Random Stuff

The gutters on my house are under a lot of trees. So they get clogged up all the time which causes the rain to overflow the gutters. I’m tired of going up on the roof to remove the leaves and pine needles from the gutter so I’m currently looking for one of the gutter cover products that are supposed to protect the gutters from leaves.

For some reason there many, many brands that all seem to be about the same. I checked out the websites of a few of the ones in the area such as Leaf Guard, Leaf Filter, and Gutter Helmet.

I contacted Leaf Guard and they came out to my house recently to give an estimate. The guy was nice enough and took all the necessary measurements. For some reason he wanted to give us a PowerPoint presentation on Leaf Guard. This was my first key that these guys are probably a rip-off, but I went ahead and watched the presentation. It was the usual stuff: Leaf Guard is the best and all the rest are terrible and worthless. After the waste of time presentation he gave me the quote and wanted me to buy it on the spot. That is the sure sign that these guys are a rip-off. The quote was for $5000, including a $700 buy right now discount. Of course I just told him I wasn’t going to buy today and he left. Now I know that these guys are just con artists trying to get a huge markup on people who don’t know much about gutters.

From what I hear from other people all of these gutter cover companies have huge markups like this. So I recommend avoiding all of them. I did hear about one product called Leaf Relief that is manufactured by the Alcoa corporation (a large, well know company). I figured Alcoa wouldn’t want to ruin their reputation on rip-offs so I found a couple of contractors on their website who could install the product. Both quotes were for about $2000, less than half the price of Leaf Guard which seems like a reasonable price. They could go even cheaper if you have existing gutters and just want to install the covers. So far Leaf Relief is the only legitimate gutter cover company I can find. If anyone knows of any others then please leave a comment about the company.

Recently I tried setting up Exact Audio Copy (EAC) in Vista Ultimate x64. With disk space being so cheap nowadays I also wanted to use WMA Lossless encoding. With lossless encoding no audio fidelity is lost and I can always convert back to the original WAV files if I want to in the future.

The first thing I did was go to the Windows Media Encoder website so that I could download the encoder. Since I’m running Vista x64 I grabbed the x64 version of the encoder. Unfortunetly this is a bad idea. What they don’t say on the site is that if you use the 64 bit encoder then all your other software must also be 64bit.  Since EAC is only 32 bit I never was able to get it to work with the x64 encoder.

Finally I gave up, uninstalled the 64bit encoder and reinstalled the 32bit encoder. After I did that EAC worked fine. The Configuration Wizard in EAC detected and set up the encoder perfectly.

The annoying thing about EAC is that when using an external encoder it pops up a new command window after every track is extracted. This makes the computer practically unusable because new windows keep popping up all the time. I looked around and found under File –> EAC Options –> Tools there is an option called “Do not open external compressor window”. This sounded like exactly what I needed so I checked it. Unfortunately this completely broke the external compression. The resulting WMA files would be corrupted after being encoded. I’m not sure if this option works on other OSes, but if you are using Vista x64 don’t select it!

Here is the solution I found to the popup window problem:

1. Hit Ctrl-Q to bring up the Compression Queue Control Center.
2. Check the “Make all compression tasks sleep” option.
3. Close the dialog.
4. Hit F9, then go to the Tools tab.
5. Check the “On extraction, start external compressors queued in the background” option.
6. Optional: Set the number of simultaneous external threads equal to the number of CPUs that you have.

Now when you extract a CD all of the tracks will go into the compression queue. When you are done extracting all your CDs, go back to the Compression Queue Control Center and uncheck the sleep option. This will make all encoding tasks start (then go eat dinner or something else that takes a while).

Spelling errors in Microsoft Windows are rare, but I recently found one in an error dialog. In Vista’s “Windows Fax and Scan” program my scanner doesn’t work and for some reason and I get an error message that says:

An error occured while setting scanner properties. If another program is scanning, please wait for it to complete and try again.

“Occured” should actually be spelled “occurred”. These scanner error messages are probably rarely seen at Microsoft so they didn’t catch it. You’d think this would have been fixed in SP1, but I guess it will have to wait until SP2.

Vista SP1 English Spelling Error