First, make sure sure the file names are in order, say, 01.txt, 02.txt, 03.txt, etc.

Then, go to CMD window, type the following command:

for %f in (*.txt) do type “%f” >> myBigTextFile.txt

The myBigTextFile.txt will contain all the text file in the directory.

S-Term download page

I discovered that I can copy and paste the Chinese characters inside the s-term window, but not from IME or other Windows. I suspect that this program does not accept Unicode Chinese characters, but only GB2312 characters.

Through trial and error, I discovered the solution:

1. Go to Region and Language Options control panel
2. Go to Advanced tab
3. Select Chinese (PRC) See picture below
4. Re-start the computer

Now I can type Chinese and copy & paste any Chinese characters from the system.

–
Putty

A friend pointed out, using putty can avoid this change: putty support Unicode perfectly well. You need to change the default font to a Chinese font, and change the Translation setting to UTF-8 or font encoding.

putty home page

For some reason, the default search of Firefox for Windows is Yahoo, but the Firefox for Macintosh is Google.

To change the default search site,

1. Alt-D to Location Bar
2. Type about:config
3. Search for browser.search.defaultenginename
4. Double Click it
5. Type in Google in the resultant dialog box
6. Restart Firefox

After this, whenever you type Ctrl-K, Google will come up, instead of Yahoo. On my laptop, since the screen real estate is a premium, I usually turn off the Navigation bar, hence the need of Ctrl-K. Otherwise, Ctrl-E can bring the keyboard focus to the search box on the Navigation bar.

Discovered how to disable it in Windows XP:

1. Win-R, type msconfig
2. Click the Startup tab,
3. Find eBook Library Launcher, click it off

Now the program will not jump out to bother me. What a relieve.

Some impressions:

It is very fast. I did not do any benchmark test, but definitely it feels more responsive than my IE8 and Firefox 3.6.6. Browser is now the center piece of my computing, the performance is very important. Nowadays, almost all my documents are on Google and other online services, so called cloud.

However, I do find somethings annoying about Google Chrome:

It reserves Alt-D, Alt-E, and Alt-F for its own usage. Alt-D is to put the keyboard focus to the address bar, Alt-E opens the page icon, Alt-F opens the tools icon, just like version 4.

Whenever I want to search Wikipedia, if I use Firefox, I just enter Alt-F, but with Chrome, I must Alt-Shift-F, quite annoying. Since I use certain shortcuts a lot, one more extra keystroke is too much.

Other than that, Chrome 5 is a very refined, responsive, and robust browser. It is becoming my main browser, like the day in September, 2008.

According to Wikipedia,

SUPER is a closed-source freeware front-end for open-source software video players and encoders provided by the FFmpeg, MEncoder, MPlayer, x264, ffmpeg2theora, musepack, Monkey’s Audio, True Audio, WavPack, libavcodec, and the Theora/Vorbis RealProducer plugIn projects. SUPER provides a graphical user interface to these back-end programs, which are command-line based.

SUPER Wikipedia entry

SUPER Official site

Guides and documents

One caveat: the official site of SUPER is rather confusing and strange, you need to click through a couple of pages before you can download the setup binary file. So read it carefully, otherwise you may click on some other software download pages inadvertently.

Also, it automatically check the updates periodically, if a new version exists, you must download and install it. It may annoy some people.

It came out around 2005, one can think it as a fore-runner of iPad. Basically, it is a handheld computer, running the Maemo operating system, a variant of Debian Linux. It has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth. It has no physical keyboard, although its successors, Nokia 800, and Nokia 810, etc all sports a decent qwerty keyboard.

It does not have the fancy interface of an iPad, but basically doing the same stuff: internet browsing, emailing, and sometimes basic note-taking, although the lack of a keyboard severely restricted its use as a note-taking device. In comparison, Nokia 810 is a much attractive successor.

I used to browse the internet through Wi-Fi on my bed. However, about a year ago, I moved to my current apartment. To my chagrin, I can no longer connect to my wireless router! Sometimes, I can pickup Optimum Wi-Fi outside. Optimum Wi-Fi is a service provided by CableVision, free for its internet service subscribers.

So the problem is not hardware, must be some software issue. In a sleepless night, I discovered it was a known bug specific to Nokia 770, and Nokia pretty much abandoned the product, concentrating on its successors, namely N810 and N900. The status of the bug report is “Won’t Fix”.

