What is the difference between mold in air duct and mold that grows in crawl space?

Question: Specifically, are they both dangerous to human health?
Answer: There are thousands of species of mold known to Science, with different species being found in different parts of the world.  There isn't any one "crawlspace" mold or "air duct" mold, it's just whatever spores of whatever species happened to take a foothold there.  Which one is more dangerous will depend on the particular species of mold and the sensitivity of the people that are exposed to it.
In general, though, you're better off not having them growing in your home because even if you don't have a really dangerous one growing now, you obviously have the right conditions for mold so a dangerous one could start growing too.
For more information, have a look at this Wikipedia article on Mold health issues
Comment: I suppose having mold spores in your HVAC will spread around the house more than one relegated to the crawlspace.  But that does not determine how bad they are for your health.
Answer: Mold detection and identification can be done in two ways. Visible mold can be collected on a test tape, and air borne spores can be collected with an air sample kit. Either way, samples must be sent to a lab for microscopic inspection and ID.
Mold and mold spores can range from common everyday varieties that rarely have negative effects on humans to very toxic species that can cause serious illness. Most common molds are classified as irritants and the effects will vary depending on how sensitive the people who contact it are, or if they have allergies or other respiratory conditions.
In probably 90% of the tests I send to the lab, the results come back as mild irritants. In some cases, especially in moldy walls or floors around bathroom fixtures where leaks have gone unmitigated, Black mold is common and this is dangerous if spores are allowed to go airborn.
I repeat, however, the only reliable way to identify dangerous molds is to have samples analysed by a professional lab.
Answer: As has been said, there are thousands of species of mold, and determining exactly what you may have, and whether it's dangerous in general, is a job for the pros.
If you are sensitive to mold spores, whether through allergies, asthma or respiratory disease, or you have a suppressed immune system due to cancer treatment, autoimmune disease or HIV, it doesn't matter what species of mold it is, or how much there is; they're all bad. That said, you will not find a house more than a few years old that you could do a standard air screening of and find zero mold. Mold is a natural consequence of human habitation and a terrestrial habitat. You can only minimize it.
To do so, simply understand that most harmful molds need three things; water, simple organic material (like the paper in drywall, or food wastes, or the nutrients in soil), and low light levels. You usually can't reduce the organic component or the light levels unless you want to remove all the drywall from your home (not a great look), but you usually can control the moisture element. Run the A/C in your home (and make sure it drains properly). Make sure all plumbing is watertight and leak-free. Clean up spills immediately. Check your basement or first floor for any signs of water or water damage (softened wallboard, peeling or bubbling paint, and cracked or crumbling mortar or brickwork are all bad signs)


Good Outlining Solutions For OSX?

Question: I write technical non-fiction and find that I cannot write well without first constructing a detailed (10-20 page) outline. Are there any good outlining solutions for OSX? Apps? Templates in Microsoft Word? Etc.
Answer: Am I allowed to beat the drum for Scrivener again? :)
Scrivener is a tremendously flexible writing program which allows you to rearrange your items easily, by dragging around icons, by putting up virtual cards on a corkboard, or setting things up in outline format (the Outline view is right in the top bar). Each item of your outline is a document, which can then be filled in as needed, and moved around if you want.
You can download a completely functional version and test-drive it for 30 days, I think, to see whether you like it.
Comment: I was ready to suggest one of the various mind-mapping tools until I saw this. I'm in the market for a new laptop and have been debating Mac vs PC but this program looks great and is another check mark in the Mac column. Thanks for sharing.
Comment: @JonDiPietro: Scrivener for Windows is in beta, official release coming soon - http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivenerforwindows/ (still a check mark in the Mac column?)
Comment: Yeah, something like Scrivener for iPad would be phenomenal. I have been using Simplenote which actually syncs with Scrivener now!
Comment: +1 for Scrivener. I wish I'd had it years ago. (I may not have been happy with pre-2.0, though, to be honest.)
Comment: Love Scrivener. Outline view makes it very easy to customize the columns so you only see what you need to. For creating website content, I've set it up to color code and show statuses so I can see at a glance what's done, what's in review, what needs to be revised, and whether the canonical version of the text is in the Scrivener file, in the wireframe, or with the html group.
Comment: Scrivener is very good -- for structural outlines. But for content outlines, I really recommend Circus Ponies Notebook. I've written a comparison of outlining in Scrivener vs. Circus Ponies in my Blog: http://www.organizingcreativity.com/2012/02/outliner-in-scrivener-vs-outliner-in-cpn-structure-scrivener-vs-content-cpn-outlines/
Answer: I have been doing a lot of my outlining/pre-writing work in Workflowy. It is technically a TODO app, but I like the bulleted and nested lists for outlining and refining. I sometimes write entire papers within Workflowy, using the nested zoom to refine and re-structure sections and paragraphs. You can export (via copy-paste) to other writing apps (msword, google docs, etc.). Be careful though, it is online only and "in the cloud." I've had it go down when I needed stuff I've written so I highly recommend regularly backing up your entire workflowy to a text document.
Answer: OmniOutliner. It is an absolutely amazing and flexible outlining tool for OS X. It also works well with OmniGraffle, say if you want to generate a graphical representation for the outline. More here: http://www.omnigroup.com/products/omnioutliner/. The professional version is better than the standard, as I recall, in particular because it allows folding the parts you are not working on.
Answer: I can highly recommend Circus Ponies Notebook. It uses the notebook metaphor and it has a page type that gives you an outliner. You can easily integrate media files as well. I use it for fictional and non-fictional writing, then put my outliner next to Scrivener to write it down (CPN has the advantage of optional checkboxes for each cell, so you always know what you have already used). You can also use keywords to make sure you remember your sources, and of course, non-relevant parts can be folded in. While I love Scrivener, I need an outline that is more detailed, one information per cell. The files in Scrivener contain more than one idea when I write which makes it difficult to shift information.
This posting on my blog http://www.organizingcreativity.com/2009/09/circus-ponies-notebook-the-best-tool-for-structuring-creative-writing-projects-esp-research-projects/ gives a nice overview of its functions, there's also an example linked at the end of the posting.
While Scrivener is very useful for structural outlines, Circus Ponies Notebook excels at Content Outlines. There a posting in my blog comparing the outlining feature in both programs: Outliner in Scrivener vs Outliner in Circus Ponies Notebook — Structure (Scrivener) vs Content (CPN) Outlines
Frankly I couldn't have written my diploma, nor my PhD thesis, without it.
Comment: Wow. That program looks awesome. I'm not sure if I want to add another program to my Evernote and Scrivener workflow, but when you mentioned using it instead of a wiki a light bulb went off over my head. I'm going to have to try it for things like story bibles or researching topics that might not be tied to a particular project.
Answer: I spend a lot of time in Tinderbox ( http://www.eastgate.com/Tinderbox/ ) It is a great tool for harvesting information, putting down ideas or any kind of notes. Then, as need arises, to structure this information, discover new relationships and patterns, and finally export it to text or html. It is great for taking notes at lectures and rework them later and for making sense of any problem whith lots of information.
You can jut notes down in map view, where notes look like sticky notes on a windowpane. There is an outline view where notes are viewed as lists. There are also several other views. You can make Tinderbox do many things for you – agents are notes that collect aliases of notes based on your chosen criteria. All in all, you can do a lot in Tinderbox. I find it is ideal for when you want to take notes, research, and when you want to think what you have researched into something good.
Answer: Not enough points to add to Lauren Ipsum's answer, but I really do like Scrivener. It takes some time to get your head around, really. As you're calibrating to it, it can at first seem too simplistic, or overly complex, but it's really a whole bag of amazing.
Not only will Scrivener allow you to outline and rearrange, but it also lets you store reference material, and add notes to your text, so it's way more than simply outlining.
Answer: I tend to write outlines using emacs and org-mode, because I do technical research that involves a lot of programming, and as a result, I live in emacs. Aquamacs is an emacs port for OS X that's free and has a nice Mac interface you can use instead of many of the Unix-based keyboard shortcuts. Aquamacs comes with org-mode, which is a nice text-based format for outlining and text-folding (so you can hide various parts of your outline). What I like about text-based formats is that it's easy to determine exactly what changes have been made between revisions (hell, if you want to track versions, use a version control system like Mercurial, Git, Subversion, etc.).
The advantages are that it's free, and highly customizable (up to a point). The outlines are exportable to a number of different formats.
The disadvantages are that the workflow tends to be designed for people who are programmers, and work in emacs. There's not much of a GUI to speak of, beyond the toolbar at the top of the screen (and each window). Emacs is written to be a highly flexible text editor, and org-mode is a plug-in; it's not designed to be something like Scrivener, which, as far as I can tell, bundles together all of the tools that they think writers need (and in a cool-looking way). If you want something to keep track of your sources or research, you'd need another program (like Mendeley, for instance, which does a pretty good job of acting as a database for PDFs and media). If you want version control, you need another tool for that. I don't know of anything that corresponds to the "corkboard" functionality. So if you want extra functionality, you need other programs to fill in the gaps.
Answer: I'm the author of Scribe, an outliner for Mac OSX.  I'm happy to offer some free copies if you write me (see website).
I built Scribe because most outliners don't feel like native text editors.  There's  a separate text field for each item in the outline.  Always found that distracting.
Scribe hooks into the native text system on the Mac and builds an outliner over it.  My hope is that this makes the outlining experience much more intuitive.
Scribe has a native file type that supports audio recording synced to your outlines, but also exports as rich text and OPML.  Scribe also can edit OPML documents.
It also supports iCloud.

