Ben's Blog

Gingerbread Battery Life

2012-01-27T23:24:00.000-06:00

All Android phones get complaints about battery life. You'll remember that I even returned my first Captivate due to battery life. After a little over a year I was about to buy a new battery for the Captivate. Then I dropped it. That story is here and ends with installing Gingerbread. Part of the screen repair process was a factory reset so Gingerbread started with a clean slate.

However I've been amazed with the battery life post the repair and upgrade. I didn't return the battery to the Samsung service center so I know they didn't slip me a new battery.

Admittedly I've been pretty light usage since the upgrade but still. Here's a series of screen shots taken each night when I plug it in for the night.

The lowest reading during those seven days was 67% remaining.

I personally don't think that Gingerbread is responsible for the majority of the improvement. I think that the factory reset and the resulting clean-up had the biggest impact.

Third Gingerbread

2012-01-20T20:22:00.000-06:00

First I installed CyanogenMod's Gingerbread on my Nook Color. Then I installed CyanogenMod's Gingerbread on my HP TouchPad. AT&T had promised last July that they were going to update the Captivate with Gingerbread. They released the update in a very low profile announcement last week.

The timing for me was perfect. I had dropped my Captivate and shattered the Gorilla Glass. I returned it to Samsung for replacement. When I got it back they had done a factory reset (which I expected) so it was an opportune time to upgrade. Samsung has published a straightforward set of instructions. Like the upgrade to FroYo the upgrade requires connecting the phone to a PC using Kies. While the FroYo upgrade took about an hour, the Gingerbread upgrade took 25 minutes which included the automatic upgrade of Kies.

Here's the result.

The AT&T Gingerbread's Notification panel is visually crisper than CyanogenMod's but still lacks the swipe to dismiss of CM7.

The Captivate seems quicker but that may be because of the factory reset rather than Gingerbread although some of the Nook Color's performance improvement was attributed to Gingerbread. My early take on battery usage is that it is better but I also wonder if this is as much due to the factory reset as Gingerbread. We'll see. Here's what the battery looked like after about half a day.

The GPS on this Captivate had always worked well but now seems to be even better. It gets a lock in just a few seconds every time. I ran AngryGPS (more in a second) and the first fix (inside the house) took 50 seconds. Subsequent fixes took around 15 seconds. This screen capture is from a "hot" start session of AngryGPS.

Ok, AngryGPS. To get the above embedded app running go to the Dialer and enter *#*#3214789650#*#*.

I had an odd problem with Screen Capture Shortcut. When I searched the market for it it said that it wasn't compatible with the Captivate. Then it flashed for a second showing the "Install" button. I quickly tapped it and it installed!

The other oddity (and a nice one) is that I get a Force Close from the AT&T Tethering Manager. The upside of this is that this is the service that blocks Android's built-in mobile AP capabilities. Without the Tethering Manager this works fine! I'm not going to look too hard for a fix.

ThinkPad T420s

2012-01-13T20:50:00.000-06:00

Anybody who's been following me here knows I have a bias toward ThinkPads. I had been using an off-lease T43 for a while but it started off (for me) with a pinky display and wouldn't run Windows 7 Aero.

Over the Black Friday weekend I lurked at the Lenovo Outlet site. They had some incredible deals but they came and went pretty quick. One of the deals that caught my eye was a T420s. I grabbed it and put it in my shopping cart but thought better and removed it. It immediately disappeared! That told me that it was a good deal. I hung around there a while longer pressing F5 every few seconds and it came back! This time I didn't hesitate. I bought it and then started trying to figure out what I'd bought.

What it was was a 3.7 lb. (the "s" in T420s stands for "slim") Intel Core i5-2540M (2.6GHz) with Windows 7 Pro. It came with 4GB RAM (which I'll upgrade to 8GB) and a 128GB SSD. It has a 14" screen (1600 x 900) and a 720p web cam. It's got a DVD burner and Bluetooth in addition to the expected Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11n wireless.

Being a "T" series it was mostly clean of crapware so my first inclination was to just go with the Lenovo image.

But after a couple of days I began to notice that I was using 80% of real memory and had almost 120 processes running. That compares to the X100e that uses less than 50% of 2GB and has less than 50 processes running. I'm not sure that's apples to apples but it certainly is an indicator.

Recently I did a clean install of Windows 7 Pro using Lenovo's instructions. I tried to do this using the UEFI feature as described here but it doesn't look like that worked.

Regardless the T420s is a lot cleaner now. It's under 80 processes and less than 50% memory utilized.

Those Are Standard Aren't They

2012-01-07T19:04:00.000-06:00

One of my co-workers came into the office after the holidays with a shiny new Samsung Galaxy S II. As we sat around the table after our meeting I noticed that he had the phone USB connected to his laptop. His previous phone (HTC G1) always needed charging so I asked him if he was charging the new one out of habit. He said no that he was trying to connect the phone to the laptop but couldn't find a driver.

My experience with every smart phone except iPhones is that you didn't need a driver to connect the phone to a PC as a USB drive. He wanted me to show him how I connected so he brought me his USB cable and phone. When I plugged it all in I got a complaint from Windows that it was an "Unrecognized device." Hmmm.

Then I plugged my Captivate in with his cable. Same thing. That invoked the "Those are standard aren't they?"

Well they should be but they aren't.

I recently encountered a similar problem when the OEM charging cable for my Captivate got stepped on. I ordered the first $.99 micro-USB cable I could find. It fit fine into the tight connector on my Captivate and the battery icon changed to charging. But the next morning the battery was only at 70%.

Here's what the charging screen looks like connected to the generic cable.

Notice that it says "Charging(USB)." That's why it was taking so long to charge.

Back to Google and I found a Samsung OEM charging cable on eBay. It came quickly and fixed the problem.

Here's what it looks like connected with the Samsung cable.

Notice that it says "Charging(AC)."

Yeah, USB cables should be standard but obviously they aren't.

Get Real AT&T

2012-01-04T19:31:00.000-06:00

I've been with AT&T since Suncom was bought by Cingular was bought by BellSouth was bought by AT&T. I've been fortunate enough to live and travel in areas where their coverage has been good. I even had a good experience with my recent international travel.

Recently I have been hankering to be able to get on the Internet with tablets while in the car. There seem to be two alternatives. I could enable the hot spot capability on my Captivate or buy a MiFi device.

So today I stopped by the local AT&T (corporate) store and told the representative that I was interested in adding a tethering plan to my Captivate. He tried to sell me DSL! I got him back on track. I have a $25/month unlimited data plan and $5/month 200 text message plan for a total of $30/month. Obviously I want to protect the unlimited plan and the 200 text messages are fine as I mostly use Google Voice for texting.

He said that I'd have to go to a $45/month data plan with 4GB and a $20/month unlimited text message plan for a total of $65/month, an increase of $35/month and losing unlimited data.

I asked him about a MiFi-type device. He said AT&T has a Sierra Wireless AirCard 754S for $69.99 that requires a $50/month 5GB data plan.

For comparison I looked at C Spire. They have a Novatel MiFi 2200 free with a $19.99/month data plan with 1GB, $29.99/month with 2GB. I realize that the AT&T device is LTE and the C Spire device is EV-DO Rev. A and that the AT&T is plan is 5GB and the C Spire plan is 1GB but still...

Get real AT&T!

Microsoft Security Essentials v4

2012-01-02T21:42:00.000-06:00

I've been an early adopter of Microsoft Security Essentials. Back in November 2011 I signed up for the beta of Security Essentials v4.

Microsoft's "What's New" for v4 includes:

Enhanced protection through automatic malware remediation: The Beta program will clean highly impacting malware infections automatically, with no required user interaction.
Enhanced performance: The Beta includes many performance improvements to make sure your PC performance isn’t compromised.
Simplified UI – Simplified UI makes Microsoft Security Essentials Beta easier to use.
New and improved protection engine: The updated engine offers enhanced detection with cleanup capabilities and better performance.

When Microsoft sent me the invitation to download I downloaded and installed it on my "BenInTheDen" laptop. This is my workhorse PC and it is exposed to lots more sites and programs than all my other PCs put together. After installation I let it update the signatures and then requested it run a full scan.

It found and removed 2 instances of malware that had not been found by the current Security Essentials. That's the last bullet above.

I'm now running it everywhere. You can download the beta version at Softpedia. I suggest you do that right away.

International Celluar Plans

2011-12-29T17:31:00.000-06:00

Recently my wife and I traveled to Italy for 10 days. In preparation I did a lot of research on international cellular plans and costs. I am an AT&T customer and to put this at a point in time, most of my research took place in September 2011.

Plan A was to acquire a local SIM card in Italy and use that for wireless voice and data. I didn't really foresee a lot of voice requirements but data is always nice for e-mail and, while on foot in a foreign city, GPS/mapping data.

While this is mechanically simple (just pop in a SIM from an in-country provider) it turned out to be harder than that. First all the in-country provider web sites are in the local language, in this case Italian. Google's translation capability left a lot to be desired in the subtleties of cellular terms and conditions.

Second AT&T could not get my Captivate unlocked (required for a non-AT&T SIM). They even referred me to Samsung who couldn't accomplish this either. You should be careful when attempting this in that there is a limit on the number of unsuccessful unlock attempts (reportedly less than 10) allowed before the phone can never be unlocked. AT&T recognized this and said they would replace the phone (with another locked) phone if they reached this point.

Anyway, we all gave up before the phone was permanently locked. At that point I escalated to a manager at AT&T and they offered a reasonable alternative. They applied a $100 credit to my account to cover the cost of AT&T international coverage while I was in Italy. That seemed more than fair and I accepted their offer.

In the meantime, a friend of mine had a Vodafone SIM and I had the unlock code so ... I put the Vodafone SIM in my Captivate and turned it on. It asked for the unlock code and I entered the code that AT&T had given me. Bingo! That worked.

But back to Plan B.

Here's what I found when I researched the international rates in Italy for AT&T.

World Traveler (Voice) $5.99/month + usage - break-even is 15 minutes (15 * $.40 - $6)
Voice $.99 vs. $1.39, Text $.50

Global Messaging $10/month - break-even is 20 texts (20 * $.50 - $10)
50 text included

International Data $24.99/month for 50MB or $49.99 for 125MB

This link will get you to all of the plans above. And this link will get you voice rates per minute by country by plan. Just in case I've include screen shots of what was there when I was looking.

Each of these features can be pro-rated for a partial month but the way that they are applied varies, e.g. Global Messaging kicks in on the first day of your billing month and International Data turns on and off day by day.

Anyway I went with these 3 features and got the 125MB International Data plan. This would have been a total of around $66 plus $.99 per minute for voice if I let them run for a full month.

How'd it turn out? I used just a few minutes of voice so I probably would have been better to go without the $5.99 uplift and have paid the extra $.40 per minute but it would have been close.

Same with texting. I'm not a big texter so I used less than the break-even 20 texts. Again, it would have been close and having a 50 text allowance made me not worry.

Both hotels we stayed in had free Wi-Fi (more in a little) so I used Wi-Fi when we were in the hotels. Since the International Data plan is pro-rated I called AT&T a couple of days after we returned to get my international data usage. The representative didn't have this readily but called back in a couple of hours with the data. With the Wi-Fi in the hotels I only used about 35MB of cellular data so I canceled the International Data plan and the charges and data allowance were pro-rated.

Overall, my AT&T charges were less than $66 even including the per minute voice charges. This $66 was against the $100 credit from AT&T so I was good.

Using AT&T's international offerings was a good deal for me (frankly even without the credit) and not having to fool with unlocking and a non-AT&T SIM.

Now, for the rest of the story.

While both hotels I stayed in had free Wi-Fi each was problematic in its own way. The first iQ Hotel Roma has wireless but you had to have an ID and password issued by the front desk. This required a login page be executed by the browser. I don't know about you but I often have trouble getting these pages up on my various Android devices. And each ID/password combination was limited to a single MAC address at a time. For example, if I was using Wi-Fi on my phone, my wife couldn't use the Nook to access her e-mail. The front desk would issue you more than one ID/password combination so it wasn't the end of the world. The Wi-Fi worked really well throughout the building including the roof garden.

The second hotel Arpaiu advertised Wi-Fi in all rooms but that wasn't so. It only worked upstairs in the common area. For a 1,000 year old building in the middle of nowhere that actually was pretty good. But it did mean that you had to get dressed and climb up 2 flights to check your e-mail.

Looking back I think that next time I'll try to get a local SIM card with a data plan. Not so much because it would be cheaper but because I could use that 3G data instead of the hotels' Wi-Fi. I'd need to enable access point mode on my phone to make that apples to apples. Figuring out how to do that over the web in a foreign language wouldn't be easy so I'd need to dedicate some time when I arrive to get all that working.

If your travel involves more than one country stick with the AT&T plans.

Note that there are a couple of things that you need to do with your phone. Turn off background data. On my Captivate I go to "Settings," "Accounts and Sync" and uncheck "Background data." This means that you'll have to initiate a refresh with each application. Next turn on data roaming. On my Captivate I go to "Settings," "Mobile Networks" and check "Data roaming." This will let you roam for data onto the foreign networks. Make these changes in this sequence on your phone when you arrive at the foreign destination. On departure do these in reverse at the foreign airport.

Send me pictures from your trip!

Crapware

2011-11-27T21:03:00.000-06:00

How many times has a friend or relative asked you to look at their PC because it was running slow? When you bellied up to it you were shocked with all the crapware that had sneaked onto it.

We all have war stories about this but Fred Langa just wrote a great post on how bad it gets. You can read the post here.

While the goal of the post is to test Registry/system cleanup tools, the part I find most amazing is how much the crapware he used to test with slowed down the system.

In a nutshell he created a minimalist Windows XP image. Then he installed the software from "CNET’s list of the '20 most popular Windows downloads.'" While he links to that list, after reading his results I won't even link to that list.

I installed all 20 apps on the test system as inexperienced Windows users might over time - layering on the software without regard to consequence and accepting all default settings, including the offers of extra toolbars, download managers, and so on.

The results were incredible. The boot time went from 30 seconds to 629 seconds, over 10 minutes!

The good news is that when he uninstalled those packages the system pretty well came back. Boot times were still slower but nothing like 10 minutes.

You can read the article yourself to see what he found with the Registry/system cleanup tools but I just wanted to share with you his experiences with crapware.

Powerline Ethernet Adapter

2011-11-21T20:56:00.000-06:00

I had run a flat Cat 5e cable from the SageTV box and the router. Over the years I used that same cable for the MediaMVP and then the Tivo Premier.

When we recently redid the floors in our house I had the installer run that same flat cable under the hardwood. His work was incredible. But ...

The operation was a success but the patient died. The cable didn't work. I ran my Ethernet tester on it and it was bad. I guess it couldn't take the glue and hammering of the floor.

So I was in a mess. The Tivo simply won't work without Internet connectivity. There's no reasonable way to fish an Ethernet cable between the TV and the router. So it was off to BestBuy.

The salesperson there was pretty good on the problem. She offered the NETGEAR - Powerline Ethernet Adapter Kit and the TiVo - Wireless-N Network Adapter.

My early thinking was to go with the Tivo brand wireless adapter so I'd only have "one throat to choke." Further thinking took me back to the NETGEAR Powerline kit as I could drop a switch in the entertainment center and support multiple devices.

Turned out the NETGEAR Powerline kit was on sale for $79.99 and I came home with it.

It couldn't have been easier to install. The instructions didn't even have any words. Just pictures.

It worked immediately and has continued to since installation. I haven't tested the speed because I really don't care so long as it's faster than my DSL. I'm not moving any local data across it.

If you go read the reviews at the BestBuy site you'll see that everybody raves about the installation. A few mention the speed (rated at 85 Mbps) and every now and then somebody will say that theirs died. I've only had mine a couple of days so I can't speak to their longevity.

Pretty nice gadget.

Microsoft and Android Patent Details

2011-11-15T13:57:00.001-06:00

If you've been under a rock lately here's a link that'll show you the background to the Microsoft-Android patent battle.

One part of this that hasn't been clear is what patents are in play. Microsoft has been requiring all parties who have agreed to their licensing to sign Non-Disclosure Agreements.

Barnes and Nobles (you'll remember they're the maker of my beloved NOOK Color) has rejected Microsoft's patent claims and has published the details of what patents Microsoft is claiming that the NOOK's Android uses without licensing.

Note that I'm not endorsing the editorial position of Groklaw but rather just using their post as an anchor of the legal material from Barnes and Nobles.

For deeper background here're links to articles from Microsoft and Google's patent attorneys.

Regardless of your opinion/bias on this issue these are all interesting reading.

Google Being a Pain

2011-11-10T15:49:00.001-06:00

Ask any of my friends. I have been as staunch a user and supporter of Google products as there is. I actually bought my first Gmail account on eBay! I have moved my domain to Google Hosted Apps along with my daughter's. I'm in the process of moving my business' domain there. And what do I get in return? Ill thought out changes and slaps in the face.

Here's my list:

Google Calendar events are now pastel colored
Gmail formatting problems
Google Docs nagging about old version documents
Google Reader redesign
Gmail "Send feedback" bar

Several of these (Calendar event colors, and some of Reader problems) are part of the new UI redesign that has been sweeping across the Google products since the introduction of Google+ and generally I like them. I'm just hoping that the nagging problems here are fixed in a refresh but ...

