Tech for Authors
Immature technology
The NVidia card I bought to render my fractals with CUDA technology works amazingly fast. An average fractal which previously took 2 hours to render now can take 15 minutes.
Theoretically.
Unfortunately this is immature technology, and so the CUDA renderers are so buggy that more often than not I’ll get a picture full of fuzzy blobs. That would be great if the fractal was supposed to be full of fuzzy blobs, but unfortunately it’s supposed to be dragons or Rorschach-esque bilateral figures or leaves or some such.
Just having the card, though, speeds up a render significantly. Instead of two and a half hours, sometimes I only have to wait one and a half hours. That’s still a thousand-word wait time, so stories and fractals are still coexisting nicely.
The Bloom Box
On 60 minutes this evening, the Bloom Box was introduced. Definitely something to keep an eye on.
http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/dec2009/gb2009127_746740.htm
The Bloom Box. Martian energy
The Bloom Box. Martian energy will fuel your neighborhood. http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/dec2009/gb2009127_746740.htm
GnuCash–Open Source Money Management
I’m using the open-source GnuCash to work on my accounting and taxes. Here comes the acid test–tax time. I’ll keep you posted.
KeePass Auto-Type
For those of you who have dived into KeePass, make sure you check out the Auto-Type feature.
Select your entry by clicking once.
Click on the login page URL you put in for that entry. Your browser will open the login page.
Right-click the KeePass entry, then select the red pingpong ball labeled “Perform Auto-Type”.
It should auto type the name and password for that page, and log you in.
This feature alone has enabled me to keep up with all the social networking obligations I need to track lately. Ah, Web Presence…
Now using KeePass passwords!
Now using KeePass passwords!
Make Your Own Parasite
Make Your Own Parasite…er, I mean, Run Your Computer from a USB Thumb Drive
Also known as Fedora on a Stick
Depending on why your computer crashed, you may be able to get to your data by booting from a thumb drive. Yes, that’s right–stick a thumb drive in, turn the computer on, and even if your operating system is corrupted, you may still see it when it boots up. Even if you had been running Windows, you may still be saved. You may even be able to connect to the Internet, and run the word processor already loaded onto the parasite…er, thumb drive.
It’s worth trying, right?
Here’s what you do:
Go here and download the free program Fedora Live USB Creator. Install it on your computer– hopefully it hasn’t crashed yet–and follow the directions.
If you allocate persistent storage, you can save your own data to the thumb drive, so after you turn off the host computer, your data will still be on the parasite…er, the thumb drive, that you take away with you.
You may have to go into the CMOS and tell the host computer to try to boot first from the USB before it tries the CD or hard drive, so this technique is a bit advanced. It’s well worth learning, though, especially since your friends will then interrupt you and not me when their computers crash.
Find more information at Lifehacker.
Fractals