Good Outlining Solutions For OSX?


Squeaky door gets the grease?

Question: When should you grease a door hinge?  When it's dry or when it starts making noise?  Is there a universally appropriate type of grease to use?  How should it be applied?
Answer: Ideally you want to grease before it squeeks.If you wait until it is squeeking you have metal on metal contact somewhere in the hinge.That kind of contact results in hinge wear.As a side note an unlubricated hinge requires more effort to close the door and that can resultin broken armrests or door pulls.I generally lube the drivers door every other oil change and the other doors,hood and trunk once a year.
Answer: I would grease the door hinges once or twice a year. When it comes to grease, having too much is never a bad thing other than the fact that it makes a mess.
The best type of grease to use is white lithium grease because it is thick and will not run out of the door hinge.
To apply it just spray it in the gaps between the door part of the hinge and the body part of the hinge and open and close the door to work the grease into the hinge.

Squeaky door gets the grease?


How can I find what Crawled Property maps to what field?

Question: I'm looking at the Managed Properties in my search administration and I see several Crawled Properties associated with Search Property Names.  Is there any way to determine what fields those Crawled Properties are associated with?
Answer: While I was trying to find the answer, I realized it's not as simple as it seems because it depends on the underlying data source and protocol handler used by the crawler.
If you want to understand more about crawled properties, I recommend reading this excellent article: Mystery Solved - Crawled Properties in SharePoint (Series)
Answer: Is this for SharePoint 2010?
If so - you should be able to click on a specific crawled property which takes you to the crawled property details page.  This page contains a listbox of all the mapped managed properties under the heading "Mappings to managed properties".
Answer: in SharePoint 2010, i got the column name by clicking on the column in the document library and looking in the URL string for <code>'SortField=SAP_x0020_Order_x0020_Num'</code>. Then you can look up this column in the managed meta data. This way assumes you know the column you need the value of to make it a managed meta data value.
I could not find a way to do it from the Global Admin.
Answer: The only was I know of is that if you have an ows_* crawled property it maps to the field with the same name, i.e. ows_mycolumn maps to the field called mycolumn.


Can you benefit from items bought on shabbat?

Question: Say someone purchased clothing on shabbat--knowing that it was a violation--can that clothing be worn?
Comment: http://judaism.stackexchange.com/questions/14726/are-you-allowed-to-benefit-from-an-electrical-appliance-turned-on-during-shabbos
Answer: Since you say the purchaser knows his act was "a violation", I'll assume he's Jewish. For the same reason, I won't discuss here a case in which someone did a prohibited act without knowing that what he was doing was wrong. (The rules are somewhat different in such a case.) Thus, caveat lector: the below is about cases in which the Shabas-violator knew he was violating Shabas.

If something is cooked by a Jew on Shabas the cooked food cannot be eaten on that Shabas, and is forbidden to him forever. (Shulchan Aruch 318:1.) The commentators note that the same is true for other prohibitions, not just cooking.
But Beur Halacha ("אחת משאר מלאכות", quoting Chaye Adam) says that if a forbidden act done on an object did not physically change the object in any way (e.g. something was carried), then it's prohibited only until the close of Shabas, even for the violator. He (still quoting Chaye Adam) adds that if the forbidden act, though it didn't physically change the object, was a divine prohibition then one should not allow himself that lessening of the restrictions, but should consider the object prohibited as per the general rule above.
But buying clothes on Shabas is usually not a divine prohibition. (It can be in some circumstances.) So in most cases, you would not be allowed to use the garment on Shabas, but it would be permitted afterward. Even if a divine prohibition were violated, the garment would be permitted to everyone but the violator.

This is a general discussion based on Shulchan Aruch and others. If the question is relevant to you, consult your rabbi.


What is the correct font for Android section headlines?

Question: The Roboto spec book shows "Black Small Caps" but it's not included in the font package. Fallback is using Black in uppercase - not ideal.
Answer: There is no available downloadable font called Black Small Caps. This is because the font itself is created with whatever word processor you are using. For example, in Photoshop i can create "Black Small Caps" of "Roboto" by selecting "Roboto" as the font, "Black" as the Font Style, and then going to the Character/Paragraph panel and applying "Small Caps".
If you are trying to implement the font style within your design, it should be possible in most design programs. If you are trying to do this in code, I can only assume that Android allows you to apply "Small Caps" to the font "Roboto Black" when called for in styling code.
Here is what the font looks like as "Roboto Black (Small Caps)" and as "Roboto Black" as applied in Photoshop:
Answer: Opentype/Truetype fonts can embed a small-caps variant of the font inside the same font, and this can be activated using Opentype typographic features (which can be embedded into any Truetype, Opentype or derived font including WOFF and EOT).
So you would use the "Black" font, but activate the "smcp" Opentype feature in whatever software you're using.  It'll probably be called "Small Caps" if you're using graphic design or word processing software.  Or if you are implementing this in software, you'll need to figure out how to activate Opentype typographic features in whatever API you're using, and activate the "smcp" one.
If the font you're using doesn't support this feature, you either won't get small caps or your software will try to create "fake small caps" from the existing capital letters.
The small caps variant of a font will not just be the capital letters shrunk down, because that would also reduce the thickness of the strokes.  Instead, the small caps variant will designed to have the same stroke thickness, and probably also the same or scaled counters (usually resulting in shorter and fatter letters) as the capitals, meaning they'll look bolder than if you had just shrunk the capital letters.


Editing gradient in vector image

Question: I have a vector image of water. I would like to keep the top wave/bubbles as they are BUT extend the gradient blue on the bottom (to fit the longer length of a trade show banner). I'm sure there's a simple way to do this in Illustrator but I don't know how...
Comment: Example image is a must in this case. Please, provide one.
Answer: Use the direct Selection Tool (the White Arrow). To click or shift-click all the anchor points at the bottom of the shape. Then simply click-drag the anchors down to where you want them. You may need to adjust the gradient stops in the Gradient Panel afterwards if the gradient moves too much.
Without a posted sample image, this is the best I can offer.
Answer: In Illustrator, the gradient is bound to the shape. So you will most likely have to edit the shape. the setting of the gradient panel will only make changes within the shape.
But we don't know your bubbles nor your trade show banner, so for a more detailed answer, please provide an example.

Editing gradient in vector image


What is must have software for image editing on Mac?

Question: Currently, I have downloaded Gimp on my Mac and using it to edit images. I don't mind spending money to buy other software if it makes things easier or faster. What is must have software for image editing on Mac?
Comment: This _might_ be seen as a little subjective. The mods will decide.
Comment: @Dave: Are you simply looking for ideas, or are you looking for some specific feature sets and capabilities? As worded, this question seems like a poor fit for PhotoSE. Gimp is much like *Photoshop*, however there are also tools like *Lightroom* and *Aperture*, as well as several open-source alternatives like *RawThearapy* that often sit somewhere between "Photoshopesque" and "Lightroomesque" that might fit your needs better. Could you update your question to be clearer and more specific about what your looking for?
Answer: It helps to think about what you mean by "editing." Do you need help with managing your photo collection, assisting with sending pictures to services, basic photo editing (how light/dark the photo is, managing overall color), or complex editing (multiple layers/channels, transparencies)?
The canonical list goes something like this:
iPhoto -- The modern version helps manage photos, send them to services, basic photo editing.
Aperture/Lightroom -- Better management of photos, more "professional" basic photo editing. It seems that some people prefer Lightroom over Apeture.
Photoshop/Gimp -- Not much help with photo management, but very good tools for both basic and advanced photo editing. I'm not that familiar with Gimp, so I can't get into that religious war.
I also know that there are web services that do basic photo editing, including canned effects as made popular by Instagram. I haven't used any of these services, so I can't comment on where they fit in the above list or how competent they are.
I use a combination of iPhoto (for managing the collection and quickly sending snapshot stuff to services like Facebook) and Photoshop for "serious" basic editing. I don't do a lot of advanced photo editing however, so I could probably get by with just Aperture or Lightroom.
Answer: Depends on what you need and how much money you're ready to spend. GIMP is good because it's free, though it requires some learning. Lightroom is definitely great for almost everything. The new Photos for Mac is great for basic edits, and hosting of images (plus it comes by default in El Capitan). Also check Photography category in the Mac App Store, you'll find a lot of cool apps there.
Answer: I used Gimp on Ubuntu for years. Its a very powerful, if a bit strange, package. Great for the price.
Since I moved to a MacBook and OS-X, I use Aperture. Its available for about $80, and it does 99.44% of everything I want a package to do. I'm not a big fan of Aperture's "library" concept, where it manages all of your images, but many people swear that its great.
When I "edit" my photos, I don't do serious pixel magic. I crop, rotate, adjust colors, patch out blemishes, etc.
I also bought Lightroom, and for me, Aperture feels better. YMMV, of course. The recent versions of Lightroom are priced to compete with Aperture, maybe a bit more expensive, but still affordable for what they do.
I have never found that I need the serious stuff that Photoshop can do.
Answer: Try FX Photo Studio Pro - it is a very simple app for adding filters to images. It also has basic features, such as crop, rotate, and advanced features to adjust hue/saturation and stuff. You can check the trial version on CNET: http://cnet.co/KLslRB


When taking a picture, where should the horizon be?

