Okay, so you’ve got yourself a new laptop, and decided a netbook rather than a full size notebook is more your style. They make a great substitute (I recently purchased the Asus 1000HE 10″ model), but they lack an optical drive for reading CDs or DVDs. So what happens when you need to install a piece of software that you have only on CD?

What You’ll Need:

• Windows XP Virtual CD Control Panel
• ISO Recorder by Alex Feinman

  For my example, I was attempting to install the Adobe Creative Suite 2 package, which uses 4 CDs for installation. What we need to do first is pull the image of each CD into an ISO. We’ll do that with the ISO Recorder software. After you have finished the installation of ISO Recorder, insert the CD you wish to convert, and open up My Computer. Simply right-click on the optical drive icon, and you should see an option for “Create Image from CD/DVD”.

  

  Click this, and ISO Recorder will load, and ask for a location to save the ISO. Once you pick a location, simply click next and allow it to finish processing (it should take around one or two minutes).

  

  Once you have the ISO files for all the installation discs, now transfer them to the laptop by whatever means you have. I prefer to use a USB drive, but you can transfer them through a network if you have one set up.

  Now we’re going to move to the Virtual CD Control Panel. Open virtualcd file you downloaded, and it will again bring up a dialog asking where to extract the files. I recommend saving it in a folder in your Documents file, or on your Desktop. Navigate to the place you extracted the files, and open the file VCdControlTool.exe. Click “Driver Control…”

  

  and you will see an option to “Install Driver…”. Click that, and you should see the file VCdRom.sys. Double click to open it. Now click the “Start” option underneath, and then click OK.

  

  

  Now we’re going to add a Virtual Drive. Click the “Add Drive” button. You can do multiple drives, but we’ll only need one right now, typically it will start with Z:\.

  

  This will work fine. If you open My Computer, you will see that you have a new Removable Disc for Drive Z. Go back to the Virtual CD Control Panel, and select Mount.

  

  Here we’re going to tell it where the ISO is that will be acting as the CD. Navigate to where you stored your ISO files, and select the one you wish to mount. Click “Open”, and you’ll be presented with the Special Mount Options dialog.

  

  These three options you won’t need to select for now. Suppress UDF, and Suppress Joliet I am not entirely certain what purpose they serve, but the Persistent Mount option allows the ISO to stay mounted even after rebooting the computer (which is useful when a software requires a reboot in between portions of the install process, such as a Windows installation). Now click OK, and you’ll see that your ISO has been mapped as drive Z:\. You’re ready to go!

  

  You can now use this just as you would a normal optical drive, but the last thing we’re going to do is “swap” discs. Partially through the installation, Adobe asks to insert Disc 2. We’re going to go and mount the second disc, but the important step to remember first is to eject the drive before mounting the second disc. If you simply mount the new ISO without first ejecting the original ISO, the installation will not recognize the new ISO, and leads to several other problems (through my own experience!).

  

  I hope that this information is able to help some of you out there. Please share your experiences if you wish in the comments!

After taking some pictures lately, I realized my indoor pictures more or less sucked. I did some reading, and found some good reviews on a relatively inexpensive flash unit: the Nikon SB-400.

I actually placed an order for it on Amazon on Sunday night, but for some unexplained reason, they decided to cancel my order. Since I had to drive to Huntsville today for classes, I made a trip over to Wolf Camera. It wasn’t much more expensive, and they let me play around with it for a while, so I decided to go ahead and purchase it. This worked out well for me, since I am basically too impatient to wait on shipping.

Another thing I’d been looking for was a remote shutter control, so that I wouldn’t have to rely on self-timer, and they happened to have one of those there as well!

So far, from shooting with it a little while, I can already tell a drastic difference in image quality. Here’s a shot I took of my nephew Caleb with it today:

I saw this label at Circuit City today, for a Gateway M6866 laptop. I wonder how something like this made it past any sort of proofreading?

Apologies for the terrible photo, it’s from my phone.

Today, I was browsing through StumbleUpon, and I ran across this popular illusion that has been around for a while. The illusion is, that there are four shapes (as shown),

that when arranged differently form the same shape, but with a different Area.

Comparing the upper and lower triangles (we’ll call them X and Y, respectively), we can see that X has an empty square that seemingly disappears when rearranged into Figure Y, yet at a glance, the size of X and Y in their entirety seem to be identical. However, since the area of the individual shapes have not changed, this simply cannot be possible! So let’s break it down and see exactly what is happening in between arrangements.

