Archive for July, 2008
I spilled milk on my keyboard – now what?
Monday, July 28th, 2008My wife posed this question to me about a week ago. She spilt some milk on her keyboard, and wondered what was the best way to handle it.
A little bit of Googling revealed the following steps:
- UNPLUG your keyboard. No ifs buts or whatevers.
- Try and get as much of the spilled beverage out of the keyboard.
- If it was water, let the keyboard sit and dry for at least a day, preferably a couple of days. You should be OK after that.
- If it was anything else (especially sticky liquids), try the dishwasher. Place it in the dishwasher (top rack if you feel brave and want to use the heated drying – I wouldn’t).
- Add soap. You don’t need any of the additives, to make glasses sparkle etc. and it may actually be harmful to your keyboard.
- Close the dishwasher and turn it on. Don’t use the heated dry cycle – it may melt your plastics.
- Remove the keyboard from the dishwasher once the cycle is completed.
- Shake out any left-over water.
- Let the keyboard dry for a week. You may want to remove the keys to allow the board to dry faster, but I think a week in a fairly dry environment should take care of it.
- Plug and pray.
I claim no responsibility for any keyboards harmed during this process, but if your keyboard is not working around step 3, you might as well try this.
Ford Sync hands-on review
Friday, July 25th, 2008This week my car was in the shop, and as a loaner vehicle I had a 2008 Ford Focus, with Ford and Microsoft’s new Sync system.
The car itself is OK. I normally drive a Ford Taurus, so the Focus is a little smaller, but I used to drive a Renault Clio back in the Netherlands, so I’ve got no problems with a smaller car. Actually, in about the 3 days I was driving it, I managed to get the average MPG up from 25 something to around 31.6. Not amazing, but better than the 19+ MPG we get out of the Freestar, and the 22-24 MPG for the Taurus.
You can tell the Focus is the low-end model of the Ford line-up. The sun visor feels a little cheap, there are some other things that make the car feel less sturdy, and whoever designed the cupholder inserts has never put a cup in one – and tried to remove it (hint: I think the rubber insert should stay in the cupholder, not around the cup as a misformed bottle warmer.
On to the tech part – the Sync system. Sync is a voice-controlled system to control phone and audio. A wide range of phones and audio devices (read: portable MP3 players and the likes) are supposed to work with it. I have a BlackBerry Pearl 8130 and a 3rd gen iPod, pretty standard equipment, so I didn’t expect any problems.
The pairing of the phone over Bluetooth went smooth. And every time I started the car, it connected to the phone quickly and without intervention. The only time I had an issue was when I got in the car around 11:15PM, and Sync didn’t connect to my phone. It took me a minute to remember that the phone turns itself off after 11PM… 
Hooking up the iPod to the Sync system was a little more complicated. The steps in the Sync manual describing how to connect your music player through a USB cable – didn’t work. The system maintained there was no music player. After a little bit of fiddling in the menus I managed to tell Sync it really
had a music player. After that, I was able to select songs, artists, albums, genres etc., but my play lists were completely missing. At least I was able to play music and the likes! But my confidence in the manual was pretty much gone.
And then the issues started:
- I like listening to podcasts. Some of them are pretty long. And I don’t like leaving my iPod in the car. However, when you stop the engine and the Sync system, or disconnect the iPod, it loses track of where it was in the “song”. The only option you have is to fast-forward to the point where you left off – a fast-forward that only skips 5 seconds at a time, at a speed of roughly 10 seconds skipped per real time second. To get back to 1 hour and 15 minutes into the podcast, I had to press the fast forward button for about 8 minutes. On top of that, roughly after every 20 minutes of the “song”, the fast-forward stops, like it thinks you can’t be serious about skipping that much of the “song”.
- While I was listening to some music, I received a phone call. I was able to answer the phone call, and talk to the person on the other side. The music had stopped. After terminating the call, I was still in the phone menu. The voice commands were now focused on the phone, not on the media. It took me roughly 3 minutes of yelling at the voice system and pushing buttons to get my music to play again. At least it continued where I left off.
