Kurt Johnson

For the benefit of a co-worker with red-green colorblindness I wrote a short powerpoint add-in that finds red colors and turns them blue. It’s useful when somebody makes edits to a document in red text since he can’t differentiate the red from grey or black to distinguish the edits from the original text.

Given that 5-10% of males have some degree of color blindness I thought this might be worth sharing so that other can find it via Google.

Download the power point add-in

To use the add-in:

1. Make sure macro security is set to Medium or Low by going to Tools/Options/Security/Macro Security
2. Download the add-in below, then go to Tools/Add-ins and select the “Replace Reds” add-in you just downloaded
3. Apply the code by going to the Tools menu; at the bottom of the list you should now have a command to “Replace Reds”

You can uninstall the add-in via Tools/Add-ins. You can access the source code in this file.

Further evidence that I am a pathological collector of gadgets; the chart below shows the altitude recorded by the GPS unit I got for Christmas.  The unit, a Garmin Foretrex 101, is cheap (~$70), easy to pocket, and logs 10,000 data points that can be downloaded via serial cable; my only beef is that there is no native USB support.  After downloading the datapoints with G7ToWin I use RoboGeo to sync the GPS tracklog with my photos and stamp GPS coordinates into each photo's EXIF headers. 

I am realizing that my gadget bag carries ~4 hard drives that are not supposed to work about 10,000 feet (ipod, laptop, 2x 4GB microdrives). Hard drives require a certain density of air to let the heads "fly" over the platter and apparently 10,000 feet is the design limit; some devices work fine, some refuse to power up, and some crash forever.

This is suddenly a concern because my time in Peru is going to be largely at 10,000-12,500 feet while next summer's trip to Tibet will be 12,000 feet or higher. Given that a week of photography in someplace like Tibet could potentially generate 10-20 gigabytes of images I'm trying to see if there's any way to avoid carrying a wallet full of solid state CF cards.   If nothing else I could probably just ration my photos and shoot JPG instead of Raw to fit onto a couple of large CF cards…

If anyone has any experience or thoughts I'd love to hear them. 

Update: Everything worked up to 12,600 feet without any issues, although I avoided using the microdrives whenever possible in favor of my solid state card.  The ipod may have balked once around 13,000 feet on Taquile; I had to reset it but I'm not sure whether this was related to the altitude.

If you have any interest on hosting photo albums on your own website, let me quickly put in another plug for Porta; I am flipping through some old albums on the plane and realizing how far superior it is to the programs I used to use. A sample album is here; it should automatically default to the non-flash version here if you do not have flash installed.

Newish stuff that I can recommend from experience:

About a month ago I switched from Readyhosting to Bluehost. I’m unequivocally glad I did; Bluehost offers vastly more powerful database/ftp/http tools as well as more useful analytics and accessibility plus 8x the disk space, all for roughly the same price. Highly recommended.

I think the move to the new host is 99% complete - there may be a few hiccups as the information percolates through the internet but it’s pretty well done. The only significant problem has been breaking my old blog feed when I moved servers (and concurrently switched from using blogger to Wordpress).

Along with getting a new host that offers a lot more features than the old one, I’m stoked about the new blog software - it’s much, much more powerful than blogger. I’ve got some format tweaking to do but in general I’ve been very happy with how quickly setup went (including importing blogger posts). Since Wordpress is free/open source software I’m sending them the $100 I would have spent on Movable Type/Typepad.

I’m going to switch web hosts from Readyhosting to Bluehost.  Hopefully this causes minimal disruption to the site but things may be a little wacky for the next week or so.  I’m primarily moving to increase disk quota (from 500MB to 4000MB) and get access to Perl/PHP/Apache.

As part of our move we’re combining two desktop PCs into one. The new box has 5 hard drives and 2 DVD burners, making a pretty full and hot running box; in fact I’m wondering how much more we can add without needing to expand our 400 watt PS.

After thinking about how to run the hard drives, here’s what I ended up with.
C: - 20 gig partition for operating system and program files (easy to wipe out and reinstall)
D: twin 120 gig drives in a RAID-1 (mirror/redundant) configuration.
E: - 180 gig partition for music/media/backups/etc. (balance of C: disk)
F: 250 gig disk for photos
G: 45 gig disk for odds & ends (because it was sitting around not used for anything else)

The idea is that day-to-day files and new photos will sit on the RAID-1 array where they can easily be recovered if a drive crashes. Periodically I’ll back up this drive to an external hard drive or DVDs that are kept offsite and move them from the RAID array to a non-RAID local disk - effectively using RAID for short term backup and offsite for long term backup. If I were only worried about drive failure I would just RAID everything but the fact is that I’m also worried about theft/fire/flood where having redundant drives in the same place doesn’t help.

Now that I’ve put all of this time into data redudancy/recovery Murphy’s law will no doubt protect me from getting any use out of it…

Update 1: I used this $20 IDE/RAID card. I used this utility to redirect my desktop/”my documents”/etc. from the standard c: drive to the new RAID drive. I use the excellent system monitor utility Everest to check details on hardware including hard drive operating temperatures included in SMART data and model numbers (when I need to download new drivers and can’t remember exactly what manufacturer/model I have).

I’ve had some headaches keeping my personal email in line recently; I’m lugging around archives of email for the last 5+ years spread across several webmail accounts, and my primary personal email account has suffered recurring corruption problems lately (and I’ve outsourced my server admin). Finally, I’m accessing email from 3-4 different PCs in any given week and I turn over PCs frequently enough that trying to move archives around is a real hassle.

My solution, for now, is to move all of my archives to gmail and forward my personal mailbox there as well. Hopefully this simplifies my life a little as I can put the archiving out of mind and let gmail administer spam filtering instead of doing my own. I haven’t figured out how to get POP downloading to work across multiple PCs yet, but the gmail interface and options make it attractive enough to forego local email except on whatever laptop I’m using for travel.

The other thing I’m doing is setting my personal mail to be BCC’d to a second gmail account so that I’ve got a permanent archive of sent mail. I ran this for a while on my own server and like the way it works, but going to gmail is an easy switch and frees up some disk quota on my web server.

Based on what I’ve seen in the last week I’m giving two thumbs up to gmail. Thanks to Tomur for the invite; I’ve now got 50 invites if anyone else wants to try it. I started using GML to upload my local mail archives to gmail and then switched to gExodus. Neither of them is perfect but they’re easier than writing my own script.