Notes on determining the power of activated carbon

the question
refresh
refresh

the 15,000 sq. meters we will give the minimum volume of 1 atom thickness.

15,000 cubic. meters/ volume of zinc=number of molecules
number of molecules/avagado's number=weight in grams*atomic number.

15,000 cubic. meters/ volume of zinc=number of molecules
number of molecules/6x10^23=weight in grams*atomic number.

Power of activated carbon: 1 gram=15,000meters
Zinc density=71.4g/cm cubed

15000meter*1,ooo,ooocm/meter=number of centimeters
7.14 g/cm cubed*number of cubic centimeters= weight in grams

15000meter*1,ooo,ooocm/meter=15*10^9 cubic centimeters
7.14 g/cm cubed*15*10^9= 1.05*10^10 grams of zinc

let's assume a brita filter weighs only 1/10 of a kg
Therefore a brita filter can absorb 1.05*9 kgs or 1 million kgs or 1100 tons

The weight of the empire state building is 365000 tons therefore it would take about 340 Brita filters to capture enough zinc of equivalent weight to the Empire State Building.

Firefox extensions

Ad Block
Add Bookmark here
Bookmarks synchronizer
Greasemonkey
Password Maker
Quicknote
Tabbrowser preferences

Undecided on
Bookmarks Synchronizer, Flashgot, Platypus, Tiny url, View Formatted Soure,

Greasemonkey and Password Maker are revolutionary but not well known.
Password Maker provides multiple secure and convenient passwords based on a single "master password".
Greasemonkey makes the customization of web sites easy. By providing a way to execute java scripts aimed at particular websites you can make: Provide a Netflix link next to every movie listed in IMDB; create a text box for adding technorati tags inside the blogger post page, etc.

Games I used to play

Great
Windows: Space Quest, Alone in the dark,
Apple II: Nueromancer, Sneakers, Autoduel, Archon
NES: Contra, Super Mario,
Other: Breakout, Push push

Games that I was obsessed with and but in retrospect don't seem so great.
Windows: Castle Wolfenstein 3-d, Doom, Ultima, Lode Runner, Kings Quest, Leisuresuit Larry,
Apple II: Bard's tale, Zork, Snake, 2400 A.d.,
NES: Zelda, Sea and skate

Didn't get along with but tried
Windows: American Mcgee's Alice, Hexen, Included Windows games, Sim city, Myst, mechwarrior (?)
Apple II: Strip poker, Pac man, Tetris, Carmen Sandiego,
NES: Miracle software, Duck Hunt, Top Gun, Mike Tyson's punchout,

Simple and fun
Boulder dash, Impossible Mission, Burger Time, Turbo outrun, Double Dragon, Castlevania, Rampage, 1942, Mario, Galaga

Hard to recall, but did spend quite a bit of time with:
Spy vs. spy, Manhunter, Joust, Original Donkey Kong, Space Invaders, Beyond zork, Black Cauldron, Choplifter, Below the Root, Ghostbusters, Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy, Karateka, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, Shanghai, a Mind Forever Voyaging, Elite, Dig Dug, Kid icarus, Metroid, Metal Gear

To be categorized when I remember the names
Windows: , cool cartoonish where you are a knight,
Apple II: Surgery game, , car game where you would go up on the truck, a spy game (not spy hunter),
NES:
Other: arcade car game where you could get rocket launcher

I'm finding these hard to remember and difficult to categorize but this has made me remember the incredible amount of time I wasted on them. I'm also fuzzy on what system they were on. I was considering getting one of the new generation of consoles but this has convinced me not to.

Gamespot was helpful in providing names for NES and Apple II but had no pictures. There is also a list for the PC but it was too long to go through. Pictures are on various sites.

Things that haven't worked out for me

and the reasons.

Web services
Friendster- Wouldn't contact someone to be an "activity partner".
Technorati- too much huddled masses.
del.icio.us-too much huddled masses.
blogroll- updating my website is a pain.
Meetup- The two meetups I attended no one showed for.
Tribe.net- don't remember.
Musicmatch- not going to deal with DRM locking me to certain devices.
Ebay, Half.com, Overstock.com, deals-of-the-day type things- Despite a few trials they haven't worked their way into my spending.


Software
Microsoft Office- Very buggy with long documents, annoying interface, expensive.
Frontpage- code soup
Photoshop- Expensive. Filters don't improve images. Still good for some things.
Abiword- Bugs. Limited functionality.
Chat- any kind.
Nero Burning- didn't do well at spanning cds.
Applescript- basic functions missing.
Winamp- terrible to use.
Musicmatch- not bad but worse than itunes.
Browsers
Camino- No extensions.
IE- No tabs or extensions.
Safari- no extensions.


