Computer Tips -Tech Info

I really don’t know if I want to do this or not… but I found several sites talking about how to salvage the laser from a dvd burner and use it as a VERY high powered handheld laser. (i.e. “light that candle” kind of power….) Don’t get me wrong, I would like to be able to start the campfire from 10 paces just like anybody else would… in fact that would be VERY cool…. but the whole “instant blindness” thing kind of slows my eagerness down a bit. (Plus maybe the “is that skin burning?” thought that comes along there too…) You see I’ve got a 6 year old in the house (and another due in February… well – he won’t be six but… ) I know how much my 6 year old likes to get his hands my combo flashlight/laserpointer that I carry with me all the time and in fact when it was first given to me at Christmas (my brothers got identical ones), he was very quick to scarf one up that was within reach and start playing with it. Now we’ve had talks about being careful, not pointint it at someone else’s eyes, not looking into it, etc… but he’s not at an age where that really clicks… so if I build one of these I’ll need to lock it away in a gun cabinet…. And really ANYBODY that makes one of these OUGHT to treat it with the same respect as a loaded weapon. (No you’re not going to kill anyone, but blinded for life would not be fun….) Treat them responsibly. Links below the fold.

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Display technology has come a long way, but the 3d holographic display that is so recognizable in hollywood special effects in movies like Star Wars have just not been anything within the realm of possibility. I recall seeing one display that used fog to shine the light on, but that was two dimensional (although you might could do 3d…) Using lasers though Japanese researchers have created brilliant dots of light in the air that can be the components for an image. The technology is certainly early in development, but it reads as though they are cooking air into plasma with the lasers and the molecules give off light in the process. There’s a lot of popping and crackling and I suspect you could have severe discomfort if you accidentally tripped over the device…. Looks neat though.

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The last few weeks have been fairly eventful and I’ve accumulated quite a few web pages open in tabs that I’m still holding open (just counted 49 tabs across two windows.) Many of these things are just for my own memory and others will be posted because I thought they’d be of wider interest. For starters I had a bad attack of vertigo on August 30th. This is the second time I’ve had such a spell (first was April of 2006.) They seem to be triggered by allergies… which leads to fluid in the ear – fullness/roaring in the ear and some difficulty hearing and… if it keeps up for a week or so the equilibrium goes out. Sometimes it’s just mild dizziness, but this was “category 5 hurricane riding out in a small dingy” vertigo…. I’ve been carrying Meclizine around with me since then and have been reading about Meniere’s disease which sounds strikingly close to my symptoms. I haven’t yet seen a doctor for official diagnosis, but plan to setup an appointment to get a bit more aggressive on the allergy front. Anyway… below the fold are some links to info on Meniere’s disease.

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At least that’s the theory…. someone has done a google sponsored search with a black background thinking they’ll save 750 megawatt hours a year. Blackle.com is the site. Of course, I don’t know if there REALLY would be that significant a difference in consumption (margin of error in observation equipment?) I REALLY would like to know how long they estimated traffic stays at google as that would make the result vary widely anyway. If the average house used 24kwh per day (I have NO idea, just a number that seems like a decent baseline… that’s 8Mwh/year… so that would be the equivalent of less than 100 houses power consumption… of course, these are just off the cuff estimates as well (just like theirs.)

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Of course, we’ve heard of skype, vonage, and our dsl/cable providers hawking VOIP. I thought I’d make a note of this one though as the name is a bit more obscure… packet8

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I’ve had a fun time this week dealing with a STRANGE Vista problem on an HP computer (I doubt it’s HP specific, but don’t know for certain.) The error goes like this… “A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.” “CLFS.sys” “Page_Fault_in_nonpaged_area” “If this is the first time you’ve seen this stop error screen….” And the stop error code looks like this “stop 0x00000050” The real problem is everything tried leads to the same place.

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I would dare say there are more than a couple people “out there” right now that are puzzled as to WHY some of their mail is bouncing back to them as being rejected. Right now I’m talking about Bellsouth / AT&T mail users…. it appears that this week AT&T is in the process of transitioning it’s outbound mail relays to a new address block. 207.115.11.51 – 207.115.11.56 – the names of these machines are fmailhost01.isp.att.net – fmailhost06.isp.att.net …. Yesterday I noticed 4/5/6 had been moved – today 3 has been moved over and I noticed only because a test message that I RUN through a (formerly) bellsouth system bounced back and made it through…. The problem is the address space that AT&T is making use of used to be in the dial up block of their service and SEVERAL online blacklists have not been notified of the change. It is not possible for an end user to FIX this problem, AT&T technicians need to contact http://www.au.sorbs.net/ (SORBS) Among other locations to help their customers. The only thing techs in control of individual mailservers can do is whitelist the new AT&T addresses. (Well you could disable whitelisting altogether, but that would probably be a big HELLO SPAM).

It may be even murkier a situation – they may using BOTH sets of IP addresses (old and new) for the time being… here are two log entries that would seem to confirm that…

Jul 25 16:47:09 xxxxx postfix/smtpd[7812]: disconnect from fmailhost03.isp.att.net[207.115.11.53]
Jul 25 16:47:09 xxxxx postfix/smtpd[7812]: connect from fmailhost03.isp.att.net[204.127.217.103]

Strange… They may have some scheme to help work around this – because the connect from the 204. address immediately followed a DNS block of the connect from the 207 range address.

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Why do I always wind up being the one to discover problems? …. Today in checking mail I found a mail that had bounced back from one of my clients that uses bellsouth… Now bellsouth has recently been bought by AT&T and it appeared as though the mail had been rejected because the mailserver trying to deliver it was in an email blacklist. *(What – a bellsouth mailserver in a blacklist?) Well, we’ve gone through this before with some of the passive blacklists where people might relay junk through their isp, but… on searching the AT&T outbound mailserver 207.115.11.54 was in the dial up block lists at sorbs and nomorefun…. (as was 207.115.11.55) These seem to be the new fmailhost04.isp.att.net and fmailhost05.isp.att.net outbound mail machines.

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I guess anytime technology changes it takes a bit of getting used to…. this video was recommended to me by a customer.

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I’ve been puzzled a bit by the graphing output of gramps – it leaves me with a file with a .dot extension that I didn’t know quite what to do with. It opened in text editors as just markup, no image viewers I used seemed to like it, so I researched graphviz (as that is what is used to make the dot file…) and found that there are ways to get an image out of a dot file… (the easiest is a command-line $dot -Tsvg strangedotfile.dot>strangedotfile.svg ) which should give you a scalable vector image with the same information as the .dot output (of course you can use -Tpng to specify png as well.) (BTW, the default settings with gramps give you a single page maximum so things may be VERY scrunched to fit in.)

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