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I think now understand how to configure Microsoft's products in such a way that they appeal to me intuitively.

Now, in the world of user interfaces, "intuitively" simply means that applications do what you're used to. In that sense, I suppose the only intuitively correct behavior among Microsoft applications would be frequent crashes, mangling of your documents, incorrect calculations in your spreadsheets, file conversion problems after service upgrades, intelligent help systems provided your IQ matches your room temperature, and so on. I suppose that in that sense I don't have to change anything.

However, I'm a Linux user at home, and while Linux applications often have their shortcomings that can often be traced to a nerdish lack of attention to the fact that non-programmers might use the applications as well, at least they rarely do something that appeals only to complete idiots. Except when they take a well throught through Linux distribution such as Ubuntu and decide to create a "Christian edition" of it, of course, but the Linux community has its share of dolts, too.

I want applications to not do my thinking for me based on others' heuristics. If my applications must do something anticipatory, at least they should seed their heuristic algorithms with my particular behavior, which I find just a little more intelligent than that of the broad market average Microsoft customer: I want my applications to do what I want, not what Mr. Average wants. Microsoft, on the other hand, wants its applications to do what Mr. Average wants, knowing that Mr. Average doesn't really know to begin with.

So there you have it. I basically want the opposite of what John Doe wants, and consequently what Microsoft wants him to want. This provides me with a perfect recipe for configuring my Microsoft products at work where unfortunately I have little choice in terms of my applications use.

The key is to invert all preselected options.

For example, when MSN Messenger recently proposed that I "learn more," that is, that I upgrade to the next, less insecure version, if presents me with installation options enabling MSN as a start page in Internet Explorer, and offers to harvest use data to use at Microsoft's discretion (not that I doubt it does anyway, but at least it gives you some artificial sense of the existence of company ethics). So I inverted these selections.

Next, MSN Messenger offered to install a blog writer, a mail access feature, one more toolbar, or an image gallery, which had all been selected for me. I might want some security features to be installed, but keeping its coding tradition, Microsoft had deselected that option. I inverted the selections once again.

Similarly, I've learned that any installation of a Microsoft product should involve a visit to the tab in the options window that was once named "Advanced" to practically invert all of the selections. The tabs have been ordered differently within recent years, distributing the options contributing to automated intelligence among multiple pages, making the task a little more cumbersome. It is still somewhat straight-forward to make the Microsoft products behave somewhat less stupidly than at their default configuration.

In Microsoft Word, look for anything that seems automated in the Options window. So for example, "Mail as attachment" may be safely left checked, because it does not seem like an unexpected, pseudo-intelligent move from Word. In contrast, correcting your typos as you type will lead to highly unexpected results, many of which will be undesired with the default dictionary, in particular if you are writing in another language than English. The letter 'i' means "in" or "inside" in my language, and I really don't want those words capitalized in mid-sentence. Oh, now I mention it, perhaps I should tell you that these options are no longer found in the "Options" window, but in the "Autocorrect Options" window. You may need to entertain yourself with a little explaration of the menus which may be found in the strangest of places.

Covering the entire options system of the various Microsoft products is far beyond the scope of any blog, and probably even beyond the scope of any but the most detailed users manual. There is instead a simple rule, which says:

"Invert any option that indicates automated behavior".

Following this rule will increase the chances that your Microsoft product will treat you as a reasonably intelligent being.

It wasn't until I had already gotten my first iPod about a month ago (in black, of course, because if you're anything like me, you know that black isn't a color but an attitude) that I discovered its audio book support. Audio books can be read aloud via the iPod at normal rate or at a slightly reduced or increased rate without changing the speach pitch. The iPod also remembers where I left off in an audio book, resuming from that position the next time I decide to listen to the audio book.

Since we have a number of audio books in tape or CD format for our kids, it only made sense to convert them to audio book format for the iPod to bring along on long rides by car, for example.

