Get Rich or Die Bryan

Well, blogspot, you win again. I have to ask the question that must now make up at least 35% of the content on this site, does anyone still use this thing? At a loss for any other suitable place to put lengthy random thoughts, and with a fierce desire to procrastinate from doing my actual work, here we are.

Anyway, the topic at hand is one of great importance. My friend Bryan wanted to tweak some of Word's bullets/numbering behavior. As my friend Dan who works on this feature can tell you, I hate it. I think it's stupid and unintuitive, especially when it comes to accidentally formatting the paragraph mark and silly tab behavior inside tables. BUT, it does have its perks. For one, it's crazy powerful, and given enough time, you can bend it to do anything. Additionally, you can change bullets into people's heads! It is those two aspects we'll address today.

Bryan messaged me the following:
"I really want my bullets to default to all the way left justified and lessen the indent between list levels. Is there any way to do this?"

Reading between the lines, it's obvious that he'd also like to have the bullets be little cut-outs of his head, so we'll throw that into the mix, too. So that's our task. 1) Left justify the bullets, 2) Lessen the indent between list levels, and 3) Turn at least one level of bullets into Bryan's head. I'll be reporting on this as more of a live broadcast and less of a tutorial because I don't actually know the best way and because my frustrations along the way might help someone else avoid them. Who knows?

Let's get started.

Ok, so I'll fire up Word and see where we are. Let's type some text, then put a bulleted list below it. 

So far so good. On my "Home" section of the ribbon (all the stuff up top in Office), the Bullet button is now selected, but there doesn't appear to be any way to change the indent when I click the little arrow dropdown. Odd. I do, however, see "Define new bullet...", which might be coming back later (if you mind profanity, don't listen to more than three seconds of that link, though it is really good) in our story! Ok, so that's a no go. What about the button next to it? Those might be useful. The dropdown on the Numbers button seems to give me just about as much as the Bullets one (nothing), but the Multilevel list! Now here's something! Let's try to... define a multilevel list?

Alright, I think we're getting somewhere. This dialog has everything I think we need. I can define alignment AND (potentially) save myself some work from having to edit every single level with "Set for All Levels". We'll see, though. 

OH MAN. "Set for All Levels" totally did what I thought it might! That's a win! I told it to first "Set the Bullet/Number position for first level" at 0" (no indent), then put the text at .25", then .5" for each additional indent level. And I think that works pretty nicely. Let's test. 

Ok, ok, the text is now left aligned. Let's see if we can tighten it up a bit. Changing that additional indent level to .25".

Nice. I think we all know what this call for (hint, it's Bryan's head). BRYAN'S HEAD! The part we've all been so eagerly anticipating. So, going back to the Bullet button dropdown, let's Define a New Bullet. Luckily, I happen to have a cropped picture that I stole from Bryan. Perfect. Let's try to Define a New Bullet. We'll select "Picture" from the options, then "Import" (Office.com? Seriously? Nothing cool could come from that.). Aaaaand... dang, it totally worked. For each bullet level, if I just select it, then click on the Bullet button dropdown, I can change the bullet to the Bryan head by just clicking it. No pain. Nice.

But now, how to save this? I mean... this document is great and all, but I obviously want to make this my default. It's too beautiful not to be featured. Multilevel List's Define New List Style (right under the Define New Multilevel List, where we first made the list) looks promising. I'll give it the name "GetRichOrDieBryan" (puns, refuge for the destitute) and tell it make new documents based on this template. 

Now, the true test. I'll restart Word, create a new doc, and hit the Bullets button. Ah, well it turns out that just does a normal list. The Bryan head is saved in my bullet history though, so I can now make and bullet an ad hoc Bryan head. Sweet. However, I want that list I just made. The Numbered List, worthless in this quest, also has nothing for us. BUT, at long last, when we open up the Multilevel List, our best friend in the whole world, shining as a beacon before us is Bryan's cranium. Clicking it sets makes our list look just as beautiful as it did before. 

So there you have it. If you want to use this now, you can click the Multilevel List button, then select Bryan's head (or whomever's head you chose). Perhaps there's a way to make it some default, so we get the list with one click, but two isn't bad. If you'd like the actual Word file with this custom list inside, you can grab it here.  Perhaps someone can tell me if it works on other computers? 

Anyway, that's that. Post back if these steps don't work for you, and we'll investigate. I consider this an hour well spent, and I really hope none of you read far enough to get to this point.

