Posts

It’s a constant battle to be able to receive my Defense Enterprise Email on linux. (Heck, it’s not that far off on Windows, either.) I had it working, then it stopped, and militarycac.com came to the rescue. It turns out that you need to renegotiate the SSL session while authenticating, which is a security hole. https://militarycac.com/firefox.htm had the right info for me: You’ll need to enable SSL renegotiation, do this by pointing your browser to about:config. After confirming that you know what you are doing, you need to start typing in: ...

Sometimes the small things are the most helpful. I needed to rename a couple dozen jpg files to "...small.jpg". Through the joys of Internet searching, I pretty quickly came to a solution from http://www.howtogeek.com/111859/how-to-batch-rename-files-in-windows-4-ways-to-rename-multiple-files/ using Windows PowerShell. So with a quick: PS > dir | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -replace ".jpg","Small.jpg"} FirstPicture.jpg became FirstPictureSmall.jpg. I hadn’t installed The Gimp yet on this laptop, but I found through a YouTube video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19GbI6oFrW0) that you can use Right Click > Send To > Mail Recipient, and Outlook (assuming it’s installed) will offer to change the size for you.

Brian Enke has another good article, this time on how NASA is treating things around the Mars mission. I’ve never been a fan of the plan to go to an asteroid. Yes, it’s technically difficult, but unless they’re going to figure out how to mine it by going there, just go to Mars or the Moon. The latest twist on the Mars mission is to test out things in Lunar orbit. ...

I just spent a few days in Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station (CMAFS). The exercise was a good one, and the mountain is much drier than it was right after all the heavy rains and floods. And, since it seemed like the right thing to do, I brought my copy of Footfall and re-read the bits where the hard science fiction authors went Inside as US threat team in case the space aliens turned out to be bad guys. (Non-spoiler: they invade.) ...

It’s a small thing, but I’ve found it frustrating that some dialog boxes show my favorites, such as Google Drive and Downloads, and others will not. To boot, most of those “others” are in C:\Users\<mylogin>, but that directory isn’t in the default list. http://www.howtogeek.com/97824/ has a nice HOWTO to edit your registry to change that dialog box. The one thing I missed was that it doesn’t add to the Save As... list, it replaces what’s there.

I’d forgotten I’d tried to set this up once, but I got an update notification today from https://code.google.com/p/google-sites-issues/issues/detail?id=73. The issue is that google sites doesn’t support 301 redirects. How does that effect us? What it means is if you’re porting an existing web site to google sites, you’re about guaranteed to have things break. If anyone’s linked to an index.html page of yours, or default.htm, you’re stuck with a 404 report forever. You can’t even load a blank page with an embedded redirect because google sites changes the document type so your browser won’t read it correctly. ...

It’s just a small thing, but had annoyed me for a while. The “Screen Locker”, from Iguana > Configure Desktop > Display and Monitor > Screen Locker, has a slide show option. Gnome seemed to have dumped this, so I was happy to see it in kde. I’m not big on fancy transitions, anyway, and the random ones here were impossibly slow. Why transition every five seconds to a new picture if it takes 30 seconds to paint a new screen? https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=182104 is the reported bug, and the fix still works. Edit ~/kde4/share/config/kslideshow.kssrc, and add EffectsEnabled=false after the last line.

Seen on the CLUE (Colorado Linux Users and Enthusiasts) mail list: I’d tell you a UDP joke but you might not get it.

I’ve finished updating the Colorado Constitution with Amendment S (State Personnel System), which wraps up the changes approved by the electorate in 2012. You can get the pdf or the LaTeX files. It runs 122 pages, and is best printed dual sided (duplexed). The next step is to figure out how to output in other formats, like text, mobi, and epub. I’m going to give pandoc a try.

It turns out that the entire constitutional change of Amendment 65 (Colorado Congressional Delegation to Support Campaign Finance Limits) is two words. It changes “… encouraging voluntary campaign spending limits …” to “… establishing campaign spending limits …”. This doesn’t match up very well with the ballot title. Ah, that’s because the majority of the changes are in Colorado Revised Statues, not the constitution. I hadn’t realized that a constitutional amendment could change law. Sure, it can force changes in law, but the other was new to me. Of course, the ballot title does start “Shall there be amendments to the Colorado constitution and the Colorado revised statutes …”, so I suppose both could be amended at the same time. I wonder if editing two things at once violates the single ballot rule? ...