ALTERNATE LINK IN CASE OF VIDEO PROBLEMS.
Of course, I’m not sure how practial it will be for many of the computer tasks I perform (e.g., text creation & manipulation). And I don’t want to spend all day hunching over a horizontal surface to do research, but I’m sure that this interface will be useful for some things. And it looks fun to play with.
CHT to the reader who e-mailed!
I do a lot of text manipulation in Microsot Word, and I’m really familiar with how to use Word to massage text into the form I want. I can really make MS Word sing and dance.
But I’m not as good with MS Excel. I can only make Excel skip and hum.
So I’ve got a couple of questions for any Excel Experts out there:
1) I’m constantly having to re-set the default cell alignments for every spreadsheet I touch. Invariably, I want the text in cells aligned to the top, with shrink to fit and word wrap turned ON. What I want to do is LOCK THE DEFAULTS to my preferred settings so that I don’t have to re-set the alignment every single time. There’s gotta be a way to do this, even if it means monkeying with a dll. Anybody know how?THIS PROBLEM SOLVED IN THE COMBOX. WOO-HOO!
2) I also need to find a way to insert carriage returns/paragraph marks/blank lines within text cells. Yet, as you know, hitting Enter does not produce the desired effect. Further, pasting multiple paragraphs from another app (like Word) results in the text being put into different cells. How can this be overcome? THIS PROBLEM PARTLY SOLVED IN THE COMBOX (THANKS!), SO HERE’S A CLARIFICATION: I also need to be able to paste text into Excel from Word that will go into several cells some of which contain line breaks within the cell (e.g., Cell 1, Cell 2 which has a line break in it, Cell 3 which doesn’t, etc.). I imagine that I need one kind of code to use as a cell break and another to use as a line break. Any ideas? Thanks!
¡Muchas gracias, mis amigos!
When 9/11 happened, I wanted our forces to release thousands of tiny, bird- or bumblebee-sized aircraft to swarm over the landscape in Afghanistan to search of Usama bin Laden.
But we didn’t have them yet.
Now we’re closer.
Good.
What amazes me is that it took us this long to figure out something rather basic about the way such aircraft need to work: They need to have wings that are less flexible on the front and more flexible on the back.
Duh! you can tell that by looking at a bumblebee’s wing!
Just look at all that structure on the front that ain’t there on the back! (Above.) That translates to more rigidity on the front and more flexibility aft. You don’t need to re-invent the wheel on this one. God already did it for us. We just need to miniaturize to the point that we’ve got countless "drones" waiting to swarm out in search of terrorist masterminds.
Oh, and we’re close to having
Good on that also.
The second link covers things like the panic-inducing Active Denial System (which was announced some time ago) as well as other systems that are still a bit down the road.
These systems, which are non-lethal, will change the face of warfare and result in it producing even less casualties than it does now, which is far smaller than in the past. Ironically, as our ability to make war has grown, a smaller and smaller chunk of the population has ended up dying due to warfare. These types of systems hold the promise of helping us get to the next level in non-lethalness.
How Catholic moral doctrine absorbs the impact of these new, non-lethal systems remains to be seen.
I use my iPod more than most gadgets. It’s kind of surprising to realize it, but I listen to my iPod more than I watch TV these days. With my bad eyes, the iPod has allowed me to read a lot more books than I was able to get through previously, and audiobook-listening has supplanted TV-watching for me.
Long-time blog readers know that I even use the TextAloud program to make my own mp3 audiobooks, such as from texts available online at Project Gutenberg.
I also download audiobooks from Audible.Com.
But there’s been a problem.
For a long time my iPod seemed to behave erratically with regard to whether it would pick up where I left off in the middle of an audiobook. Sometimes it would, and sometimes it wouldn’t.
I could always get it to pick up at my stopping point if I didn’t do anything else with the iPod. For example, if I was listening to Bram Stoker’s Dracula and I hit "Pause" then I could come back and hit "Play" and it would resume where I’d stopped listening.
But Dracula is 14 hours long, and I didn’t want to commit to using my iPod for nothing but Dracula-listening until I’d worked my way through the whole book. I’d want to use it to read Dracula a bit at a time over a few days, while listening to other things in the interim–you know, the way you’d put down dead tree book of Dracula and read something else for a while. I’d want to listen to music, or shift to a different audiobook, or go from fiction to non-fiction for a while. I didn’t want to have to devote my iPod exclusively to Dracula for the few days it’d take me to get in 14 hours of listening.
