Acro.net – Technology Rants & Raves by Acroplex®

Today I gave up on an old friend, and surprisingly enough I don’t feel awfully bad about it. But after 18 years, it’s about time to move on to something new.

I had to read that number – “18″ – again; it’s been that long since 1994, when I used Eudora as my email client for the first time, on Windows 3.1 no less. Back then, it was a huge move up from Mail and Pine, both of which I utilized in Unix systems.

And now, Eudora has to go because it can’t cope well with the 50,000+ emails I’ve accumulated over the years; its mailbox crashes often led to data loss which I compensated for with regular back-ups.

Although Eudora has an open source variant, named ‘Penelope‘, it is not supported by Mozilla. The obvious solution: use Mozilla Thunderbird; a stable, often updated, free email client with all the bells and whistles one needs. For the record, I would never touch Microsoft Outlook with a ten foot pole.

Thunderbird is quiet, efficient, fast and offers plenty a method to organize, search and manage my sizable stack of emails. It offers several quality add-ons, themes and plug-ins.

Hopefully, I’ll keep Thunderbird for the next 18 years as well.

By my own admission, I’m not an Apple product fan – but I appreciate Apple’s corporate culture.

As a graphic designer, I’m partial to the Microsoft Windows OS and its range of supported hardware, despite being forced in the past to use employers’ own range of Apple macs, running Adobe software.

But things are going to change, as today’s unveiling of the 3rd generation iPad enticed me enough to say “yes” to the newest of Steve Jobs’s brainchildren.

The new iPad looks awesome, with its 2048 x 1536 retina display, updated software suite, new 5 megapixel camera and 4G connectivity. For someone who either owns an original iPad or none at all, the purchase makes perfect sense.

You won’t see me camping outside an Apple store, however. I will wait as long as it takes for the new iPad to arrive, and perhaps so should you.

There are probably several billion reasons to use a captcha on a form; as many as the amount of spam one is in danger of receiving.

The “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart” works well when the characters are straightforward letters or numbers that must be entered inside an input box to validate its content.

All worked well, until this method was cracked by automated bots that could identify the letters and numbers with extreme accuracy, thus rendering the captcha useless.

The remedy was to twirl, slant, extrude or otherwise stretch letters so that they aren’t recognizable, unless one – presumably human – tries hard to read what the hell is the text to be typed.

But it has gotten ridiculous.

Perhaps it’s just that my analytical perception and vision have gotten worse as I’m aging, or maybe because with each new rollout of such captchas there is an extra degree, an extra amount of distortion to be overcome.

I’ve really had it. (Apparently, I’m not the only one.)

There are alternatives to captchas that seem to display letters as if they came out of the fire, all melted and gooey. This is the one I use on this very blog.

Right on its 4th “birthday”, my primary hard disk hit the digital Purgatory on New Year’s Eve. It also took a secondary drive hostage, as if lightning had hit twice.

I spent several hours wondering why would two admittedly “ripe” Western Digital drives fail on me, then I decided to go get a brand new Barracuda drive and re-install Windows and worry about getting my data back later.

I back up data regularly but not that on my main drive. Getting overly confident is a bad state of mind when it comes down to keeping data safe.

So it happened, and my primary drive made whirring noises, refusing to boot. The other drive showed up as “dynamic” and Windows asked me repeatedly to format it.

Lots of data was at stake at losing, so with Windows Vista back on the new drive, I searched for software to reclaim it. My last resort would be to send the drives off to a data recovery company and risk paying up to $1,000.

It’d be a very costly mistake but thankfully, two pieces of software – one free and one priced at $29.99 saved my digital ass.

First, my primary drive was drilled down by TestDisk, a brilliant piece of software that is “designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting a Partition Table).”

In my case, the drive was clearly dying, judging from the metronome clicking sounds it made. The TestDisk software, however, pulled through like a champ and helped me locate my lost partition and reclaim and copy all 95 Gb of data into safety. All this, for free.

My other drive was salvaged using the Dynamic Disk Converter for $29.95. After running the demo version and confirming that my data was intact, I purchased the full version and in five seconds my drive was once again recognizable by Windows and ready to use. Needless to say, that I copied over all the data to a new drive.

Moral of the story: Back up all your data regularly and don’t rely on the alleged reliability of hardware brands; get a new drive every two years max, as technology improves as well (had no idea most drives now come with 32 Gb cache as a standard!)

I thought I’d start the week with a tribute to Google and its ability to return useful results to meaningful search queries.

Projectors were eliminated from Kodak’s line of products in late 2003, much to the dismay of aging family men and old-school salesmen. For only $65 I managed to get one such projector on Craigslist; the price even justified driving to Daytona Beach to get it.

When faced with a situation where the newly acquired but rather aged (16 years old) Kodak projector kept firing up slides non-stop, I had no recourse but look online for help.

Googling the model number didn’t help much; the results involved an endless line of eBay auctions and such.

Then I searched for “Kodak Carousel 4400 keeps moving slides” and sure enough I found a meaningful result in the form of an online resource of problem-posting and problem-solving.

The Fixya.com web page contained even a schematic diagram of how to fix the problem; after taking apart the projector and pondering about the complexity of hardware made in the US, it took me just 5 minutes to fix the problem.

As it happens in those cases, it took me 30 minutes to put the projector back together but that’s a totally different story.

Thanks Google. You nailed it this time.