Our goal here is to prove that the area of triangles X and Y are not equal. There are a few different ways that we can do this, but what we will do in this case is calculate areas A and B outside of the triangle. If these triangles are, in fact, identical, then areas A and B should be exactly equal.

We’ll calculate this with the standard formulas for area:

• Rectangle: A = bh
• Triangle: A = 1/2bh

We’re interested in the total area of the colored shapes above. We now have our totals for both Areas A and B. We can see that in triangle X, where there is the unexplained square, the outer area “A” is 32. In triangle Y, outer area “B” is 33, the difference of 1 square inch caused by the extra space in X.

Why this illusion is so effective at first glance, is that our eyes assume that the hypotenuse of X or Y as a whole is a straight line. In actuality, the slopes of the two aligning triangles are slightly different. In X, the line bends out slightly outwards, while in Y, the line retracts inward. Just enough to make that 1 square inch difference.

This dose of geekery brought to you by 2:30 AM, and the addictive power of StumbleUpon. If you found this informative, please Stumble it. :)

I ran across this video on StumbleUpon today. A man is sitting in the street with a gun to his head, demanding that the police bring his girlfriend to see him kill himself. A police sharpshooter is put in position on a hill, and shoots the gun out of the man’s hand, allowing him to be safely taken into custody.

There are a lot of people who are set in their ways, who don’t like change. Then there are others who just don’t care enough to change. Well, then there are people like those whose computer I went to work on Monday.

Now, I’ve worked on some fairly old computers, Pentium IIIs with 128 MB of RAM, stuff like that, that’s fairly common. The computer I got to work on, the specs were:

• 166 MHz processor
• 16 MB RAM
• 3 512 MB HDDs
• Windows 98

Only thing it was missing was a 5 1/4″ floppy drive. :D

Oh, and the icing on the cake (for those who remember 98), his background was the bubbles pattern.

Big Spring Park, originally uploaded by Kevin Coppock.

Here are a few more shots I uploaded from Huntsville:

E Building, originally uploaded by Kevin Coppock.

Bit of backstory here since I haven’t had a chance to post a blog in a while due to computer issues. About two weeks ago, my computer’s liquid cooling pump decided to fry itself, so I had to order a new fan/heatsink from Newegg and wait for that to come in. It came in last Monday, and when I went to install it, that’s when the real fun started.

I started to remove the old cooling system from my computer, and all of that went fairly well, until I tried to remove the backplate that holds the waterblock to the CPU (those of you who’ve done this, you know what I’m talking about.) Well, apparently whatever genius is in charge of designing these thought it would be a good idea to use the absolutely strongest adhesive possible to mount it to a fragile, expensive piece of equipment such as a motherboard. After about 45 minutes with a hair dryer and a butter knife, I made some headway getting it off, only to notice, to my chagrin, a large burn mark both on my case and on my motherboard, below the CPU. Apparently I’d had a little miniature explosion in there, or something, but long story short, the sucker was fried.

So of course, being the week of Christmas, I couldn’t get a replacement motherboard until today (got an Abit IL-9 Pro, for those that care), but I threw this one together, and so far everything else seems to have made it out unscathed, including the processor, which I had assumed was probably fried as well. Moral of the story here is to not use liquid cooling systems… >.>

Also, I finally got to add some new photos now that I have my computer again, I uploaded three to Flickr today that I liked, so please go take a look if you have a chance!

So my sister has this annoying neighbor that, five or six times a day, has this ritual of sitting outside his apartment door smoking, and then proceeds to throw it in the bush that sits in front of her apartment. He doesn’t even bother to put them out, so you walk by and just see this smoking bush.

I find this very irritating…

To start with, I’ve started picking them up as I see them, and transferring them to his bush on the opposite side.

I figured this method would make it a little more personal, though:

I left these on his doorstep. Innocent enough, but maybe this will drive the point home. I doubt it, though. Unfortunately I’ll just have to imagine his response to this, but in my imagination I’m hoping for a double take, a long, silent stare, followed by a string of bewildered cursing, and a door slamming.

If this doesn’t work, I’m sure I’ll think of other plans. :)

This is kind of random, but I just noticed that Facebook has changed the way they send you email notifications. Now the email actually gives more information. Like if it’s a notification of a wall post or a message, it actually contains the post in the email. So apparently they updated it sometime between last night and today, but there’s nothing on the Facebook blog about it yet.

I always thought it would be kind helpful to have the message in the email itself, same way with MySpace.