Question: I know and understand the rule of thirds, but I would like to know, when taking a picture of something such as a tree, should the horizon be  positioned on the top or bottom third line?
Answer: The most important thing to remember is that the rule of thirds is more like what you'd call "guidelines" than actual rules. Even if you're familiar with the rule, I suggest refreshing yourself on the background of the rule of thirds and where it comes from. It contains less ancient wisdom than many people assume.
So, since there's no hard and fast rule, that means there's really no magic answer to this. (Take a look at When is it OK to place the subject in the middle of a picture? and When should I break the rule of thirds?) It would be convenient if there were an always-correct answer, but if there were, all compositions would be identical and boring. We'd not even need photographers; robot cameras could be programmed to follow all the rules and produce great art. Clearly, that's not the case.
But that doesn't mean this is a bad question or that the rule of thirds is useless. It may be just a guideline, but it does have some basic good sense. My main advice is to not get too caught up on precise alignment with the ⅓ line or any other special divisions. If you keep the numerology out of it, though, there are some basic effects that differ when you place the horizon high or low.
A high horizon can emphasize the distance and three-dimensionality in your photo, if the landscape sweeps back towards it. Or, if the foreground is the main concern and there's a dominant foreground subject, putting the horizon high places the emphasis on that subject with the sky out of the way.
A low horizon can emphasize a majestic sky, and if the foreground is boring, you can just cut it out. This composition can have a more formal, observational feel, and a sense of looking into the picture rather than being in the picture. With low horizon, the subject is more apt to break the horizon line, which is a topic all unto itself.
A centered horizon tends to create a more static composition, and often when you choose this, it's because your photograph is about the reflection of the sky and the landscape. In this case, you would generally either want to emphasize that doubled relationship, or have another strong compositional element to create tension. The second image here provides a very successful example of this.
Comment: Loved your research effort! Very informative!
Answer: There are even more options. Horizon may be diagonal, vertical, it may be upside down. As Matt said, please do not consider any "rules" to be rules for yourself :)
One more thing: if the horizon is just slightly non-horizontal, it often grabs viewers' attention and "feels awkward". I'm not saying it's a bad thing but it may take viewer's attention off from the object/scenery that you want to be noticed.
Answer: If upper branches of a tree are more important, use the bottom line. If on shot you have nice shadow of this tree, use upper. This is dependant on your subject. Here my simple sample, if somebody don't know how tree looks ;) Here is "like a" rule of third sample, because pure rule is mostly boring.
Comment: Ahhhh. I see. If it depends on whether I'm focusing on something above or below the horizon.


What is the best way to seal this old fireplace vent?

Question: I am doing some minor renovations to my basement with the drop ceiling and found that one of the geniuses that owned the house before me, used fibreglass ceiling tiles to seal off an old vent for a gas fireplace. Obviously this will not do. I'm thinking of building a section of 2x4's around the old exhaust and then filling it with rigid foam and spray foam. I can't take the old exhaust off the side of the house, since it is a condo and I doubt that I'm going to convince them to replace the siding where this exhaust vent is, not to mention it will probably cost me. Open to any suggestions. I would post a pic but the settings don't allow it, kinda odd.
Comment: spray foam might sound appealing as a quick fix, but will be a pain in the a** if you ever want to remove it!!!
Answer: Not sure exactly where this vent is, but here in the UK it's pretty much essential to include a vent whenever a fireplace is blocked off.  Otherwise the air inside the chimney goes stale and damp takes effect.  Generally the vent is to the room in which the fire used to be situated.  Just be sure that there is ventilation to the chimney before (more thoroughly) sealing the vent.
Comment: True enough. However this vent is no longer in use, the fireplace was moved a while ago to a different location in the room. Thanks for the response though.
Answer: If it's really not being used, I'd cover the vent itself in plastic from the inside wall (staple and caulk it to make it weather tight) or some other seal.  Then you can just place a standard piece of fiberglass insulation with the vapor barrier (paper backing) facing inside the home.  The expanding spray foam can make a big mess, and should someone want to use this vent in the future, it would be a serious pain to undo.
Answer: You can probably buy a metal cap the correct diameter for the pipe inlet, you can screw it on with sheet metal screws. I would stuff a few handfuls of fiberglass insulation in there first. This is a lot nicer if anyone ever wants to use it in the future, and still seals it up nicely.
Answer: Spray foam might sound appealing as a quick fix, but will be a pain in the a** if you ever want to remove it!
Here is an alternative solution:
If you are convinced that building a small section around the old vent will work if you could make it waterproof, then try this instead:

Similar to the way for building a fish tank, go out and get some
thick plastic, ideally polycarbonate.
Next, begin building the structure you were going to make out of
2x4, instead out of the plastic.
Thirdly, glue the edges together using the proper glue, and then
seal it making it waterproof using a liberal amount of waterproof silicone.
Lastly, install around the old vent, and using a liberal amount of
waterproof silicone make it watertight all the way around.

This should do the trick. Let me know if this works, or if there are other factors that I need to elaborate further on.


View live GPS tracking online during race

Question: Are there any apps that will allow me to share my current location in real time?
I'm doing a half ironman triathlon  and I want to run/bike with my phone
(GPS enabled) and share my progress in real time.  Is there any app that allows this? I'm thinking my friends/family could go to a particular website and see my progress on a map in real time.
I am aware of apps like endomondo, runkeeper, etc. but they only record GPS data.
Answer: If I enable location sharing in Latitude, that comes with Google Maps, all my friends with whom I have enabled sharing can see me either from their phone or logging in to Google Maps.


How do I return to default wallpaper on login screen in LightDM?

Question: With the change to 12.04 came the new feature of having the login screen matching the selected user's wallpaper. It's a cool feature, but not for everyone. I'd like to go the other way and go back to having a default login screen (lightDM) wallpaper that doesn't change to match the selected User's wallpaper. Is this possible?
Answer: If you're using one of the stock wallpapers I don't know of a way to do it, but I don't see why you'd want to hide any of those, as they're pretty innocuous :)
If it's an image in a user's home directory, you could try changing it so it can only be read by that particular user: right-click on the file, select Properties, then Permissions, and set "Access" for both Group and World to "None". The login manager should then be unable to read the image and will show a default image instead.
Comment: Thank you. I'd still like to know how to do it for the system and you would think Ubuntu would give you an option. But your answer works for my purposes.
Answer: You might try downloading/installing Ubuntu Tweak. There is an option to select a wallpaper for the login screen (Tweaks>Login Settings). If your custom-selected image doesn't display afterwards, you may need to sudo copy it into the /usr/share/backgrounds directory, then right-click change the permissions to match the default wallpapers.
I hope that works like what you've got in mind. Take care.


Can I make my own chestnut puree?

Question: I've got a recipe that calls for chestnut puree. I live in Australia and it's proving difficult to find. Chestnuts on the other hand are pretty easy to find so I googled around to see if I could find a recipe to make my own. The results really only returned other recipes that contain chestnut puree so I was wondering if I could make my own and if so, how would I go about it?
Answer: Yes, but chestnut purée comes in sweetened and unsweetened varieties, so making your own depends on what you'll be using it for. Chestnuts are pretty versatile, but I've come across using sweetened purée in old world desserts, while the unsweetened purée is typically used with root vegetables and winter squashes (the European variety of chestnut drop in late fall).
You'll start by scoring the skin of the raw nuts and roasting them at 400° (this prevents them from bursting). After this, peeling them is easy work. You will then boil them, optionally in a sugar syrup. Finally, reserve the liquid and puree in a food processor, adding back the liquid for the desired consistency.
About a pound of chestnuts per cup of purée.
Comment: That sounds really tasty.
Answer: There is such a thing as Chestnut Flour. I have a Dowd and Rogers brand  imported from Italy that has a recipe for for Chestnut Puree on the back, using the flour.  The ingredients are 100% ground chestnuts.
Answer: Here's one: http://www.foodreference.com/html/chest-puree-925.html
I haven't tried it though. It looks like "chestnut puree recipe" works fine on Google.
Answer: In Adelaide I have bought unsweetened puree in Coles and Woolies. You can also get the sweetened version. HOWEVER... they only tend to stock it at Christmas time... probably for Chestnut stuffing for Turkeys!!! Mind you... it's in a can... so get a few and keep them in the pantry!!!! Last year though, they were charging $6-7 dollars a tin... so if you DID get a recipe for unsweetened using fresh... I'd love to get it... as they are relatively cheap in Coles just at the moment!!!!!

Can I make my own chestnut puree?


Is there any way to disable multiple sessions on Facebook?

Question: Is there any way to disable multiple sessions on Facebook? My girlfriend has my Facebook password and I'm afraid that If I'm chatting while she is logged in, she becomes aware of what I'm chatting. Is there any way to force the Facebook prevent someone else from being logged in where an existing session is already active?
Answer: I can not find any way to prevent two Login at a same time but there is a solution for your problem by enabling notification on Login to your account.
read this blog: How Can I Know If Someone Else Logs Into My Facebook account ?
Comment: I think Facebook provide enough security by notification on Login and it's not necessary to prevent multi sessions...
Answer: This is not an issue with multiple sessions. Your girlfriend doesn't have to be logged in at the same time as you to see your chats.
Chats are now the same as messages in Facebook so anyone logged in to your account (or the account of the person you're talking to) can click on Messages and see your entire chat history.
You'll have to change your password if you don't want her seeing your activities.
Answer: Sounds like if you are worried that your girlfriend can see what you are chatting about then you should either not be chatting about it or change your password.


How to see when someone started following someone on Twitter?

