Took me awhile to track down, but there is a conflict between Intuit Quicken 2006 Quicken Scheduler and TextExpander 1.4.2. When the scheduler is running, textexpander snippets cannot be triggered via the keyboard, rather only via the menu.

What does it look like inside your computer when you are watching pornography? These new exclusive photos reveal the answer to this decades old mystery!

NSFW: Diode Sex

I also bought a Ariens Lawnmower from WashCo today for $399. They love these machines, long life, decent controls and let me tell you, I did the entire yard, back and front, in 3 bags, where the electric Black and Decker took 6 for just the front and part of the back. The Ariens does a much better job of mulching and I love the powered wheels!

I want this when it ships. Trek Lime

Apple updated Boot Camp to 1.2 beta today. I installed the update, then ran the Boot Camp Assistant (Found in /Applications/Utilities) and made a new windows drivers disc.

I booted into Windows XP, installed the new drivers and rebooted. Then I installed Windows Media Player 11, the WMDRM junk and tried the Netflix “Watch Now” feature. It had me update one WMP component and it finally worked! No more green / inverse graphics.

I know, I really don’t like what Sony has done lately, goofball company, but I was thinking that some 1080P contect for my nice new TV would be great.

However, there was no buyers remorse backout plan - Neither Gamestop nor EBGames would offer a return, so if I felt it was too noisy, or there was video lag with my TV, I’d be stuck, and $700 is a lot of stuck.

So maybe I’ll just buy a powered mower and mantis tiller instead and get some yard work experience.

People who know me know I am not much of a gardener. I kill lawns frequently. I want that to change, however, so I am adding a Mantis to my wish list.

I think I can use this to aerate, thatch up the moss and maybe even till over the weed patch.

Update: Ooh a place about 1/4 mile from me carries these and is about the same price as online! Too bad they are out of the aerator/thatcher I’d want LOL.

Update: I bought the 4 stroke Honda model today for $399. It broke in 10 mins, the fuel line snapped at the carburetor. Ouch. But they repaired it immediately, and I could not find any other reports of this happening, so I went back to work. Very exhausting but what a great little machine. I need the tine cleaning tool - that is a job and a half!

I’d love to find a nice, small air compressor for mainly inflating car tires, bike tires, fit balls, etc. Sears has a nice one it seems for $30, but it is 6-8 business days away.

Does anyone in the Portland area have a compressor they love?

Update: I ended up buying a 12v inflator from Sears

I used to keep a wish list on my old, old site for myself, relatives, etc. Why not use a Wordpress category for that?

So the first item on my wish list is a Harmony 890 Universal Remote. I own a Harmony 676 now and the buttons are starting to wear out after years of service. I’d also like the RF transmitting to IR repeater feature.

Harmony Remotes are great. Just yesterday my brother helped my Mom buy a new Sony DVD player. A few changes to the website and they were watching movies just as they had with their old, dying DVD player.

Update! Amazon has the harmony for $238 right now!

Update Ok I ordered one. They even gave me a free month of Amazon Prime, so overnight shipping was $4. heh

Elizabeth and I went to L.A. for Coral’s second birthday and a trip to Disneyland. Here is an enthralling, attention grabbing photo essay of the trip:

Look

I use Quicken 2006 and have used quicken for decades (it seems), paying my yearly Intuit tax, but the feature I use the most, downloading credit card statements, has always been flawed, it always gets out of sync and I’ve had it. I am not paying the 2007 tax to find out if they fixed this 4+ year old problem.

I had fully reconciled with my credit card statements up through December and now it is $1600 short again (it thinks I owe less than I do). I’m tired of it missing transactions, getting confused with duplicates and the like.

We need a fully secure, open source alternative. What is out there?

There is a reason we do user testing on products, to make sure that no obvious issues are overlooked. The United States Post Office didn’t do a full job with regards to their otherwise wonderful self-service kiosks.

I had to mail something to a friend in Germany so I go to the post office, after hours, and go to the self help kiosk. I put my manilla enveope on the scale and tell the computer International, then Germany. It takes my money, prints my stamp and asks me if I need anything else. No, so I affix my stamp and put my envelope in the OPEN receptacle and then close it.

THEN, THEN there is a sticker on the previously hidden part of the receptacle that says “For Domestic only, take international to a postal worker!” What the heck is this!?

I mean, come on, what person assumed that the receptacle would be CLOSED all of the time and that people would even read its stickers FIRST

There is a perfectly working screen that KNOWS I just bought a international stamp, that KNOWS the post office is CLOSED and it should have WARNED me regardlessly so I would not drop the damn thing in the open receptacle!

Now I have no idea what they will do with this thing and their phones are closed, too. Grr.

As some of you might have seen, I have been working on my website, moving it from Movable Type into WordPress. Its been fairly smooth with the exception of the URLs for the podcasts and RSS feeds. In trying to make that work as it used to, I’ve left the server in a broken state from time to time over the past 24 hours.

Thank you for your patience - I’m almost done!

Be sure to check out the new look and feel.

Elizabeth and I went to Cinetopia with Tom to see Frank Miller’s 300 this weekend.

Wow!

The story of the Spartans refusal to bow to Xerxes and in fact, hold off an army of millions with just 300 men is very compelling and based in history. This is a beautifully shot movie and while it is very violent, the use of matrix-like bullet-time special effects really enhance the physical abilities and skills of these warriors.

