I noticed recently that I’d get logged off from my computer over night. I’d leave the system running at night without logging off, and in the morning I’d have to log in again, with all the previously running programs gone. I had recently added a SATA controller in order to be able to run three SATA drives on this particular system (it only has 2 SATA ports on the motherboard), so I thought the culprit was a bad driver for the new card. Turns out that wasn’t it.

My computer runs backups over night (I use MozyHome), which shouldn’t be a problem, really. But as part of the backup, a volume shadow copy snapshot is made, and this step caused the blue screen error.

In addition to adding a SATA controller, I had also bought a bigger hard drive to hold my ever expanding collection of pictures, vacation videos, etc. When I installed it, I cloned the old drive (which was a PATA drive) to carry all the information forward onto the new drive.

Apparently, after you install a cloned a hard drive, some information is retained on the system about the old drive, and this affects volume shadow copies.

I had to go to Device Manager and turn on “Show hidden devices”:

Then, under Storage Volumes, I had to delete one in particular that seemed to have gotten a corrupted name (something like Generic Volume□□□ [not shown in this screenshot, since it’s fixed now]):

Just for good measure I deleted all of them (although they didn’t seem to really disappear), ignoring the request to reboot after each prompt to do so.

When I was done, a couple of reboots of Windows recreated the necessary information about these volumes from the (old and new) hardware. After that the volume shadow copy snapshots no longer failed and I was able to run my backups without blue screen errors.

Credits for this find go to the folks in this thread: http://www.techspot.com/vb/topic94820-2.html

Categories: Microsoft, Software, Tech Toys
1 Comment »

In case you’ve seen my Windows 7 Theme Pack, here are the pictures that are in it. You may want to know if they’re worth it before you download the 12+ MB of .themepack file.

Categories: Personal, Pictures, Tech Toys, Windows 7
2 Comments »

Just so I can say that I jumped on a bandwagon once: Mike Swanson inspired me to create my very own Windows 7 Theme Pack. It contains 12 pictures I’ve taken over the past year or so with my trusty old Canon PowerShot S30 (yes, I’m still running around with a camera that only does 3 megapixels.)

I’ve included a few photos in the pack that I managed to have included in the Spring 2009 software for the HP TouchSmart PC. They’re in the Personalize – Background area, should you be interested in finding them. Here’s one you may recognize:

While I didn’t put this one in the Theme Pack, I did pick a similar shot of downtown Seattle. Come to think of it, maybe this post will be inspiration for doing a “picture of the day” type of thing. Hmm. Been wanting to do that for a while.

All I can do now is hope the size of the pack (12 MB or so) won’t blow my bandwidth allowance…

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Microsoft, Tech Toys
4 Comments »

Just in case you haven’t seen it, this is probably the neatest geek game out there right now (next to World of Goo).

Crayon Physics Deluxe from Petri Purho on Vimeo

Go get it at www.crayonphysics.com.

Perfect for the HP TouchSmart PC, by the way!

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Software, Tech Toys
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Check out the interview with some of the HP TouchSmart folks on .NET Rocks! It just went live earlier today.

http://www.dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=399

The parts for developers are mostly in the first 15 minutes. I have some PDF slides that might illustrate things for people who are just looking for a quick visual and not a whole lot of depth. If you’re interested, let me know and I’ll post them here.

Categories: HP TouchSmart, Software development, Tech Toys
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In which I learn that even though the SMART status and drive self-tests report “No problems found”, you can’t trust them all the time.

To make a long story short: Even though I’ve mentioned in the past that it’s a good idea to monitor your hard drive’s SMART status to detect potentially impending doom, sometimes that’s not enough (in my last post on the topic, I replaced a drive based on SMART data.) You also need to look into the Windows Event Log to see if Windows silently is logging read errors (but not telling you in so many words, like “Hey, I can’t read your hard drive. Get a new one before this one goes all disc grinder on you!”)

My new tale involves a drive that didn’t show any signs of bad SMART data, didn’t report any trouble when analyzed with the manufacturer’s tools, but caused trouble anyway. Over the course of several months my main workhorse computer developed an annoying habit of booting slowly, sometimes to the point of freezing up entirely before getting all the little background programs loaded that I’ve amassed over about three years without reinstalling the OS.