Question: Someone that I'm following started following another person. They were already following a lot of people so I can't tell who the person they started following is.
How can I see who they started following?
Answer: You would need to cache the person's data and compare the previous sets.
And even if you were able to do this, here are some questions that will come up
What would happen to those who use tools to automatically follow then un-follow based on certain criteria.
Which date should be chosen ?
What about those who start off on someone's list then move to follow status ?
Or those support company accounts who ask you to follow them for a period to send a direct message ?
Certain criteria would have to be met to define exactly what date qualifies as starting to follow someone.
Answer: If you visit the list of people I'm following:
http://twitter.com/#!/rvn/following/people
The person on top is the most recent user that I followed @LottoPH, and that's how twitter lists them. The very first user I followed is at the bottom, @noi13.
My guess is that this is the same order for everyone.
Answer: I'm not sure there is a service that will send you notifications when someone you follow, starts to follow someone else.
There is DoesFollow which will tell if one person is following someone else.
There is also ReFollow which is a sort of follower management tool.  There are many different ways to sort your followers and to see who the people you follow are following.
Comment: What about just looking up when they started following someone?
Comment: @z-buffer - I don't think there is a service that does this. I think you would have to periodically check who they are following.


Is the closure of the orbits of  the mean curvature flow compact  for a finite time?

Question: Question: Suppose $N$ is an $n$ dimensional  immersed  submanifold in a complete, non-compact manifold $M$, with bounded geometry. Suppose the mean curvature flow $F:N\times [0,q)\rightarrow M$ satisfies
$$
\begin{split}
\frac{d}{dt}F&=\vec{H};\\
   F(p,0)&=F_{0};
\end{split}
$$
If $F(p,t)$ exists for $t\in [0,q)$, is there any possible the closure of $F(N\times[0,t))$  unbounded in $M$. In other words, can the mean curvature flow go to infinity for a finite time?  I didn't find the contra_example. I hope the answer is yes.  In Euclidean space, definitely this is ture? Is any one know any related reference about this question?  You are very appreciated if you can offer some opinions or information.
Answer: I guess you assume that $F_0$ is bounded.
In this case the answer is "yes".
Fix a point $p$.
Fix small $\varepsilon>0$ so that principle curvatures of $\varepsilon$ spheres in $M$ are uniformly bounded.
(It is possible since $M$ has bounded geometry.)
Denote by $S_r$ the sphere with center $p$ and radius $r$
and let $\Sigma_r$ be the inward $\varepsilon$-equidistant to $S_r$.
Note that for $r>2\cdot\varepsilon$ there is a fixed upper bound for principle curvatures of  $\Sigma_r$.
Therefore $\ell(t)=\max_{x\in F_t}\{\mathop{\rm dist}_px\}$
grows at most linearly.
P.S. I used that $M$ has bounded geometry in an essential way, but I am not sure if it is necessary.


html/css vs CMS

Question: I am currently a CS student and an aspiring programmer/web developer. I am wondering whether it is worth taking the time to master html and css to make websites when these CMS services/wysiwyg editors (wordpress, squarespace) seem to be becoming more and more functional. Does anyone think these publishing services might eventually make the need to design websites from raw code unnecessary? If not, please explain why. If designing a website eventually becomes as simple as using Photoshop I would much rather invest my time in programming languages.
Comment: Not a direct answer to your question, but go into the programming side (master C/++, a server-side scripting language or two, and programming as part of a team) rather than spending time on markup and presentation languages - you'll find more lucrative career options with that skillset because you'll have far less competition.
Comment: @danlefree true dat
Comment: @danlefee I definitely agree with you ;)
Answer: I can't imagine myself using wysiwyg for css and html. If you like to learn to DESIGN you gotta know the 'backend' 'messy' part.
Wysiwyg is ok if you are not building something robust.
but definitely invest your time in programming languages. thats the engine.
Answer: HTML/CSS can in no way be compared to a CMS(content management system).
You could maybe compare learing PHP vs using CMS, but that would't be very correct either.
CMS's are used to manage the content of your website, so it's helpful, because you don't need to write any code or think about database table relations etc.
If you want to focus on designing pages, learn HTML and CSS. If you're more into creating dynamic web applications, you can use a CMS, but I would recommend learning PHP as well, as you will surely need to adjust you website sooner or later and won't be able to do it without any PHP knowledge.
Answer: WYSIWYG editors might make it easy to write content without knowing HTML/CSS, but that's about it. You still need to know HTML & CSS in order to create templates for Wordpress or Squarespace. And WYSIWYG editors are usually poor at handling complex layouts. At best, you'd still have to go back and clean up the generated code.
If you partner up with a front-end developer/designer, then you could get away with only knowing HTML, a server-side language, and basic CSS. If you want to focus on web design, you could even get away with knowing no programming at all. But then you'd have to partner up with a developer who does and can implement your designs. Naturally, it helps if you understand the capabilities and limitations of HTML/CSS.
Another thing to consider is this, most services like Squarespace are much more expensive than the equivalent web hosting plan. You'd likely be paying more than double what you'd pay at a good web host.
For example, you can get a shared hosting account with unlimited domains for roughly $10/month. At work we have DreamHost account with 10+ sites setup on it. You'd need to pay at least $200/month for the equivalent service on SquareSpace, and you'd still end up with less flexibility and need to go with another service if you needed to build an e-commerce site.
There's no such thing as a free lunch. The less you know and the more you need others to do for you, the more you have to spend for the same results. Sites like Squarespace basically have you outsource web development to them. From a web developer's point of view, that makes little to no sense. It's only a good deal if you're a non-technical person (e.g. a musician, an artist, a designer, etc.) who doesn't want to shop for and pay a web developer. That makes sense. But it doesn't make sense to pay a web developer just so they can refer you to Squarespace.

html/css vs CMS


What font types are good for a technical document?

Question: What are some good fonts to use for a highly technical document? Is there any specific type that should be used/avoided?
Comment: Comic Sans MS should be avoided at all costs, in anything you do.
Comment: Perhaps you could add a little detail on what you mean by 'highly technical document'? Does it contain very complex tables with small text, equations, complex labelled diagrams, charts, program code?
Comment: CERN (the temple of physicists) decides to switch to Comic Sans :)). http://home.web.cern.ch/about/updates/2014/04/cern-switch-comic-sans
Comment: Technical documents? Like readable technical text or just technical annotations?
Answer: Technical documents will have a deeply nested, hierarchical structure, and also make use of footnotes, different types of emphasis, cross-referencing, pull outs and side bars of one sort of another and captions.  The main distinguishing feature of technical documents tends to be complex structure.
For headings, you can use any reasonably legible font; this could be serif or sans-serif.  It should have a complementary style to your body text, but the headings should provide an obvious visual structure to the document.
A decent serif or sans-serif typeface is fine for the body text if you have a lot of prose.  If you have a lot of illustrations with labels or captions, pull-outs or tables you might want to use a sans-serif font for the body text and a serif font for headings.  Footnotes will be smaller than the body text, so don't use a font for the body that is too small.
For emphasis, the italic or oblique version of the font should have a noticeably different texture to the body text.
For tables, captions and pull outs you should use a sans-serif font in most cases.  If you use a serif font for the body text make sure the texture of the sans-serif font complements but does contrast significantly from the text type.
If you intend to have code listings or other monospaced items in the document then you will have a third typeface for the monospaced text.  This should visually complement any sans-serif typefaces.  Don't use Courier for this as it is relatively wide; other monospace fonts such as Lucida Console will give you more monospaced characters in the same width for the same point size or general legibility.  Also, Courier doesn't really go with anything and the version that ships with most O/S platforms is very light and not terribly legible for reading large code listings.
If you have the option of buying in the fonts then you can pick any combination that looks appropriate; many resources on the web have helpful suggestions for this.
If you are stuck with fonts supplied by your operating system vendor then the story is slightly different.  Although I briefly worked as a typesetter about 20 years ago most of the technical documentation work I do these days is functional specifications and I am typically constrained by the software available in the client's standard desktop build.
Some options are:
Palatino is quite a pleasant typeface for text if you are writing large bodies of prose.  It got done to death in the DTP era as it came bundled with most Postscript printers, but that is a bit of a dying memory so it can stand on its own merits.  It will go with any of the Sans-serif fonts (Arial, Tahoma, Trebuchet, Calibri etc) that ship with Windows.  MacOS and most Linux distros also come with a decent rendition of Palatino from Adobe or URW.
The Lucida family is designed for this type of work, and has serif, sans-serif and monospace fonts.  It has a pleasant, contemporary look and works well.  Another big plus is that most O/S platforms come with Lucida fonts.  The Lucida family was also designed to render well on low-res output devices such as screens or early laser printers, so it is a good choice in a font intended for PDF output.
Stand-bys Times and Arial (or Helvetica) work OK, although I find that Times italic tends not to stand out very well on laser printed documents.  The document will look like something done with MS Word, but the typefaces are serviceable.  The main reason to avoid these fonts is personal taste or a desire to avoid looking like amateur word processing (which may be more important than you think if you need the document to be taken seriously.)
Traditional old-style or transitional types (e.g. Garamonds, Bembo, Baskerville) look quite nice and are legible in text, but have a low x-height so they need to be set in larger sizes.   Mixing these inline with a sans-serif typeface with a bigger x-height can look strange.  ITC Garamond (Used extensively by Apple in the 1980s and 1990s) is a re-imagining of Garamond with a larger x-height, so doesn't suffer from this problem.
Moderns such as CM or Century Schoolbook got done to death in the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, so they tend to come with a lot of cultural baggage.  I find moderns make a document look like something from the Victorian era or the 1920s or 30s.  While they are quite practical and legible, I must beg to differ with DEK about their appropriateness for technical documents.
Take the usual hints about care when mixing humanist and geometric typefaces.  Note that highly geometric sans-serifs like Avant-Garde Gothic or Futura aren't really suitable for text type for a technical document.  Although they may be OK for headings, if you have a lot of captions, labels or otner sans-serif artifacts in the document they will clash with AGG or Futura if not set in the same typeface.  This is a strike against using these fonts for anything but major headings such as chapter titles.  Similar issues apply when using any sans-serif font with a highly distinctive look.
From memory, I have had good results with text type set in Times, Helvetica, Charter, Palatino, Frutiger, ITC Berkeley Old Style, Calibri, Tahoma and one or two others in various technical documents I have been involved in writing.
Some combinations I have used are:

