You know I wrote not too long about about the doublemyspeed.com scam sounding radio ads. It really sounds like MyCleanPC.com is a scam in the sense that it promises a lot but doesn’t (or can’t) really deliver the miraculous results that they claim. Part of the idea is that they are a registry cleaner and claim that cleaning the registry will make your computer as good as new. For most people this really isn’t going to make an old slow pc into a brand new speed demon. From that aspect this is a scam. Over promising and under delivering.

Of course I’m not saying that registry cleaners are a bad thing. They can make a marginally noticeable difference. Although if your computer is dramatically slower now than it used to be there are really a lot of other reasons than registry cruft. Windows updates moving you up from Internet Explorer 6 all the way up to version 8 on a system that was marginally spec’d when it was purchased will probably make it slow today. 512MB memory for Windows XP is not enough today even though pre-SP2 is was probably okay for most uses.

You will not see as dramatic an improvement with registry scanning as with a proper memory upgrade (assuming you don’t already have enough memory.) The other concern with registry repair software is that if the registry is corrupted bad things can happen. If the registry is damaged yours system will not boot properly.

That much said there are some free utilities that can serve the same purpose that mycleanpc.com claims to do. I usually steer clear of programs that claim to solve your computer speed and stability problems because they typically never do. The best ways to increase system speed and stability are 1) remove unnecessary software, 2) check that all hardware is in proper working order (bad hard drive can cause slow system responsiveness) 3) upgrade memory if necessary.

Save your money to put towards a new machine if the three above still don’t make enough of a speed difference for you.

First off, you should now that I like to study languages. I have studied Spanish for a good amount of time (and have a site related to learning spanish for beginners). I’ve also studied French and German and a smattering of other languages. In fact, you might even say that my interest in shortwave radio comes from that same fascination with other languages. Anyway, I have a good number of dvds that I’ve used to help in language learning. Since DVD’s support multiple subtitle and language tracks they can be a great way to practice either your (light) reading or listening skills in a language you’re studying. However, up until now I didn’t know of a video file type that supported multiple audio tracks on the pc. I can’t say that I looked too hard, but….

The last week or so, I’ve been playing with handbrake which is a cross platform video converter. It can be used to convert Video from a dvd into a file on your hard drive, or simply move video from one format to another. The default settings for handbrake seem to be very good. (The picture I’ve seen from the default encoding is fantastic.) I’ve been compiling a collection of files to load on the laptop to take with us on an upcoming road trip. We have a 7 year old and 1 year old and (especially for the 1 year old) the 5 or 6 hour drive is looking …. challenging. So, I wanted to get a few videos together to take with us without taking a stack of videos.

So, the defaults for handbrake is to output the video in an mp4 container format, which I hadn’t made use of before, but it appears that mp4 can support multiple audio streams. As I looked into it I found how easy it was to add to your ripping project the extra audio tracks. (On the tab for audio, just click the plus sign and then select the languages in the list below. I assume the first in the list will be the default audio when you playback the file.)

My rip of a scooby doo disc finished overnight and I tested this morning with vlc as my video player. In the Audio menu you can choose the audio track. They are even labeled correctly. Up until now, I have had separate dvd rips for titles that I wanted to watch in either language (waste of space.) Now, it should be possible for me to consolidate those. FANTASTIC!

Yes, I really enjoy trying to learn languages – I’ve even got a squidoo lens about learning new languages. For that matter I’ve even compiled a listing of places you can watch spanish television online. One of the nice things about having the discs available on the computer (or even the live streams) is that you can watch in your chosen language any time. (Now if only region encoding weren’t the obstacle to dvd-language studies that it is.)

This is a bit of a tangent, but I do wish that the production studios would realize the market that their catalog of shows/movies with foreign dubs could have if distributed domestically for language learning. I know most traditional language teachers would frown on this suggesting that you first seek out movies that were originally produced in the target language you’re studying. However, my argument is this: familiarity. For instance, there are movies that I have seen so many times in English that I know every word. Picking up new vocabulary via something that’s already somewhat familiar with in my native language should be relatively easy.

