The other day my dad got me some new type nimh rechargable batteries from costco. They are called Eneloop made by Sanyo.

I have been using them for several weeks now. Both in my Altec Lansing inMotion ipod portable speakers and in my Canon S2 IS camera. They last amazingly long and recharge way faster than my Energizer batteries. Usually the energizers can go dead within a few days. They also take over 30 minutes to charge on their own 15 minute speed charger. The eneloops can last over a year charged without use. They even come charged in the package. I also just charged a set of four AAs in 10 minutes on my Energizer charger.

They just rock. Finally what rechargeable batteries should have been all along. I definitely recommend these to anyone who wants to be a little green and not use disposable batteries.

Our tax refund came in last week. My wife just loves to do our taxes, have it direct deposit to her checking account and then dole an allowance to me. Of course she almost always uses it to update something on the house. But this time I got to spend a little on something. A nice new Roomba 560 from Linens and Things.

Cnet had a good review on the 560 last fall. It has an improved vacuum, traction etc. You can read the review HERE.

The trick to buying an item like this from Linens and Things is to print off the 20$ discount coupon from the Internet. Here is a link to the 20% Coupon. It expires Dec 31, 2008. I was able to get the 560 for $305 including sales tax using the coupon.

The first one I got was dead out of the box. Would not power up or charge at all. Linens and Things exchanged it with no questions asked. The second one worked perfect. It made a little musical tone the moment I pulled out the battery protection tab from the bottom of the unit. Then I let it charge over night. It has been great. Our hardwood floors even feel cleaner when walking around in bare feet. Not that we ever had a messy house. It just makes so much difference in the feel of the floors and quality of the air having the roomba run twice a week during time we are out of the house. You can schedule the 560 for one time during any day of the week. So you can schedule say twice a week at 930am during the day while you are at work.

I was listening to Techometria with Phil Windley on IT Conversations. I just found out OpenDNS has added more category blocking now. It goes beyond just Phishing and Adult content. Say you want to block p2p, file storage and webmail for your organization to reduce likelihood of someone getting to sites to bypass your protections. Now you can. Just setup a login and you can block the categories you need. Very cool.

Yet more records get lost by businesses this year. Some closer to home for me than others. So just to be safe I decided to track down my Fed guaranteed annual credit report. Here is all you have to do if you are a USA resident. If you go to any site but this one they could be selling you a service. This is the site the agencies setup in response to the Federal law to provide the annual free report. If you do not want to check it online you can request it via phone or mail.

Since it is a new year I was updating things in my iCal on my mac. I got to wondering if there was a way to subscribe to iCalendars (RFC 2445) shared calendars. Not import but actually subscribe so they stay up to date. I found an open source project called Remote Calendars. The latest version is v6.3 on May 19, 2007. So its fairly current. If you are a windows users and want to subscribe to iCalendars you can give it a try.

I just wish more groups used iCal feeds for their schedules. I was looking up our local library to see what they offered for computer classes and see if it was something I could volunteer to help with. The schedule is on the web page only and as a PDF flier.

Alternately if you are not an outlook user, there is always Mozilla Sunbird. It is a free calendar program that supports iCal subscriptions.

Links Mentioned:
Remote Calendars iCal for MS Outlook 2003 & 2007
Mozilla Sunbird
iCal Share - Lots of Publically Shared Calendar feeds
RFC 2445 - Internet Calendaring and Scheduling Core Object Specification

Putting up your prefab Christmas tree? Does it give you a hard time going back into the box? Rather than get a case of the prickly arms trying to squeeze it into the box try a towel or multiply trash bag. Just lay it around the section of the tree you are working on and squeeze it back down into storage shape. It will be much more comfortable and easier to get it into the box for storage.

Those of us who travel for work have already heard about the new guidelines from the TSA regarding carrying Lithium batteries onto planes effective January 1, 2008.