- The “Help” command in the voice system can be handy, but at times is completely useless. I use voice recognition because I’m driving. The system knows I’m driving, because I’m not allowed to do certain setup options. Then why, pray tell, does it tell me after asking for “Help” 2 options, one of which is to “see the manual”??? Should I whip it out and read it while I’m doing 65MPH? Not a very safe suggestion.
- To this day I cannot ask the system to play an artist or album. I can play genres, but only if I select it through the button menu. The voice system claims no knowledge of any music on my system, be it an
artist or a genre. Apparently it is supposed to index your music files, after which these voice commands work. But: “Indexing” doesn’t appear in the Sync manual index, and neither does “Factory defaults” and some other useful options.
The Sync system is a very useful idea. It aims to keep your hands on the wheel, and the heads-up display helps keep an eye on the road. But it misses its goal when I have to fumble around on the dashboard because the voice recognition can’t switch from phone to media, or recognize half of the commands. My phone is equipped with voice dialing, and does a great job of understanding me (I can even call my wife, who has the same unpronounceable last name as me – and the Pearl understands who I want). I can’t believe the Sync system has such a hard time.
All in all, it feels like a Microsoft Windows product. It looks OK, but not very intuitive. It halfway works, but I’m waiting for version 2.0. At least it didn’t blue screen on me….
Tags: blackberry, bluetooth, focus, ford, ipod, microsoft, sync, voice
Program launcher for Windows – Enso
Monday, July 21st, 2008For a week or two now, I’ve been using Enso Launcher. Enso Launcher is a product from Humanized, a company focused on making the computer and its usage more humane.
Enso Launcher installs itself, displays a welcome message, and then immediately disappears out of sight. It patiently waits for you to press its hotkey (Caps Lock by default, but you can change it to the left or right control or windows key, or the right shift key if you like Caps Lock – yes, I’m looking at you, Mr. I-Yell-In-Email-messages!). If that happens, it displays a transparent message, and you can type a command. The original Enso knows about 10 commands (centered around opening and manipulating programs and their windows), the Enso Beta expands that list tremendously.
Enso Launcher is ideal for people who hate using the mouse. And it keeps you focused on your task at hand. You don’t have to remember that Microsoft Word is hiding in Programs, Microsoft Office. Instead, you can tell Enso to Open Word, and it will list all the commands that contain the phrase WORD, with the most likely and most used at the top.
An example of Enso’s use is an incoming phone call. I play iTunes while I’m working, and that can be distracting during a phone call. Instead of pulling up iTunes and pausing the playback, or pulling up the volume and muting it, I can press the Caps-Lock key, type PAU (for PAUSE), and iTunes pauses its playback. After dealing with the phone call, I can press Caps-Lock again, type PL and press the down arrow key to select PLAY TRACK, and iTunes continues where I left off.
Apart from the preprogrammed commands, you can let Enso learn new commands. With Learn As Open, you can teach Enso a new Open keyword for a directory or a file. If you’ve downloaded the Developer Prototype, and are handy with Python, Java, .NET, Perl, Ruby, or any language that supports XML-RPC, you can create your own commands.
The additional beta plug-ins to Enso Launcher add such abilities as addings maps, search an amazing variety of web services, translate selected text, render TeX markup language, and control your media player.
After two weeks of playing with Enso, I’m beginning to miss it on PCs that don’t have it. It’s unobtrusive, right there when you need it, fast and flexible. Plus some of the philosophies built into Enso (like the non-modal dialog boxes) are really interesting ideas, that should be more wide-spread.
Enso is free, open source, and is distributed on Windows 2000, XP and Vista. There are versions in the make for OS/X and Linux as well.
Tags: enso, humanized, launcher, Productivity
Top 5 articles for June 2008
Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008- (1) Kensington Bluetooth 2.0 under Windows Vista 64 bit
- (2) Blackberry Desktop crashes when reading Outlook Calendar
- (3) Wow64: How to get the Progress Debugger to run in Vista 64-bit
- (4) Setting up MXP to run under Linux
- (-) Spore Creature creator – Spore demo program