Others are more troubling.

The Calendar event colors are just stupid. There's been a huge wailing from the community and practically no response from Google. A couple of the Google Help forum posts are here and here. One of those is entitled "Give us your feedback on the new Google Calendar Look!" 475 posts later they've gotten feedback.

The Gmail formatting issue is much more serious. It seems that Gmail doesn't generate rich text, i.e. html, e-mail that is compliant with Microsoft Outlook (and other clients). The result is that there is a mixture of font faces and sizes in the sent e-mail that are not visible to the sender nor easily avoided. The principal Google Help forum post is here. This is a huge issue with business users who have migrated from clients such as Outlook and now are realizing that their sent e-mails may look unprofessional. The Google employees who have participated in this thread disavow any support of the Labs features which allow e-mail formatting which really rankles most users. My own experience is that this is a problem exclusive to WebKit-based browsers but there likely are several problems here.

After Google Docs upgraded their formats they have been suggesting to "Upgrade your document to the latest version of Google documents." Recently that yellow bar at the top of the screen can't be dismissed. My thread on this is here. There's a ton of reasons that people don't/can't upgrade their documents and many are suspicious that this is foretelling a forced upgrade.

I like the Reader redesign. They took away some of the sharing capabilities and re-instituted some of them in Google+. What has affected me is that PgDn (the Page Down key) doesn't mark the last couple of items in a feed as read. Irritating and clearly something that they didn't test. Recently there's a new red dot appearing in the bottom right corner as you scroll through the feed. Apparently that is an indicator that the feed is being updated but it serves no purpose other than to distract your eye to it. They should have used one of the new pastel colors from the Calendar event palate.

I also like the Gmail redesign. I was using one of their preview templates so visually not much changed. There are lots of new features under the covers though. Similar to the Docs nagging bars, Gmail has added a black bar at the bottom saying "Get Marketplace Apps | About the new look | Send feedback." Again you can dismiss it but it comes back.

Even the Huffington Post did a story on Google's "mistakes."

This is all coming at a bad time for me as I'm trying to convince my co-workers to move our entire business' web and e-mail to Google Hosted Apps.

TouchPad Update

2011-11-09T21:07:00.001-06:00

Recently I posted about putting Android CyanogenMod 7 (CM7) on my HP TouchPad. It's running well and I wanted to share how it's been going.

It is still rock solid. I haven't had any Sleep of Death (SOD) since right after I flashed CM7. The Wi-Fi doesn't connect as easily as it should but frankly it connects as easily as my Nook Color also running CM7. Kinda makes me wonder if it's something in CM7. Anyway, simply swiping the notification bar and toggling Wi-Fi almost always allows the TouchPad to connect.

Other people are complaining that the battery life is not good. I haven't found that to be a big problem. I tested this the other day by fully charging and letting it sit unused with the screen off for 24 hours. The battery dropped to 72%. The Wi-Fi seemed to stay connected throughout the 24 hours as I heard it dinging when I received new e-mails. That's not as good as the Nook Color but certainly very usable.

I've gotten the BlueTooth paired and connected to my ThinkPad and been able to transfer files in both directions. I've used this to send videos to the TouchPad. I use Handbrake with the same settings as I use on the Nook Color. Looks great on the video player that comes on CM7. YouTube videos play fine, even HD.

I read that the Google Docs problem was fixed in the latest version on the Android Market but I haven't tested it. What I have is working fine.

Skype will run if you install version 6 but audio drops after a minute or so.

Swype is my preferred keyboard and there's a thread talking how to decompile the Swype bits and change the code and recompile and sign the resulting .apk. Whoa! Too geeky even for me. I found that version 3 (Swype_EN_NL_WVGA_v3.26.92.35406_flat_black_v5-signed.apk) works. It isn't as wide as the display but works fine.

I also installed QuickOffice and along with Swype this combination has made the TouchPad extremely usable. This week I was on the way to a meeting and received an e-mail with a .docx document relative to that meeting. I pulled up to a Starbucks, connected to their Wi-Fi (with no problem) and downloaded the document. QuickOffice opened it and rendered it properly. I proceeded on to the meeting and was able to participate in the meeting while referencing the document on the TouchPad.

You couldn't ask for much more for $99.

3 Months

2011-10-24T12:08:00.001-05:00

You'll remember that the closing line in my HP TouchPad Clearance post was "Now let's see how long it takes to get Android on it." It took 3 months.

Cyanogen has been hard at work on putting CyanogenMod 7 (Gingerbread) on the TouchPad. In mid-October they released an Alpha entitled "'lower your expectations edition." I began following the thread on the Rootzwiki forum.

This week they released Alpha 2 known as the "don't link directly to the files edition." I was ready to jump at that point.

Being that it is an Alpha, it is not as straightforward as putting CM7 on the Nook Color.

There is a youtube video that guides you but unfortunately doesn't really show everything. I found a post in their forum that had more step-by-step and used it as well.

The install came off without a hitch. The step where you run their ACMEinstaller took longer than I expected (and much longer than on the video) but just sit back and let it run.

From that point forward it's pretty much the same as the Nook Color. You need to go to Settings->CyanogenMod settings->Display->Automatic backlight and check "Enable Light Decrease". And go to Settings->ADW Launcher->Screen -> Desktop Columns. Set to 8 for more space on the Launcher screen.

There are still lots of issues outstanding but they haven't been a problem to me. People are reporting problems with Wi-Fi. The only problem I've had is connecting to a second Wi-Fi network. I had to reboot for the TouchPad to see it. In response I set Settings->Wireless & network->(menu) Advanced->Wi-Fi sleep policy to Never.

Others report Sleep of Death (SOD) where the TouchPad won't wake up from sleeping. Seems to be a lesser problem in Alpha 2 but one recommendation is to set Settings->CyanogenMod settings->Performance->CPU settings->Available governors to ondemandtcl.

The Android Market works fine. I can't get Swype to work yet and haven't played with my Bluetooth keyboard.

There's a list of apps and their status here.

The current version of Google Docs for Android is 1.0.4. It seems to presume that if the device is a tablet that the operating system must be Honeycomb. I downloaded an 1.0.20 apk from here.

Even the media that I had loaded on the TouchPad made it over to Android and play perfectly.

Here's what it looks like (remember it's a 1024x768 screen).

And just to prove it's on the TouchPad.

Almost Chrome

2011-09-15T20:15:00.000-05:00

I have very simple needs (in a browser). I want my browser to:

Shield me from obnoxious ads
Open new tabs at the right
Close tabs when I double click them
Let me drag links to open in a new tab
Let me drag selected text to search

After this week I need to add 2 more:

Render rich text e-mails faithfully in Gmail
Reduce tab width appropriately as I open additional tabs

Here's how I got here. It starts with the topic of my previous Dancing Pigs post. Following that post I slowly started to move my browsing to Chrome.

While I like Chrome it almost made me add another requirement:

~~Have a search bar~~

Chrome has an OmniBar. In a nutshell this means that it doesn't have a search bar like Firefox and Internet Explorer. So if you want to search you have to open a new tab and type your search in what I call the address bar. After a while the Ctrl+T to open that new tab became almost natural so I can live with the OmniBar.

Chrome began to grow on me. You see lots of discussion on how fast Chrome is. I never could really tell that Chrome rendered much faster. What I did notice that Chrome is much quicker to navigate around with. The "instant" option of loading the page while you type the URL significantly speeds up my navigation. It can be somewhat disconcerting though.

Chrome had a problem where some of the threads (Windows processes) would exhibit runaway processor usage. Sometimes you could kill off a couple of them and sometimes you had to restart Chrome.

While this was annoying it wasn't nearly as annoying as Firefox's memory leak problems. I have to restart Firefox every day or two as its memory usage will grow to more than a gigabyte. There's even an Add-On for that!

Then after a couple of weeks with Chrome I began to notice that when I sent someone an e-mail and they replied to me including my text that my text had irregular fonts. It made my e-mail look very unprofessional.

At first I just though these were situations where I had copied and pasted foreign text into an e-mail but more research proved this wrong.

I went to Google and found this in the Gmail forum. You'll see that this is a long-standing problem that has been acknowledged by Google.

The last update from Google is on 08/23/11:

Just wanted to let you know that we're investigating cases of incorrect formatting when labs are disabled. I don't have an update on a solution right now, but I'll check in next week to let you know if I have any news.

To demonstrate the problem here is a screen capture of what my original e-mail looked like to me:

Here's what the recipient saw:

Notice how the point size changed from the first paragraph to the second. This is actually one of the better e-mails. Often the font changed between paragraphs as well, e.g. from Arial to Times.

I simply couldn't tolerate that so I went back to Firefox 3.6.22. It was like putting on an old pair of jeans. Gmail formatting was instantly cured. Whew!

One of the other features of Chrome that I liked was the ability to pin tabs and reduce the space required for persistent pages, e.g. Gmail, Twitter, imo, etc.

Golly gosh Firefox 4+ has this capability! Why don't I just upgrade to Firefox 6? Was my brain absent when I leaped to that conclusion?

Guess what was the first problem I ran into? Firefox Bug 574654. In a nutshell this arbitrary developer removed the beloved about:config capability to specify the minimum and maximum tab width and then created an Add-On that performs something of the same function. Go read the reviews to see the reception. Don't miss the one that points out that this add on doesn't work with the upcoming Firefox 8.

But I'm smart enough to always have a fallback plan. Right? We'll see. I had created a Windows System Restore point before I upgraded to Firefox 6 so I simply fell back to the previous configuration. Unfortunately Firefox seems to cross the line between system and user so when I restarted Windows after the restore Firefox 3.6.22 wouldn't run. I had to undo the restore, uninstall Firefox 6 and reinstall Firefox 3.

I'm crossing my fingers that Google fixes the Gmail formatting issue with Chrome soon.

Geotagging II

2011-09-08T09:19:00.000-05:00

I rambled at length in previous posts about my interest in geotagging. In my recent comparison of cameras I even talked about geotagging. In the GPS section of that post I linked to a Picasaweb album that had GPS data from the Lumix.

Yesterday I put the Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7 to the test. The results weren't pretty.

We went to the Memphis Zoo and I wanted to use this trip to compare my previous geotagging process with the built-in capabilities of the Lumix.

I enabled GPSLogger on my wife's BlackBerry Curve and set it to log every 30 seconds.

As soon as I arrived I turned on the Lumix and enabled GPS. That was the first mistake.

The Lumix took more than 5 minutes to obtain a GPS location fix. Consequently my first pictures didn't have GPS location in their EXIF data. Then the Lumix began obtaining GPS locations every 5 minutes.

When we returned home I used GeoSetter to compare the GPS locations.

Here's the result.

The top set of markers is from the Lumix and the bottom is from GPSLogger.

The first thing to notice is the absence of markers in the Lumix set near the bottom center. This is the entrance to the Zoo and the Lumix hadn't obtained a fix yet. To be fair I have to acknowledge that I started GPSLogger before I left home. The next thing is to notice that the Lumix seems to have fewer markers than the BlackBerry. This is because the Lumix tends to cluster photographs as it only renews its location every 5 minutes. Another thing is the Lumix has one photograph tagged as being in the middle of a small pond. Let's just say that I didn't get wet so this indicates a lack of accuracy on the part of the Lumix's GPS.

The other issue I observed is impact on battery life on each device. With the GPSLogger frequency set to 30 seconds it had no noticeable impact on the BlackBerry Curve's battery. I didn't fully charge the Lumix's battery before I left as it indicated a full battery although it had been used several times on that charge. During the day the Lumix's battery indicator dropped to 2 of 3 and then 1 of 3. When I returned home to offload the photos it began flashing red. I could do a more comprehensive test of the impact of the GPS on the Lumix's battery life but given the ineffectiveness of the Lumix's GPS who cares?

Perhaps I have the bar set unrealistically high. If your interest in geotagging is to tag your photos with which part of a town you are in then the Lumix does fine but carry an extra battery. And if you're lost the Lumix will even show you where you are every 5 minutes. When it obtains a GPS fix it I have it set to show the town and landmark. It kept displaying "Memphis Zoo."

On the other hand GPSLogger and a BlackBerry is a first class method to geotag your photos.

Oh and if you have an Android phone? Don't even bother.

Tablet Keyboard

2011-09-02T08:56:00.000-05:00

My Nook COLOR with Gingerbread is still pretty much the perfect tablet for me. I even shoehorned the Swype Beta on it.

But even with Swype sizable text input is painful. Even e-mail gets tedious.

So I went looking for a physical keyboard that matches the portability of a tablet. I found the Scosche freeKey Bluetooth Wireless Keyboard at Meritline for $29.99 and free shipping (sorry the coupon code has expired).

Here's what it looks like.

It paired easily with my Nook. Android does a good job of translating the keyboard actions into touchscreen equivalents. The up, down, right, and left arrows move the focus around on the screen and Enter is the same as tapping.

It came with a retractable mini-USB cable to charge it. I wish it used micro-USB like the Nook and TouchPad but I've got tons of micro-USB devices still.

HP TouchPad Clearance

2011-08-26T22:06:00.000-05:00

On Thursday August 18, 2011 HP announced that it would "discontinue operations for webOS devices, specifically the TouchPad and webOS phones." That began a run on the now discontinued HP TouchPad tablets. The TouchPad has a 9.7 inch screen with 1024 x 768 resolution. It has a 1.2 Ghz dual core Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with 1 GB of memory and 16 or 32 GB of storage. It began shipping in July 2011.

I saw the sale on slickdeals.com on Saturday and went to the BestBuy in Southaven. The representative in the tablet department said that they had some but had been told to take them off the shelves. I went home and placed an order on bestbuy.com for in-store pickup at Southaven, MS. That store showed "in stock."

I hadn't gotten a "Ready for Pick-up" e-mail by the time I left to go to the store Sunday morning. When I got there 10 minutes before opening there were 4 people in line. By the time it opened there were 25 people in line.

There was a person just inside the door telling everyone that they were out of stock on TouchPads. I proceeded to the Customer Service desk and presented my paperwork. As I waited a manager was nearby. She was saying that that store only had 8 TouchPads before this clearance started. She said that they had 2 "OMS" (online) orders (one was mine) from last night that they had put back and that was all that was left.

Mine was there and I had no trouble checking out. They didn't automatically price match but the Operations Supervisor called the 800 # and waited 20 minutes.

There seemed to be some consternation about whether they were really supposed to deliver to the online customers so I politely picked up my TouchPad and receipt and excused myself!

I went back to the store early in the week and they gave me the price match of $321.00.

Now let's see how long it takes to get Android on it.

Good On You Google

2011-07-22T22:49:00.000-05:00

While browsing around recently this big red box popped up on my Google Apps Domain hosted e-mail.

Obviously my heart began beating quicker.

Calm down. Click on the "Show details and preferences" link.

I had used my TiVo to access my youtube account.

That's really pretty cool. I wish other Internet services paid so much attention.

IsComputer

2011-07-15T20:39:00.003-05:00

You'll remember that I've been using KeePass for a long time to keep up with my passwords. And that I changed my web hosting provider. That left me without a host that provided ftp for my KeePass backup.

I've become a Dropbox user so I thought that I'd use Dropbox to backup up the KeePass database. The problem is that not all PCs are running Dropbox logged into my account. Rather than coming up with a perfect way to solve this I've come up with one that's "good enough."

9 times out of 10 when I change my passwords I'm running KeePass on a particular laptop in my house. To make things interesting though that laptop doesn't actually run Dropbox either but rather accesses the Dropbox folder across the LAN. So what I wanted to do was when running on this laptop to copy the Database.kdb to the networked Dropbox folder.

Today I came across a program from IntelliAdmin that will let me do what I wanted. The program is IsComputer. With a simple batch file I can check to see if KeePass is running on that particular laptop and if it is copy the Database.kdb to the networked Dropbox folder.

I put the IsComputer.exe in the KeePass folder on the USB drive. Then I have the DB Backup plugin execute the following .bat file when it needs to backup the KeePass database.

IsComputer /name:laptop

if ERRORLEVEL 1 goto RUN_SCRIPT
if ERRORLEVEL 0 goto EXIT_SCRIPT

:RUN_SCRIPT

REM I must be running on laptop

copy Database.kdb \\server\d\Dropbox\Keepass

:EXIT_SCRIPT

pause

It works perfectly.

Android - Volume Locker

2011-07-08T22:02:00.004-05:00

From time to time I noticed that I had missed phone calls on my Captivate. What I found was that I had bumped the volume buttons on the side and effectively muted it.

Back to the Android Market and I found Volume Locker.

Simply Volume Locker locks the volume on your phone unless you confirm that you intend to change it.

The settings page allows you to specify which volumes you want to lock and which method you want to be used for notification.

Here's what the Tray Notification looks like.

There's not much else to say about Volume Locker. It works just fine.

Dancing Pigs

2011-07-01T22:15:00.001-05:00

I rode the Internet Explorer horse for a long time. I wandered off course here and there using Maxthon and IE7Pro. Then I came back to Firefox.

Then came Firefox 4. The Mozilla developers developed a real attitude. I deferred upgrading to Firefox 4 to see how this would play out.

Then came Firefox 5. And Asa Dotzler's comment on enterprises using Firefox showed me where the Mozilla developers get their attitude from.

