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This unusual case wants to house your next PC

Dave Farquhar Hardware January 14, 2003July 15, 2017conductivity, David Huff, overclocking, usb port

The Lope I-Tee computer case is, well, shaped like a T.
When David Huff e-mailed me about it, he called it interesting. I’ll certainly agree with that.

Here’s the idea: You mount the motherboard up against the back plane of the case and put the drives and the power supply up front, yielding a case that’s not as deep as a conventional case and cools better. Allegedly.

I hesitate to write about it because I haven’t worked with one, I haven’t tested one, and I haven’t even seen one. Hmm. I really don’t know anything about it but of course I have an opinion about it. I feel so Slashdotty.

One big advantage of a layout like this is that all the ports are on the side where you can see them and get to them easily. The biggest disadvantage of a layout like this is that all the ports are on the side where you can see them, and depending on the way your desk is set up, they might be on the wrong side.

USB peripherals and front-mount USB ports are the usual cure for fumbling around the back–you can plug your digital camera or other things that move around a lot up there–but plugging your other peripherals in the back hides the cables and prevents things from getting too unsightly. Let’s face it, plugs and cables don’t fit traditional, conventional ideas of a thing of beauty.

On the plus side, cases that disassemble easily are always nice, as are cases that take up less space. But a couple of minutes with my ruler and my ATX cases shows this case isn’t any less deep than most of my mainstream cases, and due to its shape, it is considerably wider. I’d love something that genuinely took up less space on or under my desk, but this case won’t be it.

This case won’t flop on the marketplace though. They claim it improves cooling. Whether that’s true or not doesn’t matter. People buy aluminum cases because they supposedly conduct heat better. The reality is the difference in heat conductivity between expensive aluminum cases and cheap steel cases is nearly zero, and what difference you can measure is more likely due to aiflow than its material. Enthusiast overclockers still buy them anyway, hoping to get an extra 5 MHz out of their overclock. The same kind of people who buy aluminum cases for overclocking will go for the I-Tee, especially if the I-Tee’s cost is close to that of a mainstream case.

I can’t make any recommendations for or against it, based on not seeing it. But I’m willing to go out on a limb and say this–or a design like it–will survive at least as a niche product.

Umm… Don’t water-cool your power supply

Dave Farquhar Hardware January 13, 2003capacitor, voltage regulator

I saw a thing on Slashdot this morning about water-cooling your power supply. One word: Don’t.
I’ve worked inside a power supply twice–both times to replace a dead fan. One time I touched a heatsink that picked up a charge from somewhere–either a voltage regulator or a capacitor. Anyway, it really didn’t feel good. Beyond that, it made me jump.

Not a project you want to undertake if you don’t know what you’re doing. And if you do know what you’re doing, you probably already know it isn’t something you want to do be doing. Anyone who uses the word “electric” to describe something pleasant has obviously never experienced anything electric flowing through them.

I’ll pass, thanks.

Vaguely productive Saturday

Dave Farquhar Personal January 12, 2003September 30, 2010

When I gained consciousness Saturday morning, I was on the phone.
I don’t remember it ringing. I don’t remember the caller identifying himself. All I remember is a coworker describing a problem with a tape backup. I had to ask him at least three times which server it was, and it took me a few minutes to figure out where that server was and what it did.

That was about 5:15 this morning. By about 6, I’d figured out what went wrong with the backup, gotten it running, and crawled back into bed.

Such is the life of the professional sysadmin. The 1-AM road trips to Miami Street in south St. Louis or to Highway 40 and Mason Ridge in Town & Country are nearly as delightful. But having a regular paycheck really is delightful.

The phone rang again about 9. I’d told the world I’d be up by then. But I hadn’t counted on being roused from a deep sleep when I was half done. I was slightly more coherent this time–I remember the phone ringing, I remember clumsily knocking the phone and the base off my nightstand, and I remember picking it up and saying hello. I didn’t remember I’d promised to edit video that morning.

So I spent much of the day assembling clips, hunting down stray frames, and generally polishing a pair of just-over-two-minute videos.

During my breaks, I investigated the possibility of upgrading to the latest version of b2 0.61. It works and its feature list is impressive–not far off from offering what Movable Type offers out of the box and in some ways superior–but I couldn’t get all of Steve’s custom code to work with it yet so I haven’t gone live with it.

