Category: Internet & Technology

The above image, taken from this blog, is sobering for a long-time Windows guy like myself. The Mac marketshare numbers continue to grow, and if this image is any indication what the average college student is using, I wonder what sorts of shifts we’ll start to see in market share five years from now? As much as I like Vista, it just doesn’t measure up to what I was expecting to see from an operating system that had been worked on for five years. Will Vista be remembered as the tipping point for when Microsoft’s empire started to fall? I sure hope not, but I’ve lost count of the number of people I know that have switched to OS X…

Speed. There aren’t many Internet users who wouldn’t want Web sites to load faster, files to download quicker, and email messages with large attachments to get sent faster. Upload speed in particular hasn’t kept pace with download speeds – over the past five years I’ve seen my cable modem downstream speeds double from 5mbps to 10mbps, but the upstream speeds have inched up to only 1mbps. Having 1mbps of upstream bandwidth is more than enough for regular email, even with some hefty attachments, but once you start looking at uploading 500 MB worth of photos or a 100 MB video to YouTube, upstream bandwidth starts to become the bottleneck. There’s also the issue of network stability – it doesn’t matter how fast your connection is if it’s down.

So in light of that, I started to look at hardware that allows you to bond together multiple cable modems or DSL modems, giving you a faster connection. I remember systems similar to this back in the 56K modem days – they called it “shotgunning” back then if memory serves. There’s relatively cheap hardware from D-Link ($179 USD), and there’s a solution from Linksys that’s roughly double the price. In addition to the faster upload speed, which I desperately want, there’s the issue of external network stability and speed. Sometimes I’ll find that the connections that Shaw (my local cable modem provider) peers out to are bogged down, and I often wonder if I had Telus DSL (the “other guys”) I’d be seeing better overall performance.

There are some catches with this approach however: in my research thus far I’ve found that each “connection” can only be attached to one external modem. So if I’m doing an upload to YouTube, it will go out via one of the modems, not giving me a combined upload speed of two modems. If an uploader is multi-threaded (say, a photo uploader) then each thread can run on each of the modems, giving a much faster experience. But quite often the things I’d want more upload speed on are things like big FTP uploads, which if it’s a single file, is only going to use one modem.

So while I started out quite excited about the idea of bridged Internet access over two high-speed modems, it seems the reality of the situation makes it a bit less appealing. Anyone out there doing this have any thoughts?

I’ve never had any dealings with the folks at Etymotic, and while I’m sure their headphones are impressive, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing when I saw this ad on another Web site:

The ety8 headphones might sound amazing for all I know, but they look too much like big, clunky earrings for me to ever be comfortable wearing them out in public. When I saw them my first thought was of Star Trek, and not in a good way – if I geek like me gets a negative impression from that, then on the street it could only be worse.

It’s kind of ridiculous that the leading MP3 players (iPod, Zune, Sansa) still don’t have Bluetooth built-in – yet with Bluetooth designs like this, maybe it’s not so surprising…

Today I started up the Windows Task Manager on Vista and had a small heart attack when I saw a process running called KeyboardListenerServer.exe. When I see a file name like that, the first thought I have is “Ok, that’s some sort of key-logging spyware.” I wouldn’t be that surprised to see it on someone else’s computer, but on my computer? Never! I don’t run anti-virus software and haven’t for years. Intelligent computing (using your brain) prevents 99.99% of all virus or spyware installs. I immediately did a Google to try and see what it was…and got zero results. Uh-oh. You never want to be the first guy in Google to find a virus or piece of spyware – it’s like being patient zero with Ebola; no one is going to have a cure for you, they’ll just learn from your sickness and try to help others.

At this point I’m really puzzled, but before I go diving into the system registry, I expand the description column just to see if there’s any clue about what type of spyware this is. What do I see? “Keyboard Listener Server EXE for Logitech Gadgets”. Thanks Logitech for scaring the crap out of me! It turns out it’s just the process for a Logitech Vista sidebar gadget that I added – one that keeps track of how fast I’m typing (it currently says 158 WPM – that seems a bit high) and another one that keeps track of how often I use the backspace key (currently at 6.3%). Why not give the process a name that has, oh, I don’t know, the name Logitech in it so the user knows it legitimate? Why give it such an ominous-sounding name? Why not LogitechSpeedTyper.exe or something similar? Come on Logitech, you can do better than that…

One of my personal pet peeves is when people email a large group of people and don’t use the Blind Carbon Copy function in their email client. I’ve never ranted about it properly in public before, but I can’t do any better than my buddy Wes Salmon did over here at his blog a few years back. I liked his description so much I used it in a college class that I taught for two semesters. Here’s the tasty excerpt for the time-challenged among you:

“It was at this point that I realized that email has for me at least, become the modern day technological version of herpes. If the email version of a condom had been used, also known as the Bcc field, I would be ok but it wasn’t used and I had no way of forcing it anyway…If they were to practice unsafe Internet usage, and let’s face it most people do, chances are good that they would get some sort of virus or trojan that would grab all the email addresses out of their inbox and begin to do terrible things with them. Not only could I now start getting spam because of this message, I could also have my address used to forge other spam and viruses as more recent versions of these tools have resorted to doing. So welcome to the technology of the future, binary herpes that most people don’t even know they are spreading.”

Wes nailed it dead-on: unprotected, mass-email, is like an STD. I’ve posted before about how it’s sometimes hard to find the BCC function, but I really think that software developers need to get it through their skulls that people are sometimes not very smart (myself included here) and we need some help. What can be done? A simple check should be done on any outgoing email, and if there’s more than, say, a dozen people in the CC or TO field, a polite and friendly warning should pop up in the email client (or Web site) that would encourage the user to use the Blind Carbon Copy field – and a simple one-click of the “Yes” button would do it for the user, moving all the email addresses to the BCC field. Clicking “Yes” would also turn on BCC if it isn’t already active. One part education for future uses, and one part practicality in allowing the user to not have to re-do any of their work.