Yet if I migrated away and listened to something else, I’d lose my place in Dracula! Upon going back to it, I’d have to use the clickwheel to navigate back to where I thought I was in the book (and then re-listen to at least the last few minutes).
But I wouldn’t lose my place with other audiobooks. They’d pick up right where I left off, no trouble at all.
So I had a puzzle: Why would I lose my place with some audiobooks and not others?
I thought it was something I was doing: Hitting the wrong button or something (e.g., the center wheel button instead of "Play"), but I researched it and found that my actions were not the problem. It has to do with the way the iPod handles different file types, and–best of all–there is an EASY FIX.
Basically, there are certain file formats that iTunes/an iPod recognizes as audiobooks and treats accordingly. It therefore remembers where you were in these file types. But mp3 (the format I use for my homemade audiobooks) is NOT one of those file formats. Because people use mp3 for songs–which are usually short and not the kind of thing people want to pick up in the middle of–the software automatically thinks "song" rather than "audiobook" and doesn’t bother remembering where one was–even if the "song" is 14 hours long!
That’s why I’d lose my place in SOME audiobooks (ones in mp3 format) but not OTHERS (like the ones from Audible, which are in a proprietary format that iTunes recognizes as an audiobook).
The first research I did on the Web indicated that the solution to this would be to laboriously convert all of my mp3 audiobooks into another format and then change the file extensions so that iTunes would recognize them as audiobooks, and I really was not looking forward to that, given how many of these things I have, but I discovered that there is a MUCH EASIER SOLUTION.
Basically–at least in the current version of iTunes (version 6.0)–all you have to do is this:
1. Click on the file you want to have treated as an audiobook (it doesn’t matter what the format is).
2. Right-click and select "Get Info"
3. Go to the "Options" tab.
4. Select "Remember playback position."
5. Click "Okay."
And you’re done! iTunes will then start putting an electronic bookmark at the place you left off and resume there when you go back to the book.
Here’s a picture of what the relevant dialog box looks like (click to enlarge):
Now, you’ll note that at the bottom of the dialog box there are buttons labelled "Previous" and "Next."
These are EXTREMELY handy, because they allow you to quickly go through an entire playlist of files (or chunk of your library) you want to do this to. Thus if you have a whole bunch of mp3s in a row that you want to audiobook, all you have to do is select "Next" and then "Remember playback position" and then "Next" again until you’re done, at which point you hit "Okay." It only takes a few minutes to whip through a long playlist that way, since you don’t have to go to the hassle of selecting the file and then doing "Get Info" and "Options" each time.
You can also select "Skip when suffling" so that you don’t have audiobooks turning up in the random rotation when you’re listening to randomized songs, but I use the shuffle feature so seldomly that I haven’t bothered to do that yet.
One nice thing about the bookmark is that it transfers between iTunes and the iPod. This means you can start listening to the book in iTunes (say, as soon as you’ve created it) and then when you transfer it to the iPod the bookmark will go with it, so dialing it up on the iPod will result in you picking up where you left off in iTunes.
Cool!
And thus is solved one of my major headaches.
A reader writes:
I own a Logos Libronix (LDLS) collection of ebooks and love the many of the functions of the LDLS system especially the search functions. However there are few Catholic titles available. I know Harmony Media has a great selection of Catholic titles but I would love to be able to search the Catechism, and Papal Encyclicals, and Vatican II documents in LDLS.
Recently another Catholic user has posed the question in their newsgroups as to why there are so few Catholic titles. The response was the following:
"The Libronix Digital Library System is just that – a library system with many books by many publishers. And many of those books disagree with each other in one way or another. For comparative study this is a very good thing. It means you can compare multiple theologies and a variety of doctrinal positions. Yet for many Catholic publishers, that’s where the problem lies. Most love the idea of their books being searchable in the LDLS, but when they find out that other non-Catholic books can be added to the system by users, they stop loving the idea. It’s the commingling of books on Catholicm and perhaps, books on Calvinism that stops them short. For many specific reasons, they cannot and will not allow this to happen. Yet, if Logos were to build a special product that effectively put a wall around Catholic material, our Library system representing many books by many publishers would cease to be a Library system, at least in the way the LDLS is constructed. "
Are Catholic publishers not allowed to publish their books with Nihil Obstats and Imprimaturs in a system that allows the use of non-Catholic material? That seems to be the answer we are getting. But in a normal library all kinds of books are in one place, it doesn’t make sense that the Church would have such a restriction.
