Tag: computers

Have Tech, Will Travel

So last night & today, I’ve been in full-on tech mode, helping poor judiang get her PC back to some semblance of normal after it had been Geek Squaded (not a pleasant thing to happen to any technology). It’s currently having its OS partition joined with the formerly locked & hidden “recovery” partition which is now useless since it became Geek Squaded. Here’s hoping I don’t bork the OS!

We had a lovely day yesterday. It was another sunny & chilly day in Chicago. I walked over to Jewel in the morning to get some cereal, milk, and fresh fruit for breakfast and became jealous of Judi when I noticed it only took me 5 minutes to walk there. (Takes 10 minutes to DRIVE to my nearest grocery.) Judi was off getting her hair done (to repair an earlier job that hadn’t gone to her satisfaction), so I had some time alone with Patty in the morning.

We had considered walking all the way to Whole Foods to eat at the food court & explore the food, followed by Best Buy to pick up an external drive. But Judi decided it was better to bus there and head to Manny’s for lunch instead. I was OK with that. Manny’s is a relatively famous cafeteria/deli in Chicago – even Obama ate there. You definitely don’t leave the joint hungry!

I ordered a bowl of cream of broccoli soup and half of a pastrami on a Kaiser roll sandwich (which also came with pickles and a potato pancake) and some strawberries. They put about 4 tons of pastrami on the sandwich and I highly suspect they gave me cream of chicken soup instead of the other (or else it just didn’t have much of a broccoli flavor). It was good, but I did leave some of my sandwich on the plate when we left.

Despite Best Buy being the home of the Geek Squad, we went there next so Judi could get a new external HD (her old one was a measly 320GB in size and she’s got 1TB of storage on her PC now) and a USB hub. She picked a WD 2TB external drive (me, jealous?) and the second cheapest USB hub and we were off home again. I then spent much of the afternoon fixing her music collection and beating iTunes with a hammer.

Did you know that, if you have to do a fresh install of iTunes with no iTunes backup, you have to go to the iTunes store and attempt to repurchase EVERY APP you originally bought for your devices? Thankfully, you don’t have to pay for them a second time, but you have to find & install them all individually. Thank goodness I don’t have an iPod Touch or iPhone. Judi’s gonna have so much fun!

For supper, we opted for default Thai. So we walked to Ma & I for pad thai (mine with tofu, Judi’s with shrimp) and while there, noticed that Marble Slab (ice cream joint) is open again for the season. So after supper, we headed across the street for ice cream. I got coconut, which was yummy.

Today, I had a light breakfast just like yesterday and Judi and I walked to Target for a USB flash drive. She couldn’t find the Ultimate Boot CD USB drive I’d given her a couple years ago for Xmas, so I recreated it on this new drive. It’s now doing what I said earlier. We went to A Capella for lunch, where we both got soup and BLTs. I had the tortellini soup, which was yummy. The BLT was yummy too. No one else was there in the restaurant, but that didn’t stop our waiter from being late serving Judi her tea…

We WERE going back to Marble Slab for more ice cream, but despite an opening time of 2pm (which it was), it wasn’t open when we arrived. We popped into a corner store for a bit, but 15 minutes later, the joint was still closed. We walked back, sad that there’s no ice cream.

elsaf is apparently on her way. Here’s hoping she’s having an easy drive today!

Smart Airliner!

So today I’m at SOITA in Franklin, OH, being trained on the Smart Technologies Airliner wireless slate. 3 other teachers from Newton are with me and when we go, we get to take the Airliners with us for use in our classrooms. These are really nice pieces of technology which I’m excited about adding to my classroom tools. Getting used to navigating with it has been interesting, but I’m getting there.

For those of you who’ve worked with ’em before, this Airliner is really a Wacom tablet. It works seamlessly with the SmartBoard software that SmartTech has written. SmartBoards are those cool white-board-ish things which are really giant touch screen “monitors” (provided you project the image onto the SmartBoard). The cool thing is that you don’t need a SmartBoard to use the Airliner, and I think I’ll prefer using the Airliner to using a SmartBoard.