Enterprise has never been (and I’ll argue, shouldn’t be) a focus of ours. Until we run out of people who don’t have sysadmins and enterprise deployment teams looking out for them, I can’t imagine why we’d focus at all on the kinds of environments you care so much about.

I realize that this discussion is a little off topic from this thread but I reference it to demonstrate Mozilla's attitude.

I the meantime, I've been using the portable edition of Google's Chrome.

A digg thread I followed got me to thinking about if and when to switch. Firefox 5 replaced Firefox 4 in only 3 months and Mozilla dropped support for Firefox 4. I hadn't even upgraded to Firefox 4 yet and it was already obsolete! Apparently I wasn't alone. The digg thread pointed to a PCMag article.

Here are a couple of the comments from digg and PCMag.

Following some of the threads off of these articles led me to a discussion of Mozilla's revenue stream.

Google still provides 86 per cent of Mozilla's revenue, according to the open source outfit's latest financial statement. (From November 2010)

Interestingly Mozilla's contract with Google expires November 2011.

What do you think would happen if Google pulled the plug on Mozilla's revenue? How many of you remember Netscape?

Another commenter:

I'm kinda thinking along with this commenter:

And finally bringing in the title of this post.

Here's the wikipedia article.

Android - Dialer2

2011-06-24T20:08:00.000-05:00

Following along on my recent post on ShakeCall I couldn't quite put my finger on what I didn't like about the Captivate's dialer application.

While browsing the appbrain's "Hot this week" I came across an alternative dialer app. In reading the comments there was quiet an outcry about the need to allow Internet access. Presumably this is for ads pulled from the Internet. In these comments was a reference to Dailer2.

It was a quick download and install and it works great.

Again I didn't tweak the settings much.

I replaced the dialer application in the tray with Dialer2.

When you launch it, you get a much cleaner and simpler dial pad.

The most recent contacts show up in a scrolling list on the screen.

You can tap and hold on a contact to get a list of all their contact methods and tap on the number you want to call.

If the desired contact isn't in that list you can scroll or use the T9 technique to search your contacts just like a real phone.

And the best part? It's free.

Android - ShakeCall

2011-06-17T20:56:00.000-05:00

After learning how good a computer my Captivate is and what it lacks as a phone I am getting along very well with the Captivate. I still keep an eye out for tools that improve the phone experience.

As most of you know, answering a call on an Android requires swiping across the screen. Unless you have the digital dexterity of Houdini this takes two hands.

Tha app ShakeCall brings this back to one hand. To answer you simply shake the phone.

There are lots of settings but I didn't tweak them much. You can also shake to hang-up a call but I turned that off.

And the best part? It's free.

An open letter to Gary Engel, Globat

2011-06-14T17:02:00.001-05:00

An open letter to Gary Engel, Sr. Vice President, Sales and Customer Support at Globat.

I'm a long-term Globat customer. My hosting account came up for renewal this month. My last contract was for $3.75 per month for 36 months. When I called Sales on 6/13/11 and spoke to Amy the best rate she offered was $7.95 per month.

Then I had the following conversation via your online chat:

info: Thank you for contacting support. We are currently experiencing an issue with our email servers. Our Network Operations team is currently working on fixing it in order to restore email services as quickly as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience while we fix the issue. Please hold for the next available operator to respond.
info: You are now chatting with 'Matt Benson'
Matt Benson: Hi, how are you today?
Ben Moore: my domain (desotonet.com) it is up for renewal. My last contract was for $3.95 per month for 36 months. When I called Sales today and spoke to Amy the best rate she offered was $7.95 per month.
Matt Benson: Yes, that will be $95.40/yr.
Ben Moore: That's more than twice what I paid on my last renewal.
Matt Benson: Last year you have signed up with promotional offer. This offer is available only for the new sign-ups and is not applicable for the existing customers.
Matt Benson: Also, the offer price is valid only for the first term and it will be 
changed to the regular price from the next term onwards.
Ben Moore: So you're basically running me off?
Ben Moore: That wasn't my first term with Globat.
Matt Benson: Okay.
Matt Benson: But, now we do not provide promotional offer for renewal.
Ben Moore: There's an offer out there for GX01 for $3.75. Is that available to me?
Matt Benson: That is promotional offer. This offer is available only for the new sign-ups and is not applicable for the existing customers.
Ben Moore: Good bye.
Matt Benson: Thank you for chatting with us. Please feel free to contact us at any time. We are available 24x7.
Matt Benson: Bye!
info: Chat session has been terminated by the site operator.

From these 2 interactions I have come to the conclusion that Globat no longer wants my hosting business.

I would like to renew my hosting with Globat at the same or lower rate than I have been paying. Can you arrange this for me?

Android - Car Cast Podcast Player

2011-06-10T16:06:00.000-05:00

I'm a voracious podcast listener in the car.

The Android Music Player left several things to be desired.

An Android Market search turned up Car Cast Podcast Player.

Once launched go to Settings and adjust as you need. I set it to automatically download, to require Wi-Fi to download, to automatically play the next podcast, uncheck to allow data collection and to keep your e-mail address secret (just off the bottom of this screen capture).

The Subscriptions screen allows you to enter your podcast feeds. After you enter them you can even test the url.

The Podcast screen shows your list of podcasts and lets you select a set of podcasts to delete. Car Cast will even highlight the ones you've already listened to and let you delete them with one click. From this screen you can also select which podcast you want to listen to by single clicking it.

The main screen gives you BIG buttons.

The << and >> buttons jump 30 seconds backwards or forward. The |< and >| buttons skip backwards and forwards through podcasts. You can even drag the marker along the time line.

The microphone button will let you make quick audio notes while you're driving.

There's also a paid version that lags a little behind the free version to improve stability.

Yum! Gingerbread

2011-06-04T22:44:00.000-05:00

One of the blogs I follow had an article recently that discussed how to turn the Nook Color into a complete tablet. It discusses installing Cyanogen's Android 2.3 "Gingerbread" on a microSD card and basically dual-booting the Nook Color. It sounds harder than it is.

I had rooted my Nook and am very happy with it but it still had some rough edges. The Nook doesn't present the expected function keys of other Android devices, i.e. Home, Back, Search, Menu. The root process installs an application to present these as floating hot spots but that just isn't the same.

I squirreled the Between the Lines article away and ordered me a 8GB Class 10 microSD card. That was a mistake. I'll explain in a minute.

When the microSD card came in, I started following the post referenced in the blog article. While this was running (Remember the 8GB Class 10 microSD card? I'm getting close to explaining.) I came across another post. This androidtablets.net post describes a way to consolidate some of the steps in the xda-developers.com post.

Unfortunately I didn't read the xda-developers.com post closely enough before I ordered the microSD card. I like their summary: "buy Sandisk-branded class 4 microSD cards." Amen.

That's why I had time to go surf around while the install was running. The xda-developers.com post links to another post with a table of benchmark results. Some of the Class 10 cards are 100 times slower than Sandisk Class 4 cards in a area that is key to the Nook Color performance.

Although the install process worked it took about an hour. I wasn't sure how long it was supposed to take but when it was done, the Nook Color functioned but it was sooooo slow.

Time to RTFM.

That's when I read the discussion on using a Sandisk Class 4 microSD card. I headed out to my local OfficeDepot and bought this.

When I started over, I used the process in the androidtablets.net post. The consolidation of steps and the new microSD card brought the install down to around 20 minutes!

The really bizarre thing is that the Nook is even faster running off the SD card than running off the internal memory. The reason why is here.

Wow is all I can say. The resulting Nook is awesome. Gingerbread is wonderful. Now the function keys are in the Android status bar. The Cyanogen guys even have Bluetooth working.

Try it. I'm sure you'll like it. If you don't you're only out $13.00 and less than an hour.

Captchas

2011-06-03T22:45:00.000-05:00

I think captchas have gone too far.

Yesterday I had some kind of error on my Captivate and it presented me a captcha. After I failed the first one I began screen capturing the challenge and my responses.

Here are those screen captures in a random order. Let's see who can pick the one that is correct. Now remember that these were presented on a 4 inch screen in bright sunlight.

Android - Screen Capture Shortcut

2011-05-30T19:59:00.000-05:00

One thing I immediately noticed on the Captivate was that there was no way to take a screen capture. I searched and all I found were several that required either rooting or USB cable connection to a PC.

Then on androidforums.com I found a post that referred to Screen Capture Shortcut.

There's a free version and a "donate" version. On the free version, when you launch it you'll find "capture from notification." Check that. Just below is "capture delay." I set that to 1 second. Then exit the app.

When you want to capture a screen drag the notification bar down and click on the "Screen Capture Shortcut" notification. After the delay period (1 second in my case) the screen will be captured and written to a folder in internal storage named "ScreenCapture." It appears that the donate version has an option to "capture on shake."

TiVo

2011-05-23T20:31:00.000-05:00

Comcast is becoming Xfinity. This is a made-up word meaning that they're going to take more of your money.

There is a long sordid story regarding clear QAM channels and Digital Transport Adapter (DTA, also known sarcastically as Digital To Analog) but that's for another time.

Along the way to Xfinity Comcast Memphis has reflashed their DVRs. The new software is being rolled out to a number of markets and seems to be universally disliked. Truthfully there are gains and losses in the new software but as usual the losses stand out.

Just like "you can't fight city hall" you pretty much can't fight Comcast. AT&T's U-verse isn't available in my neighborhood. I don't want satellite dishes on my roof and I hear too many complaints about signal loss during thunderstorms.

Anyway on to my TiVo experiences.

I had a co-worker that had an early TiVo and had been very satisfied with it. When I got to checking the prices I found that the monthly service for the TiVo Premier was less than the Comcast DVR, $12.95 vs. $15.95. To get the $12.95 rate I had to get a refurbished model for $99. The TiVo rates and prices have just changed recently. The required multi-scan Cablecard was free from Comcast. Will wonders never cease?

The TiVo came quickly and the setup was easy. I'd heard horror stories about Cablecard pairing but the Comcast technician that brought the Cablecard had 3 TiVos at home. That went quickly.

Everything seemed good but then I noticed that none of the networking functions worked. I knew that the network connection was good and TiVo's own self-test worked. To make a long story kinda short TiVo sent me a replacement unit that worked fine. Even the Comcast re-pairing of the Cablecard was done over the phone with no problems.

I got the regular TiVo Premier with a 320GB HD rather than the TiVo Premier XL with a 1 TB HD. My thinking was that I could move the eSATA drive that I have been using on the Comcast DVR. Unfortunately TiVo is pretty particular about what external drives they support and I haven't tried my drive. After a couple of weeks using the TiVo I haven't gotten over 40% full.

The TiVo's Season Pass is better than Comcast's DVR's series recording. You can also setup a Wish List to record all programs that match a search criteria, e.g. with a certain actor.

TiVo also records TiVo Suggestions programs based on what programs you've recorded and/or watched. This is pretty neat in that during the first week of using the TiVo I had not completed setting all my Season Passes and missed an episode of a series we watch. I shrugged my shoulders and created a Season Pass to record that series in the future. Later as I was browsing my Suggested programs there was the episode that we had missed! Incredible.

Another capability I love is the network connectivity. You can search for programs and when found the TiVo gives you an episode summary by season. When you choose an episode TiVo will tell you where it is available, e.g. Amazon Video On-Demand. It also supports Netflix (I may have to reinstate my subscription) and YouTube. As we watched the Indy 500 Pole Day Simone de Silvestro was on. Rather than trying to explain to my wife what had happened to her, I paused the live TV and went to YouTube and showed her de Silvestro's crashes from Thursday practice and from last year's Texas race. Nice. Probably impressed me more than my wife but ...

I haven't gotten around to reprogramming my Logitech remote but I've come across an Android app to control it over Wi-Fi from my Captivate and the NOOK Color.

I've also found a Java app that gives me the same function from Windows 7.

You can also schedule recordings via the Internet for the TiVo. I know Xfinity advertises this same capability but it's not available in my area.

I'm not sure that the TiVo is a long term solution. I looked at building a Windows 7 Media Center and may do that yet. It is going to feel pretty good walking into Comcast with that hard-to-find HD DVR and telling them to ...

Which Camera?

2011-05-18T14:23:00.000-05:00

You may have read my earlier post about my Samsung CL-65 (actually 2 of them). For Christmas 2010 my wife surprised me with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS7.

I'm really torn between the 2 cameras and I wanted to stop and recap the capabilities and differences of them.

First I'll list the capabilities and differences and then discuss them. Please note that this is not intended to be a comprehensive analysis but rather the capabilities and differences that are important to me. You may have different objectives.

Feature	Samsung	Panasonic
UI	Touch screen	Traditional buttons
GPS frequency	Continuous	~ Every 5 minutes
Optical zoom	5X	12X
Lens design	Internal	Traditional
Process to record video	Touch screen navigation	One button
Media	Micro SD	SD
Charging	USB	Remove battery
Connectivity	Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, DLNA	None
Overall size	3.94 x 2.4 x .75	4.07 x 2.35 x 1.28

UI

While the Samsung's "gee whiz" touchscreen is fun at first, eventually you will find yourself bumping it when you don't intend to and changing something. If you're lucky you'll realize what it is and undo the change. If you're not lucky, ... You will eventually get to where you struggle to find a way to hold the camera for a long time with it turned on where you don't bump the touchscreen. This is especially problematic when you're waiting on the GPS to acquire satellites.

GPS

While we're talking about the GPS, there are significant and undocumented differences in the way each of these cameras' GPS works. The Samsung's GPS wakes up when you turn the camera on and starts trying to acquire satellites. If it is a "cold" GPS start it'll take a couple of minutes, sometimes longer than you want. If it is a "hot" GPS start, it'll take up to a minute. It could be better but it's actually good enough. Once it acquires the satellites the Samsung seems to continue updating the location. If you go look at this Picasaweb album you can actually track my walking around.

Panasonic's site says "By simply turning on the GPS function, the location data and time are automatically updated." Don't believe everything you read on the web.

The Panasonic actually keeps waking up the GPS periodically even when the camera is turned off. This should reduce the satellite acquisition time. Should is the operative word. If you store the Panasonic in a location where it can't acquire satellites all this does is run the battery down. What I did find significant was that the Panasonic only updates the GPS about every 5 minutes even when the camera is turned on. Look at this Picasaweb album and you'll see the pictures clustered where the Panasonic updated its GPS. The photos show only two locations although I clearly walked all around the house and yard.

This is apparently by design by Panasonic to reduce power consumption. There's even an icon on the screen that tells you this once you understand the issue.

You can force the Panasonic to update its GPS but that's not practical when you're walking around taking shots.

You can see this in several users' reviews on Amazon here and here.

For the trolls out there I am running Firmware version 1.2 on the Panasonic.

Optical Zoom

The numbers say everything. When you need to get up close and personal take the Panasonic.

Lens Design

The Samsung has a clever design that allows the lens to be completely contained within the compact size of the camera. The Panasonic has a traditional lens that protrudes as soon as you power on the camera and extends when you increase the zoom.

Process to Record Video

This gets back to the whole touchscreen UI issue but it is a real example. With the Samsung, you have to touch the mode section on the touchscreen and then select movie mode. This is hard to do one-handed.

On the Panasonic there is a dedicated button that starts taking video when you push it. "Piece of cake" as one of my former co-workers used to say.

Media

The Samsung takes a micro SD and the Panasonic takes a standard SD. They're close enough to the same price now as to not matter and almost all micro SDs come with a micro SD to SD adapter.

But that's just the point. The micro SD requires you to keep up with one more adapter and I can't see that much size advantage especially when you compare it to the battery. Yeah both cameras present removable drives to your computer when attached via USB but still ...

Charging

Why can't everything just charge off of a mini-USB? I know the EU has selected micro-USB and even that'd be Ok.

Both of these cameras charge using proprietary techniques. The Samsung at least uses a USB-powered cable but it's specific to this camera. To charge the Panasonic you have to remove the battery and put it in a charging shoe that plugs into the wall. While it will accept 110V or 240V it only has a US plug so that will require an adapter when I go abroad.

Connectivity

While the Samsung sounds like it has a definite advantage don't judge too soon. According Samsung's user guide Bluetooth connectivity is limited to "you can send photos only to mobile phones or PDAs" so you can't Bluetooth transfer them to your laptop. Using the Wi-Fi I've only been able to connect with no security or WEP security (isn't that the same thing?). Samsung's customer support couldn't help either. And DLNA, you get bonus points if you know what that is.

Size

The two cameras are almost identical size in every dimension except depth where the Panasonic is slightly more than .5 inches thicker. You'll quickly see how much this matters when you try to slip it into the pocket of last year's jeans. Enough said.

Conclusion

I don't know. I like them both and am using them both. My general thinking is that if I'm going to be outside where the GPS can acquire satellites the Samsung is my preference. But if I need a long reaching zoom or quick video it's the Panasonic.

SSH Tunneling

2011-05-10T14:51:00.000-05:00

I'm still worried about privacy at public hotspots. I use https on everything that I can and just don't use confidential data on any service that doesn't support https. But you just never know. Firesheep scares me.

One of my co-workers uses LogMeIn Pro and does all his "work" on his home PC. That angle interested me but while I use LogMeIn Free for occasional remote access it requires a persistent application running on the target PC. And LogMeIn only uses a userid/password for access security.