We have no responses fro any Catholic publisher on the subject.
Do you know of any other electronic versions of Catholic titles besides Harmony?
Harmony is a leading producer of Catholic e-books, though there are other companies that have put them out. To date many of the results have not been that impressive (the USCCB, for example, put out an electronic edition of the Catechism a few years ago that was simply awful; you had to click seven different things before you could get to your first screen of Catechism text). I’m sure this is something that will be solved with time and–to a significant extent–can be done at home using online resources. IntraText also has critical editions of certain key Catholic works available online.
As far as your question about what Catholic publishers are allowed to do, nothing in canon law prevents them from allowing their works to be placed in a particular storage medium as long as it is made clear that any imprimaturs that their works carry apply only to their works and not to other works also placed in the storage medium. This is the principle, for example, by which the Vatican allows the Catechism and the Code of Canon Law and the Code of Canons for the Eastern Churches to be placed in the IntraText archive, which also contains many non-imprimatured works.
That being said, I do not know who at Logos wrote the reply that you quote or whether it would be endorsed by higher-ups at Logos. It also is not clear to me what the person means, but at first glance the person appears to be trying to blame Catholic publishers for not wanting to have their works put on CDs for Catholic publishers that also contain unlockable versions of non- or anti-Catholic works.
In the old days, Logos did not have a problem preparing special edition CDs for Catholic publishers. I know, because they did prepare a special edition CD for Catholic publishers at one time that omitted the anti-Catholic footnotes of the 38-volume Church Fathers set.
If Logos has now decided that they will no longer prepare special editions for Catholic publishers and they insist on putting unlockable non- or anti-Catholic works on CDs then that is entirely a marketing decision of the people at Logos and has nothing to do with a concept of a library.
A library can include whatever works the librarian wants, and if the librarians at Logos are insisting on putting unlockable non- or anti-Catholic works on proposed CDs for Catholic publishers then that is entirely their own choice. There is no reason in the world, assuming the economics of the deal would work, why an all-Catholic library CD cannot be produced except the choice of Logos management.
I’m also dubious of the broad-brush approach that the author of the statement applies to Catholic publishers. Catholic publishers are not monolithic, just as Protestant publishers are not. They have different degrees of openness to non-Catholic ideas and different degrees of risk tolerance. As someone who works in Catholic publishing, I am leery of catchall statements about Catholic publishers saying that they (as a group) are not willing to do certain things.
I suspect that there are Protestant publishers who have resisted placing their works in Libronix format for the reason that they don’t want their works next to works hostile to their viewpoint, and I suspect that there are Catholic publishers who would not have a problem placing their works in Libronix, even on a CD containing non- or anti-Catholic works. The statement that you quote thus strikes me as taking a broadbrush approach that attempts to place blame on Catholic publishers, which is not good PR to my mind.
Knowing that a company is likely to make such statements as part of its public relations efforts is also the kind of thing that would make Catholic publishers leery of doing business with Logos. One could easily have said, "You know, we’ve talked to a number of Catholic publishers, but thus far we haven’t been able to put together any (or very many) deals, although we’d love to. If you’d like to see your favorite Catholic works available in Libronix format, contact the publishers and let them know that there’s a demand for this."
Trying to make it sound as if Catholic publishers are overcautious (or even paranoid) and thus to blame for not making their works available in this format is not the kind of thing likely to encourage them to make them available in this format.
This is the information age, and sooner or later a large number of Catholic works will be available in electronic format. Whether Logos wants its Libronix format to be the one that wins out in that regard is something that is principally Logos’ responsibility.
I’m also glad that you have had a good experience with Logos Libronix. Personally, I have had a bad experience with it. The Logos system was good when it was in the 1.6 version but when they made the jump to 2.0 they (in my opinion) overbuilt the thing so that it became so musclebound it was simply easier to use Google or CTRL-F to search html documents. Libronix, when it came out, crashed my system and I haven’t been able to use it, so they may have solved some of the overbuilt interface problems from version 2.0. Perhaps at some future point I’ll try it again and discover that the problems have been solved (something that would please me very much).
