autonomous_unit

I once tried to re-use the tiered "good" and "really good" passwords. But with the proliferation of web accounts I decided it was too difficult to protect these things from each other and make sure I never accidentally used a really good and important password at an unimportant and insecure site.

So now I generate completely random passwords and use the encrypted notepad strategy to keep them all. This also means I can change them to a new random password more frequently, without fear of forgetting them. Most of the web ones I also let my browser store (encrypted) except bank/financial ones which I have to remember or dig out from the real encrypted file once a month when I do bookkeeping. I go to extreme effort to make sure my encrypted file is accessible to me even if someone steals my computer or my house burns down, etc. In other words, I am confident I can recover them but I am also pretty sure nobody can pilfer them without me knowing about it (since I trust the encryption and do not share the passphrase).

By the way, I would NEVER try to access any authenticated web/internet resources except from my own computer where I have installed the OS from scratch and trust that the system is not running keyloggers etc. Therefore, I have no use for carrying around a big set of passwords when I don't have my laptop or a local machine I already trust as my own.

Bank ATM card PINs are another story entirely. I avoid having too many cards, and I have a tendency to forget my own PIN and then remember it eventually a few months later. I just ask my wife for cash instead.

I looked at our most recent bills, and it seems our Feb-Mar was around 2500 THB and Mar-Apr jumped to 3200 THB. I think the jump is due to the hot season A/C load and not any particular change in usage habits. The extra A/C seems to cost a lot more than the lack of water heating for showers would save.

This is our small two-story house in Nonthaburi with 2-4 adult occupants depending on the day, computers and internet gear running 24x7 and also air-conditioning running at 25C nearly 24x7 (bedroom(s) all night, home office during the day, living room a few hours per day) with relatively efficient inverter units but poor roof insulation. The units range from 10,000 BTU in the office and small bedrooms to 12,000 BTU in master bedroom and living room. We also have one 18,000 BTU unit that rarely gets used... it could turn our dining room into a meat locker if necessary, I think.

There is also a water pump, laundry with internal water heater, large refrigerator, and full kitchen with large exhaust hood, and an electric oven that gets used several hours per month. Almost all lights are 12W compact fluorescents with typically 2-6 indoor fixtures running 6 hours per day and 2 outdoor fixtures running 12 hours per day. I guess the television gets 2-12 hours of use per day depending on who is at the house, with UBC satellite receiver running 24x7 (I mention it because it always feels hot).

One note: if you use an LCD then high refresh rate is pointless and will probably cause more distortion and blurring than a lower refresh rate (if you are using an analog input). The odd resolution of 1680x1050 sounds like an LCD resolution to me...

The LCD panel will take a color and hold it until the next update, unlike CRTs which immediately start fading out and therefore need a quick refresh to minimize the flickering that you might see.

My wife and I married in California when she was there on a student visa. It does make it pretty trivial to apply for a "non-O" visa for you to visit Thailand, since the California marriage certificate would be recognized at the Thai consulate. But as far as going the other direction, I have no idea...

I guess the real question is whether anybody can guage the relative effort or risk in:

1. Applying for a fiancee visa in Bangkok (assuming you don't marry on this trip)

2. Applying for an immigrant visa in Bangkok (assuming you do marry and she returns home)

3. Attempting to change status while in the US (assuming you do marry and she wants to avoid a return home)

Unless somebody gets married very frequently, I am not sure how well they can weigh these options in practice. Since we've been married for almost four years, I know we'll be looking at option 2 if we ever decide to return to the US, so I've never looked into the other processes at all.

I've had many thinkpads over the years and was always satisifed. I've been carrying around a T42 for the past three years, and my wife has has an X40 for the same time. I had older X-series laptops before (X20 and X22) and enjoyed the fact that you could get a little "portfolio" case that zipped around it like a padded book cover, making it very easy to carry in a small backpack or even just loose in your hand... it resembles a full A4 or US letter sized "day planner", and I can say the X40 fits in the case I had with an X22.

Also, make sure you understand what you are getting. In my wife's X40, the harddrive is a tiny 1.8 inch drive. I am not sure whether the X41 uses the same type of drive or not. It cost me about $180 US to replace her failing 20 GB drive with a 60 GB drive last year, and that was because I was able to order it online and have it shipped to a place I was visiting in the USA. It is not a common part to find at retail stores.