Times text and Arial headings, captions and labels with Lucida
Typewriter listings (dictated by corporate standards)
Palatino text and Helvetica headings, captions and labels (Adobe
fonts, designed to be rendered to PDF without having to embed fonts
so I stuck with the 35 standard PostScript fonts).  The document was
produced with Framemaker.
Palatino text and Tahoma headings with Lucida Console listings.  In
hindsight, the bold on Tahoma that comes with Windows is too heavy.
Cambria headings and Calibri text - defaults with Word 2010, and look
OK together.  Shrink down the heading styles from the default sizes - the
bold is quite heavy and it looks too strong against the body text.  Also,
the default style inserts quite a bit of leading in the text styles.
Charter, CMSans, - document produced with LaTeX.  This used the basic
'Charter' style that comes with LaTeX, modified a bit by hacking
about the includes.
ITC Berkeley Old Style/Helvetica.  Headings and text done with BOS
and captions and some other bits done with Helvetica.  I like
Berkeley Oldstyle as a font (try setting the word 'Quidditch' in it) and it works
for both display and text type.  The ITC version (predictably enough, I suppose)
has a fairly large x-height, so it works with sans-serif fonts.
Lucida - comes with pretty much every major OS platform, is highly legible, and is
designed to render well on low-res output devices such as laser
printers.  There is a whole family of serif, sans-serif and
monospaced fonts available.  They render well on screen, look nice in
print and have good ergonomics for technical documents.

EDIT: Actually, this reminds me of a story.  At the university where I did my bachelor's degree they had a course that (amongst other things) teaches LaTeX and the joys of structured documents.  My friend was a tutor for that paper at one point. One of the students complained about LaTeX thus:

But if I use LaTeX all my documents look like they were done in TeX

To which my friend replied:

Could be worse.  Could look like they were done in Word.

The student saw the point.
A corollary to that is that one of the lecturers actually did some stats on this at one point and found a correlation between grades for assignments and using LaTeX.  He swears that using LaTeX for an assignment is worth about half a grade on average.  Whether this was due to the structured documentation effect and auto look-and-feel features of TeX or just because the smarter students tended to used it wasn't made clear, although I think he may have attempted to correct for the average grades of the student.
Comment: Lucida Console not the best font for code samples: '0' and 'O' aren't easily distinguished. Inconsolata and Consolas both have slashed 0, but may be worse in other aspects.
Answer: Technical documents are often set in sans-serif. There are a couple of reasons why this is preferred over its serif counterpart:

Serif typefaces are usually designed to be as transparent to the reader as possible. In a novel, reading should be a fluid activity, and the typeface must not call attention to itself. Technical documents are often filled with important notices where the reader is supposed to make stops, and be the structure must easily "scannable" with your eyesight.
Sans-serif allows for a greater range of weights, from thin to black. Technical documents often have deep, nested hierarchy, and having many weights at your disposal allows you to transmit this hierarchy.

A pair of good choices for technical documents are:
Whitney is a very complete typeface with a very wide range of weights. It also provides "lining figures" which are great for tables and such. It also has built in numbers and letters encased in circles and squares, which are very handy when making annotations.
Thesis is a serial typeface (it has serif, semi-serif, mono, semi-sans, and sans-serif choices), also in a very wide range of weights. It's monospaced font allows you to write code in the same great looking typeface.
Answer: For technical documents (or any other type) I have found the 'So You Need A Typeface' document to be very useful.  It started out as a little bit of a joke around here, but it's actually incredibly useful.  I've got a blown-up copy of it hanging on my wall.
Link 1
Link 2
Comment: *Are you alone?* [Yes] *Ok, then come with me.* - - - - - - (long walk) - - - - - - - - > [Comic Sans] :-D   Anyway, the second link is broken, I've [uploaded it to imgur](http://i.imgur.com/t5VPdh3.png) to save it for future lurkers, all credit to Julian Hansen who's [website](http://julianhansen.com/) seems to be down.
Answer: For any technical document the goals are to maximize readability, while reducing potential ambiguity.
For me this means my first rule is:

Numerals or figures should be distinct from letters, as with the modification to Brioni to clarify the digit one. I really like to see a distinction between the capital letter O, and digit zero 0, whether through a slash, through narrowness of the zero, or another indicator. In technical writing a label of combined letters and digits may be used, particularly in randomization of samples during experimentation, and in source code for programming. So ISO451 should be clearly distinct from IS045I.

After that, my suggestions would be:

Text or non-lining figures in prose in often fine as long as it is not distracting, and lining figures for most other uses, using tabular and proportional as appropriate.
In technical documents the jargon or technical words used may not have the normal amount of redundancy of information (entropy) we are use to in natural text, so ambiguous characters may be intractable in complex cases such as name of a novel pharmaceutical compound. In principle, if a typeface would obviously be a poor choice for OCR, I would avoid it. Not that I would be slavish to actual performance of the typeface and any given OCR software's performance.
Typefaces should be non-tiring to read if they are used as body text. Times New Roman, and New Century Schoolbook are boring, but easy and non-tiring to read a large amount of prose in. A modest to lightly serif is my personal preference, but a sans-serif suitable for body text for prose published in a book form (say university level textbooks), then it may be suitable.

Depending on the document's media, e.g. a blueprint or CAD drawing, if it is space constrained consider using a semi- to condensed sans-serif typeface in captions, labels, etc. to maximize the information density.
Follow any existing conventions of the genre. For legal technical documents, Typography for lawyers , is a good place to find conventions. For more academic areas, research journals publish a style guide or handbooks for paper submission with the publisher's "house" style and genre's conventions. Book publishers have similar guides for their various technical and reference imprints. Even standards (e.g. ISO, IEC, IEEE, etc.).
Respect the target media (screen, laser printer, tablet) and how it will be used (e.g. in dirty work environment with messy machinery, sections photocopied as check lists, etc.) for selection of typeface size. Footnotes might look better on a 30 inch screen in 8 point font while you set the document, but at 3am in the morning, – regardless whether it is reviewing case law, or doing emergency plumbing – at such times, clarity is the only style I care about.
Answer: Highly technical documents (I'm assuming scientific) should use STIX, without a doubt.
STIX is a free open source opentype font with a library of technical symbols that is unrivaled.
http://www.stixfonts.org/
Answer: Generally speaking, serif fonts like Times are Palatino are considered good for printed media and sans-serif fonts like Helvetica for use on computer screens.  Anything in code, however (HTML, C++, what have you) should be rendered in a fixed-width font such as Courrier New.
Comment: Generally I recommend against using Courier for code listings for a couple of reasons.  The first is that it is quite wide; you will get more columns in the same width from others such as Lucida Typewriter at a useable point size.  The second is that it's quite ugly and doesn't really go with anything else, but that's a matter of personal taste.
Comment: Actually, I've seen code pleasingly rendered in variable-width fonts.  This doesn't cause any problems as long as the use of whitespace for alignment is limited to indentation levels (e.g. no internal alignment of multi-line comments or text strings).  It also has the benefit of allowing longer unbroken lines (pretty much every fixed-width font has a painfully low number of characters per line for typical text block widths).  I'm not ready to use variable-width fonts in my editor (yet), but for printed material I think they're great.
Comment: I think serifs are now considered okay on very high res screens (higher than HD, 1920 x 1080). Definitely okay for headline text at HD.


Is potty-training in 3 days possible?

