Overseas Chinese Web Guide

Category: Tech

  • VMWare Fusion Update: Print Spooler Warning

    I recently upgraded to VMWare Fusion 2.0.2. It was an uneventful upgrade until I tried to install the latest version of VMWare Tools. Basically, it was all going so well until I got this error message: “Some files that need to be updated are currently in use.”

    print-spooler

    Fun. The last thing I want to figure out is how to close the Print Spooler in Vista. I’m running Vista on a Mac, so I launch it 2-3 times a week at best. I’m so unfamiliar with Windows apps that it took me close to forever to figure out where the help menu was on Internet Explorer. For me, the obvious place too look would be in Control Panel > Printers. But, I didn’t find anything to close the Print Spooler there. Turns out, I wasn’t that far off. With Control Panel > Administrative Tools, click on Services. In the Services panel, click on Print Spooler. Services will then display a link to stop the service or restart the service. Click on the stop link. Then, hop on back to the VMWare Tools window and click Retry to resume installation of VMWare Tools.

  • iLife ’09: iPhoto Promises Face Detection and Face Recognition

    At Macworld 2009, Philip Schiller announced iLife ’09. For around $80, you get the latest versions of iPhoto, IMovie, Garageband and iWeb. $20 per program does not sound bad if you are actually using all four applications. In my case, I’m only using iPhoto, which was not worth the $80 upgrade fee.

    So, my reason for upgrading to the latest version of iPhoto was to take advantage of the new face detection and recognition features in iPhoto. My current process is to tag all my photos with the names of the persons in the photo using the keyword feature. By setting shortcuts for the most common keywords (or names), I can tag the photos pretty quickly. Then, I have several Smart Albums that pull in the most recent photos that have been tagged with a particular name.

    If Faces worked as well as Phil had promised, I could save a lot of time. So, I’ve had iPhoto ’09 up and running for over a week now and I am not impressed. After tagging over 1,000 faces in hundreds of photos, iPhoto still fails miserably. I recently tracked iPhoto’s success rate to see whether my perception was fair or not. Of the 20 faces in a series of photos, iPhoto correctly identified 8 of them, could not recognize 8 of them, and incorrectly identified 4 of them. So, a 40% success rate sounds about right.

    From my experience, iPhoto is better at recognizing the faces of adults. I think this occurs for two reasons. First, adults know to look directly at the camera. iPhoto works real well when a face is vertical, top to bottom. When a persons starts turning their head or completely lays down horizontally, iPhoto has problems detecting faces and recognizing them. Forget about the side profile. I have yet to see iPhoto even detect a face when the photo only contains one side of a face. As for children, kids being kids, their faces can be tilted any angle as they please, which confuses iPhoto. Secondly, the faces of adults do not change as dramatically over time. So, if you prolifically take hundreds of photos of your young ones, don’t expect iPhoto to bail you out with automatic face recognition. Too bad. This feature would really be awesome if it worked right.

  • Free Wi-Fi at Starbucks

    I tried out the free wi-fi at Starbucks this morning. It works. The good news is that Starbucks is practically every where. The bad news is that when I usually need wi-fi, I’m not inside a Starbucks. I really need free wi-fi inside Costco, Target, and Ranch 99. Now that would be good.

  • MacBook Pro Upgrade with Hitachi 500GB Hard Drive

    After I purchased Dora the Explorer, Season One from the iTunes Store, I discovered that it was also time to upgrade the hard drive inside the MacBook Pro. With only 4GB free, I decided that I should not wait any longer. There were only so many file that I could delete without regret.

    So, I headed to Other World Computing and purchased a Hitachi 500GB Travelstar 5K500, which is suitable only for the MacBook Pro 17-inch. OWC also was selling a Samsung 500GB Spinpoint M6, which should fit inside a MacBook Pro 15-inch. I also picked up an OWC On-The-Go Firewire 800 case.

    When the hard drive arrived, I inserted it into the OWC case and connected it to the MacBook Pro. After I formatted the new drive using Disk Utility, I cloned my 160GB Fujitsu internal hard drive with Carbon Copy Cloner. This took about 3 1/2 hours. In retrospect, I think the Firewire 800 case was overkill. I would have been fine with a Firewire 400 case. Anyways, I designated the external drive as the Startup Drive (under System Preferences) and rebooted the MacBook Pro. With the MacBook Pro starting up without any problems, I knew that the hard drive was good to go.

