Chaos Manor View, Sunday, December 13, 2015
I’ve been devoured in trying to get There Will Be War Vol 10 out the door, but as I was about to finish my daughter was involved in an equestrian accident and ended in hospital and a great number of family, housing maintenance, and other things ate up all my time and energy. Nothing that a younger and more spry guy couldn’t have handled quickly, but I’m not what I used to be. I haven’t quite finished the book.
As part of it I did an interview with Larry Niven, and found that an ancient MacBook Pro – vintage, I got it before the brain cancer treatment in 2008 – with QuickTime and the built in microphone, laid on a coffee table in my living room with Niven and I sitting comfortably across from each other, recorded the interview well enough that I think I can edit it into a short audio to be used in promoting the book.
Which means that pricey as Macs are, you need to think about how long they are useful. I recently went to an Apple store and looked at the new MacBook Pro, and they are gorgeous. They are also fast; but really my old pre-2008 MacBook Pro is still good enough for most of what I use a Mac for. The new ones will do one thing, though: apparently you can record both sides of a SKYPE call quite smoothly with that gorgeous screen, and quickly edit that into an interview podcast. I don’t know if I’ll ever do that, but it’s tempting.
If you do much business you probably need Windows, and Eric is building us a new high performance Windows 10, but I admit I am tempted by the newest MacBook Pro as well. That screen is gorgeous.
Learning to use the MacBook Pro to record was itself interesting: the last time I did interviews, and it doesn’t seem that long age, I used a good quality tape recorder and expensive ,microphone; all that is upstairs where I can’t go without an expedition, and I wasn’t sure I could find it all anyway. So I Googled audio recording on a Mac. It seemed simple enough but the screens I was shown were very similar to the ones I got on the MacBook Pro, but not identical. KI knew that on a Mac everything was either very simple or impossible, and there certainly had to be a simple way to do this, and eventually I found that I just wasn’t seeing a couple of option icons on the QuickTime control (rather tiny) screen; when I realized they were there and did what the F1 Help screen said they did, even if the icon the Help showed wasn’t what I was looking at, it became simple. Moral: Macs really are simple, but you need some grounding in the Mac philosophy, and faith that with a Mac everything is very simple or impossible; and Macs pretty well do everything you expect them to; you just have to figure out the simple approach. Also, Mac Help screens actually have a use; unlike some that are there to prove they told you how but only if you already knew…
Anyway, I didn’t get much accomplished over the weekend, but I at least didn’t pile up more work. Sand I got a lot of the Christmas stuff done, on line. Sorry I have neglected this place.
Meanwhile, Eric has discovered that if you tell the ASUS Motherboard that you have liquid cooling, that makes the board think you are overclocking, and the least you can get away with is 12% overclock. Since we don’t want any overclocking at all, that’s important to know. If you use ASUS and do not want to overclock, do not tell the board that you have liquid cooling; at least that’s my interpretation. Full report from Eric coming up.
It’s late, I don’t have time to do comments, but here are some things to think about.
Think about this:
Microsoft’s tough love
Apparently Microsoft really, really wants everybody using Live Mail 2012 to stop and use either the inadequate Mail app or Outlook. Early this afternoon I received this:
Dear user,
In a few weeks, we will be making some changes to our email services that might impact your @outlook.com, @hotmail, @live, or @msn email account. Those changes will prevent your email from being delivered to the Windows Live Mail 2012 application you use.
In order to continue using Windows Live Mail 2012 to send and receive email for your account, you need to install the latest update published here.
If you use Windows Live Mail 2012 on Windows 8, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, we recommend that you switch to the built in Mail app in Windows to stay connected and get the latest feature updates on Windows 8, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10.
Windows Live Essentials 2009 and 2011 are not supported anymore, and you will need to update to Windows 8/8.1 or Windows 10 and use the Mail app, or use www.outlook.com. To learn more about the Mail app, please click here.
We also recommend all Windows Live Mail users on Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1 to upgrade to Windows 10 and use the built in Mail application to stay connected and get the latest feature updates.
We suggest saving this email so you can refer to it later.
Thanks for your understanding and continued use.
Sincerely,
The Outlook team
I very compliantly followed the link and obtained the update. I ran it and lost the use of Live Mail 2012. Upon startup Windows would announce the program had stopped must be closed. After some frustration including a repair install I checked out the Mail app. It’s far better than it was when first introduced with Windows 8. Then it was pathetic. Now it is merely limited, more so than is acceptable for a full PC. It would be somewhat acceptable on a phone or tablet but would be a good target for a paid competitor.
So I headed off to Outlook. My main desktop has Office 2013 but I’ve always regarded Outlook as overkill for my needs and thus drawing more resources than I cared to give it. OTOH, The average desktop is now a lot more machine for the money and Outlook hasn’t gotten all that more resource hungry. But there was a problem. Outlook 2013 doesn’t know how to import Live Mail messages. I checked the older PC on my desk’s KVM. It has Office 2010 but it too lacked the import functionality. What madness was this? Live Mails was still actively developed when that generation of Office launched. Did they not want people to move up to Outlook as they had in the past?
I noticed that this wasn’t the first time I’d run into the lack of import options in recent Outlook generations. That Outlook 2010 had a third party utility for adding the needed import option installed but it was really clunky. Handling all of the folders would be a long tedious task. Then something occurred to me. Live Mail 2012 didn’t actually crash. Not entirely. Just the part that pulls down new messages and other items like calendar data. But the primary UI was still usable so long as you didn’t click the CLOSE button on the error box. As it turned out I could retrieve all of the account setup info and even export to a PST file. Score one for the Live Mail team, wherever they are now.
Eric Pobirs
Bandow: ‘An American who values individual liberty and advocates limited government should oppose further inflating the Washington Leviathan to “do good” elsewhere.’
<http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/no-libertarian-case-for-empire/>
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Roland Dobbins
How Microsoft Created a Revolution [heh] in Soviet Computing.
<http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-microsoft-created-a-revolution-in-soviet-computing>
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Roland Dobbins
: Roy Spencer, PhD
Greenpeace RICO investigation and the satellite data trend (4 posts)
From Mike Glyer’s File 770
SITH STATUARY. The BBC profile “The Man Who Turned Lenin Into Darth Vader” tells about Ukranian sculptor Alexander Milov, who got the Odessa city council to allow him to turn a Lenin statue they were threatening to melt down into a Darth Vader statue. It even has free Wi-Fi!
To create his new sculpture, Milov strengthened the original structure and added a helmet and cape made out of titanium alloy – he also inserted a Wi-Fi router in Vader’s head. Despite the statue’s apparent glibness, it serves as a reminder that we can’t control which memories last and which don’t. “I wanted to make a symbol of American pop culture which appears to be more durable than the Soviet ideal.”
Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.
