September 2014 Archives
How To Get Things Done | Challies Dot Com
First in a series on personal productivity from a Christian perspective, featuring a short catechism on productivity.
Windows audio patch for Dorling Kindersley DK software
If you're trying to run an old educational CD-ROM game by Dorling Kindersley (DK) on Windows XP, you'll probably see an error message like this:
"Sound Software is not installed properly or has been disabled" or "1058 Sound Decompression Software not installed properly".
There's a patch to fix the problem. It's available through Global Software Publishing's support website. (GSP bought the DK Interactive Learning back catalog.) Here is a direct link to the DK audio patch file. (UPDATE 2024/04/05: Internet Archive Wayback Machine link to the patch file.)
UPDATE 2024/04/05: Stephen Stromberg, who found this entry while trying to get some old games running, reports that GSP's website is no longer active, that the company was acquired by Avanquest, which no longer hosts the patch. He was able to find the patch here, at what appears to be a clone of GSP's site on compupixny.tripod.com. File access appears to be intermittent through tripod (try a right-click Open in New Tab), but I was able to fetch the file from the Internet Archive using my original direct link. (Internet Archive Wayback Machine link to the patch file.) The patch Stephen found on compupixny.tripod.com was also captured by the Wayback Machine from GSP's website in 2013.
David Suchet: Recording the NIV Bible is my legacy | Christian News on Christian Today
Famous for his long-running role as Hercule Poirot, Suchet came to Christian faith after reading Romans 8 in a hotel room in 1986. In this interview, he speaks of the effect of reading the entire Bible aloud on his own faith and devotional habits, and how he dealt with the genealogical sections:
"For me the big challenge was Chronicles - it's filled with numbers, families, names and tribes, and I just thought how am I going to get through this? And then I realised that behind every name was a human being with a life, so I told myself not to rush it, to remember that it would have originally been read out loud to people who would have known those people, and it would have meant a lot to them, so it should to me too! These people had families and lives, just like you and I do."
Byte Magazine, March 1977, Star Trek game in BASIC
I remember sitting at my family's TRS-80 Model 1 and carefully typing in every line of this 399-line program by David Price of Midlothian, Virginia. You had to travel through the galaxy, use your long- and short-range sensors to find and destroy Klingon ships without getting destroyed yourself or running out of fuel. The end of the article addresses the lack of a standard for BASIC, which meant the reader would have to make adjustments in the code to account for variations in syntax for program control and data structures. Wikipedia has an article on the history of the game and its variants.
Tony Hancock: Funny man - Profiles - People - The Independent
A rambling essay on the life, comedy, and decline of the star of the 1950s sitcom which became "the yardstick against which all subsequent British sitcoms have been measured." Trying to escape what he saw as an artistic box, he ditched the writers and supporting actors who had made his star shine, then sunk into self-pity as their careers soared and his floundered.
Zombie » Climate Movement Drops Mask, Admits Communist Agenda
What's green on the outside and red on the inside? A watermelon? No, it's the climate alarmist protest movement. Zombie, the intrepid chronicler of way-out lefty protests in the San Francisco Bay Area, presents a thorough photo-documentary of the "People's Climate Rally" in Oakland, showing that the event was organized and dominated by explicitly socialist and communist groups arguing for "system change not climate change," a slogan promoted by Socialist Party USA. The ideological diversity of the march ranged from Leninists to Trotskyites, from Maoists to Castroites. Zombie noted two things you could find at every booth: Copies of the Communist Manifesto and anti-Israel material.
Via People's Cube, which writes, "The issue is never the issue, the issue is always the revolution."
Handbook of hardware schemes, cables layouts and connectors pinouts diagrams @ pinouts.ru
Which wires carry which signals? Here is a reference source with diagrams and details of 1,648 connectors, ports, cables, and more.
How to Win 5 State Fair Games | The Art of Manliness
How games are "gaffed" to make them harder or impossible, how to beat some of the gaffes, and which seemingly easy games are impossible to win.
