Author Archives: Brian Carnell

Directory Opus – The Other Manual

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Since 2004, the first thing I do whenever I get a new computer is install Directory Opus on it. Directory Opus is a file manager replacement that guarantees I never again have to use Microsoft’s atrocious Windows Explorer.

Directory Opus goes well beyond being a simple file manager replacement, however, and is a powerful utility that can be used to save a lot of time in doing common file operations.

The problem is that Directory Opus has so many options and features that it can be overwhelming — this is a program that now comes with a 700+ page manual.

Fortunately another Directory Opus fan has read through that manual and created the “Other Manual” guide to the program.

This is still a fairly long guide — probably longer than most people ever spend thinking about the best way to optimize a file manager — but well worth looking into. There are several configuration options that are explained in the “Other Manual” that I had yet to run across in 9 years of using Directory Opus, so even long time users should give it a look.

Death of Email, Episode VII

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It seems like someone is constantly proclaiming the death of email as in this GigaOm article about IT firm Atos Origin planning to stop using email in its internal operations.

GigaOm writer Miguel Valdes Faura points to things like social networking and tools like Salesforce’s Chatter as things that are gradually replacing email.

Look, here’s the thing — the beauty of (most) email is that it is based on an open protocol, SMTP. I have email I sent and received in the late 1980s that I can still read on an email client that was just released yesterday, thanks to the wide support for SMTP.

I’ve also had the same email address for 16 years even though I’ve changed email hosts 6 or 7 times during that period. During a small part of those 16 years, my email was hosted at another company, but for most of the time I’ve owned the server that my email domain ran on. Today, it is dirt cheap for anyone to grab a domain name and a hosting account that includes a mail server.

Social networking and similar systems are largely the antithesis of prevailing state of affairs with email. I can use my Google+, Twitter, Facebook and other accounts only because those companies have decided to continue to allow me to — and their Terms of Service make it clear they can change their mind at any moment and cut me off for pretty much any reason.

On the other hand, if I get fed up with one of my social networks, there’s little I can do but close my account and leave. Since all of these companies use proprietary standards, I can’t easily move my Twitter account to Facebook, much less even consider moving either account to my own webserver.

I can (and do) get my data out of these systems, with varying degrees of difficulty, but just having static copies of the data doesn’t come close to replicating my account. Moreover, most of these systems seem to be getting less open. Twitter, for example, used to make it obvious where the RSS feed for your tweets was, but now they hide it like they’re ashamed of it (or, more likely, can’t figure out how to monetize it).

Every time I read someone write about relying on social networking or closed systems, I always think of the BBC’s Domesday Project — an early attempt at creating a digital artifact in which more than a million people participated. But, of course, the Domesday Project is famous in part because the BBC chose to use a proprietary technology that quickly became obsolete and almost rendered the entire project unreadable.

Social networking, as it is currently constituted, is one giant Domesday Project just waiting to happen.

How Much Time Should Kids Spend Playing Video Games

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Peter Gray has a nicely contrarian article at Psychology Today weighing in on the debate over how much “screen time” children should have each week. I’ve talked to about a dozen psychiatrists and psychologists about this over the past few years when it comes to my own kids and it is interesting how diverse the opinions were, from one person who didn’t allow his children any screen time, to another who was more “anything goes.”

Gray comes down closer to the latter view,

I have a very high opinion of children’s abilities to make good choices about how to use their free time, as long as they really have choices. Some kids go through long periods of doing what seems like just one thing, and then some adults think there’s something wrong, because they (the adults) would not make that choice. But in my experience, if kids are really free to play and explore in lots of different ways, and they end up playing or exploring in what seems to be just one way, then they are doing that because they are getting something really meaningful out of it.

In my family, both my wife and I play a lot of video games. And what we emphasize to our kids is the importance of balance. Mom plays World of Warcraft, but she doesn’t say, “I’m not going to make dinner or go to work today because I’d rather play video games.” In fact, although we play a lot of video games, we also do a lot of reading, and other activities in our free time.

We’re more project-oriented than time-oriented at our house. Kids get home at 4 p.m. and bedtime is 9 p.m. Each day there are a certain number of tasks that each child is expected to finish, whether that is homework, helping out with dinner, cleaning, etc. Once our children have finished the tasks we expect them to finish that day, they are free to use their free time as they wish. Sometimes that means my 9 year old whips off a three hour session of World of Warcraft or Skyrim. More often it means they tend to mix up their activities, alternating between watching television, playing video games, reading, or other activities such as playing board games or going swimming.

Which is not to say I wouldn’t step in and place limits on my children’s screen time if they failed to live up to their responsibilities. My son knows the laptop in his room is there because he does such a good job of keeping up with all of the things my wife and I expect him to do, and that it can easily be removed or the password changed if he acts inappropriately (something we’ve only had to do a handful of times).

TapLog for Android

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TapLog is customizable logging application for Android that makes it easy for the user to log whatever it is they want to log.

First, you decided what you want to log. I track sleep and wake times, food, daily weight, television and reading habits and a few other things. TapLog then makes it easy to set up buttons that will quickly create a time stamped log of the event/item you’re tracking. For example, here’s the sample logging screen from the Android Market (love the rabbit sighting option):

Click the button and it creates a time stamped log. TapLog also lets you update the quantity, record location, and add notes. So I can hit my Weight button and input my weight. Or I can hit the reading button and input how many pages I read as well as add a text note summary of what I was reading, what I thought of it, etc.

The key here is that, unlike many other logging applications, TapLog really makes it easy for the users to set up the application to log what they want, how they want. It also supports having a button open a sub-menu. So a user could create a “Food” button which would then open a second screen of buttons labeled “Breakfast,” “Lunch,” “Dinner.”

The log can be exported as a CSV file and either shared to the SD card or emailed. The app also supports emailing a non-CSV log of events. An export to Google Docs would be nice.

Other than that, TapLog does an excellent job and is easily the best logging app available for Android at the moment.

Locking a Windows Laptop on Lid Close

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Like many people I’m a Windows user not because I have any particular love for Microsoft’s OS, but rather because it is the best OS overall for what I need to do on a day-to-day basis. Given the resources Microsoft has to throw at Windows development, however, it is amazing how much you can’t do in Windows.

For example, here’s a pretty straightforward thing I’d like to do in Windows — I’d like to set it up so that when I close the lid on my laptop, Windows automatically locks itself. Based on a couple Google searches a lot of people would like to be able to do this.

And yet, as of 2012, there is no version of Windows in which this can be done. Microsoft will let you put a laptop to sleep automatically when you close the lid, and you can always hit the Windows key+L to lock the computer, but there’s no way to configure Windows to lock automatically when the laptop lid is closed.

That, my friends, is f***ing stupid. I did find a couple of people who had created programs that intercepted the lid state and would automatically lock the lid when closed, but none of these were currently available (the website of the most popular utility for doing this was hijacked by hackers a couple years ago and is still compromised).

So if you know of a decent utility for automatically locking a Windows laptop when the lid closes, I’d be glad to hear it. Or maybe Microsoft could actually follow up on a simple, obvious feature that many of its users have requested. Just don’t hold your breath on that.