Last year I purchased a Traveler Guitar EG-1 in the mahogany finish, and I have enjoyed it tremendously—it’s great for rockin’ it out in my room at the Marriott while on the road. One tiny issue has marred what I would consider a perfect instrument: the sharp ends of the strings dig into your T-shirt and belly when you are playing.

I decided once and for all to fix this problem, and I hope that other Traveler Guitar owners can use this approach to save themselves from getting jabbed by sharp guitar strings. Read on for my cheap and cheerful solution. (more…)

I freely admit my dislike for iTunes—it’s a black box where you toss your music, giving full control over your library to Apple.
The problem is that sometimes you might want to manage your library in a way that Apple never intended, and then things become challenging. iPods, iPads, and iPhones pretty much force us to use iTunes, so why not figure out some way to lessen the pain?

I like the playlist tools that iTunes provides, and I find it very convenient to create Smart Playlists or to create Genius lists. However, I want to keep my Master Library of music elsewhere, far from iTunes. Wouldn’t it be great if I could share these playlists on my home network in a completely nondenominational format? Wouldn’t it be nice if my Squeezebox server would have those same playlists available? And wouldn’t it be spectacular if those playlists would magically appear on a network drive whenever the lists change in iTunes?

Read on for details on how I accomplished this and to download the free utility I wrote to handle this task. (more…)

I have tons of old photos that I am always in the process of scanning in. Some are pictures from childhood, others are from my time in the Navy, and still others are from family life before digital photography (somewhere around the end of 2000 I bought my first digital camera, a Canon G1).

I have been struggling with making everything digital for years now, and there are stacks of photos and thick albums that remain uncharted territory. Every once in awhile I sit down and scan in an album.

Trouble is, unless you do the whole job at once, it’s pretty easy to lose track of where you have already been. And if that’s not bad enough, we always bought double prints—they didn’t cost much more, and we could give some away. Now how do I know if I have scanned the long-lost twins of some photos that are already on my computer? That’s a problem for another day.

Here’s how I make sure I don’t scan the same single photo twice:

That’s right, I leave breadcrumbs in the form of little dots on the back of each one.

Such a simple thing, but it saves me from a lot of head scratching and wasted time scanning the same stuff over and over.

Most of the time I don’t really bother with the timestamp information that my camera embeds in each digital photo. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I checked to see if the clock was right.

Scanned photographs are an entirely different brew. They typically represent events from the distant past, and scanner software EXIF data is hit or miss.

I looked for commercial software to handle a few special cases of EXIF data troubles, but came up empty handed. So I wrote a few useful AppleScript droplets that do these tasks quite nicely, and I will share them here. (more…)

This is all about getting another stamp on my geek card, so if that’s not your thing, you might want to just move on…

Anyway, some weeks ago I was thinking how cool it would be to have a totally fanless and silent little black box that would serve up something useful in my house, such as the wiki I use to keep track of my geeky pursuits.

The other day I managed to obtain a spare Soekris net4801 box, a device best known for embedded applications such as firewalls. Between last night and this morning, I spent about three hours working out the hitches and getting MoinMoin and Ubuntu up and running on this neat little box. (more…)

I estimate that in any given day I must use clipboard copy and paste operations a few dozen times—and if I’m working with multiple documents, such as when transcribing information from a spreadsheet to a Word document, that figure becomes more like a few hundred times a day.

But in all of those times, I almost never want my computer to paste “ransom note” text. Ninety nine times out of a hundred, I want clean text to be pasted, neatly blending with its surroundings. In other words, paste it as if I were typing it at the keyboard.

So why does Apple think we always want to paste styled text? And why does Microsoft think we always want our spreadsheet to suddenly be filled with somebody else’s 24 point Comic Sans letters instead of a nice unformatted date and time?

Here are my workarounds for this problem. Maybe someone can offer a few other workarounds. (more…)

Recently, someone at my sister-in-law’s school sent out an announcement to all of the parents, using a list of e-mail addresses maintained by the school.

The content was innocent enough, but when they sent out the mailing, they made a critical error: they had pasted the entire mailing list of addresses into the Recipients field in their mail program. As a result, every parent had every other parent’s email address. Some never noticed, and others didn’t really care. Several were displeased about this breach of privacy and let the school know about it.

That individual had committed the same error as many friends and family do when they want to share a message with many people.

This social faux-pas is easy to prevent, so I include here a quick set of instructions on how to maintain your mailing list’s privacy when you have a large mailing to send out. (more…)

Do you have a shared computer somewhere in your life? A computer that anyone and everyone uses in order to hop online to do a quick web search or to print a document?

I have been dealing with situations like this for years, working with computers in a small school and at a nonprofit volunteer organization, shared by many. It seems that whenever I turn on any of these machines, the background is set to something ugly, the screen resolution is weird, there is some cute animated mouse cursor, and someone has left their most intimate secrets in a document on the desktop.

Microsoft Steady State solves all of these issues by providing a means of creating a golden configuration that is restored to absolute perfection the next time the machine is rebooted. But download it before the end of the year, when it will be pulled by Microsoft! (more…)

It seemed like all we needed to do was mix in some numbers and funny characters and that would make our passwords extra super secret enough to protect our Lego ID from the dark force.

This belief was based on the understanding that only those with supercomputers at their disposal would have the computational ability to trundle through all of the permutations needed for a brute force attack against our jumble of weird symbols.

Richard Boyd, of the Georgia Tech Research Institute, told the BBC that the number-crunching capacity of graphics cards compares to those of supercomputers built only 10 years ago.

— The Register

Huh?!

The modern bleeding-edge graphics card, normally the purview of hardcore gamers, packs sufficient mathematical muscle to compete with not-so-old super computers? (more…)

In case I haven’t made myself clear in other posts, I like PDF documents. I mean I Really Like PDF documents.

And I want to be able to treat a PDF file exactly as I would a sheaf of printed pages.

Then along comes someone who exploits yet another bug in someone’s PDF renderer. A few months ago Acrobat Reader was all over the news. Today I saw that all of the cool kids are jailbreaking their iPhones using a simple web site that exploits a PDF defect in mobile Safari in iOS4.

And if the slick website can inject code that does something as profound as jailbreaking your iPhone, it should be child’s play for a black hat to use the same thing to take over your iPhone and ring up millions of dollars of charges to some telephone extortion outfit in a remote part of Africa.

I guess all of the fancy PDF features are a double edged sword—recall that Active-X controls and DDT were both amazing and powerful when they were introduced, but the improper use of both have sullied their good names. I just hope that the goal of a pure paper replacement standard is not lost and that these events do not cause PDF to become a marginalized technology.