Miscellany: Mini-review: Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable | The Economist
"It's an odd book, and this new edition sets out explaining what it is not. Its original compiler, Ebenezer Brewer, said that it is 'not an Historic Dictionary.' Susie Dent, today's editor, also notes that it is 'not just a reference book, nor is it a single read; it is not entirely objective... it is not a straightforward dictionary, nor is it an encyclopaedia. It is, in fact, unlike any other reference book that exists, anywhere.'"
Zombie » Progressive Racism: The Hidden Motive Driving Modern Politics
A fascinating theory expounded by Zombie, the chronicler of far-left craziness. Progressives are lying about their motives with respect to gun control, abortion, climate change, junk food taxes, plastic bag bans, the welfare state, affirmative action, and nanny-statism, but conservatives are wrong about their true hidden motives. "Nanny statism is the modern progressive version of Jim Crow: regulations whose real intent is to oppress blacks, but now hidden behind the smiley-face mask of universal oppression."
R.I.P. "Bro-Country" (2011-2014) « Saving Country Music
"Death by overexposure" was the coroner's verdict. "Bro-Country is scheduled to be buried in the rubble of the historic RCA Studio 'A' building set to be bulldozed on Music Row in Nashville. And in Bro-Country's memory, an edifice to gentrification and homogenization will be erected in the form of a 147,000 square foot condominium complex on the location."
Singer/songwriter Ben Dukes writes in the comments:
"I pitched a song earlier this year, and received the critique:
"'While the story development and imagery are strong, this publisher is looking for HITS. The song lacks in this area. Focus more on current country themes like partying, drinking on the tailgate, girls in short-shorts, etc. Melodically, this feels more like Waylon Jennings than anything on the radio. Focus more on repeating triplets or rhythmic patterns similar to Florida Georgia Line's "This is How We Roll" or Blake Shelton's "Boys Round Here."'"
Scottish Independence Referendum Data Map
This map shows when the different polling districts are expected to report, the expected relative turnout of each, and the expected result in each. A must-have for following the results Thursday evening, which should start to roll in around 8:00 pm Tulsa time, but it will be another three hours before a majority of the vote will have been counted. The big cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow won't report until 11 pm Tulsa time, but suburban areas of East Lothian and North Lanarkshire will be early bellwethers.
MORE: Test your knowledge of Scotland's historic (pre-1974) counties by clicking the county for the name, or type the names in until you've found all 33 (34 really, but they group Ross and Cromarty together).
1940 State Farm / Rand McNally Road map of Oklahoma - David Rumsey Historical Map Collection
Note the number of state and U. S. highways that were still graded dirt. State Highway 11 is shown as extending south through Tulsa on Peoria, jogging east at 61st to Lewis, then south on Lewis to 91st, east to Delaware, south to the 96th Street bridge, south on Elm and west to Glenpool.
Bradley's Arnold: A practical guide to Latin prose composition: openlibrary.org
When in Rome, write as the Romans do. This is George Granville Bradley's original revision of Thomas Kerchever Arnold's earlier work. Newer editions are still used as the standard text for teaching how to write Latin in the style of Cicero. Why would anyone want to do that? You don't really know a language or appreciate the nuances of its literature until you learn to express ideas in that language as a native speaker would. It's also a useful tool for resolving ambiguities in English-to-Latin translation exercises.
My wife, feverish and not thinking clearly, opened an infected zip file attached to an email. I was away from home, advised her to use System Restore, to restore system files back to the state prior to her mistake. She reported that she couldn't -- system restore was turned off and the System Protection tab on the computer properties dialog was missing.
I used Windows Defender Offline (from a bootable USB thumb drive -- had to be plugged into a USB2 port) to scan the hard drive. It found and cleaned Rovnix.gen!A and another virus, but I still couldn't see the system protection tab. I ran Kaspersky's TDSSKiller -- found nothing further. I updated and ran MalwareBytes and Spybot Search and Destroy -- found and cleaned some annoyances but nothing big. I ran SysInternals Startups and disabled some services and processes that looked dodgy.
Finally I found this article. I ran through all the steps recommended by "Broni" -- first in safe mode, then in normal mode, then in safe mode again. Now we have a System Protection tab again, and I was able to enable System Restore. Then again it might have been because of a Microsoft Windows security update.