My girlfriend called around 8 pm. I told her I was tired. She called me an old man. I was too tired to protest. She told me she replaced her Vin Diesel wallpaper on her computer with a picture of the two of us.

I’m moving up in the world.

Or maybe I dreamt that last part.

Rethinking Movable Type and b2

Dave Farquhar net.culture January 11, 2003September 30, 2010TCA

A very interesting discussion today made me re-think the importance of a content management system such as Movable Type or b2.
I was talking with two people whom I expected would be among the last to even consider dropping their long-standing practice of creating their daily writings with FrontPage and moving to a CMS approach. (Saying their names would be name dropping and it’s irrelevant.) Their questions made me really question what the advantages to this system are. That’s good.

Products like Radio Userland and Trellix are really just a step beyond FrontPage, in my estimation. They’re designed for journals, rather than general purpose Web design, which probably makes them faster and easier to use and certainly cheaper. But you still get flat, static files. Radio will allow readers to navigate by date, so they can quickly get to last Tuesday’s entry–assuming that for some reason they already know they want to read last Tuesday’s entry. (Sometimes they will, sometimes they won’t.)

Manila and Blogger move all of Radio Userland’s work to the server and gives you an integrated search engine, which is one more step in the right direction.

But a true content management system takes a reader’s daily entries, stores them in a database, and then when a reader asks for the content, generates HTML to send them. Movable Type does this generation in advance; b2 does it on the fly. There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches; it’s not worth dwelling on.

What b2 and Movable Type give you over static pages is significant. Maybe you like what I wrote Thursday about video editing and you want to read more stuff like it. Well, I happen to have a category called video. Click on it and you get everything I’ve ever written and put into that category. When I post new content, I just tell the system what category to put it in, and it does the rest of the work for me.

Also, b2 and Movable Type make it significantly easier to gain traffic from search engines like Google. Once an entry falls off the current front page (usually set to show a week’s worth of entries), it gets its own page for time and eternity. One day’s entry is much easier for a visitor to make sense of than seven days’ worth. Individual entries can be titled appropriately, which makes Google rank it higher than pages that aren’t titled. Both of these make a reader more likely to visit.

Since b2 and Movable Type use databases, it’s easy to query the database for similar content. It’s easy to display current content. When someone visits this page, even if they grab a story that’s four years old, they get the same sidebar as my current page, which contains recent stories of note. If one of those stories grabs the visitor’s attention, I’m more likely to turn that visitor into a regular reader.

It’s also fairly easy to make b2 or Movable Type display links to the last few entries in the same category at the bottom of an entry. (I really need to implement this.) Imagine if someone likes my video editing story, gets to the end, and sees links to five more stories like it? Do you think the reader is more likely to click on one of those links than s/he is to go looking for something else like it? If the reader has to go looking on his or her own, I’m probably out of the picture. It’s easier to go back to Google. But if the reader reads another story or two of mine, I get more chances to get my hook in.

One advantage for me–this was a terrible turn-off for one of the others, as he keeps tight control on other people’s content on his site, and that’s one of the things his readers really like–is the comments system. I like leaving all of my content open to all for comment. I get very little e-mail and sometimes other people answer questions for me. That’s not necessarily a plus. At least it’s easy to turn off the feature entirely.

There are some less-obvious benefits as well. Both b2 and Movable Type offer newsfeeds–small, downloadable XML files that programs can download and use to display headlines off your site, complete with links to the full story. News aggregators are becoming popular among certain segments of the Internet community; already a significant portion of my traffic is newsfeed-related. This allows people to keep my newest stuff on their desktop or display it on their own Web pages–almost like the ill-fated PointCast, only this time likely to succeed just because there isn’t a necessary business model. This feature makes keeping up with my site, or a large number of sites like mine, trivial.

One advantage to me since I spent a weekend or so setting up a CMS for the first time has been that I don’t spend any time editing HTML anymore, short of inserting hyperlinks and inserting emphasis. I write, and that’s it. Some days I can write my entry in 15-20 minutes. On those days, I spend about 15-20 minutes on my site, unless it’s been a heavy comments day, because I just write in my preferred tool of the day, copy and paste it into b2, click a button, and within a few seconds, my new stuff is live.

