flipangle

Over the last year, while studying, I noticed there is a marked difference in my ability to concentrate for long periods, without distraction, on study material. When at university,  I can recall completing sessions in excess 90 minutes quite easily. These days I struggle to hit two pomodoro successively without a distraction. And major ones at that.

I have surmised that modern technology and the internet has a part to play. After all, at university I didn’t have a internet connected device in my pocket. I had to walk over to the the computer lab. (We were so jealous of the computer science “nerds” who had connections in their residence rooms.)  In the last few months I have come across a few articles where this was mentioned in passing. Today, purely by chance I happened to see an interview with William Powers at the recent  Melbourne Writer’s festival. And he just made sense. He has authored “Hamlet’s Blackberry” in which he describes the role of technology and how it has changed us. And one item he did mention, was this new inability to maintain a sufficient attention span.

As further food for thought he showed this advertismenet from a major Thai telecommunications company. It speaks for itself.

He also related a type of technology sabbath , that he and his family has practiced for 4 years already, whereby the family turns off their modem for the weekend on a friday evening. I wonder how I would cope

Both the full interview and a highlights packgee can be found here: ABC’s “Big Ideas”

My ageing macbook didn’t quite like the upgrade to Lion. Addittionally, the fact that rosetta is no longer supported is rather crucial when you have a soecific piece of hardware that uses custom PowerPc software to run. Yes it may be old but, in my case that would require replacement of a specific niche bit of hardware, not a no cheap alternative.

As long as you have a Snow leopard boot DVD and a time machine backup of your mac pre Lion installation, its actually quite easy.

On would assume you made a time machine backup just before upgrading to Lion?

Place the boot disc into the drive, restart and Press “C” during bootup to get the DVD to be the boot drive. Afterbooting up, before confirming a clean SL install it will prompt you for a restore from a time machine backup. Follow the instructions by reaching for the utilities tab in the menu’s.

After ensuring the time machine drive is connected you will be offered multiple restoration points. Luckily the version number of the OS is indicated. So choosing the last 10.6 version would have you selecting a snow leopard restore.

A few clicks further and a serious bit of a wait, and its all done.

She’s running much smoother again and I have my legacy apps.

With the Mendeley desktop installed you will find that an attempt to install the citation plugin for OpenOffice on your copy of LibreOffice will fail through the usual route of Tools>Install OpenOffice plugin. The prompted “manual” install alternative does not work either.

The way to get this to work in LibreOffice is to open the appropriate Mendeley supplied *.oxt (plugin file) with Libreoffice.

On Mac this would be right click Mendeley Desktop in Applications>Show package contents>Contents>Resources>OpenOfficePlugin> Mendeley*.oxt file. Right click>open with>LibreOffice.

Basically its a manual install of the plugin .oxt file by LibreOffice. Too easy.

Thanks to tkeitt ‘s post on http://feedback.mendeley.com/forums/4941-mendeley-feedback/suggestions/1226271-plugin-for-libre-office

Me doing a security type post, here’s a first…Some of you will repost this, others won’t. No scaremongering here. Realistically, not enabling https access may not affect you at all, but if you use an unencrypted wi-fi access for FB, then you definitely should be. (Does anyone still have a non WPA2 encrypted home wi-fi network? I so so hope not!)

I am not going to get technical. Lets just say that gmail implemented it as default a few months back. I remember Charl B pointing out this issue with regards to gmail nearly 16 months ago and the opt in solution . Then they made it default a few months later.  Most gmail users probably never even noticed the change. It made no difference to the performance.

On facebook its still opt in however, not default, a year later!

https is the encrypted protocol that banks use for communication when you do your banking. You know, “the lock” at the bottom of your browser?
Firesheep is an add-on that runs in firefox that allows someone on the same unencrypted wi-fi network as you to basically log in as you to sites that don’t use https for the whole session. Before this, “sidejacking” was a bit more difficult.

Aston Kutcher, while at TED (TED is awesomeness!) must have used unencrypted wi-fi without https on his twitter and got firesheeped.
more background here:
Someone in DC cares about online security

It makes sense to turn it on. If it gives you hassles, turn it off. If you use unencrypted wifi bear with it!

in FB goto
Account>account settings>Account security and click Secure browsing (https)
Simple!

If you use firefox and facebook, you may notice (or may not actually) that the navigation buttons and added functionality options by way of “buttons” dont show up. These are the Nav buttons next to the facebook logo for Friend requests, messages and notifications. Then the button for settings on posts on your wall and even the forward and back buttons for the photos.

To get these back, while you have  facebook up, just

1. Right click screen
2. go to “view page info”
3. select “media” tab
4. uncheck “block images from static.ak.fbcdn.net”

(Source: A helpful post in the FB forums from M.Delhie)

A mouse is connected and I am not using the built in track pad on my macbook. Occasionally while typing I inadvertently touch the trackpad, the cursor moves to some random spot in my typing without me noticing and the new input is somewhere between everything else.

Going to the Trackpad tab in System Preferences has the Ignore accidental trackpad input box checked, but makes no difference for me.

The answer is to go to Mouse and track pad under Universal Access in System preferences. Click Ignore built in track pad when mouse is present.

It would be better if the previous solution actually worked as advertised (am I missing something here?) But this solution is the best I have found.

Sorted!

I found this very elegant trick from user ryanker over on macosx.com http://bit.ly/9MjfWN:

If you have your inbox open and wish to select all the emails listed on the page for an action (like delete), you may find that the option of clicking the first , while holding down shift and clicking the last email in a range, to select all intervening entries, will not work if you are using firefox/chrome on a mac.

If the ability to consecutively select is not available, no matter what combination of OS or browser you are using, just copy

javascript:var f=document.activeElement.childNodes[1].contentDocument;var c=f.all['MsgID'];var i;for(i=0;i<c.length;i++){c[i].click();}

into the browser address bar and hit enter. This will select all the messages. Then hit delete/move, whatever.

I was tying to clean out a few hundred emails spanning a year and clicking each one individually was not going to be the answer, till I found this.

Old school, very elegant.

So you have noticed that flash is not working on your new Firefox 4 beta install.

You have checked that the plugin is in place and you even updated it, but still no dice.

The answer is that you need to run FireFox in 32 bit mode and forego all the advantages of 64 bit.

To do this, close FireFox. Left click on the Firefox icon in the applications folder via Finder while simultaneously holding down <control>. Hit “get info” and tick the box “Open in 32-bit mode” Close that up and relaunch. It should work.

As for reasons why this is so…its a long story that you’ll need to google.

Not exactly possible. SATA2 drives, though apparently back compatible to SATA1 (1.5Gb/s), don’t always automatically default back on this m/board.

Look up your HDD manufacturers site and find the jumper setting to revert it to SATA1. My drive has a drawing on the drive cover

Ensure Onboard SATA is *enabled* in the BIOS.

The MB will then recognise the SATA drive. I just could not make this drive bootable.  So currently booting from the IDE drive.

Firstly, within the case,  make sure you have connected  S/PDIF OUT on the motherboard to the S/PDIF pins on the graphics card with the (provided) lead. The HDMI port needs to get its sound from somewhere.

Then, Control panel>Sound. Look throught the devices and right click the S/PDIF device and change to default. Save these settings and reboot. That should work. If it does not, goto the same S/PDIF device in control panel and with a right click/properties there is a tab for supported codecs. Untick all and leave only the Microsoft WMA Pro Audio option.

The app that did not want to play sound (in my case: Media Centre) needs to be restarted for the settings to work, which I achieve with a reboot.

Good luck.