The matte black finish has begun bubbling and peeling off on the bottom of her X40, again probably related to the harsh tropical environment.

The TV satellites are in geosynchronous orbits. If you want to point a dish at a satellite providing service to the US, you'll discover an object blocking your line of sight: the Earth!

It's not straight down to point at the sky over the US from here, but close enough... (I guess some part of Central America or the Carribean is straight down from here). You need to get a satellite setup that is appropriate for picking up the satellites pointing down on Asia instead...

My experience with True ADSL and TOT ADSL are that on average I don't notice much difference. I had True 1024/512 service for almost two years back in 2004-2006 in a high-rise condo block over the river in Bangkoknoi. I have had TOT 1024/512 service now for less than a year in a mooban over the river in Nonthaburi. (In between I was stuck with GPRS and there I learned to appreciate any ADSL at all. )

Both times, I have seen good line quality (low noise and attenuation statistics) and the performance is undoubtably limited by the local backbone and/or international gateways. You have to keep in mind that the local connections, contention created by neighbors, and different tech staff from the ISP may influence these experiences... someone living in different parts of the BMA might see different service from each company.

I saw random outages in the first weeks of service with both companies, settling into a pretty decent service once you accept the bottleneck for international traffic. I think that perhaps the TOT DNS servers are a little slower to respond than the True ones were, or maybe websites I visit now just require more DNS lookups (more annoying ads loaded from third-party servers, etc). I had better bandwidth sometimes with True, but also much worse at times. I never felt like I needed the "true2m" login boost here with TOT, whereas I had to use it with True at times just to get things done.

21 inch 1600x1200 desktop LCD w/ DVI (I previously felt like 1280x1024 was the best on 21 inch CRTs, to avoid fuzzy pixels)

15 inch 1400x1050 laptop, which I don't like to use for too long because it doesn't have contrast as nice as the desktop

My most common (Linux) application is "xterm", a text terminal in a window which can fit about 80 lines of text on the laptop screen and even more on the desktop... also, I do set "minimum font size" limits in my web browser because some pages would otherwise use smaller type than I like.

Frankly, I don't think there is much hope of selling ideas in most markets... there is enough trouble enforcing copyright or patents in narrowly defined areas, much less trying to define what an idea is that is not in a recorded medium or technical apparatus. (This is a completely practical observation, and doesn't depend on one's attitudes about whether one ought to be able to sell ideas.)

Like Simcity said, the world really requires you to develop your own business ideas out, potentially with some funding from trustworthy investors. Even here, it is a game to make the investor believe they need you to execute the idea, and you need to develop it together before revealing it to a larger market where copycats will surely try to catch you. Selling to an existing is that much more difficult, since they believe they are in a position to execute the ideas themselves.

The other option is to sell your efforts rather than your ideas... many of us are consultants because we can make a living from doing hard thinking for clients. They do not buy your ideas. They see your past "portfolio" of work and they hire you to generate new ideas for them... you cannot sit back and reap the benefits of an idea in perpetuity, but you can gain a reputation that brings in further consulting work and increases your marketable fee rates.

Look, I am not sure why you want to flame. I agree that desktop replacement laptops make perfect sense for some people who need portability of their office. The original post was asking for laptop advice and seemed price conscious. For some people who want to work or play games at home but still be able to check email or browse the web from cafes, etc., buying a basic laptop and a fast desktop can be more sensible.

I'm really missing something here, because the link to an "UltraSharp" LCD desktop panel you provided shows a nice 24 inch LCD with 1900x1200 resolution for $629 US. Are you suggesting you can get a comparable LCD in a laptop? I feel like this Dell LCD is a perfect example of how you can get nicer desktop equipment than laptop for a given price. I know these prices do not compare well to Thailand pricing, so let me give another comparison. I know that six months ago, a Dell Workstation 390 (high end PC) with 2.4 GHz Intel Core Duo, 1GB RAM, 300 GB SATA II, NVIDIA Quadro graphics, and a 21 inch 1600x1200 LCD could be had in Bangkok for 85k THB. Could a laptop be had here with those specs for a price anywhere near that?

I also know that in the US last year, one could put together an AMD based system with nearly identical performance (socket AM2 dual core Athlon64) for about $800 US, including the same 21 inch LCD from Dell and some components from newegg etc.

I also think it sounds like a software problem given that safe mode works, though I was originally thinking "bad battery" until you said you had tried it both with battery and mains power.

