Byte by Bite

Needs Headline

by Marv Dealy

Since he just turned 80, we’ll start with one from my dad—News of the Past. This website (www.newsofthepast.com) will give a quick overview of what happened on any day, well, at least any day back to January 1, 1880. I entered my birthday and discovered that on that day Deutsche Gramaphone introduced the first 33 rpm LP, Chase and Manhattan began discussions on the largest bank merger in history, and Great Britain and Iran began talks on an oil dispute.

Joe DiMaggio was retiring from baseball on that day, and Willie Mays was joining the Yankees. Gas sold for $.20 a gallon, a new house was about $16,000 and an average wage earner made about $3,500 a year. Nat King Cole was tearing up the charts with Too Young. All this news came, of course, from 1951.

Next, several entries in the Freebie Bank from card-carrying reader number seventeen Jim Tuite. First comes Process Explorer (http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ProcessExplorer.html) which sounds sort of like a Task Manager on steroids. Copyrighted and I presume written by Mark Russinovich, the program can help you figure out which program has a particular file or directory open. Russinovich says this will be useful for “tracking down DLL-version problems or handle leaks, and provide insight into the way Windows and applications work.”

Jim also writes about Sunbird, a new free beta calendar program from the folks at Mozilla, which gives me an opportunity to rant about how I have to teach folks how to keep a work calendar and work log—how can people get past high school these days without being taught how a calendar system works? The kind of calendar I refer to doesn’t hang on the kitchen wall and note friends’ and relatives’ birthdays or list appointments with doctors. I mean a work calendar.

I still don’t use a digital calendar at the office (gasp!) preferring the two-page-per-day paper spiral bound calendars that Day Timers has put out for years. On the left side, I can note the appointments to be kept for a day, and things that must get done. On the right side is plenty of room to make work notes that will be turned into billable hours down the line.

I never have to change batteries in this calendar, I can access any day within a 90-day period quickly (I use the three-month at a glance version) and I can move an appointment or task from one day to another with a pencil and eraser—technology that’s been around for years. My calendar never crashes and loses all entries, either.

On the other hand, I understand that some folks can’t get along without an electronic calendar system, particularly if they’re in the corporate world and are hooked into the system via Microsoft Office products much like folks are hooked up in the Matrix movies.

The calendar Jim calls our attention to is in between the approach I take and those of the corporately-wired individual. Jim found Sunbird in a download suggestion from Kim Komando, the self-proclaimed digital goddess. Komando touts Sunbird saying “a well-kept calendar ensures that you never forget an appointment” to which I say poppycock.

Komando continues “Paper calendars are helpful, but they can be limiting. A few schedule changes can make your calendar a mess of erasures and rewrites. And you must buy a new calendar each year. These drawbacks vanish when you go digital.” (http://www.komando.com/downloads/category.aspx?id=2055)

Perhaps someone needs to show Kim how to use a pencil and eraser to make entries in a paper calendar rather than ink and whiteout.

In any event, Sunbird’s parentage—Mozilla—means that it’s probably worth a good look if you’re interested in a digital calendar. Get on over to Mozilla Calendar page where you’ll find not just Sunbird, but also Lightning, the “integrated calendar” as well as a calendar extension. (http://www.mozilla.org/projects/calendar/)

Mozilla describes Sunbird as “our standalone calendar application” and says it doesn’t offer tight email integration.

Lightning is a calendar addition for Thunderbird, Mozilla’s email program. Features such as email invites or address book integration are planned in the future. These features are, of course, available today in the Microsoft Outlook environments. That environment, however, isn’t free.

Mozilla’s calendar extension is “the old calendar extension for Thunderbird and Firefox” and offers some of Sunbird and Lightning’s features, but lacks the email integration of lightning. It appears that Mozilla won’t let you download this extension anymore, so if you’re using it you might consider updating to one of their newer offerings.

Remember—Mozilla’s stuff is all a Friday Freebie, which means the price is right.

Last, while on the recent road trip, the occasion arose to attempt viewing pictures I’d taken so far on the trip on a screen larger than my laptop. My dad’s suggestion set off a flurry of trying this cord and that, this setting and that until—voilà—we were able to look at the pictures I’d downloaded from a digital camera to the computer on a screen big enough to see from across the room in comfort.

I confess to not having done this before—I think back on several business meetings where we huddled around the screen where this knowledge might have been useful, but then it’s not as easy as it sounds either, as the screen resolution of a “regular” TV is way to low to read the text portions of computer screens. The setup works great, however, for just looking at pictures.

Our problem was compounded in that when I got my Tosiba laptop I didn’t get it with an S-video jack, not believing I’d ever need one. The laptop did, however, have a yellow RCA jack, and we decided to connect that to the yellow RCA jack on the TV. So far, nothing.

I finally found the solution by accessing the properties of the graphics card on the laptop, going to Properties, Advanced, choosing the second monitor, choosing Advanced, Video Adapter Settings, Additional Properties, Device Selection and then choosing TV. Bingo—the desktop I was used to seeing on my second computer monitor was there on the TV screen, much bigger than life.

This was fun—I’d not seen many of the snapshots before (I took over 1700 on the trip) and clicking through them on the TV was easy, although not as easy as it would have been with a new Mac laptop that can include a remote control that would have further facilitated such a picture show.

In any event, this ought to work with your computer as well—I suspect that Macs will do something similar and probably more easily. It’d be nice if one of you Macheads out there who has actually done this would advise the rest of us.

A word of caution—every computer is going to have a different graphics setup, and few will mimic exactly what I describe above. The general idea, however, is to get into the sixth tab on your Display Properties screen. If you don’t have that sixth tab with its advanced settings, I’m not sure how to go about this process—maybe one of the readers out there can help us with this.