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LangaList 2004-06-10 Please visit our sponsors and help keep the LangaList S.E. free!
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1) Quiet As A Library Whisper!A lot of your fellow readers are discovering that it's surprisingly easy and inexpensive to achieve major--- major!--- reductions in PC noise. In our ongoing "Cool and Quiet" series ( http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=21401323 ), we found that it sometimes only takes a simple $10 plug-in fan replacement to make a noticeable difference. But there's a flip side, too: Some "fixes" don't do much. I found a couple of dead ends in my search for a quieter PC, for example. And other readers, like this one, found that, sometimes, high priced parts don't guarantee quietness:
Things are about to get even more complex because we'll soon see "active sound dampening" technology on the market for PCs: Instead of simply using quiet PC parts, this approach lets the PC make all the noise it wants to, and then tries to cancel that noise: Tiny microphones pick up the sounds, signal processing creates inverse waveforms, and tiny speakers pump the inverse waveforms back at the noise sources to cancel out the sound. (See http://snipurl.com/6wpk ) It works, but why not just use quiet fans in the first place? I suspect we'll see a hard sell for this active sound-cancellation technology, but it really seems like overkill when simpler, quieter parts can prevent the problem in the first place. You can avoid dead-ends and too-complicated solutions
with the information in our articles: It can be easy and inexpensive to make your
PC as quiet as a library whisper! Check out the details: Click to email this item to a
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--------------( the above is an advertisement )------------- 2) Extending the Life Of Old Software
Thanks, Mike. A lot of people may find that helpful. It's amazing how much old software is still in use--- or, to put it another way, how useful some old software still is. As long as it can be made to run on newer PCs, it's sometimes as good or better than anything else available! Click to email this item to a
friend 3) CleanMgr Hangs, Real And IllusoryHi Fred, In your series on cleaning your system, you recommended using Win XP's/2000's Disk Cleanup tool. [CleanMgr] Thanks, David. That particular problem is related to a bad registry entry that causes the compression app to get confused about which files should be compressed. For me, the most common problem with CleanMgr is something different: an apparent hang that's really not a hang at all, but actually is just a very time-consuming operation taking a long time to complete. Its cause and cure are discussed here: http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2002/2002-12-19.htm#8 Click to email this item to a
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--------------( the above is an advertisement )------------- 4) Find Your Lost "Product Key"I'm embarrassed to say that a too-quick cut-and-paste lopped off the sender's name from this note:
We've covered other programs that do this, but for them, key recovery was mostly a sideline. For this tool, it's the main point and purpose. This is a nice find--- now we can find lost product keys, although this helpful reader's name itself was lost. My apologies. Click to email this item to a
friend 5) Change "Open With" On The Fly
What a handy one that is! I've added it to my software toolkit already. Thanks! Click to email this item to a
friend 6) Is This Newsletter Interesting? Useful?If you think the LangaList is a worthwhile read, maybe a friend would find it
useful too! Just use the following link to recommend the LangaList---your friend
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friend 7) Free Caps UnlockerThe question asks about XP, but the answer applies to ALL versions of Windows: Dear Fred, I am using XP Home on a laptop and the CapsLock key is often hit when using the shift. Is there any way to disable it or have it work only with another key like "alt or ctrl" ? Thanks! Keep up the great work! ---John Long Here you go, John: http://www.brainsystems.com/capsunlock/ It's free, runs on all Windows, needs only 11Kb of disk space, and prevents the accidental turning on of CapsLock. Click the link for more info. Click to email this item to a
friend 8) They Just Keep Coming And Coming...Well over 3,000 of your fellow readers have "loaded the code." Have you?