But you should take this into account all the time. My dad twice has had his pocket get really warm all the sudden from spare batteries in his pocket shorting with contact from keys and change. He takes lots of photos so he carries a spare set all the time. He recently gave me a small plastic case made for carrying my spare batteries when I am out taking pictures. He now carries his this way. Unfortunately I cannot find the simple 4 battery case online to link here. BUT I did find a nice 8 battery case meant for photographers to toss in their bag. You can find the case over at B&H Photo for $9.00 USD. If only cyberguys carried like a five pack of the four battery plastic holders. I would buy that in a minute.

I was browsing the Sunday sales flier for a not so best purchase price establishment. $129 for their team of specialists to “protect your new pc.” Gets you Antivirus, antispyware, installation and a so called speed and performance boost. Ok. Let’s start with antivirus. AVG is FREE for home users. Antispyware? How about Microsoft Defender and occasionally run Adaware, again both are FREE. Top that with setting up your system for OpenDNS and you can block phishing, adult content etc. How much? You guessed it, FREE again. Lastly. Speed and performance boost?!? Are they kidding? On a new pc what are they going to do, remove all the crapware that comes on the pc while replacing it with some half junky bloatware AV package they love to sell in their ads? Any IT person with experience knows the two “classic” AV packages nearly rate as viruses themselves in what they do to Windows stability and performance. Do yourself a favor. Apply the $129 toward a nice iPod Nano, subscribe to some podcasts and use these free solutions instead. Don’t forget going into add/remove programs and removing all that crapware is free too with a few mouse clicks.

Links Mentioned:
AVG Antivirus
Microsoft Defender - Antispyware
Adaware - Antispyware
OpenDNS - help block phishing, adult content etc for free.
Previous FiT Post on OpenDNS

A lot of folks got GPS units this year. Remember like any computer they require updates. My dad gave us a Garmin 2820 for our wedding gift last year. I had been forgetting to update the firmware and voice module until yesterday. We were over a whole version number behind on the firmware. It can update interface bugs, bluetooth firmware to interoperate with your phone etc. What got me on the path was we gave my inlaws a Garmin 650 for Christmas. They were driving down to a wedding in Florida this past Friday. Somehow a unit that has no bluetooth module came up on the screen to discover a bluetooth device. Talk about a bug. It completely froze his unit and he could not get control. So he called me and I found that the unit has a reset button off to one side he had missed. Pressing that then powering back on fixed the issue.

Map updates always cost money every year. But most firmware updates are free. So be sure to register your unit, install the software on a pc, connect the gps via usb cable and run your updates.

I cannot stress the importance of having an offline backup. An offline backup is a copy of all your valued data to a backup medium such as an external hard drive that is stored on a shelf, in a safe etc. Anywhere but plugged in. Ideally you put it off site as well in your bank’s safe deposit box.

Storage is cheap these days. Just check out all the holiday sales on external usb drives. Get yourself one, copy all your data to it once a month then store it someplace safe where it is not plugged in. I use my safe here at home until I can move it to my safe deposit box away from the house.

I just spent two hours trying to recover data for my wife’s friend. The internal hard drive of the computer claims to be 2TB. A heck of a bargain when it originally was 40GB. The external drive she was using for backup is also toast. It sounds like a bomb waiting to go off. The reason for the loss? A nasty storm and only using a surge strip. Surge strips are a waste of money for anything but the most basic of electronics. Computers, game systems etc. Get yourself a UPS. That might have saved this person from the loss of all their data except what I could piece together from their ipod and a few usb thumb drives.

Still the best solution is an offline copy of all your data where no power hit or fire can affect it.

I heard about Scratch on Phil Windley’s Technometria as released through IT Conversations.

Scratch is an awesome visual programming environment made by folks at MIT. Drag and drop coding with color and shapes to each object. It is perfect for teaching programming to kids. It even has a social component in that you can click a button to submit your creation back up to the Scratch site to share with everyone. At the time I write this over 49,000 projects have been shared on the Scratch site. It is free for both Windows and Mac OSX.

Here is a snapshot from the Scratch Introduction PDF showing how a small program is built.

Uploaded with Skitch!