I wondered if there wasn't something that I could do in my router. I discovered that dd-wrt supports SSH Tunnels (I don't agree with the "easy" adjective).

I decided that I wanted this SSH tunnel to "land" on a virtual machine on my home PC. That way I can closely manage what that "PC" has access to on my home network.

I found a refurbished Cisco E2000 for less than $40 that has a gigabit switch, 802.11N Wi-Fi, and supports dd-wrt.

I'm really big into portable apps that run from my USB drive so a friend pointed me to PortaPuTTY.

Configuring PortaPuTTY wasn't obvious to me either (hmmm, there's a pattern here) but with my friend's generous help I got it working!

One of the first things you need to do is to generate a key pair for the SSH session. PortaPuTTY has a key generator included.

Notice that you also have to establish a passphrase so that even if you lose the USB drive you're still protected.

dd-wrt "support" is the typical open source support. They do miracles but communication is not their strong suite. I finally found the bits for my router and the flashing was easy. dd-wrt is certainly a very cable firmware and gives so much more information than OEM firmware.

To enable the SSH support in dd-wrt v24 and higher go to Administration/Management and enable "SSH Management" and put in a value for "SSH Remote Port." We'll use that later.

Now go to Services/Services and scroll down to "Secure Shell". Enable "SSHd". Enter the port from above. Paste into "Authorized Keys" the key from PuTTY Key Generator.

Be sure to click on "Save" at the bottom.

Then I put the private key in the PortaPuTTY folder on the USB drive. Whew! And we're just getting started.

Next in PortaPuTTY you'll need to set the "Host Name (or IP address)" for your home system. If you don't have a fixed IP address you'll need to use dyndns or something similar (dd-wrt has an embedded solution). For "Port" use the value for "SSH Remote Port" that you used in dd-wrt. I strongly suggest that you use a non-standard port.

When you're done you'll come back to this screen and save the session information.

Next go down to "Connection" and "Data" and enter "root" as the "Auto-login username". This is required by dd-wrt's SSH support.

Expand the "SSH" selection and click on "Auth". Click on "Browse" and find the private key file created above.

Click on "Open" and when you get back to this screen delete all the path information except the file name. That'll let you run this regardless of what drive letter is assigned to your USB drive.

Go down to the "Tunnels" section and put a port of your choosing in the "Port" field. I used 4444 but it doesn't matter much. In the "Destination" field, put the local address, e.g. 192.168.0.107, and a colon and then "3389". This assumes that the listening service on the target PC uses 3389 which is the default for Remote Desktop Protocol.

Click on "Add."

You don't need to change the RDP port number to a non-standard value because it is not advertised on the Internet, only to the LAN. The router's NAT firewall ensures that. You can change it if you want to.

I'm using Oracle's VirtualBox which allows you to have multiple VRDPs (Virtual Remote Desktop Protocols) running for different Virtual Machines. You do this by specifying VRDP ports for each one.

Note that the IP address here is the address of the PC running the Virtual Machines, not the IP address of the Virtual Machines proper. This is because the VirtualBox service offers the VRDP sessions for the Virtual Machines. Whew again!

Don't forget to go back to the first screen and save this session configuration. Incidentally the reason that PortaPuTTY is portable is that it saves the session information in the .putty/sessions sub-folder.

At this point I go into the PortaPuTTY .putty/sessions sub-folder and mark that session file I just created as read-only.

Next you'll need to create a RDP profile. Go to Start/All Programs/Accessories/Remote Desktop Connection.

In the first screen put "localhost:4444" or whatever port you specified above.

The following screens are my other settings. You may have your own preferences here.

Remember to go back to the "General" tab and save the profile in the PortaPuTTY directory. Click the red "X" to close this.

I still use PStart to manage my USB drive.

Here're the parameters I use for the SSH entry.

And for the RDP session.

Go to the PStart menu and double click on the "Start SSH Client" entry.

You'll get this screen. Enter the passphrase you created above.

Now go back to PStart and double click on the "RDP to Home VM" entry.

When you're done with the SSH session, close the RDP session. Go back to the SSH window and enter "exit" and press Enter.

Remember that your speed is limited to the home's upload speed. For me that's AT&T's DSL Xtreme 6.0 at 512 Kbps (yeah, right).

Good luck.

Thanks to splashup for the image editing for this post.

There's an App for That

2011-04-06T14:48:00.005-05:00

Huh? I was searching for a swype application for my daughter's iPhone (unsuccessfully I might add) and found some hits on ipadforums.net.

When I clicked on the link I got the following pop-up on my Captivate.

I guess they realize where the market is going too.

Yum! Frozen Yogurt

2011-02-27T13:29:00.003-06:00

Samsung and AT&T finally got their Android 2.2 (FroYo) update pushed out to Captivates. I lurked in the forums for a couple of days and then went for it this morning.

All is well.

It took about an hour end to end using the instructions from Samsung. The only unclear points are a couple of times when it says things like Step 3.2 "It will do this for several devices and may take a few moments." Wonder how long a "few moments" is? And in Step 3.3 "Once the computer has finished..." I just waited 2 minutes after the last message and went on to the next step.

When the upgrade was done on the phone it buzzed for several minutes and then rebooted. It seemed like it took an extra long time to boot up but all was fine. It went through a new phone type setup. I had to redo my home screens but I had documented this beforehand so that was easy. All my local documents and pictures were fine.

I went to the market and got the new Gmail app. This allows me to send from alternate e-mail addresses. I also had to reset my settings in Gmail, things like how many days to sync which labels.

Pressing and holding the Home key brings up recent tasks like Android 2.1 did but also has a button for a Task Manager.

I've played with the GPS a little inside and haven't seen a miraculous improvement.

Google Docs are editable with Android 2.2 but I've discovered that the documents have to be in the newer format. I'm still using some documents in the old format. You can edit them using Quickoffice that came with AT&T's OTA update last year.

Android Bandwidth

2011-02-18T15:06:00.004-06:00

I've had my AT&T Captivate (Samsung Galaxy S) for almost 2 months, long enough to get an insight into the bandwidth usage. AT&T does a good job of tracking the usage and presenting it in an organized manner.

My wife now has my BlackBerry Curve using it for her work e-mail. She doesn't really use any other data on it.

Here's what the last 6 months of her data usage looks like. Look carefully at the units down the left axis. It pretty well tops out just under 4 MB per month.

Now here's my last 6 months of data usage. The first 4 months are on my BlackBerry Bold and the last 2 on the Samsung Captivate.

Wow!

And I have the Captivate setup to use Wi-Fi wherever possible. I don't stream anything. I download podcasts but I have that set to only download using Wi-Fi.

I have the grandfathered AT&T "unlimited" plan. Even so, I'm well within the currently offered 2 GB plan. Still, that's a huge jump in data traffic.

I've Been Captivated

2011-01-26T17:14:00.006-06:00

I've been getting hand-me-down phones from my son-in-law until he upgraded from his iPhone 3GS to an iPhone 4. He gave the 3GS to my daughter!

I never wanted an iPhone anyway. ;)

I had been watching Android phones. AT&T was slow to get Android phones, perhaps because they had the iPhone. They finally got the HTC Aria and the Samsung Captivate (a Galaxy S variant).

My rationale was to wait until these devices were upgraded to Android 2.2. The reason was that I wanted the newest Gmail and Google Docs applications and tethering (really unlikely due to AT&T).

Then the battery in my BlackBerry Bold started to get less and less capacity. And the holster broke. I needed some kind of excuse!

I thought I wanted the Aria until I touched the Captivate. It's so slim and light and the OLED screen is so bright!

Just before Christmas I discovered that AT&T had refurbished Captivates on their web site for $9.99. Yes, the decimal is in the correct place.

Compared to the iPhone 4 the Captivate is lighter with a bigger screen. And it doesn't need iTunes. Did I mention that it's cheaper?

There's a great comparison here.

When it arrived, I had never played with an Android. I spent the next 12 hours playing. It's amazing.

I use Google Hosted Apps to host the e-mail for my domain so I was able to use my domain e-mail as the Google account. I expected everything to work smoothly but I wasn't prepared for how well integrated all the Google services were.

I was used to the BlackBerry BIS e-mail being quick to deliver but it was really a copy of my Google e-mail. So when I deleted an e-mail from the BlackBerry I still had to dispose of it on my Google e-mail. On the Captivate, I can archive an e-mail on the phone and when I look over to my web Google e-mail, the e-mail has disappeared.

The calendar is the same. Today I created an event on my web Google calendar. As soon as I saved it, the phone buzzed. That was the notification for the new event.

I have been challenged by the battery life. I did all the suggestions I found in the forums with little success. AT&T exchanged the phone for me and the new one seems to be some better but still erratic. Most days I have 50%-60% at the end of the work day but then some days it'll be 20% and complaining. I can't discern a pattern nor cause. I've just laid in microUSB cables at strategic locations to recharge but I really haven't needed them.

I use Wi-Fi (802.11n) heavily at home and at work. The work network uses 802.1x authentication and with a little fiddling it works great.

The original phone's GPS was good. This is apparently a problem area with Galaxy S phones. The new phone's GPS is Ok but not as good as the original phone. I guess I'd rather have better battery life than a quick GPS.

I'm not an app hog but I've installed a number of apps from the market. AT&T has restricted the Captivate to only Android Market apps but that hasn't been an issue.

Here's what I've installed:

Graffiti Pro for Android
GasBuddy
Car Cast Podcast Planner
Classic Tetris - Game Blaster S
gReader (Google Reader)
FourSquare - foursquare
Barcode Scanner - ZXing Team
Text Edit - Paul Mach
Dropbox - Dropbox
Klondike Solitaire - Softick
Angry Birds - Rovio
GPS Test - Chartcross Limited
GDocs - WildArt
GPS Logger for Android - Mendhak
WeatherBug - WeatherBug Mobile
NOOK for Android - Barnes & Noble
Google Voice - Google
Google Maps - Google

I'll write additional posts on several of these apps.

I haven't rooted it like I did the NOOKcolor and don't expect to. If Samsung and AT&T don't ever deliver Android 2.2 then I'll have to reconsider this.

Not Your Mother's Flip Phone

2011-01-26T15:57:00.005-06:00

I'm sold on smartphones, particularly my new Samsung Captivate.

But...

There's always a "but" isn't there?

Smartphone users obviously benefit from the tremendous capabilities of their new phones (really a handheld computer). The latest smartphones have powerful Internet access, applications, still and video cameras, etc.

But they aren't as capable phones as they used to be.

I came across this blog post that got me to thinking.

This poster mentioned his three "biggies:"

Blackberry Messenger
BB Holster Magnet
Security

I hadn't enumerated my "biggies" but my experiences recently inspired me to write this.

The battery cable came lose on my car and reset my radio so I had to find and enter the radio's security code. That isn't a phone issue except that it triggered havoc with my Samsung Captivate.

I put the security code in and thought I was done. Ok. That's "easy." I set the input to "Aux" to get the signal from my BlackBerry Remote Stereo Gateway. Then I fired up Car Cast to resume listening to my podcast.

But wait, that's where I got the Android equivalent of a Blue Screen of Death. It said that the Car Cast app had been Forced Closed. Ok. That's "easy." Just go to the home screen and restart it.

But wait, it crashed again. And I noticed an alert in the notifications area. Ok, That's "easy." Just pull it down and it said that the external microSD card was now unmounted. I hadn't done anything with the menus and hadn't dropped or bumped the phone. I opened the back of the phone and removed and reinserted the microSD card.

But wait, that got me a message that the "mount point was invalid." I wouldn't call that very user friendly. Ok, that's "easy." So I powered the phone down and rebooted it. That got the microSD recognized. And now Car Cast would run.

But wait, now the phone wasn't connected to the BlackBerry Remote Stereo Gateway's Bluetooth. Ok. That's "easy." Navigate on the phone to "Setting," "Wireless and network," and "Bluetooth settings."

But wait, there were NO Bluetooth devices listed. Ok. That's "easy." Click on "Scan devices."

But wait, it didn't see the BlackBerry Remote Stereo Gateway. Ok. That's "easy." Just turn off "Bluetooth" and turn it back on then "Scan devices" again.

But wait, the BlackBerry Remote Stereo Gateway shows "Paired but not connected." Ok. That's "easy." Click on the device entry for BlackBerry Remote Stereo Gateway and in a few seconds it connects.

Try explaining that to your mother.

The Rook Is Nooted

2011-01-20T11:26:00.000-06:00

I finally gave in and rooted my NOOKcolor.

It was sooooo easy. I simply followed the step-by-step instructions here. The biggest problem I had was that my first USB SD adapter didn't work.

I used the Auto-Nooter variation. There are more details here. Auto-Nooter also:

Installs su and Superuser.apk
Installs Busybox
Installs Calendar and Calculator
Installs and enables Android Market, Gmail, Youtube
Enables Multi-touch for Android Apps
Enables Live Wallpapers
Enables Android Market and Gmail
App Auto Install (automatically install apps that you drop into the sdcards /data/app folder via USB)
Installs Soft Keys 3.0
Installs Genie Widgets
Installs Droid X Multi-touch Keyboard as an option
Adds a removable Custom Boot Animation

In addition to the basic rooting instructions, I also followed these to enable my Google Apps account. While this all worked fine, read through both of these posts a couple of times to see how they fit together.

I installed ADW.Launcher. I had gotten a recommendation for LauncherPro but I discovered that on the Nook you have to really hack at changing the apps in the dock bar.

I had one spontaneous reboot but it's been rock solid since then.

The latest root process even enables the Android Market so you can download whatever apps you'd like. I have downloaded ADW.Launcher, Home Switcher, Dropbox, greader (Google Reader RSS), Titanium Backup, Klondike Solitaire, and Angry Birds.

I used Home Switcher to make ADW.Launcher the default launcher. I changed the grid size on ADW.Launcher to 6 x 6. I'm not sure that's the "right" size but it's a good start.

The root process installs SoftKeys which lets you bring up the equivalent of the normal 4 buttons on the bottom of an Android screen.

To get youtube working, I had to use Titanium Backup and "wipe data" for youtube.

Pretty nice Android tablet for $249.

Good Job AT&T

2011-01-13T19:07:00.000-06:00

We're all too quick to whine and complain about service, especially me. And who better to complain about but TPC (The Phone Company)?

I have AT&T's DSL XTreme promising 6.0 Mbps (and delivering pretty much that).

Starting last Friday evening, I began noticing my Internet speeds stalling every now and then. I logged into my D-Link DIR-655 router and looked at the log. It didn't show any problems. Then I went over and looked at the statistics. I refreshed the screen every 1-2 seconds. When it was running good I could see that I was receiving 100-200 packets every time. I was attempting a youtube upload at the time.

But every 30 minutes or so, the receiving rate would drop to pretty much nothing. The symptoms were that pages wouldn't load and my youtube upload would fail.

I reset the modem and reset the router with no change.

Saturday I finally gave up and called AT&T's DSL support. I was prepared for the worse but I was pleasantly surprised.

After the obligatory chatter about modems and routers I asked the representative to check for problems in the area. He reached out to the technical support team. We went back and forth on hold for 30 minutes or so.

At one point I noticed all my instant messaging clients drop and restart. A few seconds later the representative came back and and said the technical support team had reprovisioned my DSL service.

It's been fine ever since.

Good Job AT&T!

DKIM

2011-01-07T21:15:00.004-06:00

You get an "atta boy" if you know what DKIM stands for.

DKIM - DomainKeys Identified Mail. This is a technique for signing outgoing e-mail messages so sent mail is less likely to get caught up in recipients’ spam filters.

Google has added this to all Google Apps users. Administrators can enable DKIM signing in the “Advanced Tools” tab of their control panel.

Once you get this text string, you have to go create a TXT record in your DNS.

Here's what mine looks like:

It took 20-30 minutes for the DNS updates to propagate.

There's a nice tutorial here.

Nice job Google! And the price is right: FREE.

Browser Share III

2011-01-01T11:34:00.006-06:00

I didn't realize it had been so long since I looked at and shared my browser statistics.

A recent exchange about file sharing tools got me looking at the distribution of operating systems visiting my web sites. I specifically looked at www.desotonet.com and benmoore.blogspot.com DeSotoNet is more of a general purpose site and gets non-techie visitors. My blog gets the geeks (like you).

The exchange that triggered this was with a Microsoft representive. His comment was "Yeah, XP is gone - wasn't happy about that, but it's so old and antiquated now." When I shared that with a manager at a Fortune 100 company his response was "And XP is not gone. Probably on >50% of the home and work machines that are active."

Anyway here's what I found on operating system share on my web sites. I threw in browser share just for fun.

I use 2 different statistics tools so some interpretation is necessary.

Here's the operating system view on desotonet.com:

XP is practically 50% of the Windows visitors. The Vista share surprised me. I'd guess that "Windows 2008" is Windows 7. I suspect that a large portion of the "Others" is some kind of Windows as well. Web crawlers would show up there also.

Here's the browser share on desotonet.com:

Internet Explorer dominates. This isn't the techie crowd.

Here's the operating systems on my benmoore.blogspot.com:

My Windows 7 shows up as "Windows NT." None of the techies are running Vista!

