benshead

I purchased a Nike+ SportBand the other day and was excited to get started with it. I knew I needed to install the Nike+ Utility on my computer in order to be able to configure it, so I set out to do that. I followed the instructions, but nothing happened. A brief bit of googling turned up the startling revelation that the utility would not work in x64 Windows. There had been no marking on the package to indicate this inconvenient truth, but there it was. Forum post after forum post, some from Nike employees, indicated that it wouldn’t work.

I also noticed a few people who mentioned that they had it working, but they didn’t really offer much advice on how I might do the same. Knowing that someone had it working was enough to goad me into trying it for myself, though. And voila, I got it to work. Here then are the steps I took in Windows 7 Ultimate (64-Bit). I have no reason to think this won’t work in other versions of 64-bit Windows 7 and Vista:

1. Install the Nike+ Utility. Download it from here: nikeplus.com/downloads
2. Once installed, locate the utility in the Start menu:



3. Right-click  the  Nike+ Utility and choose ‘Properties’ and choose the ‘Compatibility’ tab. Select the choice to ‘Run the Program in compatibility mode for:’ and choose ‘Windows XP SP2.’



4. Next, and this is important, insert the SportBand into an available USB port.
5. The Nike+ Utility should appear now on your screen, but if it doesn’t, look down in the toolbar and find the little Nike icon. Right-click ‘Hide Nike+ Utility’ and then Right-click again and choose ‘Show Nike+ Utility’. For some reason, this sometimes helps it appear on my computer.



6. That’s really it.

Now, I can’t really fix the steaming pile of Flash that is the Nike Plus site. Luckily, I don’t need to. I’ve set my account at MapMyRun.com to sync runs over from my nike account, so I shouldn’t really have to visit the site.

We receive new phonebooks at least once a year, even though we aren’t customers of any traditional phone company. I suspect that phonebooks are so ad-driven that it will take more than the extinction of landlines or the hegemony of online search to kill them.

In our house, we have had an annual, serialized conversation that goes something like this:

Spouse #1: Why do we still keep phonebooks in our living space? Do we ever use them?

Spouse #2: Sure I use phonebooks! We need to have them available in case.

#1: In case of what, the suspension of the internet?

#2: There are some things that are easier to look up in a phonebook.

#1: Like what? Anyway, they take up too much space.

This conversation can go on forever.

But I was pretty sure that neither of us ever used phonebooks (oops, did I just betray the identities of spouses #1 and #2?), so I decided to try a small experiment.

I placed a single piece of tape across the edge of the two phonebooks opposite the spines, put them back on the shelf and promptly forgot about it.

It’s now a year later and some new phonebooks just showed up on our porch. As I went to grab the old ones from the shelf, I remembered my experiment and wondered what the results were.

It was as I’d expected, the tape had not been disturbed, indicating that no one had looked in the phonebooks or even tried to remove one from the shelf. Now, they’re all in the recycling bin. If only I could cancel the future delivery of them…

I’ve been a fan of virtualization for a few years now. I have two servers running VMWare Server at work and a machine that I’m testing VirtualBox with. When it came time to set J. up with a way to use her EMR from her home Mac, it seemed natural to dutifully buy a copy of Parallels Desktop and Windows Vista. And they both lived up to the hype, allowing her to use Internet Explorer to access the ActiveX-ridden web site that she needed to. Well, at least until her machine died last week.

Now I wish we’d saved our money. When she got her Macbook Pro back from Apple yesterday, it came with a new hard drive and a fresh os install. Before I went to the trouble of installing parallels and Vista again, I thought I would give ies4osx a try first.

Ies4osx is a gpl-licensed software package that installs with Darwine and provides Mac users an honest-to-goodness Internet Explorer that lives on the dock and launches like any other application. And it works nicely with ActiveX. Really. It should be noted that for now ies4osx only runs IE6. Apparently it used to run IE7 as well, but there were some problems with that.

It’s so easy and quick, though, that I certainly won’t be putting Parallels or Vista back on the Mac. I guess I can use the time I would have spent on that coming up with a better backup strategy…

Linux users should check out ies4linux, whose name is fairly self-explanatory when you think about it.