Is your hard drive mysteriously full? Adobe Acrobat may be the culprit

Much to my displeasure, I recently discovered that my primary partition for Windows 7 was dangerously full. Windows 7 will tell you about such maladies when they reach a dangerous point (which according to the engineering gods is between 10-15% remaining free space by volume.) This is all fine and dandy. However, with more than 5 terabytes of total storage and a setup that reserves most of my primary partition for applications, there should be no reason why I would need to buy a larger hard drive to store my files. I have about 200 gigabytes of photo files on the partition and of course Windows 7 64-bit Ultimate as well as a buttload of applications. That should be about 450 gigabytes.

Money is tight and I’m not interested in spending a few hundred bucks on terabytes without good reason. That led me to search for a program that would analyze my used space and tell me what the heck was going on. Google led me to Gizmo’s Freeware and a fabulous article entitled Best Free Disk Space Analyzer. The article is right on target in my opinion.

SpaceSniffer is my #1 for two simple reasons first, and foremost it’s free, and second it seems to be far and away the best free space disk analyzer I’ve seen to date. Using SpaceSniffer is fairly simple, I just clicked on the drive I wanted to work with and hit scan. Right-clicking on a box gave me several options such as delete, cut, copy, paste, etc, depending on what I had install on my machine. With these commands and the visual representation of SpaceSniffer I was able to quickly spot and delete forgotten and useless files, that otherwise would have gone unnoticed, bloating my hard drive and pulling down performance. When I left-clicked on a box I found myself zooming into the specific heading containing the box allowing me a much clearer picture of what I was looking at. The toolbar also has some interesting options such as the more and less detail buttons. These detail buttons allowed me to decide just how many file levels I wanted to view at once.The green star button toggles the option to see the the free space left on my drive. Under configure I was also able to change the colors of the treemap, because brown and blue just wasn’t doing for me.

I have a co-worker who uses WinDirStat religiously and it’s also quite good at telling you where the horror of waste files is hidden in the bowels of your hard drive. Important note if you’re exploring for lost files that take up lots of room – WinDirStat hasn’t been updated in several years. SpaceSniffer has, and it is Windows 7 compatible.

In any case, when I ran my search, I discovered that half of my terabyte partition was being consumed by acr*.tmp files. That revealing fact gleaned thanks to SpaceSniffer led me to this article pinning the blame squarely on Adobe, a company long maligned for a multiplicity of reasons. If you’ve never been to the Dear Adobe blog it’s worth a visit just to read the gripes. In any case, rather than spending  bucks you will have to apply for federal stimulus aid to pay back your credit card fraudsters with, clean up your temp files. Adobe may not admit they make bloatware, but they do tell you how to use Microsoft’s built-in tools to get your hard drive humming again.

Handy cross blogging for WordPress: Blog Desk

Serious bloggers might want to check out Blog Desk. It is a totally free application for WordPress (and other less popular blogging systems). A key feature for me is the ability to cross post to multiple blogs.

Blog Desk works with Windows 98, NT, 2000, ME, XP, Vista and 7. The interface is very simple. I find it easy to work with, particularly when it comes to images. However, I think the best feature is the cross posting ability. Blog Desk can post to multiple blogs easily once it has been set up.

The interface is spartan but has the features that I need to share my opinions, views and topics of interest with the world. Good stuff. If you are serious about putting out a lot of content across multiple blogs you should check out Blog Desk. Be sure to read the frequently asked questions as some of the more useful features do not necessarily jump out and beg a blogger to use them.

Rand Paul is not a racist

After listening to Sirius radio yesterday and hearing numerous “educated” discussions regarding Rand Paul’s alleged racism I had to make a donation to the man’s Senate campaign. I hope most people understand that the civil rights movement of the 1960′s in the United States would have eventually had the same result without the heavy handed federal intrusion into personal freedoms.