Microsoft? Google? Yahoo? Time to wake up and bring some practicality to this situation – it’s been ignored for too long. Quite often, especially where business emails are involved, I’ve found that the person sending the email knows they should use BCC, but they simply forget. We need software that would remind them, and allow a one-click fix.

The trigger for this blog posting was two separate emails today that I received from PR and marketing “professionals” where in both cases my email address was in the CC line along with hundreds and hundreds of others. Not only it is a violation of my privacy – I didn’t give these marketing people my permission for them to share my email address with hundreds of others – but it’s also exposing me to all sorts of potential spam. I see this at least half a dozen times a month, and in more than one case I’ve suddenly started receiving news updates from random blogs after it happens. When I questioned how they found my email address, these blog owners sheepishly explained that they used all of the email addresses they found as a basis for their email list.

If you’re reading this blog, odds are high that you’re probably amongst the top 1% of Internet users – please, do the world a favour and teach your friends and family about how, and when, to use BCC. Until the software developers making email software and Web sites take some responsibility for this, user education is our only option.

I use Exact Audio Copy (EAC) to rip my CDs because over the years I’ve heard countless glitches in CD rips I’ve made from my collection – EAC is a great tool for getting bit for bit perfect rips. When I put in a CD, my hope of course is that it’s in the freeDB database so I don’t have to type in the names of all the tracks. I’m a fan of a particular genre of A Capella music, typically referred to as “College A Capella”, which usually involves 20-something college students doing all-vocal versions of modern pop songs. At any rate, I bought a new CD (Best of College A Capella 2006) and popped it into the DVD drive and EAC happily identified it. It wasn’t until I was using MediaMonkey to embed the album art that I noticed that the artist name and song name were identical across all 20 tracks. I know it can be tricky entering in information for multi-artist CDs, but the odds of a group doing a song called “The Reason” and their group name being “The Reason” are pretty damn slim, don’t you think? Off to re-type a lot of information…

I’ve been in semi-stealth mode the past few days, but not by choice: my main workstation is massively screwed up. I’ll probably post a detailed explanation on Digital Media Thoughts
later today, but in a nutshell here’s how it went down:

1. I purchased and installed Acronis TrueImage 11, as I always do with every new version of their software. I’ve used it for years and really like it.
2. I installed it, rebooted, everything seemed fine.
3. The next morning I rebooted and was informed that there was no operating system on my hard drive. It seems TrueImage had mucked up the master boot record.
4. I used Vista’s repair tool to fix the master boot record, which worked, but then Vista would complain about a missing/corrupt DLL after login – I’d only see a black screen. I could boot into safe mode, but after two days of research trying to fix this problem, I gave up.
5. I tried to restore back to the TrueImage backup from the night before this problem, but guess what? Same corrupt MBR and Vista problems. Did I mention that I overwrote the TrueImage 10 daily backup with the TrueImage 11 daily backup?
6. I fought with it all day, then gave up and installed a “clean” image of Vista for this machine. Unfortunately I had an ATI video card in this machine originally, and now have a NVIDIA card…and Vista really didn’t like that. Even after uninstalling the ATI drivers, when applying the 34 patches since I made this build, Vista would bluescreen over and over. Crash crash.
7. So I gave up on EVERYTHING and did a clean install of Vista from scratch and have been re-building everything.

The ultimate irony here? I couldn’t get the client software for Windows Home Server to work, which is why I was still using Acronis TrueImage. If the Windows Home Server software had worked, I wouldn’t have bought TrueImage 11 and been put in this situation. 🙁

Here are some random bits of information I’ve discovered about my Dell XPS M1330 in the past few days:

• The issue where, upon resuming from sleep mode, the M1330 will drop from 1280 x 800 resolution down to 1024 x 768, seems o have no fix at this time. I called XPS tech support and they weren’t even aware of the issue (which I find hard to believe, it’s mentioned all over the place). It happens perhaps 25% of the time, and the only fix it to go into the display settings and set it back to 1280 x 800.
• Upon resuming from sleep mode, the screen will light up as normal, then go black, then come back. This is irritating. The solution (which I found in this forum) is to go into the Task Scheduler (just type Task at the start bar and you’ll find it). Look under MICROSOFT > WINDOWS > MOBILEPC and you’ll see a task listed called TMM. Right-click on it and select DISABLE. This will address the issue.
• Although the XPS tech I spoke to insisted otherwise, upgrading the graphics driver for the NVIDIA GeForce 8400M GS with a driver right from NVIDIA isn’t possible. Only a driver directly from Dell will work, which sucks because it means I’ll never be able to have the highest-performing drivers.
• I have a D-Link DIR-855 802.11n router and was having a lot of connectivity problems with the XPS M133o – it would always connect initially, then it would drop the connection…but only for certain types of requests (seemingly). I could ping anything (I ran a ping -t), but no Web pages would load, nor would email. Vista’s “Detect and Repair” thought that the connection was perfect, so it was no help (I suspect it does a ping to check connectivity). This issue was driving me crazy, but after installing the 1.05 firmware on my router, and updating the BIOS on the M1330 to A06, it’s now working fast and stable.

UPDATE: A solution was presented in the comments section: disabling the TMM scheduled task. I did that, and guess what? No more resolution switching. No more “fade to black” effect. Nice!