Another advantage to me is traffic. Having entries small enough for people to link to and small enough to facilitate locating search terms quickly, Google treats me very well. This month, over 26% of my total traffic is coming from Google. (By comparison, 31% of my traffic comes from bookmarks.) And I’m not even doing everything I can–yet–to kiss up to Google. And since there are plenty of links on the sidebar to content that’s either fresh or compelling by some past measure, chances are someone will click on at least one other entry here, which gives me two chances–not just one–to turn that visitor into a regular reader.

If you’re currently using a tool like FrontPage or Trellix or Radio Userland to create your daily journal/blog/whatever you want to call it, you ought to give a full, complete, content management system-type program like Movable Type or b2 a look. Movable Type is easier to set up, but if you have programming ability, b2’s setup will allow you more flexibility on your site output.

Migrating a lot of existing content can be a pain. You can look at doing what I did–operating the sites in parallel, leaving the old content up and running but putting the new content in b2/Movable Type–or you can try to enlist some help in getting the old content moved in. Even if the old content stays put, it remains no less accessible than it is now. The new content just becomes much easier to navigate and cross-reference and mine for the juiciest bits.

But no matter how painful the changeover, I believe the categorization, the dynamic nature of the front page, and the ease in finding older content of interest will only increase your readership. It certainly has for me.

How to make a video that ignites people’s passions on your issue

Dave Farquhar Video January 9, 2003journalism

My video editing partner, Brad, asked me a really good question this morning: Will this video ignite a passion about this issue?
The topic of the video is irrelevant here. If you’re going to do advocacy in video, there are certain universal truths. And Brad made me think about some basic journalism principles I hadn’t consciously thought about in a long time. For some people, this is review. Others might be hearing this for the first time.

We were fortunate in that Brad interviewed people who are passionate about the issue. You can see it in their eyes and hear it in their voices. That’s step one. I don’t know if that’s stating the obvious or not, but it goes without saying that your job will be a lot easier if the people who are talking are passionate about the issue.

Which reminds me: Some people are really nervous in interviews. There are several things I tell people to calm them down and put them at ease.

1. Remember why you’re here
2. Remember why that’s important to you.

That helps them focus. The other thing I tell them is to not worry about what they look like or sound like. Making them look and sound good is my job. You can pull out stutters and pauses in the editing process. (If the picture jumps after you’ve done that, find an excuse to show something else during that segment, or put in a transition.) If you can’t make the person look good (fat chance–NTSC television is awfully forgiving), show the person’s surroundings while they’re talking, rather than showing them. That’s a good idea anyway, since a talking head isn’t very interesting.

Once you’ve filmed the person talking for a few minutes, the first stage of the editing process is identifying the best points they made. Identify those sound bites, then take them into the computer. Concentrate on things that get your attention even when you’re distracted–I usually don’t sit down and watch the tape I shot, I just press play and go do something else and I stop and make note of things that make me drop what I’m doing–and on things you didn’t know before.

Once you’ve collected those pieces, do what I’m doing now: String those sound bites together into something coherent.

When you’re done, chances are you’ll have something that’s 3-4 times the length of what the finished product is going to be. Then you have to get merciless. Listen to the audio. Then remember Brad’s question, and consider every second of audio you’ve collected. If any particular second of audio doesn’t do something to ignite the passion–if it’s not necessary background information, or some killer point they made, or if they’ve already made that point somewhere else before–cut it.

The shorter it is, the more of it people will remember. And that’s what you’re setting out to do. A lot of advocacy pieces aren’t 30-minute documentaries. People have short attention spans. You can do an effective advocacy piece in two minutes. If you’re really good, you can probably do it in 30 seconds.

The RIAA owes you $20

Dave Farquhar Music January 9, 2003September 30, 2010celebrities, DEC, RIAA

In case you haven’t read about this elsewhere, be sure to file your claim if you purchased a CD, tape, or record at retail between the dates of Jan. 1, 1995 and Dec. 22, 2000.
This is the RIAA’s slap-on-the-wrist punishment for price fixing. If too many people file, the money goes to charity. And I’m curious what this will do to CD prices.

On an only semi-related topic, the RIAA asks for the last four digits of your social security number. I don’t know why they need that. You can find social security numbers of several of your favorite dead celebrities, including Richard Nixon, Dr. Seuss, and Kurt Cobain, here. (If the link goes dead, plug the URL into the Wayback Machine.