You can read about the graphic novel, watch the movie trailer in HD or, if you are a fan of Frank Miller’s work (my brother will remember him from the Dark Knight, as well as Sin City) you can support Geeks R Us by shopping at Amazon:

Amazon has some very affordable ($9.95 at time of this writing) Kingston 1gb keychain drives

They also have 2gb and USB versions linked from the same page.

Unsanity, whose products I stay away from, seem to have come across some very useful information regarding Apple’s Installer process and a major flaw in it.

You can read about the flaw and check out their software, but personally I’d stay away from anything that requires “APE”. Kudos to them for uncovering this flaw however!

In a nutshell, if “Optimizing System Resources” runs on two or more processors at once, say triggered because you were using your mac while it was updating, some files, randomly may be deleted, zeroed out, kaput, gonesky.

Back when I talked about Apple’s Smug updating reference in Calling Apple to Task several people said I did things a little too cautiously, or they were always lucky.

This nasty multiprocessor bug just verifies the steps I take on each update as sane:

1. Run Alsoft's $100 DiskWarrior 4 prior to installation
2. Download a "combo" updater if available
3. Quit all applications manually, including background applications (Unsanity said to "step away from the computer as if it were a swarm of bees")
4. Run the combo updater
5. Reboot immediately after installation

I’ll stick with my process as I know it works and I wish you the best of luck in future updates until Apple nails this very nasty bug!

As a bare minimum, obey step 3

This screencast covers columnar selections with TextMate as well as the Markdown tagging language.

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Matt Riggins writes:

I upgraded a machine in my office to Vista to get a feel for the OS, how it works, etc.

I use both a variety of Windows and Mac boxes and the first thing I noticed after upgrading to Vista was that I was unable to connect to the Mac’s SMB File Sharing. Typically in the windows address bar under XP pro I would type:

\IP Address\username (the username being the short name on the OS X user account)

It would prompt me for a username and password, which I would type. (The os x username/pw) The share would come up (the user’s folder) and I was done.

This did not work in Vista. It would ask me for the username / password, but typing it didn’t work.

I googled it and came across this great post:

http://www.macfixit.com/article.php?story=20070226082237597

There are a couple of things to try on this post. The first being from Vista using the command line trying to login using IPAddressUsername together. I tried that, with no luck. The 2nd step is a registry edit in vista. I make this change and it now allows me to share to OS X again:

1. “Click Windows Visa Start Orb
2. In search box, type “regedit” and return
3. Once regedit opens, click File -> export to make a backup copy
4. Navigate to Computer HKEYLOCALMACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet Control Lsa.
5. In the right pane, right-click the “LmCompatibilityLevel” key and select “modify”
6. Change the value from 3 to 1
7. Exit regedit and you should now be able to properly authenticate to your Mac OS X (or other Samba) share.”

Matt Riggins

Matt Riggins writes:

Why I’ll never use the Amazon Unbox / Tivo Service again. (after only using it once)

Tonight I got an automatically generated email from Tivo regarding the Amazon Unboxed / Tivo deal and how I can rent or download movies from Amazon directly to the Tivo. This seemed like a nice option as having a young child my wife and I have not really gone to the movies in 2 years. Having them on my Tivo seemed like a nice option.

Here are my experiences.

1. The Amazon Unbox web UI is horrible. They list out x amount of movies per page, out of over 5,000 something movies and tv shows. You can search, but the overall ease of use is the worst I’ve ever seen. Episodes are mixed in with rentals and those are mixed in with full movie purchases. One slip and you could be buying a movie, not renting one.

2. It mentioned that if I “signed up” prior to late April, I would receive $15 for purchases. I signed up which was free, and then proceeded to rent a movie. It asked me for my credit card information. Never did it ever state I had a $15 credit on Amazon’s website. Eventually after the “rental” purchase, I received an email showing the subtotal of the rental which was $3.99, minus discounts/promotions of $3.99 and total for his order $0.00. The email gives me no running balance. Very lame.

3. It then starts to transfer the movie to my Tivo, which is connected to my network via the wireless adapter. As we know, this is no way to transfer large amounts of data. 2 hours later, I had the rental movie on my Tivo.

4. I rented the movie on 3/12/07. Upon looking at the Now Playing list and clicking once on the rental to look at it, in very small and (not aligned) text across the entire middle of the screen it stated this movie would be kept until 3/14/07 and deleted on 4/11/07. How confusing is that? I tried to figure it out, ok maybe it’ll be kept in Now Playing until 3/14/07 (so, two days rental time, for $3.99 weak!) and then get moved to deleted, where I can retrieve it up until 4/11/07? Who knows, I had no clue.

5. And to top it all off, after spending 10 minutes on number 4, trying to figure out how long I could keep the movie, I hit Play. It then shows me another screen that says to this likes… Due to copyright restrictions, this movie can only be kept for 24 hours after the first initial play of the movie. Once the timer starts, you can play the movie as much as you want for 24 hours. After that it will be deleted.

This is by far the most lame dvd/movie/rental/dvr setup I’ve ever seen, for all the reasons above. I’ll never buy another Amazon Unboxed rental/movie again for my Tivo or PC. It’s back to my nice iTunes account, which I can play forever on my machine and sync to my iPod. I’ll buy an Apple TV and have all my purchases ready for play, when ever I want, on my TV.

Matt Riggins mattriggins@ca.rr.com

A little demo of associating actions with frames in Sophie (Soon to be RC3)

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