Anyhoo, we’re currently toying with the devices and I decided to do a short post re: what I’m up to. So there ya go!

BWISER 2007 Days 1 & 2

Yesterday was our first full day at B-WISER and first day of classes. I woke early and decided to get up around 6:30. My roomie, Carolyn, followed suit. The two of us headed for breakfast and had pancakes and sausage. (Carolyn was disappointed in the lack of eggs. I was OK with the lack of eggs myself.)

The morning session was physics, and Dee had the girls doing measurement and density, with me as the faithful assistant. However, I spent much of the second period opening the Cruzer Freedom 1GB flash drives we’d gotten the girls. I put labels on all of them (which had a girl’s name and a female scientist’s name) and separated by groups. And during the third period, I headed off to the computer lab to see how things are set up.

The student machines had a Novell logon that was written on the chalkboard, but the machine hooked to the room projector had a Windows logon that I had not been told. So I decided I’d get my laptop at lunch and use it to run the projector. I had managed to turn on the projector during this testing session, and I’d also successfully transferred the Portable Apps onto one of the USB flash drives. Things were looking good.

After a delicious lunch, I headed off to the computer lab and found that half of the girls were already there. I had the idea during lunch to transfer the Portable Apps onto the computer desktops and tried to do this with girls sitting at machines. Then when they all arrived, I had them do that for me. Meanwhile, when I tried to get the projector on, it wouldn’t come on. So I couldn’t show the girls what I was wanting them to do, but we still managed to get the files transferred onto the PCs and then onto their flash drives. And eventually I figured out the projector. (Definitely a case of the Mondays.)

While the files were transferring onto their flash drives, I did my presentation on The Internet: Search Safely, Search Securely, Search Skeptically. Thanks to of all the aggro at the start of the period, we didn’t have time for the girls to research their female scientists. Alas! But the second and third classes went very smoothly and they did get to research theirs.

After class, Carolyn, Dee and I went to Walmart to take Carolyn’s new shoes back and for Dee to get photos printed. I picked up an extension cord for the wireless router. Then we were back for supper and the evening activity. The girls had 3 activities they were alternating though – bowling, a scavenger hunt, and a craft. Joyce and I supervised the bowling. And even got a game in with Anne, the nurse. I was doing VERY badly at the start, but finally got my groove at frame 9 when I got 3 strikes in a row and wound up with 127. judiang would have been proud. 🙂

Today was another early awakening for me, and Carolyn finally got her eggs. But no meat today – just hash browns with the scrambled eggs. I also had a chocolate muffin, and requiring more carbs, toasted an English muffin and put grape jelly on. Yum!

Physics had the girls racing balloon cars to work through Newton’s Laws and then outside to blast off film cannister cannons. Well, the first two periods had the girls outside. During period 3, they got outside, watched as the rain began down at the end of the street and headed towards them, then Dee herded them back inside before it hit here. So they did the film cannister cannons over the sinks instead. Heh.

After lunch (mmmm, pirogies!) it was time to teach computers again. I showed the girls OpenOffice.org’s Calc Portable and we entered in all the data and calculations for the Work & Power lab. Then we had the girls run/walk/climb/tiger dance (yes, one of them did this) up the stairs outside the classroom. I timed them doing this, then we had them enter the data into Calc. And instantly they had their work and power in climbing the stairs. Woot!

We teachers had the evening off, so I headed off to the chemistry building to meet up with the other teachers, who were helping the chemistry group clean up. Then we headed back for the dorms to get our money. It was time to go to the Toy Store! Yay!

We went to the toy store where I found dad some father’s day & birthday gifts and got me a couple of physics toys. Then on to the movie theater to watch Ocean’s 13. I haven’t seen the first two movies, but having enjoyed this one so much, I think I need to rent the other two. Mucho fun. Finally supper was at Jake’s steakhouse. Where I had beet battered fish & chips and a very nice brownie & ice cream dessert.

We ladies had a blast out this evening. I really love teaching with these ladies each summer and am glad that we were able to have the camp despite the lower numbers.

