Why Are My Pictures Missing from Blogger? (or other sites!)

 You can find a multitude of flavors of this question floating around on the Internet.  There could be many reasons.  "There are 8 million stories in the Naked City, this is one of them!"

My ISP (or perhaps its equipment) is no longer happy with requests to access sites via HTTP.  Centurylink.net will not correctly handle an 

http://4theloveofwood.blogspot.com/

request, for example.  Oh, it will get you to the site, all right, but most of the formatting and all of the images will be deleted.  I have tolerated this situation for the past six months or so - but now it is bugging my wife, so something must be done.  I have reported the problem.

As far as I know, use of http has not been deprecated on the Internet - it should still work.

If you are having this problem and notice that you are using an "http://" llink - I suppose that there are only a trillion or so of them floating around on the net, try inserting the little "s" after the "p"

You might be pleasantly surprised!

By the way, if you own a blog or a website and your users are having this problem, you can fix it for them by turning on an option that will upgrade your users' requests to https - provided you have the proper security certificate on the service that you are using.  (Blogger does, of course.)

Below are two screen grabs that show the difference:

    

Don't expect your ISP to accept this as his problem without a struggle.  Good luck.

Fixing the Honeywell 4000 Programmable Thermostat (It's Not as Smart as it Thinks!)

This post is offered to alert you to two features built into the Honeywell 4000 series thermostat that you might not realize are affecting your life and comfort.  The device is very intelligent - but the manufacturer and installers assume that you are not!

We participated in a "*free energy audit" this summer.  It took about a year for the busy auditors to get around to us.  The (apparently) high demand for this audit service is fueled by the promise of *free replacement light bulbs and a *free programmable thermostat.

Such a deal!

Now that the heating season has arrived, we find that the furnace comes on at an unpredictable time each morning and the humidifier doesn't work.  So much for the world of "intelligent devices."

The free thermostat is a modern Honeywell 4000 series which is replacing a much older Honeywell device.

We programmed the new thermostat to set the temperature way back (I am too embarrassed to divulge Linda's idea of an ideal sleeping temp - we once froze the pipes overnight in a previous home) for sleeping and bring it back on a half hour before I get up.

This seemed to be working as the heating season began, but then the heat began coming on earlier and earlier than the prescribed "wake" time.  The installer had taken us through the programming cycle - we checked the "setting" instructions - we even checked a couple of YouTube videos.

If that wasn't bad enough, the furnace was cycling on and off much more frequently than before.  These short cycles bothered me for two reasons - first, you only get so many "starts" before maintenance is required and second, our humidifier on the furnace does not start until well into the "on" cycle of the furnace - we were suffering from dry air.

I quickly diagnosed the frequent cycling - the heat anticipator was set wrong.  What's a "heat anticipator?"  In the old days, it was a small heating coil mounted below the bimetal strip in the thermostat.  It had a rheostat wired in series to control how much juice got to it.  The purpose is to warm the sensor a bit faster than the room to prevent the device from overshooting the setting.  Follow this link for example to read about the one shown below on the familiar old "clock face" Honeywell unit.

Now then - where is the heat anticipator located on the new Honeywell 4000?

You have to open up the Installation Instructions and probe deeply to find the intelligent electronic replacement:

Instead of a "Heat Anticipator," you get a "Heating Cycle Rate" - the default setting is 5.  I set it back to 3 for an opening bid.  Perhaps 1 will be better.

As for the the heat coming on at a much earlier time than actually programmed - that is due to the "Adaptive Intelligent Recovery!"   This feature is easily disabled once you find out about it.  The feature tries to figure out how much before your "Wake" time it should start the furnace.  It is easily confused by people who sometimes open windows at night!

I was planning to go back to the old thermostat this weekend - but maybe I have outsmarted the intelligence in this device sufficiently that we will be able to live with this genius in the house.



