Friday Hodgepodge

Four Neat Tech-y Things...

... I might try.

Of course, some may decide it's best to keep their thoughts to themselves, after all... (Image by Jeff James, via Unsplash, license.)

1. Someone out there has figured out a good way to transform hand-written notes into web pages. He elaborates in part within a blog post he originally wrote by hand:

Every morning I kept adding to my new paper website until I had written a whole tiny travel blog about the trip.

Despite no one reading it, I found myself genuinely looking forward to writing a new post each morning.

I wrote more without the distractions of the internet, and it was refreshing not being in front of a screen. It was also just really fun. [link omitted]

This enterprising soul has started a small business that offers "a year long paper website, and a free Moleskine notebook to build your website in" for 99 smackers. In addition, he names some interesting web sites that some of his customers have come up with.

If you want to journal and get a blog out of it at the same time, now there's a way.

2. Did you know that Salvador Dalí and Thomas Edison took advantage of an early sleep stage to further their creative efforts? Here's how::

To use the technique, visionaries such as Dalí and Edison would hold an object, such as a spoon or a ball, while falling asleep in a chair. As they drifted off, the object would fall, make a noise and wake them up. Having spent a few moments on the brink of unconsciousness, they would be ready to start their work.

I have an advantage in trying this as I am one who falls asleep easily. Unfortunately, I have kids and most of my work happens in the wee hours or during the day. Caffeination might be a problem during the former -- drink coffee and be unable to drift off, or don't and risk sleeping through -- and the extra measures I employ for short naps might work against me during the day. I intend to try it at some point anyway and, if I get dramatic results, I'll say something.

3. The FDA has recently approved eye drops that counteract presbyopia. (This is a new use for a drug that has been around for a while.)

"Beginning around the age of 40, many find themselves using reading glasses, holding text further away, or even increasing the font size and lighting on screens to try to see more clearly," he said in a statement. "We are proud to offer VUITY as a first-of-its-kind once-daily eye drop that we believe will change the way people and their eye doctors approach presbyopia. The FDA approval of VUITY exemplifies our continued pursuit of innovative new treatments that push the boundaries of what's possible in eye care."

Pilocarpine HCl ophthalmic solution 1.25% is a daily, prescription eye drop that works in as early as 15 minutes and lasts up to 6 hours, as measured on day 30, to improve near and intermediate vision without impacting distance vision.

I have worn glasses for mild nearsightedness and mild astigmatism for decades, and my current glasses allow me to ... sort of ... correct for presbyopia. But for fine print, I'm having to whip out a magnifying glass, which is a pain.

My near vision is good enough that being able to change focus easily would obviate the need for either when I'm working. I'm definitely looking into this some more.

4. Over a decade ago, Portable Ubuntu proved quite useful to me in situations when I had to use a Windows computer. Unfortunately, it became outdated orphanware soon after.

But I have been interested in using Linux from pen drives since and keep an antenna out for replacements or interesting similar ideas.

A common one of these is booting from a pen drive with Linux installation files on it (but without installing it). People who want to try Linux often do this, as do people who need to rescue data from a computer that can't boot. A major problem is that, until recently, this entailed some kind of skullduggery and an ISO image of an installation CD or DVD. This means that for reasons I don't fully understand, the pen drive itself is unusable to do such things as -- oh, I don't know -- save the data when you find it.

This is where EasyOS comes in. It uses a drive image file to contain the OS instead, which -- for reasons I don't fully understand, makes the rest of the pen drive available:

With a drive-image, the entire USB-stick is available. The EasyOS drive image has two partitions, a vfat "boot partition" and a ext4 "working partition". Initially, the working-partition is only 640MB, but at first bootup it automatically expands to fill the drive.

This doesn't let you use Linux and Windows at the same time -- I have a different way that I do that now -- but it does allow for a much better Linux-based system rescue option than before.

-- CAV