Just for reference, I have a T42 which is very similar hardware to your T40 and it did have an overheating problem. It would "throttle" the CPU to 600 MHz but it kept running.

Gharknes, I'll give you two reasons that laptops are not as fast as desktops at the same price point:

1. Power consumption: The fast memory and I/O buses of desktops consume too much power, and laptops subsequently use slower and/or narrower electrical buses to keep their requirements down (and keep battery life up). Recently, there has been a big leveling with the new Intel Core processors, but even now laptops typically have slower core speeds and different cache/bus options than their desktop counterparts.

2. Integration costs: All the extra space and general purpose sockets of desktops allow economies of scale to reduce prices for fast parts that can be mixed and matched to build good cheap systems; meanwhile laptops are so integrated that a narrower range of components enjoy the economy of scale necessary to bring down costs.

This is not to say that you cannot get a fast laptop, but that when you are on the upgrade treadmill, you can almost always purchase faster components more frequently by using desktop parts.

sorry mate but that is just complete rubbish, quality is what you pay for in any guise laptop or desktop, my laptop screen will outperform most decktop screens in every respect except for very high end kit which will cost an arm and a leg, I was going to buy an external monitor for my laptop but would have cost almost the price of a laptop to get the resolution and clarity of what I have now

e.g. http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/product...mp;sku=320-4335 ultra is the key here with a resolution of 1900/1200, non ultra monitors would be third this price but what a drop in quality and capability

Of course, I mean that a laptop LCD and a desktop LCD at similar price points... What is the premium you pay for a super high resolution screen on the laptop versus buying it with a basic screen and getting a desktop LCD as well? That is the way to price shop, IF you do not require portability of the full resolution screen (one of the first points I tried to emphasize about intended usage patterns).

I should also point out that I look at laptops as consumables, so a cost per year could also be considered. How long do you keep the laptop before upgrading? How long would you keep the desktop LCD? In my experience, a nice 21-inch or larger desktop LCD will outlast several laptops without noticable reduction in its image quality. Most of my laptops have had obvious degradation in the backlight color, brightness, and uniformity after less than a year of daily use; that is I have gone through about seven laptops in the last ten years, but only two CRT and two LCD desktop screens. The laptops were retired due to being too slow and having screens that wore out. The desktop screens were still doing fine, but I handed them off to junior staff when I had the opportunity to upgrade to larger screens with a new system purchase.

question: are the latest laptop screens as good as a desktop monitor?

No, not really and probably never will be. A laptop screen is always a compromise to keep its weight down and reduce its power requirements in order to extend battery life. A desktop LCD will always have brighter and more uniform back-lighting than a laptop, because it can use more power and have a thicker back-light system behind the screen. This translates to better and more uniform colors on the desktop LCD.

If you have the option of using a "docking station" and desktop LCD with only occasional use of the internal laptop LCD, that will probably be your best value (particularly with DVI so there is no image quality loss for the external screen). The laptop will be cheaper and a nice desktop screen may outlast several laptops too.

I've found that my ideal situation is a real desktop machine and a small laptop used exclusively on travel... even a cheap desktop can outclass most laptops for performance, and a slower and cheaper laptop often is lighter and gets better battery life too! Once I got used to "syncing" my files between the laptop and desktop, it also gave me peace of mind to know there was a backup system in case the other needed maintenance or something like that.

I also have found that I rarely take my laptop out of the bag at a cafe or other stop where others seem to love to use theirs... even on long flights, I often prefer to listen to music or think and jot notes on paper for a few hours before digging out the laptop to review something or get some writing tasks done. I've even pondered just carrying something like a Mac Mini in my baggage, but then I would have no way at all to use it until I reached another office with an LCD and keyboard waiting for me, and that seems a little too extreme...

So it is very difficult to recommend a specific purchasing strategy, when different work styles can put such different value on things...

This may be too late to help the original poster, but some US banks (Wells Fargo among them) also have "third party deposit" mailing addresses where you can send a check to have it deposited into the payee's account. I've arranged for this when someone wanted to send me money, so I could then just withdraw via ATM etc.

I am not sure it is a good idea to send the check back to the US (because of the unreliable Thai postal system) but that would probably be the cheapest way to "cash" the check, if you have an account at a US bank with such a service.