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*TANSTAFL Warning!  Of course, the new light bulbs and thermostat are not really free.  They are built into the price of our utilities - so naturally, you will want to maximize your share too.  You might have to sell the thermostat on eBay and go back to the old one - so save the box and instructions.

Which Photofinisher Is Best?

It's a pretty silly question - the obvious answer is "It depends."  But that didn't keep the New York Times from taking it on in the Travel Section last September.

Stephanie Rosenbloom wrote the article and led off with this comparison photo:

Her winner was the photo on the right, described as "sharper and truer to life."  Note my arrows on the left.  They point to the detail in the shadows which the finisher on the right threw away!  You will have to go the original article to see that the photo on the right also discards considerable highlight detail - look at the divided light windows, for instance.

So, we know the article is written by someone without photographic expertise - shadow detail is the first place a photographer would look.

But let's consider where the real variation in photo printing takes place.  It's at the printer where the ink meets the paper.  Proper calibration of the printer is essential to good printing.

I have two Walgreen's close to my house.  How my photos will look varies greatly between the two and sometimes, even from day to day.

Here is an example I recently printed at both stores.

If you didn't see the shadow on the tee box, you would think the first picture was taken on a cloudy day.

Good luck getting your prints to come out "correct."  Only a professional operation with a standard color chart and personal control of the printer is going to have consistent reproducible results.  Consider each printing exercise to be an experiment.  For a large group of prints, I will send one or two to my favorite printer and go get them to see how the printer is running at the moment.  Then I send the whole batch.

My ESC Key Quit Working!

I recently acquired a new Dell Inspiron laptop and began the usual tricky process of getting all my software moved from my older laptop onto the new one.

It wasn't too long before I was working on an Excel spreadsheet and entered a few letters into an incorrect cell.  I paused and hit the ESC key.  Nothing happened.  WTF!  I had the same problem with my Adobe Photoshop Organizer the previous evening when it wouldn't exit from "full-screen" mode as I pressed the ESC key.

What is going on?  Has Dell done something sinister?  I searched the Internet.  And searched some more over the next couple of days.  Of course, I mostly turned up stories of how bad the customer support is at lots of companies.  Finally, I turned up the source of the problem here.  Yes, it's Adobe again.

When I closed Adobe Photoshop Elements 9, the ESC key began working again.  Sorry to have doubted you, Dell.  I should known to always suspect Adobe first.  And this time, they didn't just sabotage other folks software, they sabotaged their own, Organizer.

But wait!  I have this same exact software installed on my previous computer, also running Windows 7.  Why is it only causing a problem on this one?  That's why I became suspicious  of the hardware.  Thinking back, I realized that I had installed Photoshop before installing Office on this computer.  Perhaps that causes the problem.  Well, I'm not going to do all of Adobe's trouble-shooting for them.

Now this problem has been around since at least 2007, Microsoft Vista and a wide variety of Photoshop products.  So you would think that Googling "Adobe Photoshop ESC key" might produce some kind of humble apology statement and maybe even a fix for it.  You would be wrong.  All you are going to find is the usual, "it's surely not our fault" response that Adobe in known for. This led jayp2007, back in 2009, to post this comment on the Adobe support bulletin board:

Have you even read this post and the issue it's regarding? People with both 32-bit and 64-bit are having the problem where their escape key doesn't work anywhere else in the O.S. when Photoshop is running. And people with both Photoshop CS3 and CS4 are having the problem. And of course it was first reported nearly 2 years ago... Not that this apparently matters to anyone at Adobe.

Nice observation, Jay P! 

And why don't I update to a newer version of photoshop?  Well, I am waiting for their support attitude to change.  Until then, I will live with the problems I know instead of spending more money with them to buy problems that I don't know.

McAfee and Thunderbird - Don't Bother Trying to Mix These

You'd be better off mixing ammonia and bleach in a small room than trying to get McAfee antivirus to work with Thunderbird e-mail.  But, at least, the household chemical companies put warning labels on the containers.

