Years ago I got into the habit of taking handwritten notes and scanning them into the computer. I then have a digital record and no paper lying around to get lost, stolen, or cluttered.

A problem has arisen with this recently. Late-model multi-function copiers like the Xerox ColorQube scan at such a high resolution and sensitivity that they capture not just the handwritten notes but the texture of the paper. This is extremely annoying because all I want is the writing, of course, and even the "Remove Background" feature of the Xerox ColorQube just doesn't.

So, for the time being, here is a cheap way to remove backgrounds. Load the scanned document into your favorite editor and reduce it to sixteen color palette.

For example, in Paint Shop Pro 4, my favorite for quick-and-dirty fixes, select Colors...Decrease Color Depth...16 Colors and select "Palette Windows'" then "Nearest color" and finally "OK." This magically removes the background noise and so far it has worked on nearly everything I scan.

Be sure you do this after scaling down your image. PSP 4 calls this "Resample" which, by the way, is the only correct way to resize an image in PSP 4.

Forget CentOS, who are taking too long with 6.x. Amazon AWS with Red Hat Linux 6.1 for $0.085/hour for t1.small is excellent and $0.02/hour for t1.micro is even more excellent for high-availability services.

For file backup services, the S3 reduced-redundancy storage for $0.093/GB is a steal, but make sure you convert your storage buckets to RRS. The Windows Home Server plugin does not set RRS so use an Amazon EC2 instance to run convert_to_rrs.py and quickly convert your bucket to RRS for big savings. The AWS console won't work on huge buckets, nor do the popular Windows-based S3 tools. This might cancel out some of the savings.

Do you want to kick-start Windows 7 updates for a computer you've built or set up for someone else? This is what I do and it mitigates the threats to newly-installed machines. It installs certain libraries and other dependencies that trigger Windows Update to give you the latest and greatest. You can let the user do the Service Pack updates at a later time. In this situation we are bootstrapping the update process for most of the important libraries and software you care about without buying Microsoft Office and installing the most important updates before you leave the user to his own devices.

Download and install the following software in this order on another PC and put them on a USB drive.
Do not connect your new computer to the internet yet.
Run these installers in this order. Nothing should ask you to reboot, but if it does, let it reboot and continue with the next one.

Microsoft Word Viewer 2003 (the latest is Word 2003).
Microsoft Visio Viewer
Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer 2007
Microsoft PowerPoint Viewer 2007 SP1 Update
Microsoft Excel Viewer 2007
Microsoft File Format Converters
Microsoft DirectX Redist
Microsoft .NET 3.5 SP1 (Windows Vista and XP Only, x86 and x64 are in the same download)
Microsoft .NET 4.0 Full (x86 and x64 are in the same download)
Microsoft Security Essentials

Restart your computer.
Go to the Windows Update control panel, click "Check for updates," and then install all of the Required and Optional ones.
After you're done with all this, go to the Windows Update control panel and ask it to install "for all Microsoft products". This is somewhat more difficult to find.
Go to Windows Update and hit "Check for updates" again and install everything.

Note that Microsoft .NET 3.5 SP1 includes .NET 2.x and 1.x inside it. Windows 7 has 3.5 SP1 built in already. Windows Vista may or may not depending how old it is.

The Cherrypal Asia laptop at http://www.cherrypal.com/ is now shipping with Google Android installed. This replaces the older Cherrypal Asia mini laptops that were running Windows CE and Linux based. Both laptops run the ARM9-based VIA 8505 SoIC platform at 533 MHz with 256 megabytes of RAM and 2 gigabytes of NAND flash. The $148 version has a 1024x600 screen while the sub-$100 model runs 800x480. I'm looking forward to seeing how Android can squeeze more throughput out of the VIA 8505 since Windows CE didn't do such a great job on the original Cherrypal Asia.

[Reposted from Newegg because I'm proud of my review.]

Blurb: "Great feel and nice loud sound, but not a Model M clone"

Pros: Loud, ringing reverberation is just like keyboards of old PC clones not made by IBM (see Cons).
The keyboard is only a little larger than the keys take up. This is a major bonus if you like small keyboards but don't want to compromise on keys.
FULL SIZE caps lock key for Unix people who remap CTRL to caps lock. This is rather rare on any keyboard (and I am still searching for a Model M clone with full-sized caps lock either).
The keyboard is nice and heavy as nature intended, with amazing, grippy rubber feet (and really good rubber on the risers, too, also rare).
Stiff, solid, and a very tasteful matte black finish that isn't painted on (the plastic is black).

Cons: The case reverberates a bit with a ring. Your table may amplify or muffle it. I don't happen to care but you might.
This is not a Lexmark Model M keyboard clone and does not pretend to be. The reviewers who think this is a Model M are confusing this with another type of old-school "clicky" keyboard.