The quote from the Scratch About Page:

Scratch is a new programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art — and share your creations on the web.

Scratch is designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills. As they create Scratch projects, young people learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also gaining a deeper understanding of the process of design.

Today I saw an article from Computerworld on a Gmail flaw. Basically if you are logged into your Gmail account, then visit a compromised site it can let malicious folks add filters to your Gmail forwarding email or email with attachments to another place.

The lesson here. LOG OUT! When you are done with Gmail, or your Banking site, or any other site that deals with your private information and money. LOG OUT! Find the link on the page and click it BEFORE you do anything else. Particularly if it’s money related. Paul and Larry talked about the same issue over on Pauldotcom. They don’t visit any other site or check email while doing online banking. Then they log out, close their browser completely and open it again for normal browsing. Why not check email? Think how much email you get that acts like a web page (aka HTML Email). Those can cause exploits to run.

So remember. Safety first. When dealing with your private information and money. Do just that task then log out. To be extra safe close your web browser completely then open it again for less important web work. If you don’t log out your session can still be active until you restart your browser. All it will take is one spam email laden with an exploit for a popular service like Gmail or a major bank. Or even a targeted attack at folks who blog with wordpress. They could take over or spam your blog through your own logged in session. Then lots of people will wish they clicked those two words. Log Out.

There have been so many stories about how NBC is going to market its content. I like the latest one. NBC is going to offer free downloads that last seven days then expire. Windows only of course. You can see the NY Times article over at cnet.com

Here is my take. NBC, you are nuts. As a consumer and scifi fan I decided to grab Heroes on iTunes to catch up since I never watched the show before. I watch NOTHING else from your network. I barely watch tv at all any more with all the free content from podcasts etc. I like Heroes. I would have dropped my money for an iTunes season pass in a heartbeat. But now. You must be running a fever. You are trying so hard to get back at Apple that you are destroying an income source. People like me who like and are happy in the iTunes structure. I have an AppleTV etc.
Now here are the consequences of your actions. Consumers who want the content for free will find a way to get it. I liked Heroes well enough to be looking forward to the next season. So now instead of getting a dime of my money I will set my Microsoft Media Center DVR to record the show (for free) and I will skip every ad in it while watching. Now even your advertisers won’t get a penny of benefit from your decision.

The stock holders in NBC should make you feel like a roasted Thanksgiving Turkey. You can’t make up your mind about what you are doing and you are cutting out Apple users at every turn. Amazon Unbox, Hulu and now this free direct service. I will go with the door option, my own free method and skip your advertising to boot. My wife will be doing the same with Friday Night Lights. You are delusional from what is obviously a bad case of old school media mogul bird flu. Best of luck to ya.

After seeing a number of articles lamenting the Firefox plugin Adblock Plus I decided to try it.  It works on Firefox regardless of windows, mac etc.  Just save yourself some grief and subscribe to one of the blocking signature feeds.
I can say one thing for sure.  It sure works great.  I have several IT news sites I read.  I was on the verge of stopping from reading them any more AT ALL.  Let’s just say their names match the pattern *world.com.  It was infuriating to get not just a front page ad BEFORE you could reach the site but then these horribly invasive flash overlays would not let me even read the front page at times.  Ad block plus sure took care of that.

The downside.  I agree to some extent that sites rely on advertising for income.  Podcasters frequently do this since their shows are free on their own.  Another thing I have noticed it that it blocks some embedded flash content like video and audio tools for ustream, talk shoe etc.  So what I decided to do is leave adblock plus installed.  But click the icon  for ABP that is in the top right corner of your firefox web browser when I go to sites I want to be sure to support and have the flash tools work.  Such as this site, Typical Mac User etc.  Just choose Disable on this site and it will add the site you are viewing to be excluded from ad blocking.

Some commerical web sites are definately more readable with the dozens of ads they stick everywhere blocked.  I agree on the creator of ad block plus’ statement that too many ads make it a horrible experience for users.

