A friend of mine told me about GizModo today. Here is an except from their about page.

Gizmodo is a weblog dedicated to everything related to gadgets, gizmos, and cutting-edge consumer electronics.

Spring must be here. Animals are posing all over the place. This crane was fishing in a ditch after a thunderstorm. It has been in the area for quite some time, but I never seemed to have my camera ready.

I had to make a quick trip up to the school, saw it, came home to get the camera and found him still there. Made for a fun day.

Great Plains Rat Snake
(Elaphe emoryi)

I went to clean out the pool skimmer today and found this little guy. He was about 36 inches long and very docile. When I was carrying him around in the bucket, Home Depot issue if you couldn’t tell, he became a little agitated and started rattling his tail and opening his mouth very wide. Although he has no rattles on his tail, he is able to vibrate it quickly enough to make the sound.

After photographing him and showing him to family and neighbors, my daughter and I dropped him off at a local pond. The University of Texas has information in their Herps of Texas - Snakes area.

Dictionary of Computer Terms

While researching a project for work, I needed to get definitions of some computer terms. Not being comfortable with my connotation of the terms, I used Google to search for other definitions.

After spending a fair amount of time googling, I ran across this gem: whatis?com.
According to whatis, it contains “Definitions for thousands of the most current IT-related words”. Most importantly, it provided the definitions of the terms I was trying to clarify.

A while back, I had a DDR module go bad and trash portions of my Win2k registry. Not a huge deal, Installed XP and copied all of the data over. The bigger problem was that I was dual booting to RedHat 7.3 using Grub. When I installed XP, it proceeded to wipe out my bootloader thereby making it impossible to boot into Linux (for the record, I haven’t tried to restore the partition).

These tools were all found at FileSystems:HOWTO

LTools

On a whim today, I decided to see if there were any tools available for reading Ext2/Ext3 partitions from Windows. A little google magic and up pops LTools. I extracted it, ran it’s setup program, started the Java version of the UI, pointed it the drive which contains the Ext2 partitions and viola! I got my data. This product is great for browsing, but it won’t let you do recursive copies.

Explore2fs

Failing to be able to copy the files I needed using LTools, I found Explore2fs. While not as polished as LTools from a UI perspective, it does seem to be able to recursively copy files.

If you need to connect to Windows XP or Windows 2000 server from an older client,
Microsoft has published the Remote Desktop Client Software
for download. This is a must have if you do any remote management.

I have added a new Insects album.
A photo with a katydid and grasshopper on the same stalk, a spider
(my kids call it a banana spider), and a katydid at night.

I had a big scare the other day. We went to my daughter’s
Brownie Bridging Ceremony
where I took several once in a lifetime photos. While we were at the ceremony, we reviewed
the photos many times and everything look great.

When I got home, I started to pull the images from the CF card and noticed that
there were no photos! The card showed that it had almost 57MB used, but the
directory must have been corrupted. So that I wouldn’t mess things up, I left
the card alone.

After a few hours, I did a google search and found this gem:
Digital Image Recovery.
Not only is this tool free, it was able to pull the images off the CF card. If you
run into a similar problem, try this tool. It doesn’t do any writes to the card so
it is pretty safe. I keep saying card, but the software works with any device
that can be mounted as a drive.

I have several new critters added to the Animals album.
There are a few pictures of a very small anole, several pictures of a mole that we found
swimming in our pool, and one of a snake that I saw in the bushes at my mother’s house.

I’ve been fairly motivated lately to start getting some of our pictures online. To
that end, I installed Photo Gallery
an open source tool for managing and displaying collections of photos.

Note to friends and family. An account is required to view some albums.
If you remember it, it is the same username and password that you use to access
the friends and family link. If you’ve forgotten it, email me and I’ll send it to you
again.