Other Thoughts: This type of keyboard is not the same as a Model M. The clicking noise comes from the keys landing, not from the (very faint) click in the key mechanisms themselves. However, the click happens at the moment of keystroke actuation which gives this a nice touch. I didn't feel any of the "halfway down" actuation some other reviewers claimed.

This keyboard is an excellent a clone of those "other" clicky keyboards that came with Compaq IBM PC clones in the late 1980s and early 1990s. I have about twenty real IBM/Lexmark Model M keyboards in various states of repair. Those boards click loudly as the key is struck and also when the key hits the back plate. This one only really clicks when it hits the back plate. If you had a PC clone in the late 1980s or early 1990s you know this feel. I think some people call it the "Cherry" feel.
It's not better or worse than the Lexmark Model M; it is just different.

I've updated my Bottomfeeders collection with several Twenty-First Century Bottomfeeders at the following link:
http://kriston.net/hardware/

The unit is a very small and light, slightly customized version of those $100 laptops that have been spreading across Asia for the past year or so. The model I ordered runs Windows CE 6.0 and a suite of custom installed programs like various media players and document viewers. The Youtube application does not work but the rest work fine. The machine is rather slow but it browses the web just fine. The word processor is also good. Some applications are formatted for Pocket PC (the menu bar is on the bottom instead of the top) but Windows CE users are used to this. A benchmark I ran says 200 MHz but I believe that speed is actually due to power management which is always adjusting the CPU speed based on your usage of the unit.

My unit came with some nasty glue that I had to clean off, presumably from stickers that were removed from the original manufacturer. The Cherrypal brand stickers are coming off, too.

I had to order this thing four different times. The credit card processor changed each time, too, but no money was stolen from me. The Cherrypal people say the delays and strange circumstances were due to hacking attempts but my own observations make me speculate that too many customers complained to the credit card ordering processor which caused Cherrypal's account to be terminated for undelivered goods. I persisted through four different ordering processors since December of 2009 and eventually got my unit in late March 2010.

When you order the Cherrypal Africa you are not guaranteed any particular processor type, memory, or screen size, just the minimum specs. This means that your processor can be ARM, MIPS, some x86 variant, or maybe even a PowerPC. Most people seem to have gotten what I have, which is a "VIA" ARM-VT8500 and I'm not really sure if that's the real "VIA" from Taiwan. It also has 128 meg of ram, WiFi, and 2 gigabytes of NAND flash.

In conclusion, I expected what I had received, which is an extremely basic laptop. One thing I didn't expect though was that the "Windows XP" spec was changed to just "Windows" when I had originally ordered it. If I had realized that it is Windows CE I would have ordered the Linux version instead.

OpenOffice, the free desktop office application suite, is almost totally compatible with Microsoft Office. It does not support *.docx files and other proprietary (non-free) elements that are needed to share documents with users of Microsoft Office. Novell has solved this with their own version of OpenOffice but it is only for Windows and SuSE Linux. For Fedora users the Go-OO version can be used. Go-OO is the special version of OpenOffice with the non-free elements which Novell's version is also derived from. It should be noted that Fedora's version of OpenOffice is also Go-OO with the non-free portions stripped out.

The challenge is to replace the OpenOffice that cannot be removed from Fedora with this new, enhanced Go-OO version. It's not easy because OpenOffice is a core desktop application and Fedora forbids its removal without removing about 300 other packages that make up the desktop operating system. We're going to force an installation of Go-OO on my Fedora system, uninstall the "required" OpenOffice, and then force another installation of Go-OO on top of that to get things cleaned up.

Go to http:/www.go-oo.org/ and read the documentation.

Run Go-OO's downloader script in its own directory:
        mkdir GO-OO ; cd GO-OO
        wget http://go-oo.org/download/download-go-oo.py
        chmod a+rx ./download-go-oo.py ./download-go-oo.py

Forcibly install everything it downloaded:
        sudo rpm --install --force *.rpm

Remove the original OpenOffice packages:
        sudo rpm --erase openoffice.org-math-core openoffice.org-presenter-screen openoffice.org-opensymbol-fonts openoffice.org-core openoffice.org-math openoffice.org-brand openoffice.org-calc-core openoffice.org-impress-core openoffice.org-writer-core openoffice.org-graphicfilter openoffice.org-draw-core openoffice.org-langpack-en openoffice.org-xsltfilter openoffice.org-impress openoffice.org-writer openoffice.org-calc openoffice.org-extendedPDF

Install Go-OO forcibly again:
        sudo rpm --install --force *.rpm

Now it's all set. I can read and write *.docx and *.xlsx files in Fedora. It's also much faster than Fedora's OpenOffice.

