Tech Tips - Random Walks in the Low Countries

On Google Maps

June 30, 2016 by Dave Hampton

New, high-resolution Landsat 8 images have been swapped into Google Maps, yielding really amazing pictures of terrain and buildings. The whole earth is now cloud-free and the detail is good enough to make out patio furniture, stone paths, and garden boxes in my backyards.

A nice 3-D effect has been added, with taller structures like houses and trees shifting perspective against the ground as I pan over a neighborhood. .

Street View has also been updated, as I found out when I called up 5 Woodside to show my parents my UK abode. The picture of the house was perfect, but when I shifted perspective to show my street, I was surprised to find…well…me.

The photos must have been taken by the Google-Cam-Car last summer. It’s my old car, midday. and it looks like I’m packing for a trip north. ‘Cute that they blurred the milk bottle in my right hand.

I must have been lost in thought: I don’t recall seeing the vehicle glide past. But it’s nice to be immortalized, literally ‘On the Map’.

Simple PC repairs (not)

October 17, 2015 by Dave Hampton

Four engineers are riding in a car when it suddenly sputters and stops. The electrical engineer suggests that the problem is the battery, the mechanical engineer pokes the valves, the chemical engineer sniffs the gasoline. The computer engineer insists that everything will be fine if everyone simply gets out of the car and then gets back into it.

Friday I logged into my PC to find that my Start Menu was corrupted. This would prevent short-cut access to any programs, so I checked on the internet and found lots of people reporting the same error and lots of guidance for fixing it.

Rebooting, disabling the antivirus, going to Safe Mode didn’t resolve things.

I tried to add a new user, the solution that most advisors advocated, but Windows prevented that.

I hacked into PowerShell and rebuilt the startup tables. Nothing changed.

Deepak, the Indian IT fellow living up the hall, suggested getting a Mac.

Worse, the problem was spreading. Search stopped working. The Associations, which link a program to a data file type so that clicking on a document, for example, starts Word, became corrupted. Repairing / reinstalling Office failed to fix anything.

Worried, I updated my backups.

The next suggestion was Reset my PC / Reinstall Windows 10 (Your applications will be lost, your data files will remain).

It took a few hours for the process to complete, and my data files and account settings came through intact. Microsoft kindly posted a list of everything that was uninstalled to my Desktop. All of the problems were, indeed, resolved.

So I’m now in the midst of a two-day recovery to re-install and re-set several dozen applications. It’s time-consuming, but likely will make the computer run better.

I also took advantage of the transition to migrate from Windows Live Mail to Outlook. Microsoft hasn’t updated Mail since 2012 and it has been getting increasingly unreliable.

Outlook 2016 is not a happy alternative. Bloated and slow, it’s been a hassle to set up and connect to my email accounts, and slow to download my existing mail files. I can’t drag and drop mail between different accounts, and Search will take weeks to finish indexing.

We treat our computers, like our cars, as an appliance: focused on using them to get from here to there and not worrying about how they work. When they fail, the cause can be difficult to diagnose, and any fix often seems like trial and error.

And when it involves IT, the fix is often counterintuitive and leads to a lot more work.

‘Taking it slowly

July 23, 2015 by Dave Hampton

I dropped into my Leisure Centre at six, e-book and MP3 player in hand as customary. I’m trying to wrap up a light, misogynistic thriller so that I can get into Hatching Twitter, the personal startup story of the one social medium I’ve never understood.

A row of signs diverted towards the gym: Blood Donations Evening. I knew that NHSBT hosts donor events across England, much as the Red Cross does in the US. I’ve always given blood, initially because it earned me a free dinner at Burger King in college, but later because I knew so many friends and colleagues who benefited during their hospitalizations. At this point, it would also be interesting to see how the process compared here in the UK.

Country to country, societies reveal their truest selves in grocery check-out lines. The Dutch fling new goods down the belt before the previous customer has cleared the area. The US is more polite, but asocial. In the UK, people take it slowly, chatting with the clerk, counting out change, digging for coupons.