Well, yes, but a Buddhist is not supposed to do good with the idea of getting some reward, although a reward might be a side-benefit. Ideally the whole of Buddhist morality is mental cultivation with the aim of diminishing the ego. I think that makes it different from most other religions. And karma in Buddhism is intent as well as action. The karma of the intent as well as the action leads to good or bad results, not just the action alone. That's something else that is a bit different.

I only mentioned the game theory in an attempt to illustrate the "natural" basis I see, as a materialist, for the pervasive emergence of philosophies of kindness and justice. Evolutionarily speaking, we might not be here now if we were, on the whole, biased towards making overly selfish, greedy (and therefore sub-optimal) decisions on how to act together as social animals... some other creatures could have taken our place by thriving relative to us in the same environments! I think that this is the only underlying physical law behind one "getting what is coming to him." This is not to say that there are not other internal, mental benefits to living by such creeds. I would imagine there are also "universal" benefits for reforming oneself to be compassionate and good---we share a common physiology and core psychology, but it is a messy enough topic that I shy away from speculating too much further...

By the way, I am not Christian, but I have been exposed to enough of it to say this: I believe the Christian message of loving your neighbor, turning the other cheek, etc. has just as much to do with cultivating the mind and finding a sense of peace in honest living as practicing of right-mindedness in Buddhism. I do not think that is really so different from the Buddhist goal, if you look at either from the same philosophical and psychological standpoint. I think contemporary humanists would express similar attitudes as well. There are different "depths" to which one can appreciate and practice the same abstract teachings.

Also, I think it is easy to mix up the underlying philosophies and tenets with the rhetoric and metaphysical depth of the typical spokeperson. If you are tuned to a metaphysical approach, you may not appreciate what an evangelical person has to say... but I believe there are thinkers in many religious schools who could espouse a self-reforming concept very much like what you are describing. Having grown up in California, I have to point out that there are even evangelical and "born again" Buddhists who can turn me off to their message just as fast as any other salesperson.

The problem in discussing this is considering the teachings in a large population. Some people look at karma or God's judgement as a carrot on a stick, promising a nice dessert if you behave. But others look at the internal change of being true to these feelings of kindness and love as the true reward. Both ideas exist at the same time in a society full of people. Some people are just more self-aware than others...

Camerata wrote this but I cannot get the quote to work right:

I think there is a big difference between, say, a Western Buddhist coming from a materialist background and someone who was born into a Buddhist culture. Buddhism should not be fatalistic in the sense that "Everything that happens to me is a result of past karma therefore there's no point in trying to change anything." In fact, karma is only responsible for part of our current situation and we can affect the future by what we do now.

I'm not sure how much Buddhism has to do with it. I was referring to the "layman's karma" as mentioned earlier in the thread. I only mean fatalism as how people can try to explain apparently unjust situations with an accounting of bad actions in "past lives", much as other people assume "the will of God" or something like that. I think the underlying issue is that people do not like to consider that maybe unjust things happen for no reason at all, something I accept as reality with my materialist views.

The underlying notion of "doing good is for your own good" appears in many philosophies and religions, and I think even is proven in game theory and economics to be a good strategy in populations. It has a statistical and probabilistic basis, not requiring any judge or accountant. Ironically, I have not found that living in Thailand emphasizes this viewpoint. In fact, I was surprised at first with how much apparent selfishness I saw in the way people act in Bangkok. I think I saw more "good towards strangers" in the US than I have here, though I realize my own experiences are not a statistically sound sampling... I might just be better at evading selfish folk in my own culture.

Resident alien basically means "green card holder" rather than where you are living, so it does not contradict the foreign earned income exclusion requirements at all. You would file form 2555 for her as well, unless that is optional since she has no income of her own (I do not know this detail). We elected to treat my wife as a resident alien and we file separate form 2555 copies for each of us (different travel dates and incomes, etc.).

I have a materialist point of view, and living in Thailand has not significantly changed it. I do not believe in karma in the sense that the universe is just; I think we wish there was justice but the universe is really unaware and uncaring in its physical laws. Living here has given me a glimpse into what I see as a different cultural approach to coping with this universe and the psychological stresses it entails (belief in karma or fatalism, as opposed to a much more active idealism such as in the US where we like to think we can "make things right" through sheer force of will).

But, I do believe in the underlying ethics of karma, and particularly as it was described earlier in the thread to produce immediate positive results for the person doing good things. Good deeds may or may not elevate you out of your physical environment, but they can elevate your mind to a better place. Thankfully, the result of many people doing good deeds can elevate the society physically and mentally as well.