I'm not sure why, but we bought another HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server with the intention of gifting the old one to someone else. This version is really different. Not only is the server two gigabytes of memory and uses a 64-bit CeLeron processor, it also has a large number of features that were not present in the refurbished Sempron 512-megabyte HP MediaSmart server. I'm not really sure why but this newer model has Amazon S3 backup service and a huge number of new features that aren't present on the Sempron-based version. We updated the server software on both models but only the Intel CeLeron model has the new features.

If you're going to try out Windows Home Server to automatically and effortlessly backup your Windows machines, get a non-refurbished Intel-based HP MediaSmart server. All of these new features are in the HP MediaSmart software and not WHS itself. I'm not sure why HP did this but it's eye-opening.

I'm going to try to install the Amazon S3 and other software add-ins to our older, refurbished model by doing a "factory restore" from the Server Recovery Disc that came with the non-refurbished model and see if these awesome features get installed on the older server.

Very interesting difference. It might be that the newer one has two gigabytes of memory and the other one only has 512 megabytes. It's possible the features are dependent on the memory specifications of the server, but I doubt it.

Windows Home Server has a really neat feature. Install the Windows Home Server Connector and configure it to back up your computer. In a day or so take the hard drive out of the computer and throw it into a lake. Get a new blank hard drive. Boot the computer from the Windows Home Server PC Recover disc. YOUR COMPUTER COMES BACK.

This is the killer sleeper Windows app of the new century!!

The Mozilla Flashblock plugin is getting fooled by advertisements on some sites like urbandictionary.com which use a countermeasure (seems to be iframe abuse). Installation of version 1.5.11a2 from the special link http://flashblock.mozdev.org/installation1.html solves the problem for now.

Here's the stupid thing about Cox Cable Television in the Northern VA area.

Technicians are going crazy yanking old cable off the telephone poles to install multi-wavelength fiber and switched-video-compatible boxes because they ran out of bandwidth to compete with all the HD channels that the other services, like FiOS and satellite, offer.

The stupid thing is that FiOS has the same 1 gigahertz video capacity that cable does (not including Video-on-Demand which is served by Internet on FiOS and through hidden video channels by Cox). Likewise, FiOS has twice the SD channels and HD channels without the need for switched-video to solve a perceived bandwidth problem.

This doesn't make sense. I did some digging. For now I still use cable internet so I scanned the Cox Cable signal on my HDTV and found out that nearly all of Cox Cable's SD channels are still analog. This means that most of Cox Cable's 1 gigahertz of bandwidth is consumed by analog channels at 6 MHz per channel, even though you can fit more than 10 digital channels in one analog channel if they were to use digital instead.

Why is Cox Cable spending so much money installing switched-video if all this bandwidth is available?
Why isn't Cox Cable using digital for their SD channels?

Apparently the bandwidth required for Video-on-Demand is the business reason for the switched-video upgrade, but switched-video is not just for VoD. It is also used on non-VoD channels because of a system-wide bandwidth shortage on Cox Cable. This means if nobody in a neighborhood watches Food Network HD, it gets turned off until someone tunes it in again.

The cause of the problem is that Cox Cable is still using 6-MHz-per-channel analog for most SD channels.

In professional Software Engineering circles we debate topics with real-world applications.
Sometimes, the debate must be aborted when a participant quotes one of the following so-called pundits. Most of them are academics or failed dot-com company founders.
The key point here is that "professional Software Engineers," referring to people who make a living actually accomplishing real work on real systems.

Here is the list of Godwin's Law violations.
Quoting them makes you forfeit your side of the debate:

Joel "On Software" Spolski
Daniel "I always wear black" Bernstein
Randal "I hacked into Intel and all I got was this felony conviction" Schwartz

This is the tool that enables the partnership between OLPC and WorldSpace Satellite radio so important.

http://wiki.laptop.org/go/BookBeaming

[Written as a response to a LinkedIn.com question concerning the use Google and Adobe's online applications instead of Microsoft Office]

I dare suggest that the Writely and Tonic Systems applications that became Google Apps are very simple and rather slow when compared to OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Office.

The global accessibility is appealing if you are not able to use an internet file sharing service or a remote login program like LogMeIn.com but you lose a large number of important features using Google Apps and you sacrifice your personal, and more importantly, your business', privacy and security.

Finally, if you are concerned about privacy, you should know that Google's agreement reserves the right to anonymously search, index, and catalog your "private" files. This is the same thing that Google does with Gmail. While they currently only use this for targetted advertisements you should be aware that they are scanning, indexing, and cataloging all of your data.

Google exists to scan, index, and catalog the entire body of data in the world. If you like that idea, then you are contributing to it by using Google Apps.
If you want to preserve your personal and business security you should not use it.