Question: I want to potty train my 2-year-old, and I read about The 3 Day Potty Training Method which claims is possible to do it in 3 days! Has anyone tried this method?
Comment: i'd be a bit skeptical if the only way to find out if this works is by paying $24usd...
Comment: Please, let us know if it worked for you!..
Comment: hmmm.  i don't believe you can rush a good thing ... http://parenting.stackexchange.com/questions/91/how-can-i-potty-train-a-12-month-old .. let me know how you get on ...
Comment: i already have the book, ;) some one gave me a copy
Comment: Some people say it works.  Some people say it trains you more than the child.  Changing diapers is not the difficult part of parenthood so why worry about it?  It'll happen.  How many adults do you know who aren't potty trained?
Answer: I wouldn't rush it, unnecessarily.  You can take it slow and let your child learn at their own pace. Putting a timeline to it only stresses you and them out needlessly.
Every kid is different. Be consistent with him/her. Be patient and loving with them and they will learn in 3 days or 3 months.
Our own kids were different -- Our oldest took 7 days. (He had just turned 3). Our youngest did it in 2 days (maybe one accident?) and he was 2 and 1/2 at the time. One boy in the neighborhood took 2 months. Bottom line, doesn't matter how long it takes. As all three of them are now toilet-masters :)
Answer: I'm not familiar with the book, but I can tell you my experience with my first child. He started showing interest in bathroom and waking up with a dry diaper. My wife was on vacation and I was going to have a long weekend so we decided to give it a try.
We sat down with him and explained the whole thing, and how he was now a big boy and he was ready to use the potty. At first it was very scary for him. Sitting was fun, we read him a story or showed him a video from Elmo, and he was very happy, but when he felt he was about to pee, he started yelling a lot, as if it was a bad thing. We faced the same situation on a previous attempt and we quit trying then. But know we kept on trying, we told him everything was going to be alright and it was OK to pee in the potty. He finally did it and started to be less scared every time. Every time he pee in the potty we gave him a price such as a gummy bear or a little chocolate. Next day he was going every time with just one accident and he has been fine ever since.
He was on his underwear the whole time (no training diapers, except when we went to the store or grandma's). And at night we would sleep with his training diapers. After a month or so without wetting the training diapers, we decided that he could sleep without them.
I think the most important thing is to notice when the kid is ready and make him as comfortable as possible. If there are accidents, don't make a big deal out of it, just have him help you out to clean. If he succeeds, make sure to make a big deal and regard him with hugs and maybe a little treat as well.
So to sum up, it is possible, my kid had it almost completely at day 2, but I'm sure it depends completely on each kid. I've heard parents saying that theirs did it on day one, some take more than a week.
Comment: I have not read any literature on the subject, but in all my conversations with fellow parents there is one universal truth: every kid is different. Bottom line though: if your child is ready, then yes, it is possible. But only if they are actually, sincerely ready.
Comment: How old was your son then?
Comment: He was two years old
Answer: I read the book, however, my kido took almost a fortnight to get used to it.
 "HOW TO" books do not consider the individual personality types.
Answer: Depending on the physical and emotional development of the child it may be possible.  Keep in mind that some kids can't hold it while sleeping until they are much older regardless of their desire to do so.  That being said, when we pulled the trigger thats how long it took with one of my kids (if you don't count the very occasional accident for a time).  The other one took a little longer.  I think that you should consider carefully if they are ready and when you do pull the trigger, to not go half way.  You have to be committed to watch them like a hawk and help them succeed, prevent and deal with night-time accidents, etc.  An incremental approach is bound to bring conflict, foot dragging, and begging by both the parent and child.
Answer: I'm sure it is possible to do it in 3 days, but you have to wait until the child is actually ready. They should be showing interest, and waking up dry, etc. Like the first author says. If the parent is the one initiating the process, it is going to take however much time it takes until the child is ready. Better to just wait until they've mastered the physical skills necessary instead of trying to force something you can't.

Is potty-training in 3 days possible?


Handling Boards and Cards in an Organisation when members leave.

Question: We removed a member from our Organisation as they are no longer part of our team but there are a few boards that this person was the only administrator. How can we remove the boards or add a new administrator to the board if it was not done before they left.
Comment: What app are you talking about?
Answer: If you still maintain an e-mail account for this user you might temporarily re-enable it with a new password and then use that e-mail address with the "Forgot Password" login process with Trello. A change password e-mail should be sent. (You may need to know the username which should be in the original "Welcome to Trello" e-mail)
Once logged in to Trello as that member (you only removed the member from your organization, not from Trello) you can then add administrators of your choice to the existing boards you wish to transfer. You can also remove any boards no longer needed.
If you are not able to use the e-mail account or otherwise not able to log into the Trello account for that user, I suggest contacting firstname.lastname@example.com


How do I determine where lead paint was used?

Question: I just bought a new house. The inspector told me that the entry way paint is cracking because a previous owner painted over lead paint without using the proper primer. How do I find out which walls have lead paint before I move in? I plan on painting all the walls.
Answer: They make lead testing kits for this purpose.
You should ensure that you understand the correct process and procedures for painting over lead paint and that you take the proper safety precautions.  The EPA has a website with lots of information on this.
Answer: Steven has given you the right info to test for lead.  As a certified home inspector and licensed EPA Lead renovator, I question the method your inspector used to determine that there was lead paint present. He should have used a test swab for verifiable results. Assuming there is lead paint simply because over coated paint is cracking is making an irresponsible assumption. Any time a competent inspector is looking at a house built prior to 1978, he should random test, or offer to test for lead.  Cracking paint can be caused by many situations. A few could be, cheap paint, paint applied over a very glossy paint that was not properly prepped, or even paint applied when temps were very hot and humidity very low causing paint to dry too fast. The primary reason could well be that the surface was not primed well, but that in itself is not a positive sign of lead paint underneath.
When you use the lead kit, be sure to follow the directions exactly.  Use a utility knife to make a small "V" cut into the paint in an obscure area, being sure to expose a cross section of all layers of paint to the bare wood.  The swabs are extremely sensitive and will pick up on very minute amounts of lead and give a red swap indication.
Do read some articles so you feel confident to use the lead tests properly. Simple testing is easy, but more extensive lead testing should be left to a pro.  Good Luck
Comment: Let's just be clear that quite a number of builders and repairmen stocked up on the "good stuff", e.g. soon to be banned lead paint, which may have ended up in houses built after 1978.  1978 is not in fact a fully magic cutoff date for danger.
Answer: The gold standard for lead testing uses an XRF gun (X-ray Fluorescence Analyzer).  it's far more accurate than the test kits, which often test positive even when lead is not present.  As a certified EPA renovator for pre-1978 buildings I strongly recommend a whole house professional XRF test: you'll identify many areas with no lead at all.  Even if there is lead, if the underlying paint is intact, the best thing in most cases is to add another layer.


How to disable iChat's popup "You are not connected to the internet"?

Question: I am tired of seeing the "You are not connected to the internet" message from iChat every time after I open my macbook. I use iChat for screen sharing. Is it possible to disable the annoying popup or should I just use another app for messaging and screen sharing?
Answer: You should probably use another app for screensharing and messaging.  If you choose to do this, I reccomend Adium for messaging and TeamViewer for screensharing.  I searched the contents of the whole iChat application, and I couldn't find anything, which leads me to believe that the pop up (I've had it too) is not actually part of the iChat application, but used by iChat.
Answer: Open ichat, close windows, logout. That fixed it for me.
Comment: That's a rather extreme solution for this, don't you think?


Timber Veneer Flooring?

Question: We have existing polished timber floors, it is patchy (different parts of the house are floored with different kinds of timber) it also has a few gaps and holes. We are thinking of laying down some kind of timber veneer over the top, is this a good idea and if so what are the best materials available? (Ideally it would look as authentic as possible)
Comment: A quick googling tells me that polished timber is Aussie for what most of us call hardwood.
Comment: "Is this a good idea" and "best" are both opinions, therefore VtC.
Answer: Engineered hardwood flooring is what you're looking for. It's a thin layer of real wood bonded to a backer and pad. They snap together tounge-and-groove style. You may be able to install it directly over your existing floor, but you'll have to check with the manufacturer of the particular product to see if that is an allowable installation method.
Answer: I have done work with this company before:
http://www.mrtimbers.com/
..they reclaim old barn timbers and turn a lot of them in to flooring. It is usually 100-200 year old Douglas Fir in our area (upper mid-west) and it is authentic and looks old and beautiful.
My suggestion would be to find a company like that in your area.
Answer: A good sanding and refinishing could solve your problem.  There are all sorts of tinted fillers that can be used to fill the gaps and holes.  If the floor is relatively level and solid, than this is probably the way to go.
I personally do not recommend this as a DIY project.  It can be done, but it requires some hand skills and experience that a professional will have and you will not.  They also likely have a half truckload of fillers and tints.
It will take about 5 days to do the job properly. (1 day sanding, + 4 coats varnish)

Timber Veneer Flooring?


When editing white balance on a computer, should I tweak tint or temperature first?

Question: Changing the value of one affects the appearance of the other, hence it makes a difference whether you change the tint value first and then move on to the temperature, or the other way around.
Answer: They are independent, the temperature slider affects the color temperature, which is effectively blue-yellow, while the tint affects the green-magenta axis.
In Adobe Camera Raw, the temperature slider is before the tint slider, probably for a reason, so I think the best strategy is to adjust them top to bottom, and this is the advice given in many books on the subject.
Comment: I am ashamed to admit I had never realised this.  Thank you!
Answer: Personally, I prefer to adjust temperature first, and then tint. It is just much easier for me to adjust warm-cold (yellow-blue) balance, then get the right magenta-green. So my tint adjustemnts tend to be smaller, and I often look for just particular "known" color like skin tone.
I believe there are some reasons to do temperature first:

human eye is very sensitive to tonal difference in blue
blue-yellow is the strongest color contrast (probably high sensitivity to yellow wavelength vs low sensitivity to blue wavelength helps here; reference needed)
it helps to separate cold and warm regions of the image

From the computational point of view they are independent.
Answer: They affect each other, but it does not matter which one you move first, the result is always combined from those two settings.
While the temperature is used in a creative way and may be almost artistic, the tint slider is mainly used to correct lighting imperfections in the image and is more of an "emergency image saver" than a creative tool (even though in some cases it might be used creatively too).
In most cases, I let the CameraRaw set the tint automatically (by selecting a white point in the image, using the tool that has color picker icon with target beside it) - that makes sure I corrected unwanted color changes caused by colored walls, neon lights nearby etc. When this tint setting is done, I then play with the temperature as I wish to get desired atmosphere.
Answer: The settings doesn't actually affect each other directly, but if one is too much off in the wrong direction, it's hard to see what the other should be.
Personally I find it much harder to adjust the tint, so for tricky images I first set the temperature to a setting where it's easiest to see tint changes, adjust the tint, and then set the temperature.
For example, to adjust the tint right for skin tones (caucasian), I set the temperature way too warm so that the people look mostly like Simpsons. That way it's easier to balance the red and green.
Comment: Great advice about skin tones.


