Steve Holden's Blog

Thoughts & Tips For June 2018

Photo by kindfolk on Unsplash

Technology

I took one of my Wyze cameras on travel in May to Washington, DC with me to watch over all my gear in my hotel room while I was at out of the room.  It worked out well.  No issues.

I am moving from a Windows 7 HP tablet/laptop to a Windows 10 Dell tablet at work by the end of June.  A lot of stuff to do to make that transition happen.

Thankful For

Mother's Day was great and Memorial day weekend was a lot of fun around our house.  We also had a good time seeing the Star War's Solo movie for Spencer's birthday.  The previous week Spencer and I saw the very funny Deadpool 2 movie.

My favorite band CHVRCHES released their 3rd album "Love Is Dead." If you are a crazy fan like me then please listen to the CHVRCHES Fan Podcast.

Future

June is going to be busy: my 50th Birthday Party, a lot of high school graduation parties with friends' kids graduating, and a possible trip to DC at the end of the month.  Plus I am taking two big courses in June - one on Systems Engineering (late in June) and another on Model Based Systems Engineering (early in June).

I also have three more Vital Smarts' new 1-day Getting Things Done (GTD) classes scheduled for the summer at work -- one in July, one in August, and then one in September.

Tips

I really like these instant coffee packets from South Korea -- Maxim Mocha Gold Mild Coffee Mix.  They are great for travel, camping, and mixing it up from standard coffee. And these sugar free sweeteners are great with sparkling water plus your favorite adult alcohol like vodka -- Jelly Belly Liquid Drink Mix.

Quote I'm Thinking About

"Society has arisen out of the works of peace; the essence of society is peacemaking." - Ludwig von Mises

Can you get a Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M to work with Windows?

The short answer is "Yes."

I was able to get a S510M that is marketed towards to Apple Mac users to work on Windows 7 by loading the latest ScanSnap software for Fujitsu for the S510.  Once loaded and patched to the latest version, hook up via USB to the Windows 7 computer.

When I did this I got an error that no driver was available, but I went to Computer > Manage > System Tools > Device Manager and right mouse clicked on the Unknown device for the scanner. Choose Properties and then the Driver tab.  Click Update Driver ... and then manually select the Fujitsu S510 driver to apply to this device.  You should get a warning message saying it might not work but say OK.

Once that drive was applied to the Device the S510M (with S510 driver) showed up in the Imaging device area and scanning worked without any issues.

An Apple iPad ~2 Month Later Review & Update

Here is a follow-up update to my one week review of the Apple iPad.

Overall, I am still extremely happy with the device.  It has become my primary personal device when I'm at home eliminating my Microsoft Windows 7 TabletPC I was using before the iPad.  I have also travelled with the iPad twice since the initial purchase, and I have found it a great device for reading material (books, PDFs, magazines, saved offline web content, etc) and for consuming videos (podcasts, TV shows, and movies).  Taking the iPad on travel vice the personal TabletPC has also meant that I had over 6 pounds less in my backpack than normal.  This made travel much more enjoyable.

NY Times' BOB TEDESCHI recently did a review on his impression of travelling with the iPad.  The only thing I found different from Bob article is that TSA at both San Diego (SAN) and Washington Dulles (IAD) wanted the iPad in a seperate container to scan vice stored in my backpack.

Things that continue to make this device enjoyable:

• Excellent form-factor, screen, and battery life
• Internal speaker is well suited for casual listening
• Consumption of media when and where I want to is ideal
• Applications customized for the iPad are compelling

The one thing I did have to figure out was how to seemlessly as possible listen to "new" news and video podcasts directly on the iPad without having to do a regular desktop sync.  I tried using Safari and Google Reader to manage the feeds but playing MP3s in Safari has proven to be buggy for me.  Safari would play them for a while but then become unstable and quit, especially for large shows over 15 minutes long.  I then moved those specific news and video podcasts to my desktop iTunes to get the subscriptions loaded on the iPad.  Once loaded you can then play them from the iPod application.  But if you want new podcasts you need to click "Get More Episodes ..." which then launches the iTunes application.  You then need to click on the Free icon for the newer podcast items you want to download directly.  The Free icon then changes to Get Episode which when you click on that icon will download.  You then need to application context switch back to the iPod application to play the new content.  It works but definitely not seamlessly.  But the benefit of using Apple's iPad and iTunes applications on the iPad is that you can listen to content and launch other applications.

The biggest negative continues to be lack of multi-processing. Switching between applications is fast but swapping context is mentally challenging.  Plus, I'd love to be able to run Pandora in the background and then go about whatever else I'd like to do.

 

My top ten most used 3rd-party iPad apps seem to be:

1. TweetDeck (Twitter app)
2. Kindle (eBook reader)
3. iThoughtsHD (MindMap tool)
4. Evernote (online notes and reference library)
5. Toodledo (projects and tasks management)
6. Goodreader (PDF reader)
7. The Weather Channel MAX+ (check the weather)
8. Dropbox (online, multi-computer file storage)
9. Atomic Web (multi-tab browser)
10. QuickVoice (audio recorder)

 

Next on the list is to consider trying out some of the remote access solutions to see how well you can run a Mac or PC from the iPad.  If you have a favorite then please let me know.

Windows 7 Tip - NVIDIA GT 220 driver

My desktop test system for Windows 7 Ultimate is a HP s5150t with a NVIDIA GeForce GT 220 video graphics driver. As I post this tip, the NVIDIA site has the following video driver available (since 8/21/2009):

• 190.62_desktop_win7_winvista_32bit_english_whql

Which I installed a couple of weeks ago. Previously they had the following:

• 186.34_desktop_win7_winvista_32bit_international_whql

I was having periodic problems with the v186.34 version where the video would just stop sending a signal, and I'd have to remote in and restart the computer.  Since putting on v190.62 I haven't had this issue so I think the bug has been fixed.

However, I recently ran Windows Update (I think on Friday morning) and it said there was a new graphics driver available for the NVIDIA GT220. I mistakenly trusted the recommendation and installed it.  It appears to have been the v186.34 version because my video issue shortly re-appeared.  I backed out the buggy update, put v190.62 back on, and everything is stable again.

Hopefully, as Window 7 gets closer to official launch, this type of driver issue will be resolved.  If not, it could be a rocky launch for what has been for me a pretty solid product.