How to connect a Dell XPS 15 to an external monitor that only has VGA input

On the Things I Wasn't Expecting list: my new laptop doesn't have VGA output. And my existing monitor only has VGA input. I'd been hoping to plug the laptop into my existing peripherals for everyday at-home use (Q: Why? A: Ergonomics and because I tend to eat and drink at the computer.) so this threw a wrench in my plan.

The solution: a VGA to Mini DisplayPort adapter. The Mini DisplayPort (with which I was unfamiliar going in) is another video input, and is located (as of December 2010) at the back right (as you're facing the screen) corner of the computer, just behind the XPS logo. I found them at Future Shop but not The Source, but didn't look anywhere else. Apple appears to manufacture them, so you can probably get them through the Apple Store too.

Temporary workarounds for when your computer enters power save during boot up

Yesterday, my computer froze completely and I had to do a hard reboot. During the reboot, it entered power save (just after the Windows XP screen) and couldn't be woken up. When I did another hard reboot, there were minor flaws with the graphics, which suggests that the problem is related to the video card somehow.

Restarting in Last Known Good configuration didn't help. A System Restore didn't help. Cleaning out the inside and reseating the RAM and video cards (because the internet suggested it) didn't help. I did manage to boot up in Safe Mode (press F8 at the BIOS screen, before the Windows screen shows up) and tried to update my video drivers, and it blue-screened on reboot (the error message was Driver IRQL Not Less Or Equal). So I tried rolling back the video drivers and it blue-screened and crashed before I could even see the error.

So currently the temporary workarounds I know are: boot up in Safe Mode with Networking and you can get on the internet and access some stuff. It will get you through the day and help you google through your troubleshooting. You can also choose Enable VGA on boot-up (through the same F8 method as to get into Safe Mode) and you'll have access to everything, but ridiculously low resolution (640x480) and graphics quality. When you boot up, you get an alert saying that your graphics settings are very low and offering to raise them, but doing so causes it to enter power save again.

I do not have a permanent solution to this problem. Since my googling was finding stuff about motherboards that's way over my head, and since my computer is 6 years old and a desktop, I've just bought a new laptop. So don't hold your breath watching this space for a permanent solution (although if you have one, please post in the comments for anyone who's googling!)

The computer is a 6 year old Dell Dimension 4700 and the video card is an Nvidia GEforce 6800.

How to get Rogers to realize that there's a network problem in your neighbourhood

My internet's been down for nearly three days with some complicated problem that's maybe three levels more complicated than I can understand. (They were pulling wires out of my walls and testing them, then had to get the supers to let them pull wires out of the building's walls, then had to escalate it one level above that.) The techs who helped me were awesome - communicative, respectful of my need to have my internet service work, accepted my troubleshooting and explained what they were doing when it got above the level I can understand, didn't make me uncomfortable even though I had a cumulative total of three strange men who were bigger than me in my apartment - and made the process as painless as possible. They were carrying extra modems with them, and were fully prepared to just replace my modem on the spot if that ended up being a problem! I'm not happy about 3 days without internet, but I'm very satisfied with the service I received.

But here I just want to share one thing the tech told me, because if everyone knows this it will make life easier for all of us: Rogers only knows there's an outage in a given area if a lot of people call them!

If only one or two people call, they have to start by treating it as an individualized problem, which means walking people through troubleshooting over the phone, and if that doesn't work sending techs to individual households to check the modems and the cabling. They can only start treating it as a macro problem if they get a large number of calls all from the same area or if, as in my case, the techs are dispatched to an individual household and spend an hour painstakingly confirming every single thing that could possibly be causing the problem within the household.

So it turns out our natural reaction - "Meh, I don't want to wait on hold for ages! I'm sure they already know about this, I'll just patiently do something else until they fix it." - are counterproductive, and we need to call in when we're experiencing a network problem.

How to fix your computer freezing after the latest ZoneAlarm upgrade

After the latest ZoneAlarm update (I got it on Friday, May 28), my computer started slowing and freezing. I'm running Windows XP on a five-year-old computer, 2.8 GHz processor and 2 gigs of RAM. Not the best, but it had served me well right up until that upgrade.

Sometimes after boot-up, nothing would work. Like I'd click on something and after five minutes it still hadn't loaded, and even the Task Manager would freeze. I also started getting errors when launching Sims 3, "Application failed to initialize properly." I tried a system restore to before the ZoneAlarm upgrade, but that didn't help.

The ultimate solution ended up being to uninstall and reinstall the ZoneAlarm upgrade, but not installing all the components. Unfortunately I failed to write down the exact name of the interface items, but there's a window with three checkboxes asking what you want to install. The first checkbox is the regular firewall, I forget what the second is, and the third offers to put a ZoneAlarm security function in your Google toolbar. If you uncheck the second, the third is greyed out.

The first time around (which caused all the problems), I'd chosen all three. The second time around, I chose only the first of the three. The installation went smoothly and there have been no problems since.

