I remember, way back in 1982/83, when math was boring to me (I finished our assignments rather quickly), and my 3rd grade teacher, Mrs. Luther, was searching for something to keep me busy. She handed me a book on BASIC programming to use on the Commodore PET computers we had in the media center. I think we had the models 4016 and 4032.

A few weeks before this, or maybe the year prior, we were introduced to the PET computers and turtle tracks. Turtle tracks was a simple LOGO-L-based programming language. It taught us logic and directions at a very early age.

I remember using it in this fashion:

FORWARD 100
LEFT 90
FORWARD 100
LEFT 90
FORWARD 100
LEFT 90
FORWARD 100
LEFT 90

Not only did we have a VERY EARLY lesson on programming in the 2nd or 3rd grade (and onwards), but computers were in a pioneering state and a fairly decent part of our education, for those times. We had exposure about once a week, and this raised interest in some households. I wouldn’t say a large percentage of homes had computers in 1982 or 1983, but I’d make a guess that about 15-20% of the homes had one. Those who had them were relegated to playing games on them, and a small percentage of them were using them to do things like “socially network” on bulletin board systems.

If you go back in time and investigate what these systems were, you could easily determine they were VERY EARLY social networks. Online services like CompuServe, Prodigy, and AOL expanded on the BBS, and became the definite precursor to social networks of today, like: MySpace, Facebook, and Orkut.

Let’s wrap this up. I’m a proponent of making computer science, even elementary programming (coding) education mandatory. It will teach our youth, our leaders of tomorrow, our future champions of industry, that computers aren’t meant for just hanging out on Facebook, Google+, and playing games. It could actually help to bridge the gap between playing and using a computer.

Should Kids Learn to Code was the original article that led me to Andy Young’s article.

To do it, you go to your notifications page and click the “x” all the way to the right of the notification. From there you edit that app’s settings (even though you don’t even have that app) and choose “Never” for how it notifies you.

Here is the two step process on how to do this:

All it took was a 93ms search and the result was Insync! Not only is Insync the solution I was looking for: A desktop folder that is synced with Google Docs, but it can do this with multiple Google Accounts!

Taken from their site, here is some info about Insync:

Why should I use Insync over Dropbox?

1. Way cheaper storage — Google charges $0.25 per GB/year and Dropbox charges $2.00 per GB/year. That’s 8x difference. Plus you can get 20GB for $5/year.
2. Extensive sharing features…
   • read/write + read-only sharing permissions
   • nested sharing
   • share recipients are not charged against their storage quota
   • re-sharing permissions
   • individual file sharing
3. Multiple Google account support (personal, work, school, org, etc.)
4. You can use Google Docs web to edit docs online

Insync is 100% free. How do you make money?

We plan on making money via premium features. Example: secure remote wipe of local GDocs.

What does “Perform these operations when I’m not using the application” mean?

It just means that if you are offline, Insync still has access to your GDocs to perform operations. It doesn’t mean Insync has forever access. By the way, you can revoke access to Insync at any time using your Google accounts page.

Why does Insync need access to my Google contacts?

We use your contacts to faciliate auto-completion when you are sharing.

What’s Insync’s favorite song?

That’s a no brainer.

First attempt at opening one of my MKV folders was a success. Let’s hope this persists. Thanks NirSoft!

Vic-20

I had this computer in the 3rd grade, for about a month. We got sick of it quickly and got a Commodore 64 instead.

Commodore 64

This computer was the base of my entire existence, damn-near, from 1983 – 1986 or 1987, when I got the Amiga 500. I got the Amiga in 7th grade or 8th grade. I know it was at least 7th grade, as it came out in 1987, which ended 7th grade for me. I remember selling people in Jr. High Commodore 64 games, so I must have still had the C64 at least in 7th grade. Anyway, I had my own phone line when I was 9 or 10 years old and ran the Snakepit/Snakepyt BBS and went by the handle Diamond Back. I had the grandest time during this pioneering era of home computing. I repeat, GRAND and PIONEERING at the same time.

Commodore Amiga 500

Can we say “game changer” here? Amazing computer. Amazing possibilities. True multitasking operating system. Separate chips for Audio, Video, and I think memory controlling. Even swapped out the Motorola 68000 for a 68010 for a slight bump in performance. I remember buying the Commodore A590 hard drive for this thing. About $1000 and came with a 52MB Quantum SCSI hard drive. I can’t believe I spent this kind of money. I also spent about $500 on a US Robotics Couriest HST modem that got around 14000 baud when connected to another Courier HST modem. Man, those were the days. I could go on and on about this. The people I hung out with. The activities I thought about doing, day in, and day out.

Luckily for me, there was an exact post/article that led me to a fix. Thanks pyrocam.com!

I did run into a few hangups while running through the registration batch file, having to kill regsvr32.exe a few times, but who cares. I can now go back into explorer.exe and right-click Computer.

