BEEP

Somehow my latest work laptop (Dell Latitude D620) has a PC speaker circuit that bypasses mute settings and the headphone jack. Windows loves to BEEP on certain events, whether it's just control-G ASCII characters in the console, or a bell in a PuTTY window.

The quick solution is to run the secret: "net stop beep". That stops the secret beep service from running.

But a more permanent fix is to go into the Device Manager (Control Panel -> System, Hardware tab, then the Device Manager button). In the View menu, pick "Show hidden devices". Now down in the treeview, under Non-Plug and Play Drivers, there is a "Beep" driver. You can change the properties on it to disable it and stop/disable the service. Ignore the prompts to reboot now.

That's it. No more beeps. Well, unless you run VMWare. See my other post about that.

Find out what's on Clearance at ThinkGeek!

Technocrati tags: Windows Dell D620 beep

Abortion Survivors

This is an amazing article, no matter where you stand on the different abortion issues.

Thirty years ago, Gianna Jessen's mother had an abortion when seven-and-a-half months pregnant. The abortion failed and, 18 hours later, Gianna (pictured) was born alive. She suffered cerebral palsy as a result of the botched abortion, yet has defied doctors' predictions that she would never walk. In fact she has run a marathon, is an accomplished singer and writer and travels the world to campaign against abortion.

Windows driver for Linux disks

http://www.fs-driver.org/index.html

This is only for ext2 (and 3?) filesystems, but that's still pretty
cool if you dual-boot or otherwise share physical disks between Linux
and Windows.

Good Idea at the Time

Something I've really learned this year doing Detour (our Wednesday night children's ministry) is what a difference there is between doing something with 2 or 3 kids and doing something with 15 or 25 kids. A couple of weeks ago we thought paper mache pinatas sounded like a good idea. Sure it's a little messy, but water and flour sounded much easier to clean up than some of the other messes we've had, like corn starch/water/food coloring goop or some of the different food activities the kids have done. I could think back to memories of making a few paper mache objects with my parents and brother and it didn't seem that messy at the time.

Fast-forward to tonight. Holy moly. 25 kids from pre-k to 5th grade all slapping newspaper and paste everywhere. An entire bowl of paste spilled. How do kids get everything in their hair? In the past 10 years I don't think I've ever managed to accidentally wipe some ick from my hands into my hair. I think I have to go back to c. 1991 when I had a problem removing a stubborn oil filter.

LinkedIn loads webmail contacts

An old roommate of mine added me on LinkedIn and I noticed that LinkedIn can now retrieve contact lists from webmail like Hotmail, Yahoo, or GMail. Cool. In just a couple minutes I pulled two contact lists in and it even showed me which of my contacts were already registered as LinkedIn users. Some people I hadn't even thought of were out there, waiting to be added. Quick and easy. Cool feature.

Cool blogs

http://www.plan59.com 50's era marketing

http://www.shorpy.com historical photos. This is also an interesting business model. The content is just free for the taking from public domain sources.

http://www.on-my-desk.blogspot.com A look at lots of designers' workspaces. Mine is amazingly bland, mostly because I don't do a lot of design work anymore, but also because I have kids around that steal every cool toy or inspirational clipping. In exchange I get to look at their odd liger-ish animal drawings and a parade of stuffed animals in all the latest paper and tape fashions.