Adventures in Tech

There are a lot of articles on the Internet comparing font rendering philosophies between Windows and Mac, including Damien's,   Jeff Atwood's, and Joel Spolsky's. The articles come with a vibrant set of comments that advocate one rendering philosophy over the other based on aesthetics, readability, and eye comfort. So far I have been oblivious to the difference, since I have been using the Mac exclusively for the last 15 years. But with my recent switch to Windows the rendering difference popped up, and it was not the font aesthetics since the font rendering on both platforms looked good to me. Rather I noticed that I can read on Windows for a long period of time without my eyes getting tired. On the Mac I needed AntiRSI or Timeout to help me take work breaks every half hour to alleviate eye soreness. After I switched to Windows I have not had a need to search for their equivalents.

I've been using an earlier version of Windows 10 preview for a couple of weeks, and have been pleased with it. However when I tried to upgrade to a new drop, I was greeted with a cryptic message: "Cannot update the system reserved partition". A little bit of research internally and on the Web exposed that the message appears when the system partition is full. To see the details of your drive: partitions, volumes and all, the command "diskpart" is your friend. First list the volumes on the disk you're interested in: diskpart> list volume Some of the volumes might not have a drive letter associated with them. You can assign drive letters to the volumes you'd like to explore through diskpart> select volume=N Then assigning a drive letter through diskpart> assign letter=E Now you can look around the drive and figure out how to create some free space for the install, and all will be well.

I joined Microsoft a couple of weeks ago, and after 15 years of only using Macs and OS X for my work and personal computers, I traded both for their Windows equivalent. For my laptop, I got a Lenovo X1 Carbon that is growing on me. It reminds me of my Mac Book Air: it is very light, with a great design, and an excellent battery life—with a ton of applications running, I usually get 6 or 7 hours of battery life. And the icing on the cake is the touch screen, and the great tactile feel ThinkPad keyboards are well known for. The laptop had Windows 8.1 on it, but since I have access to any Windows build, I decided to image it with a prebuild of Windows 10. After a couple of weeks of usage, I can safely say I like Windows 10. It has definitely come a long way since the last time I used it 15 years ago.   For one, hibernation and wakeup are much faster now, and file operations—which I remember were slow and infuriating, are now acceptable. I also like Cortana, and the ne...

Taking backups with Time Machine on Mac OS X is a breeze: you plug in the backup drive, and wait for the magic to happen. Restoring the backup to a misbehaving laptop though appears to be a different story. I had to go through multiple iterations before I finally got the data back on the laptop. Since my backup setup is not atypical with the exception of an encrypted drive and backups, I was surprised it took that many times to successfully restore the data. Initially I tried restoring the backups by booting the Mac in recovery mode, and using the restore from Time Machine option. The restore started, but after roughly 12 hours it silently failed. For my second attempt I decided to install Yosemite from scratch and use the user migration assistant to recover my data. After progressing for a long time, the restore silently failed as well. My third attempt was a bit more drastic: I wiped out the drive, and attempted to restore the backup from Time Machine. That too failed after pr...

I have an old Samsung ML-1210 printer  that is more than 10 years old. Despite its age, the printer is still in an excellent condition: it prints high quality PDF documents reliably albeit slowly, and satisfies my needs. But because of its age, it is hard to find a working native driver for Mac OS X, as Apple stopped supporting the printer in Lion, and Samsung stopped supporting the drivers after 2005. I could of course retire the printer, and buy a new one that is faster, and cheaper, but I tried to find another route where I continue using my old trusty printer. Luckily, one exists through CUPS on Mac OS X, by using  ghostscript, foomatic-rip, and samsung-gdi . The packages on the page are for Mac OS X Lion, but I found them to work for later versions as well. The only inconvenience of using these packages is that you have to re-install them after every Mac OS X upgrade. With the latest Yosemite upgrade,  the packages broke because of sandboxing,  where foomat...

I stumbled upon an old article from the Harvard Business Review about the making of a corporate athlete . The title lured me in; it is always flattering to compare corporate leaders to professional athletes that are admired by the masses. The thesis of the article is that performance demands on today's corporate leaders rival those on professional athletes, and while the latter get all the training and recovery and support they can before and after competing, corporate leaders do not. In fact leaders are required to perform under stress 24/7 year round with no time to recover or unwind. The article argues that unwinding and recovery are crucial for peak performance.  The article lists four dimensions of capacity that the leader needs to worry about: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual capacities. By strengthening each of these capacities, the corporate leader can draw on the separate strengths, and manage to handle work pressure, and performance demands. The article l...

This year's modern marketing experience conference took place in Las Vegas at the Venetian hotel. The hotel, like other Vegas hotels, contains a lot of fancy stores with prestigious brands. In between the sessions, the conference attendees would walk around the stores perusing the merchandise and enjoying the luxury of the stores. One of the more eclectic stores in the hotel that attracted my attention was Bauman rare books store .  I have never seen a similar store before, so I decided to go in and check it out. The store specializes in rare first edition books and ones that are signed by the author. I was surprised to see first edition books by Charles Dickens, and John Steinbeck, as well as Winston Churchill and author famous authors. The store appeals to rare book collectors, and the prices definitely reflect that .  Despite that, the staff were very friendly toward non collectors. They were very engaging and knowledgeable about each book's history and lineage. They e...