I suspected the motherboard to be faulty at first, so I switched that out, with the result that I had to re-activate XP, which was annoying. I thought that had worked, but no, things kept being bad. Then I figured that I’d have to somehow test whether the hard drive controller on the mobo had gone bonkers. Well, since I have two other drives on the same chip, that didn’t seem possible.

Next, I thought “How about doing a benchmark on the hard drives?” So I found this pretty cool free (for personal use) benchmarking program called HD Tune (which, incidentally, also reports SMART data), and guess what – it would sometimes abort the test with a “read error” message. And sometimes the benchmark graphic would look like this:

Believe me, you don’t want it to look like that, blue and yellow all over the place like a shiner! What you want is something more like this:

A nice and steady drop-off in speed (blue) and increase in access time (yellow).

Anyway, the read error prompted me to check the Windows Event Log, and sure enough there were disk read errors quietly reported regularly over the past several months. So I decided it was time for another hard drive replacement. What I learned from that is “meat” enough for another post. Good thing I keep all my data on a physically separate drive (and online at Mozy).

The moral of the story is: “Check your hard drive’s SMART status, but be suspicious anyway!”

Categories: Software, Tech Toys
2 Comments »

The big day is here and gone. The new TouchSmart PC has been announced to great fanfare on the web, and I’m sure there’s more to come. The blogs are full of praise and criticism already, of course. Since I was closely involved with the creation, I’m happy about all the praise and hope that we’ll be able to address the criticism over time (especially regarding the software). In other words: there’s never enough time to get any piece of software 100% smack-dab perfect for everyone’s taste.

I’d like to write a little about things that may not be well known yet. Yes, there is actually limited “dual-touch” in the new software. You can resize the upper row of “tiles” using two fingers. You can scroll using two fingers once you’ve gone into the “Browser”. Due to how the touch screen works you need to make sure your fingers are a certain distance apart to get it to work right. It’s “limited” dual-touch because of the natural laws of time and resource constraints on the development team: we ran out of time to do more.

Oh, and nowhere in the HP TouchSmart software do you need to “double tap”/”double click”. If a single tap doesn’t do it, the touch screen saw too much movement of your finger during the tap and turned it into a move action instead. That’s the challenge with using optical technology that sweeps just above the glass. It sees your finger a little before you actually touch the screen. (Think Vincent Cassell in “Ocean’s Twelve” or Catherine Zeta-Jones in “Entrapment”)

We’ve had feedback from users in the past, asking for tutorials around the software. I’m personally really happy that we managed to put two tutorials on the system for this new incarnation of HP TouchSmart. And they are available right from the lower row of “tiles”. Here’s a small taste of how the tutorials were created:

As you may be able to see, there’s a lot of work that goes into even such a small thing as creating tutorial videos. I certainly had no idea how involved the process is before I had the chance to help out with the production in a (very) small way. I feel lucky to have worked with and met so many great people. You can find the tutorials here, starting with the basic one in English.

For those of you who read this blog because of the WPF topics I’ve touched on in the past: yes, central parts of the software were created using WPF. I don’t mean to be a fanboy, but I’ve said it in the past, WPF is powerful stuff. The ability to have separate people working on styling the software while other people work on “business logic” is incredibly valuable. At the end you get full visual fidelity of the design for virtually no added work.

Before I close (and this gets much longer), let me put a question out there for software developers. If it were possible to write software that could end up as “tiles” in the TouchSmart software, would that be interesting to you? If not, why not? Don’t take this question as any indication or promise of what the future may hold. I’m just curious about your opinion. Comment away, please.

And for those of you who just stumbled upon this by chance (or dug through the sea of noise out there) and are curious about certain aspects of the new HP TouchSmart PC or the software, I’ll try to answer questions within certain limits in the comments as well.

The rest of this post is mostly a collection of links I gathered on the day of the announcement, with a little added commentary for myself. What a splash!

