Geek On The Mountain


Slick Computer


Jul 03

Posted: under Technology.

I’ve got my computer running smooooooooooth! Or rather, I’ve got my computer/me interface tweaked nicely.

First of all, I’ve actually started using the middle mouse button (the wheel). Long ago I heard that the middle mouse button would open new tabs in Firefox. Why I never bothered is beyond me. I usually just down control when I click or hit the context menu quickly. No more! Now I push on the wheel and my links open nicely in a new tab. Furthermore, when you middle click on a tab it closes…very handy as well.

The biggest thing though is that I finally got my keyboard running and tweaked my mouse buttons. I have a logitech wireless keyboard and mouse. The keyboard stopped working shortly after I got it. I knew it wasn’t the keyboard but windows itself. Windows was totally messed up and I had to reinstall it. Now, being the procrastinator I am, I just never got around to installing the software so that I could use the keyboard or remap the extra buttons on the mouse. I finally did that yesterday and it’s awesome…. The keyboard has a bunch of buttons on it that I remapped to various things. Probably best of all though is that my “media player” keys (play/pause, next, prev) now work with iTunes. (My other keyboard has those keys, but they only work with WMP without some playing around (MS KB) ) It’s much nicer to just hit a button when I want to go to the next song instead of having to use the context menu in the systray.
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Deep Impact Will Hit Soon


Jul 03

Posted: under Technology.

Deep Impact will hit it’s target, the comet Temple 1, at 1:52am EDT on Monday, July 4th. The 370kg impacter has already been released from the spacecraft and now it’s just waiting for the comet to plow into it. The goals of the mission are:

1. Observe how the crater forms
2. Measure the crater’s depth and diameter
3. Measure the composition of the interior of the crater and its ejecta
4. Determine the changes in natural outgassing produced by the impact

Basically, they want to know what the comet is made out of, so they’re going to hit it at 23,000 mph to create a crater 25 meters deep so they can study it. It should be interesting.

I don’t know how I keep on coming across these spacecraft that are about to do things…. I didn’t even find out about this one on any of the sites I’m usually at… I just stumbled across it a couple of days ago somehow. This stuff interests me, but I don’t follow it all that much. I imagine by this time the story may have hit slashdot and perhaps even google news though..

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