By contrast if I pick up a movie I’ve never heard of, in my target language the challenge is much greater. This doesn’t mean that I’m snubbing the culture of the target language, it just means that I’m not ready to cross that threshold yet. As I’ve studied Spanish I can’t tell you how many hollywood movies I’ve watched with the Spanish language dubbing and really never got into the original Mexican movies, but as my Spanish is better and I’m actually able to understand more, I find myself getting sucked into some of the late night “golden age” of Mexican cinema films.

Windows users know chkdsk, linux users know fsck… users of each MIGHT have heard of SMART. These are different ways of TESTING hard drives. Well, there’s also a utility called TestDisk that looks promising for recovering data… Here’s the clip from their site. “free data recovery software! It was primarily 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). Partition table recovery using TestDisk is really easy.” It runs under a variety of OS’s and recognizes several different disk formats.

In ubuntu/debian linux software installs, there are such things as “metapackages” which is a package that just describes what OTHER packages it “needs”. For instance in ubuntu, the kubuntu-desktop package is just such a package – when choosing it, it installs everything necessary for the kubuntu desktop/customizations to install. So, I was hit with an idea while I was apt-getting 30-40 odd packages…. everytime I “provision” a new ubuntu system I have a list of packages that I want to make sure are installed, why don’t I just create a single metapackage and be done with it to make life simpler…. But how could I do this?

This article has the essentials…. make an empty directory structure….

mkdir -p package/DEBIAN

and create a control file….. *(single text file, named control in the DEBIAN folder)

example from above site…

Package: iandefors-metapackage
Essential: no
Priority: extra
Section: metapackages
Maintainer: Ian Defor
Architecture: i386
Version: 1
Depends: abiword, gnumeric, xchat-gnome
Description: Iandefor’s Metapackage
Iandefor’s preferred packages

Customized of course to your preference….

And then dpkg-deb -b package name.deb

It might be worthwhile to break your metapackages up into a couple of “thought” groups… internet / multimedia /etc… but if you’ve got several systems and want to make sure you quickly and easily install the same software on each this could be a good shortcut for you.

I’ve been looking for a simple windows based web editor to recommend for someone. I use quanta plus on linux and would really have a hard time LEAVING it, but… there’s of course dreamweaver and frontpage… but I’ve also found kompozer which is based on nvu – although I still REALLY wish quanta plus were available for windows. (Of course, if they want the nice toys, maybe they should just think about switching or dual booting…) I’ll leave comments on in case anybody knows of a good windows based, web editor that has some of the similar capabilities of quanta plus.

I don’t know if anonymity is exactly acheived, but…. anyway not too long ago I explored/setup tor on my system to play around with, no real reason I suppose, but doing what I do it pays to be aware of many different kinds of software. Tor proxies web requests from your machine through a tunnel to another machine on the tor network – it could be nearby or far away, but it essentially prevents the destination site from knowing EXACTLY where you’re located and can prevent machines in the middle from logging your access (i.e. your isp, or a wireless access point owner.) The problem is – once it’s setup you have to turn it on by changing the proxy settings in your browser – tedious. Well, in comes torbutton, which is a firefox extension to enable routing through tor with the click of a mouse. (You do have to have it setup beforehand (tor and privoxy work well together for that.)

I’ve just been using miro the last few days and I ought to mention it here. It’s a multiplatform program (windows/ mac/ linux) that let’s you subscribe to video feeds (much like a podcast catcher does for audio.) It also plays video within the player (you can organize your local video clips through it as well.) You can also search/download from youtube/etc. and you can add custom rss feeds such as those from tvrss.net for instance. It’s also bittorrent aware, so it can make use of bittorrent for downloading.

