Tag: Computing

Huzzah for the mighty intarweb once again!

A simple web search saved a lot of headache in installing unnecessary software to allow Mac OS X to monitor our new APC battery backup system.

Over the holidays we bought a APC home battery backup system for our “server” iMac. This came with their PowerChute software, which allows the backup to notify the computer when the power goes out, so the computer can shut down semi-gracefully when the battery gets low during an outage.

I was debating whether to install this software (which in theory supports Mac OS X), so I did some Googling first. There wasn’t anything very concrete, but there were some suggestions that Apple had included this kind of software in OS X at some point, and that Apple’s was much better than APC’s.

So I plugged in the provided cable that ran from the battery backup to a USB port, and Lo! and Behold! it immediately recognized the battery backup and nifty new options appeared in the Energy Saver panel of System Preferences! I set it to shutdown when the battery was down to 95% of capacity, and unplugged the battery backup from the wall, and it shut down beautifully. Without APC’s software.

Problem solved!

Thanks to all those that contributed to the many technologies great and small that allowed me to figure this out quickly and without having to call people, or post questions, or any of those annoying things.

Tags: apc, battery backup, computers, Computing, googling, mac os x, search, software, system preferences, web

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A tale of misery and (file format) woe

Filing cabinet fence
Creative Commons License photo credit: hradcanska
As we were car-less in the UK last year, we would rent wheels at various times when we needed to move all three of us and lots of stuff over what passes for long distances on the small island. Our last rental, for our last week between Spain and our return back to the U.S., was from Enterprise. When we dropped the car off at the airport their desk was closed, so I just plopped the keys in their little return safe.

Today I got an e-mail with the receipt. As an attachment. In “.MDI” format. Whatever the hell that is.

I was pretty sure we were going to find out that this was a M$ format before I’d even bothered looking, as it’s almost always people that have been sucked irretrievably into the M$ vortex that blithely send out files in annoying proprietary formats without considering the possibility that not everyone has sunk loads o’ dosh and a major organ into M$ software. I was right. It turns out that it’s Microsoft Document Imaging format, which apparently scans physical documents and converts them into TIFFs. But instead of then using the open, nigh on universally supported TIFF, they wrap (I’m guessing) that in their own goofy MDI format so people like me can’t open the documents.

Charmed. I’m sure.

Nothing I tried (and I tried quite a lot of things) would open this MDI file up, so I (nicely) wrote back and asked if he could re-send the file in an open format, like plain text or PDF. A model of restraint, I was. Really.

They promptly sent a second message with a new attachment in “.doc”. Good on the promptly. Less winning on the “.doc”, since that’s clearly not an open format. Happily, however, NeoOffice was able to open it up, sparing me a second round of e-mails with this nice person.

And what, after all this fun, did this remarkable M$ Word document contain?

A single, small image.

The image looks like a scan of a small bit of a spreadsheet. A small bit. No names (theirs or ours), dates, or any other standard “invoice” information. Just 10 lines of text, four of which are labels, four of which are actual entries (the rental amount, VAT, etc.), with the rest being sub-totals and totals.

In other words, a ton of machinery to obfuscate a quite small bit of information.

I just hate it when that happens…

Tags: Computing, file format, image, information, Microsoft, open formats, proprietary formats, software

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