Giving blood is much the same: a stepwise process through intermediate queues, earnest polite conversations at each station. The level of concern for my travels and possible exposure to West Nile Virus was new, and the laboratory screening tests seemed more superficial. I liked the space-capsule style recliners and the techs were much better at hitting a vein on the first try than their American counterparts.

But the experience is much liken the Tesco check-out: calibrated to the slowest participant, fully satisfied before moving on to the next. It took an hour and a half to complete the donation.

A similarly slow and deliberate process accompanied my transition to Windows 10 this week. I have hated Windows 8, the touch-tablet universal interface getting in the way of work constantly. The new upgrade promised to be more desktop-friendly, with tiles moved to the background and the return of the start menu.

I approach these brain transplants with care. There are always missing (video!) drivers and dropped settings during the upgrade. I backed up everything locally and to the cloud before starting, scheduled the install to occur at 1 am, and crossed my fingers.

Happily, this was the smoothest upgrade that I’ve done. There were no lockups and I think that everything came through unscathed. I like the new focus on the desktop a lot, and the Start Menu is learning my habits and preferences. Each day, more of what I need is offered ever-more conveniently in its menus

There are some configuration adjustments (CNET and BGR have recommendations) and I’m not sold on Edge or Bing, so I set default browser / search away from them the first day. But otherwise it seems to be a worthwhile and painless upgrade that solves a lot of usability problems.

Tools I use

July 22, 2015 by Dave Hampton

Windows 10 releases this week, I have high hopes that it will make the whole PC experience easier and faster again. I’ve really struggled with Windows 8.1. The touch interface gets in the way, inconsistent and oversensitive: I prefer to command the computer when I have work to do, rather than stroke and poke at it.

I pine, still, for my BSD Unix command window.

OffSite Storage: Someone asked me about my cloud storage preferences the other day. I am, frankly, ambivalent about the cloud, where the only copies of my data and applications are kept at the other end of a network connection. With travel and paranoia, I keep a copy close by on a USB drive.

Worse, and too often, a remote photo archive or data server has closed down without warning when the vendor’s business model failed, costing me China pictures and web sites. I’ll acknowledge that PC disasters, a dropped computer or a spilled drink, have also cost me dearly, so this isn’t unique to the cloud.

In any case, I run a three-pronged cloud strategy:

My computer continuously backs up to Carbonite, highly recommended, it just works.
My photos back up to Google Photos. The storage seems bottomless and the indexing gets better and better. I do wish the creepy Story Generator would stop aggregating unrelated photos into fables, though.
My shared files go to to Dropbox. It’s quick, clean, multi-platform, with excellent sharing and privacy tools for collaborative work.

Utilities: While looking for solutions to a few specialized tasks, I found some good apps worth a try:

Memrise: For years, I’ve been looking for a good Dutch flashcards program to practice my vocabulary. Memrise is great: itofferss lots of courses (I am doing the MRT Dutch 2, with over 3300 intermediate-level words) and syncs progress across multiple platforms. A $10/mo subscription unlocks additional practice games, but the basic learn and review is free and effective. They continue to make improvements, introducing voice output last week.
Malwarebytes: I use Windows Defender, but caught a nasty virus anyway that sent spam emails, disrupted Skype, and slowed my PC. I got it out in a day’s work, but then bought Malwarebytes as an added layer of protection. It’s worked well: my only complaint is that it freezes the touch interface briefly when it does a scan. For extra care, I run Spybot S&D monthly.
Supertintin: I occasionally need to record business conference calls, and this background utility does a very nice job: it’s efficient and unobtrusive. Purchasing the app removes the time limit, and it’s worked very smoothly. My only issue has been one crash during an incoming call, losing 5 minutes of cached data.
Koredoko: I am posting daily photos to the Dorset Landscapes group and to Instagram. I don’t want to run down my camera battery with GPS, though, so need to geotag my photos after the fact. Koredoko has a good map-based interface that lets me update my tags quickly. Some of the interface is counterintuitive, but works well once I found the right buttons.

Desk Tools: Finally, I am still looking for a good solution to Contacts and Calendars. These are the most basic of office tools, but the existing tools from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Android are still awful.