HP TouchSmart PC gets slick upgrade (Slashgear, Promo pics)

HP TouchSmart- bringing touch to the iMac form (jkOnTheRun, Promo pics)

HP TouchSmart PC gets refreshed, unboxed (Gearlive, unboxing [http://www.gearlive.com/gallery/category/C67])

HP’s TouchSmart 2 in the wild (Engadget, Promo pics link)

HP Touchsmart IQ506 Brings New Interface, Bigger Screen (Gizmodo, tutorial video embedded, press blurb)

Preview- HP TouchSmart IQ500 Series PC (Hardwarezone Australia, prototype pics, specs)

HP updates TouchSmart with TouchSmart IQ504 and IQ506 PC (Krunker, promo pics, iMac comparison quote)

HP Touchsmart IQ506 and 504 Touch PC (Techfresh, promo pic)

HP launches TouchSmart all-in-one PCs (TechChee, promo pic)

HP Touchsmart IQ506 and 504 Touch PC (HawtGadgets, promo pic)

HP TouchSmart IQ500 hands on PC (Five.TV, promo pic)

HP Launches new touch-screen PC (Nudjit.com, Stage pic, embedded tutorial video, showing the precise touch action needed to avoid accidental “moves”)

HP TouchSmart update tackles iMac, Gateway (electronista, Promo pics)

http://www.kickstartnews.com/2008/06/hp-announce-new-pcs-and-laptops.html (Promo pic)

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2008/080610xb.html?mtxs=rss-corp-news (HP press release)

http://blogs.msdn.com/mthree/archive/2008/06/10/touchsmart-2-061008.aspx (MSDN, Promo pics, link to PC Mag article)

http://hpcorp.feedroom.com/?fr_story=1a61d0307fcbf0b5a167dd7e419f65b157125a75&rf=rss (HP video site, fingerprints video)

HP Connecting Your World Keynote – Live (Gizmonews, LiveBlog from the Berlin event, lots of stage pics)

http://blogs.yankeegroup.com/2008/06/10/hp-wants-to-be-touched-but-not-groped/ (Promo pic)

http://vantan.org/archives/2008/06/hp_launches_tou.php (Vanessa Tan, lots of Berlin stage pics, one YouTube video)

http://site-designer.blogspot.com/2008/06/news-hp-targets-wider-market-with-new.html (Mostly a press release rehash)

http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9963859-1.html?part=rss&subj=Crave (Crave, Promo pics)

http://techdigest.tv/2008/06/hp_unveils_touc.html (One promo pic)

http://hdtvprofessor.com/HDTVAlmanac/?p=705 (Promo pic)

http://stuff.tv/News/HP-slims-down-Touchsmart-allinone/10203/ (One promo pic)

http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9964073-7.html?part=rss&subj=news (One promo pic, link to gallery of all HP products launched)

http://xzx.g8online.net/2008/06/10/wow-hp-touchsmart-to-redefine-home-computing/ (Promo pics)

http://www.electricpig.co.uk/2008/06/10/hp-touchsmart-pc-causes-finger-frenzy/ (Small promo pic)

http://www.gadgetusers.com/hp-touchsmart-iq506-and-504-touch-pc/ (Promo pic, link to ubergizmo gallery of promo pics)

http://www.livemint.com/2008/06/10142732/HP-targets-wider-market-with-n.html (Mostly press release)

http://www.lowyat.net/v2/latest/touchsmart-to-redefine-home-computing.html (Promo pics, seems there’s no original content here)

http://gadgetsaddict.com/hp-touchsmart-pcs/ (Promo pics)

http://www.blog4it.com/index.php/hp-brings-touchscreen-to-pc.html (no pics, very short)

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2319417,00.asp (One small promo pic)

http://www.gottabemobile.com/Introducing+The+New+HP+TouchSmart.aspx (One pic)

http://news.cnet.com/2300-1042_3-6241247-3.html?tag=ne.gall.pg (Picture)

http://news.cnet.com/2300-1042_3-6241247-4.html?tag=ne.gall.pg (Picture)

http://blip.tv/file/979499/ (Richard Walker demo)

http://blip.tv/file/979518/ (Joan Jett ad)

http://blip.tv/file/979452/ (I could defend the problems you see in this video with operating the touch screen, but I think that would be futile, so I’ll just leave it. Trust me when I say it takes a little getting used to, but it works pretty well after that. We did lots of usability studies on this puppy.)