Hope this helps!
It all started with a cheerful electronically-generated voice telling me that my cellular service provider needed to change the SIM card in my phone and could I please come down to the nearest store location so that this could be done?
So, I headed out to the nearest store location I knew of and found out it was no longer in business. Figures. Eventually I found another location and pulled into the lot. When I entered the store I found out that this must have been the day a whole lot of other people were also told to get new SIM cards. I was in for a wait.
After waiting thirty minutes, more or less, and joking with people in line that apparently the store locations were not given the heads-up on the Great SIM Card Switch, I finally handed my phone over to an employee for service.
"Oh," I’m told, "This phone is too old for the new SIM card. You’ll have to get an upgrade."
Yes, the phone I had was old. I originally purchased it in 2000 when I decided that I would rather not hike to a freeway call box if my car broke down by the side of the road somewhere. I ended up using it more than the two or three times in its lifetime I needed to call AAA from a broken-down vehicle, but I never did upgrade the phone. It was clunky and didn’t do much beyond send and receive calls, but that was all I needed.
But the perk to losing a faithful friend would be a free phone, right?
Riiiight.
For a two-year contract and $20 more — after mail-in rebate — I could get a phone that looked somewhat like my old one but was so small it looked like I’d have to hold it to my ear to hear and then move it to my mouth to speak. So, for a mere $40 more — after mail-in rebate (and that two-year contract), don’t forget — I could get a cell-phone that looked like a phone. It also had a camera, which I thought was neat, but didn’t really need. I would learn later that it also had a confusing host of other features that I am still trying to figure out how to navigate.
After forking over $85 — after tax of almost $15 — I was the owner of a new phone. "Would you like any accessories today?" asked the clerk who should have just given me a new SIM card or a free phone to compensate for my cellular provider’s decision to reprogram their networks in such a way that they could no longer accommodate long-term customers (six years in my case) who had old phones. It was all I could do not to snort.
You may be wondering why I didn’t protest more forcefully. Well, remember that thirty-minute wait? There was another thirty-minute wait behind me and another gentleman was patiently trying to get redress from the clerks who had basically destroyed his phone by putting in a SIM card that restricted his access and couldn’t be replaced by his old SIM card — because, one, they had thrown away the old one; and, two, because they had already transferred his phone’s information to the new, faulty SIM card. In the face of such suffering by fellow customers, it seemed churlish to raise holy hades at having to pay for a new phone.
Why am I telling you all this? To give you the heads-up on what lies ahead should you receive a call or letter asking you to replace your cell phone’s SIM card. What happens should you choose not to replace it? Funny you should ask. A customer put that very question to one of the clerks.
"Well, your service just keeps getting worse and worse until finally you can’t use your phone at all."
NOTE: Now that I have a cell phone I no longer can use, I was intrigued to find out that there is such a thing as a cell-phone recycling program.
Apple and Microsoft appear to both be trying to get out an interesting new product in time for Christmas: the wireless iPod (or, in Microsoft’s case, a wireless mp3 player):
Current iPod owners have to sit in front of a computer to download music onto the gadget. But with the wireless version, they would be able to download new songs anywhere and at any time – as long as there is a wireless network in the area.
I thought the story was interesting, and it touched on some additional interesting things, but I’m not bowled over by the idea of a wireless iPod.
I use my iPod every day (mostly for audiobooks), and I think it would be nice to have the ability to download content wirelessly, but that’s not the highest thing on my most-wanted iPod features list.
I haven’t had a lot of success using wireless hotspots with my laptop, and I don’t know if they’d fare much better with a wireless iPod.
They also aren’t all over the place (yet). If I could have cellphone-type coverage for downloads (i.e., if I could take my iPod virtually anywhere and get content), that would be better, but I just don’t hang out in wi-fi hotspots (not even Starbucks).
And then there’s the matter of trying to navigate a wireless music store with a click wheel. Ick.
What I’d rather have a Bluetooth iPod so I could get the content from my computer without having to hook up the iPod physically.
Built-in speakers for the iPod would be even better.
