June 2011 – Page 2 – My Rantings, Ravings and Thoughts

A tool that has saved me a number of times…

Computers, Software, Web Development No Responses »

Jun 122011

Have you ever been typing in a web form and had it close down unexpectedly, taking a huge blog posting or a forum post or some other long post with it? Of course you have, I have had that happen many times! I use a Firefox plugin called Lazarus, available from http://lazarus.interclue.com/ as well as the firefox addon site. It will save your form information as you type it so if something bad happens and you lose the page you will be able to pull the information back. You can do this a couple of ways , right click on the webpage and select recover form, which brings up a dropdown with the available save points, or you can right click the text box you are filling and select recover text which will give you a dropdown that has all of the text fields you have enterred in that box. Comes in very handy!! I even use it to enter contests, if you have a long form you fill out like everyday then you can just right click it and recover form and it will fill all of the fields on the form except passwords.

They even have a plugin for chrome if you happen to use that browser.

Hopefully that will help someone else out like it did me.

Dell Precision M6400 Windows 7 Fingerprint reader

Computers, Hardware No Responses »

Jun 102011

Ok, here goes, I have been having issues with my laptop locking up, which is for another post, and i finally decided to bite the bullet and do a install of Windows 7 x64 again. I remember last time I did the reinstall I could not get my fingerprint reader installed and while doing research I found many having issue with it, so I figured just give up and let it go. This time I posted on the dell support forum and someone pointed me towards an 0ld post which talked about XP and mentioned the three installs they needed to make it work so I went to the driver download for dell and downloaded:

– DELL_CONTROLPOINT-SECURITYMGR-Manager
– Dell_ControlPoint-Security-Driver pack
– Dell_ControlVault

in whatever version was on the site for my laptop, first I installed the driver pack and rebooted, then installed the control vault (after that I had to manually run the firmware update since windows 7 does not run the bat file correctly….so I ran the ushupgrade.exe app from the firmware directory that was created by the control vault and watched it complete correctly. Then I ran the Security mgr setup and rebooted and low and behold I was able to set fingerprints then after a reboot I was actually able to log in using those fingerprints. Woohoo. Now I do realize that Windows 7 does not see the fingerprint reader well enough to actually use it for passwords for apps that are running, like roboform etc, but at least I do not need to type in my password for windows now. Hopefully that helps some people and hopefully I can figure out how to make it work for apps as well.

Riding is getting easier now…another almost 7 miles logged

Biking, Personal No Responses »

Jun 082011

Well, on 6/7/2011, I rode a few more miles, just about 7 to be exact, and accomplished a couple of achievements, one is the shortest time around the 1.7 mile loop of 6 minutes and 30 seconds (I even had a 6:31 time as well) I also set the fastest average speed for myself of 15.5 mph, granted it is only a 2 mile loop but still that was moving pretty good, I think. I actually felt good on these rides, I felt like I was not done yet and not beat down. I just really need to start stretching out my distances now and start pressing up some larger hills. Later

Another day of riding and distances are increasing

Biking, Personal No Responses »

Jun 062011

Well, on June 2 I rode again, this time pushing myself a bit further than the other days by going 9 miles total. I did not set any speed records for sure since we had winds at around 10-15 mph, and since I ride loops, I will definitely end up riding into the wind at least in one direction, and I am fairly sure there is nothing worse than riding into string head winds, makes you feel like you are standing still almost. I think I am starting to get smarter in my riding though, allowing myself to go slower so I do not kill myself, I have also realized that I need about a mile to get my legs under me, but that first mile is almost torture, just need to figure out how to accomplish that without riding on too big of a hill that will kill me. Back to my 9 mile ride day, I rode the larger loop around where my son has wrestling practice which is about 5.25 miles and has some fair hills, nothing drastic but still helping me on my way to getting better at climbing, only averaged 13.9 mph and completed it in 22.5 minutes. Not nearly as good as my 21.5 minute time set a week ago, but a lot better than the 30 minutes it took me in April. After that ride I rested a bit and then rode two of the small loops (1.68 mile) taking a nice slow pace of about 13.4 mph, and did them back to back and it was relatively easy. So, I am starting to feel better riding and hopefully it will start to get easier. Until next time, later.

Some more biking under my belt….

Biking, Personal No Responses »

Jun 022011

I want to document my biking so others can see what it is like to take it up and can see they are not alone in the issues they may face and so that hopefully they will not give up too soon. Since my first ride in late April of this year where I was ready to fall over dead, I have logged a total of 20 miles and have made great strides in being able to start to ride longer distances. Now I do realize 20 miles is what many people can do in one ride, but I am following the baby steps approach to biking, don’t get me wrong it is very disappointing and aggravating to sit and watch other bikers zooming all over, able to climb decent size hills and ride long distances, but I am still building myself up for that and only time will tell. Honestly I think I try to ride too fast and that is something to get used to, I can average 13-15 mph over these 5+ mile trips, but hopefully this will help me out in the long run. Hills are still difficult, but getting better, just need to use the right gear. Hopefully, someone will read this and will understand they are not alone in having a hard time starting to ride.

Now to the particulars, since the last time I wrote, 5/24, I have logged 15 miles and have set personal bests on a number of fronts including fastest time around my short 1.8 mile loop of 6:42, fastest average speed over the ride of 16.02 mph, I also cut my time from almost 23 minutes for 3 short loops down to 21 minutes, another best I set is most miles ridden in one day which 7.2 miles, which I am going to try to go over 10 tonight. Keep in mind we have just had the highest temperatures in my area so far for the year, made it to over 95 for a few days with high humidity and I still set these bests. Like I said baby steps, now I need to start to get some proper clothes for riding, baby steps on that as well.

Experiencing random lockups on my laptop with Windows 7

Computers, Hardware, Software No Responses »

Jun 022011

I have been having a problem on my Dell Precision M6400, where Windows 7 was starting to lockup, not where the mouse would stop working but enough of a lockup that any application I could click on was rendered useless with the spinning orb. I ran antivirus scan, a spyware scan, a malware scan, cleaned out my hard drives, defragged the HD, performed a sfc /scannow, even checked my hijackthis, and nothing stood out. This lockup would happen anywhere from 15 minutes to 2-3 hours after a boot, and was getting very hard to find. I went back to another problem I had early on with this laptop, heat, I fired up speedfan, which can be acquired here http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php for free, the temperatures looked weird but not out of the ordinary, or so I thought. That’s when I started to run out of ideas, but I did think it seems to happen when I am looking at something a bit more taxing on my graphics card, so I went to nvidia’s site and grabbed the video drivers for my quadra 2700 FX card, installed them, rebooted and looked at the temperatures again, the GPU temperature dropped almost 20 degrees Celsius and changed the ambient temperature quite a bit as well, and the laptop has been running for 10 or so hours now with no issues of locking up.

Just wanted to throw this out for anyone else that may have troubles.

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