Setting Up a Replacement Computer

I just purchased a new Dell laptop to gain a larger disk drive and more memory.  These were starting to become issues on my previous Dell laptop.

I stuck with Windows 7, of course, even though ZDnet finally pronounced Windows 8 usable about ten months ago.

After getting the computer booted up, I installed my Internet connection and the three web browsers, IE (just because I might need it), Chrome (because it really is fast - especially with Paul Kimpel's Burroughs 205 emulator) and Firefox (because I am used to it.)  This also helps me deal with reading more than 10 NYT articles in a month.  I have one correspondent who frequently sends me links to the NYT.

The Anti-Virus Program

I like to describe both Norton and McAfee products as computer viruses.  They sneak onto your new computer in a deceptive manner (by claiming to prevent problems and being planted there by hardware vendors) and cause performance problems or program failures.  Nevertheless, when McAfee caught me browsing the Internet without "real-time protection," I decided to give it another chance.  I gave it the go-ahead to save me from the evils that lurk beyond my firewall.

Next up was my e-mail.  I use Thunderbird and have for many, many years.  I have been very happy with the product.  I would say totally satisfied except that they inserted this bug into the software last fall and still have not fixed it (but there is a workaround.)  I downloaded Thunderbird and then moved my profile with 9 gigabytes of old messages onto the new computer.  Getting my e-mail vendor passwords updated is another irritant with Thunderbird but I got through that too.

Then, I sent myself a message.  Thunderbird hung - and hung for over five minutes!  It finally came back to life.  Just a one-time issue, I thought.  Perhaps some kind of initiation ritual.

Later, I heard the "you've got mail" ding.  I checked Thunderbird.  Dead - or at least comatose.  I fired up the task manager.  McAfee has a process taking 25% of the system processor resources.  So, I must really have a four-processor system!  A CPU-intensive task now only takes 25% of the system instead of 50% or 100% - ah, sweet progress.  But that McAfee task has effectively stopped Thunderbird while letting everything else run.

The problem is McAfee - as usual

So, I Googled "Thunderbird McAfee slow".  O, yeah - big time issue.  Has been for years.   And, as usual, neither party wants to deal with it.  And people that bring it up in support forums get slapped around for not providing enough information.  That and forum-joining requirements is why I just bitch about it on my blog instead of trying to get someone to fix it.

Diagnosing the problem is not hard.  I have lots of messages in my Inbox.  Over 7000 marked as unread on my laptop, over 30,000 on the desktop.  Yes, I can find the e-mail that you sent me in 2004.  To go back beyond that I have to leave the inbox.  This is why I use Thunderbird.  It searches well and sorts all of those messages by "From" or "Subject" almost instantly. 

Diagnosing the Problem for Them

Pretty clearly, McAfee's "real time protection" is wasting a lot of time looking through either the whole Inbox or the Unread messages in the box.  When I have some spare time, I will figure out which it is and update this post. 

Short-Term and Long-Term Fix for the Problem

Meanwhile, I shall eliminate McAfee's real-time function.

No wonder people keep abandoning Microsoft and going to Apple.

Can Treehouse Really Sell a Product with This Screen?

I was browsing the web for content management system software and its documentation tonight.  I came across a page for Treehouse. ... the fastest, easiest way to learn to code, make apps, and start a business. Tutorials in CSS, HTML ...

I paused to look a bit:

That's right, they think that using medium gray text on slightly darker medium gray background is a good idea in explaining their product.  Do they really think I will next take time to figure out how to buy it?  BTW, it looks better here in the screenshot than on their real page.

Maybe someone on their staff will shoot a link to this page to their management and say, "we might just be shooting ourselves in the foot here!"

How Many OSHA Violations Can You Spot in This Photo?

I checked out the StarTribune this morning and saw this picture.

I assumed they were running an article on OSHA violations in the local contractor market.

My bad.