    Next, I followed the instructions on iFixit for installing a hard drive on a MacBook Pro 17″. Just follow the instructions and keep your screws labelled. After each step, I placed the screws on a piece of white paper and wrote down the location and step associated with the screws. The only problem I came across was one screw that I couldn’t loosen. A friend stopped by and used a flat-head screwdriver to remove it. Other than that, it was pretty straightforward.

    Once the MacBook Pro was reassembled, I started it up. System Profiler now shows a Hitachi hard drive with a capacity of 465.44 GB. Not quite 500 GB.

  • Google Chrome Has Stopped Working

    I’ve been using Chrome, Google’s opening act in the browser market. However, I haven’t abandoned my beloved Mac. Instead, I’m running Chrome inside of VMware Fusion and am loving it. The browser is surprisingly responsive, despite my less than optimal configuration. It hasn’t crashed on me yet, but a Google Chrome has stopped working window popped up this afternoon. I’m not sure what triggered it because I was able to close the pop-up window and continue using the browser. Interesting.

  • Windows Mojave Sucks. Internet Explorer Help Menu Found

    Lately, I’ve seen more than my share of commercials telling me that Windows Mojave (a/k/a Vista) doesn’t suck. But it does. At least the version of Internet Explorer that comes bundled with Windows Vista. My #1 gripe with Internet Explorer 7 is that it breaks all the rules, and not in a good way. For decades now, we have all grown accustomed to using the drop-down menus that appear at the top of the application window. On Firefox, you will find the File, Edit, View, History, Bookmarks, Tools and Help menus located in the upper left-hand corner of the application window. The menus are in that same location on Notepad and Minesweeper. But, that is not the case with Internet Explorer.

    So, what lead me down this path? Well, I was searching for the Help menu on Internet Explorer yesterday and I couldn’t find it. No drop-down menus at the top of the application window. Instead, the menus have been dumped into the toolbar. So, I studied each of the icons and couldn’t find the one labeled Help. Next, I did what everyone else usually would do when confronted with a problem. I turned to Google. For all I know, maybe Microsoft dropped the Help menu because they thought the application was so straightforward that no one needed help. Well, one of the Google search results lead to a Microsoft page that confirmed that Internet Explorer had a Help menu. But, where was it?

    After another round of clicking on just about everything on the toolbar, I finally found it. To the right of the Tools menu, there is a >> link. Clicking on it displays Help as a submenu item. Goodness. Should it take 15 minutes to find a Help menu?

  • Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M Scanning Tips

    I use the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M to scan checks before I deposit them at the bank. Later, when I’ve downloaded my transactions into Quicken and want to identify where the money came from, I can pull up the PDF and review all the checks. While the ScanSnap works quite well when scanning documents of the same size, it occasionally stumbles when presented with documents of different sizes. Sure, the size of personal checks are pretty standard, but if someone pays you their online banking account, those checks come in assorted sizes depending on the financial institution. After some testing, I found that sorting the checks by size and scanning from largest to smallest works the best.

  • Bandwidth Throttling is Comcastic

    Whenever I have the radio on, I inevitably will hear a Comcast commercial talking about their high-speed broadband services. However, I think they’ve wasted all the money they spent on that commercial because the EFF reported that Comcast interferes with their user traffic. So, the message that I get is that Comcast will charge a premium for high speed internet access, but if you really use it, then Comcast will interfere with your downloads or even cut off your service. I think there’s a disconnect between their marketing and engineering departments.

  • Macintosh Video Thumbnails

    I use Apple’s Grab application to take screenshots. Naturally, when I needed to grab a preview frame from a video, I followed my usual workflow: open video, pause video, select frame, grab video window, copy video window, open image editing application, paste, etc. Then, I read this and realized I was doing it all wrong. I can copy a frame directly from QuickTime Player. No need to launch the Grab application. OK, that’ll save a few steps next time around.

  • Midomi is a Fun iPhone App

    Last Thursday, I downloaded several iPhone apps in anticipation of the iPhone 2.0 release. Once iTunes upgraded my iPhone and synced all the apps, I finally had a chance to test some of them. I really like Midomi because it is both fun and free. Just sing a few bars from a song and it will return a list of potential matches. When it works, it’s really impressive. However, when it’s off, it’s way off.

    I saw a few bars from Frere Jacques, and Midomi was able to match that song, as well as Are you Sleeping? and 两只老虎. That’s one of the more impressive matches.