Peter's Useful Crap

My internal hard drive recently started to make clicking noises, which is often the first sign that it a hard drive is near death. I quickly went out to buy a new internal hard drive, as well as an external USB hard drive enclosure in order to connect the hard drive to the still working computer and transfer all data as soon as possible. Once that was complete, I would just swap in the new hard drive.

For those who are interested, the program I used to successfully copy all my data to the new hard drive is called DriveImage XML. DriveImage XML is free for personal use and enables you to “image” a hard drive even while it is in use running an operating system.

The challenge I had was in getting Windows 7 to actually recognize the external hard drive in the first place. I figured that USB enclosures are “plug and play”, and the USB tray icon verified that:

Double-clicking on that icon showed the enclosure device, and it even correctly identified the hard drive itself. But it wasn’t showing up as a drive with a drive letter in Windows Explorer — and as such, no program would be able to recognize it as a drive either. The Volumes tab on the Properties menu for the drive showed its status as “not initialized”.

What I’d completely forgotten was that internal drives usually have to be formatted before being used, whether in an enclosure or internal to the computer; this is in contrast to drives that already come advertised as external drives and are usually pre-formatted. And something I learned is that you no longer need a separate formatting or partitioning program such as Partition Magic. (In fact, the built-in tool has been available since Windows XP — it’s been a while since I’d needed to partition a drive!) You can access the Windows 7 partitioning tool “Disk Management” via:

Start Menu > Programs > Administrative Tools > Computer Management
or
Control Panel > Administrative Tools > Computer Management

Then, under “Storage Tools” you should see “Disk Management”:

Once there, you should see your unformatted and unpartitioned drive in the bottom panel. Right-clicking on the unformatted space should bring up a menu where you can create a formatted partition, assign a drive letter to it, and mark it as active to make it bootable. If you are going to have a few partitions on a drive, be sure to only mark one as active / bootable.

The formatting and partitioning process took only a few seconds, and the status for the drive then displayed as “Online”:

Except in special, temporary circumstances, tap water in Canada is safe to drink. In fact, Metro Vancouver boasts some of the cleanest tap water in the world. It is certainly the environmentally friendly alternative to bottled water (which itself is often just bottled tap water). However, even if you’re on board with tap water, you might still filter it with Brita products and their alternatives, for reasons of taste preference, fear of contamination from water pipes, fear induced by misleading advertising, or even social pressure. I won’t argue against those reasons in this post. What, though, do you do with the filters when they need to be replaced?

You can recycle Brita filters, although this fact is not well publicized. The Brita Canada website does not seem to have any mention of this, but Brita has partnered with recycled plastics manufacturer Preserve to accept used Brita filters. (Unfortunately they do not accept other brands’ filters.)

If you live near a London Drugs store, you can drop off the filters there. Otherwise, as a consumer, the process is roughly as follows: dry out 3 used Brita filters, wrap them in plastic, and ship them to Brita, preferably in the original box. The Preserve website has a link to a prepaid shipping label to print and affix to the box. Because the Preserve recycling facility is in New York, Brita Canada ships them large batches of used filters a couple of times a year. Preserve will then recycle both the plastic and the active filter elements.

I’m a bit skeptical as to how efficient that process is, but Brita claims that shipping the filters out for recycling has a net benefit impact (in an unknown unit of measurement) versus just throwing them away. I think that there is at least an intangible benefit to people getting into the habit of trying to divert as much waste as possible from landfills (and also to limit the amount of waste generated in general).

For full information, check out the Preserve website.

Online contact lens retailers such as Clearly Contacts have definitely impacted the contact lens industry, and I’ve ordered from them without problems before.

Lately, however, I’ve discovered that storefront dispensers are not necessarily more expensive. I’ve been going to Eye Shades Optical in Burnaby, and they work out to be cheaper than online sites when shipping and my low-volume purchases are factored in. The staff at Eye Shades Optical are very nice, helpful, and friendly, and provide good answers to my occasional questions. They have also given me a free contact lens case when I’ve needed one with a purchase, and also sometimes have free samples of contact lens solution or contact lenses, and occasional deals on the lenses.

Eye Shades Optical is located adjacent to the Metrotown bus loop and SkyTrain station, underneath the movie theatre at Station Square, and can be reached at 604-438-8788.

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On a related note, remember to regularly visit a licensed optometrist or ophthalmologist to get your eye health checked. You’re not obligated to buy contact lenses or glasses from them, but they can identify eye diseases and other vision problems, unlike a normal retailer or optician such as Eye Shades Optical. Eye exams are also covered by MSP.. Thanks to Derek for pointing out that routine eye exams are not covered by MSP unless you’re 18 and younger or 65 and older. (Although, if the eye exam uncovers a potential medical issue with your eyes, MSP might cover part of the exam cost.) If your employer has a benefits plan, eye exams might be covered under that.

I was trying to print some invitations on a custom 5.5-inch by 8.5 inch paper size on an HP 7760 printer. However, it would spit the paper out with this error:

“Paper is too small. Choose a larger paper size. Job was cancelled. Press OK.”

Of course, the paper size was properly set within Word or OpenOffice, and the printer supports paper sizes much smaller. A Google search revealed suggestions to choose a different paper size and then adjust the margins to mimic the paper size. However, the solution for me was just to make sure that a few key printer properties were set, specifically on the Features tab:

Most importantly, the paper type, paper source, and paper size have to be set. When you select the paper size “Custom”, you can define a custom size such as “Invitation”:

As for paper type, I just chose one that sounded close enough (“Other Greeting Cards”). I also noticed that changing a selection for one of the first two options unexpectedly reset the other selections. I didn’t realize this at first, and got the same printer error a couple more times. Be sure to set the size first, then set the paper source, then set the paper type.

On another note, if you want to change the measurement unit from centimetres to inches:

• In Microsoft Word, access the “Tools” > “Options” menu, then the “General” tab.
• In OpenOffice.org Writer, access the “Tools” > “Options” menu, then the “OpenOffice.org Writer” > “General” settings.

In the Privacy tab in Firefox’s Options menu, there is a setting “Remember my browser history for at least __ days”. Although I had this value set to 60 days, it was storing my browser history for over 6 months. Of course, the wording for that setting includes “at least”, so it was still behaving as specified.

It can be very useful to keep a browsing history of the past 6 months, but the problem is that it was considerably slowing down Firefox. Whenever I would start to type a URL into the address bar for the first time, the browser would freeze for probably about 20 seconds, presumably because it was loading the URL history into its cache so that it could auto-complete the URL for me. When you use a computer at work every day, and your job involves building and testing websites, that URL history grows very fast.

Thankfully, Firefox has many more configuration settings than are revealed in the nicely laid out option menus. Many of the settings are mysterious and not that well-documented, but they exist nonetheless. You can access these extra settings by typing “about:config” in the address bar. There is a setting “browser.history_expire_sites”; putting this value at 20,000 means that the browser will remove URL history entries that are older than the number of days specified above and that are more than 20,000 URL visits ago.

On another note, if you want a really speedy browser, try Google Chrome and Opera.