Jesus, Google!

Apparently someone at Google has decided that composing an e-mail is too straightforward, and so they've decided to muck with Gmail yet again. Zoho, anyone?

Dumb Tracfone.com

Some moron at TracFone put the following on their texting FAQ:

So is this 0.3 minutes? 0.3 cents? 0.3 dollars?

5 is Not Prime

Well, it is prime, but if we relax the requirement that it has no integer factors to allow complex numbers with integer components, i.e., a + bi where a and b are integers, then 5 is not prime.

(2 + i)(2 - i) = 4 -2i + 2i -i^2 = 4 - (-1) = 5

I love the BBC 4 program In Our Time. Listen to the discussion of the history of complex numbers at http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/radio4/iot/iot_20100923-1035a.mp3

Screenshots in Gnome, Mate, etc.

[ Note added 2013-05-13: I now have a scrot-based shell script that does this better IMHO than does Imagemagick. See http://martesmartes.blogspot.com/2013/05/screenshots-in-lxde-mate-etc.html ]

The Gnome screenshot tool has always fallen a bit short in the usability department. How do I change the default directory for storing screen shots? How do I make it default to "select area to grab"? I've always just lived with it, but tonight decided to do a little legwork to learn how to make it default to what I wanted, and I found something better.

 I've long used ImageMagick for image editing. In some respects Mirage is easier to use, but Mirage doesn't handle as many image formats. I suppose the GIMP is more popular, but it's a usability nightmare. Google led me to a wonderful page at the Webmaster Tips Blog.

Assuming one has ImageMagick installed, taking a screenshot of a selected area on the screen is as simple as typing

    import filename.imagetype

and then selecting the area of the screen to copy.

As a concrete example, suppose I want to capture some text from above in file selectArea.png:

    import selectArea.png

The result is this, in a file called selectArea.png:

I like it.

Thumb Drive Undelete Files

A few weeks ago a student wanted to know how to undelete files on a FAT-formatted thumb drive. I knew I used to be able to do that with a Linux system--no guarantees of reliability of course--but a quick search turned nothing up. Actually, it's easy: just install testdisk, https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/testdisk . To run, you may have to be superuser. It installs easily and works well (n of 1 study) on Mint 13, but any Debian-derived system is probably fine.

Sprint News: Too Little, Too Late

One week after I cancel my contract with Credo Wireless (and pay a $70 early termination fee--totally worth it) comes the news that Sprint may be expanding their cellular network if some other company kicks in some money. Credo is on the Sprint cellular network, and I can't say that anything like this is likely to entice me back. What Credo meant to me was a long-term commitment to a bad phone and poor signal strength. Sprint was the poor signal strength part of this. Credo/Sprint didn't provide a usable signal in my office, a good signal at my home, or any signal to speak of at my parents' house. Good riddance.