Friends in Tech

Is once daily enough?

Kevin Devin — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 15:43:52 +0000

I’ve been using the beta version of SyncToy 2.0 to synchronize my mini-mobile USB hard drive to the file server. It’s been a great safeguard. All of my working data is kept on the mobile unit rather than the laptop’s hard drive due to space constraints. This also allows me to simply take the mobile hard drive home alone to work on as opposed to my entire laptop. This is VERY handy considering that I’ve been commuting by bike a lot lately.

But I only synchronize my data from the mini-mobile hard drive to the server once a day. Today, I found that to be a mistake. Not a major mistake, but good enough of one to make me tweak my method. After working on a project most of Friday, I took the unit home to work on over the weekend only to forget to bring it back in with me today. No problem, I have a copy up on the server. Whoops… if I work with that data, everything I did on Friday and over the weekend is lost.

So… I’ve now tweaked my scheduled sync to run twice a day — once in the morning, and then again in the afternoon before I leave. The task scheduler within XP makes it a breeze to do so too.

Open the task from within Task Scheduler, go to the Schedule tab, at the bottom of the screen check the box “Show multiple schedules.” Then, click on the “New” button at the top and set your second schedule for the task. In my case, the first task instance is set to fire at 9:30AM and the second instance is now set to fire at 3:30PM.

SyncToy v2.0 Beta

Review - Belkin Mini Surge Protector

George Starcher — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 22:28:08 +0000

I had been waiting on Belkin to get this unit out since I heard of it. Finally on Monday I stumbled onto it at the Apple Store. It is a nice little three ac outlet travel surge strip with two additional USB charging ports. It will even charge Motorola phones which are notorious for only charging with units made just for them.

Belkin Mini Surge Protector

Update: You can find the Belkin unit at CDW for $22.
http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/default.aspx?edc=1440970

Review - ATP Photofinder for Geotagging Photos

George Starcher — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 09:02:08 +0000

Victor and I each ordered an ATP Photofinder. Our experiences were definitely different. Give our review discussion a listen and hear the good, bad and ugly about the ATP Photofinder.

You can get it at a good deal from Costco. Just click here to find it for $79.99 till June 30th. Buy at your own risk.

Mingling Miis on your Nintendo Wii

George Starcher — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 14:18:44 +0000

Many of us have or are new owners of the Nintendo Wii. A wonderfully fun gaming console. Even my wife loves it. Well loves to kick my butt in bowling anyway.

We like to see our friend’s Miis next to us when we bowl rather than randomly generated Miis. I talk about how to setup your Miis to Mingle on your friends Wii consoles without having to actually send them your Mii itself.

Tags: Nintendo Wii, Mingle Miis

CERT Online IT Training

George Starcher — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 01:21:18 +0000

Looking for some great online training content for IT related topics? Check out the CERT Virtual Training Environment. There is a ton of free content. Those of you in the DoD environment can take advantage of the sponsored account agreement with DISA and get access to the full library of online training.

They have topics for all sorts of computer security and forensics tasks. Here are just a few!

Advanced dd Usage

Application Filtering and Network Access Controls

Automated Collection of Process Information (FRUC)

Avoiding Routing Loops

Basics of Dynamic Routing

Tags: CERT, Training

Nintendo Fan Network

Kevin Devin — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:59:05 +0000

This past weekend my son and I were able to take in a Mariners game as part of Little League Weekend. Knowing about the Nintendo Fan Network, we made sure to bring along my son’s DS Lite.

I believe the NFN is only available at Safeco Field in Seattle, but I’m sure there must be similar geeky offerings at other stadiums throughout the country.

If you know of any geeky-goodness like this offered at other ballparks, let us know. Drop us a line or post to the forums about it.

Nintendo Fan Network
Seattle Mariners

Forgot your Thumbdrive?

Mike McBride — Thu, 29 May 2008 02:10:21 +0000

So you’re a PC tech, and you’re used to being called in to look at problem PC’s under all sorts of circumstances, and you probably have all the SysInternals tools loaded on a thumb drive just for those occasions. Well, what happens when you don’t have it available?

Head over to SysInternals Live and run them from the site! How very useful!

Have you been over there and run them? Let us know what you think!

(h/t to Ed Bott, who you really should be reading too…)

Tags: Sysinternals

Review - Eye-Fi Wireless SD card for Cameras

George Starcher — Tue, 27 May 2008 01:37:04 +0000

Victor Cajiao and George Starcher review the Eye-Fi SD Card. The Eye-Fi is a 802.11G wireless memory card. It lets you upload your photos to your computer and even sharing sites like Flickr straight from your camera as you take photos.

Links Mentioned:

Eye-Fi

Eye-Fi on Flickr

ATP Photo Finder - GPS Tagger

Tags: eyeFi, Review, Photography

Opening doors with blogging and podcasting

Kevin Devin — Sat, 24 May 2008 05:00:44 +0000

Over the past several months, I have to say that I’ve been pretty darn lucky. It started out where after having worked in the IT department for most all of my professional career that my job was going away, a victim to outsourcing. I pretty much expected it when we were first acquired by “Giant Corp” — it was just a matter of when.

Fortunately for me, I was able to cash in on my podcasting experience and parlay a position within our User Education department. My IT skills, coupled with my podcasting experience, meant I was able to continue working at the same company with the same people I enjoyed working with but just doing something else — something that was equally, if not more, exciting than what I’d been doing for so many years before.

They today, lady luck was on my side yet again. Upon making my move in to the User Ed department at work, I’ve been working on my eLearning certificate from the University of Washington. During that time, I’ve kept a blog (off and on) of my endeavor. During these last few months I’ve been working with all sorts of eLearning software — one piece of software I’ve become very fond of, but unable to convince my boss to purchase a copy.

Well… this evening, my blog was stumbled upon by an individual from the company who makes the piece of software that I am so fond of and asked me if I was interested in participating in an upcoming beta of their product.

So, you just never know… There’s a good chance what you blog about or podcast about may work in your favor at some time in the future. A new job position or a chance to play with some cool software, you just never know.

Phone Privacy

George Starcher — Mon, 19 May 2008 03:02:20 +0000

There are times when you want to give out a phone number but you do not want to give out a live direct number. This happened to me when making some contact information cards for the library classes I volunteer teach. I certainly did not want to be giving out my cell phone number to just anyone who showed up for the classes. So I dusted off something I setup a while back. Grandcentral.com.

Grandcentral is now a Google owned property. It lets you pick a phone number you can keep effectively for life. The fun then begins. You can import the contact information from your computer and teach it how to route calls based on who is calling. So you could setup one number and if it is your spouse it rings your cell number and work number effectively forwarding the call. If it is an unknown stranger you can have it go to voicemail instead. Then Grandcentral will even email you a link you can click to play any recorded voicemail. Optionally you can have it SMS your cell phone to notify you of voicemail.

You can setup rules so certain contact numbers only get forwarded to certain real numbers for you such as home, work and cell. You can do this by grouping those contacts as well.

So if you have need to share a common number but want the control to protect your direct number privacy then Grandcentral is a great tool. It is free so create an account and give it a whirl.

PS You can even change the routing rules based on callerID from the call logs. So if someone starts bugging you, just route them to call blocked… =)

Tags: Grandcentral, Phone Privacy