How was Charles Free caught?

“ABC News” tonight had an interesting story about an escaped convict, real name Jack Hazen, assumed name Charles Free, who managed to live undiscovered in Las Vegas for the past 31 years. In 1975 he had been convicted of armed robbery, then ten months later escaped. He has not gotten in trouble with the law in all the years since. His wife and two daughters apparently knew nothing of his secret, are shocked, but say he’s reformed and are appealing for leniency. Extradition proceedings are pending. He may have to serve the rest of his original sentence in Florida, as well as additional time.

“ABC News” did not address the most interesting question: How was Hazen/Free’s cover blown? The kvbc.com site briefly addresses this:

The newly formed DOC Cold Case Fugitive Unit in Florida connected the dots by comparing electronic databases to known fugitives. They tipped off local officers and Hazen was arrested again.

Oddly enough, for the last three years Hazen has been living just two doors down from a Clark County Marshall’s house.

That’s something, but I’d still like to know what in Hazen’s Free-era info tipped off authorities to his real identity. Probably he got a little too sloppy, feeling the trail had grown cold. The data in computers doesn’t grow cold, it just gets passed around and passed around and mixed and matched and analyzed and re-analyzed.

So, what’s the skinny on those browsers, anyway?

The complete text of our reader’s question was a little too long for the Deepest Sender grid. To wit: “In recent months, you’ve said, ‘More soon on the browsers and other software’ and ‘if you’ve got links on your desktop to 11 Internet browsers (yes; 11, about which more later)….” So, what’s the skinny on those browsers, anyway?”

Did I say 11? I currently have icon-links to 14 browsers on my desktop. The browsers I use at least somewhat regularly are Internet Explorer, Firefox, Crazy Browser, K-Meleon, OffByOne, and iRider. I also click into Deepnet Explorer now and then. I still have a set-up project going with Deepnet.

Until I switched to the new laptop several months ago, IE, Firefox, K-Meleon and Navigator were the browsers I typically resorted to. I knew about Opera, but didn’t realize it was now free and somewhat more robust than when I had last checked it out.

A big discovery was iRider, which allows the user to open many links simultaneously (or seriatim very quickly) and to “pin” open pages so that they’re retained in permanent memory to be opened each time the browser is opened. IRider is fast and versatile, and the only browser I’ve ever paid money for. However, after I bought it I learned a lot more about Firefox add-ons and also the “group” feature that Firefox and many browsers now have, including Crazy Browser, K-Meleon, and Internet Explorer 7. This feature allows the user to save a bunch of related pages under an assigned name in the browser’s permanent memory. That’s helpful for quickly starting up research within a particular category of web pages, for example the portal pages of a major client’s web site, or the home pages of major newspapers. Or say you’re a film buff, you could make a group of all the sites you like to visit for movie news and reviews. It’s a more efficient kind of bookmarking.

OffByOne is the most stripped-down browser for windows. If you don’t care about a web page’s format, just want a bare-bones page for reading text and prefer to use as little memory  as possible, give OffByOne a try. I’d install it on my Asus eee if the eee had an XP instead of a Linux OS. If you have a clunky old PC with not a lot of RAM, try OffByOne. The makers call it “the world’s smallest and fastest web browser with full HTML 3.2 support. It is a  completely self-contained, stand-alone 1.2 MB application with no dependencies  on any other browser or browser component. For Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows  ME, Windows NT, Windows 2000 and Windows XP.”

K-Meleon and Crazy Browser are both pretty nimble. Crazy Browser will list the groups you save so that you can just click on the collection of web pages you want to work with, whereas K-Meleon asks you to type in the name of the group.

Firefox tends to be my default browser, and it’s what came pre-installed in my mini-laptop, the Asus eee. I’ve installed most of the same add-ons in both the eee’s Firefox and the Dell Vostro 1000’s Firefox.

Internet Explorer 7 is a pretty good browser, but seems a little slow to me. It has tabbed browsing, but I think every major browser has tabbed browsing these days. I need IE7 to view Netflix movies online, and to most efficiently send pages to Microsoft’s OneNote notetaking software (pages can be sent to OneNote using the print function in other browsers).