Portable Apps

This Sunday I’ll be heading North East to Wooster for B-WISER Science Camp for Girls once again. There was a fear that we wouldn’t even be having the camp this summer – enrollment is down big time. We have 30, maybe 32 girls, signed up now, however, so we’re going to do the camp, but with half the staff we usually use. As one of the senior teachers (heh, I still think that’s funny – I’m younger than most of my coworkers at this camp, but I’ve been teaching there many years now) I still have a job there. Phew!

In order to accommodate the smaller staff, we’re splitting the morning and afternoon up into different classes. Normally Dee and I would teach 6 sessions of physics. This year, we’ll teach 3 sessions of physics in the morning, and then in the afternoon, we’ll teach 3 sessions of computers. Dee is in charge of the physics in the morning with me as her assistant. And I’m in charge of computers in the afternoon with Dee as my assistant.

Computers, eh? Wow, what to teach for computers? I had a lot of ideas and little time to implement them. (Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do computer based labs for a week?) But what I finally settled on was getting the girls something they could use even after camp – portable applications and a little flash drive to store them on. (Thanks to the College of Wooster bookstore which is giving the camp a nice deal on 1GB flash drives!)

Monday won’t actually require the portable applications – I’ll be working on Internet Safety and Skeptical Searching. I haven’t decided yet if we’ll use Firefox portable to do the session or just have the girls use the browser that’s on the lab computers we’re using.

Tuesday we’ll definitely get into the portable apps. I’ll introduce them to the programs on their flash drives. Then Dee and I will have the girls do a lab on work, power and energy, but we won’t have them do the calculations. We’ll return to the computer lab and use OpenOffice.org Portable‘s Calc (the spreadsheet) to do the calculations. 🙂

Wednesday is when I introduce them to the Gimp. Yes, there is a Gimp Portable. And it works just fine. We’ll be uploading photos each night to my website of the girls and they can download some and manipulate them. Mostly I’ll focus on resizing pix for webpages and presentations.

Thursday we’ll return to OpenOffice.org Portable and work with Impress, the presentation program. We’ll have the girls create a presentation of the pictures they worked on the day before. And best of all, they can take everything home with ’em when they go.

Friday we don’t meet for classes, so that’s all we’ll have to teach during the week. I included some other programs which we’ll put on the flash drives, including GAIM, a media player, Clam Antivirus, a PDF viewer, and Sudoku. 🙂

Day off? Nope! :-(

Ah, today was going to be my Day Off. I was going to sleep in til I couldn’t stand it anymore, then eat my strawberry donuts and play City of Heroes. Oh ye evil lightning blasts of the weekend!

Around 8:30am, I got a call from the treasurer at work. No one could logon. So I sat up, slipped on some clothes & a hat (my hair must be washed every morning) and rode my bike to work. I figured all I’d have to do was turn on some servers that didn’t restart or reboot one that got confused.

I did the rounds and most of the servers were doing quite nicely. The PDC (Primary Domain Controller), fileserver and web caching server all were uninterrupted thanks to the UPS they are hooked to. The elementary server showed up fine on the server list. But the two servers in the media center were not showing up on the list. They were both on, but Blackknight wasn’t responding and the HSBDC (High School Backup Domain Controller) needed logged in. HSBDC is our DHCP server (sorry for all the geek talk – those of you who know what I’m talking about can start to see why things weren’t necessarily working well). And when I checked on the DHCP service, it wasn’t running. And I couldn’t start it. DHCP is what sends addresses to our computers so that they can log onto the network. So with it down, people couldn’t log on. Blech.

Well, I didn’t know how to fix that DHCP service since it was running on Linux, but I can set up a WinNT4 box with DHCP, surely… Well, I had done it before. So I decided to stick it on the PDC. This is all temporary anyhoo since this summer the school is getting a new tech and Win2003 server network. I figured the PDC could handle being DHCP until then. But stuff still wasn’t working even when I had it set up. A few phone calls to other techs (the county & MDECA) and it was 3 hours of me at work. I was very hungry and very stinky. I needed to have breakfast & bath & wash my hair. So I rode my bike back and did just that. (Mmmm, strawberry donuts!)

