Dan’s Space on the Web

(Quick Specs: an old shuttle PC running Vista. ok, I can’t remember the specs. will update later)

Attempting to get S3 sleep state to work.

Had to change power settings in BIOS – ACPI Standby State set to S3. I think setting it to S1&S3 didn’t seem to work, will elaborate more on this later.

Initially, I followed the instructions as linked above but it made things worse – the PC didn’t seem to power down at all, with the “On” indicator light not going off. It turned off the TV display but that’s about it.

Then I found out that the problem was having created based off the High Performance plan. When using High Performance, the computer doesn’t sleep much, only as above. Switching to Power Saver fixed this, and my shuttle went off nice and quiet (previously you could still hear a fan spinning), as if it was completely off. Cool.

Minor problem at this point – had to push power button to wake it up, keyboard/remote control didn’t work. Fixed this by enabling wake by USB keyboard in BIOS.

Quick elaboration on setting BIOS ACPI Standby State to S1&S3 – when I had done so earlier, I think I was still using the High Performance plan. Don’t remember testing after I switched to Power Saver.

Next attempted to schedule a recording and put computer to sleep. However PC seemed to just turn off the display again. Suspecting Windows (Vista) Media Center to be preventing proper S3 sleep, closed VMC and tried going to sleep. Success. It came on as scheduled to record, but it didn’t go back to sleep after that.

End of this for today.

Noticed that watching TV through the PC (tuner card) was significantly worse than watching from Starhub HD STB. Understandable since what I’m getting is probably the analog free-to-air and signal strength is not as good as cable’s (and it’s analog vs. digital). Currently I’m using the TV OUT from the Starhub STB to connect to PC (via coax cable). Rerouted this TV OUT to TV to test signal quality. TV looks better than PC, but still worse than cable STB (over HDMI). Makes sense, but notes that the PC is indeed degrading quality. I need to figure out if it’s due to the TV card, or a VMC problem. Perhaps VMC is enconding the video badly before displaying? Or is the video encoding handled by the TV tuner card? The “bad” quality looks like it may be a compression issue. Will have to look into this.

Next up…

1. Fix S3 Sleep
   • Run another scheduled recording test, see if it goes back to sleep
   • Verify scheduled recording behaviour by reverting to regular sleep
     • Find out if this uses the Windows Task Scheduler. If so, might be able to get info from that.
   • Verify inability to sleep when hybrid sleep enabled and VMC running
2. Improve Live/Recorded TV Quality
   • Check if it’s signal quality issue (including analog vs. digital) by switching to composite video input from STB (ie. see how cable channels look like)

[Click Here HTPC Specs]

Today we’re trying to get to the official Windows 7 page (hosted off microsoft.com).

The results are so abysmal there’s no point taking screenshots. What’s that? You want proof? Fine.

Live Search, keywords: windows 7

not on any of the first 5 result pages, couldn’t be bothered to find out where it is. The closest I found was on page 5 with a hit for the EULA page.

Google search, keywords: windows 7

first hit.

Come on, Live Search, I really would like to do a post where you gave the better result. I really really do.

This 3rd post on Live Search vs. Google probably makes me look like I have something against Microsoft. That is no where near true, and to make it up to them I’ll soon be posting a rather positive one about their Windows Live Messenger.

Dropbox doesn’t allow you to sync folders outside of the “My Dropbox” folder, so here’s a workaround to have your Documents folder (and any other user folder) automatically synced using Dropbox.

(This guide written for Vista, but it works the same in XP)

Motivation/Background: I first did this a few months back when my Macbook Pro had to be sent in for repair (the video card broke. again.) Not having my main work machine with me, I was working off my old PC instead. I wanted a way to easily transfer all my documents back to my macbook when I get it back, and in addition at the time I had a 2nd laptop (on loan to me for our Senior Design class) which I was using occasionally. Syncing files using Dropbox was the solution, but it was troublesome to always remember to specifically save files in the My Dropbox folder. I then explored and found out that I can change the location of my Documents folder. As a bonus, I was also able to sync easily sync files with the Documents folder on my OSX side, and more recently I was able to quickly format my computer without worrying about manually backing up my documents. It’s also giving me a peace of mind while I operate out of Win 7! OK, enough banter.

1. Right Click on Documents folder > Properties

2. Location Tab

3. Click on Move…

4. Browse to ”My Dropbox” folder.

5. Create a Documents folder there, if you don’t already have one.

6. Select this Documents folder. You’ll see that the path back on the Location tab has changed to reflect this (for example mine is, C:\Users\Serenity\My Dropbox\Documents)

7. Click OK

8. It’ll prompt you asking “Do you want to move…” Select Yes.

Done!

Notice the Dropbox sync status icon overlayed on your Documents folder.

