I had about 60 apparently corrupted photos on a Com­pact­Flash card this evening. It might have been due to Lightroom going berserk, but it was more likely from my pulling the card reader out of the computer without ejecting it first.

The photos wouldn't show up under Mac, Linux, or Windows. I tried to chkdsk the card under Windows, which complained about a “raw” disk. That led me to ZAR, the Zero Assumption Recovery toolkit. The evaluation copy retrieved the photos very nicely. Whew!

To my tech supportees:

XKCD's Tech Support Cheat Sheet nails it! This is es­sen­tial­ly what I'm doing when I sit down at your computer and dig you out of your latest hole.

If only you'd make some more in­tel­li­gent guesses for yourself, you might be able to solve more of your problems.

But it's not quite that simple.

You probably don't understand very much about what you're doing. I have enormous depth and breadth of experience which informs my in­ves­ti­ga­tion. I am—no false modesty here—a master of debugging. The extra context helps me hone in on a solution more often than not.

Still, do give the flowchart a shot. Being able to …continue.

Before we left on our trip, I picked up a pair of 4GB SD cards for my point-and-shoot Canon Elph. I brought my Linux netbook along, which has a built-in SD card reader, and the cards worked fine with that.

But they didn't work at all in any of the external card readers that I have, and I had to resort to a USB cable to transfer photos from the camera to my other computers.

Wikipedia discusses com­pat­i­bil­i­ty issues with 2GB and larger SD cards, which is initially what I thought the problem was. On looking more closely at the cards, I see that they're the newer SDHC cards. The card …continue.

When using Lightroom before, I was never able to figure out how to move photos from one folder to another. You'd think that you could just click on a photo and drag it. I just spent twenty minutes figuring out what I've been doing wrong. After you've selected multiple photos, click on the photo thumbnail and not the sur­round­ing gray frame, and then you can drag the photos to the target folder.

I had become accustomed to clicking on the frames to multi-select photos, so naturally I assumed that was also how you dragged a set of photos. But clicking on a frame of a selected photo merely deselects …continue.

We're traveling to Spain and Ireland for three weeks. I'm bringing the netbook, not the 17" MacBook Pro, because it's small and light. It doesn't have a DVD player and I'd like to bring some DVDs to watch. I could either spend about $80 on an external DVD player, or I could rip the DVDs beforehand.

I've ripped a few DVDs with Handbrake, an open source, cross-platform video transcoder, which seems to do a good job. I'm playing them in the cross-platform VLC player, which released version 1.0.0 yesterday, after almost 8 years of de­vel­op­ment.

I'm heading down to Portland tomorrow evening for Motsscon XXII, of which more later.

It seems no-one thought to set up a map of the events and restau­rants, so I spent half an hour in Google Maps creating a custom map. It was sur­pris­ing­ly painless and the sug­ges­tions for businesses near an address really helped.

Update: 10 minutes after writing the above, Google Maps crashed Safari 4 while trying to print the map.

I complained a week ago about my display driver going berserk. I blamed Windows Update, since it happened within hours of a pile of updates being installed. I upgraded to the latest beta NVidia drivers on Monday and it helped for a while, but by Wednesday, it was almost as bad again as it had been last Friday. It was in­fu­ri­at­ing and I was both en­ter­tain­ing and alarming my neighbors with my cursing.

Today was the last day of a very busy sprint for me and at last I had the time to dig into it. I opened up the case and took a look at both video cards—I …continue.

Google finally released the much-an­tic­i­pat­ed Chrome preview for Mac and Linux yesterday. I've tried it on my OS 10.5 MacBook and my Ubuntu Jaunty Netbook Remix netbook.

Chrome works fairly well, so far. It seems slow at resolving hostnames, but otherwise downloads pages quickly. Rendering speed is good. Gmail comes up in an amazingly short time, as in Windows Chrome. It uses less CPU than Safari or Camino.

Favicons are not showing up in tabs on Mac. Fonts are not an­tialiased on Linux.

As a user, I'm happy to see that there is real com­pe­ti­tion between the browsers after the stagnation in the first half of this decade, when IE6 ruled. As a web …continue.

I just spent over an hour wrestling with the Address Book in Evite, trying to convince it to import a pile of freeform addresses, to no avail. I had to paste them in one-by-one, clicking Add for each one. Feh.

I succeeded in my bigger goal and that was to send out an Evite for our Bloomsday Reading. It'll give us some idea of how many to expect at the reading.

I mentioned CrossLoop before, as a tool for remotely helping someone out. It uses VNC to share desktops.

The last time I looked, it was Windows only. Now there's a Mac client too.

I had to use it to help my father out in Dublin. Somehow he had managed to delete both Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash—I haven't figured out how.

It was painful, painful, painful. The connection was dropped repeatedly and the link couldn't begin to keep up with the amount of graphical data being trans­ferred. Even though CrossLoop reduces the color depth, actions like switching tabs in Firefox cause huge amounts of data to be sent. I couldn't tell …continue.