Personal Cloud (your data anywhere)

There are some interesting new tools coming out with powerful implications - kind of like the 'place-shifting' & 'DVR' which allowed TV to be watched anywhere.

Your own 'World-Wide Drive' (WWD):
Any interesting new class of product is the PogoPlug appliance. For about $125 it lets you 'mount' a few USB drives which you nestle safely at home (or work). It supports Windows, MAC and Linux. So now while at home or at work or on the road, I have a magic drive "P:" which is my own private little 500GB of space. Course it's NOT a very speedy drive! Your broadband upload speed is tiny compared to real online servers. But it lets me keep PDF files of industrial protocols and other rarely needed stuff in easy reach. Plus it is MINE - all mine. I can maintain or backup my 500GB without paying monthly fees or getting nasty bandwidth warning from my broadband supplier! Plus it could expand to a dozen TB (1000 of GB) there if I wanted to.

The PogoPlug device is a small Linux-based appliance about the size of a USB drive with an Ethernet port and 4 USB host ports (aka: PC-like). You plug your USB drives into it - preferable drives which power down when idle. My only drive at the moment is a chromy-choco-brown Samsung 500GB drive which I bought on deep discount. The drive's a bit gaudy, but it is small, runs cool and spins down after 5 minutes of inactivity.

From your home Ethernet, the PogoPlug-driver fetches data directly via Ethernet, which makes the PogoPlug a simple 'home file server'. I can maintain or backup the files directly to a 1TB drive in my desktop.

When you are out & about, then the PogoPlug-driver uses HTTP (or HTTPS) to fetch your data via cloud servers which fetch it from your home box using encrypted UDP. You never need to know the IP of your home system because the PogoPlug keeps itself 'available' to the cloud 24/7. You can also 'share' the drive, so I could give YOU access to my protocol library or music files.

Is it secure? Probably fairly, being somewhere in between the 'very secure' of running your own dedicated Linux home file server with fixed IP, and 'not really secure' of an online file-space company. (Sure, those 'online' backup sites promise your files are private, but the files sit on a 'computer drive', where any bored night operator can browse your files looking for porn.) The PogoPlug system only bounces data packets through the cloud, so it would take a higher level of security breach to actually see your files as 'a drive'.

Magic WWW File Sync:
The other tool I am starting to use is Microsoft's Beta 'Live Mesh' service, which allows you to automatically sync files between internet-connected Windows (& MAC) computers. It has other features, but my main interest is in simple things like (as example) say there is a new version of 7-zip or OpenOffice. I can download the installers once, place them into a magic directory on one PC and eventually it will exist on all of my other computers.

Why not use my PogoPlug? For one thing the speed of the Pogo drive is not good enough to run applications - even opening a PDF file is slow since Acrobat jumps around the file so much as it read the file. So I find manually copying the file to a TEMP directory the best.

in contrast, the Live-Mesh solution allows me to just have the EXE/MSI installer magically appear on each of my local hard-drives. Is it secure? Is anything connected to the Internet? For now I am just using it for big things I need to 'have local' on each computer.

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Win7 and Blue Ray - is it free?

I been busy - now have an i7 core system up with Win7 Home Premium 64-bit. My 3D rendering with Poser 8 likes the larger memory.

To answer a question I didn't find answered directly: while Win7 'Media Center' now plays DVD for 'free', it does not play Blue Ray.  I always found that annoying in Win Xp Media Center 2002 - you needed to pay someone $20 to play DVD, and if I understand it correctly, the 'theory' is that the fine people creating the DVD encryption/encoding demand a 50-cent per copy royalty.  So your $20 is a $19.50 mark-up.

So now Win7 (somehow) lets one play DVD without buying a third-party addon.  But not so for Blue Ray - trying to run a Blue Ray disk causes a 'cannot play with any installed app' error.