Well, thanks to the calls, when I had returned, I had an idea of what to do. I changed a few settings on the new DHCP service and then released & renewed addresses for any machine that I knew had been on that day. (For a school that’s out, there sure were a lot of folks in the building!) It was another hour and a half of work to finish all of this. But it looks like folks were able to do everything they needed to do. Yay!

Tomorrow is the first of two summer training sessions on ProgressBook, our new grading program. It’s the one I signed up for, so no day off for me tomorrow. I’m hoping that Wednesday will be my Day Off. The donuts will be rather dry by then, however…

And more Geek Stuff

Heh – two things I forgot to mention in my last Ultra Geeky Post: I’m using VNC to remotely run my new MusicServer now that I’ve got all of the major work done on it. And I’m going to try and embed my Last.FM radio station in this post.

So, what’s VNC? Virtual Network Computing. I use it at work a lot (it’s how I can monitor student machines while they’re working on computers. Embarrassed my cousin Chris one time by projecting his screen on the board during physics one day. Heh heh, yes, I am evil.) It basically lets you run another machine as if you were on it rather than on your own. It’s a little sluggish in running, but for running playlists or double checking a certain service is running, it’s wonderful. I use TightVNC as my program of choice. It’s the program I picked at work to be the server program, however, I view multiple screens with VNCon.

Anyhoo, there ya go.

ETA: Darn LJ and their lack of Flash support… I guess if you want to listen to my Last.FM station, you’ll have to take the link above. 🙂

Musical Geeky Treen

After I did my taxes this year, I decided to research small form PCs to use as a music server. Although I loved the Pandora Mini PCs that Cappuccino PC had on offer, I didn’t want to spend much more than $400 on a PC. And once I kitted one of those puppies up with the RAM and HD space I thought I’d need, I’d get into the $600+ range. I was also debating OS or no OS. If I got it without an OS, it would have been cheaper, but could I get Ubuntu or another Linux flavor to do what I wanted? Well, playing around with my old PC which had Ubuntu on it had convinced me that I don’t have enough Linux experience yet to do everything I wanted to do.

Some more searching around online led me to check out Shuttle PCs. They’re not as small as Mini PCs, but I found one kitted out with the specs I wanted and it was only $425 including shipping. Yay! Not only that, but it came with keyboard, mouse, and what could laughingly be called speakers. (I’ve had Solo Cup Phones with better sound, IMO.) I’d never ordered from Silicon Assets, but they did just as advertised. The PC arrived a few days after I ordered it and it’s so cute!

While rearranging the desk, I finally replaced the wonky fan in my main PC and put some fresh conductive goo on top of the CPU in order to fix my overheating problems. I also moved my old PC out from under the desk and will set it back up as a Win98 machine to give to my Aunt Becky. Two days after my Shuttle arrived, I finally got to turn it on. I didn’t have to uninstall too much crap from it, which is one way that Silicon Assets differs from, say, Dell or HP. And I figured I might as well leave OpenOffice.org on it. 🙂 (I have Star Office on my main PC and my laptop. No MS Office for me at home!)

I moved all of my MP3s onto the new MusicServer (which is what I’ve called it in the network). While doing so, I discovered FINALLY where all of my Christmas 2005 photos were stored on my main PC! I was sure I’d taken pictures that year, but I couldn’t find them at all. I’m not sure how it happened, but they were in my Shared folder (which I never use). I probably pulled ’em from my laptop and put ’em there or something. Finding those pictures, IMO, was worth the new PC. Heh heh.

I downloaded several programs which I figured I could use – MediaMonkey, Quintessential Player, Rhapsody, Last.FM and the Last.FM Proxy. Everything but iTunes, actually. Oh yeah, and Firefox. It turns out that Windows Media Connect is now part of Windows MediaPlayer 11, so they don’t have a standalone download of it. Thankfully, I had Media Connect 2.0 on my main PC so I installed that rather than MP11.

