1) Workaround was needed for sharing files from Win2K to Win7 Home Premium Edition (dated 2009.) Those were the days I still used a Win2K laptop as our home NAS. It required a registry change.
2) Guest Additions (dated 2010) was for VirtualBox. I needed it back then for sharing files between my VM and the host (and I still need it now!)
3) Dell DJ 20 Gen 2 was my latest toy in 2010 (and I still listen to it almost every night!) When it was newly released in 2004, it cost >$100 and I bought it for $40.
Its drivers were still available for download from Dell in 2010 (not sure if the link works now.) It is not a plug-and-play device on Win7 and the Windows driver needed to be installed for it to be recognized. The WinXP driver actually works on Win7 too. Also, to use subscription service like Rhapsody, one needed to upgrade the player with a PlaysForSure compatible firmware (the last one on the page) Unfortunately that .exe only works on WinXP so you need to somehow find one. And when I ran it, it stuck on "Restarting player" even though the player was restarted (and upgraded) Fortunately it didn't matter. I just close the installer and it didn't cause any problem. Once the player has been upgraded, you could still transfer subscription tunes using a Win7 computer.
Fast forward to 2014: I could use my Dell DJ 20 on my Win8 PC in plug-and-play fashion. I couldn't get it to work with the Rhapsody client though. Rhapsody no longer officially supported it (no more PlaysForSure?) Today it plays non-DRMed files for me only.
4) CopyTrans is a free tool for copying songs to iDevice without iTunes
5) 2009 was the 50th anniversary of COBOL. It was obviously an important milestone but it's also one of the few major computer programming languages that I knew little about.
6) Shozu was an iPhone App I experimented with (and wanted to recommend) for posting to Blogger. I don't think I used it that much after I drafted that post in 2008 with it though :P
Fast forward to 2014: the official Blogger app on iOS is free yet still not very good. I'm writing this on a PC instead.
7) I wanted to raise awareness of radiation level in Hong Kong back in March 2012. Excerpt from the CNN article:
When Pieter Franken visited Hong Kong one of the first things he did was measure the level of radiation in his hotel room. "The whole idea is to measure everything (rather than only performing spot checks)," said Franken. Hong Kong lies just 50 kilometers from a nuclear power station located in Daya Bay in Guangdong province, but its 12 permanent radiation monitoring stations are not in heavily populated urban areas. On a six-hour drive around the city's major commercial and residential, Franken mapped radiation levels with a portable monitoring kit devised by Safecast. All the data is publicly viewable as interactive heat maps on Safecast's website. The drive revealed that Hong Kong had a constant level of radiation that hovered around 0.2 microsievert per hour for an annualized dose of 2 millisieverts. This was slightly higher than the 0.1 microsievert per hour that Safecast mapped in the major urban centres of Tokyo and Beijing. One millisievert per year is an internationally-recognized nuclear factory guideline for exposure to radiation by the general public, according to Dr. John Leung, radiation expert and physics professor at the University of Hong Kong. "Your risk of having cancer is increased for 4 to 5% per sievert of radiation your body absorbs," explained Leung. "The way to control it is to receive as little as possible." On his drive around Hong Kong Franken wanted to see how localized the radiation was, "but it seems to be all over," he said. Franken believed that the common denominator throughout the city, concrete, was a key source of the radiation. Or more specifically, the locally-sourced granite aggregates used in place of pricier cement to make the concrete. "Hong Kong is lying on a high-background radiation level because the radionuclide content in the granite in this region of the country is a bit higher than the world average," said Leung. "There is more uranium and thorium in our granite. It's natural." A study conducted by Leung and his colleagues in 1990 found that the gamma radiation dose rate of local soil to be 1.8 times the world average. Hong Kong's concrete infrastructure poses no immediate harm to residents' health, but some wonder if more attention should be given to how buildings are made in the city. "When we make concrete, we don't pay attention to the mineral content of the rock, so long as it is strong enough," said University of Hong Kong structural engineering professor, Albert Kwan. "If it's really is the case (that local granite has elevated radioactivity), perhaps we should import our granite from elsewhere." The everyday doses of radiation we encounter are far from being fatal in one shot, but it is the accumulated exposure that may be cause for concern. To reduce everyday levels of radiation Safecast suggests opening doors and windows to ventilate rooms. This minimizes the accumulation of radon - a radioactive gas produced by the decay of naturally occurring uranium and thorium. Inhaling radon - one of the leading sources of human exposure to natural radiation - in the home and workplace causes tens of thousands of deaths from lung cancer annually, according to the World Health Organization.
8) I was experimenting with booting to a Live version of Arch Linux on a USB drive on my personal laptops in 2009. larch was the next thing to try after my FaunOS experiment.
I basically followed the instructions and also did the followings:
I) make a copy of an existing profile. I copied xmini to a new one named "my"
II) I changed the addedpacks by
- remove all xfce* lines and added one line with jwm (pacman cannot find those xfce related packages and I prefer jwm anyway)
- remove aufs (otherwise I got error about dependency on pre-2.26.29 kernel. It has actually become part of the new kernel anyway. However, the included one is aufs2 and it doesn't support "Merging overlays" when you save sessions from running the resulting image of larch.)
III) create a directory for building the image. Make sure it is on a filesystem with lots of free space!
IV) the command should be./mklarch -ug -p ./larch/profile/my [dir created in 3]
Fast forward to 2014: I tried something similar again: Live Ubuntu on USB on my Intel Core i5 laptop. The performance was horrific. Slow to boot and slow after boot (probably worse than the 2009 experiment!) I ended up buying a $50 60 Gb SSD (el cheapo and SSD didn't appear in the same sentence back in 2009) and installed Ubuntu 14.04 properly on it. I like this setup. It didn't require much tweaking at all and most things work out of the box (except this)