What I’d like most of all are good wireless earbuds (probably kept in a compartment inside the iPod when not in use so they can recharge) that have significant battery life so that I can listen to my iPod in public without having that annoying cord between the Pod and the buds.
I know that there are already some wireless headsets for iPods, but I haven’t been impressed with the ones I’ve seen thus far, and I’d rather have earbuds that I could plug into the iPod for recharging when not in use.
But that’s just me.
Whadda y’all want in an iPod (or equivalent device)?
Back in the 1980s there was a TV show based on the character Max Headroom.
It was called (unsurprisingly) "Max Headroom."
Or sometimes, "Max Headroom: 20 Minutes Into The Future."
Whatever.
Anyway, the pilot episode of this show (which also has a British version that is somewhat different) tells the origin story of Max Headroom.
It seems that 20 minutes into the future, ace news reporter Edison Carter is being shoved off of a story by his employers (Network 23) because he’s getting Too Close To The Truth.
The Truth is that the station’s major sponsor–the sinister ZikZak Corporation–has begun using a new advertising technique called "Blipverts," which are very, very short ads (just a few seconds) that have unpleasant side effects . . . like causing some of the viewers who see them to explode.
Eventually, sinister forces decide to bump off Edison Carter. They fail, but in the process a virtual quirky sorta-clone of Carter is created, and thus is born Max Headroom.
Why am I telling you this?
Because some advertisers are now considering using a new advertisting technique, which would be . . . you guessed it . . .
Edison Carter, call your office!
BTW, my favorite line from the Max Headroom show was the following explanation that one character gave to a couple of girls who had grown up in the TV-saturated, cyberpunk culture of the show: "It’s a book. It’s a non-volatile storage medium. It’s very rare. You should ‘ave one."
Man, if the guy in the photo on the left only existed in the real world, with real, functional flying wings like the ones he’s got on, that would be WICKED COOL, wouldn’t it?
Well, he does! And it is!
It turns out that
Elite special forces troops being dropped behind enemy lines on covert missions are to ditch their traditional parachutes in favour of strap-on stealth wings.
The lightweight carbon fibre mono-wings will allow them to jump from high altitudes and then glide 120 miles or more before landing – making them almost impossible to spot, as their aircraft can avoid flying anywhere near the target.
Most of us have probably heard that a high-ranking official with the Department of Homeland Security was recently arrested for soliciting sex with a 14 year old.
Shock. Rage. Depression.
Turns out the youngster was a cyber-impostor, in reality the official was fooled by a cop (good thing it wasn’t a terrorist, huh?).
Over at The Smoking Gun, comes a tale about similar disgustingness going on at the highest levels of NASA. I happened to be drinking coffee from a NASA mug when I read THE STORY, so it was of more than passing interest. According to the article:
"On Wednesday morning, federal investigators seized a laptop computer, a hard drive, CDs, and other material from the office of James R. Robinson, who was present when agents with NASA’s inspector general executed a search warrant at his E Street office. According to an affidavit filed in U.S. District Court, Robinson, 42, used his office computer (and another in his Virginia home) to trade and examine illegal images and videos."
So, I thought, the proclivity to want to look at nasty pictures of children doesn’t discriminate, but can be found at all levels of society, all occupations, and in people of great or little intelligence. Once again, the perp was caught by a cyber cop(s) posing as a youngster. As has been said before, sin makes people stupid.
But what really caught my eye was this bit:
"In December, after being contacted by postal agents, NASA’s inspector general opened its own probe of Robinson, which included a review of reports from the space agency’s "web activity monitoring application." The NASA system, dubbed Web ContExt, is apparently a state-of-the-art application that used a "skin tone filtering system" to determine that Robinson was viewing child porn from his office computer, most recently in January, according to the affidavit."
So, NASA has some new, ultra-kewl technology that somehow scans the content of web images and indicates how much of the total is made up of "skin tones". I assume that over a certain threshhold, some sort of red flag would pop up.
I don’t know how widespread this technology is, but it wouldn’t be too surprising to find out that some of the larger corporations were using it. If they aren’t, they soon will be.
This brings up the old debate about public good vs. invasion of privacy. On the one hand, you might catch a bunch of child victimizing cyber-pervs, and on the other, you might have blackmail, extortion and the errant prosecution of innocent people.
One way or the other we will have to come to terms with this kind of technology.