Writing for an Audio book. What are specifics?

Question: What are specific requirements, a writer should follow, when writing something that is going to be (or just can possibly be) not only read but listened as well?
Comment: Interesting question. :)
Answer: The best advice I can give: read aloud what you've written. When you write a book, you're writing for the eye. When you write an audio piece, you're writing for the ear. If it doesn't sound good when you read aloud, then it won't sound good to the reader.
Some specific tips

Be concise and keep sentence structure simple. We're listening,
not reading so we've got to
comprehend quick and fast.
Write the way you speak.
Write as though you're communicating with one person at a time, that's how people will listen after all.
Use more present participles than you would for a book or text-on-paper kind of piece. For a book, it's good to avoid the verb "to be" -- but for an audio piece, it works because we use "to be" in speech constantly.
Comment: I definitely agree. It's also very useful having someone else read it aloud to you and seeing if there are spots where they stumble, or where the dialogue sounds stilted.
Answer: Well you will probably want to avoid very long place or character names. A lot of the names used for fantasy novels don't really lend themselves to spoken expression.
Answer: Straightforward sentence structure will help. Try listening to some radio drama or the BBC Radio 4 "Book at Bedtime" (a slightly abridged version of a existing novel).
Answer: An interesting story.
I've heard both fiction and non-fiction audiobooks.  The only thing that's really required is interest.  The reader can add a lot, but if there's nothing worth knowing or experiencing then people aren't going to want to listen.
Answer: When listening, it's not a simple matter to flip back ten pages when you've forgotten who the heck Character X is again. One thing that may help is to remind the reader of a trait or profession or other identifying sign once in a while, especially if the character hasn't been seen much yet/lately. (Everything in moderation, of course — doing this too often can result in so-called "Burly Detective" Syndrome.)
I used to be big on very naturalistic dialogue, complete with ums and ers and half-finished sentences. After several years of listening to audiobooks, however, I'm starting to lean the other way. Having characters stammer and constantly interrupt one another can be tough for a reader to pull off well. So yes, write sentences that people might actually say, but also let them get their thoughts out, at least most of the time.
Similarly, snatches of dialogue, as some authors use to capture crowd scenes ("It's her!" "...hasn't been seen in seven months..." "...swore up and down she was dead!") or dialogue that's only half-audible to the viewpoint character, can sound silly even in the hands of a good narrator.
And it probably goes without saying that very visual devices like online chat or computer code, while they may provide some nice flavour in print, don't translate well to audio.
Addendum: Text that's only set off typographically is tricky too. There have been a couple of books where I've been confused by a paragraph-long flashback that was set in italics, or by a stream-of-consciousness passage without attributions. (The audio versions of several of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels used reverb on the voice of Death, whose dialogue was always set in small caps, but this sort of thing is rare.)
Answer: You might want to first listen to a few audiobooks yourself, not just the great stuff like Jim Dale's Harry Potter, but head over to LibriVox and listen to some of those volunteer audiobooks, some are good, some less so. You'll learn a lot from other's mistakes.
Remember to let the narrator breathe. You can write really long sentences in a book, but real people need to breathe. Shorter sentences and judicious use of commas is handy. Narrators can figure out places to breathe but make their lives easier and do that work for them.
A simple way to hear how your story sounds is to let the computer do text-to-speach for you. It doesn't sound great but it will help you catch the big problems early.
If you have any unusual names, a pronunciation guide would be handy.


Do you give local administrator account password to notebook users?

Question: My notebook users need to travel a lot.
Quite often, they need elevated privileges on that machine, like when adding a printer or change network settings.
Should I give them local administrator's password for solving shuch problems?
Comment: By what you have asked, no one can guess the relation you and the users have. So more explanation of the situation would be helpful, otherwise this question will likely be closed, its just too vague.
Comment: As Walter said, the appropriate answer is completely up to you and your users. There are ways to allow people to install most printers without given them full admin. But you need to, based on your company policy and technology environment, make this decision yourself.
Comment: Why not just give them permission to install printers?
Comment: Thats up to you, its your risk to to let them possibly mess something up - we can't decide that for you.
Answer: The answer is: It depends.
It depends upon your relationship with your users, and how much they can be trusted to not create problems, and the extent to which you want to support laptops where the user has administrator-level access, and the necessity of administrator-level access from a mission/business perspective.
It's just a question with a bunch of tradeoffs, and you'll have to decide from the perspective of your own organization what makes best sense for you.  The benefit of giving your users admin-level access is, as you identified, it may allow them to solve problems themselves, e.g., while on the road or while your support help desk is not open, or without contacting your support help desk.  The disadvantage is that it users now have the power to shoot themselves in the foot.  They can make changes to settings that render their system unreliable or unusable; they can install software that is malicious, bad, or just contrary to your organization's policy.  You may see those users later at your help desk asking you for help getting their laptop working, because they screwed it up (they may not even realize it is their own darn fault).  On the gripping hand, if you lock down users' laptops too tightly, and you have power users, they may come to resent the IT department for controlling things with such a tight fist, which is not good for your organization.
I would ask yourself what kind of relationship you want to have with your users, what level of support you want to provide, and what risks you want to accept or not accept.
For the most part, this has only a modest connection to security.  There are some increased security risks from giving users admin-level access on their own machines.  However, from a security perspective, even if users don't have admin-level access, they can still get infected by software that steals all their files, so it's not like withholding the administrator password somehow automatically eliminates all security risks.
Answer: There would seem to be circular logic in this question.
From the point of view of security, the whole point of passwords is to protect some asset. In the case of Windows 7 the idea behind having different levels of access for administrate and user accounts is to protect the operating system from corruption, malware, viruses etc. Having administrative passwords really does nothing to protect user data files like a word document since the user account has to have access to those files for the user to edit them.
If you are looking to protect the operating system files, as opposed to corporate secrets, then admin passwords work reasonably well.
Now you introduce the factor of user convenience. The user wants to use a new printer on short notice and does not want the inconvenience of having to check with IT and having to wait for them to perform some function.
Which leads to the user wanting to plug in some unknown USB device that has never been vetted by IT and letting that device self-identify and cause the downloading and installation of drivers.
Since it is an unknown device in an uncontrolled environment it could clearly cause the installation of malware such as a keystroke logger etc. Further even if the device is legitimate, there is no guarantee that the network being used at that time has not been hacked. For example when the OS goes to download the driver from what the user thinks is the HP website, it could easily, and without the user's knowledge, be going to an alternate website (bogus DNS entries etc.) which downloads a driver which appears to work but which also includes malware.
So where is the security?
Answer: I am assuming they are using windows:
You could set a local policy on the machine that allows the user to "Load and unload device drivers"
If you open gpedit.msc go to computer configuration > windows settings > Security settings > local policies > user Rights Assignment > Load and unload Device drivers


Conducting a competitive analysis

Question: What are the questions you need to ask or the methods you perform when you're doing a competitive web site analysis from a UX perspective? How do you gather the facts? When in the project process do you do it? Before you have done a user test analysis or afterwards?
Answer: The System Usability Scale was made for this; though rough it gives you quantifiable measures to compare two systems (sites) by running users through your site vs other sites. Since your sites (presumably) are significantly similar in intended purpose your results should be readily comparable to the other sites.
More generally, A/B testing your/their site for simple tasks can help you find where users have trouble with your site as opposed to their site or vice versa.
As for what questions to ask, ask what's relevant to your site. For Mint.com the big question is "would you trust this site with your financial information". For Facebook (in it's early days) it might be "would you use this site daily" or "would you recommend this site to friends". If your users trust the other site more, find it easier to log in or are more willing to spend time on their site, you need to know that, and then you need to know why.
Do some qualitative analysis as well; have users use both sites. Ask what stands out to them; maybe the competitor has a way better log in process, maybe your sites ads are annoying. Getting users to compare first impressions for both sites can be very enlightening.
This should be done after you've done some simple user testing on your own site; catch the egregious usability/UX issues on your own site before you bother to compare to other sites.
You want to be comparing a viable product to the opposition otherwise your competitive analysis is just going to tell you what your user testing will tell you.
Answer: I think in order to answer your questions, you should first focus on what type of metrics are important to you. Also focus on the main tasks that users perform on your website. You can judge your website's performance by user experience metrics, including efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction.
Here is a good webinar that you can watch on competitive benchmark of 4 allergy medication sites. It will give you answers to some of your questions.
http://www.userzoom.com/resources-on-onlineremote-ux-research/webinars/pharmaceutical-allergy-medication-industry-user-experience-benchmark-study
Disclaimer: I work for Userzoom.
Comment: Please disclose your relationship with any companies to whom you post links in your answers.

Conducting a competitive analysis


When should police be notified about host intrusion?