I also do not believe in good nor evil as existing outside our own preferences and interpretations. I think evil appears within the minds of those who see the evil. The processes or actors "causing" or "doing" the evil might be people who are ignorant of the observers' values, those who are aware but intentionally violating them, or even inanimate processes which cannot be held to be ignorant nor informed.

Unfortunately, humans are still children when it comes to living together and dealing with the different value systems we all bring with us. It is all too easy to decide that our own values are universal and that others are deviant.

You might want to try Bud's of San Francisco brand ice cream for your next indulgence! I think it is better than Swensen's, and maybe you'll get lucky and not be allergic to its ingredients...

I had one that was let to pass naturally when I was in the US... and they just gave me acetaminophen and ibuprofen to take in alternating doses.

The pain was bad, but that and pissing blood was what made it scary at first! Luckily, I self-diagnosed correctly and that reduced the worries until I got to an emergency room for an X-ray or three. My dad had told me about his experience having kidney stones long ago, and one bit of the story stuck in my mind and described exactly how I felt: the pain triggered some primitive urge to lay down on the bed, and then the floor, as if somehow if I could just get lower it would not hurt as much...

Along with asking about the minerals for changing diet, I'd also suggest you pay more attention to the color and opacity of your urine in the future... I learned that I sometimes would let myself get dehydrated and my urine would get more yellow and cloudy. It is useful feedback to make yourself drink more water.

Alas, my own experience is that a migraine headache can hurt more than passing a kidney stone. But it is certainly qualitatively different to have the pain in your head than feeling like a knife is going through your back...

It's not generally feasible because PDF (and Postscript) are closer to "rendering" languages than actual structured document languages. It would help if the original poster explained his problem and goal in more detail. What sort of PDF? What is the reason for wanting Word documents (to view, to edit, ...)? I remember somebody had a problem on this board a few years ago where they were trying to, ahem, borrow a PDF price sheet that had tables of information. That is much harder than importing some basic paragraphs of text.

One approach would be to use Ghostscript to render the PDF pages into images, with one image per page in the Word file.

There are some open source tools on Linux/Unix platforms such as pdftohtml and pdftotext which do a decent job of converting the PDF to more basic formats. You will likely lose some formatting in the process, but the output might just be editable by humans. Of course, if the PDF has lots of image content in it, that will at best result in similar images in the output and not in editable text, even if the images have words in them.

A brute force method might produce a Word document with hundreds of floating boxes, each with a few words or letters in them at a specific position on the page. I think nobody has bothered writing this kind of tool because it probably is not what people would want anyway.

Another brute force method is to convert PDF to PS, then use pstoedit to generate a low-level vector graphics file representation. This could then be edited in detail, e.g. with page setting/desktop publishing tools. You can even get it to render the letters as vectorized objects rather than as "text" in the vector formatted output. This of course is NOT akin to word-processing. You could edit the shape and placement of letters, but not modify sentences in any meaningful way...

Near where I live, I've watched the chaos at a roundabout (3 lanes wide) for the past few years, and was relieved to see them installing traffic lights. We actually saw them operating the other day, and it seems they may only do it during some peak hours... part of me wishes they would turn it on full time.

Not only do the local drivers not understand right-of-way, they do not understand lane discipline or how to steer their car in a smooth arc to change lanes. Everything is violent tangential manuevers from an entry/exit to the apex of the innermost lane, etc.

I think the only solution that works safely here are the U-turn bridges and tunnels where you enter and exit from the outermost lanes. Of course, with those you will still see people racing up the side of the road in reversing gear, whether to return to a U-turn they missed or to get out of a U-turn they already started!

$100 + 200 Baht - still too expensive!

Tell me about it! We've been together almost nine years now, and it seems I may never earn my freedom...

Maybe we qualify with the least expensive wedding...

We were married in the US, so our only expense in Thailand was a taxi ride to the amphur office to register the pre-existing marriage, giving us local Thai documentation we needed for some other bureaucratic activities. I think there was a "copy fee" but it was much smaller than the 200 baht taxi ride (round trip).

The US wedding was more expensive... we must have spent $100 US or so, including the marriage license and some fuel for the car... Our honeymoon involved several tanks of fuel, a national parks pass, a camping stove, and a peaceful cabin in the woods (Sierra Nevada in California). I am proud that we pulled off an almost perfect anti-wedding.