I get annoyed whenever I see the AVG Anti-virus certification tag in people’s e-mails. Anti-virus software should be silent unless something bad has happened. During long email threads, it’s not uncommon to see AVG’s tags trail on for pages and pages at the end.

AVG 7.5 hides the option to turn off the certification, but it’s easy enough to do:

1. Open AVG Free Edition Control Center 2. Select the menu item View->Extended Mode (F4) 3. Scroll down and click on the E-mail Scanner block in the main window 4. Click on the Properties button in the lower-right hand corner 5. Click on Configure in the modal dialog box that pops up 6. Uncheck Certify mail in both incoming and outgoing mail

Kim, this post is for you. :)

I am going through hours of underwater audio clips and placing markers in each track that correspond with the beginning and end of interesting audio snippets. After each clip has been marked up in its entirety, I select all of the markers and generate subclips en masse.

In the beginning, I had a mouse connected to my notebook, but I’ve discovered that the trackpad is a better tool because it has horizontal scrolling built into it. Even when a clip is being played, I can scroll the clip view left and right by simply placing a second finger on the trackpad. It’s one of the few instances where the trackpad is better than an external mouse. Video demo follows… (read more »)

Shuri Castle, Okinawa

[Part I] [Part II] I’ve always been curious about Okinawa because of its (distant) relation to Taiwan as an island (once) occupied by Japan. My grandparents are with us on this trip, and it is their broken Japanese that we are relying upon to communicate with locals. They were forced to speak Japanese for the first 20 years of their lives, and although it has been 60 years since they had to speak they seem to remember a surprising amount. Soon after the end of Japanese occupation, it was Mandarin that was forced on them. Strangely, when they try to speak Japanese it is often Mandarin that comes out, and they are sometimes not even aware of the mistake. (read more »)

a reading of tchaikovsky’s souvenir de florence [photos @ flickr]

It has become tradition to have some sort of music party before my actual birth date, not because we don’t want to celebrate on the day itself, but because our schedules never quite work out. (read more »)

Two of my good friends are planning a trip to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Thailand this coming March. Does anyone out there have some good advice for them? Specifically, they are looking for the following information:

1. Siem Reap - Does anyone have a great English-speaking guide for Angkor Wat, Angkor Thom, etc.? We will be in Siem Reap for 3 days. 2. Ha Long Bay - We booked an overnight boat trip through Inserimex Travel, who we were referred to by John Gray’s Sea Canoe. As far as I can understand, the boat is not the most luxurious and we will be the only passengers on it, but it is the only option that takes people kayaking deep into the caves. I would prefer a bigger, air conditioned boat with other tourists on it, but don’t want to sacrifice the opportunity to kayak into the caves. Thoughts? Recommendations? 3. Chiang Mai - I’ve heard that the Four Seasons arranges wonderful hikes in the area. We are not staying at the Four Seasons. : ) I’ve also heard that visits to towns around Chiang Mai seem staged (because they are). Any recommendations for good guided tours or hikes in the area?

My buddy Adam Nash made it onto ValleyWag in the form of a video announcing news from LinkedIn (where he is Senior Director of Products). As is typical when you make it onto popular websites, Adam gets picked on a bit… but who cares? He’s on the site, and we’re not.

I stopped by Nash’s place over the weekend on my way back up from judging the NCUPS Sea 2007 underwater photo competition in Monterey. It was great to see the Nash babies, and as usual I tolerated the mutant beagles’ constant poking around for food. I see that they (the beagles) have lost some weight, which means that they are now only 2.5x the weight of a normal beagle. :)

I use VMWare Fusion primarily to run QuickBooks on Windows XP. I also use it for the occasional BreezeBrowser and ProShowGold session. Here’s a video that shows me launching Fusion on a MacBook Pro, opening and resuming a virtual machine (QuickBooks is open), starting IE7, switching to Unity mode (like ||’s Coherence), and tabbing between Mail.app and the apps in Fusion. Finally, I go back to Single Window mode, suspend the virtual machine, and quit Fusion. (read more »)

When I upgraded Mac OS X to Leopard, I ended up with two versions of Stickies.app in the file system. One was in the main Applications/ folder, and one was in Applications/Utilities/. I run most of my apps using Quicksilver, and the effect was that Quicksilver would default to the older Stickies.app, which doesn’t run on Leopard (silent failure, too — so you don’t know whether it’s Quicksilver or something else). Deleting the old version from the Applications/Utilities/ folder solved the problem.

When asked what compact camera to buy, I always recommend the Fuji FinePix F30 or F31fd because it’s the only point & shoot with respectable low-light performance. I own a F30, and wouldn’t replace it with any other model from any other brand.

Recently, Fuji bowed to marketing pressure and released a 12-megapixel successor called the FinePix F50fd. DPReview has an in-depth review of the camera, with many images that compare it to the F30. They conclude that it is a really great camera, but doesn’t really improve output when compared to what the F30 produces.

So does the release of the F50fd change my recommendation? Nope. I certainly wouldn’t upgrade to the F50fd from a F30. There is simply no reason to scale up resolution if the output isn’t going to be as good; more pixels doesn’t always mean a better image. However, I would certainly buy a F50fd if I were in the market for a new compact camera. It’s probably the best compromise between size, quality, and price.

UPDATE, July 4, 2008 I think I’d probably recommend the Fujifilm FinePix J10 these days because it is relatively inexpensive ($115) while providing similar quality to Fuji’s existing line of compacts. It’s also really small and takes SD cards so you can scrap your old xD cards (hooray!). The J10 doesn’t have face detection, but I could live with that, since no camera I’ve owned has ever had that feature, and I do just fine. :)

I found this video on Adam Nash’s blog, and it’s awesome. (read more »)

I attended two 1st year Korean “Tol” baby birthday parties over the weekend, which were both a lot of fun. I’ll post photos, soon. Parties and gatherings are great, but they are tough to schedule at the moment because I’m swamped trying to both catch up with life stuff and get the 2nd issue of Wetpixel Quarterly out the door. It’s 3:30am, and I just finished what I had to do today.

Earlier today, I was thinking a bit about the social-networking applications that I use (Twitter and Facebook, mostly). (read more »)

Hey, does anyone out there have advice for what I should be wearing if I am to be standing around in temperatures of -40°F -48°F or colder (without windchill) for hours, at night? I have some warm fleecy things that have kept me warm-ish to around -30 (effective, with wind-chill), but I was only out for 15-20 minutes at a time. This time around, I’ll be standing around at night for what will potentially be long periods of time.

For my torso, I was thinking of using the thickest wool base layer I can find, along with warm fleece and a shell. I also have a down vest that I can try to stuff in there.

I have no idea what to do for my legs. Wool base layer, plus… some kind of track pants / guide pants, like what Patagonia offers? Or… full-out down pants, with a shell?

Help me! :)