How to change the windows 7 desktop clock to show 24 hour time

It's not as simple as clicking on it and finding the control for this, but it's not that far off either. This configuration has to be accessed via the control panel. Apparenly what you're doing is changing globals that apply for all software on the machine. Here's the link with nice screensnaps:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_vista-desktop/control-panel-change-12-hour-clock-to-24-hour/490a874b-7d3a-4fa4-ad38-c6ebc24a854a

A netbook for a 4-year-old

My goal was to get a small, cheap laptop for my 4 (soon to be 5) year old to use for accessing the two or three websites that she presently likes, that could be hardened to prevent accidentally going to other websites until she actually wants that capability (like in about 6 months), and is modern enough to actually play videos etc at full speed. Here's an article from the dusty, ancient year of 2009 that covers this question:

http://blog.laptopmag.com/kids-netbook

Option 1 is the Disney Netpal, which supposedly has parental controls simple enough for even a dinosaur like myself to set up without it becoming an all-night project. The downsides are: It's pink, and it's pretty tiny (10.1-inch screen). They made a blue one as well but only the pink ones were popular enough to show up on eBay these days.

Option 2 is just a different netbook that I install some kind of parental control software on.

The Netpal is no longer made, so old stock at online stores is now oddly expensive. Units being sold on eBay were in the right price range though.

The netbook market these days has shaken out into two or three brands at most. If I'm going to give up on the Disney package, I also might as well go for something slightly bigger. That pretty much leaves the Acer Aspire One line (Asus, the maker of the NetPal, has a few options but most of them are in the 10.1-inch form factor).

Also, very unfortunately, it is already becoming difficult to get laptops with anything other than Windows 8, so I am already being pushed into the Used market. Searching for Acer Aspires with Windows 7, I liked this 11.1-inch one the best:

http://www.amazon.com/Acer-Aspire-AO756-4854-11-6-Inch-Netbook/dp/B0083PR78M/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1355682002&sr=1-1&keywords=acer+aspire+ao756#productDetails

I didn't need the 500G hard drive, but it did seem to come with a professional copy of Windows7 and more RAM. The model number A0756 seems to cover the basic model, and the particular combination of hardware and software options is varied by the style number 4854, which seems to allow for all kinds of variation of processor, memory, hard drive, and OS. Here it is on Ebay:

http://www.ebay.com/sch/Laptops-Netbooks-/175672/i.html?_from=R40&_nkw=AO756-4854

Apparently, the 2899 model is much more humble, with a 32-bit Windows 7 installation, less HD and RAM, and a Celeron instead of a Dual Core processor. However, it's also about $200 less and this is mostly for use over just the coming year so this might be good enough:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Acer-11-6-Aspire-One-Netbook-877-1-4Ghz-Dual-core-2GB-320GB-AO756-2899-/271115648294?pt=Laptops_Nov05&hash=item3f1fc07d26

And because Google makes it possible to find *anything* online, here is the side-by-side comparison of these two models!

http://www.shopping.com/xSBS-acer-acer-aspire-one-11-6-netbook-2gb-memory-320gb-hard-drive-ash-black-acer-acer-aspire-one-ao756-4854-ash-black-intel-pentium-967-1-30ghz-11-6-4gb-ddr3-memory-500gb-hdd-netb~PRDLT-127171921-133374655

So, what kind of parental control software to get? What I need at this point is just simple whitelist control. Most software of course is much more feature-laden than I need. I don't need content recognition, keylogging, etc, at least right now. Here are some reviews that do a good job of showing the entire spectrum of options:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2346997,00.asp

http://lifehacker.com/5868750/how-do-i-set-up-non+annoying-parental-controls-on-all-my-devices

Whitelisting is apparently easiest to implement at the router or DNS level. I'm not sure that I am ready to do all the work necessary to implement this, but I've found some products that both implement it and have easy hole-poking options for "parental" use:

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2353883,00.asp

Disable middle mouse button closing tabs in IE

This "feature" in Windows 7 has caused me more trouble that you'd think would be possible. With my work laptop, the placement of the mouse buttons under the track pad makes it super easy to hit the middle button when I meant to hit the left button, and boom the tab is gone.

It turns out that the answer is simply to edit the mouse setup properties for the track pad; the definition of each button is fully configurable. I made the middle button the same function as the left button and my problem was solved.

Here are some links. This first link describes the problem perfectly but not the solution so much:

http://www.xyplorer.com/xyfc/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=8148

Here's the (in retrospect, not very related) link that got me to realize that I could just change the mouse button settings through the control panel:

http://www.sevenforums.com/general-discussion/34877-middle-mouse-button.html

Recycling Alkaline Batteries

Having saved up another year's worth of used batteries, I was strangely having a hard time finding a place to take them; the usual battery disposal bins at work were no longer installed. Finally getting around to searching online I am finding that the recycling programs for these batteries are being shut down. Bizarrely, all the county recycling programs are now requesting that these batteries just get thrown in the trash, under the orwellian excuse that they "no longer contain mercury since 1996". What a shame. Here are some of the links to this effect:

http://www6.montgomerycountymd.gov/apps/dep/solidwaste/collectionservices/material_detail.asp?categoryID=34
http://www.howardcountymd.gov/Batteries.htm

This link seems to offer hope that Alkalines are still taken by somebody, and also have the list of retailers that take them back (Radio Shack for example):

http://www.ehow.com/how_7859426_recycle-alkaline-batteries-baltimore-maryland.html

According this link, I could either kill a Saturday trekking out to Alpha Ridge Landfill, or try taking them to MOM's:

http://ellicottcity.patch.com/articles/properly-dispose-of-cfls-and-alkaline-batteries

Setting up Windows XP to use a time server

I needed to set up my Windows and Linux systems to all use time servers so that the times in the error logs on all systems would match. This does not seem to be as easy as I remembered it being for XP systems, and super easy for the Linux systems except that we've lobotomized their ethernet interfaces so that the whole LAN can be taken off of the WAN whenever we need. Consequently, I never got to a working answer with either system. (Update: See final solution at the end of the post.) Here is what I've learned so far:

Network Time Protocol (NTP) works by having branch systems poll systems higher up the tree rather than going to a central hub. Presumably, the base of the tree is a reliable server. Reliability at the branch level is increased by having them poll more than one other system, in fact any number which are then voted against each other. The branching levels are called STRATUMs, and it's bad form to connect to a STRATUM1 system but STRATUM2 or lower is fine.