Check out http://www.langa.com/code.htm for the details. Manually Browse All Posted-to-Date Sites Starting
At Tom's World and Tom's Programs WebSpinner access control solution Wilbees Marks Music Computers lovemychihuahua McBrides Closed Socket Industries Tech Notes Registry Answers hypercognition Click to email this item to a
friend --- ( Your Clicks On Ad Links Help Keep The LangaList S.E. Free! ) --- "Hi Fred, I just wanted to tell you that I love the
Plus! site and the --------------( the above is an advertisement )-------------- 9) Free "RegSeeker"
Different Registry tools seem to focus on different things; so what's right for one user may not be best for another. That's why it's great to learn of new choices. Thanks, Keith. Click to email this item to a
friend 10) Just For GrinsHope you got to see the transit of Venus last Tuesday. It was initially foggy here--- at the ungodly early hour we went out <g>--- but the clouds thinned just enough so we could see the show with no solar filters needed. I loved it: Normally, humans only see Venus as a bright morning or evening "star," but here it was in negative, as an easily-perceptible black disc crawling slowly across the face of the sun. It was also amazing to see a world almost exactly the same size as Earth reduced to so small a disk: With the Sun in the background, for the first time ever I had a visceral (and not merely a vague intellectual) grasp of how large the Sun really is. In all, it was an amazing show of geometry, perspective, and celestial clockwork. <g> I'd also recently seen the International Space Station eclipse Jupiter. ( http://www.google.com/search?q=iss+jupiter+eclipse ) That was a fleeting but interesting moment: The ISS is broadly visible, but its shadow is only about 250 feet (80 meters) wide, and is moving at 18,000 miles per hour (call it 28,000 kph), so to see the ISS completely block a celestial object like Jupiter requires getting yourself into that extremely narrow shadow band at precisely the right time. The map here ( http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2004/12may_issjupiter.htm ) grossly exaggerates the width of the band, which in true scale on that map would be less than the width of a hair. I got a list of the exact coordinates for the shadow, and found that it would pass within a few miles of my home. Using a GPS, I got myself to where I thought I should be, and--- right on cue--- the ISS climbed out of the southern sky, passed directly in front of Jupiter, and continued on to the northeast. The eclipse lasted only a fraction of a second and wouldn't have seemed all that special unless you knew what you were seeing. But, with that knowledge, it was an amazing thing--- a wonderful display of math, science, and technology that not only created the moment, but that let me observe it (without a GPS, I wouldn't have had the necessary precision). Moments like these--- the transit of Venus, the eclipse of Jupiter by the ISS--- bring a smile to my face. So do technological wonders and examples of high human achievement, like the "Colossus" machine we mentioned in this space several issues ago ( http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2004/2004-06-03.htm#10 ). Colossus was, and still is, a marvel; a seminal feat of human intellect and technology; and thus surely worth a smile. That's why I sometimes include items like these in Just For Grins [JFG]. Why am I spelling this out? Because I got a number of letters like this after the Colossus item:
Ahem. Not only does this person--- and the others who wrote to complain about the Colossus item--- ascribe to an extremely narrow view of what's risible; but they also almost to a person managed to lace their arguments with both national and personal insults. Sigh. (For some odd reason, most of the negative letters were from Canada. I have no idea why.) This newsletter item is called "Just for Grins." Maybe I'm easy, but I smile--- grin--- for many reasons besides obvious jokes; I might smile from surprise, chagrin, amusement, awe, wryness, pleasure, embarrassment, wonder, intellectual delight, or any of a dozen other emotions and situations. That's why we've had JFG's on astronomy and many of the other sciences; on art, on linguistics; on politics; and on many other topics, as well as many straightforward jokes. To me, they're all valid: A JFG that produces a "Wow" is just as worthy as one that generates a guffaw. I see no reason to change the mix or to narrow the definition of what constitutes a JFG. But perhaps clarifying the reasoning of what constitutes a "grin-worthy" item will help the more literalist readers to see that many things can legitimately go in this space; and that the inclusion of non-joke items doesn't necessarily reflect some weird character defect in me. Man, some days you can't even try to share a smile without getting into trouble. <g> Click to email this item to a
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