Question: If an attacker gains unauthorized access to a host, or makes unauthorized modifications to information on that host, is it appropriate to contact the police or some other law-enforcement agency?  In many cases, the host in question is in the United States, and the attack appears to originate outside the United States.
Answer: I can only provide one Dutch case: A webdesign and hosting company (with approximately 100 clients) had a password hacked that was used for everything. (Yeah, don't get me started on all other security issues there.) A few websites were defaced, and private information from the owner was made public. Overall relatively little damage, but damage with a clear origin (we had the attacker's IP which was not a proxy and traced back to the same city).
We printed out the logfiles that we were able to get together (logging was malfunctioning on most websites...), and my boss went to the police with the information. At the police station, nobody knew anything about computers, but everything was written down best they could. The people usually taking these cases were having a training and would probably pick it up next week.
Next week came and passed. Next month came and passed. We called for updates, nothing. The case would have been a simple lookup (ISPs are required to log which IP is owned by whom at any given time), but they didn't do anything.
To the best of my knowledge, it's now 6 months later and the case hasn't even been looked at yet. I still think you should always go to the police with a breach, but the odds of it being solved are low when there is no big money involved.
Comment: Have you tried https://www.meldpuntcybercrime.nl/english_information.html ?
Comment: @Tie-fighter No we haven't, but I don't work there anymore. I would send this link to them, but solving this was not a priority at all since the attacker didn't return. Thanks for sharing this though, perhaps it'll be useful in the future (or for other users)!
Answer: As far as I know (and don't go sticking your fingers in any ports now because of this) it's not worth reporting to any law enforcement unless there has been harm or damage to the system. In that case the cybercrime devision of the FBI is where you would report it, which is located in the "contact us" feature of the FBI's cyber-crime site and select "Internet crime" if you have a crime to report.  At this point, when no harm is done, as far as I can tell it's pretty similar to walking on someone's lawn (there's no gate, so you don't have much of an argument, or there's a gate and I didn't break it when I came in).
Hence, to extend the metaphor, I recommend you send a report to the Host's web admin (which can usually be found using the whois www.abcdefg.com command in linux) and let them, (ehem, I couldn't resist) shoot whoever's in their lawn, or at least build a new gate!
Last, to go on a tangent, most local law enforcement authorities have a cybercrime division as well, but they mostly handle harassment (serious internet threats) and fraud investigation.
Comment: While in the majority of cases it's unlikely the police will investigate. If they do investigate, it's ulikely that you will get restitution for any damage. However failing to disclose that your systems have been compromised could land you in a lot of trouble in the US and Europe where you can be required to do so in Stock Exchange filings and under data protection / privacy laws.
Comment: Thanks for the answer.  Offline, I asked a friend with the CISSP certification, and he provided a very similar answer.
Answer: I can't really tell you about the US, but here is a general consideration:
I heard a story of a woman (US) who parked her car in a long-term parking garage and when she wanted to retrieve it the company had gone bankrupt and her car was gone. Police didn't care to investige what appeared to be a multi car theft...
However I feel it is important to report such incidents for the sake of statistics and research, even if there is little or no chance of a positive outcome. Simplified speaking: If nobody reported crimes, police wouldn't know if the crime rate was high or low and what to focus on and try to prevent.
Even if police were not able to track somebody down based on your report, maybe one day they catch somebody and might be able to link your incident to that person.
Also a police report might be required by your insurance company in order to pay you out.
(Also don't underestimate the USA's diplomatic, political and military involvement around the globe...)
PS: Usually the officers at your local station will not know what to do but your country's Department of Justice will probably have experts and a point of contact.
Answer: What about an sql injection attack where data is only leaked(by selecting) and nothing is altered.
Would you call the authorities then?


Symbology of contour lines in ArcMap

Question: I have contour lines with height values from 0 to 1030 (sorted by height 110, 115, 120, 125). Values with in-between number (like 5, 15, 115, 135...) should be grouped and colored with same color, and other values should be grouped this way 10, 60, 110, 160, 210, 260... (yellow), 20, 70, 120, 170, 220... (red), 30, 80, 130, 180, 230... (cyan) etc. I hope you get it despite my bad English :) So, I don't know how to change symbology in ArcMap to color them that way. Can somebody help me?
Answer:
In the Symbology tab you can classify your own values and apply to the contours
http://webhelp.esri.com/arcgisdesktop/9.3/index.cfm?tocVisable=0&ID=-1&TopicName=contours&pid=1
Answer: One solution is to create separate layers for each group and then apply a definition query that uses a modulo operation to filter records, then symbolize each layer appropriately.  For example, the query for your first group would be:
MOD("HEIGHT" + 5, 10) = 0

For the second (yellow) group:
MOD("HEIGHT" + 40, 50) = 0

et cetera.  I believe the above syntax will work if the data is stored in an ArcGIS datastore (SHP, GDB, etc).  If it is in SDE, you will need to change it appropriately to match the RDBMS syntax (e.g., ("HEIGHT" + 5) % 10 = 0 for Oracle)
Answer: Multiple layers and loads of symbol editing work, but the ideas can be combined into a simple efficient solution: use the Field Calculator to compute the contour levels modulo 50 (or whatever), effectively creating a new field to be used for the classification.  Symbolize based on that new field.
Advantages and strengths
This method (a) maintains a single layer (which is useful for future spatial analysis, creating a persistent object, etc.) and (b) requires only one symbol to be selected and edited for each different type of contour.  Its principal disadvantages are that you (c) need the attribute table to be editable and (d) will not frequently be updating that table.  In situations where the table might be frequently updated or where you cannot or do not wish to modify it, consider creating a lookup table that effectively reclassifies all contour levels when joined to the attribute table.  The join is dynamic and therefore will automatically reflect updates.  The same lookup table can be used for other datasets having the same range of values.
Weaknesses
A disadvantage compared to the multiple-layer solution is that making subsets of the contours invisible is easy with multiple layers: just turn them on or off.  Thus, which solution you choose will depend on how you anticipate interacting with the contours in the future.
Answer: Assuming that you contour lines are in a separat Layer and not part of a TIN, you can do the following:

You have to access the Layer Properties for your contour lines (double click the layer in the Table of Contents on the left side of ArcMap).
Choose the Symbology Tab.
On the left side choose "Categories" -> "Unique Value"
Now you choose your Value Field containing the hights - Elevation as shown in the picture.
Press the "Add All Values" at the buttom of the dialog.
Now you simply select the values you want to group by clicking them one by one while pressing ctrl on your keyboard.
When you are done selecting values you make a right click and choose "Group Values" as shown in the picture.
Now you can choose a symbol for the new group by double clicking the symbol.

I hope this helps you and I realize, that if you have a lot of unique values this might be a long proces.
Regards from Steen
Comment: you can do this once and save it as a style (or .lyr) then can be applied to many contour datasets
Comment: Yeah, I knew for this, but it is too long process. Thank you anyway.

Symbology of contour lines in ArcMap


Preselect Text On Selection

Question: I'm wondering if there is a rule of thumb for the scenario where a user selects a textbox that has content in it. Would it follow that all the text in it should always be selected to allow a user to type a new value with no additional interaction than typing what's new?
Answer: Always think about the scenario involving the textbox field:

For example, if it's a field that is likely to be changed completely each time the user clicks on it, select all the text.
A good example would be the browser's address bar - the far more common scenario is that the user wants to type in a whole new URL rather than amend the current one.
However, if the more common scenario is to make a correction, don't select it (think of a field to fill in a web-form, where you might have made a mistake filling in your address and you just want to make a tiny correction).

Another important thing to remember is that users might not expect the selection of the whole text and hence starting to type erases all the previous text. If the text field is long or "difficult" (think address with zip code) the "damage" of erasing it might overcome the benefit of auto-selection.
Answer: In my opinion selecting the text would in most cases be unexpected and unnecessary, if not even harmful. However, there are exceptions. Browser's address bar is the best example I can think of. It is probably safe to assume the user usually wants to write a new address instead of modifying the current address, so preselecting the text is helpful.
So my answer would be that text should not be preselected, unless there a specific reason for doing so. In other words, if you don't know which way is the right way to go, then do not preselect. That seems like the safer choice in most cases.
Answer: I believe the "rule of thumb" is that no pre-selection occurs.
At least. this is how it works in all of our companies software, and also how it works in every app and website I just quickly checked :)
If the text was NOT entered by the user (eg, it is default text, like the search box on this site), then that text should be cleared out before the user begins to type...
Answer:
If the content in the field has been entered by the user, the text should not be pre-selected. There's a very small chance that the user needs to remove all text from the field, but rather needs to make edits or add additional text.
If the text in the field is default text before the user has entered the field, then it could be highlighted (assuming the right context - something that needs to be erased before the user types in the field).
Answer: It's context again with this ...
You need to assess how likely it is that your user is going to need correct the text in the box and how likely they are to want to overwrite whatever is in the box when focusing on it.
For example: address bars and search boxes are often set to preselect on websites. In both cases there is a chance that a misspelling has been made or that a power user might be directly manipulating the address bar (think of pagination). In the case of search its reasonable to expect a user to want to refine their search by adding an extra keyword or altering one that is there, so deciding to select on focus in both cases must be carefully thought of.
Also, consider how likely the field is to be pre-populated by the browser. For example, an email sign-in box is more likely to be pre-populated than a search box, so an email sign-in box might be a good candidate for select on focus, once its saved the user wont ever want to change it unless they clear their personal data and on focus may well be a new user with a completely different email address.
But with all of this it depends on the context of field and the type of person filling the form in, so I'm not sure there is a clear rule of thumb.
I think the only clear cut cases for select on focus are when the text box contains an URL itself or contains code which the user will want to be cut and paste in its entirety. e.g. Google Analytics tracking code, or a GIT repository / social network profile URL.

Preselect Text On Selection