Astonishingly, in Windows it seems to be set up to use an NTP time server, but to configure it oddly requires nightmarish direct registry modification. Per the following links:

http://www.atomic-clock.galleon.eu.com/support/windows-xp-ntp-time-server.html
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314054

This set of slides from NIST hints that is could be possible to set everything up by using net time, and then stopping and starting w32time, but that can't be true otherwise M$ and others would have that instead of the registry modifications in their hints.

http://tf.nist.gov/service/pdf/win2000xp.pdf


After reading these links, my thoughts were more along the lines of "maybe the laptops are already set up to time servers and I just need to prove it to myself.". So the question of how to check if a server has been set up led to further dead ends until I decided to give that up too. Apparently, net time and w32tm can be used to find this out, except that not so much on XP. Apparently the /querysntp option doesn't exist for net time on XP, and w32tm fails if the local domain, protocols, or firewall aren't set up right.

http://superuser.com/questions/425233/how-can-i-check-a-systems-current-ntp-configuration

When I tried net time on the laptops I got "System error 5 has occurred. Access is denied." (It worked fine on my own laptop.) This apparently means access to the remote system, apparently if any systems in the local domain are mismatched this will fail, or if there's a firewall issue, or oddly if the computer times are mismatched (hope this isn't it):

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/555644

From a rootkit vendor:

http://www.personalcomputerfixes.com/general-errors/how-to-fix-system-error-5-%E2%80%93-%E2%80%9Caccess-is-denied%E2%80%9D/

And w32tm was full of options, none of which included a simple query as to the setup, as far as I could tell.

So eventually, I decided that the PC times seem really close to my own which I know is on a server, so they must be getting time from a server. How about the linux box?

Finally, something easy:

https://help.ubuntu.com/8.04/serverguide/NTP.html

Getting less eay:

http://www.ntp.org/ntpfaq/NTP-a-faq.htm

Too bad we turned off both the nameservice and even the gateways for these machines because we couldn't be bothered with any sort of sophistication when setting them up to run off of the network. Ah well.

Update: From the first link just above, I learned that it is possible for a sysadmin to run ntpdate directly to do a one-shot clock setup from another server. Presumably I wasn't able to use the gateways on my linux box to get to any other servers, but here's where it all comes together: what about polling the other systems on my LAN that are in the /etc/hosts table? Yes, I was able to reset the time on the linux box by using the windows laptop as my NTP host. Using:

sudo ntpdate [ip of the windows XP system]

and boom the ubuntu time now matches the time on my Windows laptop. Crude but effective, and it wouldn't have worked if my XP firewall had been better set up).

Furthermore, I added an entry in /etc/cron.daily to run ntpdate every day since the unix boxes seem to have an impressive amount of clock drift (a couple of minutes over the course of a month). This required that I add an executable script (named ntpdate per the examples but I think that the name is unimportant) to this directory which contained my ntpdate command. This was covered in the first ubuntu link above, however I also had to do some reading up on cron and found some very nice links for that:

http://www.unixgeeks.org/security/newbie/unix/cron-1.html

http://www.unix.com/unix-dummies-questions-answers/5695-cron-how-tell-s-working.html

http://www.softpanorama.info/Utilities/cron.shtml

The last link above is the one that confirmed that these are indeed just shell scripts in this directory, and ignore lines that begin with the standard shell script comment character #. On a side note, apparently the version of cron that I'm running in ubuntu is called "Nixie cron".

Then I had to correct the timezone. I did this by doing:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata

Which launches a hilarious terminal server that offers bios-like choices for location that allowed me to pick "New York" and set the time to the correct time zone. I got this from the following link, which is very nice and also reiterates everything that my previous ntp references told me, but in a much prettier way:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuTime

Python one-line if statement

After days of fiddling, I finally broke the code for the one-line if syntax in Python. This is so that my gseos menu options can call a python routine, and have the result from that routine be the condition for calling other functions. I had previously already figured out that these menu options were essentially just python statements and that I could have multiple statements by linking them together with semicolons. This extends it even further, probably further than the gseos architects even intended.

My menu items now look like this:

if routine(): statement1;statement2;statement3

The key breakthrough was that after the semicolon had to be one space (a tab did not work) and to give up using curly braces around the three statements.

Windows 7 network usage

I was pretty sad about not getting that network usage icon in the bottom right corner of my task bar when my OS changed from XP to Windows 7. However, I just now found something even better, Resource Monitor. I'm still not clear on how I got it to start up, but it not only shows memory and network usage, but what task is accessing the network and where they are trying to access!

I began checking some of the addresses being accessed. One of them was a suspicious-looking 239.255.255.250. It turns out that this is a M$ kludge for discovering plug-and-play services on the network? Who would do such a terrible thing?!!

http://help.lockergnome.com/general/239-255-255-250-Port-1900--ftopict18953.html