Some capable hand discovered a fix:

Nokia 770 Wi-Fi bug & possible work-around

Comment #39 from Xiaopeng Wang 2009-09-16 00:14:13 GMT+3 [reply]
(In reply to comment #38)
I agree if someone can make or port a GUI tool to do this(e.g., report error
and handle dhcp stuff) that would be the best. Here I just list what’s working
on my 770 at home:

OS: os2007HE
installed packages: xterm, gainroot, wireless-tools

step 1: get root access in a xterm
step 2: run these commands in the xterm:
ifconfig wlan0 up
iwconfig wlan0 key (your wep key)
iwconfig wlan0 mode managed
iwconfig wlan0 essid (your ssid)
ifconfig wlan0 (your ip) netmask (your netmask)
route add -net 0.0.0.0 netmask 0.0.0.0 gw (your default gateway)
echo “nameserver (your dns server)” > /etc/resolv.conf
gconftool -s -t string /system/osso/connectivity/IAP/DEFAULT/type DUMMY

In the above commands, replace “(blahblah)” with parameters of your
network(without the ‘(’ and ‘)’).
Then minimo should work fine; when using any built-in applications and the 770
asks you to choose a connection, always choose “DEFAULT” from the list, and
then everything should work fine.
You can also put all the commands in a script to make it easier to run it
again.

The problem is, I have difficulties to install new applications on my Nokia 770, having a problem with the Application Manager, not very different from the following description:

A Discussion on Application Manager

Without the ability to install new applications, I cannot get the root access; without the root access, I cannot attempt the fix mentioned by Mr. Xiaopeng Wang.

I have two choices: re-flash my unit, or live with it, in its current incarnation. Considering its advanced age, I chose the second option. At least I still have my FBReader on it to make it a good eBook reader capable of doing ePub eBooks.

Check the manual, the SD1000 use M-JPEG codec to compress the video data. M-JPEG is a rather inefficient video compression format, it is an intra-frame compression scheme, meaning it will not take account of similarity between frames. As a result, the final image size is huge compared with inter-frame compression schemes, such as MPEG-1, or H.263.

The upside is that intra-frame is easier to edit with non-linear editing tools, but the huge size offset the benefits.

For simply linear editing, the open-sourced VirtualDub is an ideal tool.

VirtualDub

One good thing about VirtualDub is, it can save and re-use processing settings, such as video and audio codec, filters, and other whistles and bells. The performance is good, and it is open source, free.

With MP4 compression codec, VirtualDub can reduce the video file size ten-folds.

It takes some time to learn and master it. Read the manual, and the documentation, as always.

Picasa Web

The other day, the thought came to me that why not try their web service, it should be quite similar to Flickr, Windows Live Photos, or Facebook.

At first, it seemed so. However, when I tried to upload some photos, I realized it only allows me to upload 5 pictures a time, a rather tedious process if one happens to have a bunch to upload. Other services, like Facebook, Flickr, all sport some sort of upload tools to make the uploading really easy inside the browser. But for Picasa Web, one does not have this option. If you are using IE, and you are lucky, you can install the ActiveX upload tool, similar to Windows Live Photo Uploading tool. I mean, if you are lucky, because in my case, the ActiveX control failed to install on my computer.

I further tested my system, it seems it cannot install new ActiveX controls. The existing ones are working fine, such as the Windows Live Photo Uploading tool. When I tried to install the Flash player ActiveX control, it crashed. I managed to manually install the Flash ActiveX control, but I don’t have such an option for Picasa Web Photo Uploading tool.

Maybe that’s a way for Google to persuade you to install the Picasa full application. But I do not really need it, just to test the web interface. My system is already cluttered with millions of applications, enough is enough.

I will stick to Facebook, and Windows Live, for now.

Accesskeys: Unlocking Hidden Navigation

Access Keys Wikipedia entry

Fortunately, both Twitter and Facebook use access keys for easy navigation and accessibility:

Twitter accesskeys:

0: Skip Past Navigation

1: Home

2: Skip to Navigation

3: Jump to the sidebar

h: Home

p: Profile

=: Find People

s: Settings Link

?: Help

l (Letter L): Sign out

u: Text area

>: Direct Message

n: New Result Notification

m: Reply

d: Inbox

i: Inbox

o: Send

f: Favorites

r: Retweets

/: Search

Facebook accesskeys:

1: Home

2: Friend Request

3: Messages

4: Notifications

5: Home

6: Profile

7: Account

Six snow photos taken with my cell phone

A really big snow in the city. Commuting was a mess. Hopefully tomorrow will be better, a better tomorrow, that’s a movie’s title, isn’t it?

Viera Link

The player has YouTube player, Amazon Video player, Google Picasa, but NO Netflix! That’s the biggest issue. I hope sometime later, they will add the functionality through a software update, but it all depends on the business deals between Panasonic and Netflix. In the time being, I just use my computer to watch Netflix, with HDMI and wireless keyboard and trackpad.