Here's the browsers on benmoore.blogspot.com:

Thankfully IE 6 is pretty much gone.

NOOKcolor

2010-12-09T18:48:00.017-06:00

Over the Thanksgiving weekend I bought a NOOKcolor by Barnes & Noble. I had tried to get my wife interested in an iPad by showing it to her at the Apple store. Here response was "Is that all it does?" I didn't want to make that mistake again.

With the Nook I bought it and loaded a trial copy of a book by her favorite author before I showed it to her. That made the difference.

There's her Mary Higgins Clark book at the bottom left.

The Nook is actually an Android tablet. It has a gorgeous 1024x600 7" capacitive touch screen. It is running Android 2.1 (for now).

Look carefully and you'll see that this is an Android homescreen with three panels.

Click on the book and this is how it looks in reading mode.

You can change the font, the point size and the margins.

But this isn't just an e-reader. Barnes & Noble has added several nice apps. You access these by pressing the soft button at the bottom. Touch "Library" and then "My Files" and you can see part of the file system.

Navigate down to "Videos."

These are videos that I've transcoded using Handbrake. Detailed instructions are here.

Back to the soft button and choose "Extras." There are a couple of games and a "Gallery" and "Music."

These are simple apps but my wife liked the straightforward music player.

Press and hold on a song and you'll get a context menu.

But wait, there's more!

Back to the soft button and choose "Web." Yes, the Nook has a browser. Like the apps, it's pretty simple. I've been able to get many services working by using their mobile URLs.

YouTube even works but the playback is pretty choppy.

Content sites like usatoday.com work better.

Back to the soft button and choose "Settings."

That gets you information on wireless and the device.

There's lots more to the Nook.

By the way, I captured these screenshots by pressing the Nook button and the volume down button at the same time.

My next challenge is to decide whether to root the Nook or not.

Bluetooth Tethering with Windows 7

2010-12-02T21:27:00.013-06:00

Last spring I got my Asus Eee PC 1000H running Windows XP tethered via Bluetooth to my BlackBerry Bold.

Then this summer I got the ThinkPad X100e and installed Windows 7 Pro 64-bit.

Windows 7's networking is pretty different than Windows XP networking so I had to work some to get the tethering working.

First you have to pair the X100e and the BlackBerry. Remember that you have to make the X100e discoverable first.

Then click on the Start button and type "dial-up." Select "Set up a dial-up connection." Choose the Bluetooth link.

Here's what it looks like when its done.

This string is:

at+cgdcont=1,"IP","wap.cingular"

The password is CINGULAR1.

Then go into the "Network and Sharing Center" and choose "Internet Options."

Go to the Connections tab and check "Never dial a connection."

Finally go to "Network Connections" and uncheck "Cancel as default connection."

Adobe Reader X

2010-11-20T11:00:00.004-06:00

Like you've seen everywhere else on the web, Adobe has released Adobe Reader X (10.0) with sandboxing. If you want to read the gory details, start here. Here's a direct download link.

What I'm here to tell you is how to make sure you don't lose any security when you install it.

If you're following all the best practices, you've turned off JavaScript and cranked down the Trust Manager in Reader.

You've got to do that again in Reader X.

Click on "Edit" and then "Preferences." Select "Trust Manager." Uncheck "Allow opening of non-PDF attachments with external applications."

Now select "JavaScript." Uncheck "Enable Acrobat JavaScript."

Click on "Ok" and you're ready.

It sure is frustrating that Adobe didn't keep security preferences from the previous version but did keep some non-security preferences, e.g. disabling of the splash screen.

When you open your first document, you'll see this little tool tip in the upper right corner. If you hover your mouse over the top right corner of it, an "X" will appear. Click that and the tool tip seems to be gone forever. Irritating!

Google Voice and Mobile-to-Mobile

2010-11-09T13:31:00.006-06:00

Maybe nobody cares about this but me but I got to wondering. Since I have my Google Voice set to pass through to me the Caller ID of the caller, does AT&T Wireless think that the incoming call is really mobile-to-mobile?

YES!

Here's my Google Voice setting relative to incoming Caller ID.

Here's the entry in the Google Voice History for an incoming call from an AT&T mobile.

Then here's the entry in the AT&T call log showing a matching number, time, and duration and indicating it was "M2MCNG."

Just to close the loop, here is AT&T's definition of "M2MCNG."

What this means is that you can share your Google Voice number with everyone. If someone then calls your Google Voice number with an AT&T mobile phone and you answer it on your AT&T mobile phone that call will be counted as mobile-to-mobile, i.e. free.

If you're not an AT&T Wireless customer, your mileage may vary. Try it and post your results in the comments.

Election Day 2010

2010-11-03T20:07:00.004-05:00

No, this is not a rant on the elections. Rather this is a compliment to one of my area's local papers, the DeSoto Times-Tribune.

As I surfed around last night looking for early returns, I went to the Memphis paper and the Jackson, MS paper but there wasn't anything there. As a last resort, I went to the DeSoto Times-Tribune.

On the front page was a link to live results. I apologize that I didn't screen capture that page but what was there was a list of local races and links to Google Docs spreadsheets!

What the DeSoto Times-Tribune had done was created Google Docs spreadsheets for each race with rows for each ballot box and columns for each candidate.

With Google Docs real-time collaboration, you could actually watch them post the results ballot box by candidate live! Incredible.

Here's what one looked like.

But wait, there's more.

Google Docs lets you download these spreadsheets so you can keep your own copy of these detailed results.

Good job DeSoto Times-Tribune.

Windows 7 and ThinkPad T43

2010-10-23T21:07:00.001-05:00

I was all ready to install Windows 7 on my ThinkPad T42.

Before I could get around to it, the image on the T42 screen made a little swirling motion and froze. That pretty much wound up the T42. There was clearly something cracked inside. If you turned it off and let it cool, it would work for a couple of minutes then freeze again.

The T42 had served me well. I got in in July 2007 so it lasted me 3 years. It was probably 4 years old when I got it.

I managed to get all the data off it and ordered a T43 from Intechra. It came with 2GB RAM and a 802.11g WiFi card so I was in business.

I used the technique I had learned on the X40. Do a clean install of Windows 7. Then plug it into an Ethernet port and run Windows Update. Then for what's left, go to Lenovo/IBM. Everything works.

I was hoping for Aero capabilities but wasn't sure. After hours of Google searching, it won't do Aero. My first impression of Aero on Vista was that it was eye candy. Now after using it on a couple of systems, I really miss it.

Another Short Term Victory Over Spam

2010-10-16T22:31:00.004-05:00

Late in 2008 I wrote a post about a huge drop in spam.

In that post I was amazed by a period where there was almost a 50% drop in spam. Recently I have measured a drop of more than 80%.

Again I turned to Brian Krebs for an explanation.

Given that my spam dropped in late August/early September I think the key point is in Brian's update near the bottom. In summary, two major spam botnets have been slowed down.

Thank goodness.

Windows 7 and WAV Files

2010-09-03T21:19:00.004-05:00

Years ago (exactly how long ago in a minute) I recorded a short WAV file that I used as an announcement that my daughter had gotten on AIM.

When I upgraded to Windows 7 I set this as a pidgin Buddy Pounce. But it didn't work!

Oddly Windows Media Player would play it but Media Player Classic wouldn't nor would Windows 7 play it as a system sound. Hmmm.

Off to Google.

It wasn't on the first page but on the second page was this link.

That held the key and the solution to the problem.

I had recorded that WAV file using Windows 98's Sound Recorder application.

I fired up AudacityPortable and opened the old WAV file. Then I exported it as a WAV but obviously Audacity used a different codec.

That fixed it.

Windows 7 and ThinkPad X100e

2010-08-25T18:09:00.004-05:00

I've made good use of my Asus Eee PC 1000H. Recently upgraded to Windows 7, it has been my "in the car" laptop for months.

But it's still not a ThinkPad. Lenovo recently came out with several new models that piqued my interest, the Edge and the X100e. I started lurking around Lenovo's outlet site and finally found a deal on an X100e.

The specifications for the refurbished X100e that I got are:

Processor	AMD® Athlon™ Neo MV-40 (1.60GHz, 512KB L2)
Operating System	Genuine Windows 7 Professional 32 - English
Keyboard/Pointing Device	UltraNav (TrackPoint and TouchPad)
Total Memory	2GB PC2-5300 DDR2 667MHz SDRAM SODIMM Memory
Hard Drive	250GB, 5400RPM Serial ATA 2.5" Hard Drive
Display	11.6” WXGA HD (1366 X 768) LED, W/ 0.3 MP Camera
Graphics	ATI™ Radeon™ HD 3200
Ethernet/Wireless	11b/g/n Wi-Fi wireless
Bluetooth	No
Integrated Camera	Yes

The outlet price was 50% of list and since it was very slow to ship, Lenovo gave me an 10% "sales concession" (credit) so the price was very good.

Although Lenovo doesn't put a lot of crapware on their PCs, I wanted it running Windows 7 64-bit so I reformated and loaded Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. I had let Windows Update install all the drivers it had and then went to Lenovo to get all the rest of the drivers.

The only issue I had after the reload was that when running Google Documents using the new document format, highlighted text was barely discernible when on battery power. As you can imagine, that took a while to figure out what all the conditions were.

I turned to my favorite problem solver Google and came up with a solution. What had happened was that Windows Update installed a standard ATI driver but the Lenovo driver had the Catalyst Control Center included. This solution uses the Catalyst Control Center to turn off the Vari-Bright feature. With this off, the contrast is back to normal.

Just for fun, I installed Office 2010 64-bit as well.

Windows 7 and Asus Eee PC

2010-08-18T11:53:00.005-05:00

My Asus Eee PC came with Windows XP Home. I've used it as my travel laptop. I got a cigarette lighter adapter and keep the Eee PC in the car.

When I got the Eee PC in the fall of 2008 there was lots of chatter on the forums of installing Vista on it. There were some bootleg drivers out there but no formal support from Asus.

After I got the TechNet Standard subscription, the Eee PC was high on my list for Windows 7. As it turns out, Asus not only supports Windows 7 on the Eee PC with drivers but actually provides a self-upgrade guide to install Windows 7.

It all worked great. I had already installed 2GB of RAM so that wasn't a problem. There are a few subtleties of the Eee PC that don't work. For example, the XP load has the ability to configure the display to 1024x768 and either make it scroll or compress. The vanilla Windows 7 video drivers don't support that. I never used that capability but there are some hacks out there if you must.

Even the Eee PC "bells and whistles" work. For example, the multi-touch track pad (actually from ELAN) is fully functioning along with Asus' Eee Super Hybrid Engine.

Flashing the BIOS was the toughest part. I haven't figured out how to get rid of the grey POST screen but I haven't tried very hard.

Bugzilla Entertainment

2010-07-29T22:17:00.002-05:00

Here's another of those threads where the open source contributors take a "holier than thou" approach to users of their software.

Firefox 4 is now in public beta. With Beta 2, a new "bug" was fixed.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=574654

This change nullified some simple about:config parameters that were widely used to basically turn off tab scrolling. The submitter of this "bug" said "Users can override this using userChrome.css if they absolutely want it. I don't think the prefs are worth it." userChrome.css doesn't ship with Firefox. You have to create it yourself then insert CSS code into it to reinstate this capability. Skip on down in the thread and see the uproar.

The author of this change submitted some sample CSS code that hadn't been tested and didn't work so even the author was having trouble implementing it! "Sorry, I didn't actually try it myself and got confused. This should work (although it's again untested):"

The good news is this is in a beta, albeit public.

This certainly gives some credence to concern over open source software in a corporate environment although similar points could be made over some of Microsoft's choices.

Hopefully this will all be cleared up by the time Firefox 4 goes gold.

Windows 7 and ThinkPad X40

2010-07-25T17:46:00.000-05:00

With my shiny new TechNet Standard subscription in hand, my first target was my beloved ThinkPad X40. You'll remember I replaced the 1.8" hard drive with a KingSpec solid state drive.

I maxed out the memory at 1.5GB with a $19 DIMM from 5R Processors.

I built a USB drive with Windows 7 Pro and Office 2003 and Office 2010.

I booted the USB drive and Windows 7 was installed in about 30 minutes.

But...

Device Manager didn't look so good. Lots of yellow exclamation marks! I started Googling them one by one but came across one suggestion that was just too simple: Run Windows Update. Duh!

Since one of the exclamation marks was the wireless adapter, I plugged in an Ethernet cable and fired up Windows Update.

Fixed it.

Except...

The video card wasn't recognized. Back to Google. It wasn't so simple this time. The Intel chipset the X40 uses simply doesn't have Windows 7 drivers.

There were a couple of people who claimed they had overcome this but there were almost always comments that that solution hadn't worked.

I finally took the simplest solution with no dissenters and tried it.

Worked.

Now I have a 2.7lb. sub-notebook running Windows 7 with all the features working fine.

Next? A ThinkPad T42.

TechNet

2010-07-18T17:19:00.000-05:00

I have a lot of PCs around my house, 3 desktops and mumble, mumble laptops! I'm slowly becoming a big Windows 7 fan after my experience with Vista here, here, and here. The Big Honker is just humming along with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

On one of the podcasts I listen to Paul Thurrott mentioned Microsoft's TechNet subscription and even pointed to a coupon to lower the cost to less than $300. In a recent podcast, Paul mentioned Microsoft has announced a new TechNet Standard subscription for $200. Rather than me rehashing all the work Paul has done, here's his post on this.

I bought a TechNet Standard subscription and have started using it.

Comcast and Cisco RNG200

2010-07-13T23:20:00.003-05:00

I have Comcast cable service in the Memphis market. For a set top box I have an Cisco RNG200 HD DVR.

This morning when I came into the den, the face of the DVR didn't show the clock. Odd. I powered it up and it took a little longer than normal and then gave an error screen saying something like that the network wasn't available.

I had been watching QAM on my KWORLD SA290-Q LE so I knew that the cable-ready was working. I turned it off and went on about my business.

This afternoon when I returned home the clock was back so I figured everything was Ok. Wrong.

Later in the evening when I went to look at some recorded programs I discovered that all my programs and programming were gone!

I called 1-800-COMCAST and went through the obligatory 20 questions only to be told that they were too busy to talk to me. I immediately started pressing 0 over and over and ended up listening to Muzak (or some cheap equivalent).

When the representative came on she told me that Comcast had pushed an update to the Cisco RNG200s overnight and it had been unsuccessful. The result was that all of them were WIPED! I whined some and she agreed to give me a credit for a month of the DVR service of $15.95.

I can't believe that no one has commented on this! If this happened to you be sure to call Comcast for your credit.

Flash 10.1 and My Screen

2010-07-11T19:16:00.000-05:00

Surely you've read the hoopla over the recent Flash vulnerability. The official download link is here. But if you're like me, you don't want to install an application just to get a patch so the direct download links are here.

Now that that's out of the way, there's something new in Flash 10.1. Hardware acceleration has been turned on by default. If you know what that means I'm sure you're excited. If you don't (like me) you'll also be excited when your power settings are ignored and leave your screen on all the time.

Not to worry. It's easy to fix. Bring up a page with Flash on it. Right click on the Flash object. Select "Settings." Click the leftmost tab at the bottom. Uncheck "Use hardware acceleration." Click on "Close."

Samsung CL65

2010-07-04T16:06:00.004-05:00

Remember last summer when I blogged about geotagging? I'd had to work some to capture my lat/lon information and associate it with each photo. That worked pretty good but I wanted something simpler.

My Casio Exilim EX-Z1000 was only a 10 megapixel and only 3x optical zoom.

So I went Google shopping last Christmas and came up with the Samsung CL65 (ST1000 in Europe).

The CL65 has 3.5" touch screen LCD. It has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi along with built-in GPS. It has software on the camera to directly upload images online or e-mail them via the Wi-Fi. It's 12.1 megapixels with a 5x zoom lens. Oh, and the video recording is HD.

When I started looking it seemed to also be made of "unobtainium." I got on a waiting list at Rocket Camera. Their BBB rating doesn't look so good but I didn't have any problems with them. They had a good price and gave me good service. Caveat emptor.

The camera is awesome. The touch screen took me a little getting used to as I seemed to touch the screen accidentally while I was holding it. Other than turning it off, there is no screen lock. The GPS isn't AGPS like your phone so it takes a little while to find the satellites when you first turn it on. When I was in a situation where I was likely to be taking frequent photos, I just kept turning it on and off to keep the GPS sync relatively fresh.

I don't like digital zoom so I played with the settings until the digital zoom was disabled. Unlike the Casio, there isn't an obvious setting for this and I don't know which setting I changed to disable it but I think it was the image stabilization that did it.

Speaking of settings, the Casio has a lot more of pre-programmed scenarios. The Samsung has only 13. I don't use these much and all the ones I looked for were there, e.g. sunrise.

The Samsung charges with a proprietary (and short) USB cable. This cable also presents the MicroSD card as a USB drive to the PC. Just don't lose this cable. I haven't had any problems with the battery life even while running the GPS all the time.

The Samsung's 5x optical zoom is all internal. What this means is that the lens never protrudes from the camera's body. Nice.

I can't get the Wi-Fi to connect to my WPA/WPA2 network on my D-Link WBR-2310 router. I called Samsung and they weren't much help. It connected when I turned off security but that wasn't acceptable. I did get it to connect at my daughter's house and at her mother-in-law's house.

