved!!). I enjoy articles about cutting edge issues and tech, and hope Slashdot lives long and prospers.
I'm a retired computer guy (71), and I do a ton of work for my senior citizen neighbors. I suggest a $20/hr "donation" to the R&R fund for me and my wife, for an hour or two of services that would cost them $80-$150 at any computer shop. If the person is really poor, or doesn't tumble that I accept "donations", then I just do the work for free. I go to their homes, and fix their problems (all over the map :). I am viewed as a local treasure by all the old folks I know, as most of them haven't a clue how to fix their problems. I don't advertise because I get enough by word-of-mouth to keep me as busy as I care to be, as I do other things too :). But if your parents have a retired computer guy in their neighborhood, perhaps they can establish a relationship with him/her. I would work for free, as I don't really need the money, but on the other hand, it gets old, and the $20 helps pay for a dinner out or a movie for me and my wife. She used to complain about my being gone, so I came up with the brilliant idea, I split the money with her. So if I'm gone for a 2 hour computer call, and I come home with $40, she gets half. Now when someone calls for help, she smiles and says, "off you go". Bottom line, a little bit of money makes everyone happy :).
You've made the point! The US gubmint realizes it can't do a thing about guns, that horse has left the barn. They don't want to repeat that mistake with drones, so if they get "registration" in place quickly, then they will be able to solve drone-related crimes in the future. I've been flying radio controlled hobby planes for years, and get that it is a widely spread hobby. But I also have a dread feeling that these fun toys, especially the newer expensive quadracopters, are simple to fly, very accurate, can be fitted with FPV (first point of view) cameras, and so can be sent on missions far out of sight with significant payloads. Witness the beginnings of crime with drones, where they are being used to drop payloads into prisons. We haven't had an incident yet where a terrorist has delivered a significant payload (ten pounds of C4 explosive?!), but technically it isn't all that hard. So maybe getting the ball rolling on registration will nip that in the bud. The BIG HUGE thing, is to do it without destroying a magnificent hobby. And the new ability to use drones for aerial videos is stunning, and countries all over the world will be encouraging this burgeoning new industry. I think a GoPro flying camera that tracks you as you mountainbike around or run a wild river is stunning! Or aerial views of our neighborhoods can make us feel like birds in the air. Wonderful. The US has to walk a fine line, not to destroy a goose that lays golden eggs, and yet be sure that goose won't be used to deliver weapons.
I think it is backwards to say "blocking ads is stealing". It is quite the other way around. When I want to watch a video online, or read an article, it is stealing from me to divert my attention to something I did not choose to see and which I have no interest in. That act of theft of my precious attention (I only have so much of it in my life, and it is MY attention that I have the right to direct as I choose) is an immoral act. We are so used to this immoral stealing of our attention that we have gotten numb to it. But that does not make it right. The immorality of advertising was a wake up call to me. I had never thought of it that way until I read a Slashdot article recently pointing this out: http://slashdot.org/story/15/0.... From that article: "Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted." Touche, advertisers!!! You can pry my adblocker from my cold dead fingers!
I am an old retired computer guy with a dozen Rubbermaid tubs of old photos, documents and film/video inherited from my parents that go back generations and are priceless to my family. My goal is to have a method of preserving both physical and digital resources in such a way that they are accessible in 50 years. I have photos that are over 100 years old, so that is a reasonable goal.
After months of research, I have become most impressed by a "museum" approach. That means, cataloging the media resources with a defined vocabulary--I chose the Dublin Core (www.dublincore.org). It means developing a way to link the physical media to any digitized versions, by assigning a numbering system ("accessioning" in museum-speak). And the most important thing I learned was to plan to save a text file with each digitized item, that describes it and contains the stories about it. For example, a photo titled, "Grandma Kayaking the Missouri River.JPG" would have stored with it a file named "Grandma Kayaking the Missouri River.TXT". The reason for this is profound! The associated text file is MOST likely to survive 50 years. No matter how software changes, text files are likely to be readable in 50 years.
The plan would be to open and resave all the media, say every 10 years, and update as needed. For example, JPG files might need to be updated to JPG2000, etc, etc, as new software is developed. A slightly sophisticated wrinkle is to actually store the text in XML or HTML format. So instead of having a line in the text file that says, "Title: Grandma kayaking the Missouri River", it might read Grandma kayaking the Missouri River. The advantage of this is that it makes all the text files "machine readable".
If this level of approach is interesting to you, then the best site discussing these issues I have found BY FAR is "http://archivehistory.jeksite.org/index.htm". This amazing site contains basically a 250 book on the subject that is amazing. It isn't immediately apparent how extensive this site is, but it is just wonderful. There is vanishingly little else of this quality out there, I've spent months looking. The Library of Congress has a "Personal Archiving" program, but it basically says just "scan well, organize folders well and backup well". That is good advice, but doesn't touch the bigger issues. For small museums there are cool sites like "www.omeka.org". I adore the "ATOM" project ("https://www.artefactual.com/services/atom-2/", but it is just over my head in sophistication. Here is a website that discusses 29 "free and open source" solutions to digital archiving: "http://www.ethnosproject.org/digital-curation-digital-asset-management-community-archiving-systems/". I have gone through and examined each of them, but they are just a bit over my head. I have found several projects in Australia to be very interesting, but again, not an exact fit for us "family archivists".
I have finally decided to "roll my own" program. I am building a Microsoft Access database that will catalog my media resources, and which will then automatically generate my "text" file for each resource, putting the text file in the proper folder, and containing the correct XML depiction of my Dublin Core description of my photos, videos, documents, etc, including the locations of both the physical and digital media. I have made arrangements with some computer science folks in my family in the next generation (nephews), to "inherit" my "family museum" effort, and to carry it on to the next generation. My whole point with the "museum" approach is that it creates an intelligible system that can be left to the next generation! If my Microsoft Access program gets lost over the years, it won't matter, because all the database information about the digital media will be stored in those amazingly simple TEXT files!!! Good luck in your efforts.
There is a bomb shelter built under I-5 near Greenlake in Seattle, that was built in the early 60's (ok, fallout shelter). It was touted, I believe, during the 1962 world's fair in Seattle. Here's a King5 video about it: http://www.king5.com/story/new.... It is a circular room with bathrooms under the freeway, with a small entrance. Later, it was used to issue driver's licenses. I got one there myself in the early 70's. Now, it is a grown-over place used as a City of Seattle municipal records storage center for a few years, and then abandoned. A massive cement structure like a bomb shelter doesn't go away, nice they can be reused in peacetime. What could be more peaceful than marijuana :).