Specification

* output power: 150mW into 16 Ohm, 16mW into 300 Ohm

* SNR: >95dBA

* Distortion: <0.0009% (10mW)

* Frequency response:10Hz~100KHz

* USB power supply port:DC 5V/500mA

* Power supply mode :Built-in rechargeable lithium battery.

* Size:41mmx40.2mmx9mm

* Weight:16g

After listening to them for a few hours with low volume (25% or less through the PC) through my cheapo Dell desk speakers, I wasn’t SUPER impressed. I think you need to turn up the volume to 50% or higher to really get a good idea of how the E6 performs. I then switched to the Sennheisers and pumped up the volume to 50% (I’m using Spotify as my music player and listening to some Armin Van Buuren State of Trance 500 album). Cycling through the 4 EQ settings, I’m able to:

1. Hear the difference between them all and
2. Truly benefit from 3 of the 4 settings: Neutral (still amps the signal), +3dB, +6dB, and -3dB.

I’ve never heard my Sennheisers sound this full of life before.

All in all, I think this was a great $24.99 spent at Amazon.com and I’d highly recommend this to anyone who has felt they could tweak their headphone listening a bit.

For a more in-depth review, you can read this one at headfonics.com or this one at anythingbutipod.com.

Specification

* output power: 150mW into 16 Ohm, 16mW into 300 Ohm

* SNR: >95dBA

* Distortion: <0.0009% (10mW)

* Frequency response:10Hz~100KHz

* USB power supply port:DC 5V/500mA

* Power supply mode :Built-in rechargeable lithium battery.

* Size:41mmx40.2mmx9mm

* Weight:16g

After listening to them for a few hours with low volume (25% or less through the PC) through my cheapo Dell desk speakers, I wasn’t SUPER impressed. I think you need to turn up the volume to 50% or higher to really get a good idea of how the E6 performs. I then switched to the Sennheisers and pumped up the volume to 50% (I’m using Spotify as my music player and listening to some Armin Van Buuren State of Trance 500 album). Cycling through the 4 EQ settings, I’m able to:

1. Hear the difference between them all and
2. Truly benefit from 3 of the 4 settings: Neutral (still amps the signal), +3dB, +6dB, and -3dB.

I’ve never heard my Sennheisers sound this full of life before.

All in all, I think this was a great $24.99 spent at Amazon.com and I’d highly recommend this to anyone who has felt they could tweak their headphone listening a bit.

For a more in-depth review, you can read this one at headfonics.com or this one at anythingbutipod.com.

I restored the 4S from the backup taken at 835am.

Later in the day, I noticed my Camera Roll was empty (well, it had 4 photos I took with the new phone to test the camera’s optics). NOTE: I DO NOT have iTunes set to sync my photos on the phone with anything on my computer. I just grab photos from my iPhone from time to time with either Windows’ native importer (into Live Photo Gallery) or Picasa or even Lightroom.

I tried to restore my phone again from the iPhone 4 backup, but it didn’t exist. I thought I’d try to make a backup of my 4S, just to see if it would end up showing all backups. iTunes only showed my iPhone 4S’ backup.

I started looking through my phone and noticed that its last iCloud backup was about 1.8GB in size. When I showed its details, I noticed that it had 1.5GB of photos. Crazy!!?!?!?!? I did a little more digging and found out where iTunes stores its backup files (for Windows Vista/7) here: C:\Users\_______\AppData\Roaming\Apple Computer\MobileSync. There were 8400 files here, none with an extension.

I copied all of those files to a new folder and appended .jpg to their filenames. What this did was show me which of these were photos. Take note: There will be JPG files here from your phone’s app and browser cache, but you can have Windows (or a 3rd party app like Picasa) display the photos sorted by their dimension. This way, you can see the photos you took with the phone’s camera which are something like 2592×1936 (taken on an iPhone 4) in resolution. Icons from apps and the web will be smaller, like 320×240, and similarly small in resolution.

The files will look like this. The highlighted file, when copied to a new folder and adding the .jpg at the end, does in fact show up as a photo!

So, at this point, my photos have been saved, but they are not back on my camera, not in their own folder/album, and not in my camera roll, where I really want them to be.

In my digging, I also found iPhone Backup Extractor. This is a clever piece of software that goes into your iOS device’s backup on your computer and lets you extract out specific items, like photos, for example. I AM NOT ENDORSING THIS. I only tried the unregistered version, which would only pull out 2 items per extract. Since I was able to manually get to my photos, I ended up not buying this app. It does look VERY useful and helpful though. Something to consider having in my IT toolbox (yep, I’m that guy…the one who helps their family and friends).

And my first work on a Mac was for the Michigan Tech Lode, their weekly paper. Was a PowerMac and used QuarkXpress. Loved it.