Deepnet Explorer combines a browser and a news reader. I haven’t yet explored this browser as deeply as I’d like to (get it? a pun!) but I like what I’ve seen so far.

Other browsers on my Dell, which have been praised by partisans but which I use only occasionally:

Safari - The Apple browser, now available in a Windows version.

Opera - Supposed to be very customizable with widgets, but these widgets don’t seem to be as easy to install as the Firefox add-ons.

Netscape Navigator - Owned by AOL now. They’ve thrown in the towel and will no longer be publishing new versions or supporting the latest one. Navigator was of course the first big browser to give Internet Explorer a run for its money.

Wyzo - Supposed to be especially good at downloading media.

Avant and Maxthon - Two of the browsers based on the Internet Explorer “core.” Crazy Browser is another. I don’t know quite how this works. Does Microsoft have to give them permission? Anyway, I gather that these shell-browsers won’t function if you don’t have IE also installed.

Flock, based like Firefox on something called Mozilla, had me at hello and then lost me shortly thereafter. Flock is a so-called “social” browser that helps the hipsters stay plugged into Facebook and YouTube and whatnot. I liked that it includes a blogging utility compatible with WordPress. But it seemed to be impossible to choose the right category for a blog being posted (unless it was among the first few categories listed in the scrollbar), which meant I had to log in to WordPress directly anyway to pick the category… I’ve had better luck with the Deepest Sender add-on for Firefox. Perhaps the problem with Flock’s blogging feature is easily solved.  But if you’re giving somebody a utility to do something faster and better, and it doesn’t work perfectly immediately, you risk losing the user to another utility that does work perfectly immediately. That is the way market competition goes sometimes, especially in the lickety-split world of software. (Yes, even freeware is in a market.)

I was a bit surprised to learn about all these browsers. I could have found out about many of them a few years ago with a Google search or two. There are many more out there in addition to the ones I’ve mentioned, some of them very specialized. If you want a sports-themed browser geared to guiding you quickly to all things sporty, there’s something called Sportsbrowser.

The next question to ask me is what Firefox add-ons I’ve installed.

Is the Asus eee hard to balance on your lap?

One of the occasional complaints about the economical mini-laptop produced by Asus, the eee, is that it is hard to balance on your lap. It’s not good for the lap-balancing. In an article at searchCIO.com:

Before Apple head honcho Steve Jobs unveiled the MacBook Air at Macworld in January, some Apple-watchers were hoping for a sub-notebook - something smaller than the existing 13.3 inch MacBook, rather than thinner. While there was some disappointment, the truth is that anything smaller than 13.3 inches results in a screen and keyboard that are too small to use all day, every day. Take the tiny seven inch Asus Eee PC which weights in at under a kilo. The Eee PC’s small size makes it awkward to balance on your lap yet, even sitting at a desk, the small keys can turn otherwise competent computer users into two finger typists. In comparison, the MacBook Air’s large backlit keyboard is joy to type on.

I don’t think the eee was intended to be used “all day, every day,” but it’s nonetheless remarkably usable and I end up spending a lot of time with it even when my main laptop is easily accessible. Using the smaller screen is a little tricky, but it’s doable enough with a few common-sense workarounds. As for the lap-balancing…  One can’t even place a regular-sized laptop on one’s lap if one is bothered by the heat and weight. I use the eee with a usb keyboard and put the keyboard on my lap. The eee itself can be propped anywhere–on a tray, on the arm of the arm chair, a table, whatever.

Apple’s Air looks looks like a very interesting machine. It has a different set of trade-offs and is also a lot more expensive. The eee is one of the first mini-laptops to be small in price as well as footprint.

Did you ever get the Asus eee you said you were going to get?

I’ve had my Asus eee for several days now and I like it, I really like it. It’s $300 to $500 depending on which model you buy (mine was $350, via J&R Electronics, via Amazon). It weighs about two pounds.

Cheap, light and pretty-robust mini-laptop on the road is better than expensive, heavy and very-robust regular laptop on the road. If my regular laptop were lost or stolen it would be a more-than-minor inconvenience given not only the cost but also all the oodles of installations and settings. It’s also nice to be able to scoop up the light machine and take it to a local shop or just to another room, or across the room.