If a business owner wants to run a race based business that is his or her choice in a free society. Every other free human can then choose how they want to react by either patronizing or protesting or ignoring the new establishment. You don’t need people with guns and batons to enforce basic racial harmony in most segments of the United States today. It is pretty well ingrained. Rand Paul isn’t arguing in favor of racism, he’s arguing in favor of allowing people to steer their own ship. If they are dumb enough to steer it into a reef, that’s their issue to deal with. Of course, many people would just be more comfortable pushing racism back under the surface where it hides under our current political climate. Personally, I would rather have it out in the open where it is easy to see and punish. Rand Paul is an advocate of choice, not a racist. He deserves your support just as people in general deserve to be allowed to make bad choices so they can learn from them. The alternative is a society of lemmings dependent on overlords for their food and shelter.

Ketamine and the sense of self

It is fascinating (to me) to ponder the nature of self. I recently came across this article in Scientific American that explores the ease with which we can be separated from reality.

But even this axiomatic foundation of your existence can be called into question under certain circumstances. Your sense of inhabiting your body, it turns out, is just as tenuous an internal construct as any of your other perceptions—and just as vulnerable to illusion and distortion. Even your sense of “owning” your own arm is not fundamentally different—in evolutionary and neurological terms—from owning your car (if you are Californian) or your shotgun (if you are Sarah Palin).

Outlandish as such a notion may seem, what you think of as your self is not the monolithic entity that you—and it—believe it to be. In fact, it is possible to pharmacologically manipulate body ownership with a drug called ketamine, which reliably generates out-of-body experiences in normal people. Patients on ketamine report the sensation of hovering above their body and watching it. If someone gives them a sharp poke, they might say, “My body down below is feeling the pain, but I don’t feel it myself.” Because in such patients the “I” is dissociated from the body it inhabits, they do not experience any agony or emotional distress (for this reason, ketamine is sometimes used as an anesthetic).

At the risk of being judged and found guilty of thinking too independently, I would be very interested in trying some experiments with this product. Unfortunately, that wouldn’t be legal. The Office of National Drug Control Policy does acknowledge that some people don’t care about little details like legality. They have published a helpful list of street terminology associated with ketamine.

In any case, the key point is that it is important for humans to explore how the sense of self impacts our existence and the societies we create. Go read, Hey is that me over there?

‘Anonymous’ GPS data reveals speed habits

Based on this data, I tend to drive 9 or so percent faster than the average American. Except when I’m testing engineering limits of the various vehicles I drive, of course.

Based on anonymous driving habit data from customers in 45 states, GPS navigation firmTomTom reckons that Americans tend to drive at about 70 MPH on the freeway, regardless of the posted speed limit. More specifically, most Americans tend to stay within a few miles per hour of the speed limit on interstate freeways. The WSJ [sub] reports that these findings are consistent with efforts to raise freeway speed limits around the country, as Virginia recently became the latest state to raise its freeway speed limit to 70 MPH or above. Naturally, there are still safety advocates still sticking to their “speed kills” talking points, but despite these state-by-state speed limit increases, America’s road fatalities per vehicle mile traveled has been dropping consistently. That Americans rarely drive over 70 MPH, even when limits are as high as 75 MPH, shows that motorists tend to find their natural comfort limit at that speed anyway. And the fact that states with higher freeway speeds tend to be large, sparsely-populated Western states indicates that motorists tend to vary their speed only slightly from the 70 MPH “state of nature” even when faced with longer distances and less traffic. [Hat Tip: ClutchCarGo]

There are a few points worth noting. The only reason the data is currently “anonymous”is because the GPS maker wants it that way. Market forces combined with social mores dictate that anonymity is dead or dying in America. If lawmakers and manufacturers decide we aren’t going to fuss about it, your car and/or GPS will soon track you. Rental companies track your every move. OnStar does as well (read the privacy policy very carefully; there is no expectation of privacy). Eventually, vehicles being driven contrary to acceptable societal norms will auto alert authorities who will come punish you in various nefarious ways to include clumsy attempts at re-education.

I wonder if my 9% deviance from norms will be tolerated when that day arrives.