- May 1 here in the Springs will see a high of 36, and a low of 16…with 2-4 inches of snow likely. I’m thinking I’m going to have to drain the sprinkler system yet again.
- The end must be near: Jeff spent some time fooling with a Samsung ATIV running Windows 8…and was impressed. It’s a 12″ tablet with a dockable keyboard, not unlike a bigger version of my Transformer Prime. The first thing the Best Buy sales guy showed me was how to flick away the Windows 8 UI like a bug. What remained was enough like Windows 7 to be usable.
- Alas, Office 2000 will not run on Windows 8. Nor will Office 2003. But Atlantis will. As will Libreoffice. Not sure about AbiWord.
- Something shot a hole in one of the ISS solar panels. Guys, the Universe is armed and dangerous.
- And unpredictable. There are now more spots on the Sun than I’ve seen in years. Will need to spin the dials a little later today to tell if it’s doing us any good.
- Wikipedia’s psycho editing community got on the wrong side of feminists recently, and Salon did a nice piece on “revenge editing.” Requiring that real names be published for all editors would help this problem a lot. (If I had a Wikipedia entry, I’m sure I’d be vandalized for saying this.)
- Poking around Salon led to this: We once tried to weaponize the weather. (So much for those bucolic 1950s that everybody seems to love.) Of course, the key to weaponizing the weather is knowing where to deploy your butterflies.
- Suddenly I’m seeing the word “adorable” used with what appears to be a straight face. Is this a hipster thing?
- These see-through highlighter pens were a long time coming, but they’re simply adorable.
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Well, you theoretically could run Office 2000 or 2003 on Windows 8 inside of a Windows XP virtual machine. That would certainly make it much faster to re-install Office if you needed to reformat your computer. In practice I think running MS Office in a virtual machine may be a pretty major violation of Office’s EULA / end user license agreement (although I don’t claim to be an expert on Office’s EULA).
With Crossover Linux I’ve been able to run Office 2000 on Linux for several years. So there’s always that option. My bitch about Linux is that they keep messing with the UIs. I liked the early KDE, and GNOME 2. The current ones, not so much–and I dropped Ubuntu like a hot rock when Unity came out. Now using Mint.
If you don’t feel the need for the see-through tips, the highlighter I have favored for years is the Pentel XO Data Checker. The bad news is that it does not seem to be available in most American stores. It is offered in Canada, and can also be ordered on Amazon (from a seller in Hong Kong.)
I favor it for several reasons. The first is no longer important, but it was the first highlighter I found which did not magically erase text from a fax page. Second, it has a huge ink supply. Third, the ink supply is easily seen through the case, so no surprises in the field. And finally, a very big one, in my view, I recently found some which had been packed away several years ago, and they are as fresh as when they were packed. It’s a great product.