Letting Google index appointments and travel from my email has not brought any predictive order or useful notifications from G+Now. So I stay with my paper diary and ignore the jeers (sending Lucy Kellaway’s article when people press the point: Users of electronic calendars can take six times longer to scribble something down.).

I had hoped that LinkedIn would be the basis for a self-updating business contacts system, and spent hours linking and pruning my Contacts in Android. Unfortunately, people don’t keep their profiles complete or current, and Android doesn’t back up or maintain records properly. Paper alternatives are not good either, so I just struggle along.

Disclaimer: I was neither asked nor compensated to write any of these reviews. As always, I select and purchase all of my own tools, and the opinions are mine alone based on daily use.

A wee bit ‘o techy trouble

May 27, 2015 by Dave Hampton

The problems first appeared last night, Windows Live Writer (WLW) returning an error when I tried to push a new essay up onto Blogger. It looked like an authentication issue: I checked passwords, then had a beer and waited for Google to sort itself out. An hour went by with no change.

A quick search turned up a number of frustrated WLW users complaining in Blogger’s Help Forum. Unhelpfully, we were informed that Google had changed it’s user validation process and that Microsoft had chosen not to update it’s software. Microsoft, in turn, saw no reason to update a legacy product that had not been updated in years.

As the evening wore on, it became apparent that none of the Windows blogging clients had updated when told to, from BlogJet to BlogDesk, so nobody was able to post to Blogger. Microsoft’s Word and Outlook interfaces were also broken.

Suggested work-arounds included migrating the blog to WordPress, but the importer likewise had not been updated, so all formatting was lost if I migrated using the Export Content To File / Import Content From File suggested by other users.

I took up the challenge and found that if I mailed a copy of the WLW post to Blogger, then copied Google’s HTML back to WLW, tweaked the format, and pasted the HTML back into Blogger, I could get a post published with pictures and formats. It takes a bit of hacking at the code to smooth it out – if you are noticing small formatting glitches, that is why.

Google is now promising to work with Microsoft on a fix, we apologize for any inconvenience caused.

Some days the Internet is sooo brittle…

Good news, bad news and the novel

May 12, 2015 by Dave Hampton

How many ways can you tell a fictional story? British newspaper columnist Christopher Booker suggested in 2004 that the answer was “7”: 1. Overcoming the Monster, 2. Rags to Riches, 3. The Quest, 4. Voyage and Return, 5. Rebirth, 6. Comedy and 7. Tragedy. All but the seventh have happy endings, either the restoration of order or the promise of renewal.

‘nothing magical about 7, of course, and other authors argue for anywhere from three to thirty-six basic plots.

Complementary to that was Kurt Vonnegut, who argued for Universal Shapes of Stories in his rejected Masters thesis. In it, he traces the sentimental arc of stories, the shifting balance of happiness and sadness as the plot unfolded. He identified eight basic types of story arcs, well illustrated here and charmingly presented in video by Vonnegut here.

Enter Matthew Jockers, a University of Nebraska English Professor. He assigned a sentiment weighting to any word that carried some emotional affect: for example, Pout, Powerless, Prejudice are all unhappy; while Gallant, Generous, Gentle are all happy. As computers scan text, they can assign emotive values to each word, calculate cumulative sums and averages, and thus follow the ups and downs of sentiment across a work. So, for example, Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist:

A few things to note: the average sentiment is positive (μ > 0.0), the novel has many ups and downs (black annotated line) but the smoothed trajectory is sort of happy-sad-happy (blue line). It roughly follows Vonnegut’s Man in Hole model (top of page).

Analyzing 41,383 novels with Syzuhet, he concluded that there are six, maybe seven, basic sentiment plots. The two Primary arcs were Man in Hole and Man on Hill, with variations on each.

It’s not a perfect path to analysis. Jockers notes that happiness can be false-notated in sections where the bad guys are having a very good time. It completely misses British subtleties of irony or dark humour (as do I).

Still, I find the whole analysis sort of delightful, I’m looking forward to an atlas being published so that I can see how some of my favorite works are diagrammed (the software is available if you want to do your own analysis as well).