Why Blue Ray?  Well, the internal BD-ROM/drives are now down to $50+ and i needed a new drive.   Just be aware - some of the lower cost drives don't come with software which plays Blue Ray (aka: you get a 'legal' DVD software suite which needs an 'upgrade' to play Blue Ray).

I bought the low-end LG model from newegg.com, in part because the lower cost LiteOn had lots of customer warnings that the included tool didn't play Blue Ray (seems rather counter-intuitive, but money is money I guess).

So now I have a NVIDIA GT-240 with HMDI/HDCP to an Asus 22-inch 1080p display.  Works great, but on such a small display one doesn't really 'feel' a huge difference between normal DVD and HD.  of course on a 60+inch HD TV I bet it's more meaningful.

Firefox 3.5 Embarrassments

(This entry is 'dated' and will become irrelevant some day - at the moment " Vista + FireFox 3.5 + Karpersky " is an incompatible combination)

Well, I had to stop using Firefox after it upgraded itself to 3.5 – but switching to Opera has started to grow on me. (http://www.opera.com/).  Opera seems very light and agile after using either FireFox or IE, and while it doesn't work well on heavy ASP business sites, but I can use IE for those anyway.

Although the issue has (perhaps) been solved for others, it hasn't helped me yet so I put this web page up to help others discover the secrets which a month of casual web searches didn't find for me.

Half the time when I start FireFox, it hangs using 100% of one of my four cores. Then I must open the Windows Task Manager and manually kill FireFox off.  Whenever FireFox does succeed in running again, I get that "this is embarrassing" error display which so many FireFox apologists are in love with.

Worse, I have FireFox set to open a BLANK page when it starts, so this "embarrassing" message about failing to reopen pages I don't want to see is beyond annoying. Again, the FireFox apologists say isn't it wonderful that a potentially harmful web page which crashed FireFox is the very first thing FireFox tries to open after restarting. If this crazy behavior was a user-option which I could enable or disable then I won't mind, but I am forced to accept this asinine default which over-rides my explicit request to always start FireFox with a blank page!

The issue is (I guess) solved for others, but not me.  http://support.mozilla.com mentions there is an issue with FireFox and Karpersky.

My company forces me to use Vista Business, plus Karpersky Internet Security 2009 – and some feature within ( Vista + FireFox 3.5 + Karpersky) clashes. Suggestions to “update Karpersky” don't help me because corporate “Security Policy” locks me out of doing anything with it. “They” (meaning IT) push down updates daily, but I have no idea when they'll risk the firmware update which works with FireFox given the strain Vista + Karpersky + MS Office 2007 + VPN causes on most of the notebooks around here.

Interesting twist to Win7

I have 2 systems with Win7- one I have been running full time, while the second is dual boot with Xp SP3.

The one running full time is "normal" and happy, while the one which dual boots has not run Win7 for a few weeks, and now it has a nifty little "your Windows is not genuine" warning complete with popups claiming I might be a victim of counterfeiters. Both were installed and validated with Microsoft supplied activation codes.

I suppose since it has NOT been running, Microsoft can't really tell if it is a old install or a ghost/image of one. Anyway, the Win7 should come out in Oct 2009.

Another minor annoyance - I have Qwest DSL and they provide a security suite, but it won't run on Win7 yet. I put a free Win7 version, but it prevents OpenOffice 3.1 from starting. So I have to disable the 'on access' checking to use Open Office.

Win7 RC

As any good geek, I have been playing with Win7 RC. It went surprising well - after a few instabilities which might have been due to an old NVIDIA 7100GS card. I doubt that was a very popular model, so upgraded to a nice ATI card with HDMI (with audio) output. I've also ordered the released Win7 to be shipped in Oct 2009.

I hope to use it as a Media PC (things like NetFlix, Boxee etc) and have the Win Media Center TV running fine with both analog (from basic cable) and digital channels active. It also runs OpenOffice for document editing.

