Caltrops - American McGee's Honda Civic





	[quote name="Tansin A. Darcos (TDARCOS)"]It's a nice machine a refurbished Acer Aspire X1420G, 4GB of memory, 750 GB disk, 3.2 GHZ quad-core processor, Windows 7 Home Premium, DVD drive, and - especially important since I had to carry it home in my lap in my wheelchair under my arm on two buses and a train - in the box it only weighed 17 pounds and the computer itself only weighs 12 pounds. There were a couple of other machines from Dell and Hewlett Packard and both were over 25 pounds in the box. About the only thing I'm surprised about was that I didn't have to buy speakers for it, it came with them (specifically "Acer" brand speakers.) I didn't notice this in the specifications for the machine, I spent $6 to buy a set of Inland speakers (what I have on my other machine). I am currently using that machine to write this article, after I downloaded Firefox to enable me to browse safely. I've also installed a few other things, including Steam so I can play the Steam-based games I have on the Optiplex also on this machine (Half Life 2, HL2 Ep 1, HL2 Ep 2, Portal, Portal 2, Peggle Nights, Peggle Deluxe, and a few others), plus Duke Nukem Forever (I do a separate article about that) which was purportedly the reason I bought this machine. I also probably want to install a bunch of other things, including a lot of open-source applications. I just thought about all the crap I use on a regular basis that I have on other machines: <ol> <li> VLC player </li><li> Google Sketchup 8 for 3d designs</li><li> Inkscape for 2D designs</li><li> Audacity for audio editing</li><li> Free Basic and </li><li> Free Pascal for programming</li><li> Firefox for web browsing (I never use IE unless I'm doing testing of a website I'm designing for compatibility except to download Firefox) </li><li> PDF Creator for making PDFs</li><li> Open Office or Libre Office to read and write Word documents</li><li> Word Perfect for writing documents and books</li><li> Filezilla FTP application</li><li> Codelobster IDE for developing PHP-powered websites</li><li> Programmer's Editor for editing HUGO-based text adventures</li><li> The original Duke Nukem 3d so I can play that game plus third-party maps</li><li>Doom so I can still play that from time-to-time</li><li> The HUGO programming language compiler for writing text adventure games</li><li> Mercurial and SVN for source-code archiving for two different projects</li><li> YouTube Downloader so I can watch YouTube videos when I'm off-line</li><li> MagicJack software to run the MagicJack adapter to provide a desktop phone (it's not too bad; I get about 98% of a standard hard-line phone for a total of $68 for a five-year license (Magic Jack was announcing it was raising the license fee from $19 a year to $29 a year but I could still buy a 5-year license for $69, and I've been buying one-year licenses for three years so I decided to take the longer license) , it really does provide phone service for the equivalent of $1.70 a month)</li><li> 7-Zip to read .zip, .gz and .tar archives (while Windows can read and add to zip archives, treating them like folders, sometimes it does not handle .zip archives correctly and misses some files in some archives)</li><li> An anti-virus program after I got hit with the first virus in my entire computing history, stretching more than 30 years</li></ol>I'm probably going to need to install most of these (except the ones marked by * which I have already done so.) As far as sound is concerned, I think inexpensive speakers are okay. I mean, I'm 51 years old, my hearing isn't what it was when I was 26, I'm sure, and I've found that the stereo sound from the inexpensive speakers from Inland are just fine. I'm still trying to clear the wax out of my right ear, sometimes it cuts off some of my hearing, but the wax remover should eventually break it up. I notice one thing now that I can't hear when I did this maybe 15 years ago and possibly more often. Either the wax is so thick it hasn't gotten to the point of breaking it up yet, or I've lost that low end of my hearing, is that I can't hear the "fizzing" sound when the carbamide peroxide hits the wax and starts melting it. I can hear the sound of the nozzle spitting wax remover drops, so it might be that the plug I'm having to remove is a lot bigger than ones I've done in years past and it's so massive I can't hear the sound through the clog yet. Getting too much wax in an ear has been a problem I've had for years. About every 5 years the problem becomes noticeable. First time, when I didn't know what it was, I was getting terrible dizziness problems, which was back around 1978. I eventually had it cleared by a doctor at the county hospital, I got anti-dizziness pills to tide me over until my appointment came up in 4 months, and when he finished flushing my hear with warm water to dissolve the blockage he got a chunk of wax the size of the nail on my finger and about as thick as my pinky. So, 5 years later when I got a similar thing happening, I got ear wax remover and used it. Same thing two more times. Now, this time I can hear and feel the plug in my ear canal, it's that large. So I realize it's a big plug. By the way, can someone tell me how an article about my new computer got into a discussion of the wax in my ear? :) [/quote]