Highly Recommended: Bullzip PDF printer

Many programs let you export to PDF, but many others don't. For this, you need a PDF printer, which lets you print to PDF just as if you were printing to a physical printer. For this, my favorite program is currently the free Bullzip PDF printer. Get it at bullzip.com - no advertising or crapware is included. It works with all recent Windows versions including 64-bit. Donations are accepted. It's fast, simple, and works well.

My Review of Seattle Sports H2Zero Diamond Dry Bag - Large - Special Buy

Originally submitted at REI

A clear diamond-shaped window in this large dry bag makes it easy to view its contents.

Seattle Sports H2Zero Diamond Dry Bag - Large - Special Buy

Good bag for quick-grab raft/kayak/canoe

By water on the brain from SLC, UT on 10/25/2011

 

4out of 5

Pros: Sturdy clip, Waterproof, Strong Material, Good Capacity, Good size, Surprisingly durable

Best Uses: Paddling

Describe Yourself: Casual/ Recreational

Was this a gift?: No

Had this bag 2+ years and used it on several multi-day trips. It has held up better than I expected. No leaks or holes so far. Good for holding mid-size camera, glasses, keys, other small things that you want easily reachable through the day. Transparent window is handy.

(legalese)

My Review of NRS Cargo Net with Straps

Originally submitted at NRS

Our cargo net is one of the most versatile rafting accessories on the river. It can be secured over the top of your gear to keep it in the boat, or hung between two crossbars to create a cradle for loose gear. Built with a border of 2" webbing for strength and strap on points for securing misc...

NRS Cargo Net with Straps

Definitely worth it for truck and raft

By Bruce from Salt Lake City on 6/19/2011

 

5out of 5

Pros: Fits full size pickup, 9 straps are great, Seems plenty sturdy

Best Uses: Rapids Paddling, Truck on way to river, Rivers

Was this a gift?: No

This was purchased before a high water Green River and then a Yampa trip. We also used it on the pickup bed on the way to the river. It seems very well made, and the large size is just right for a full size 8-foot pickup bed. It makes securing gear on a 16-17' raft a lot easier although more D-rings on the raft would be nice. It's a little big for a raft not really heaped up but I just rolled up the edges. Way better than the cheapo bungee-type net I had gotten at a tool outlet. Seems like it will last a good long time, and it was great to have nine straps included. Someone at NRS thought this through pretty well.

(legalese)

I drank the Apple Kool-Aid: iPod Touch 4G: what? Only synch to one desktop?

So I am at last sipping the Apple Kool-Aid and bought an iPod Touch 4G 8 GB for $200 at Target. So far so good. There are lot of things I like about it. My kids love Angry Birds! So I installed iTunes on the family PC and expected to be able to also synch to my work desktop and notebook (something Palm has had for, oh, 15 years). Nope! I cannot easily copy music, podcasts, photos etc to another PC. What is up with this? Why is desktop synch in 2011 so hard when it was so easy in 1995?

Hardware UARTs under Windows 7: Yes, it is possible

There are many reasons to want a real hardware UART on a desktop PC. In my case, we use a number of embedded systems and devices (e.g. Cisco 678 DSL modem, UARTs on TStik) which require an asynchronous serial connection at up to 115200 baud. In addition we need to be able to use some legacy software (e.g. javaxcomm which is recently changing under Oracle), as well as scriptable serial terminal software (e.g. RealTerm) to communicate with embedded systems, sensors, and devices.

Similarly, we have the need for a true hardware IEEE1284 parallel port with EPP mode to use with ;egacy  JTAG adapters for Xilinx and legacy hardware such as JStamp and JStik.

BUT most new PCs have only USB (and things like RS232 handshaking signals are sometimes not properly functional on USB virtual COM ports) and Windows 7 no longer includes Hyperterminal (no great loss IMO). So the common (mis)perception is that hardware UARTs and software to access them are difficult or impossible under Windows 7. Ditto for IEE1284 true parallel ports with EPP mode (not just printer-capable ports).

Today I am building new Windows 7 64-bit PCs and wanting a solution for this, along with many of our customers. I'm using the MSI 890FXA-GD70 motherboard

And I am happy to say that real hardware UARTs are possible under Windows 7.

Here is the Rosewill RC303 at Newegg. This under-$20, PCI-bus card has two serial and one parallel port. So far I am able to use the hardware UARTs with RealTerm. I will add to this with more information as it develops.

Eudora 7.1.0.9 under Windows 7, vs Eudora OSE

So I am finally building a nice Windows 7 machine to replace the old reliable Dell 670 which is my main workstation. The 670 BTW just got brought back to life, sort of, but that's another post topic.

Yes, Eudora 7.1.0.9 (now called 'Eudora Classic') CAN be used under Windows 7. See

this Eudora forum post for some tips and helpful  links. More relevant: I just installed  Eudora Classic under Winodws 7, pointed it at the NAS folder holding all my mail, and it seems to be off and running.

Eudora OSE is an enhanced wrapper around Thunderbird, but also includes changes to Thunderbird, if I understand the remarks at https://wiki.mozilla.org/Eudora_OSE

I run it this way (mail files on NAS) so that they get back up along with other data, and also so that another PC on the company network can access the files if my desktop is down or otherwise occupied.