Things I continue to use but don't like*
Blogger, Flickr
Notepad, Real media, Dock, Windows, Explorer, Adress book, Mail.app,


Use often*
Firefox, openoffice, Thumbs Plus, Total Commander, Homesite, Text Wrangler, Quicktime, Thunderbird, Neooffice
Amazon, Google, IMDB, Netflix, Yahoo, Consumer reports.

Seldom used but good when I need them*
Grab, DVD capture, Windows Media Player, Stickies

*Applies in the past tense if Windows based

General rules of computer use

• Remember what you are trying to accomplish.
  
• Don't meddle with a system.
• If you run into a problem pursue multiple avenues simultaneously.
  
• Backup.
• Make friends with gurus.
• Upgrades are usually worth it.
• Be wary of tech support. Use a solution based on whether it makes sense, risk, and your time.
  

Blogger bugs

I'm sick of blogger.

• It's difficult to post with Blogger's edit window because
• Inconsistent Mac interface leads to sometimes using control and sometimes the Apple key. For example italics use control but cut and paste uses Apple.
  
• Incredibly poor spell checker. Doesn't learn words. Can't add possessive or capitalized versions automatically. Very small dictionary.
  
• Not able to search while editing a post.
• Spacing issues. HTML for this post is unreadable because of no carriage returns. There is another option for carriage returns which disable wsywig.
  
• But it's difficult to create posts outside of blogger because
  
• Cut and paste leads to many errors.
• Mailing to blog adds extra paragraphs in middle of sentence and puts in unclosed tags.
• It has no categories.
• It's slow.
• Templates are difficult to edit due to small text box, no search, lack of color coding.
• Dealing with images is a hassle (this is most understandable, considering it is free service).
• No password protection for posts.
• Combined with Google bar spellchecker it will delete posts.
• It can take a long time (months) for a blog to get indexed. Pretty poor for a service hosted by a search engine. Indexing speed is probably based on traffic.
• There are sometimes problems on the edit screen where the edit bar will take up most of the page.
  

Also

• Blogger support team is unresponsive to bug posts.
  
• Bug list on blogger page is nowhere near complete.
• Service outages.
• Spellchecker is very poor. These were all words that Blogger didn't know as I was posting on July 30- Davids, sociologist's, publisher's, asphyxiated, unfunny, unAmerican . This number is fairly representative.
  

Future of the browser

A while back there was a post by a Firefox driver asking where Firefox
should go- for people not to list smaller, faster or more stable but to
imagine what could be done. The question proved more difficult than I
imagined. Firefox had made my browsing incredibly simple. A letter, an
arrow key, and enter would often take me where I wanted to go after
which I didn't think about the browser and concentrated on content. I
realized that bookmarks for places that I visited infrequently were
still difficult.
Even with good titles bookmarks were still difficult to distinguish,
categorize, and browse. They were also one of the slowest and most
memory and focus demanding of the usual browser tasks. This resulted in
my not wanting to create them as it would only make the list longer and
interrupt what I was doing by categorizing it and forcing me to choose
a magic title. There was also another problem with bookmarkds that was
getting steadily easier with computers in general. Deleting files tends
to be something we do less of. Hard drives are larger, file navigation
is easier, version tracking (within programs) is better. With the
steady rise of internet web sites and the fact that as a user spends
more time on the internet they have more sites they want to remember
there is an increasing need for bookmarks. This means that bookmarks
need more deleting to avoid problems due to irrelevance, similar
titles, and broken links. Even if they were all relevant deletion would
still be needed to minimize the problems of navigation. I would also
say that looking for a specific bookmark and seeing all the other ones
that I half remember was distracting. I got sidetracked into wanting to
see what is happening with another site.
There is also the issue of making bookmarks public. People need to have
a way to link and provide meta-information about other sites or current
topics.
How do you do create bookmarks in a way that is efficient,
customizable, and fits in with your online presence?
I was unable though to figure out how to make things better.

