Blog: General

If you have a battery, especially AA or AAA, that might be good or might be dead and you don’t have a meter to check it with, you can see if it will bounce. Hold the battery about an inch above a hard surface and drop it on its end. If it’s a new, fully charged, battery it won’t bounce much at all. In fact, it’s not unusual for it to just land with a thud and stay standing on its end. However, if it’s low on voltage, it will bounce much more than a fresh battery will. The difference is clearly obvious.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_m6p99l6ME

My Android phone was frequently losing the connection to the SIM card, causing me to miss calls and text messages. Several online forums point to battery and system monitoring apps as causing the problem. I had one of these apps installed, so I uninstalled it, but the problem remained. I even tried resetting my phone to factory defaults, but that did not work either. The solution turned out to be really simple. I found a forum a few months later that suggested removing the SIM card tray and placing a small piece of tape over the back of the SIM card to hold it more securely in the tray. I did this over a month ago and have not had the error happen since then.

We all think of Microsoft Excel as a fantastic tool for data manipulation and calculation, but few of us have experienced it as an artist palette.  A Japanese man has taken up the challenge, and has created masterpieces using the graphics capabilities of Excel.  You can see and read about his work at this url: http://www.spoon-tamago.com/2013/05/28/tatsuo-horiuchi-excel-spreadsheet-artist/

 

I have an external drive I use from time to time with various types of files.  I thought it would be interesting to see how Windows indexing would handle files and information on the external drive, so I checked its checkbox in the indexing options and let it index the drive.  Sometime later, I noticed my system disk space was dropping precipitously.  I looked at the disk space use and found the windows.edb database file had grown to more than 100GB.  After I unchecked the external drive in the indexing option and had Windows rebuild the index from scratch, my disk space was back to normal.

If you are interested in a fitness tracking solution, one of our employees has reported good results with the Fitbit Flex (www.fitbit.com/flex).  It comes as a module that inserts into a wristband.  It tracks steps and sleep activity.  Battery life is about 5 days.  It uses low-energy Bluetooth to sync with your portable devices, and comes with a USB dongle to sync with software on your laptop.  The online portal has lots of options to input additional data like workout activity, diet/calories, and weight.

I was recently introduced to BatchGEO (batchgeo.com).  It is a mapping service which will plot multiple locations on a map based on address information compiled on a spreadsheet.  The home page allows you to paste records directly on the page or to download a spreadsheet template to import later.  With your data loaded on the web page, you can click the Map Now button and all the locations will be plotted and displayed on a map.  You can save the map and a link to the map can be shared with other folks.  A bonus is when the map is emailed and opened on an Android mobile device, driving directions are available.

Data mining (looking for useful or interesting trends in massive amounts of data) is becoming more accessible to individuals as huge databases are being brought online by companies such as Google and Amazon. A good example is the Google Ngram Viewer (https://books.google.com/ngrams). It is a front end search engine that queries Google’s database of public domain books going back several hundred years. You can search for individual words and phrases (e.g. When did the term robot come into common use? According to the Ngram Viewer, is was in the mid-1920s). However, the tool also supports more complex queries. This article discusses some them: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/bigger-better-google-ngrams-brace-yourself-for-the-power-of-grammar/263487/ An interesting query in the article uses basic math in the query to compare how often (as percentages) the term “United States” was used as a singular noun versus a plural noun. In the 1800s, there was a significant shift following the Civil War where the United States became more commonly referred to as a single nation rather than a collection of individual states. As is typical with this type of “big data”, the possibilities are endless.

Microsoft has started to roll out new functionality for touch screen devices in windows 8.  On my personal Windows 8 system, I noticed I had updates to apply.  I applied the updates and my desktop was slow coming back up, somehow this new functionality got invoked and my computer started to narrate my keystrokes.  I was briefly caught off guard until some research uncovered this new Microsoft feature.

There is a neat feature on the iPad that will assist in limiting the access for very young people and helping very old people use the iPad. The feature allows you to limit the buttons available on an application and is accessed through the Settings->General->Accessibility->Guided Access. Turn Guided Access “on” in this screen, then start the application you wish restricted. A “triple click” option then brings you to a screen that allows you to identify areas of the screen you wish to be inoperable… then “start” this shell application. [more]

I used this to assist my 96 year old mother-in-law… so she can read books in the Audible application… without getting into screens that she doesn’t understand. This really helps her quality of life… to be able to listen to audiobooks, and my quality of life... not having to run to her rescue to stop the book so she can do to dinner or sleep!!