Work miracles on your photos and scans with Qimage Pro

Dave Farquhar Photography January 8, 2003April 11, 2025journalism, sony

A little over a month ago, reader Gary Berg suggested I give a program called Qimage Pro a look and see what it would do for my digital camera output. And I finally got around to doing it.
If you’ve got a scanner and/or a digital camera, I’ve got just five things to say to you: You gotta get this thing.

OK, OK, I’ll elaborate a little.

I took a few design classes in journalism school, and I remember one cardinal rule when it came to dealing with images: Reductions are fine, enlargement is a feature you should never use. If you’ve got a 5×7 image at 300 dpi, it’ll get pixelated if you try to enlarge it. You can go smaller, but you can’t make something from nothing.

Qimage Pro is supposed to work miracles. So I threw the worst-possible test at it.

I took a 640×480 image taken by a Sony Mavica digital camera. I blew it up to 8×10. Then I printed it on my 600 dpi laser printer. On cheap office-grade paper (not even the highest grade available).

Now I’ll gladly admit, the resulting picture shows a little bit of pixelation. A little. But from a slight distance (I’m talking two or three feet here), I wouldn’t know the difference. That picture would look fine hanging on my wall, and I’m not just saying that because I’m supposed to like looking at the subject matter.

I’m amazed. Based on previous experience, I wouldn’t dare try printing a 640×480 image any bigger than three inches across.

I suspect printing in color might give me less leeway. I plan to test that theory on my girlfriend’s color inkjet later today.

That test knocked my socks off, but there’s more to Qimage than just giving high-quality enlargements that look better than anyone has any right to expect. Photo paper is expensive, and it will arrange photos on the paper to maximize the available space on it. Depending on how you’re currently printing your digital photos, it might pay for itself in paper savings.

I also like its redeye reduction and blemish removal. To take out redeye, you click on the center of the pupil and drag your mouse to the right. To do a digital makeup job (or fix other problems–I swear that Sony Mavica must have had dust on its lens at some point), click on the center of the spot you want to remove and drag left. It sounds weird, but it took me about two tries to get the hang of it.

And the autocorrect functions are pretty intelligent. You don’t want to go blindly turning all of them on. On some pictures, it looked pretty good when I did that. Others took on a really artificial look. So experiment to get the hang of the tools, but be selective.

If you want to crop an image, it has a Crop Wizard. Who needs a wizard to help you cut out a piece of an image? Don’t worry, this isn’t a worthless wizard like Clippy from MS Office. Its recommendations, believe it or not, are intelligent. This wizard really does help you.

If you have a scanner, Qimage Pro will give you an easy way to make quick-and-dirty enlargements and reprints. Scan the picture at your scanner’s highest hardware or optical resolution (check your scanner’s manual). Load the scan into Qimage and size it however you want, do any touchups and/or cropping you want to do, then print. You’ll definitely want this if you ever get to spend an afternoon with the stash of photographs your grandmother kept under her bed in a Russell-Stover candy box.

It’s not a serious photo manipulation tool like Photoshop. If you want to cut out your head and put it on the body of a supermodel, Qimage Pro won’t do it. But most people are just interested in touchups and printing and don’t want to spend an hour futzing around with each image. For those kinds of people, Qimage Pro is perfect and it costs 40 bucks.

The only downside to any of this is that the quality of most inkjet printers is anything but archival–the ink fades fairly fast. But Qimage can’t do anything about that. It does an amazing job at everything else.

Disadvantages of Windows 3.1

Dave Farquhar Windows January 7, 2003April 7, 2025amiga, Microsoft Office, new hardware, old windows, spyware, unix, windows 7, windows 98

Note: I wrote this way back in 2003, so my advice as far as replacing Windows 3.1 is a bit dated, but the strengths and weaknesses remain valid. If you’re thinking of a new computer, please don’t run anything older than Windows 10.

I found a search in my log analysis for “disadvantages of windows 3.1,” which I found interesting. I can talk about that. Someone asked for it, and I aim to please. So let’s head down memory lane.

Help! I do tech support for everyone I know!