I’ve had a fun time this week dealing with a STRANGE Vista problem on an HP computer (I doubt it’s HP specific, but don’t know for certain.) The error goes like this… “A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer.” “CLFS.sys” “Page_Fault_in_nonpaged_area” “If this is the first time you’ve seen this stop error screen….” And the stop error code looks like this “stop 0×00000050″ The real problem is everything tried leads to the same place.

The last thing the owner described happening was a storm that knocked out the internet connection (but not power) and in attempting to regain the internet connection they rebooted and were welcomed with this blue screen on reboot. (Just after the copyright Microsoft screen with the green scrolling animation.) Startup Repair didn’t solve the problem, starting in the various safe mode options led to the same error. I verified there were NO other hard drives attached to the system and at times pulled all peripherals (including the keyboard and mouse.) Most boot attempts were made with ethernet cable/ps2 mouse/ps2 keyboard/vga monitor/1/8″ speaker, but some boots were attempted with ethernet/mouse/keyboard disconnected which made no difference.

So after a while of trying various attempts to boot or repair or reload the last known good configuration I booted up an XP based livecd and copied the data to a USB key and prepared for the system restore. Well, bios came up pressed f11 to launch the system restore and…. SAME $$!$!$! error. “It’s worse”… call HP (1 month old system…) Somewhere along the line here I pulled one of the two memory sticks and tested with each, no difference. HP basically sold us a recovery cd (thanks HP.)

Well, the recovery cd arrived and !surprise! it booted to the same bluescreen – hello HP again… (I heard an AWFUL lot of “hmm”’s on the other end as I explained the case history and he read the previous notes. It looked as though we were heading for a bench repair on the machine, but he had a suggestion that seemed a little far out… one person complaining of this problem online had it suggested to them that they might have a virus… “well if it’s a virus, then removing the hard drive ought to allow the recovery cd to at least boot (unless it’s a REALLY clever virus)..” Ok – So I pulled the drive and low and behold the recovery cd booted…

New drive arrived and today the recovery cd installed everything to the new drive in ~2 hours.

All in all this was VERY odd… the drive passed ALL S.M.A.R.T. diagnostics that were run on it, it’s filesystem apparently was in good enough shape for a winxp boot cd to be able to browse and copy files from it. But something must have gone sideways that Vista didn’t like.

CLFS is related to Common Logging…

System specs:

HP Pavilion a6000n PC

AMD 64×2 dual core 4200+
1GB memory
250GB Sata drive
multi dvd burner

I’d love to know what had gone sideways and if there had been ANY way to recover (outside of WIPING the disc).

I like the PDF file format for so many reasons – free writer under linux is one of them, usually it’s just configured out of the box – openoffice does a nice export to PDF too. Of course, PDF is accessible on all platforms with free viewers…. there are some pdf writers for windows that are free, among them…. PDF Creator and cutepdf also distributes a free pdf writer. Printing to the virtual pdf printer makes archiving web pages fairly easily done as well.

For years I’ve been using smartmontools on my linux-based machines. What I’ve absolutely LOVED about it is the advance notice I’ve had of hard drive failures. Two consecutive Decembers I received an email from my server claiming that a drive was dying and had time to replace them rescuing the data. (Although the first one was falling to pieces as I copied.) If I had not know until I NOTICED a problem I would have likely lost a good amount of data and had a long rebuild process from various backups.

One of my LONG standing frustrations with Windows is the lack of useful command line tools (including the ability to email from the command interface which, to me, is CRUCIAL when scripting.) But on studying the smartmontools documentation I found reference to blat blat is a simple command line emailer for windows. You install it to the path (Windows\system32 is a good choice), then from the cli can install it to use a default mail server and sending address and then you’re in business. All that’s needed then for your windows boxes to email smartmontools distress calls is to edit the smartd configuration file to do routine tests, add the -m option and address to mail to (you can also have a message box popup too).. Then install and start the smartd service and you’ll hopefully have a bit earlier warning on those hard drive failures.

Sometimes drives fail quickly, but if you can have a 12 hour heads up that might be the difference between a quick and easy drive cloning and a long and tedious rebuild.