Contriving

Fix pen not working on waking from sleep on a TC4200 running Vista

Ok, so this isn’t really a fix.  It’s more of a work around.  First of all you need to obtain devcon.exe.  This is basically a command-line Device Manager provided by MS.

Drop devcon in c:\Windows\System32.  I chose this directoy only because it’s in the path.

Create a batch file with the following commands in it:

devcon disable ACPI\WACF006
devcon enable ACPI\WACF006
exit

Use Task Scheduler to create a new scheduled task.  The trigger for this task should be set as in the following screenshot.

The set the “Action” to start the batch file created above.

Now, when your tablet is woken from sleep it will run the batch file which disables and then re-enables the Wacom driver.  This takes probably 15 seconds so you still can’t use your pen immediately, but it’s much better than having to open the tablet so you can use the keyboard.

Precision Computing – Getting Started with PowerShell

Want to learn PowerShell (formerly codenamed Monad)? Go here and commence the learning. 

No One Cares About HD?

Despite Scoble’s love of HD, I see the reality as being a bit closer to this survey that Gizmodo reports on.

While most people I know really like it when they see HD on their new HDTV set, it’s just too complicated to figure out how to get HD programming, and often they don’t even realize they are watching standard def!

I don’t know how many people I’ve seen buying HD sets without knowing what they were doing.  A plasma or LCD set is just cool to have.  A status symbol. 

I recently found out that my wife’s boss bought some plasma screen TV awhile back because they’re cool basically.  He’s been watching standard def on it because he had no idea that he had to subscribe to HD programming from his satellite provider.

Currently, HD is too complicated for most people.

Why I Dumped Digg

Sensational Fanboyism

So many stories that make the front page are based on platform zealotry.  Or stories that have just a tenuous link to Apple, Microsoft, Linux, or politics soon descend into a fanboy fight in the comments.

Old News

I find a well crafted list of blog and news subscriptions gets you cutting-edge news in a more timely manner with much less noise.

Too Slow

Digg, the actual site itself, is so slow.  It takes much longer to load than Google Reader or many other news sites.  While catching up on my feeds I’ll normally open up links I want to look at further in background tabs.  Invariably, Digg links are still loading long after most of the other tabs have finished.

Drama Queens

I don’t care about all the Digg drama.  “OMG TOP USER QUIGGLES HAS BEEN BANNED!!!1111!!!!!oneoneone!!”,  “NETSCAPE DIGG CLONE SHUTDOWN”, “I GET PAID TO DIGG!”.  There is way too much news about Digg on Digg in the form of both stories and comments.  Attention diggers, no one in the real world cares.

300

Fantastic.

Fast and lightweight software. Who needs it?

Over on Techcrunch they have this Bram Cohen quote:

“Moving forward behind the scenes, we will continue to develop µTorrent and will be using the codebase in other applications, especially ones where a fast, lightweight implementation is more suitable, such as embedded systems on TVs, cell phones, and other non-PC platforms.”

 When are fast lightweight implementations like uTorrent not suitable?

Link to Techcrunch » Blog Archive » BitTorrent to Acquire µTorrent

YouTube – Building Stonehenge – This Man can Move Anything

Pretty amazing to see what one man can do with some ingenuity. 

Newsweek looks at anti-senescence

 Newsweek looks at recent research on anti-aging drugs.  It’s actually fairly exciting to think about.  I’ve been interested in the field after reading Kurzweil’s The Singularity is Near.  Also of interest on the subject is the work of Aubrey de Gray.

Link to Can We Slow Aging? – Newsweek: International Editions – MSNBC.com

Windows Live Writer (Beta)

Microsoft has released a new product into called Windows Live Writer.  It’s sole purpose it rich editing and composing of blog posts.  As this is my first use of it I can’t tell you how good it really is, but so far it seems completely excellent.

For example, right from the Writer you can insert pictures into the post:

Also of interest you can insert maps right into a blog post:

St. Louis is about 60 miles from me

(Yes, I know I haven’t posted in a long time…Sooooo busy)

SMT5600 crashes while syncing via WMP10

Argh.  While syncing my music to my SMT5600 the phone crashes after just a few songs are transferred.  The phone will not respond to any button presses.  The only way to recover from this state of affairs is to remove the battery.

WMP10 just shows that whichever song it was copying when the phone crashed is xx% done without reporting any errors.

My search skills have failed me because I am unable to find anyone else suffering from the same issue!