BrockLi Soup

A couple weeks ago, I got a new keyboard for my carpal tunnel issues. It’s pretty comfortable to use, now that I’ve started to get the hang of the split style, but it’s also got all these extra buttons: mail, home page, favorites, things like that. I never understood why anyone would want all that extra crap until I started using them - they’re not a waste of desk space after all!

But this particular keyboard includes at its center a much-touted zoom slider. Who the hell needs a zoom slider? Aside from the elderly or others with poor eyesight, I can’t imagine this thing being useful, and I was pretty disappointed to find that the configuration doesn’t allow you to use it for scrolling instead - something everybody could use.

Lucky for me, I found Josh Highland’s post on the matter. He has a link to download a new version of C:\Program Files\Microsoft IntelliType Pro\commands.xml, but I don’t recommend that. I used WinMerge to diff it against my own, and found that some new stuff had been added since he posted that two years ago.

Thankfully, updating the file is a piece of cake.

1. Go to the C:\Program Files\Microsoft IntelliType Pro folder. Copy commands.xml to another location, just in case something goes wrong and you need to restore the original.
2. Open C:\Program Files\Microsoft IntelliType Pro\commands.xml in your editor of choice.
3. Replace every instance of "ZoomOut" with "ScrollUp".
4. Replace every instance of "ZoomIn" with "ScrollDown".
5. I did not replace IllustratorZoomin or IllustratorZoomout. I don’t know if these should be replaced with ScrollUp and ScrollDown or something else, but I don’t use Illustrator anyway. You can try replacing those if you’d like to.
6. Reboot the machine.
7. Make sure that the slider is enabled by opening Keyboard in the Control Panel and enabling the zoom slider (the name doesn’t change there, but that’s OK).

And bingo bango, you’ve got something useful in the middle of your keyboard. As always, I make no guarantees about this process, do it at your own risk, and try not to set anything on fire.

For those of you who were interested, I posted my quick and dirty hack to fix my iTunes playlist woes. It won’t re-create the playlists, but I got the information I wanted.

And yes, I know it can be done in a few lines of Perl, but I know PHP much better than Perl, so this was the quickest (and easiest) way for me to do it.

Know what sucks? Scheduling bill payments on your bank’s site and realizing that it’s going to be another tight week. So, I cancelled my phone bill payment.

I got a landline when I moved in for two reasons: I have an old Series 1 TiVo with a modem, and I didn’t want salespeople and such calling my cell phone. I figured I would get more use out of it than a couple pizza orders and calls from charity muggers, but no such luck. I love TiVo, but it wasn’t worth $46 a month.

I ordered a TurboNet NIC from 9thTee.com, and it came in today. I couldn’t believe how easy it was to install the damn thing - I was done in about half an hour. It would have been 20 minutes, but I put it all back together without reconnecting the power cable (whoops), so I had to pull everything back out.

It was about $75 after shipping - more than the phone bill, but it will pay for itself quick.

I just finished (finally!) updating my TiVo with a 160 GB drive I found at CompUSA for just $30 after rebates. I bought it a couple weeks ago, but got frustrated with it after messing around for a couple hours. You have to take an image from the original drive(s) to get the OS and settings, then write the image to the new drive. I was having problems getting my machine to recognize the two TiVo drives so I could pull the data off.

If you want to do it, the directions are available online, but don’t follow them word for word. I couldn’t get my machine to recognize the drives in the configuration they recommend - most of the commands were different, since the drives weren’t attached where the author’s said they would be. I learned a few things about Linux mounts in the process though, and it all worked out.

We now have a TiVo with lifetime service and 45 hours at best quality - 160 at basic. And BP just bought a big TV a couple weeks ago - what more could a man want?

I don’t know what the hell I was thinking - that totally works. For some reason, I kept thinking that MT template tags wouldn’t work in a PHP file because they wouldn’t get updated. I created two categories just for the side bar: Recently Viewed and Reading. Then I made a new index template that contains everything in the side bar - since index templates are rebuilt when a new post is made (as far as I know, anyway), my side bar file is updated. The CatEntries plugin allows me to filter what categories are displayed. In the side bar, the last 5 posts from Recently Viewed are shown, and the most recent post from Reading. The index page excludes these two categories, but they still appear in monthly, daily, and category archives. It’s a neat way to use MT as a database management system.

Originally, I wanted to avoid a PHP include; I was so hell-bent on performance that I wanted to eliminate any PHP and make all pages static (because, you know, thousands of people are checking to see what I write EACH AND EVERY DAY). Realistically, a single file include isn’t going to affect performance in the slightest. I may add a couple while(1) loops just to be sure, though.