Now the Documents folder is no longer at C:\Users\<you>\Documents, but as far as navigating to it through tabs, shortcuts, start menu, it’ll automatically jump you to the correct folder in Dropbox (and for the most part this appears seamless! you don’t see that you are in the My Dropbox folder). Applications that use the Documents folder (eg. some video games) would also automatically be directed to the correct folder. So far, I’ve not come across anything that was hardcoded to go to the old Documents folder.

You can do this for almost any other user folder (ie. any folder in C:\Users\<you>\), but Dropbox only gives you 2GB (unless you go premium) so I would stay away from syncing Videos, Pictures, Music, and Downloads, unless you are careful how much you put in there.

from the search box in Vista’s start menu, hit ctrl+shift+enter to run your selection as Adminstrator.

Ok, seriously?

Live Search, keywords: Live Messenger
 

Google Search, keywords: Live Messenger

Goal: to download Windows Live Messenger.

With minimal keywords, Live Search failed to give me satisfactory results: the first result is almost completely off, second result is satisfactory although the displayed url throws things off with ‘addyahoo’ at the end, and the remaining top hits are rubbish.

With the same keywords, Google got it right on the first hit. It even provided sub-results for it, including a direct link to the Download page. The following top hits are also close if not correct.

Seriously, Microsoft? Is this the search engine you are trying to use to take back the web? Sure, I could have searched for “Windows Live Messenger” instead, but shouldn’t your search engine recognize your own product even if I miss the “Windows” in it? Google not only found the product, it guessed correctly that I was trying to download it. Sometimes I wonder if Google reads my mind, but then I realize that that’s sillytalk.

Sometimes I wonder if Microsoft is even using their own products to test their search engine.

Just did some maintenence for my family PC and reinstalled WinXP. Wanted to give it a quick makeover, so went looking for the Zune desktop theme. Decided that I’ll give Live Search a shot, since that box was there in my IE7.

Attempt #1, keywords: Zune Theme

Note that the first link, zune.net, while it’s the official Zune website it does not have a download link for the desktop theme. So..

Attempt #2, keywords: Zune Desktop

Attempt #3, keywords: Zune Desktop Theme

I knew that there was an official download link from microsoft.com which I wanted to use, so the last result shown above in the 3rd attempt (download.com), was not acceptable. Note that there eventually were similar download links in later search results (for all 3 attempts), but just not the one I wanted.

A little frustrated, I decided to see how Google would fair.

Attempt #1, keywords: zune desktop

There we go.

Just in case you’re wondering how the other keywords would work on Google,

Now, I’m not saying that Live Search sucks completely. It’s had its (rare) moments for me. However this case is especially surprising since the thing I’m looking for is not only a Microsoft product, but hosted on the microsoft.com, and yet it failed to show up as the first hit, or even the first 5 hits. Something is wrong here, no?

Wow, I just freed up 5 GB of space, ~3GB of which were duplicate files.

Thanks, Easy Duplicate Finder !

(The mass duplicate files are due to me having used to often format my computer, and just simply copy and paste files to be backed up into separate folders each time)

Besides that, here are some common useless files I found lying around
- essays and presentations I wrote in secondary school
- random MSN Received Files (especially media that I opened once, and never touched again)
- useless chat logs

and a few more I forgot… I started writing this post … 11 months ago, saved it as a draft, and forgot about it. Yes, today I’m cleaning out the trash.

As an added tip to having more hard disk space, often I have friends who are building new systems and ask for my opinion on their configuration. They’re usually on a budget, but I notice something crazy like 2 500GB hard drives. Honestly, nobody needs that much space. Your drive may be exploding with anime and music, but come on, do you actually rewatch all those old shows? Some might be worth keeping, but not all. Burn those to DVDs, delete the rest. Same goes for music – there’s no way you can possibly listen to 500 GB of music, even once through. That will literally take years.

My advice to them is usually to re-evaluate what you are storing, and perhaps you can exchange that spare hard disk for better system performance.

Personally the biggest space I’ve ever had is a 250GB drive, but I donated that to my family’s HTPC about a year ago and have since been surviving fine on 80GB (30GB of which is for my mac partition) + 120GB. I install lots of games (and games these days take like 5GB or more), yet still have free space remaining.

I’ll have to admit that it’s getting tight thanks to games, but instead of whoring 1TB all to myself, I’ll be getting a new external drive to act as storage and backup for my whole family. I need somewhere to store all those Steam backup files instead of having to constantly redownload the games, and our HTPC is slowly reaching it’s limit for recorded TV. oh and HD recordings are coming up…

Recently I’ve been using OS X Leopard a lot more than my Windows, mainly because I was playing around (messing with registry, startup services) and did something stupid that starting causing various problems. Note to self: before screwing around as such, always set a restore point. As a result of using Leopard more often, I’ve noticed both things that I wish were in Windows and things that make me miss Windows. This series is going to be about those… things.