http://www.tweakup.dk/readmore/11757/ (In Danish)

http://www.sickofgadgets.com/hp-launches-touchsmart-all-in-one-pcs/ (One promo pic)

http://thedigitallifestyle.com/cs/blogs/ian/archive/2008/06/10/video-of-hp-s-new-touchsmart-system.aspx (Promo pics, good quality video of Richard Walker demoing)

http://thedigitallifestyle.com/cs/blogs/ian/archive/2008/06/10/hp-connecting-your-world-keynote-from-berlin.aspx (Voodoo, event pics)

http://www.notebooks.com/2008/06/10/hp-touchsmart-why-cant-i-have-this-interface-on-my-tablet/ (Seems to be down temporarily)

http://venturebeat.com/2008/06/10/hp-launches-50-plus-consumer-products-in-berlin/ (Promo pics)

http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/desktop/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208403180&subSection=All+Stories (No pics)

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/06/10/hp-touchscreen-pc-tech-pers-cx_bc_0609techhp.html (No pics, but look at the headline. Wow.)

http://blog.laptopmag.com/hp-wants-to-bring-multi-touch-to-notebooks (One promo pic, discussion of software for laptops)

Categories: Software, Tech Toys, Work in general
18 Comments »

Next week Monday through Wednesday there’s an invitation-only event in Berlin, Germany where some of the stuff I’ve been working on (since the HP TouchSmart) will be shown to the public for the first time. I hear it’s going to have top billing on Tuesday.

I’ve noticed that a few bloggers have been invited to the event, which I think is pretty cool. There’s Sierra Modro from gottabemobile and Ian Dixon from thedigitallifestyle.

When you look at the agenda for June 10 on the event page, you’ll get a hint at what will be shown. It’s pretty darn cool, even if I have to say so myself, but I think you’ll agree. I hope the main page will be updated with live videos and such, like it claims. There’s also a blog (by Waggener Edstrom it seems), a Twitter stream and an RSS feed. Seeing all this for the first time as I dig into it, I wonder why there doesn’t seem to be more buzz around this whole thing. Still too buried I guess.

I’m a little sad that I’m not going, but personal plans got in the way. My boss and a colleague are there, though. The breakout session poll is also a little disappointing right now, with the “HP: A Touch Different” session lagging the field at around 15 – 16 %, far behind “The Evolution of the Mobile Lifestyle” with 30%. I don’t think there have been too many votes, though, since my one vote moved the session from 15 to 16 % just now. (Actually, as I’m writing this, the poll for Touch moved to 23%, and now 29%, now 46%, what’s going on there? Maybe someone is gaming it?)

And just for the record, before everyone starts speculating, Microsoft had no involvement whatsoever in what we came up with this time around, for better or worse.

Oh, and I think there’ll be at least one VERY interesting mobile product shown as well (via fredshouse and eBay), but that’s just speculation on my part:

Guess we’ll have to share the stage…

Categories: Tech Toys, Work in general
1 Comment »

I had almost forgotten about the OLPC give-one-get-one campaign I took the opportunity to participate in last year. Well, the thing finally came today. I wasn’t really all that anxious to get it, so it didn’t bother me at all that it took a while. I thought it was more important that the real recipients get theirs first.

Anyway, here are a few pictures of a kind of unboxing. It’s really more of a series of pictures of the packaging/parts, since I had already unboxed the thing by the time I took these.

Simple cardboard packaging and plastic bags for protection

All parts arranged on the open box

Front of welcome brochure and power brick

The OLPC itself with the two random color elements that make it “unique”

Back of the OLPC, with battery removed

Battery and welcome letter

Inside of welcome brochure

Back of welcome brochure

The battery actually came mostly charged, which was a nice surprise. Turning the laptop on for the first time took me through a simple naming step and then right to the “hub”/home screen. It took a while to get there, but it was really, really simple. No series of screens that ask for all kinds of information, like on regular PCs.

My initial exploration of the software took me around to the Journal, Webcam app (called Recorder), Paint, Measure (seemed to enable you to analyze / show the sound from the microphone), wireless setup, Browser and a few other things. Looks very interesting so far.

Both my kids have expressed interest in fiddling with it. Should be a lot of fun.

Categories: Personal, Tech Toys
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Here’s a quick tip: If you’re a Netflix subscriber and are having problems with the WatchNow feature, take a look at whether you have any caching proxy servers between the PC you’re using to watch a show and the Netflix servers (yes, that’s a long path and a very general statement, I know).

If, for example, you have a home network server with a caching proxy feature, try turning the proxy feature off. That helped me with MediaError(1400) problems, anyway.

If your ISP has a caching proxy, see if there’s a way around it, too. It may be a source of problems.

Categories: Personal, Tech Toys
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