I've taken hundreds of snapshots with the Samsung but hadn't traveled with it to exercise the GPS until our recent trip to Bainbridge Island. Picasaweb does a great job of presenting the lat/lon for each photo. All went well until just before this photo.

That's when I dropped the Samsung into my soup! Luckily I had the camera all set before I handed it to the waiter so the picture turned out fine. The camera wasn't so lucky. It had landed screen down. Initially the touch screen wouldn't respond at all. Slowly it began working better and better and eventually seemed fine.

It worked great all the rest of the day but the next morning I got up early to take photos of the sunrise and it was cold outside. After about 30 minutes out in the cold the touch screen quit again.

Luckily Father's Day was coming up and the CL65 was much more available. My wife got me a new one and I've applied all my settings to it and am ready to go.

BlackBerry OS 5

2010-06-20T10:55:00.006-05:00

I saw a friend's Bold 2 recently and it was running BlackBerry OS 5. Of course I was jealous so I went to get it from AT&T.

Surprise! AT&T doesn't support it on the Bold. I wouldn't let that stop me. After reading about good experiences, I followed the instructions here. It worked like a charm for me and I haven't had any of the problems the subsequent posters had. It took about 40 minutes end-to-end. I'm running v5.0.0.681. Realize that there are a couple of ".0"s in there so it's real early for v5.

The best recap of the new features I could find was here and that was when v5 was still in beta.

Here're the handful of things I found different.

There's something different on the home screen. Maybe it is the highlighting of icons.

The compose screen for SMS is different.

In the Messages application, there is a capability I hadn't noticed before of flagging messages.

In the Contacts application, the search is more obvious.

The Media application has several changes. It includes icons for the Video Camera and the Voice Notes Recorder but not the Camera.

It also has a search field like Contacts.

When you're playing a song, the presentation is different and nicer. Ignore the boxes instead of proper text. That is because of podshifter.

One thing that took me a while to get resolved was that by default Media times out and closes after it is idle for 45 minutes. Here's where to set that.

In the Browser, you can choose your default search provider from a nice drop-down menu.

There are slick drop-down menus everywhere.

Even Applications has a search field.

RIM also includes icons to install Facebook and Twitter applications. While we're looking at this screen, all of my old applications came across and worked fine on v5. I did lose the internal settings of them and had to reestablish those, e.g. GPSLogger.

There's a nice new application called Files.

Files is like Windows Explorer. You can navigate the file system either on the media card or the device memory.

It even has viewers.

Probably the nicest new feature is threaded SMSs.

Reminds me of the Treo 650! I blanked out the name in this screen capture.

AT&T Data Plans

2010-06-06T09:54:00.007-05:00

I certainly can't say anything that hasn't already been said about AT&T's new cellular data plans.

What I can do is show how it affects me and let you see how you can determine if it affects you.

I went back through my AT&T bills for the last year. Here's where the data usage shows up in my bill. Notice that mine is a BlackBerry feature code so yours may be different.

The simplest thing is to search for "kilobytes".

Here's my data usage month by month.

Clearly I'm way under 200MB per month. My BlackBerry data plan is $30 per month (actually $35 with 200 SMS messages) so it looks like I could change my plan to "DataPlus" for $15 and save $15 per month. Remember that you can't go back to the unlimited (actually 5GB) plan.

There are a couple of observations from looking at the data. My data usage didn't change when I went to 3G with the Bold. My conclusion from this is that the screen on the Bold is still so small that I'm not willing to surf very much on the phone. A second observation (really a question) is why are those two months (June and August) twice the rest?

HTML5

2010-05-02T22:35:00.002-05:00

I'm sure by now you've heard the buzz about Apple, Adobe Flash, and HTML5 video. If not you can find lots on it here.

If you want to see what all the hoopla is about, here's how to play with it yourself. Install the latest Google Chrome Portable. Then go here and opt-in to YouTube's HTML5 beta. Finally, go watch this.

Encrypted Thumb Drive

2010-03-27T15:33:00.015-05:00

I've been using TrueCrypt for a long time but I use it as an exception rather than the default on my thumb drive. What I was seeking was to setup a thumb drive so that it would always be encrypted yet be as simple to use as possible.

I think I ended up with a pretty good solution.

I used PStart that I had used earlier. This time though I used the startup and exit features.

To get PStart running, I created an autorun.inf file on the thumb drive.


[autorun]
open=PStart.exe -autorun
icon="PStart.exe"
action=Thumb Drive Menu
label=Your Name

This causes an entry to be presented at the top of the Autorun menu (unless it is disabled) asking if you want to start the "Thumb Drive Menu."

Within PStart, I setup an entry called "Mount My Documents." This entry invokes TrueCrypt with command line switches set to automatically mount the volume as drive T: and not display the TrueCrypt window. This was specified to run at PStart startup.

Another entry was created and called "Dismount My Documents." Similarly this entry invokes TrueCrypt with command line switches set to automatically dismount any volumes TrueCrypt has mounted and not display the TrueCrypt window. This was specified to run at PStart exit.

The above makes the whole thing work. When you insert the thumb drive, if you have Autoplay enabled, you get the Autoplay menu asking if you want to run "Thumb Drive Menu." You click on it and PStarts runs TrueCrypt. TrueCrypt prompts you for the password for the encrypted volume. You enter the password and the encrypted volume is mounted as T:. When you close the PStart menu, it runs TrueCrypt and dismounts the encrypted volume.

Now, what do you do with it?

In my case when at work, I wanted to replicate "My Documents" with the PC. Within PStart, I setup an entry called "At Work." This entry invokes Allway Sync 'n' Go to sync "My Documents."

When anywhere but at work, I wanted to just use the "My Documents" on the thumb drive. Within PStart, I setup an entry called "At Home." This entry invokes Windows Explorer to explore "My Documents" on T:.

Here's what PStart's menu looks like.

Here're a few of the PStart configuration screens that make it look like I wanted it.

Bluetooth Tethering via BlackBerry Bold

2010-03-16T16:15:00.001-05:00

Ever since I've inherited the BlackBerry Bold, I've fancied tethering a laptop to its 3G connection via Bluetooth.

Recently I've tackled this and succeeded. To be honest, I hacked away at this off and on for months. I've referenced forum posts and blog entries all over that were very helpful. I can't give you a single step by step process to get there. What I can give you is a set of references and what my Bold and Asus Eee 1000H look like when I'm done and connected.

Pinstack Probably the most comprehensive
PortlandITGuy Good links to other sources
CrackBerry Not using Bluetooth

I didn't use the BlackBerry Desktop Manager nor the AT&T Communications Manager. While these may have made the process simpler, I didn't want the result to be dependent on another piece of software.

I also didn't add tethering to my AT&T plan. So far, I've only tethered to prove the concept. If I use this regularly I plan to add this $30/month feature.

This document doesn't cover pairing the 1000H and the Bold. That was routine and similar to pairing with a headset.

When I was done with the pairing here's what it looked like on the Bold.

By the way, I captured these BlackBerry screens with CaptureIT.

I didn't have to tweak any settings on the Bold.

It's another story on the 1000H.

The password is CINGULAR1.

Uncheck all of these.

This is after I'd clicked on "Query Modem."

You have to set this!

Now that you've waded through all these screen captures, I'm sure you're dying to know "How's it work?"

Great!

I don't have Flash on the 1000H so I used InternetFrog's speed test.

You can see that it showed almost 700kbps down and not quite 100kbps up. The QOS figure does NOT represent dropped packets but rather consistency of speed during the test.

Just to validate that test, I ran the same test on my ThinkPad connected via 802.11g to my (alleged) 3.0mbps AT&T DSL link. It tested at not quite 2.0mbps. I then retested the DSL using SpeedTest.net and got the expected 3.0mbps.

One way to read this is that InternetFrog is conservative or wrong. The other read is that SpeedTest is optimistic or wrong.

Regardless the Bluetooth tethering via the BlackBerry Bold ran somewhere between 700kbps and 1.0mbps down. That's very satisfactory to me. It feels quick.

If I left something out that you need, leave me a comment and I'll add it to the post.

VirtualBox

2010-03-09T08:24:00.002-06:00

One of my goals for the Big Honker was to support virtual machines.

I had thought I would run VMware's ESX on the raw metal and then have everything virtualized under that. I found that this was very limiting, first in specific hardware support (after all it's really for servers) and second in support of USB devices being passed through to the virtual machines.

I compared VMware's Workstation to Sun's VirtualBox. Besides VirtualBox being free and VMware's Workstation costing $189, VirtualBox seemed to be more flexible and simpler, at least for what I needed/wanted.

VirtualBox's download and install was easy. It bounced the network (warning me first) to install its virtual network adapter in the TCP/IP stack. More on this a little later.

One of the first uses I tried was to install Windows 98 SE which is not officially supported. There is a good dialog on the VirtualBox forums about installing and running Windows 98. After holding my mouth just right, I got it to install but could never get it to access external data, e.g. CDs or USB drives. Perhaps I could have eventually overcome this.

But I moved on to just using Windows XP Pro. This is an officially supported environment. When I went to create the virtual machine, XP was on the menu. It gave me a recommended configuration and I was ready to go.

When I finished the normal XP install, there's a drop-down in the VirtualBox menu to install Guest Additions. These are software and device drivers that aware of the virtualization going on and enable some enhanced support, things like cursor focus being transparent.

With regard to getting access to external data, XP was much easier. I just set the network adapter to be bridged and the XP virtual machine appears to be on my local network. I can also assign any USB device to the virtual machine and it has complete access to it.

Access to the virtual machine is simple. VirtualBox has a built-in server for the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). This lets me invoke an RDP session from my laptop and go full-screen. It's like I'm there!

My next goal is to get my XP virtual machine where I want it relative to software, tools, and patches and then "clone" it. Then I can create cloned virtual machines from that base and play with them. There seem to be a couple of choices from simply duplicating the virtual hard drive to snapshotting and creating "differential" disks with just the changes from the snapshot.

This is fun!

Blackberry Remote Stereo Gateway

2010-03-02T18:48:00.001-06:00

You know I'm an avid podcast listener.

A couple of posts ago I discussed my quest for a cable for my Bold. That has been working well but...

I wanted a less intrusive way to do this. I noticed that some Bluetooth hands-free units supported A2DP. That would let the Bold send the audio output to the hands-free which could then relay it to the car via an unused FM frequency. Interesting but complicated.

Then I came across the Blackberry Remote Stereo Gateway.
What this gadget does is provide a Bluetooth A2DP connection to the Bold and convert it into a 3.5mm jack that feeds the "Aux" jack on my car. All I have to do when I get in the car is press the "Pause" button on my Bold and the podcast starts playing through the car's speakers. I just leave the Blackberry Remote Stereo Gateway gadget in the console box where the "Aux" jack is.

The Blackberry Remote Stereo Gateway is powered by a mini-USB plug like almost all other Blackberry devices so I plug it into a cigarette lighter to USB converter in the console box. Incidentally, I have a cigarette lighter splitter in the console box! The cigarette lighter plug for the Asus Eee PC is in there too.

Cigarette Socket Power Splitter

2010-02-23T19:31:00.000-06:00

As you can imagine, my car kinda looks like my desk at home - a real tangle of wires. When I got my new car I tried to clean it up a little.

What I needed was a cigarette lighter splitter for my console box. I found one at Meritline for $4.99 (now $3.99) with free standard shipping (from Hong Kong).
This has worked fine. Some plugs are a little loose in the sockets but I haven't found that to be a problem so far. Notice that it has a USB power socket too.

Windows 7 HP Printer Drivers

2010-02-16T13:39:00.000-06:00

This is really more an HP issue that an Windows 7 issue but I ran into it because of Windows 7.

In my research for the Big Honker, I looked for drivers for all my peripherals. This resulted in having to buy a new scanner but my HP printers were good.

I have an HP DeskJet D4260 and an HP LaserJet 1020. Neither is brand new but not more than a couple of years old.

The HP support pages for each showed that there were Windows 7 64-bit drivers available so I downloaded and stashed them away for the install. I was a little cautious as the LaserJet 1020 driver was only released in November 2009.

When I actually did the install, I was surprised that the DeskJet D4260 driver was already loaded and it worked immediately. I loaded the LaserJet 1020 driver and both were working. They worked from my XP laptops using the existing drivers as well.

Or so it seemed.

My wife had a color page she needed to print from her laptop. When she did, the colors were off, blues were grey, yellow was pink, etc. Of course you immediately suspect that you're low on ink. I went to the Big Honker and printed a test page and it looked Ok but it really doesn't have much color.

Then I created an image in Paint on my laptop that had big blocks of primary colors. When I printed it, the colors were off there too so it was off to WalMart. $18 later for a color cartridge, I was back.

Same problem. Hmmm.

I recalled that the test page printed from the Big Honker was good. So I printed my wife's document from the Big Honker. Worked fine. So that meant the driver that came with Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit wasn't compatible with the previous drivers.

I installed the new drivers that I had downloaded earlier on the XP laptops (they worked on XP also) and all was well. Why would HP change the color mapping of the drivers?

The Big Honker

2010-02-09T11:47:00.002-06:00

My main desktop PC (which I call SERVER) is getting long in the tooth. It is a refurbished HP Pavilion 522c that I bought in 2003. It has an Athlon XP2000+ 1.67GHz processor. I'd upgraded it along the way with memory (256MB to 1GB), a DVD burner, 2 bigger hard drives, even a Firewire card.

I did my typical drop the partitions and install a clean version of XP Professional right out of the box. But I had never refreshed it. It was getting a little flaky.

When I started looking for replacements, I wanted to stay with HP since I've had such good luck with them. I wanted something that I could run Windows 7 64-bit since I think that's the new standard for home. I also wanted something that supported virtualization. That turned out to not be so easy.

Intel calls its virtualization VT-x. AMD calls theirs AMD-V. AMD's is pretty simple. Pretty much anything you can buy supports it. Intel's is another story. wikipedia says "Intel uses the feature to segment its market." I would add "and to confuse."

All the Core i3/5/7 processors support VT-x but systems with those processors are expensive and you know how I am. Core 2 Duo/Quad was more my price.

So go look at this page from Intel. Many of them don't support VT-x outright. The rest refer you to their SPEC details. That doesn't help either. I ended up with an E6300. Way too confusing.

I got the E6300 in (another) refurbished HP Pavilion p6112p from buy.com. It has a 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo, 8GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive, a LightScribe DVD burner, gigabit Ethernet, and a bunch of other bells and whistles. It came with Windows Vista Home Premium 64-bit but was eligible for a free Windows 7 upgrade. The motherboard details are here.

On Christmas Eve buy.com had it for $399.99 with free shipping.

I did my normal process of dropping the partitions and doing a clean install of Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit.

I put one of the leftover 400GB hard drives from my Drobo in it and added a second DVD burner.

It's up and running and doing fine. I haven't had the first problem with Windows 7 64-bit other than one program from the early '90s won't run. How I resolved that will be explained in a later post.

2010 Maxima RearView Monitor

2010-01-12T21:40:00.002-06:00

My wife just bought a 2010 Maxima. It came with the monitor package which includes a "RearView Monitor." This consists of a 7" color screen in the dash and a camera just above the license tag.

From the owner's manual:

When the shift selector is shifted into the R (Reverse) position, the monitor display shows the view to the rear of the vehicle.

The system is designed as an aid to the driver in detecting large stationary objects to help avoid damaging the vehicle. The system will not detect small objects below the bumper and may not detect objects close to the bumper or on the ground.

This soooo understates what this thing does.

I took pictures tonight when I was backing into a parking spot. These pictures were taken with my Blackberry Bold so I apologize that they are not very well focused or framed but you'll get the idea. You'll need to click on the pictures to get the full-sized versions.

In this first picture, I'm just beginning to lineup. Notice that there are two separate boxes in the image. The multi-color box (green, yellow, and red) is where the car will go if you continue with the wheels straight. Green indicates that you have a safe clearance. Yellow indicates that you are getting close and red that you are really close.

The orange box is where the car will go if you continue with the wheels turned as they are now. See how the orange box is curved?

The second picture is as I'm entering the parking space. I'm not straight with the parking space as the orange box still crosses the stripe on the parking lot. The car already parked is still in the green area.

In the third picture I'm getting close to being parked. The parked car is in the yellow area approaching the red area. The orange box is now aligned with the multi-color box indicating my wheels are straight and not too far over the stripe.

Parked! The fourth picture is when I'm done. Look carefully near the crossed white stripes on the ground to the right and you'll see where the multi-color box transitions from yellow to red. There's a red indicator there that indicates that you should stop.

That's amazing. Every car should have this.

Now my wife wants one looking forward!

elog

2010-01-05T20:38:00.000-06:00

I saw a link on a Wave blip that referred to elog.com.

I think they explain it better than I can.

elog.com is a public service that enables anybody to create and update their own web page just by sending an email with the content for the web page.
You do not have to formally register with elog.com, no password is necessary, there is no minimum age requirement, and you can create as many web pages as you want.

elog.com is ideal for quick updates to simple web pages. However, email applications have become very powerful - words can be bolded and colored; links, pictures, and videos can be included, etc. In other words, the email application that you use everyday is probably capable of building a very nice web page.