My previous mini-laptop was a second-hand MobilePro 900 that sported a restrictive 2000-era Windows CE operating system. I had to buy a wi-fi card to gain wireless access, then perform a magic spell to activate the wireless card. Nor was this solution stable. After leaving the MobilePro fallow for a few months, I discovered that the machine-plus-card had forgotten the magic. It didn’t seem worth the trouble to figure it out again.

Cheap-and-fairly-robust is better than cheap-and-gotta-keep-wrestling-with-it. The 900 has cramped programs and OS, and scanty memory. (And was cheap only because second-hand; the price was something like $900-$1,000 when it came out.) I gave up trying to solve the complicated process by which one could add new CE-compatible software to the 900. It does have uses on the road, but you cannot (or I, at least, could not) download and read an Excel sheet using the MobilePro alone. This would have made it hard to quickly do a job for the client who sends me data in Excel sheets. And even with functioning wi-fi, browsing the Internet on the MobilePro was a slog, too much of a slog.

To be sure, PCs are ubiquitous, as is broadband these days, and there’s usually a desktop wherever I’m going to be. But I don’t like to be too dependent on a machine that somebody else may need to use also and that is not tailored to my liking.

The Asus eee solves everything, as far as I can tell. Some reviewers complain about the small 7-inch screen and small keyboard, and also the touchpad. But on my machine these are responsive enough, and one can get used to the trade-offs. There are also fixes. The MobilePro has one USB port; the eee has three, as well as a monitor port. So it’s easy to plug in a keyboard and a mouse, even a flat screen if need be. I use a mini-keyboard that has its own trackball, making a separate mouse and pad unnecessary.

I too would like a bigger screen. But the one on my model is fine. You do have to scroll more than when using a regular-sized screen. But aren’t we used to scrolling through web pages anyway? The viewing area is certainly more than you get with a cell phone or PDA. Text might be a little too small when you first click into a page, but no need to squint, usually. To easily read a long article on the installed Firefox browser, I often switch to print mode and enlarge the text. You can also zoom the view in a word processor document.

Wi-fi is occasionally a little quirky, but not as quirky as on the MobilePro. And now that I’ve rigged “full desktop” (as opposed to the default “easy”) mode, at home the wi-fi seems to leap into action automatically. It’s also pretty stable.

The eee has a Linux operating system and comes with plenty of programs for standard uses, including Skype (for making phone calls over the Internet) and Open Office. Instead of a whirring hard drive, it has a solid-state flash-card-type drive. It holds just 4 gigabytes on my model, much of it taken up by the installed software; you can add a flash card to supply more storage. Battery time is reasonable, a couple hours, nothing special. The power adapter is like a cell phone’s, small, light and easy to bring along.

The electronics of this gadget are low-end to save money. But today’s low-end is pretty good. And the pieces are well-integrated. The random access memory is 512 megabytes, enough for most workaday purposes using the installed software. I wanted a little more running room. Although on some eee models the RAM cannot be easily upgraded, I had no trouble installing a 2-gigabyte chip. The machine recognizes only 1 gigabyte of that, alas. From help sites I learned that you can update the kernel to get the machine to recognize the full 2 gigabytes, but the procedure sounds complicated and a little dangerous. You can’t just click on a link and download a patch. There are a lot of stupefying command codes that must be chanted in the proper order. Still, I might try it after learning a bit more about Linux. There’s also a way to install Windows XP on the machine, but I don’t see a need for that.

The XO, aimed at kids in developing countries (”One Laptop Per Child”), is the other major recent solution to the problem of producing a cheap but robust mini. Others are on the horizon, happily. Competition in this niche is long overdue. Until now the smallest laptops with any robust and general capacity (as opposed to, say, AlphaSmart’s minimalist alternatives) have been among the most expensive. No doubt we’ll soon see even better solutions from Asus and other companies.

I’ve tweaked the system a bit since getting my eee. But it’s set up so that it can be used out of the box by a person who would dread to redo a single default. (You might want to fine-tune at least the touchpad settings, though.) The home screen features several tabs taking you to pages for “work,” “play,” “learning,” etc., and each of these pages houses several large icons taking you to the software programs. If you can click on a power button, click on a tab, and click on an icon, you’re good to go. Easy, easy, easy.

