Virtual Visit

Dear Mom,

I thought you’d enjoy seeing these… even though they’re not photos of our family, they’re from a family you’ve heard about.

Just click this line to open a new window and see the photos.

Love,
Dave

Dear Mom,

Last Christmas, I got Jeanean an iPad, the tablet computer from Apple.  It’s very different from the computers you’ve seen–no keyboard (when you need to type, you can have a virtual keyboard on the screen).  No buttons (they’re virtual, too).  No mouse (no place to plug it in).

Here’s a commercial for it (a bit noisy on the sound track):

My thought was that she could use it for reading and for listening to music and podcasts (recordings you can download). I also thought that sometimes on trips, she could leave her regular computer home and take just the iPad.

But to get music onto it, you have to use Apple’s iTunes Store, an online site.  The easiest way to to day (and “easiest” is a very relative term) is to install iTunes on your PC.  Actually, I think the easiest way is probably to throw out your PC and get an Apple computer, but we weren’t quite up to that.

What you do is install iTunes on your PC, then connect the iPad to it and synchronize them (“sync” is the cool word).  But we never had any luck getting them to sync — the process would hang up at step 2 of 7, for more than an hour.

So this week I was determined the make this thing work.  I tried again; no luck.  I removed iTunes from her computer and reinstalled it — the kind of thing computer people do because it’s just easier in the long run.  STILL no luck.  I even let the sync run for four hours, thinking, okay, I’ve just been impatient the first time.

Nope.

So I went searching around online for help.  The secret is that you have to ask the right question when you search.  If you search just for “sync iPad,” you get a billion matches.  Ditto “sync ipad and pc.”  Finally I asked about “sync ipad pc windows xp” (XP is the operating system on Jeanean’s computer).  Finally I found some suggestions in an online help forum.

The problem was some obscure thing so technical I don’t think I can explain it.  The good news is, the two computers are now synched.  What this means is that if Jeanean copies some new music onto her PC, the next time she starts iTunes on it and has the iPad nearby, the music will automatically transfer to the iPad.

It’s weird.  It’s like scanning those checks instead of depositing them.  But I’m in a really good mood because my frustration is over, and because maybe Jeanean will now find more uses for her iPad.

Love,
Dave

Dear Mom,

Since you’re an expert computer user–you’ve had one for more than a dozen years–you’ve heard a lot of the strange terminology that people think makes sense.

Like “wallpaper.”

Wallpaper is the term for the picture that you see as the background on your computer.  I think you use one with autumn leaves.  Here’s a similar image on a wide-screen monitor:

Just an example

That monitor is like the wide one that I use.  I told you before, I think, that I usually have two screens going: the one on my laptop, and the wider one that’s connected to it.  This gives me a lot more real estate to work with–I can open a document to read, open PowerPoint and move its window alongside so I can write about what I’m reading, and even have email or something in the background.

One problem is that the two screens are different sides, and so if I set up wallpaper to be on both screens, either the picture is too small for the big monitor or too big for the smaller screen on the laptop.  Here’s an example:

Leaf image doesn't look the same on both

I took these shots while I was writing this post. If you look closely in the photo above, the picture of the leaves looks very nice on the external monitor (the screen on the left).  But the image is too big to fit onto the laptop’s screen.  Look closely and you will see the little triangular hole in both pictures.  Basically, there isn’t enough room on the laptop screen to fit more than about a third of the total image.

So, using some fancy footwork, here’s what I did:

• Took the image that fit nicely onto the big monitor.
• Copied it and resized the copy so it’d fit on the small monitor.
• Pasted that copy to the right of the original image — so I have one, really wide image.

I call this a span picture, because it’s designed to span the two monitors.  Here’s what the spanned image for the leaf picture would look like if you printed it by itself:

The span image - image on the left resized and pasted on the right

The white space you see at the lower right of the picture is due to the fact that the laptop screen is only 768 pixels high (a pixel is one dot on the computer screen) while the external monitor is 1080 pixels — nearly half again as high.

This looks strange, but when I set the span picture as my wallpaper, the break occurs in just the right place.  As a result it looks like I have the same picture on both screen, with the one on the right smaller overall.

If you compare this picture with the first one, you can see the difference: the whole leaf picture shows up on my laptop (on the right).  The colors looks different, but in par that’s due to the angle of the screen.

I really like this two-screen arrangement, and I have a folder set up with a couple dozen of these span images so I can have a different wallpaper image each day–and have the wallpaper fit.

Love,
Dave

Dear Mom,

When I get up in the morning, one of the first things I do is check my phone… not because I’m expecting calls, but because that’s the fastest way to check the weather report.

I have one app (an “app” is what they call the little programs or applications that run on a phone) that gives me the local time and weather.  And I can click to a more detailed report, like this sample:

Not MY weather forecast, but A weather forecase

That’s a sample I found online (you may recall that I don’t live in New York).  At a glance you can get the current temperature and other information, along with the day’s forecast.  I like the percentage of precipitation–I’m not one of those people who complains when “they get it wrong.”  if they say 50% chance, then to me that means half the time it’s not going to rain.

The picture above is shorter than the one on my actualy phone… where you see “extended forecast,” I see a display like they have on the TV weather report, with little clouds or suns or thunderstorms for each day.

What surprised me about this, after our fairly chilly weather, is that the predicted high for today is 86.  We’ve had things pretty mild, so it will be a surprise for it to get so warm.  By the weened it’ll be back down around 70, though.

This will be yet another test of our attic insulation job.  I’ve been tracking our electric bills and the monthly average temperature, just to see if I can notice definite improvement.  I got the monthly electric bill going back to October 2009 (since we had the work done in October of 2011, I backtracked two years).  I made a chart for the amount of the bill, the total kilowatt hours, the daily average kWh, and the average temperature at Reagan National Airport for a given month.

The dates don’t necessarily coincide, but I’m more interested in the overall pattern, which is why I use a monthly figure.  That means I only need three numbers each month when I update the chart.

This is my “average temperature” chart:

The thicker green is for the year that began in October of last year (after the new insulation went in).  You can see that the entire winter was warmer than the previous two years, so even without the insulation we’d have used less electricity.  However, the bills for December and January were nearly 1/3 lower than the average for the previous two years, which to me says things are working out well.

I mention all this because the paper this morning was predicting a very warm summer.  That’ll be another test for the insulation.

Love,
Dave