To create your own web page, just send an email to newpage@elog.com. Your email can have pretty much anything you want in it and your new web page will look just like the email you send. You will be issued a public web page, e.g. 1993.elog.com, that others can view immediately. To update your web page with new content, just send an email to it, e.g. 1993@elog.com.

elog.com is registered with Google and Yahoo, enabling them to regularly crawl and index any web page at elog.com (such as your web pages).

Pretty cool.

Odd Laptop Problem

2009-12-29T13:24:00.001-06:00

Each week I volunteer at a mid-sized non-profit in Memphis. I basically do break/fix stuff. When I arrive, they have a pile of PCs for me to fix/reimage.

Two weeks ago, they had a Compaq 6510b laptop that had had a hard drive crash. They had sent it out to have the drive replaced and my job was to reimage and install the local applications, e.g. Acrobat, Java, Office 200x.

I dove right in but immediately notice that the system was slow, REALLY slow. It is a Core 2 Duo 2.20GHz with 2GB or RAM so it shouldn't be slow.

Since it had a new hard drive, I suspected that. I ran HD Tune's benchmark and as expected the HD was much slower than the other reference systems I had. The facility manager returned the system to the provider who had replaced the drive.

They replaced the drive and returned it. I retrieved it and the power supply and began working on it. It was still running extraordinarily slow. The hard drive benchmark showed that it was as slow as before. I checked all the Device Manager settings as well as the BIOS settings with no solutions.

Finally I Googled "compaq 6510b slow hard drive" and on the second page came across this link:

http://www.itwriting.com/blog/985-hp-laptop-go-slow-caused-by-power-supply.html

This describes a user who had a problem with the power supply giving an incorrect signal to the laptop making it think it was about to run out of power and hence "cutting back on CPU/mainboard frequency to conserve power."

It seemed too simple but I unplugged the power supply. The laptop was transformed. Opening a new tab in Internet Explorer was instant. Plug the power supply back in and it once again slowed to a crawl. On battery, the hard drive benchmark now reported more than 60MB/sec.

How odd.

Apple Tax

2009-12-22T19:55:00.000-06:00

The hand-me-down Bold has a slightly recessed 3.5mm headphone jack. My old 3.5mm-to-3.5mm cable had fat plugs and won't work consistently.

One day I remembered that there had been a similar situation with the original iPhone. There's an Apple store nearby so I dropped in looking for a cable.

I found one.

$19.95! I left it in stock.

I did notice that it was made by Belkin. So when I got home, I went and looked at Belkin's site. This looked like the exact same item without the Apple brand.

$14.95. Headed in the right direction.

I finally bought it at Amazon.

$8.45.

Now that's an Apple tax.

TinyMailTo

2009-12-15T10:56:00.000-06:00

Sometimes it's the simple things that make your day. Just go to TinyMailTo. You'll understand.

The Drobo Is Hungry

2009-12-08T20:15:00.001-06:00

Two years ago, I got a Drobo for my birthday. It is still serving me well.

Initially I populated it with 2 400GB drives.

That gave me 371GB of protected storage.

Then I added a pair of 500GB drives.

Bingo! 1.2TB of protected storage.

Looking towards Santa's visit this year, I bought a 1TB drive on Black Friday. To install it, I just popped out one of the 400GB drives. The remaining 3 drives began blinking orange. I slid the 1TB drive into the now open slot. In a few seconds all 4 drives were blinking orange and green. After about 6 hours, they were all green again.

This only took me to 1.3TB of protected storage due to the asymmetry.

After Santa makes his visit, I'll replace the remaining 400 GB drive with a second 1TB drive.

Ah! 1.8TB protected storage.

That's nudging right up against the 2TB limit of USB 2.0. Although the Drobo will present 2 drives to the host if it goes over 2TB.

But wait, if I replace one of the 500GB drives with a 750GB drive I get 2TB protected storage.

Dear Santa,
...

BlackBerry Gmail App

2009-12-01T10:59:00.001-06:00

With my new (to me) Bold, I wanted to try the Gmail application for the BlackBerry. My first impression was WOW!

I loved that it pushed to the BlackBerry. You could archive from the BlackBerry and it would be archived on the Gmail server. You could even see sent messages! And messages were presented in conversation view. It even put an alert in the profile that you could manage just like BlackBerry e-mail, i.e. it'd blink the notification light.

But there are downsides. First the new message formatting isn't very good. This is a message that I wrote on the BlackBerry as it is presented in the Sent label on the Blackberry.

Ooops! There's a spoiler in there.

When you view it on a PC, this is how it is rendered:

The top of this conversation thread was composed on a PC. This shows the contrast between the compositions. It looks like the Gmail application inserts a hard carriage return at the end of each line. Not shown here is that the Gmail application doesn't honor the Labs "Signature tweak." It does honor your signature, just not the tweak.

I also use Google Voice. When I got a Google Voice voicemail notification, I went to click on the "Play message" link in the e-mail.

It isn't a link! It is in the standard BlackBerry e-mail client. To play this message I had to go to the browser and login to Google Voice and play it from there. There is a Google Voice client for the BlackBerry that I haven't played with.

In Media (including View Pictures in Camera) you couldn't choose the Gmail client to send pictures. Worse, you couldn't attach anything in the Gmail client. So I had to setup the AT&T BIS just for that.

The "push" from Gmail wasn't more or less timely than the AT&T BIS push.

Now back to the spoiler. On my Curve, most of the time I could go 2 days between chargings. With the bells and whistles of the Bold I wasn't expecting so much. I got worse. By the end of the day, the battery indicator on the Bold had turned yellow. I asked my son-in-law about this and he said that he had often been able to go 2 days. Hmmm. Wonder what it was? I stopped the Gmail application and at the end of the next day the battery was at 70%. I think I found it.

I've gone back to the standard BlackBerry e-mail client.

KingSpec SSD

2009-11-24T11:10:00.001-06:00

You'll remember that I got a slightly used ThinkPad X40 and suggested that I might add a SSD drive to it? I did. WOW!

I ordered the 32GB KingSpec 1.8" PATA/IDE SSD Solid State Disk (MLC) P/N KSD-PA18.1-032MJ from MemoryC in Ireland.

This picture is of 2 KingSpec SSDs showing the top and the bottom. Don't panic seeing that jumper. Just leave it alone and it'll be fine.

Before I ordered it, I had a technical inquiry of them and it was answered via e-mail within 12 hours. The time difference worked in their favor. With that resolved I ordered it on a Tuesday afternoon and it arrived the following Tuesday, 7 days.

The end-to-end installation took 40 minutes. I booted Bart-PE with Ghost v8, created an image of the old Hitachi 40 GB HD on an USB HD, swapped the drive, and restored the image. Swapping the drive was just about the easiest hardware modification I've made. One screw to remove the drive and carrier. Four screws to remove the HD from the carrier. Put it all back together with the KingSpec SSD and you're done. Really couldn't have been simpler. Ghost handled the smaller sized drive with no problem as the 40 GB was only about 8 GB used.

And the results? With the Hitachi HD the X40 took 2:14 to hibernate and 1:05 to resume. With the KingSpec SSD it takes :29 to hibernate and :20 to resume. These aren't terribly scientific nor comprehensive but they are what I care about.

To Boldly Go...

2009-11-17T11:38:00.000-06:00

I've loved my BlackBerry Curve. I hardly ever have to reboot it like I did the Motorola Q9h. Some people may complain about the 2G network but I never found that I wanted to browse long enough on that screen for the network to make a difference.

It's sad when you get so old that you look forward to the the hand-me-downs from your children. My son-in-law has been one step ahead of me in cell phone gadgets. He had a Treo 650 before me then when he went to a BlackBerry Bold I followed with a BlackBerry Curve.

Now he's gone to the iPhone 3GS. I'm holding out for a GSM Motorola Droid (Milestone?) but he passed on his Bold to me.

There's a great comparison here.

The Bold compared to the Curve is a tad larger at 4.5x2.6 vs. 4.2x2.4 and .8 oz. heavier.

But that screen! It's the same size as the Curve's and clearly smaller than the iPhone 3GS' but the resolution is what makes a difference. Not only is it brighter with more contrast than the Curve but it is 320x480 compared to the Curve's 240x320.

It runs BlackBerry OS 4.6 like the Curve but has Visual Voicemail. I had to call AT&T to get this provisioned on my account. There's no charge for it.

My son-in-law had had this Bold connected to his work e-mail so I had to remove the IT policy. I used BlackBerry's JL_Cmder to do this. It took 10-12 attempts to get it to "connect" so keep trying.

One of my projects is to tether a laptop to the 3G network via Bluetooth. That'll be fun.

20 GB for only $5 a year

2009-11-10T21:33:00.002-06:00

Google has always been about cheap (even free) storage. Initially Gmail had a gigabyte of storage. Unbelievable! Then Google raised the bar. Now the storage is over 7 gigabytes. This was used for Gmail and Picasa Web. If 7 gigabytes wasn't enough Google would sell you more. An extra 10 gigabytes was $20 per year.

Now Google has doubled the storage to 20 gigabytes and dropped the price to $5 per year. For the old price of $20 per year you get 80 gigabytes!

You can read about it here. The prices are here.

Pssst! Can you say Gdrive?

Office 2007 and Wide Screen Displays

2009-11-02T15:39:00.003-06:00

I really prefer to call them Short Screen Displays. I've had personal consternation at Office 2007's placement of the ribbon across the top of displays when displays are becoming ~~wider~~ shorter rather than taller. It always seemed to me that it'd make more sense from a real estate perspective to at least alternatively allow the placement of the ribbon on the side rather than at the top.

I was never brave enough to put this in writing but finally someone else did.

In Jerry Pournelle's Computing At Chaos Manor: The Mailbag a reader wrote:

Also, the ribbon occupies some of the most valuable real estate on the modern display: vertical space. On my laptop I have a modern wide aspect display. MS Word XP displays templates, formats and similar helpful stuff off to the right, leaving me with a relatively tall text space. A ribbon would be disastrous. It's merely annoying on my 4x3 display, but I keep it minimized. Needless to say, despite having access to cheap copies of Office 2007 (two more students in our household), I will be maintaining our Office XP versions.

It's very interesting to watch a huge company make such a bone-headed decision on its flagship product. At the very least, you'd think there would be a way to run the ribbon vertically, so that it could be a sidebar, like the bookmark and history sidebars we see in some browsers. Heck, even my ancient copy of Paint Shop Pro 7 allows for vertical toolbars. And MS's own Vista developers allow for a sidebar display, with pretty widgets. They get the wide aspect business. You would think that watching Firefox get ready to destroy its classic UI to reduce the browser's vertical acreage would be a clue to avoid filling up vertical space.

Yeah. What he said!

Christmas Wish List 2009

2009-10-29T21:00:00.008-05:00

32GB KingSpec 1.8" PATA/IDE SSD

Samsung CL65
about $295
Google search
Specifications
User manual

8GB microSDHC (with SD adapter)
around $20 - for the camera
Google search

1TB Internal SATA hard drive
as low as $75 - 2 would be great!
Google search

Ajay Bhatt

2009-10-18T13:47:00.000-05:00

I'm not a big fan of Conan O'Brien. Between he and Letterman they've given me an extra hour of sleep each night.

Anyway, I came across this clip that Conan did with Ajay Bhatt.

I love his response about Firewire!

Office Web Apps

2009-10-11T20:23:00.000-05:00

Heard about Microsoft's Office Web Apps? Didn't get in the Beta? Want to? Here's how.

Go to SkyDrive. Login. See here for how to get a Windows Live ID.

Now just go to any folder. I chose Documents. Click on "Add Files" and upload a Word document. You'll get this screen when it's done.

Look at that cute little line!

Join our preview program to create, edit, view, and share Office documents! Learn more

Don't just sit there. Do what it says. Click on "Join our preview program" and you're on your way.

Click on "Accept" and then click on "Documents" up at the top.

Hey! There's something new there - New. Pull it down and click on Microsoft Word document.

Sorry. That's not ready.

Click on "Microsoft Excel workbook" and that'll work.

Click on "Create" and you're on your way.

Pretty cool, huh?

Live Mesh

2009-10-04T19:07:00.006-05:00

You'll recall I was a BIG fan of Microsoft's FolderShare. I used it until my wife's work blocked it.

Then Microsoft changed FolderShare to Sync. But wait, that's what Microsoft calls the gadget that Ford puts in its cars. I'm confused. I think I'm not alone.

Anyway, to get back on track, I wanted to find something to synchronize photos between my house and my daughter's house. I looked at a lot of alternatives including Dropbox and Hamachi. Close but no cigar.

Then I stumbled across Microsoft's Live Mesh. Its web site doesn't do a good job of explaining but just go with it for a minute. You need to have a Windows Live ID. Don't sweat that even with the footnote:

If you have a Passport Network, Hotmail, or Windows Live Messenger account, you can use it as your Windows Live ID.

Just click on the "Need a Windows Live ID?" and create one using your favorite e-mail address.

Login and you'll get this screen.

Click on "Connect" and you'll get this screen.

From here you can create a folder and upload (using the ugly web interface) just like SkyDrive. Microsoft seems to have at least two of everything.

This folder on your Live Mesh Desktop is a little different than SkyDrive though as you'll see in a minute.

Back up at the top of the screen, click on "Devices" and click on "Add Device."

Pick your OS and click on "Install."

Unlike most Microsoft products, this is a light client.

Now, the folder you created above can by synchronized with your PC, i.e. Device. Then you can update it on your PC and the changes will be replicated to the folder on the Live Mesh Desktop. And you can invite other Live Mesh users to share it.

But the real trick is that now you can create a folder on your PC and enable Live Mesh for it and then invite other Live Mesh users to share it. BINGO!

It works like a charm. I have created two folders and enabled Live Mesh for them and shared them with my son-in-law. One folder is for us to send to them and the other for them to send to us. One would suffice but separating is easier to think about.

Think of all the things you can do with this. You can share like we have. You can use a remote PC (think your mother's) as a backup! And if you place this folder on your Live Mesh Desktop you can access if from the web. By the way, this all works fine with Firefox!

Oh, did I mention it is free?

aviary.com

2009-09-29T17:30:00.003-05:00

Recently I was reviewing a web site that was still evolving and wanted to mark it up and feed my comments back to the creator. (He is a friend of mine so I wasn't just taking pot shots at him!)

I wanted something to capture the entire page (most required you to scroll to see it all) and then be able to annotate it.

I found nirsoft.net's SiteShoter but that was really too simplistic and didn't allow me to annotate.

Then I found aviary.com.

In some aspects it is simplistic as well. For example, to capture a page, just put "aviary.com/" in front of the URL, e.g. "aviary.com/http://google.com"

Then you get a Flash page up with the target web page captured. There are some simple editing/annotating tools there and the option to save it to your desktop or to their site.

The editing capabilities here are simple (that's what I was looking for) to the point of being rudimentary. But be careful of clicking on any of the more advanced options. Let's just say they go to the other end of the scale. They were way more complicated than I needed.

Play with it some before you're trying to use it for real. Find your own sweet spot for the level of complexity you need and can handle.

Link to Link to Link to...

2009-09-22T19:59:00.001-05:00

I realize this is petty but it frustrates me. I hate it when one news feed just references another that references another that references another ...

Today on my engadget feed was an article on a robot that was being developed to draw blood. I clicked on the link. Here is the string of links I had to follow to get to the original post.

engadget
Switched
OhGizmo
BotJunkie
Wired

Google Maps Traffic

2009-09-15T20:39:00.006-05:00

I have Google Maps on my BlackBerry Curve. One morning on my way to a meeting I ran into a traffic jam on I-240 Eastbound.

As I sat there, I had time to play with Google Maps. Tennessee's SmartWay has started publishing traffic reports. Google picks them up and overlays them on their maps.

Google also "crowd sources" traffic information from the My Location feature of Google Maps. This is enabled by default but you can turn it off.

When I first looked, it seemed that the information was incomplete. I saw green on the Westbound lanes but the green stopped just behind me.

It turns out that there is a yellow line indicating slow traffic on top of the yellow line for Eastbound I-240. Look closely and you can tell the the slow traffic line is more golden than the road line. That's hard to tell on the low contrast BlackBerry screen.

This became obvious as I traveled further Eastbound. A red line started indicating stopped traffic!

In a later trip I was able to take advantage of this information.

I was Eastbound on I-240 approaching Millbranch and the traffic slowed to a crawl. I dived off on Millbranch.

Once on Millbranch I fired up Google Maps and this is what I saw.

What that told me was that I could hop back on I-240 at Airways since the green started back up between Millbranch and Airways.

How cool is that?

Podshifter

2009-09-08T19:58:00.001-05:00

If you listen to a lot of podcasts like I do, a way to speed up the replay speed without distorting the sound would be a great find.

Well, then go to podshifter.com. Paste the URL of the RSS feed into the page and select how fast you want to go. I use 1.4. Click on "shift it" and you'll get a page back with a new URL that you can put into your podcast catcher. (I just use Google Reader.)

This reduced Windows Weekly 118 from 105:31 to 75:23. That'll give you half an hour of your life back!

