The coldest winter I ever spent
It’s time to upgrade my phone. Internets, what do I get?
I want/need:
Android
a good camera – photos of Abigail!
At least 64 GB of memory – podcasts, videos of Abgail
All-day battery – 0% at at 10pm is uncool
Unlocked – I’m on Cricket wireless
Affordable – Abigail takes precedence
Google voice commands – I love talking to my phone
I was thinking… Moto G, OnePlus… or…
I’ve been looking for a better way to store all the stuff in our house. Books take up a lot of space in our house. I found a great guide for how to store books. Notably, it told me that I shouldn’t store books in sealed, clear plastic boxes with desiccant on our back patio. The reasoning: UV light and daily temperature variability is bad for books. I’ll keep looking for a good way to store all our stuff.
Here is the guide:
I found the guide on the Wayback Machine at archive.org. It used to be on the museum’s website.
Here is a super-useful list of programs to help recover friend’s computers
https://www.howtogeek.com/340763/how-to-create-the-ultimate-usb-key-ring-to-solve-any-computer-problem/
Go to HowToGeek.com to view it. The snippet here is for archival purposes… just in case!
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Google Chrome Portable: Because you don’t want to use someone else’s browser, do you? The link above is a modified version of Chrome that launches from any folder, updated with the latest stable release from Google.
Revo Uninstaller: This tool is a fast method for uninstalling applications, like the bloatware that tends to cling around on new machines. It has a few useful extras, like a “Hunter Mode” that can uninstall programs just by pointing at their window–great for that crapware you aren’t sure the name of. Best of all, it can also clean up those annoying leftover directories in places like the main programs folder and the startup menu.
Avira Rescue System: a self-booting drive tool that can clean viruses, malware, and other nasty stuff off of other operating systems. This one will require its own USB drive on your key ring. Make sure to update it periodically with the official freeware tool–instructions for creating your own USB rescue drive are at the link.
CrystalDiskInfo: A tool for checking the health and longevity of hard drives. Handy if you think the storage on a PC is failing.
Speccy: An easy way to quickly see all the technical specifications of a computer, including non-obvious stuff like the number of RAM DIMMs installed and the number of expansion slots used.
Process Explorer: A tool that helps you identify running processes. Handy for identifying running malware and other bad stuff.
AdwCleaner: A tool that seeks out and destroys adware–those annoying toolbars and pop-up menus that tend to install themselves when unknowing users download free programs that are bundled with all kinds of mildly malicious advertising. The program is a self-contained executable you can launch from a USB drive.
Peerblock: A tool for creating a quick firewall, selectively blocking incoming and outgoing traffic.
MBRtool: This isn’t a standalone app, but a bootable tool that requires its own flash drive. Once you create it, you can pop the drive into any PC and boot from it to repair the master boot record, one of the most common causes of an OS boot failure.
HWMonitor: An easy way to inspect all kinds of esoteric hardware and settings that aren’t normally visible in Windows, like all of the temperature and fan sensors on the motherboard. Especially handy if you’re tuning a “Gaming” or performance PC.
Wireless Network Watcher: This program can show you all of the devices connected to your local network, including their IP addresses and MAC addresses. Very useful if something is giving you network issues, or you suspect someone’s on the network when they shouldn’t be.
WinDirStat: a disk analyzer and cleaner. Good for quickly finding big and unneeded files to free up space if your friend’s hard drive is getting full. If you prefer a more graphical layout, SpaceSniffer is a good alternative (or addition).
NirSoft password recovery tools: this collection of programs is designed to recover usernames and passwords if no easy recovery option is available, like resetting via email. The various tools work on web browsers, wireless networks, Windows Protected Networks, and even remote desktop tools.
Hiren’s Boot CD: an all-in-one package that includes a ton of tools for repairing and optimizing computers, all squeezed into a self-booting CD file. Don’t let the title fool you, you can run it from a dedicated USB drive as well. (Note: this actually contains a number of the tools we’ve included in this guide, plus a lot more–but having your own versions of the tools on a non-bootable drive makes things a little easier, so we included them in this list anyway.)
ProduKey: another Nirsoft tool. This one helps you find Windows and other registration keys, in case you’re unable to verify someone’s legitimate copy, even from other PCs on the local network. It’s a portable, all-in one application, but using its advanced functions requires a bit of command line use.
ShellExView: for cleaning all of that crap off the Windows right-click menu after you’ve gotten rid of the programs your friends shouldn’t have downloaded.
BlueScreenView: this very useful tool will show you the results and minidump files behind the machines latest blue screen (of death) crashes. Much better than reaching for your phone camera in the five seconds the screen is up.
The Official Windows Recovery Drive: Lastly, don’t forget that you can also create a USB recovery drive from within Windows–and if you frequently find yourself repairing someone’s PC, it might be a good idea to do that once you’ve fixed their problem and gotten the computer into a working state. This will require its own flash drive.