Dave Farquhar General January 6, 2003September 30, 2010antivirus, apple, buffer overflow, dell, kmart, os x, spyware, vulnerability, Windows XP

Here’s an interesting dilemma: How do you avoid becoming the primary technical support contact for all of your friends and family?
Richard “Rich Job” Jobity asked a really good question, didn’t he? I had to think about it for a while. That label fit me for a very long time. In the past year, it stopped, but I never knew exactly why. He made me think about it, and I found I’d done some interesting things on a subconscious level.

There was a time when I didn’t mind. I was 16 and still learning, I had some disposable time on my hands, and, frankly, I enjoyed the attention. You can learn a lot by fixing other people’s computers. And I used at least one of those friends as a reference to get my first three computer-related jobs. But over time, my desire changed.

I think a good first step is to identify exactly why it is you don’t want to be the primary technical support contact for all your friends and family.

In my case, I spend 40 hours a week setting up and fixing computers. And while I definitely spend some time off the clock thinking about computers, I also definitely want to spend some time off the clock thinking about something other than computers.

I have a life. I have a house to take care of, I have meetings to go to, and I have a social life. Not only that, I have bills to pay and errands to run, and physical needs to tend to as well, like cooking dinner and sleeping. And people get really annoyed with me for some reason if I don’t ever wash my clothes.

So if you get into a situation like I got into a year ago, when I had a friend calling me literally every night for a week with some new computer problem and keeping me on the phone for several hours a night while we tried to sort them out, I think it’s perfectly understandable for any reasonable person to be a bit upset. So here are my tips for someone who wants to head off that kind of a problem.

Have realistic expectations on all sides. So the first step is to make sure your friends and your family understand that you have responsibilities in life other than making sure their computers work. You’ll do your best to help them, but it’s unrealistic to expect you to drop everything for a computer problem the same way you would drop everything for a death in the family.

Limit your availability. Don’t help someone with a computer problem while you’re in the middle of dinner. You’ll be able to concentrate better without your stomach growling and you won’t harbor resentment about your dinner getting cold. Have him or her step away from the computer and go for a walk and call back in half an hour. The time away from the computer will clear his or her mind and help him or her better answer your questions. Don’t waver on this; five-minute problems have ways of becoming hour-long problems.

Here’s a variant of that. I had a friend having problems with a Dell. She called Dell. She got tired of waiting on hold. “I know, I’ll call Dave,” she said. “Dave’s easier to get ahold of than this.”

She may have tried to call me, but last week I was everywhere but home, it seemed. She didn’t leave a message, so I didn’t know she’d called. The moral of the story: Don’t be easier to get ahold of than Dell. Or whoever it was that built the computer or wrote the software.

What if I’d been home? It depends. If I’d been home and playing Railroad Tycoon, I’d be under more obligation to help a friend in need than I would be if I were home but my girlfriend was over and I was fixing her dinner or watching a movie with her. The key is to remember your other obligations and don’t compromise on them.

I remember a week or two ago, I was sitting on my futon with my girlfriend, watching a movie, arms entangled in the weird way the way they tend to do when you want to be close to someone. The phone rang. I didn’t move. “You’re not going to answer that?” she asked. “No,” I said. Since when is it rude not to answer your phone? They didn’t know I was home. If I don’t want to talk at that instant, I’m not obligated to. Besides, both of us would have had to move for me to pick up the phone. So I ignored it. She looked at me like I’d paid her some kind of compliment, that I’d rather stay there with her than yak on the phone. Call me old-fashioned, but that used to go without saying.

Whoever it was didn’t leave a message. If it’d been important, either they would have or they would have called me back. (Maybe it was the friend who’d thought of using me as a substitute for Dell tech support. Who knows.)

Don’t do a company’s work for them. If someone’s having a problem with a Dell, or having a problem dialing in to the Internet, I stay away from the problem. If a Dell is having hardware problems, the user will have to call Dell eventually anyway, and the tech will have procedures to follow, and there’s no room in those procedures for a third-party diagnosis. Even if that third party is a friend’s cousin’s neighbor who supposedly wrote a computer book for O’Reilly three years ago. (For all the technician knows, it was a book about Emacs, and you can know Emacs yet know a whole lot of nothing about computer hardware, especially Dell hardware. But more likely he’ll just think the person’s lying.)