Things Microsoft Word Should Invent: treat text boxes like part of the document

When text boxes are used in the documents I translate, it's always purely for layout purposes. The author just wants these words to be grouped off over here. The problem is that Word doesn't treat them like part of the document. When I Select All (to change language, to restore any formatting that has been altered by copy-pasting or translation memory) and when I search and replace (to save time, to ensure phraseological consistency, to fix any suboptimal translations I made early in the text for which better translations occurred to me later on), it doesn't include the text boxes in the process. This wastes my time and increases the likelihood of human error. I really would like Select All to mean All, including text boxes.

I don't know if there are actually legitimate uses for text boxes where the user would specifically want them to be treated as though they weren't part of the document as a whole, but I've never seen one in the wide variety of texts my clients produce, in two years doing tech support, or in all my years in school. If people do need text boxes to be treated separately, they should at least have a "Select All including text boxes and everything, really" option.

Things They Should Invent: optional accent sensitivity in search engines

Some of my tools are accent-blind (i.e. they read ou and où the same) and others are accent-sensitive (i.e. they read ou and où as two different words). As a lazy Anglophone, I prefer accent blindness, but sometimes accent-sensitivity would be convenient to filter out interference.

I'd love it if we could have a checkbox to turn accent-sensitivity on or off depending on our needs.

xkcd knows everything

How to fix your computer.

Things They Should Invent: search and replace throughout every file in a folder

The translation request contained 26 files. Three different translators translated them. My job was quality control, which, in cases like this, also means ensuring internal consistency. Each of the three translators might have, perfectly validly, chosen a different way of expressing a certain concept, but I had to make sure that concept was expressed the same way in all 26 files. There were four such phrases that each occurred once in every document.

You can tell the word processor to search for every instance of A in a document and replace it with B. I want to be able to tell it to do the same thing with every instance of A in every document in the folder. An acceptable alternative would be to do so in every open document. (In other words, I'll totally go to the trouble of opening all 26 documents at once to save the work of having to do all the corrections manually.)

Open Letter to Firefox

Dear Firefox:

Please let me have different Google accounts logged in in different browser windows. Internet Explorer lets me do that!

Dell comes through again

My first computer, bought in 1999, was a Dell. Just months before its warranty expired, my power supply died. Dell sent a technician to fix it at no cost and at my convenience, and it was as stress-free as could reasonably be expected considering it's a difficult-to-diagnose-by-phone problem.

My second computer, bought in 2004, is a Dell. Today, just months before its warranty expires, the monitor stopped working. I called tech support, no waiting on hold, they accepted my troubleshooting that correctly diagnosed it as a hardware problem. Procedure said they had to flash the BIOS and see if the problem came back, so they did so and then arranged to have someone call me back tomorrow and check if the problem came back. Total time on phone 30 minutes, total angst zero.

Unfortunately, it came back an hour later. So I called them back (had to wait on hold 15 minutes), they accepted my diagnosis again, and they arranged to ship me a new monitor. Total time on phone like 10 minutes, total angst zero.

While it takes a few business days to ship so it would have been a noticeable inconvenience but for Poodle's awesomeness (see below), that's the reality of logistics and the laws of physics so I find it perfectly acceptable. (Which, I realize, is very easy to say when I'm still sitting here using my computer thanks to Poodle's awesomeness.)

So that's two Dell computers, both of which kindly had their major problems before the warranty expired, both of which got fixed under warranty at no cost to me and no more inconvenience than strictly necessary. I think my third computer will be a Dell.

Also!

Mega-bonus thanks to Poodle who eliminated literally all the stress surrounding this situation!
Me: "My monitor stopped working and I might not be able to use my computer for a few days! My life is ruined!"
Poodle: "Here's a spare, I'll go out of my way to bring it to you as though it's no trouble whatsoever."

Shipping update: My conversation with the call centre that resulted in them shipping out the new monitor occurred on Wednesday, after 8 pm. My monitor arrived by Purolator on Friday.

iTunes Genius has lost its memory

Earlier today I was playing with iTunes Genius, and it only gave me a 13 song playlist for Amy Winehouse's You Know I'm No Good, even though I asked for 100 songs. (It didn't even bother to pad out the playlist with the rest of my Amy Winehouse.)

I hadn't updated iTunes in a long time, so I decided to do that and see if it helped. After the update, it didn't recognize You Know I'm No Good at all, as though it's not in the database any more!

WTF?

Computer animation

A sketch from Important Things with Demetri Martin:



The animation is a bit crude, isn't it? (Not that it matters - Demetri Martin usually uses line drawings on a flip chart - but it something I noticed.)

But there was a point in my lifetime when that silly little animation would have been cutting edge. And there was a point in my lifetime when the technology didn't exist to make that silly little animation. That's really weird if you think about it.

How do I find my missing mp3s?

My itunes contains 3686 mp3s. When I press "shuffle songs" on my ipod, the first song says "Track 1 of 3666." I know that only two tracks in my itunes have been set to "Skip in shuffle." I did double-check this and I did sync manually.

So how do I find where the other 18 mp3s went?