The OSE version looks promising but lacks some of the Classic features I have come to like: e.g., outgoing mail filters, cascading of open mail folders, right-clicking to make a current mail the basis for a new filter, etc. OSE documentation leaves a lot to be desired. I would be happy to help write some of that if I can first figure out how to get OSE usable enough for me.

Classic also has some bugs/issues (automatic filters don't seem to work correctly for me; I have to periodically manually filter my main in-boxes to get it all filtered) and it sometimes crashes and then spends forever rebuilding indexes. And it just seems like I should upgrade. But in the meantime I have to get work done...

So maybe I will try OSE on a home Win7-64 machine and hope that the rough edges get smoothed soon.

Some users reported that they had to manually install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 runtime to get Classic to work under Windows 7 64 bit, but I didn't.

Microsoft .NET Security Update Fail

 So Windows Update keeps wanting to load a Security Update KB2418241 for .NET 2.0 SP2 and 3.5 SP1.

But it fails every time with unhelpful messages.

Great. So what to do? Well, it turns out I cannot uninstall, repair, or reinstall .NET 2.X using Windows Installer or Windows Install Cleanup. Swell.

So it gets me wondering: what uses any of these .NET runtimes? Why can't windows tell me?

Perhaps by deleting the .NET 3.5 SP1 I can wait to see what fails: Evernote 3.5 crashes ungracefully with no helpful message at all. Reinstalling it forces a reinstall of the missing .NET 3.5 SP1. But I still can't install the Security Update.

KB2416473 is a Security Update for  .NET 3.5 SP1 only - will it install now? Yes.

.NET 2.0 shows up in Add/Remove Programs, but cannot be uninstalled:

The obvious thing to do is look at the article URL (which is not clickable and can't even be selected for copy and paste... aargh.... http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/q312/5/00.asp which redirects to http://support.microsoft.com/KB/906894 but sadly this is no help. I am advised to "To resolve this problem, uninstall the .NET Framework 2.0 Service Pack 1 before you install the .NET Framework 2.0." but this is not possible on my system.

Time to try the registry? I tried to delete the values in LEGACY_CLR_OPTIMIZATION_V2.0.50727_32 but could not. So instead I searched for all .Net references and found a few to .Net 2.0 such as
 HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\ASP.NET_2.0.50727 which has Performance->Library value c:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\aspnet_perf.dll.

So all the keys using .Net 2.0 include
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\aspnet_state\Performance
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\clr_optimization_v2.0.50727_32
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Eventlog\Application\.NET Runtime 2.0 Error Reporting
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Eventlog\Application\.NET Runtime Optimization Service
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Eventlog\Application\ASP.NET 2.0.50727.0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Eventlog\Application\SyncToy
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Eventlog\Application\System.ServiceModel.Install 3.0.0.0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Eventlog\Application\WMI.NET Provider Extension
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Eventlog\System\MSDTC Gateway
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\Eventlog\System\MSDTC WS-AT Protocol
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\aspnet_state

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Enum\Root\LEGACY_CLR_OPTIMIZATION_V2.0.50727_32\0000
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Services\ASP.NET\Performance
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Services\ASP.NET_2.0.50727
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Services\aspnet_state
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Services\aspnet_state\Performance
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Services\clr_optimization_v2.0.50727_32
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Services\Eventlog\Application
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Services\Eventlog\Application\.NET Runtime 2.0 Error Reporting
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Services\Eventlog\Application\ASP.NET 2.0.50727.0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Services\Eventlog\Application\Business Connectivity Services(Legacy Provider)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Services\Eventlog\Application\idsvc
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Services\Eventlog\Application\SyncToy
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Services\Eventlog\Application\System.ServiceModel.Install 3.0.0.0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Services\Eventlog\System\MSDTC Gateway
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet002\Services\Eventlog\System\MSDTC WS-AT Protocol

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Enum\Root\LEGACY_CLR_OPTIMIZATION_V2.0.50727_32\0000
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Services\ASP.NET\Performance
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Services\ASP.NET_2.0.50727
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Services\ASP.NET_2.0.50727\Performance
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Services\aspnet_state
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Services\aspnet_state\Performance
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Services\clr_optimization_v2.0.50727_32
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Services\Eventlog\Application
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Services\Eventlog\Application\.NET Runtime 2.0 Error Reporting
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Services\Eventlog\Application\ASP.NET 2.0.50727.0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Services\Eventlog\Application\Business Connectivity Services(Legacy Provider)
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Services\Eventlog\Application\idsvc
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Services\Eventlog\Application\SyncToy
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Services\Eventlog\Application\System.ServiceModel.Install 3.0.0.0
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Services\Eventlog\Application\WMI.NET Provider Extension
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Services\Eventlog\System\MSDTC Gateway
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet003\Services\Eventlog\System\MSDTC WS-AT Protocol

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Enum\Root\LEGACY_CLR_OPTIMIZATION_V2.0.50727_32\0000
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ASP.NET\Performance
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ASP.NET_2.0.50727
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ASP.NET_2.0.50727\Performance
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\aspnet_state
OK this is getting tiresome and I can see a pattern here.

In fact, 2.0 seems to be installed at C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727, and likewise C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v3.0

What Next?
Google for some other solution such as
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/astebner/archive/2005/04/16/408856.aspx