Category: Computers

Fitbit Charge HR review

2014-12-19 wt8p 4 comments

Since my Fitbit Force was recalled earlier this year, I’d been pining for a simple motivational aid. Microsoft’s Band looks awesome, but it’s sold out as soon as they get another batch of units. The Garmin VivoSmart had some interesting features, but lacks stair climbs (important to me because I do so much of that in a given day) and was at […]

Windows Update

2013-09-13 wt8p

Another, big batch (27) of security patches landed on my Windows 7 desktop. Since I’m likely to be running long, data-intensive jobs, I have it not apply them right away. Sensing this large group would necessitate a reboot, I avoided installation until lunch time today. The philosophy is simple: computing should not be about constantly applying software patches. One of […]

GoogleSoftwareUp clearing CS_VALID and Mac Freezes

Computers

2012-12-31 wt8p 5 comments

PSA: In case someone else encounters similar symptoms where your MacBook freezes and the only indication is an error GoogleSoftwareUp clearing CS_VALID, I hope to save you a wasted evening of trying things and reading forums… Symptom: My heretofore reliable MacBook started going into “beach ball” mode. The active application remained responsive to keyboard, mouse and screen input but only […]

Dolphin Kick

2011-02-07 wt8p

When I first heard someone mention the term dolphin kick, I thought it was a reference to the 1980s Patrick Duffy show, Man from Atlantis. The BBC says the dolphin kick “replaces a standard underwater leg kick with a whipping motion that minimizes water resistance.”[1] It’s a little easier to make sense of this if you watch the video. Suffice […]

Dates

2010-12-23 wt8p

I’ve been researching date/time formats for inclusion in a software product, and wanted to share some of the thought processes involved.Use case: an engineer or scientist wants to plot something over some time period. All time periods are possible, so we must provide years down to minutes. For example, a coastal engineer surveyed said he: “visualizes the results of the […]

Notes from SC10

2010-12-02 wt8p 1 comment

King Neptune, outside Mardis Gras Land A few weeks ago, I spent a week in New Orleans at Supercomputing 2010. (Sometimes my job has perks.) I wrote a really long summary of this for internal use, but thought I’d share some of my notes: Jack Dongarra of Oak Ridge National Labs offered his perspective on HPC (High-Performance Computing), past […]

Why Not a Netbook

Computers

2010-02-20 wt8p 5 comments

Late last fall, when I was first contemplating replacements for my four year-old Dell Inspiron laptop, Netbooks piqued my interest. I gave them serious consideration as a replacement machine, but there were three major problems: 1. Screen sizes suck, especially the vertical. The most common (at the time) were 1024×576, which was a huge step down from my Inspiron’s massive […]

Mechanics

2009-04-12 wt8p 2 comments

I have to agree with Elizabeth that the whole taking a phone call in the middle of a meeting is off-putting. Some of my coworkers are notorious about this, often jumping to address a quadrant 4 domestic issue. I do try to ignore any calls until after the meeting’s over. One exception is if my spouse’s cell phone number flashes on […]