Luckily people are on the job.
Google now records individual's searches. I haven't had a chance to
evaluate but the ability to search your search history is a very
strong. Its connection to the fabric of everyday use also gives it an
advantage that none of the other services will have. Any service like
Technorati will force the user to choose its service, while Google
steadily moves to being one interface for everything. Being Google it
also has the ability to bring in a number of users that will dwarf the
other communities. Its problem is that it doesn't allow the viewing or
searching of other's people history. The pause feature may indicate
that this will come. A minor weakness, shared by others, is an
inability to add your old bookmarks but this could be corrected with a
simple script.
Between Google and blogger all the elements are there but aren
I have briefly looked at StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and Technorati. They
may not be primarily about bookmarking or may not seem to be about it
but this is the future. Collective intelligence both automated and
manual will become the only way to maintain indivual memory and will
also provide ways to expand these memories. Right now they are not
well-suited to the long tail which is precisely where bookmarks are
deficient. A contributor to this problem is that none provide a
permanent location for results.
The unfortunately-named Technorati allows users to create watchlists of
blogs and search on current topics. The search is slow and poorly
implemented. My search on “translucent concrete” prioritzed results
with these words separate above those together. The help showed no way
to couple them. More critical is that a watchlist is something that
people want to check frequently and for this RSS feeds are much easier
to use. It does provide a good combination for fine-grained and general
searching.
Even more unforturnately-named, Del.icio.us (somewhat like Flickr) is
more link based and provides an HTML interface for finding new links on
a topic. Wisely it provides no distinction between results that belong
to a category and those which come from a person. It doesn't implement
search.
StumbleUpon is a Firefox extension and a web service. The idea of
StumbleUpon is to guide users to new websites that are well rated by
similar users. It presents a toolbar allowing a user to give a thumbs
up or down for a site. This then causes the rating to display when the
site is visited, enters a favorite in the user's online profile. If the
site has never been rated by a StumbleUpon user- this typically happens
with very small sites and permanent links within larger ones the user
is asked to give a description for it. StumbleUpon automatically places
it in a category.
A user selects a category and clicks StumbleUpon which sends him to a
highly rated site, within the category, that he hasn't seen before. Or
the user can go to the profiles of friends or users that StumbleUpon
has rated as being similar to him and see the links they have selected.
The bookmarking has some good features- it has the highest ease of use
of any tool I've used. The extension automatically (and insecurely
)logs in and the majority of the time all the user does is make a
click. The worst case, where the user has to enter a title in a pop-up,
is easier thany to the typical browser case because it doesn't have to
be categorized. These links are created on a web for the user that
anyone can access regardless of browser.
There are still a host of problems. The links are not on a consistent
page- as bookmarks are added they will be placed on another page. The
categories that are entered for sites can not be used on individuals
pages for sorting. The only sorting is chronological and they can not
be searched. They are not available offline but I don't think this is
generally a problem.
It is frustrating because none of these problems are inherent to this
type of service. StumpleUpon could be: an easily-used bookmarking
device that uses collective intellegince to add meta-information, an
innovative site-finder, and a community builder. At this point I've
used StumleUpon a few times to get sites similar to the ones I like and
the others not at all, none of them are as easy to retrieve as the
insufficient in-browser bookmarks.

Blogger doesn't import email well

Below is what blogger created out of one of my email posts. This applies to rich text or plain text email. With rich text you also get unclosed font tags. But with both I got many paragraphs randomly inserted.
It adds many unn

<fontfamily><param>Times New Roman</param>A while back there was a
post by a Firefox driver asking where Firefox should go- for people
not to list smaller, faster or more stable but to imagine what could
be done. The question proved more difficult than I imagined. Firefox
had made my browsing incredibly simple. A letter, an arrow key, and
enter would often take me where I wanted to go after which I didn't
think about the browser and concentrated on content. I realized that
bookmarks for places that I visited infrequently were still difficult.

Even with good titles bookmarks were still difficult to distinguish,
categorize, and browse. They were also one of the slowest and most

Powerbook you are so beautiful

I dearly love your beveled keys. They are firm but responsive, musical but industrious. Listen. Those soft clicks interrupted by the  syncopated clap of the spacebar. The tiny row of function buttons on the top, smoothly framed by the esc and eject buttons. The four arrow keys both with and separated from the others.
The subtlety of your trackpad, I wouldn't have known- I didn't know. How could I have suspect that something so metallic and bare could move me? (You know what I mean.) It's not like those other trackpads.
Silver, silver everywhere.  The powerful subdued cover opening to brightness- as if jewelry had come alive. Glowing and shimmering, facets expanding.
You resemble not other computers but the designs of movies. My apartment will never be your match until I can place you next to a door that softly slips into the wall as I near.
But even that isn't it. There is also in your features the strong shapes of modern art. Look only at the bottom half of the front it is as if I had gone into Plato's cave and switched on the lights, therefore finding the perfect button.   The long lines curving at the ends like a racetrack and then the black moat of air pulling me toward it. Made whole with the neat cupping of the frame.
Descending to the bottom it merges with other shapes- the tiny row of circles following behind larger one (like baby ducks), these circles buried into a 3-dimensional rectangle confronted by a smaller brightly framed one. In between these two rectangles, directly below the perfect button, parallel to the circle, sits a larger circle. A calm home bringing a Japanese sense of balance to the strong American shapes.   
And when you speak to me Vicki-with-an-I...