Previously, I never paid much attentions to the YouTube account details: Subscriptions, Channels, Playlists, and Favorites. All I need is to use YouTube to find videos and watch right there.

Now after I played with the Panasonic DMP-BD605’s YouTube player, I realized that the best way to enjoy this feature is to populate my favorites and playlists on my computer, then watch the video content on my Blu-ray player. When I log on to my YouTube account with the Blu-ray player, I can directly jump into my playlists, favorites, and subscriptions; it beats searching YouTube video content with the remote control numeric keypad pants off.

Usually, when you type something in the search box of the System Preferences window, the spotlight will highlight the relevant items, so one can easily open the preference with arrow keys and enter key.

However, in my case, I typed something, the whole window darkened, but nothing was highlighted. Very strange. I created a new user, logged on, no such problem, must be my account settings. Logically, I went to the ~/Library folder to have a look.

The first thing I noticed was the whole ~/Library folder is rather big, more than 500 MB. The Caches occupied the lion’s share, more than 400 MB. Searched the internet, many suggested that it can be safely removed. I made a copy, trashed the ~/Library/Caches folder.

Tested, the System Preferences search box is back to normal.

However, with the advent of the very next version, Chrome 2, the accesskey support was unceremoniously broken. It is a big deal for me to use the accesskey attributes, since my customized GTD PHP and other online applications use a ton of them. I cannot image myself using the web apps without keyboard shortcuts. Life is too short for mousing around, also, screens are too big nowadays.

I promptly switched to Firefox. It supported accesskey attributes exquisitely, with the about:config options, one can easily change the default accesskey from Alt-Shift to a more convenient single Alt key.

Last month, the much anticipated Firefox 3.6 came out. It is faster, better looking, and more Chrome look-like. The new tab opens next to the originating tab, similar to Chrome. Persona is just another moniker for Chrome Theme. The accesskey functionality is intact. I like this new version.

In the mean time, Chrome underwent two more incarnations, version 3 and 4. Both restored the accesskey support, but with some variations. With Chrome 3, one can use the accesskey D, E, F, but with Chrome 4, those keys are used by the browser itself.

Normally, I expect the accesskey overrides the default browser keyboard shortcuts, for example, if Alt-A is used by both web page and browser, the browser should honor the web page first. But a lot of browser treats them differently and inconsistently. For example, Alt-D always put focus on the address bar in Internet Explorer, and Chrome, but Firefox honors the web page accesskey first.

In Internet Explorer, Alt-A goes to the favorite menu, but when web page uses accesskey A, it honors the web page first. But Alt-D is a different story. Maybe Alt-D is too important to mess around, since it puts keyboard focus right to the address bar? By the way, in Chrome and Firefox, Ctrl-L does the same in addition to Alt-D.

Anyway, Chrome 4 chose to ignore the Alt-D, E, F in the web pages. Instead, Alt-D goes to the address bar, Alt-E opens the page icon, and Alt-F to opens the tool icon. If the web page happens to contain D, E, F accesskey links, one must use Shift-Alt-D, Shift-Alt-E, and Shift-Alt-F to access them.

For now, Firefox 3.6 is my main browser on Mac OS X and Windows. Consistency is always good.

Cocoa Application:

$ file /Applications/Fetch.app/Contents/MacOS/Fetch
/Applications/Fetch.app/Contents/MacOS/Fetch: Mach-O universal binary with 2 architectures
/Applications/Fetch.app/Contents/MacOS/Fetch (for architecture ppc): Mach-O executable ppc
/Applications/Fetch.app/Contents/MacOS/Fetch (for architecture i386): Mach-O executable i386

Carbon Application:

$ file /Applications/Adobe\ Photoshop\ 7/Adobe\ Photoshop\ 7.0/Contents/MacOS/Adobe\ Photoshop\ 7.0
/Applications/Adobe Photoshop 7/Adobe Photoshop 7.0/Contents/MacOS/Adobe Photoshop 7.0: header for PowerPC PEF executable


Out of curiosity, I took a DVD, trying to insert into the slot. Oops, it seemed there was something already inside, and got stuck. Maybe another disc got stuck? But I was sure that I would never leave a disc inside the drive before shutting down the computer.

First, I tried to open the machine up to have a peek. But before doing anything drastic, I’d better check out what people say online. A Google search led me to Apple’s official support site:

Apple Computers: Troubleshooting the slot load optical disc drive

At first sight, it was not helpful. It asked me to reset my PMU, if not working, then contact Apple support. Not now.

Reset PMU

Checked another discussion forum article, a user reported that he succeeded by power off the machine, and restart, during the restarting, he managed to load the disc successfully.