Does it ever make sense to benefit from somebody else’s pain?

Often. Let me give you an example that has been one of my favorites ever since ten minutes ago.

I received in the mail today a Transcend 8 GB SDHC flash thingamajiggie that I bought in anticipation of eventually owning an ASUS eee mini-laptop, a cheap yet powerful gizmo that is all the rage right now among persons who want a lot for a little vis-a-vis electronic portability. But my Dell Vostro 1000 did not recognize the SDHC card. Of course I’d like both the Vostro and the eee I’m eventually going to own to recognize the card so that I can use it to flip stuff from the Vostro to the eee. Now, the main point of the SDHC is to expand the eee’s flash-drive memory, and of course it would be possible to use a different kind of flash card to transfer files between the two machines, using the USB ports. But it certainly would also be convenient for the SDHC card to work on both machines.

As I say, though, the Vostro 1000 refused to recognize the SDHC card. Was completely inert. As if the SDHC card were not even in the slot.

Internet. Google. I found a post by a guy who’d had the same problem, relating a long horror story about all the trials and tribulations he suffered while trying to find a driver for his Vostro 1000 that would recognize the SDHC card. At the end of the post he supplied a link to the required driver. I downloaded the file, unzipped it, ran the executable, rebooted the machine, and voila! my laptop now recognizes the card.

This lazy short cut of learning from somebody else’s sweat and tears without actually suffering all the same sweat and tears oneself works for many other things too, which is why it’s such a good idea to have division of labor, history, etc.

Do you feel that there is a lot of potential in the pop-up box?

The pop-up box can be used for all sorts of things and we have only begun to scratch the surface, or scroll over its substrata.

I would love it, for example, if I could read (i.e., try to read) an article written in French that were festooned with pop-up boxes pop-uppable over every word, you’d just glide your mouse and the illumination would come, the English translations and concise explanations of every nice grammatical and stylistic point. Maybe some of the pop-up boxes would have other pop-up boxes that pop up.

It turns out that pop-up boxes can even be used to express coy reservations or second thoughts. Instead of sticking such asides in brackets or footnotes or addenda, you could have a little pop-up box ready to leap out of the text you wish to nervously explicate. I saw this form of annotation in an essay on authority and authoritarianism by Timothy Wirkman Virkkala (I hope I’m pronouncing that correctly), to which I was led by an article about presidential candidate Ron Paul’s disowned newsletter copy, long story.

With regard to the line in Virkkala’s piece about “who is he to tell me to accept his categories,” I thought it was obviously a little ironic joke about authority and questioning authority, in line with the button slogan that annoyed Lew Rockwell, not a seriously indecorous implication that in the essay to which Virkkala was responding Rockwell had offered no argument but only demanded agreement with tough-sounding authoritarian assertions. Be that as it may, Virkkala now disparages the wisecrack as “indecorous.” He has had second thoughts about it; the tone is too jarring in light of the relatively elevated tone of the rest of the essay or whatever.

But…indecorous?! Why do persons kick themselves in the groin like that, accusing themselves of indecorousness and the like?

Hold on, though. Our pop-up box encases one of the more-sinuous sort of second thoughts, those that come with their own airbag and trampoline. Note, uh, Benny, the full text of the apologia that will accost you if you take the trouble to scroll: “Does this seem harsh? An editorial snafu led to this indecorous moment.”

Huh? Are you like me? Are you shaking your head, tall, just showered, enjoy books and movies, and making yourself a glass of chocolate milk as you get ready to turn in for the evening?

First of all, the author says he’s guilty of indecorousness, or rather that the moment was (hmm…), but then fobs off the responsibility for this renegade moment on an anonymous factor called “editorial snafu.” See, these Editorial Snafu gremlins clatter across escritoires at many an inopportune moment, and there is nothing to do about them but sigh and erect your self-accusatory, self-exculpatory pop-up box which nobody will ever see who does not click on hyperlinks expecting to be led to yet another damn web page….

We’re just at the beginning of all this. The more we see from the pop-up box, the more we can expect to see.

How do you avert desktop-icon disaster?

You can avert desktop-icon disaster with the Shock Desktop utility, which just saved my bacon.

