thoughts.bjsintay.com

Olympus created one of the world’s lightest voice recorders in its line of WS-3xx devices.  I became interested in this model because of its size and weight.  The WS-310M packs in 512MB of memory for over 138 hours of voice recording (on low quality mode).  At less than 2 ounces including battery, this recorder has replaced pen and paper for recording my adventures out on the trail where lightweight is king.

I initially tested my device by recording about 40 tracks from old analog voice recorder tapes that I’ve made over the past 10 years.  The device is straightforward to use.  After recording, I snapped off the battery case and plugged the recorder directly into my USB port - no cables required.  Copying everything to my computer was easy, but here is where I found the first glitch.  The device had a few tracks that got “stuck”.  My computer reads the files as corrupt disabling me from moving them to my computer.  I unplugged the device and listened from the tiny on-board speaker… no problems on the playback end of things.  So that problem has me stumped.  I read that cutting power to the device while recording can cause problems, but I can assure you that I didn’t do this.  Since this one incident I started using another “folder” on the recorder (there are 5) and have had no problems so far.

I put the device back together after transferring the WMA files onto the computer.  Another glitch.  The device totally lost the time/date.  This is annoying because it tags your files with the time/date.  I would imagine that this could be fairly important for most people.  I have continually found that this device cannot hold the clock for a long period of time of after mucking with it at all in the USB port.  Basically, check your time/date every day that you use this device.  Maybe others don’t have this problem?

The device has mic holes in the front and back and on both sides (stereo).  I found this very frustrating because it is impossible to twist the device to avoid the wind noise when outside.  You have to use it in a windless environment or on a calm day.  Bad for outdoor use.

I am pleased with the device, however, I think mine may have a few annoying glitches (corrupt memory, time/date problem).  If these problems were fixed, I would give this device a 4 out of 5.  With these problems, it gets a 2 out of 5 for total unreliability.

This past week I reconnected with an old floppy disk game Space Quest 1 (VGA edition) by Sierra.  Luckily I have backups of my floppies now, because the disks no longer work.  If you’re holding on to old floppies, you may be  surprised to discover that the data is no longer there!  Anyways, I played the game through in about 3 hours the other night and really enjoyed it.  Space Quest 1 is an old Sierra RPG in which you are a janitor given the job of saving the universe.  The game is a ton of fun and was one of my favorite computer games when I was younger.  What’s funny is this game has to run on DosBOX, an emulator of DOS.  It’s hard to imagine we already need emulators for those games in a Windows environment.

Have you recently reconnected with an old video game? 

By now you are well aware that daylight savings time (DST) was adjusted by the 2005 energy bill put forth by the US Congress.    If you’re not aware, you may need to check your clocks.  This act mandated a change in the usual DST dates in 2007 in order to “save energy” by utilizing daylight.  This came about from a study that showed DST reduced American consumption of oil by about 100,000 barrels daily.  Congress decided that (in 3 paragraphs worth of explanation) they would help the world become a better place to live by capitalizing on these “savings.”

Let me just say, congressmen and women - DUMB MOVE.

I applaud the thought that doing something this simple could save oil and help the environment.  Yes, indeed, this all looked good on paper.  Apparently, no one remembered that this would also make the morning darker, requiring people to simply replace the amount of time spent with the lights on at night with more lights on in the morning.  Forget the fact that it is estimated this change cost American industry $2 billion to fix nearly every computer system out there.  It seems our friends in congress forgot about our old friend Y2K.

So thank you, thank you for handing a 2 billion dollar expense to our high-tech industry which will in turn be handed down to consumers like me.  Thank you for creating a myriad of headaches among the IT workforce which probably consumed more than 100,000 barrels of fuel per day just keeping the lights/computers on to think about this problem.  Thank you for forcing me read countless emails about how this or that upgrade needs to be done to fix the DST change issue.  Thank you for forcing me to check all of my devices, computers, and calendar appointments for proper rollovers.  Most of all, thank you for giving these two PhD. students in economics something to write a thesis on which proves that all you did was tick a lot of people off:

http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/print?id=2938715

Few programs are as near and dear to my heart as LeechFTP.  The sad part is that this graceful creature hasn’t been touched by developers in years.  In fact, I first received LeechFTP from a coworker at NCSU about 5 years ago.  The developer, Jan Debis, hasn’t touched it since.  The program was folded into a “newer” program which I absolutely hate and resembles nothing of the original.  Debis’s site for LeechFTP has been shut down in the past year marking a final death for the program.  The .EXE file is still available at download.com.  With 1.2 million downloads and a 4.5 star rating (215 votes), you’d think Debis would notice that this program really caught on.

The basic layout has an echoing terminal at the top to visualize FTP chatter.  Below is a 3-pane panel with operations, local files, and remote files panes.  The operations pane contains a file upload queue that you can put to “sleep”.  My favorite tab in this pane is the threads tab which shows you exactly what threads are running, what files they are transferring, their speed, estimated time each, and more.  You can limit the number of connections here easily.  There are also other tabs, but the only one I find useful is the failure tab which allows you to re-queue any problematic file transfers.  LeechFTP also has a system to store your favorite FTP connections in folders.  You can easily access or edit your connections through this brilliant system.

One of the saddest days of my life will be the day that LeechFTP no longer runs on my computer.  I have not tested this program on Vista, nor have I heard anyone talk about it.  I am hoping it will survive this OS upgrade.  It was originally designed in the Windows 98 OS, but XP picked it up just fine (minus the old GUI still adorning the app).  I would almost pay thousands for the code to LeechFTP so I could maintain this brilliant program myself throughout the decades.  I tried to work on my own FTP program, but this proved to be very time consuming.  It has never reached the full capacity that LeechFTP has.

Jan Debis, please, if you are out there anywhere, please consider coming back to our old friend LeechFTP.  Don’t force us to use other programs like CuteFTP or FileZilla in the future.  You made the FTP process so easy and quick.

I will saver my final years with this program like a fine wine.

Linux command got you stumped?  Have it all come back to you quickly at one of my favorite sites for re-hashing Linux commands.  ss64.com has a great list of Linux commands along with the documentation to get you through it all.  This is a must-have bookmark for all of you wannabe hackers out there.

http://www.ss64.com/bash/