Another note: I started writing this post a few months ago. I then got busy, saved it as a draft and forgot about it. As such, the last few point may appear weak as I forgot everything that I had originally intended.

No Right-mouse Button on my Macbook

I like how mac fans were so happy when they got their second mouse button with the Mighty-Mouse. Welcome to 20 years ago! So my understanding is that at least since the beginning of OS X,  there have been context menus. Why the heck then do you still not have a second mouse button on your laptops?! To be fair, I have gotten use to the two-finger right-click and scroll. So used to it that now I’m a little retarded when it comes to using regular trackpads. However the lack of a second mouse button still is a hindrance – forget about playing RTS games with this thing (ok, you really shouldn’t play RTS games with a trackpad, but I was desperate then).

No PrintScreen Key or Utility

This is partly an annoyance with the mac keyboards. So instead of giving you one key (or two – couldn’t even make it a fn-key?) to take screenshots, the people at Apple decided that it’ll be fun to watch you try and press up to 4 keys at a time. And then realize that you forgot to press Control as well (a 5th key) to prevent it from auto-creating a png on your desktop and instead have it go to your clipboard. cmd + shift + 4 (what happened to 1 and 2?) will bring up a selection tool for you to select an area of the screen.

No Double-Click to Auto-Adjust Width of Column

one fundamental feature of Windows that I miss is the ability to double-click on a column separator and have it automatically adjust to fit the longest entry. Can’t do this in Leopard, sadly.

No Navbar in Finder, how to go to up folder level

There is a back button, but no “up one folder level button”. So now try this: open any folder (except a root folder) in finder, and try to go up one folder level. I’m sorry, but considering this is what, more than the 10th edition of a GUI OS, this is plain stupid. Does nobody in Apple test their own basic file explorer interface?

No right-click rename

Another problem with the Finder. I can’t right click and rename? Isn’t that a basic file operation that should be included in any file context menu?

No physical cd eject button. cannot eject blank cds easily.

I noted this when I first began writing this post a few month ago. Now I can’t remember why. I’ll try to verify it and update accordingly. Apologies if this is not a real issue.
I think the issue was that since the CD is blank, it doesn’t show up in Finder, and so you can’t eject it that way. the keyboard eject key didn’t work either.

One of the few things in Vista that I actually hate is its file operations system.

To begin with, before doing anything it tries to search and index the files or something, to get info on it. This takes ages when trying to modify(delete) a large number of files.

Next, the copy operation is junk. Not only does it run slower than my grandmother, it is highly unreliable – often disappearing as though it has completed copying files when it actually did not. I lost a bunch of data thanks to this – I was backing up my files over my wireless network, and I suspect that the other machine’s wireless dropped and so the copy operation stopped and disappeared. I thought that it completed, and wiped my drive. Big mistake – I should’ve verified it first.

Anyway, that’s a mistake I’ll never make again – I’ll never use the regular Copy and Paste in Vista, especially on large files. Heck, I’ve even started to unzip files using 7-zip, because it takes an unreasonable amount of time to unzip files using the built in zip manager (which appears to use the same file operations system as copy/paste).

Enter Robocopy, my new best friend (for copying/moving files) and one of Vista’s hidden gems. Not only is it 102938 times faster, it provides you a handy log of the files copied. There are also a bunch of useful options, such as mirroring two folders to easily keep them in sync, or copying in restartable mode which allows you to resume a file transfer over a network if it were to be interrupted.

robocopy, however, is a command line tool, so you’ll have to open a command prompt to use it. you should also open the prompt as Administrator.

if you’re not familiar with command prompts, fear not: there is a GUI version of Robocopy.

I was rather disappointed with Microsoft’s failure to meet their initial promise of distributing the Windows 7 beta to the public on Jan 9th at 12pm. The fact that it was limited to the first 2.5 million people made it worse.

I had delayed a lunch appointment to 12.30pm in hopes of being one of that 2.5 million, and in the end I never got it. It was probably a waste of a good number of other people’s lunch hour as well. No word on their homepage, just the same “want to try the beta? come back in the afternoon on January 9″. They should have at least immediately put up a notice saying that it was delayed, even if there was no ETA – it’s unfair to leave the customer in the dark and having to continuously refresh the page, which I imagine just puts even more load on their servers. Unforeseen demand and server overload? I find that hard to believe. With a catch like “first x number of people”, you should definitely expect tons of people to be desperately refreshing their browsers hours before the release. ok maybe not hours, but close. It looked like a case of bad server management, which is disappointing coming from Microsoft.

Fortunately, they have redeemed themselves with what I think is fair compensation – the beta is not only now properly up and available to the public, but the 2.5 mil limit has been lifted in favor of a limited time approach. The Windows 7 beta is available from the Windows 7 page until January 24th.