Fwd: Purpose

This blog more than the others is for my own uses. I want a record of what causes me trouble and the solutions I find so that I can: get a recognition of patterns of problems, solutions, and their sources; be able to retrieve solutions that I've forgotten; find answers to problems in the process of collecting my thoughts on them; and stopping obsessing about problems.
I didn't expect the last two results when I started writing this. I'm the most pleased about the latter. I have a tendency to work for long periods on problems that are not critical. The idea is that I want some type of perfect environment and that if I achieve that I won't have to spend any more time tinkering. This is, of course, not possible. I will always be dealing with software that in some way does not work the way I want it to. Even if somehow this magically did occur my computing environments are not stable. As soon as an upgrade was done, I would be back to endlessly tinkering. There is also the problem that every change to a computer not only brings it to a less common and more difficult to diagnose state as well as creating the risk of unintended consequences.
Here are examples of this that have caused me problems this month-  Wanting so badly to get bullets working in Mail that I spent an hour on it, called Apple Tech support for another hour during which they erased all my mail, and now spending many hours trying to recover the mail; Wanting to have all my email centralized, therefore enabling POP on my Yahoo account, and removing all the files which over the years I had diligently made online backups of. There haven't been bad consequences but I've also wasted many hours trying to get Iphoto to import; dealing with Greasemonkey script bugs, dwelling on Apple's replace vs. merge for folder copying, and trying to create an AppleScript that won't do much for me.
Writing about these helps me stop obsessing. When dealing with a problem I create a mental list of possible solutions. I have to remember this list so that I don't retry something unsuccessful and to figure out what I haven't done. By putting it on paper I allow myself to forget it and can convince myself that I've tried all the avenues- or occasionally in the process of collecting the thoughts I realize there is something I haven't tried. There is great relief here- these aren't things that I work on for a few hours but things that my mind returns to again and again over the course of months.
I think occasionally I will find a solution that will be useful to other people and I'm glad of this. What would be even better is if they saw how pointless much of this is and decided to stop tinkering themselves.

Replace and merge

The argument over what should happen when a folder is placed over a folder with the same name seems to be a distillation of the PC vs. Mac debate. As always there is a tendency to reduce the arguments to single points ("don't you know what replace is??") which means that issues lose their context.
Replace would not make sense on a PC. The reason that replace is an option on a Mac is because of the good choice of separating the user properties from the applications. On windows if a replacement of an application folder was done, data would not be lost but configurations and extensions would be.
The use of replace as a method for installing applications also fits in with the Mac philosophy of making drag and drop a universal feature. As a PC user, it seemed to me there was an excessive amount of drag and drop (henceforth "drag) talk with Macs. I hardly ever used drag so it seemed like just another example of Macs choosing a graphical nicety over getting things done. What I neglected to think about was that part of the reason I didn't use drag on the PC was that it was broken. PC drag works so inconsistently that remembering where it works becomes worse than memorizing genders in a foreign language. Not only are we dependent on the application but on the relationship of two applications, their states, and the type of data.
The idea on the Mac is a consistent, easy-to-understand interface for getting things done. Therefore drag can do work that on PC would be drag, program installation and file opening. f these three the drag is the most readily understood because it has a real world equivalence. If we were purchasing the equivalent of an application (a calculator, a clock) we would drag it home from the store, not install it. This means people don't have to be experts to get things done.

I think the ideas of simplicity, consistancy, and a real-world equivalence, are far stronger argument than the language argument ("replace means replace, get it"). What we are dealing with is metaphors. A metaphor is a way of understanding something in terms of something else not an exact equivalence. If above my chair I have a desktop with files that I need to move I would not "cut and paste" them. Nor would I attempt to put a clock or a calculator inside a folder. I might put a directory inside a folder but not the other way around. These ideas do not mean that our computer OS's are faulty they are doing the best they can.
Let's also imagine a scenario. My computer needs more RAM but the two slots are both full. I go to the store and buy a larger module then replace one of the smaller ones in the computer. After I replace the old one it does not disappear from existence. I could go back and replace the new one with it if needed.

Computer metaphors also have to bend to suit computing. Deleting doesn't suggest a trash can but both OS's understand that regardless of the wording this is something that users need. And it is hear where the use of replace leads to both inconsistency and potential problems.
Users come to understand that deleting is difficult to do. On the PC it is Delete-Yes-Empty Trash-Yes. On the Mac it is Apple+Delete, Trash, Yes. Not only are these (basically) four-step processes but we are trained to stop in the middle (for days or months) and two of the steps mention delete.
With replace there is only one step of confirmation which does not mention delete.