There's one nuance that took me a while to figure out. PodShifter doesn't compress the podcast until someone requests it. How that affects me is when the RSS feed shows up in Google Reader and I click on it to download, I only get a 1K file. This means that PodShifter needs to go copy that file and compress it. Just delete that small file and wait an hour or so. The next time you try to download you'll get the compressed file.

I listen on my BlackBerry and the name that presents in the Media Player looks garbled. Interestingly, the album art is fine.

BBWeather

2009-09-01T21:40:00.001-05:00

One of my favorite BlackBerry applications is BBWeather. You can get the over the air (OTA) download here.

Here's what your home page will look like when the BBWeather icon is not selected:

Here's what your home page will look like when the BBWeather icon is selected:

The options you select affect this. We'll look at mine in a little bit.

Click the icon and you'll get the Current Conditions:

Press Menu and select Daily Forecast:

Here's the Daily Forecast:

Press Menu and select Hourly Forecast:

To set it up, go to the main menu and select Options and then Add.

Enter the ZIP Code and press the menu key.

Select Lookup Location ID. It will fill in the name of the location. Select Ok.

There are several settings to consider in the Options menu. Here's how I have mine set.

Oh, BBWeather is free.

Google Voice

2009-08-25T10:10:00.000-05:00

There can't be much new to be written about Google Voice. Everybody has covered it. Here's the wikipedia article on it and here's the NY Times article on it.

I've been using what is now Google Voice since it was GrandCentral. Google bought GrandCentral and seemed to let it lie dormant for a long time. In the Spring of 2009 Google renamed it to Google Voice and began ever so slowly handing out new invitations. Google killed off a couple of GrandCentral capabilities (being able to make your ring-in sound like a European phone) but added many more such as voice mail transcription (cute but really pretty worthless).

I use it for 2 purposes. First, I have it ring my home phone and my cell phone simultaneously so I can always be found. I can even add locations when I'm going to be somewhere else, e.g. my mother's, for a while. That's so easy to do.

Second, I use Google Voice to present a consistent caller ID. The free long distance is nice but I use Google Voice to make even local calls so that people I call always see the call coming from the same number.

There are some other considerations. If you receive a call on your cell phone through your Google Voice number you don't get the benefit of mobile-to-mobile. Also, Google Voice is subject to service disruptions like Google is. Occasionally, you'll notice things like incoming calls going straight to voice mail or even that the call can't be connected.

Google Voice is not a part of Google Hosted Apps. What this means is that if you have a Google Hosted Apps e-mail (like I do) that your contacts are not shared between your Google Hosted Apps e-mail and your Google Voice. Maybe someday.

I'm sure that Google is going to continue to develop Google Voice. This service will redefine what voice service delivers.

Crapware

2009-08-18T17:36:00.000-05:00

I can't tell you how many PCs I've come across that have all kind of toolbars and crap installed on them. You wonder why people install all of them. They're such a drag on the PC's performance.

Here're a couple of blog posts that explain what's going on. First there's Windows Secrets' article on the latest Java update. Next there's Lifehacker's post on the Digsby instant messaging client.

I won't rehash these stories. Just go read them yourself. And when you install any update or new program, READ EVERY SCREEN and uncheck freely.

New Google Search

2009-08-11T09:46:00.003-05:00

Mashable has a post about a test version of Google Search. Google talks about it here.

Here's a post that tells you how to add it to your Firefox search bar.

It's too early to tell how different it is.

Ultra Capacitor Screwdriver

2009-08-05T21:19:00.005-05:00

My wish lists for gifts are always made up of URLs. For Fathers' Day, the URL was this. My wife was a little suspicious of that web site but she went with it. You can also get it at Amazon.

What this gadget is is a Coleman 5.4V Flashcell Cordless Screwdriver. That's a mouthful. What it means is that it doesn't have a conventional battery. Instead it uses an ultra capacitor.

The effect of this is that it charges in 90 seconds. It does have a downside. It has about half the capacity of a traditional rechargeable screwdrive. This isn't much of a downside when the charge time is less that the time it takes you to go to the bathroom.

Popular Mechanics has a good write-up here.

Here's a YouTube video on it.

ThinkPad X40

2009-07-27T21:09:00.003-05:00

If you've been reading my posts for a while, you know I'm a big fan of ThinkPads. I've written about my history of ThinkPads, my current T42, and my wife's current T61.

For my birthday last year, I got an Asus Eee PC 1000H. I love the physical dimensions of the Eee PC and the battery life. The battery lasts hours and I've never had it run out on me. As an aside, I have begun to notice that it drains slightly faster but I'm talking about 4 hours vs. 6 hours. The right shift key took some getting used to but I'm pretty good with that now. The 1024x600 screen takes a little adjusting to.

The 1000H weighs about 3.3 lbs. While the dimensions always impress onlookers, the weight surprises them. The weight is in the battery which is at the back of the unit so it makes it off balance when the screen is tilted back. It wants to tip over if it's on a soft surface, e.g. your lap.

The ongoing irritant is the touchpad mouse. I like that it is multi-touch but for those of us with that little dent on the tip of their right index finger from the ThinkPad's TrackPoint, nothing will take its place.

So I kept lusting after ThinkPad X-series. More so the slightly older ones with the 4x3 screens rather than the latest with wide-screens (I call them short-screens). In one of my previous posts I even said "I can't imagine what a new X40 would be like."

Now I can.

On my favorite used PC site (Intechra), I came across an off-lease ThinkPad X40. I held my breath until I had it in my shopping cart and checked out. The cost with shipping was just over $200.

It is a 2371-G4U with a Pentium M 1.4GHz, 1 GB of RAM, and a 40 GB HD. As expected, the battery isn't "fresh" but it will run for an hour or so. It came with 802.11A/B/G and an SD card slot (the X20 had a CF slot).

The appearance looks like somebody had it in a docking station for 3 years. Barely a mark on it anywhere.

I used my procedure to reuse the Windows XP Pro COA.

It is practically the same size as the 1000H but amazingly it is lighter! 2.7 lbs. And it's thinner. Overall it clearly feels smaller than the 1000H. Even more people "oh and ah" over it than the 1000H and it's 4 years old!

I need to replace the battery (about $40 on eBay) and am looking at doing some sort of solid state drive.

Browser Vulnerabilities

2009-07-14T10:55:00.002-05:00

It's been a while since I've talked about vulnerabilities. This time it seems like there's been a flurry in both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

Last week, SANS reported a 0-day exploit in Microsoft's DirectShow ActiveX control that can be exploited in IE. This ActiveX control is not intended to run in IE. Microsoft's advisory is here. Microsoft created a "Fix it" article that turns on its kill bit. Though unaffected by this vulnerability, Microsoft is recommending that Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 customers apply the "Fix it."

Then this week, SANS reported a 0-day exploit in Microsoft's Office Web Components ActiveX control that can be exploited in IE. This ActiveX control is not intended to run in IE. Microsoft's advisory is here. Microsoft created a "Fix it" article that turns on its kill bit. (Is there an echo in here?) Microsoft's Security Response Center says it doesn't affect Vista. Read the details for yourself.

Then today, Brian Krebs reported a "highly critical" vulnerability in FireFox 3.5. He describes the "about:config" as a work-around:

To disable the vulnerable component, open up a new Firefox window and type "about:config" (without the quotes) in the browser's address bar. In the "filter" box, type "jit" and you should see a setting called "javascript.options.jit.content". You should notice that beside that setting it reads "true," meaning the setting is enabled. If you just double-click on that setting, it should disable it, changing the option to "false." That's it.

The bad news is that this slows Firefox's Javascript back down to 3.0 levels.

Creative Labs Vado HD

2009-07-12T13:58:00.006-05:00

As a going-away present, my former co-workers gave me a gift certificate at amazon.com, one of my favorite stores. The timing (of the gift certificate) couldn't have been better.

My daughter was expecting our first grand-baby so I was in the market for a grand-parent's camcorder.

I had already been shopping for a camcorder. I wanted something with a USB connector. Not only did the Vado have that but it had a built-in HDMI connector. It uses its own 8 GB internal storage so I didn't have to buy a separate SDHC memory card.

I'd read a lot about problems with low light recording and shaking but I haven't seen problems with either of these.

The size is amazing. It is only slightly larger than my wife's Blackberry Pearl. It charges from the USB connector so you don't have to fool with a power adapter.

It wasn't obvious from the advertising but the USB presents a drive to Windows that has Autoplay. If you let the autorun.inf run, it installs a codec for the Vado and then launches a limited version of muvee's Reveal. It is pretty crippled, e.g. it won't convert to DVD, but it does Ok.

It even has a button that directly uploads to youtube. I've also used its capability to consolidate a couple of clips and output a .wmv.

The codec that is used by the Vado is a proprietary h.264. Even with the Vado codec installed, I've not been able to process the files directly using uLead DVD Movie Factory or Pinnacle Studio.

Posterous

2009-07-07T17:16:00.000-05:00

My wife has 2 shelves in our kitchen full of recipes. They're in boxes, magazines, books, and scraps of paper.

I've been wondering how I could help her keep up with them and find just the one she wants. Of course the first thing that came to mind for me was technology, perhaps a data base?

Then I came to my senses. I played around a little with Google Docs but that seemed awkward.

One day, I came across posterous.com. All you have to do is to e-mail something to post@posterous.com and it's posted. They even clean it up for you. For example, if there are multiple pictures, they setup a picture gallery!

You can see her recipes here.

There's a great podcast about it here.

Geotagging

2009-06-28T10:25:00.011-05:00

After our trip to Long Island last summer, I laboriously went through all my pictures on Picasaweb and geotagged them. I liked the result but not the effort!

So I've been investigating how to do this automatically. I searched high and low for GPS loggers. I looked at ATP PhotoFinder (original and mini), Sony GPS CS1KA, Qstarz BT-Q1000P, Canmore GT-730F(L), i-gotU GT-100, AMOD AGL3080, and more.

My key criteria were that I wanted it to be rechargeable via USB and to not require Windows drivers to get the data off the device.

The closest I came was the Columbus V-900. It recharged via USB and wrote KML files to a micro-SD card. That way all I needed was a micro-SD to SD USB adapter. Close enough so I clicked on "Submit" on Amazon.

Then I remembered my Blackberry Curve has GPS. Duh! I googled "Blackberry geotagging" and eventually found GPSLogger on some of the Blackberry forums.

It met both my criteria. Obviously the Blackberry is rechargeable via USB and GPSLogger creates standard format files on the Blackberry's micro-SD card.

The short version is that it just works. Surprisingly, it runs in the background. I've run it for 12 hours and it drew down about 1/2 the Blackberry's battery.

Here's the track in GeoLogger:

Here's the altitude:

And the speed:

Here's what I have for Options:

When you want to export the track, go to the path manager and "Export Path to Filesystem":

To apply the GPS data to the photos, I'm using GeoSetter. It's real simple but very capable.

Here's the result in Picasaweb.

Now I'm set for our next vacation. And I have to return the Columbus V-900.

KWORLD SA290-Q LE

2009-06-21T18:19:00.005-05:00

I've been trying to find a use for the Astar MP-32HB HD TV that I got a couple of years ago. When I got the Sony KDL52W3000, I moved the Astar to my bedroom. I ran it on cable-ready for a while but that was all SD. Then I got a second HD DVR for it.

That had a couple of problems. First was the cost, about $30 per month to Comcast. Second was the noise. The hard drive kept spinning up and down. I replaced the DVR once but the second did the same thing.

Really, all I watch back there is the 10 o'clock news and the late night talk shows. It seemed silly to spend that much money for that but I had gotten where I liked the HD quality.

That's where I was when the digital TV transition happened. What that brought was that Comcast started carrying the local stations in digital format and in HD resolution. Unfortunately the Astar doesn't have a QAM tuner.

What I did is got a KWORLD SA290-Q LE from newegg.com.

Notice that it will also do VGA out so you could drive just an old PC monitor.

Read the reviews on newegg.com. Lots of people complain about it. The setup instructions are non-existent but the comment thread helps a lot. I bought a cheap programmable remote (GE 24950) and replaced the terrible remote that comes with it.

It has a bright blue light indicating power. That wouldn't do in the bedroom. I covered it with a 1/2 inch square of black duct tape. Perfect.

I feed the Comcast cable directly into it and get around 30 digital channels, no cable-ready although I had expected them also. Most of the digital channels that I've checked are HD, some 720p, some 1080i. I use component video to drive the Astar.

It'll pay for itself in 2 months.

Firefox Again, Again

2009-05-20T11:42:00.004-05:00

This time I think I've found a keeper. I've been really leveraging Google's Hosted Apps for my domain using e-mail, Docs, Calendar, Tasks, Voice, etc. What I've run into is that IE7 (with IE7Pro) suffers seriously from memory creep. And no, I haven't tried IE8. IE7Pro reportedly doesn't work consistently with IE8.

The symptom I observed was that my real memory used crept up over 1GB after a couple of hours of usage. My T42 only has 1GB of RAM so that's bad. I could see this by firing up Windows Task Manager and looking at the Commit Charge at the bottom right. The Mem Usage of iexplore.exe would be a couple of hundred MB. When I'd stop IE7 the Commit Charge would drop lots more than what was attributed to iexplore.exe. Something was leaking somewhere! I suspect Javascript.

I thought I'd try Firefox again, again. Wanting to get as current as possible, I downloaded Firefox 3.5 beta 4. I haven't had a bit of trouble from the beta.

Most of the Add-ons I'd used before are still valid with Firefox 3.5 beta 4. Only Tab Clicking Options wouldn't work with it. This was easily replaced with Close Tab by Double Click. You don't even have to set any options. On QuickDrag I also checked "Open tabs for text searches in the foreground."

Besides the previous tweaks, I also found one to make search results open in a new tab.

howtogeek.com says:

Type about:config into the address bar, and then put the following into the filter box:

browser.search.openintab

Double-click the value to change it to true.

This time, I also turned off third party cookies.

So far, so good.

Atlantis Takes Off

2009-05-13T14:34:00.003-05:00

This week I flew down to Orlando to see Atlantis take off. As this was the last mission to the Hubble the area was packed. I watched from a location on the Cocoa Beach Causeway (SR 520).

The last mission to the Hubble was in 2002. This mission was scheduled for 2004 but scrubbed as too dangerous after the Columbia disaster in 2003. Post-Columbia, the plan in case of orbiter damage has been to keep the astronauts at the ISS until they could be rescued. This isn't possible when going to the Hubble. Hence, the Endeavour shuttle was on the other launch pad in case a rescue mission was required.

What sounds like wind noise starting at about 1 minute into it is the noise from the launch finally reaching our location. That says we were about 8-10 miles away. It gets louder as the shuttle gets higher then dies down.

Click on the HD in the bottom right corner of the picture. Depending on your Internet speed, you may want to then click on pause and let it load before playing.

This was shot with my Creative Labs Vado HD using a tripod (at first).

Oh, I haven't told you about the Vado HD have I? Later...

View Larger Video

IE8 Blocker

2009-05-01T16:45:00.002-05:00

I'm really pretty neutral on Internet Explorer 8 right now. I haven't played with it yet. Microsoft just moved IE8 over to "Critical" status so it'll get pushed to a PC near you soon. I'm pretty conservative on letting things get pushed to my PCs.

With IE7 I used the IE7 blocking tool from IntelliAdmin.com. It worked great.

With IE8 Microsoft came out with their own blocking toolkit. Needless to say, it's bigger than a breadbox! It ends up creating a script that you have to run from a command line and set switches. Yuk.

In the end, it simply creates a single registry key. I created a pair of .reg files that do the same thing.

Just download this zip file. In it are 2 files, one to block IE8 and one to unblock IE8. Just open the zip file and double-click on whichever you want to do. Click on "Yes" in the dialog box that comes up and you're done. Look at them pretty closely. Use at your own risk.

As I was preparing this post, I went back to IntelliAdmin.com to see if they had done something for IE8. Needless to say they have. They have added IE8 blocking to their Network Administrator tool. Their article is here.

It's not quite as trivial as my .reg files (it requires an install) but I'm sure it's very good.

contxts.com

2009-04-24T21:34:00.009-05:00

Sometimes I run across something that seems SO neat. So I go setup an account and play with it.

Then, I start wondering what I'm going to use it for.

I had that experience with contxts.com.

contxts.com is harder to explain than twitter.

Go to contxts.com and click on "get it free."

Fill in the form. Here's my sample.

And the result.

You can edit the field that is labeled "YOUR TXT CARD." You want to make this look kinda like a business card. Note that this field is simple text and is limited to 140 characters. Does this sound familiar?

I can't tell that the fields below with Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. do anything. I probably just haven't figured it out yet.

Ok. As one of my old bosses used to ask "So what?"

Here's how you use it. Say you want to share your contact information with a new acquaintance. Get their cell number (we'll use 601-444-2323 in this example) and send a text message from your phone (601-555-1212 in this example) with "send 6014442323" to 50500.

contxts.com will send a text message to 601-444-2323 with the text you put in the field of "YOUR TXT CARD."

An alternate method is to tell your acquaintance your "USERNAME" ("bogusname" in this example) and tell them to text that to 50500. They will receive a text message with the text you put in the field of "YOUR TXT CARD."

Here's what it looks like on my BlackBerry Curve.

Neat! Definitely. Useful? I dunno.

PS. Now that you understand this completely, go read foursquare's overview. Notice what shortcode they use. Huh?