While messing with setting up a Personal Domain option on my Apple dotMac account I had a simple but inspired thought. I use DynDns to make a friendly DNS name for my home connection. But what if you don’t like using a domain name like me.homedns.org? Here is a quick trick and it works. Make a new cname entry for something like home on your registered real domain. Have it point to your DynDns name, like me.homedns.org. Then when you do something like home.mypublicdomain.com it would kick over to your home pc and kept up to date via DynDns. It hides the uglier name of me.homedns.org. Keep in mind it will break if you do not keep your DynDns entry updated for your IP address with their client or other method.

To sum up, make a cname with the alias of home pointing to me.homedns.org as an example.

If you want screen shots for Godaddy check out my posting over at Typical Mac User. Just alter the last step of the cname. Make a new one rather than editing www.

Ok I admit it. For lounging around I picked up this T-Shirt from ThinkGeek.com.  My wife just LOVES mine.  Yeah right.
Show your Commodore 64 pride, click the photo and get one of your own.

I loved it back then. My first computer was a Commodore Vic-20. I recall saving $80 for an 8K memory expander for my solid ole Vic. Yup I said 8KB not 8MB. I had learned to program by turning a stock simulation paper game of my stepdad’s into a simulation. It got so big I had to have the memory expander just to finish it. The first storage I had was the tape cassette drive. I went to heaven when I got the first modem that was not acoustic. No more knocking yourself offline if you played your music too loud.

Next in my computer life came the C64. The best home pc ever. Hours of typing in games from magazines. I was in real heaven the day I got my first 1541 floppy disk drive. I could actually SAVE those games after entering them. I wrote my own BBS software and even had to get a second 1541 to host my BBS. Along came another C-64 when my first one finally died. The c-64 rocked more than anything for the programmer’s guide you could get for it. Peek, Poke and you were in the world of assembly language.

In those days online consisted of dialup BBS systems. You can find a list of the ones I frequented here: http://bbslist.textfiles.com/205/ I remember folks like Rocky Rawlins, Robert Broome and Richard Foshee. There was a time in the mid 80s where we actually did not need passwords. You just entered your name and started talking to folks via the message boards. Then the teen flamers started and I recall all the major BBS admins and programmers in the area teaming up to help each other implement password authentication.

I did a little Apple IIe work in high school labs. But I never had one of my own. I even recall the hype of the colecovision based computer. It sounded so good at the time but completely failed to live up to the hype. It was a turn key system complete with printer. The printer was so bad it was driven by what appeared to be fishing line.

The last computer I got before I finished high school was the Commodore Amiga 1000. Man were the graphics and music beautiful on that system. I actually used that computer all the way through my first three years of college to do my papers in the word processor and dot matrix printer. It was in the University library I got exposed to Apple again. It was way easier to write up physics and chemistry lab reports on a mac.

Now I see the Commodore name is back. This time as a windows based gaming machine. They do have an online web based C-64 emulator in their site. You can find them at http://www.commodoregaming.com/

Oh those were the days….

Victor from the Typical Mac User podcast and I have a discussion that starts with OpenDNS. We both had it setup in our Apple Airport Extreme N routers. Yet OpenDNS doesn’t work. We talk about why, what the options are. Since we were on DNS we move onto DynDNS and Lighthouse. Lighthouse is an application that lets you easily open ports on your router via UPnP aka Dynamic Port Forwarding.
Links Mentioned:

• OpenDNS
• DynDNS
• Lighthouse

 

 Standard Podcast [21:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Sooner or later everyone hears about Dynamic DNS.  Good for giving your home network a human readable name.  Some but not all routers support having a dynamic DNS account.  More often users rely on a software client loaded on a pc behind their router to phone in and update your IP address.  Mac users have had a second rate client for a long time.  Well recently www.dyndns.org updated their mac client.  It is WAY better now.  It runs in the background once you set it up.  No more having to leave it running under a user account.

So if you are mac user and wanted something like myhome.homedns.org as your DNS name for connecting to things you share out at home give the new client a try.

Links Mentioned:

• http://www.dyndns.com/support/clients/beta.html