The creation of an audio book from existing files isn't straightforward, unfortunately, as the iPod audio book format relies on Apple's proprietary formats.

It took me a while of searching and reading online until I learned how to easily convert a collection of MP3 files into an audio book suitable for an iPod.

First, get the following support software:

• mp3wrap, for combining multiple MP3 files into one,
  
• mplayer, for decoding MP3 files to PCM format, and
  
• faac, for converting audio to the audio book format.

Use your Linux distribution's preferred method for downloading and installing these free (of course!) utilities. On my Ubuntu Feisty 7.04 distribution, aptitude was able to locate, download, and install all three utilities.

You probably have multiple chapters or books in MP3 format from your CD or tape rip of the audiobook. Make sure they're named sequentially, e.g., "chapter001.mp3," "chapter002.mp3," etc. Combine these MP3 files into one single MP3 file using mp3wrap as follows:

mp3wrap outputfilename *.mp3

where outputfilename is the name of the combined MP3 files. You could call it "audiobook," for example.

Next, convert the file to PCM. This requires lots of disk space:

mplayer -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:nowaveheader:fast:file=outputfilename.pcm \
  outputfilename_MP3WRAP.mp3

where outputfilename is the same name as you chose for the mp3wrap utility. I'm using mplayer for the conversion, because several other MP3-to-PCM conversion utilities fail as soon as the PCM file size exceeds two Gigabytes.

When you start mplayer, look for a line in the status output that looks something like this:

AO: [alsa] 44100Hz 2ch s16le (2 bytes per sample)

This output indicates that the audio is output at a sample rate of 44,100 Hz (the sample rate of an audio CD), has two channels (i.e., it's stereo), and that sample in each channel is encoded in 16 bits, or 2 bytes, as "little-endian" (Intel mode).

Assuming that the parameters are 44,100 Hz, two channels, and 16 bits per sample, convert the PCM file to an audio book using faac:

faac -R 44100 -B 16 -C 2 -X -w -q 80 --artist "author" --album "title" \
  --title "title" --track "1" --genre "Spoken Word" --year "year" \
  -o outputfilename.m4b outputfilename.pcm

Again, outputfilename is your audio book filename. You probably want to rename it to reflect the title of the book by now if you didn't already specify that as an output filename. In the above syntax, author, title, and year are the author, the title, and the year of publishing of the book. You can put anything as genre, but "Spoken Word" is probably a good choice.

If the output of mplayer says anything else than 44,100 Hz, 2 ch, and s16le, such as 22050 Hz or 1 ch, then you must modify the appropriate parameters for faac. Instead of specifying "-R 44100," specify "-R 22050" in case the sample rate was 22050 Hz, and "-C 1" in case there was only one channel (1 ch) in the above command line example.

Once faac has finished encoding, which is by far the most time consuming part of the conversion process, you may safely delete outfilename.pcm. You can also delete your MP3 files, but you may want to hold on to the original MP3 files.

Audio books can be purchased and downloaded from a variety of online stores, but you might want to see if you can get one for free first. Check out Librivox, Project Gutenberg, Free Classic Audio Books, or Audiobooks.org for free audio books. These were just some of the suppliers of free audio books that came up on a Google search, so perhaps you'd like to add additional sources of free audio books in the comments?

Our children of three and eight have a computer in their room that our oldest child has had since she was three years old. It's a very popular toy, and they actively seek out educational software. They also seem to stay within safe pages (both in terms of computer security and child safety) on the net.

At the time we gave our daughter her computer we equipped her with a 15" CRT monitor. CRT monitors were still prevalent at that time, and CRT monitors have a unique feature that is required in children's rooms: no matter how much you touch the screen, the marks left by the perpetually dirty child fingers can easily be wiped off, and more importantly, the screen doesn't break.

Put a TFT flatscreen monitor in a child's room and have the child point at the screen a few times, and it will be broken within minutes. Children's way of pointing at a screen is a highly physical interaction with the hardware. And, as any parent will know, children cannot be told not to touch it.