Last there is a general design principal that anything users do should have an undo.

By using either undo or the trash can with replace the Mac could allow for user mistakes and be consistent across two fronts.

Google answers

I still think that "you get what you pay for" should be changed to "you get less than what you pay for". But there are times when you get what you pay for. There are even times you get more : hackey sacks, bicycles, Google answers.
The quickness, generosity, and dedication of the staff seems completely unconnected to any thought of monetary reward. I have asked 9 questions, gotten pages of comments that were really answers and paid, I believe, less than 5 dollars.

There are a few problems.
You can't search or link to a particular posters questions. A non-answers Google search will find some of them but there are no boxes on the page for this. So you need to logout or use your browser toolbar. The list derived from this is also uniformative displaying things like the names of those who commented and the price of the question. For example these are mine.
There is also some funny business with logging into answers. Since I'm logged into Gmail it brings me to the answers page already logged in. I have to logout because when I joined answers it was before I had a Gmail account. The login page is then presented in a small box of the old page (instead of going to a new page with a login screen). A reload can fixes this but it can't be fixed in general. When I try to change my email address to that of the Gmail account it says I have to use an external account. Besides making logging in difficult this means that I can not use Gmail and Google answers at the same time.

Current issues or bugs

See also: Firefox bookmark issues, iPhoto issues, Nikon software, ivew,

Unsolved
TiVo cannot connect to computer. I have wireless USB for TiVo box and a wireless powerbook. I installed the TiVo software and TiVo appears in the system preferences. (TiVo originally did not work with 10.4 but one of the patches fixed this. My Ethernet is not wireless. I have turned on the service and checked off some playlists so they will be shared. I added my computers i.p. inside TiVo. This stage does not work. I tried rebooting.

Gmail does not handle attachments over a Meg in size even though its stated maximum is 10 Megs. It gives "Document Contains No Data" errors. I initially thought it was still working because the red message at the top still displays "Sending". Google shows many other users experience this.

iMovie can not add titles. CGContextSetFillColorWithColor: invalid context . All I saw about this was that someone saying that Googlemaps didn't work and he fixed it by clearing the Googlemaps cache. Clearing iMovie cache did nothing.

Solved
I was not receiving email from a friend. This was because he was also hosting my future web domain and he had already made the change on his end. So the emails stayed on my account on his server.

Unable to "Rate this item" on Amazon. It was because it is an image and at the very bottom I never found it.

Importing from Thunderbird to Mail.app

When I first started working with Mail I did an import of my Thunderbird stuff but today when I tried again, in order to recover deleted messages. I ran into a lot of problems and the help I found didn't work. All of the things it made sense to import were grayed out.
The solution is to import the folder called Mail.
This may not work for me though because currently I only see Sent, Trash and Unsent. Perhaps Mail has something that records what you have previously imported.

Gmail vs. Yahoo Plus

I decided that I should get Pop working for all my accounts so after setting up Gmail I decided to do Yahoo. The default for Mail is to delete all downloaded mail after a week so Yahoo did what I told it to do and a week later deleted all my email. This is frustrating because I had intended to have many of the documents online so they would be invulnerable to hard drive crashes/ theft, etc.
Gmail on the other hand only archived the emails each week. I keep finding that Gmail is easy to use in many small ways that I hadn't been looking for: preventing composition loss due to navigation away from page, combining threads, listing number of unread messages in title (unobtrusive and it can be scanned from other tabs), combining replies.
The combining replies with the original message has multiple advantages:

• reduces page loads when composing
• will globally enable a more consistent replying method (as more people use Gmaill there will be less need for the included originals)
  
• message content streamlining (the message you write only has things written by you. This makes manual and automated searching more efficient. )
• reduces wasted bandwidth.
  

I haven't used Gmail long so there are probably more things, I'll discover.

Gmail JavaScript broken by Greasemonkey script

I was unable to use the selecting JavaScript in Gmail (all, non, unread, etc.). By selectively disabling the scripts I noticed that it was the Humane autosave feature that was causing this. By tracking down the script home I noticed there was an update. The update fixed this problem but there were a few other problems that need to be highlighted.

• There's no way to know that a greasemonkey script has an update
• Greasemonkey's most current version which allows you to see the script is not available by auto-update. This is a problem common to many extensions.
  
• It may become very difficult to tell which Greasemonkey scripts are causing problems and some problems may go undetected.