What I learned today:June 27, 2012

Meine Damen und Herren, Illustrator...has spellcheck.


I know. I was shocked too. So where is spellcheck in Illustrator? Right here:

More specifically, under the Edit menu in CS5.5. As long as your text is still formatted like text (not rasterized, etc.), spellcheck will...well, check your spelling.

What I learned today: Daisy-chaining Hardware Port Multipliers, June 26, 2012

If you're like me, you grew up in a world where, for the most part, if you wanted to know something, you googled it. Discounting those early elementary school projects where they forced you to learn how to use an encyclopedia, the vast majority of the information that I ever looked for I found on the internet, for better or for worse. The modern world would be slow and impractical without the web's hive mind - in fact, you count on other people to post somewhere that they, too, have encountered Windows Error Message 7x000f941A42 (but only when booting from an external drive, on a Sunday, with a Japanese version of iTunes installed and playing a cover of "Brown Eyed Girl"). So when I went looking for a particular piece of information on the internet today, and didn't find it (!), it threw me for a loop.

So if anyone out there is wondering if you can daisy-chain SATA hardware port-multipliers (HDMs) and see the disks connected to the second HDM as individual drives (JBOD*), the answer is...no. You can't. Sorry.

Do you not know if you have this problem? Here's a handy little diagram:

All stand-alone letters here represent drives.

What we have here is a computer with a particular multi-drive compatible SATA PCI Express card installed. Into that, we plug Hardware Port Multiplier number one. Into that, we plug (some number of hard disks and) a second Hardware Port Multiplier. We connect some number of hard drives to this second HPM. Questions: can you see the disks at the second level? do they appear as individual drives or one big drive?

Answers: If this is the setup you have, and you're trying to configure ABCD as JBOD (i.e., you want them each to be their own volume), you're SOL - it violates the protocol of how the information is transferred. ABCD can (must), however, be configured as RAID (you would see them as one logical volume). See this helpful tutorial from Addonics for more on that. abcd can be configured as RAID or JBOD - I think. You should verify that with someone who's more of an expert than me. Have you checked the internet?




*RAID = Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks
JBOD = Just a Bunch of Disks
Learned in the context of TechnoFrolics, a very cool company that does very cool stuff. 

What I learned today: June 25, 2012

Using Command Line Options to Enable/Disable Windows Hibernate Function

File this one under "titles that are longer than the actual post itself." This is incredibly quick and easy, even if you've never used command line anything, ever. 

1. Run the cmd.exe as an administrator. In Windows 7, the easiest way to do this is to click the start button, then type in "cmd" (less quotes). There should be one option under "Programs", cmd.exe. The icon is a little black window with white writing. Right click on it and select "Run as Administrator."

2. Say "Yes" when the window pops up asking if you want to allow changes. (Sorry for lack of screenshots. PicPick isn't the most fantastic screen grabber. 

3. This window should open up: 

4. Type the following in: 

5. Press Enter. You're done! The hibernate option shouldn't even be visible anymore. 

6. To turn hibernate back on, you do the obvious: instead of typing "powercfg -h off," you type "powercfg -h on". 

Learned in the context of TechnoFrolics, who are very cool people who do very cool things and you should go check them out. 

What I learned today: June 23, 2012

How to nail Golden Hour*, the respectable way:

1. Become a photographer. Or:
2. Become a meteorologist.
3. Spend 40 years in the business.
4. Learn from experience how to predict Golden Hour accurately.

How to nail Golden Hour, the cheap and lazy way:

1. Go to this site and put in your city.

I KNOW, right? 

*For those of you who don't know, Golden Hour is a magical time just before sunset when God turns up the world's "Fairy Tale" setting and it is physically impossible to take a bad photo. True fact. 

File under: Boring but helpful

The word on the street is that the way you become a good blogger is by blogging often, with lots of pictures, clear insight, and original content. In pursuit of that goal, I have blogged....not at all in the past three weeks. So with the same reasoning that makes McDonald's outsell Per Se, I'm going to try a series of "What I've Learned Today" posts: content that's not especially well done, but damn if it's not prolific.

Delicious cardboard-y content.

To really outdo myself, here's the only thing I can remember that I learned today:

To find out what version of Quick Books you have, press F2. The window that pops up will have "Quick Books yyyy - ABCD" at the top. The ABCD is your version number. 

That's right, folks - no screenshots, no nuthin'. Just something that I wish I had been able to find a little quicker when I was trying to figure it out today. 

How to update Quick Books without it failing at the last minute is a little trickier. I'll let y'all know when I figure it out.