I tried, but it didn’t work. Then, I reset the PMU according to Apple’s instruction, then restarted the machine. At first, it did not work. However, I heard some noise, as if the drive trying to eject a disc. So, I repeated the PMU resetting and restarting routine, as soon as I heard the drive noise, I pushed a disc into the drive. It worked!

So I suppose that the drive mechanism got stuck for some reason. After resetting the PMU and start, the drive tried to un-stick itself, but cannot without some external push.

Anyway, I am glad my superdrive is back.

For example, the following article on the T9 text input method:

T9: Text on 9 keys

For some reason, the white text on blue background makes the reading very uncomfortable and tedious for me. Fortunately, the good people at Arc90 lab made a very good tool to deal with this problem:

Readability Bookmarklet

As indicated on the page, the easiest way to use this wonderful tool is to drag the button to the bookmark toolbar. Of course, you can also put it in your bookmark menu, invoking its function by pulling down the menu. Why one want to do this? Screen space. On my smallish 12-inch PowerBook, I hide all the toolbars, but I activate the full keyboard access within Tiger OS. So I can easily use the keyboard to invoke the readability bookmarklet function.

Two keyboard commands can relieve the pain:

Cmd-Option-T will remove both the toolbar and sidebar, make a Finder window much smaller. However, when you open a folder inside the Finder window, a new Finder window is opened, instead of opening inside the same Finder window as with the toolbar is present. To avoid the resultant screen clutter, press the option key when opening the new window (Cmd-Option-O). The current parent window will automatically close. To return to the parent window, press Cmd-Up arrow. To return to the parent window and close the current one, Cmd-Option-Up arrow.

Cmd-Option-Ctrl-T to collapse the sidebar only, the toolbar is intact. Opening an inside folder with not open a new Finder window.

Constantly switched between these two OSes, some observations noted here, just in case I need to revisit them.

1. Multiple file properties

With Windows Explorer in Windows XP, the multiple files are selected, use Alt-Enter (Property command) to show the properties, the result property window will show in a single dialog the summary information of all the selected files. With OS X Finder, Cmd-I (Get Info command) will open one info dialog for each file. If you happen to have 100 files selected, Cmd-I will get you mad pretty quick. To show the summary info in a single dialog as in the case of XP, one need to use the Cmd-Ctrl-I (Get Summary Info command).

Actually, it is better to summarize the following three commands in Tiger Finder:

Cmd-I (Get Info command) to show a static info window for the selected file(s). It will display the same information even when a different file is selected in Finder. When multiple files are selected, this command will display one info window for each selected file.

Cmd-Option-I (Show Inspector command) similar to Get Info command, but the info window is a floating window, which dynamically displays the currently selected file info. Choose a different file, the inspector display changes with the selection.

Cmd-Ctrl-I (Get Summary Info command) will display only one dialog, even when multiple files are selected. It will sum up the size of all the selected files.

With XP, Alt-Enter (Property command) is like Cmd-I and Cmd-Ctrl-I combined.

2. Spotlight Comments & XP comments

When showing the Get Info (or Show Inspector) window is open, there is a Spotlight Comments text box. One can tag the selected file, which is very useful for audio and video files, since they usually don’t have text content for the Spotlight to search. Spotlight Comments provide a convenient way to tag the audio and video files.

Although it is not well know, there is a similar text field for XP files:

Select a file, Alt-Enter to open the properties window, click the Summary tab, you will be able to enter the comments for the selected file. You can also display the comments in Windows Explorer Window by select the “comments” when right-click on the column header inside Windows Explorer window.

However, unlike Spotlight in OS X, it is not guaranteed that this filed will be searched in XP. The following link, summarized the difference between OS X and XP very well:

Indexing File Contents & Metadata - XvsXP.com, Mac OS X vs. Windows XP

One problem I experienced with this software is the lack of a convenient way to navigate the photos by using keyboard shortcuts. One must use the navigation buttons to move to the next or previous photo:

Aiming the tiny buttons is not easy, especially when you are using a big screen computer, or on a laptop without an external mouse.

Last week, I looked into the template file for the photo page of Gallery2, made some modifications, so now one can use keyboard to go to the previous and next photo. For example, open the following picture:

A picture in my photo album,

If you use Macintosh:

Firefox browser, Ctrl+> (period key) to go to next photo, Ctrl+< (comma key) to previous photo,

Safari browser, Ctrl+Option+> to next photo, Ctrl+Option+< to previous photo;

Windows computer:

Firefox browser, Alt+Shift+> to next photo, Alt+Shift+< to previous by default, (one can change that to Alt+> and Alt+< by changing the value of ui.key.contentAccess to 4, inside the about:config configuration page)

Internet Explorer, Alt+> or Alt+< followed by the Enter key

Google Chrome, Alt+> or Alt+<, without hitting the Enter key