Rest in Peace Joe Frank. He died January 15th, 2018 at age 79. I first heard Joe Frank’s haunting, hallucinatory radio plays in the late 1980’s, listening in my car late at night. I sat in my car on many a cold Boston winter night listening to his stories. I heard a program of his just a few months ago too. The shows were and are a revelation of amazing visual-auditory imagining. The stories and voices spin through my mind in the most pleasurable spirals, like a Whirling Dervish on the path to God. He is remembered with great fondness!
His art is his legacy and is still accessible (in the sense of availability as well as intellectually) at his website, JoeFrank.com and on public radio stations around the country in the small hours of the the night.
Do you have a website or blog I should know about? The number of personal bloggers I know has fallen to… well I can literally count them on Count Rugen’s hand (the 6 fingered man from The Princess Bride). The Facebook and subsumed them.
If you’ve got a personal blog, even if you only update it occasionally, please tell me about it! Comment or email!
Here’s my 6. And truth be told, this is a stretch because all but JWZ’s blog is updated quarterly at best.
I just called my insurance company (Amica) and updated the mileage we drive on the cars. Since we drive fewer miles nowadays, we saved $200/year. :-)
Was: 10,000/year and 6,000/year. Now 6,000/year and 5,200/year. (apparently, insurance costs about $0.04/mile)
Megan and I were woken up with a start at 2:41 this morning by an earthquake! It lasted just a few seconds and we fell right back to sleep. It didn’t even wake Abigail. The USGS says it was 4.7 centered in Berkeley!
In context, things are pretty ok here. Just today my friend Nick in the northeast sent me pix of a scene right outside his window, a big chemical spill, nearly 3 feet of dihydrogen monoxide solid precipitate blanketing his neighborhood! Thankfully they are all safe for now!
Happy New Year to the world from Megan, Abigail and Lee! And thanks to Zeke for the photos of us at Thanksgiving and Christmas!
As part of my master’s in occupational therapy at San Jose State University, I authored a research project with my research professor. The project was to have my fellow OT students take some questionnaires about how stressed they were and how satisfied they were with their lives. I then crunched the numbers and got some interesting results!
Here is the research project I completed for my occupational therapy master’s degree:
I’m honored to have been selected to present my research as a poster presentation at the 2016 OTAC (Occupational Therapy Association of California) conference in Pasadena, California.
Highlights:
The OT students surveyed had average stress levels (surprising for grad school!) and high life satisfaction (also surprising for grad school!). And they felt like they got the support they needed from friends and family. Read on for more deets.
72 SJSU occupational therapy students completed two self-report questionnaires: The Stress Profile and the Satisfaction with Life Scale. The Stress Profile measures 15 areas related to stress and health risk. The Satisfaction with Life Scale measures a person’s global cognitive judgment of satisfaction with their life. The results were analyzed, looking for correlations and other relationships.
Results:
On average, participants in the study:
– had typical stress levels
– had a high life satisfaction score
– had a high level of social support (a belief that they have people in their lives on a regular basis who love and support them)
– that were living with their parents had significantly lower stress scores
– that were living with their parents reported less use of alcohol, recreational drugs and cigarettes
– that were male had significantly lower stress scores than women
The people surveyed that were most satisfied with their lives had 3 things in common, they had a good outlook on life, felt like they ate well, and didn’t think poorly of themselves. Now read that same info in master’s project-ese:
The strongest correlations between life satisfaction and individual stress factor scales were:
– High Cognitive Hardiness
– High Health Habits (especially, eating/nutrition, and exercise)
– Low Negative Appraisal
Brief definitions of those terms:
Cognitive Hardiness: a coping style… a buffer between work and stress. It has 3 attributes:
1) View of commitment rather than alienation in work and life
2) Personal control over one’s life
3) View of life change as a challenge rather than a threat
Eating/Nutrition: Whether a person practices eating what they believe to be well balanced and nourishing meals.
Negative Appraisal: Approaching life’s challenges with a negative attitude, using self-blame and criticism.
Limitations: There are lots of reasons why this research may have been be deeply flawed. The most obvious problem is that only about 1/2 the students took the questionnaire; the students who were most stressed or had the lowest life satisfaction may have chosen not to spend an hour taking our questionnaire because they were too stressed or unhappy. Or maybe not, I don’t know! Also, questionnaires are always problematic because you never really know if they are measuring what you think they are measuring for a variety of reasons, but they are way easier to administer than other testing tools. And one of the most important things I learned when performing all this research is that all research is flawed. Please take this, and all research with a giant grain of salt. Even when researchers are trying to get it right in the face of funding bias, unintentional bias, publication bias, and every kind of possible misstep, it can still be really hard to do good research!
Eventually, you’ll grow up and stop believing in magic. And then eventually, you’ll grow up and believe in magic again.
– Me after going to Burning Man 2009