Once I had all of my media software installed and the songs moved over, I checked out my Roku Soundbridge to see if it could see the server. It could, and I can have it access my collection via Media Connect, my Rhapsody radio stations via Rhapsody, or even my Last.FM radio stations via Last.FM proxy. Woot! I can serve up any tunes anywhere! Well, OK, not anywhere, but in my reading room. Which got me thinking… What if I get myself another Roku? One for the living room or my bedroom?

As I started researching the Roku Soundbridge prices (this morning), I found out that the best place to get the M500 (which I have) is from them – refurbished. The M1001 sounds really nice, but the M500 works just peachy keen in my house. So I’ve ordered myself a second one. Of course, the drawback to a Roku is there are no speakers on it. So I decided to research speakers too.

I discovered the Bose Companion 2 in my research. Well, rediscovered was more like it. I’d actually seen them before, at Sam’s Club. And while researching them, I found out Sam’s Club had ’em $30 less than anyone else. Ah ha! A shopping trip was in order! I washed my hair, got dressed, and was ready to head off to Miller Lane for a good lunch and a Sam’s Club trip.

I had the Basil Pesto dish at Nothing But Noodles (without mushrooms, TYVM) for lunch, and then found the back way into Sam’s Club. I bought 2 sets of the speakers (one for the new PC, the other for the future Roku) and some CD-Rs plus some shelled pistachios. (Heh – at least I didn’t get the jumbo vat o’ cheese fondue.) A stop at Krogers for a few groceries and then I was back home.

When I opened the Bose Companion 2 speakers, I discovered they have RCA inputs. This was GREAT news, because that’s the inputs in the Soundbridge. Yay! No odd connections required to get down to 1/8″ stereo plug! (And they give you two cables, one all RCA and the other RCA to 1/8″.) They allow for 2 connections in one pair of speakers, so I could hook both computers up to the speakers. (I may have to play with the speaker setting some, however. I noticed the music sounds are WONDERFUL, but game playback sounds muted somehow. If I sort that out, I’ll just use the Bose for both PCs.)

Anyhoo, I’ve decided to kit this post out with lots of Links, and I’m going to go one step further. I have photographed my new desktop setup and I’ve made an image map of it. Heh – thank you Paint Shop Pro for doing all the difficult bits. (Gah! When did Corel buy Paint Shop Pro from Jasc? I feel betrayed!) If your browser knows how to interpret the “title” tag, you should see little pop ups over the image as you move around. They describe what you’re looking at. And there are links to them too! The one link I left off is for my current desktop wallpaper for the new MusicServer. It’s from the Big Finish audio The Rapture and was designed to look like a music CD cover. I thought that highly appropriate.

Moodle

When we had a Make-It Take-It workshop on KDE server & squidGuard, the instructor informed us that it would run on almost anything. So dad and I brought “anything” along. Well, we got it to work, but it was the slowest machine in the room. Thankfully, all of the other techs were slow typists, so I was able to catch up to them.

Today, I’m at a Make-It Take-It Moodle workshop. Moodle is NOT a mispelling of noodle, as elsaf keeps implying. Though a noodle workshop would be fun, I already learned how to make pici at another class, so I don’t really need to know how to make noodles.

The computer that I brought along to “Make-It” on is a 533MHz machine with 256MB of RAM. Basically the low end of the Fedora Core 5 specs. The machines in the room (that people could use if they opted not to bring their own) are 2.4GHz. Needless to say, mine is still installing the software whereas those folks who haven’t had CD-ROM drive errors (there are a few of those, alas) are finished. No matter, thanks to the machines which are having CD-ROM errors are also still installing. And hopefully (cross fingers & knock wood) I won’t wind up having a CD-ROM error.

Supposedly 15 minutes to go on the install. And then, I’ll have a nice Linux Box. Or I’ll have to start all over again.

ETA: It worked! I’ve just added this ETA from the Linux Box. Yay!

php & mySQL training

I love being at tech workshops that have an always on Internet. So while I’m learning about php & mySQL here at Quest Business Centers in Columbus, OH. I’ll be staying at a hotel near the business center tonight since I have an all day workshop tomorrow where we will build a Moodle server. It’s fun being a geek!