The CRT screen wore out eventually, in part because of the hostile environment of a child's playroom, and in part because it was getting rather old.

This left us in a somewhat awkward situation. Our children needed a new monitor, of course, but flatscreen monitors had replaced CRT monitors in the stores.

I decided to buy an inexpensive 15" flatscreen monitor and harden it a bit with the help of acrylic plastic.

A store specializing in mirrors and windows half a block from where we live was happy to cut a sheet of plexiglas about 1/10" thick in the size of the monitor for a few bucks.

I had thought about fastening the acrylic plastic to the monitor with velcro, double-sided tape, or perhaps super glue but decided that this wouldn't look good.

Instead I drilled four holes in the corners of the acrylic plastic with a #65 drill (.35" or about .9mm) and got hold of some black steel wire with a diameter a little less than that.

I bent the steel wire so that the end of the wire would just grab the acrylic plastic when inserted into the upper hole, and drew the steel wire over the back of the monitor, to the front again, and into the bottom hole of the plexiglas.

The difficult part was to measure the steel wire so it fit very tightly onto the monitor. I had to plug the steel wire into the holes in the plexiglas sheet before I attempted to snap it onto the monitor; it would probably have been impossible to get the steel wires tight enough otherwise.

The monitor doesn't look too great from the behind, but the back end is facing away from the room anyway and isn't seen. On the front, only about 2/10" of the steel wire is seen, and the plexiglas is cut to size of the monitor and looks like it was always there.

The plexiglas was full of dirt from the children's fingers within minutes, proving that this little project had probably both saved the monitor's life and made it possible to use a TFT monitor in a child's room.

Movable Type 4 doesn't come with blogroll support right out of the box unless you're willing to perform a few tricks. You can wait until MT-Blogroll is ported to MT4, but if you desperately need your blogroll right now, there is something else you can do.

The secret is that your default MT4 installation includes the MultiBlog 2.0 plugin, which lets you include contents from another blog in your blog. By creating a new blog and using that for blogroll entries, you can include that blog in your current blog, and voila: you have your blogroll.

Create the Blogroll

Create a new blog named, say, "blogroll". In "blogroll," use an entry for each link, entering your blogroll links as follows:

• Use categories to divide your blogroll into categories.
• Each entry is a blogroll entry, where:
  • The title field is the title of the link.
  • The body is the actual link.
  • The extended body is a piece of non-linking text that appears together with the link.
  • The excerpt is a description of the link appearing when the visitor hovers the mouse over the link.
• Then fill your blogroll with links.

Add Template Content to Your Existing Blog

In your existing blog, add the following section to your template where you want the blogroll to appear; I recommend creating a new widget template. This section includes the following lines of code, which will copy your "blogroll" entries and present them as links ordered by category and title:

<MTOtherBlog include_blogs="3">
<div class="blogroll widget">
<h3 class="widget-header">Blogroll</h3>

<div class="widget-content">
<MTCategories>
<div class="category"><$MTCategoryLabel$></div>

<ul>
<MTEntries sort_by="title" sort_order="ascend">
<li>
<a href="<$MTEntryBody convert_breaks="0"$>"
  <MTIfNonEmpty tag="EntryMore">title="<$MTEntryExcerpt$>"</MTIfNonEmpty>
><$MTEntryTitle$></a>
<MTIfNonEmpty tag="EntryMore">
<span><$MTEntryMore convert_breaks="0"$></span>
</MTIfNonEmpty>
</li>
</MTEntries>
</ul>

</MTCategories>
</div></div>
</MTOtherBlog>

In the above, change include_blogs="3" in line 1 to use the ID of your new "blogroll" blog.

Finally, go to your blog's plugin settings for the Multiblog plugin. Create a new trigger and select the "blogroll" blog, choosing to rebuild indexes when the blog publishes an entry.

You're all set! You can always modify the style sheet template for your blog to fine-tune the appearance of your blogroll.