Protecting Data on a Hard Drive the Hammer Way

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I use Acronis Drive Cleanser to wipe out hard drives (it overwrites every bit on the hard drive with 0’s and 1’s several times to stop anyone from recovering the data), but if you have a hard drive that is too borked to be wiped via software, you have a bit of a problem – because if you just toss it out, someone could retrieve it and if they thought the data was valuable enough, remove the platters and take your data. So, to prevent that, use the hammer method.

  1. Take hard drive
  2. Smash with medium to large size hammer
  3. Repeat until hard drive sounds like it’s full of sand when you shake it

Pictured above is the result of said process. The piece of crap Samsung hard drive died 60 days past its one year warranty, but it would still spin up so I knew the data was likely viable. The hammer method solved that!

Spammers Still Using My Domain

Sometimes I hate the way the Internet is so de-centralized and de-regulated…I understand those are the very reasons why it has grown to be such a great tool today, but sometimes the very things that make it so wonderful are the things that make it SUCK. For the past four months or so, a spammer (or series of spammers) has been using jasondunn.com as the reply-to domain for their email spam. The problem is that I have an all-domain email forward active, meaning that if someone sends an email to [email protected] (or anything else @jasondunn.com) I’ll get it in my Inbox. Normally this is a good thing, because it allows me to make up email aliases on the fly – meaning when I register for something at a Web site I can create a unique email address linked to that site (Amazon.com, Napster, etc.) Then, if I ever get spam to that unique email address that only that one site had access to, I’ll know they sold my email address and can simply set up a server-side block on that exact address. This is the way I’ve done my email for years, and it works really nicely.

Unfortunately, the one weakness is the scenario I find myself in: some piece of crap spammer is sending out umpteen thousands of email messages, and using random @jasondunn.com email addresses as the reply-to addresses. Every day I get 50 to 100 email messages that are bounces from email addresses that the spammer sent email to that no longer work, error messages from email accounts that are full, bounces from spam gateways telling me their blocking “my” spam, and even now and then an angry email from a real person who wants me to “remove them from my list”. This has happened before in the past, but the spammer s have always moved on to using other domains, so it lasts for a few days then stops. This time, it seems that the spammer in question isn’t changing his tactics – I’ve been getting hit with this stuff for months…and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it other than keep pressing that delete key – all because the Internet is so de-centralized and de-regulated.

It’s Official: Belkin Products Suck

In general, I try to give a company several chances to prove itself to me – I know that product defects happen, and that just because I happen to get a defective product, doesn’t mean that other people are going to have the same problem. Last night, however, was the last straw. Over the past year, I’ve had two defective Belkin KVM switches (the expensive DVI kind) go bad on me (one was bad right out of the box), I had a defective Belkin 802.11g router, a flaky pre-802.11n router that never worked right, and last night the last straw: I bought two Belkin wireless mouse/keyboard combo units from Dell a few months ago, 50% off, for only $20 each. I figured for that price, what did I have to lose? I’d keep ’em as spare units. I decided to take one over to my in-laws house to set up because they commented that someday they wanted to buy a wireless mouse/keyboard. I struggled with the setup for 30 minutes, including changing batteries, before I finally determined that the unit was defective. I tried setting it up on my laptop and had no luck there either. So from now on, I’m avoiding all Belkin products like the plague – they just don’t have the right level of quality control for me to trust their brand again.

Christmas Time…

One of the things I like about Christmas time is how everything seems to slow down…I get less email, less phone calls, less things that need immediate attention. I can relax, spend time with my friends and family, and not feel like my work life is piling up. It gives me a chance to re-charge my batteries, take it easy, and prepare to take on the new year. With all the travelling I’ve done over the past 90 days, I feel like my work/life balance has gotten out of whack and I need to focus hard on getting through reviews, getting my office organized, and making Thoughts Media more successful in 2007 (no complaints here though, I’m paying my bills).
What’s funny today though is that we’re getting a “white Christmas” about 72 hours too late – it was a brown and sunny Christmas, until today. Then it got cold, and started to snow. Here’s a picture I just took:

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A Fun Photo Project

I did a fun photo experiment on Digital Media Thoughts today, and it turned out quite well. Here’s the result:

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You can download a 1600 x 1200 sized version for square-screen wallpaper purposes.

More Massive Monitor Mayhem

My geek life just got more complicated. Remember I had ordered those three Dell 24 inch widescreen monitors? Well, Dell just released their new 22 inch widescreen monitors – and I got an email promo that says on the 26th and 27th they’ll be offering the monitors for $80 off, making them only $299 CAD each (that’s what the email says, though $80 off the published price of $399 is $319…). $299 for 22 inch widescreens! That’s crazy-cheap. So I’m in a quandary – I could get three of these 22″ widescreen monitors for $897 CAD versus the $2097 CAD for the three 24″ widescreens. And we’re only talking about two inches here. Big change in resolution though: the 24’s run at 1920 x 1200, the 22’s at 1680 x 1050. The 22’s aren’t as bright, and have a lower contrast ratio. But for the difference in price, would I notice? Hrm. Decisions, decisions. The monitor is so new I can’t find any reviews of it…

Three Days Before Christmas

I always enjoy Christmas time, because it means spending time with my family getting away from the stress of constant incoming email, and not staring at my table of review items that are taunting “Review me…review me!”. This year promises to be extra fun because Ashley and I bought presents for each other that the other doesn’t know about – quite often we want such specific things the other person knows what they’re getting. I’d tell you what I bought Ashley, but she reads this blog so that won’t be a good idea. 😉 Some random thoughts…