-Jake

US Drone Attacks on Pakistani Militants

Well, it's apparent now that all those moms who said nothing good would ever come of video games were dead wrong.

Although perhaps "useful" would be a better word than "good". It seems that the US has started to really implement its Predator UAV program in Pakistan, making huge stirs in American and global news corp. For although the program has been fairly successful, "500 to 720" militants being eliminated over the program's life, concerns have been raised about whether the estimated 300 civilian deaths are worth it.

I think there are two things to consider here when deciding if this action represents a travesty. The first is that it's important to consider how different the drone attacks are from manned aircraft attacks. If the predator is about as accurate as a manned aircraft, that is as good at minimizing civilian casualties, it would seem that all of the fuss is over the craft being unmanned. I have yet been unable to find such data, but I think it should be the first thing to look at. The second consideration, which ties into the first is that the predator is not fully autonomous. Pilots on the ground are operating the machines, much like a video game. The pilots are surrounded by screens that simulate what they would see if they were in the craft. This seems hardly different than the pilot actually being there.

I feel like our values as a country should put civilian life very high on the list, and if the drones are incapable of minimizing those deaths, then perhaps we should consider their removal. However, it should be stated that in the case of Pakistan, civilian deaths are unavoidable. The militants often live and operate maliciously among civilian, which makes the situation difficult when those militants are firing on US troops.

So, at the end of the day, if US troops are put out of danger, and the bad guys are eliminated without unnecessary civilian casualty, the drones are probably a good option.

Configuring Rainlendar to Work With Google Calendar

This is where I'll tell about what I did from 1:30am to 4:00am.


OK. So I found this, and I was of course all "WANT" and stuff. Specifically I wanted the embedded desktop feature. You can make the stuff you put on your desktop very close to actually being a part of it, wholly background and not on-screen clutter (ie - Vista's sidebar). I also wanted it to autoupdate with my calendars. And since it was like 1am on a weekend of tough partying (I think I had a lab due Friday night...), I decided to do it.


GCalDaemon

The first tool needed is the GCalDaemon, which is how you're going to get your calendar(s) to your computer. After installing, the "config editor" is going to be your main interaction, or at least is was for me. Under "File Syncronization" there should be some good stuff, mainly the addition of your google account and that of your calendars to that account's calendar section. If you want to add new calendar, say "appointments", that is in your gcal, you're going to have to go into the settings in your gcalendar calendar to find the private ical link. Then, click on "new" to add a calendar to your gmail account's section in the file syncronizer window. You'll need to specify a location to store the file on your hard drive, and you might even have to specify a file (eg - C:/Program Files/GCALDaemon/appointments.ics). The tricky part about this is adding the ical feed to the "google calendar" entry and putting the actual file in your hard drive in the "ical file" entry.

You can do this with as many calendars as you want, but each has to have it's own unique file on your drive. You can change the interval between updating the calendars by changing the "google calendar polling interval" slider bar in the upper part of the "file synchronizer" page. The least I've gotten it to is 10 min, which should be fine. You can force it to update by running the "Sync Now" function from the start menu or from some other menu, I'm sure.


Rainlendar


Now on to the frontend. Using Rainlendar, you can display the calendars you've downloaded in pretty slick ways. First, to add your calendars, open up the Rainlendar settings, click "calendar" at the top, and select your ical files on your hd. By right clicking on the calendar, which should be on your desktop if you've opened Rainlendar, or by right clicking on the icon in your start tray, you can toggle calendars on and off with the "calendars" header.

From here, it's pretty much all tweaking. Getting new skins for rainlendar can be really easy or really painful. There are some good ones here, as well as a few good guides via Lifehacker here or here. Once skins are downloaded, the easiest way to add them to the program is to simply drag them onto a calendar. When I first saw that, I thought it was the stupidest thing I'd ever seen, but now I'm not so sure. Regardless, if that doesn't work, you can try tossing the files into your /program files/rainlendar2/skins folder, making sure to keep the .r2skin extension on the skin file.

Now you can mess with all kinds of stuff. Opacity, blending, mouseover effects, whatever. The calendar is actually only the beginning and people have done some crazy embedded applets on their desktop. Here's what mine looks like right now. I've kept it pretty simple. Observe the subtle calendar in the upper right. Ah yeah.

So that's pretty much it. Let me know if you have any questions, though I'm not sure how equipped I am to answer them. Enjoy.