ITunes questions

1. How do I get itunes to ignore album artwork? I don't care about the album artwork. I don't need it on my ipod, I don't need it on my computer, I don't need itunes taking up my valuable time and processing power fussing around with album artwork. How do I get it to completely ignore and disregard it?

2. Is there a way to get Genius to generate playlists without actually starting to play them? I want to play with Genius while I listen to music, but I don't need to hear every song I generate a playlist based on. I just want to play with it.

Weirdest disclaimer ever

The following is copy-pasted direction from the terms and conditions of the itunes software update:

THE APPLE SOFTWARE IS NOT INTENDED FOR USE IN THE OPERATION OF NUCLEAR FACILITIES, AIRCRAFT NAVIGATION OR COMMUNICATION SYSTEMS, AIR TRAFFIC CONTROL SYSTEMS, LIFE SUPPORT MACHINES OR OTHER EQUIPMENT IN WHICH THE FAILURE OF THE APPLE SOFTWARE COULD LEAD TO DEATH, PERSONAL INJURY, OR SEVERE PHYSICAL OR ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE.

Damn, there goes my plan to build an itunes-powered nuclear spacecraft!

Helpful Hint: delete your restore points every once in a while

I found a function in disk cleanup that allows you to delete all but the most recent restore point. So I clicked on it. It hourglassed for quite a while, and when it was finished I had 7 gigs of space freed up. (My computer is just celebrating its third birthday sometimes soon or recently.)

The anti-circumvention clause would discourage people from legally purchasing content

I'm not going to get into excruciating detail about why the anti-circumvention clause is stupid. I'm sure we all had the same "One of these things doesn't belong here" moment when reading about it, and if not the whole entire internet has already commented on it.

I'd just like to add that, on top of everything else, this clause will actually make it more desirable for the consumer to download pirated content instead of purchasing it through legitimate channels.

Under the proposed bill, consumers could be liable for $500 in damages for "private use infringements" pursued by the copyright holders.

However, the penalty could rise to up to $20,000 in damages if a consumer hacked a digital lock to make an illegal copy. That includes hacking the anti-copying mechanisms of a computer game to make illegal copies.

Suppose you want a certain movie on your iPod, to watch during a long plane trip. And suppose it is available on DVD, but not through iTunes because Canada sucks that way. You have two options: get the DVD and convert it, or download it. Now suppose you like the people who made the movie and want them to get rich from the movie, so you purchase the DVD through perfectly legal commercial channels. You then remove the copy protection, rip the movie, and put it on your iPod. Guess what? You've just broken the law, and are liable to a fine of up to $20,000. However, if you had simply gone to your favourite torrent site and downloaded the movie, you would be liable to a fine of up to only $500.

The situation in which a person would ever find themselves circumventing copy protection is if they have a legally-purchased commercial copy of the product in hand. If you make the fine exponentially higher for an act you can do only with a legally-purchased copy (and would have to do as part of the perfectly-legal act of converting content you own for a device you own), then the more enforceable you make the law, the more people will be encouraged to download a bootlegged copy and be liable to a much smaller fine.

Why is the percentage completed on my Bittorrent download going backwards?

I'm downloading something on Bittorrent. It said it was 65.2% complete. Then I looked at it later and it said it was 65.1% complete. WTF? I noticed that throughput was a bit slow and the status bar was saying "Online, maybe firewalled" instead of "Online, ports open" so I restarted the program. Then it was 64.8% complete. So I thought maybe I lost something when I closed the program so I let it go for a while. Then later it was 64.9% complete. But then later still it was 64.8% complete.

WTF? Help?

(I know, maybe I should be using another client, but I want to finish downloading this huge-ass torrent first.)

Wanted: an anonymizer that will let me watch hulu

Anyone know offhand of an anonymizer that will let me watch stuff on hulu that's blocked to people outside the US? I can google up all kinds of anonymizers, but for some reason the video viewer thingy (to put it in technical terms) will never load.

Post your headphone recommendations here

The headphones that came with my ipod are dying, so I'm in the market for new ones.

I want something with hardly any bulk (because it has to be carried around in a pocket or purse and I dress girly) and that can be comfortably worn for up to 10 hours if necessary. Because I already know that clip-ons hurt my ears if worn for long periods of time, I think this points to earbuds, although I'm not married to the idea.

I plan to treat my headphones with no care whatsoever. They will be worn outdoors in all sorts of weather, stuffed into wherever I happen to be putting my ipod, and exposed to disgusting amounts of sweat and earwax. I don't expect them to last forever, but at the same time I don't want something that has to be babied.

I spend most of my time in areas with a lot of white noise so I'd appreciate headphones that can address this, but I still want to be able to jaywalk across Yonge with impunity so I don't want so much noise cancelling that I can't walk around safely. I can hear the technical flaws of the white ipod headphones and I don't want anything worse, but I'm not a huge technical quality geek and top-of-the-line anything is generally wasted on me.

Price point is flexible. I don't want to spend $200 for something that's going to die in six months, I don't want to spend $10 on something that's inconvenient to use.

I'd appreciate any thoughts anyone might have.