  • This Christmas we had the opportunity to reach out and help three groups of people in three specific ways, and we feel extremely blessed to have the financial resources to do so. I’m not a believer in being generous only at Christmas – responsible stewardship of our resources is a year-round task – but this time things just kind of fell into place. It brings Ashley and I tremendous joy helping others – I think people from the richer nations in the world would give even more if they knew what giving felt like (only a small percentage of the population gives on a regular basis).
  • My cold is finally breaking today – the past three days I’ve had congested sinuses, swollen glands and a touch of a cough. I very rarely get sick – I think the last time I had a cold like this was when I was in Scotland in 2004. I’m really hoping that when I wake up tomorrow it will all be gone. Here’s hoping! I haven’t been very productive lately because of this cold – it’s hard to think straight. I took some Benadryl yesterday morning, and I didn’t realize it was the “drowsy” version. I was half comatose for most of the day, feeling veeeery sluggish and more or less brain dead. Watched a lot of TV – The Lost Room miniseries was very cool!
  • I set up the R1800 printer last night – the geek paralysis was broken – and did a few test prints, including my first 13 x 19″ printer. STUNNING quality. I did a sunrise print on Epson semigloss and it looked amazing. I’m doing up a print for my mom, a 13 x 19 print of a sunset over the ocean in Hawaii, and I’m confident it’s going to turn out fantastic.
  • Today is the day that a very cool piece of hardware is supposed to show up. I’m not sure if I’m allowed to say what it is yet, so I’m not going to say anything…other than I’ve been told it’s coming with 2 GB of RAM and two 400 GB hard drives in a RAID 1 array. Mmm. Tasty!

Geek Paralysis

There’s a certain type of “geek paralysis” that occasionally happens when I buy a new piece of technology, but then I hold off on installing/unboxing it because an issue has come up and I’m not sure I’m going to be keeping it. That lovely Epson R1800 printer I bought a couple of days ago? I’m in geek paralysis over it. As someone very correctly pointed out on Digital Media Thoughts when I posted about it, what about Vista drivers? Will Epson release Vista drivers for the R1800, or will they use this as an excuse to release the R1850 that’s identical but has support for Vista? Back in the pre-XP days, I remember companies doing exactly that: I was running Windows 2000 and went to upgrade to Windows XP and I think it was my scanner that lacked drivers for XP. The company released a near-identical scanner, only with support for XP, and never released drivers for the scanner I had. I’m concerned that the same thing is going to happen with my R1800. The printer was $549 CAD + GST + environmental disposal fee, a complete set of ink for it is about $140 CAD, and the paper…oh man, the paper. 20 sheets of 13 x 19″ glossy paper is $83.99 CAD – over $4 each! Check out Epson Canada’s pricing – I’m gagging on my tongue. Worse yet, it’s really hard to find this stuff – my local stores carry 13 x 19″ paper for HP and Canon printers, but not many for Epson – watercolour and some velvet-finish type. I found a place in town that carries pretty much all Epson papers – The Camera Store – but in my current state of geek paralysis I don’t want to buy any paper until I know if I’m going to keep the printer. I’ve got an email in to an Epson PR person, hoping that he’ll respond with something to indicate to me if I should keep this printer and wait for the Vista drivers (which Epson Canada tech support said were coming for all models of printers – but do I believe them?).

25 Megabit Internet Access Now Offered…

Shaw, my local cable company, is the provider for my Internet access and our home phone (think high-grade VOIP). I currently pay an extra $10 per month to get 10 megabit per second Internet access, but they’ve recently started offering a package the blows everything else I’ve seen away, both in price and in performance. They have a 25 megabit offering that costs $99 CAD per month – the question is, would paying for this actually enhance my day to day Internet activities? As you can imagine, I’m online day in, day out, and am typically doing ten things at once – email, FTP, streaming video/audio, you name it. So I need a lot of bandwidth – but there’s a limit that most servers will be able to kick out at a time. I’m downloading 330 MB of video files from one of my servers now, which isn’t serving up much at all late on a Sunday night, and I’m only getting 600 KB/s of total downstream bandwidth. If you do the math, that’s 0.6 megabytes per second, and my 10 megabit connection can theoretically dish up 1.25 megabytes per second. So would going for the 25 mbps connection benefit me? Not really. I see this 25 mbps offering as a stepping stone for eventual delivery of HD movies on demand. I’d be better off getting a DSL line and figuring out some way to bridge the cable and DSL connections together for added speed and redundancy. I know Robert X. Cringely did the same thing, but I have no idea how…

A Lust-Worthy Printer: The Epson Stylus Photo R1800

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A few hours ago I picked up an Epson Stylus R1800 for the great price of $549 CAD, normally $699 CAD. Long story short, I was using my local Wal-Mart to do some holiday greeting card prints, and the colour reproduction was horrific – we’re talking truly pathetic. I couldn’t even find anyone that knew anything about colour to talk to, so I gave up and printed the photos myself at home on my R200, which turned out great. The reinforced my belief that being able to create great-quality output at home was of great importance to me, and being able to do larger prints has always been on my geek lust list. It’s also part of the re-configuring of my work area to better serve my goals of upping the game of my photography.

So, tonight I drove across the city to the one place in Calgary that had this printer that was open late on a Sunday, and picked it up. I was looking for a printer (available locally) that would do 13 ” x 19″ prints, but also printed on CDs and DVDs – and the list of printers that met those requirements was one item long: the R1800 (unless my research was inaccurate). I was initially a bit hesitant on getting this printer because it was released in February 2005, so it’s a bit old, but Epson made no move to replace it with a newer version at Photokina 2006, so it seems it’s still the most modern printer of its type – especially for $549. I haven’t even un-boxed it yet, but I’m really looking forward to it! Much to my dismay, the store was out of Epson 13 x 19″ paper, because someone bought an R2400 the day before and all of the 13 x 19″ stock at the same time. So I’m off to another store tomorrow AM to pick up some big paper to make my first prints.