All my desktop icons somehow got screwed up when I transferred my laptop from one work station to another and back again. I didn’t panic at all this time! I simply activated Shock Desktop (after finding its icon, that is; remember, the icons were no longer in their well-designated order), clicked on the desktop profile, and presto reverto, all was once again as it once had been. Elsewise it would have taken an hour or so of sloshing around before the icon order were sort of sorted out. (See the Lifehacker post, “Create (and Keep) a Perfect Icon Layout with Shock Desktop.”) Shock Desktop is easy to use. You mostly have to remember that when you add an icon to the desktop or rearrange any icons you must tell Shock Desktop to “update the profile.”

Some persons might wonder what’s the problem. I imagine that these are persons groaning under the weight of all of five or six shortcuts on their desktop. I have maybe 100 desktop shortcuts now. I don’t like to hunt for programs or docs I use frequently. I’ve become even more of a shortcut fiend because of the new laptop’s higher resolution and the excuse that prepping it provided for installing lots of new as well as familiar software.

If you’re happy with Microsoft Office + Internet Explorer and/or Firefox browsers, Shock Desktop solves a non-problem. But if you’ve got links on your desktop to 11 Internet browsers (yes; 11, about which more later), six Word files, a dozen notepad files, a few select web pages, the DOS command prompt, eight or nine security software programs, Skype, Encarta, an RSS reader, etc., you want your icons to be a little organized in accordance with a secret scheme of your own, and you want these icons to stay where you put them. Imagine that you had a box of several dozen 3×5 index cards (in the olden days, we had physical index cards and carbon paper and things), which somehow got spilled and were now all out of order. Even if they are clearly labeled, it’ll take a while to shuffle them back into alphabetical order. Now imagine you have a button you could push that would restore order instantaneously. Wha…? Yeah! It’s true! I know whereof I speak. I just clicked the Shock Desktop utility and watched all the desktop icons flying around like something out of a Harry Potter movie. And all was well.

Why is the keyboard of most laptops on top, with the mouse below the keys?

A mystery. Maybe the laptop manufacturers believe that users want to “rest” their palms on the surface below the keys; but that is not how I type. Did either manual or electric typewriters ever have a strip of surface below the keys to “rest” the palms so that one’s hands might be periodically crooked awkwardly?

To type on a typical laptop one must extend one’s hands in a way that I don’t find convenient or natural. For that reason and partly because even with a desktop I always put the attached keyboard on my lap (the wrong place to put a laptop) rather than on the desk, I type on laptops with an external keyboard, the larger keys of which are also easier to depress. With the keyboard slung on my lap, my hands are relaxed. I occasionally hear about how to position one’s hands ergonomically as one types to reduce strain, but I never have a problem. My hands are always in the laziest, most comfortable position.

Many smaller laptops or quasi-hand-helds like the MobilePro 900 lack the awkward strip of space below the keys. But on the typical average-sized laptop, the placement of the keyboard seems to have escaped any discipline of market process. A default layout has emerged from whatever historical design or engineering considerations, and now no thought ever is given to enabling the customer to type more comfortably. But it can’t be that outre an innovation to have models with keys at the bottom, mouse at the top. And once it becomes an easily available option, the world may find that I’m not the only typist who prefers it that way.

When are you going to do another post, PayPerQ?

That’s a very good question. Soon. Very soon. Oh, wait, this is one right now, isn’t it?

Several weeks ago I got a new Dell laptop. Still with the XP operating system, because I wanted the memory for apps that I believe Vista would have hogged and because I had heard all the stories about incompatibilities. Even so, I decided to double the RAM shortly after the system arrived, from 1 GB to 2 GB.

Of course, the laptop’s price dropped another $100 or so right after I got it… Dell declined to give me a rebate but did give me a coupon.

I’ve installed a bunch of new software (new to me anyway), including various browsers in addition to the familiar Internet Explorer, Netscape, Firefox, and another I had started using more recently, K-Meleon. More soon on the browsers and other software. I’m particularly happy about one of the browsers I discovered, but a couple others are also doing a thing or two that I am glad to see them doing. Though Firefox gets the most press as an alternative to IE, seems many more innovative browsers have been popping up over the last few years than I realized.

Why add a typewriter to your writing-tool pool?