And if someone can’t dial into an ISP, well, I may very well know more about computers than the guy at the ISP who’s going to pick up the phone. I may or may not be more intelligent and and more pleasant and more articulate than he is. But the fact is, I can only speculate about whatever problems the ISP may be having. And seeing as I don’t use modems anymore and haven’t for years, I’m not exactly in a good position to troubleshoot the things. Someone who does tech support for an ISP does it every day. He’s going to do a better job than me, even if he’s not as smart as I am.

Know your limits. A year ago, a friend was having problems with OS X. She asked if I’d look at it. I politely turned her down. There are ideal circumstances under which to try to solve a problem, but seeing the OS for the first time isn’t it. She called Apple and eventually they got it worked out. It’s a year later now. Her computer works fine, we’re still on speaking terms, and I still haven’t ever seen OS X.

Around the same time, another friend toasted her hard drive. I took on that challenge, because it was PC hardware and she was running an operating system I’d written a book about. It took me a while to solve the problem, but I solved it. It was a growth opportunity for me, and she’s happy.

And this is related to the next point: If you’re not certain about something, say so. It’s much better to say, “This is what I would do, but I’m really not sure it’s the best thing to do” than it is to give some bad advice and pretend that it’s gospel. Get your ego out of the way. There’s no need to try to look good all the time (you won’t).

Limit your responsibility. If your uncle has a six-year-old PC running Windows 95 and ran out and bought a USB-only printer because it was on sale at Kmart and now he’s having problems getting it running and he never asked you about any of this, how much responsibility should you be willing to shoulder to get that printer running?

I’m inclined to say very little. It’s one thing to give some bad advice. It’s another to be dragged into a bad decision. If the only good way to get the peripheral running is to buy Windows XP and wipe the hard drive and install it clean, don’t let that be your problem.

Don’t allow yourself to be dragged into giving support for free software downloaded off the ‘Net, supercheap peripherals bought from who-knows-where, or anything else you can’t control.

You can take this to an extreme if you want: Partition the hard drive, move My Documents over to the second partition, and then create an image of the operating system and applications (installed on the first partition, of course). Any time you install something new, create a new image. When your friend or relative runs into trouble, have him or her re-image the computer. He or she can reinstall Kazaa or whatever notorious app probably caused the problem if desired, but you can disclaim responsibility for it.

Which brings me to:

Disclaim all responsibility for poor computer habits. Gatermann and I have a friend whose brother repeatedly does everything I’d do if I wanted to set out to mess up someone’s computer. He downloads and installs every gimmicky piece of free-with-strings-attached software he can find, turning his computer into a cocktail of spyware. He runs around on Kazaa and other file-sharing networks, acquiring a cocktail of who-knows-what. He opens every e-mail attachment anybody sends to him, acquiring a cocktail of viruses. He probably does things I’ve never thought of.

Gatermann installed antivirus software on the computer, and we’ve both run Ad-Aware on it (if I recall, one time I ran it I found 284 instances of spyware). Both of us have rebuilt the system from scratch numerous times. The kid never learns. Why should he? Whatever he does, one of Tim’s friends will come over and fix it. (I guarantee it won’t be me though. I got sick of doing it.)

Some good rules to make people follow if they expect help from you:
1. Run antivirus software and keep it current. This is a non-negotiable if you’re running Windows.
2. Stay off P2P networks entirely. Their clients install spyware, and you know about the MP3 buffer overflow vulnerability in WinXP, don’t you? Buy the record and make your own MP3s. Half.com is your friend.
3. Never open an unexpected e-mail attachment. Even from your best friend.
4. If you don’t need it, don’t install it. Most free Windows software comes with strings attached in the form of spyware, these days. If you don’t want to pay for software, run Linux.
5. If you must violate rule 4, run Ad-Aware religiously.

And? This doesn’t mean I never get computer-related phone calls. A family member called me just this past Sunday with a noisy fan in a power supply. I found him a cheap replacement. I went over to my girlfriend’s family’s house Sunday afternoon and fixed their computer. (It made me wonder if the “4” in Pentium 4 stood for “486.” Its biggest problem turned out to be 255 instances of spyware. Yum.)

But I’m not afraid to answer the phone, I don’t find myself giving people longshot answers just to get them off the phone long enough for me to go somewhere or start screening my phone calls. And I find myself getting annoyed with people less. Those are all good things.