I also have file-sharing active, with XP computers able to access the 1TB drive in the Win7 system. The file sharing was surprisingly easy to setup - its not the new Win7-only "HomeGroup" stuff, just older XP xompatible file sharing.

The system is Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 with 4GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 4650 with HDMI/HD audio to Asus 24-inch at 1920 x 1080 LCD. WD 1TB drive. Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-2250 (dual TV tuner)

Hard Drives Galore

I went to my 30-year high-school reunion last night - and I was reminded of this blog by several people who had read it recently, soundly declaring me a true geek due to my "perspective" on hardware. Hmmm ... good or bad? Well, at least I am still employed with a job paying me far too much to quit.

The subject of computer hard disk came up, as someone joking said that he felt clever just being able to add a second hard drive ... and I thought perhaps it appropriate to add my opinions on the subject here (as I wait for Win7 RC to load on an old system).

First, I'd suggest that one not "add" a second hard drive - it only wastes power (as in your cash & added green-house gases) plus it makes your life more confusing. Chances are the new hard drive will be both faster and use less power, which means it will heat up your computer (and room) less as well. So given the low cost of large drives these days, anyone wishing to "add" drive space in an older computer should instead:

1. Buy a nice 320, 500 or even 1000GB (1TB) drive - if your computer has the SATA ports, then buy a SATA (serial) drive drive. It is faster, plus the thinner cabling runs neater and allows better cooling in your case. Otherwise buy an older style.
   
2. Buy a full retail version and not an "OEM" version which comes bare and bubble-wrapped. The retail package costs $20 more, but comes with a CD utility you'll need - plus it promises your drive is not a used one (I have heard of people buying the "OEM" drives on line and discovering in the fine-print that it is a "reconditioned/used" one which coems complete with someone else's data!) OEM drives make the most sense for people buying more than 1 drive, but for 1 drive the cost savings isn't justified
   
3. Install the new drive (screw-driver perhaps required)
4. Your new drive should now function as a second drive, but you do NOT need to format it yet.
   
5. Run the utility on the CD which came with the drive and it will allow you to "copy" or clone the data (including Windows) from your old drive to the new drive. It magically "expands" the Windows space to fit the new larger drive.
   
6. After you shut down the computer, remove the old drive. When restarted, your computer will runs the newer, roomer, faster, cooler-running drive ... plus your old drive a pure "backup" of your system.
7. Either store the old drive, or pay $20 more to buy an EXTERNAL USB enclosure for it. I tend to do that with my old drives - I can then use them for backups or like 80GB floppy drives.

I bring this up in part because a few months ago I was aghast to read an article in a well-respected computer magazine which explained how to reload Windows, and the sample computer "like one your relatives ask you help with" had three hard-drives - the smallest 40GB and largest 120GB. They suggested one buy Norton Ghost and do both disk images plus manual data backup of the old drives so they could be reformatted.

It was a nice article, yet wrong. The writer should have suggested that "the user" NOT buy Norton, and instead use the money saved to buy a 500GB drive. The other three older drives would NOT require backup, as Windows would be installed fresh on the new larger drive. Then once the 500Gb drive was working, the user could pull files from the older drives temporarily installed for that purpose. All three of the old small drives should have been retired, plus would have remained their own backup!

I am also waiting for a hard-drive test to complete on a pair of new 1TB drives I purchased (yes, these were the OEM form). I am running a destructive Western Digital write+read test which I found on the free Ultimate Boot CD, which is indeed I guess a geeky tool. It includes all kinds of free tools on a self-booting CD which allow running memory tests, disk tests and so on.

The 2 new drives are the Western Digital "green products" (WD10EADS), which just means they run at the older slower speed of 5400 RPM. One of the new tetrabyte drives is going into a "media computer" I am setting up to enable watching online NetFlix movies on the main TV. It will also function as a network file server and I figure the slower "green" speed makes sense. The second drive will go into a Vantec/Nextstar 3 USB enclosure for use as backup, and since it runs over USB the slower drive speed should not be an issue.