In the previous blog entry I reported that I had hauled the typewriter out of the hiding place and might try to use it now and then as an alternative to the PC.

In general I want to increase the ubiquity and variety of my writing tools as an aid to productivity and bulwark against sloth. The typewriter is on a stand in the bedroom, along with a few books I need to consult for the writing chore I have in mind. I figure if I don’t want to stumble into the office and fire up the PC I might still hack away at a job on the typewriter, then port it to the PC once there’s a draft. The retyping won’t be that much of a loss of efficiency, at least not for short projects.

Another addition to the pool is the NEC MobilePro 900 mini-laptop that I picked up second-hand from an Amazon vendor recently (the model is also available from eBay sellers). Circa year 2000 vintage, of a line that isn’t produced any more. There’s a certain skimping on programs and memory for the sake of the light weight (about a pound) and the instant-on capability. With the appropriate wi-fi card it can hook into the Internet at hotspots. Surfing the web is a trawl compared to what a regular PC can do, but it’s still cool to be able to check email online or scan some headlines. While the MobilePro’s keyboard is usable, the care required to type on it does slow down typing speed. But the little critter also has a USB port. I’ve used it for a flash drive and also to plug in a regular keyboard. With a splitter, it can accommodate both a keyboard and a separate mouse. (What I need is a keyboard integrated with a mouse pad.) The MobilePro’s screen isn’t that great for outdoors, but it’s visible enough indoors.

The tradeoffs are fine if the main reason for having the machine is to be able to take it anywhere and turn it on and start typing a second later. Price was an issue when the MobilePro was new (about $900, about the same as a fully featured if more cumbersome laptop). But now you should be able to pick it up from the secondhand market for less than $200.

The third tool I’m adopting is a simple memo pad for jotting chores and notions that occur to me before they fade into oblivion. One for my pocket, another for bedside along with the yellow legal pads for longer scribblings. Seems obvious, especially for a “Columbo” fan, but yeah, I’m just getting around to it. I used to call my voicemail a lot to leave messages and reminders to myself, but that’s going to be a little harder to do now that I’ve discontinued my landline phone service (still doable from my PC or with my Tracfone). But that’s another story. Anyway, transcribing a litter of phone messages is cumbersome too. Might as well just retype the scribblings.

Update 12/29/07. You know, scratch all that. I ended up stashing the typewriter for now and buying a new laptop that I recently set up in my bedroom. And although I used the memo pad for a while, I don’t bother any more. Still the most efficient way to leave a note-to-self when I’m away from the computers is to leave a mesasge on my voice box or call Jott to send myself a (possibly typo-ridden) email. I don’t use the MobilePro very much and once I get an ASUS eee, a more functional light mini-laptop that is going for about $400 or less (I really want one!) I doubt I’ll ever use the c. 2000-issue MobilePro with its relatively rigid and limited capabilities.

Can you turn a typewriter into a word processor?

A long time ago in a technological environment far, far away, an article in Writer’s Digest proposed a way to keep up the flow of writing that is repeatedly interrupted by the necessity of putting another sheet of paper in the typewriter once every 250 words or so.

The advice was to use a long continuous roll of suitably wide paper, obtained perhaps from factory overstock. The roll, perhaps 8 and 1/2 inches by 50 feet in dimension, would gradually be used up as you typed away, but not so fast as an 8 and 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper would be used up.

Of course, you were supposed to try this with first drafts only, not final copy. Until electronic submissions became commonplace, editors still always wanted manuscripts to be submitted in sheets. Market listings never included a request that manuscripts be submitted in the form of tubby industrial paper rolls. But the point was that by obviating the need to replace pages as you went along, you’d enhance the creative flow that was most important when you were first coming up with the words, not quite so important when pruning and polishing them.

The piece appeared probably in the late 70s. Has the advent of word processing killed the utility of this notion? Maybe. But there is something to said for handwriting or typing as an alternative to electron juggling, to relieve sameness or to ward off the demon of obsessive-compulsive blue-penciling. It’s easy to edit as one goes along on the computer; and hard, at least for some writers, to train oneself just to let the words flow happily or crappily and amend and repair later. So maybe I’ll try to scrounge up one of these paper rolls and see how it goes, now that I’ve hauled out the electronic typewriter.