Riley McArdle

Engadget has a sweet video of a 360-degree holographic display. Watch the whole thing, there’s an animated hologram of a man running at the end of the video… definitely the best part.

KiXtart is an easy to use scripting language that is ideal for logon scripts. I use KiXtart for the logon script at Ergotron to map network drives and printers, adjust system settings, remove unwanted programs, install standard software and more. Over the last few years, the script has grown to over 1,800 lines but still runs quickly and is fairly easy to maintain.

Periodically, I’ll post about common logon and administrative tasks that I’ve found KiXtart useful for.

Here’s an example of a simple use of KiXtart to map different network drives for different groups of users.

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; Everyone gets a drive mapped to the "Company Documents" share
USE "X:" "\\SERVER\Company Documents"
 
; Only users in the "Finance" group get a drive mapped to the "Finance" share
IF INGROUP ("Finance")
	USE "Y:" "\\SERVER\Finance"
ENDIF

Rob Rohan has a quick, easy way to allow typing pīnyīn on Windows with tone marks. It only took me a minute to install it and start using it and it works great.

I agree with Michael Arrington… I Want This In Photoshop Immediately:

Update: Turns out Adobe has hired the co-inventor of this technology, Shai Avidan, so maybe this will be in Photoshop someday soon.

I’m back from China and I’m exhausted.  I’ll start posting again once my brain wakes up.

ATA drives that run in PIO mode instead of DMA mode use a lot of CPU any time that data is transferred to or from the drive. This can cause significant performance problems. Common symptoms are slow boot times, erratic or stuttering mouse movement, CD or DVD burning failure, and stuttering while watching DVD movies.

I’ve used this method countless times to re-enable DMA mode on stubborn hard drives and CD-ROM drives:

Getting back to DMA mode in Windows

That post says Windows XP, but the technique is the same for Windows 2000, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista and probably Windows Server 2008.

ChinesePera-kun is another great Firefox extension I found recently. This extension is cool – you can hover your mouse over Chinese characters (both Traditional and Simplified) and it will show you the pinyin pronunciation and the English definition. I’ve been wanting to learn Chinese for a while and I’m starting Chinese language classes in a couple weeks. This extension should help a lot.

A lot of people don’t quite get blogs and this whole “Web 2.0” thing. At Ergotron, we’re trying to start getting into the spirit of Web 2.0 and joining the conversations that are going on out there. It’s been rather slow going, though, trying to help people get to the point where they “get it”. Web 2.0 is such a nebulous concept that it takes quite a while to wrap your head around it and see all the potential that is out there – even for those of us with a technical background.

I think the best way to start learning about Web 2.0, is to just get into it and start reading blogs. Manually reading a bunch of blogs can get extremely tedious though, so you really need to use an aggregator. Finding and using an aggregator can be a pretty big hurdle for some people, so I searched around the net and found a nice, short, 3-minute tutorial on how to use the built in tools in Internet Explorer 7. Even though its not the best aggregator out there, its definitely the easiest to get, since pretty much everyone has IE7 by now anyway.

Here’s the tutorial:

http://timeatlas.com/tutorials/ie7rss.htm

Once you’ve learned how to subscribe to a blog, you’ll need to find some blogs that interest you. An easy way to find blogs is to just search Google. For example, to find blogs related to quilting, just search for “quilting blog”.

http://www.google.com/

You can also try browsing through Technorati Blog Finder:

http://technorati.com/blogs/

Or the EatonWeb Blog Directory:

http://portal.eatonweb.com/

You’re sure to find some blogs that interest you. Once you’ve found some, keep checking your feed list in Internet Explorer. If you see a post that you have an opinion on, post a comment… get into the conversation. This is the heart of blogging and its power… it’s two-way… it’s interactive… you don’t just read, you participate.

Speaking of participation, click the “Comment” link below and join the conversation right here.

Extremely funny and so very, very true…

10 things your IT guy wants you to know

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