I don’t mean a dual-video laptop, which most are today. I have my laptop hooked up to an external monitor in my office and can display different content on each. That’s not what this laptop does. Instead, it carries around it’s own second screen so I don’t need an external monitor! That may not be very practical, it’s probably heavy, and I’m sure the battery life sucks.

But still, I want. One. Now.

Dual Screen Laptop coming soon.

Gizmodo Article

Last week one of the drives failed to start up. The disks were fine, they just weren’t getting any power. Of course with any older hardware getting spare parts can be problematic. I finally tracked down the current owner of the technology (it had been sold a few times since I purchased the original units) and asked them for a quote on a replacement power supply.

They told me $135.

I told them thanks, but no thanks.

Instead I purchased two brand new Netgear Duo boxes. This is a similar device except that’s it made for users to be able to swap drives in and out. The Snap had a sticker on it that voided your warranty if you opened the box and installed larger capacity hard drives without their permission, mainly because they wanted you to pay them for their (overpriced) larger drives. Netgear’s device is not only made to be updated / upgraded but the drives are hot-swap, so you can pull one out and plug in a new one at any time.

Cool stuff.

I purchased two Duo devices and four TB drives from Amazon and got a really good deal. I now have 2TB of backup storage (had one before) and the overall purchase for everything was less than what I paid for one of the Snap devices years ago.

As an added bonus, the Netgear devices are whisper quiet. I can actually hear myself think in my office now, which is a bit disconcerting.

Apple just released a new version of iTunes that includes the Apple Genius feature. What does it do?

Genius makes playlists from songs in your library that go great together.

The Genius sidebar recommends music from the iTunes Store that you don’t already have.

Sounds great. What does it cost me? Just my musical privacy.

Genius is able to make playlists and give you great recommendations by periodically sending information about your iTunes library to Apple. This information will only be sent to Apple if you choose to turn on Genius.

The information sent to Apple includes details about the media in your iTunes library such as track names, play counts, and ratings. This information will be stored with an anonymous Genius ID and not linked to your iTunes Account. When using the iTunes Store or Genius sidebar, Apple will also use your purchase history to give you better recommendations.

Is this really a big deal? Amazon already uses information like this to suggest “if you liked this book, you might like these other items that other people that also liked this book bought” and so on. Sure enough, here’s the final bit of the disclaimer:

The information about your library will be anonymously combined with information provided by other Genius users. Apple will use this combined knowledge to improve Genius playlists and recommendations for everyone.

So if I think that John Hiatt and William Topley go together, Apple will combine my thoughts with those of all of their other geniuses and use that information to sell my preferences to other people, and try to sell their preferences to me. I will admit that I have received some great tips from friends and co-workers over the years after they see me listening to a particular artist or group. I’ve gone from the Hooters to Gin Blossoms. From Jeremy Fisher to Jason Mraz. Molly Hatchet to the Outlaws. And as I mentioned above, I know Amazon already uses a very similar strategy… in fact, they might have been the one to pioneer the technique.

To be clear, the Apple Genius feature is “opt in” while Amazon’s is not (or at least doesn’t appear to be). So why am I worried about Apple and not so much about Amazon? Perhaps it’s because Amazon only knows about things that I have actually purchased from them, while Apple wants to know every single song that is in my library. And not just the titles, but how frequently (and recently) I have played them. And what playlists I’ve created out of my own music library.

I think for now, I’ll leave the genius on the shelf and continue building my own playlists.

What about you? If you have an iPod and use iTunes, did you get the update yet? Did you sign up to be a genius?

It is interesting to me to see how many bits and pieces of computer history are actually preserved. Like we really do know who invented emoticons. It was a professor at Carnegie Mellon that claims that he was the first to put together some punctuation marks and tell people to “turn your head sideways” to read them.

“It has been fascinating to watch this phenomenon grow from a little message I tossed off in 10 minutes to something that has spread all around the world,” Fahlman was quoted as saying in a university statement. “I sometimes wonder how many millions of people have typed these characters, and how many have turned their heads to one side to view a smiley, in the 25 years since this all started.”

Read the full story on Yahoo

I’ve been a loyal winzip user for years. Frankly, why wouldn’t I be? I paid my shareware registration years ago, and their agreement lets me use the program on as many computers as I have. I don’t remember which version I started with, but it could very well have been 1.0. The original author allowed free upgrades for life, meaning each time a new upgrade was available I was able to download it, install it, and enter my registration code.

Not any more.

It seems that all my favorite shareware programs are going commercial. Paintshop Pro (formerly of JASC) is now a Corel product. I think they took over with version 10, which explains why I’m still using version 9. And today I saw an announcement that WinZip “New! Now with RAR Support!” was available so I hopped on over to their website to download it.

Guess what… Corel bought them out too. And no more “Free upgrades for life” either, it seems. Starting with version 10 (hmm, coincidence?) upgrades were no longer free. My registration code that has worked for all these many years has stopped working.

After a few quick searches I found out that this happened last year. So I guess since I was happy with version 9, I will continue to use it. Afterall, I’ve paid for it. I certainly didn’t seem to be missing anything when they released version 10 and now 11 and I didn’t even notice…

What Goes Around…

Does anyone reading this remember the “ARC” format? Back in the early days of BBS / modem communication every bit you had to push down the line was precious. A company named SEA put out a program that allowed you compress a batch of files into an ARC or archive file. They also released the code under what an open-source type of agreement. Phil Katz took the code and rewrote it in assembly, or at least bits and pieces of it. He released a program called PKARC that was fully compatible with the ARC file format but tons faster as far as the compression / decompression steps.

For some reason, SEA got upset by this, and sued. I don’t pretend to be a legal expert, so I don’t know what the basis for their suit was. Long story short, Phil rewrote PKARC and PKZIP, and BBS owners everywhere took it upon themselves to switch standards from ARC to ZIP because it was faster and compressed better. Remember, every “bit” helped. I was working for a software company that maintained a BBS at the time, and I actually helped with that process.

The point of this diversion is this: I wonder how much longer the “zip” format as supported by WinZip will remain a defacto standard? On the one hand you have zip support built in to various operating systems. On the other hand you have the RAR format and others that are competing for attention. I guess we can check back in a few years and see what has happened to Winzip.

But it does feel a bit like the passing of an old friend to find out they’ve been bought out.

Related Links

• Wiki on SEA versus Phil Katz
]]> http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/2007/09/17/winzip-surprise/feed/ 2 http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/2007/07/28/gadget-of-the-month-magellan-navigator/ http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/2007/07/28/gadget-of-the-month-magellan-navigator/#comments Sat, 28 Jul 2007 19:26:37 +0000 Dave Rathbun http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/?p=95 Not too long ago I read about a survey from a British insurance company. It seems that they talked to 2,000 adults about their driving habits. The result? Men apparently waste six million hours a hear driving around lost. Yes, male drivers waste an average of 20 minutes when they get lost before stopping to ask for directions, while women wait an average of only 10 minutes. See? That’s justification for a gadget purchase if I ever heard it.

Last fall I purchased a Magellan GPS system. It took me a long time to decide which model to buy, but when I finally pulled the trigger I was quite happy with the results. I purchased a Magellan 760, pictured below:



What made me pick this one? For starters, it doesn’t have a battery. It only operates when plugged in. After reading about dozens of different GPS models I finally realized that to narrow down my choices I had to figure out what was important. I determined that the odds of me taking the GPS out of my car and walking around with it were slim, at least for the models I was looking at. If I wanted a hiking GPS, I would get a hiking GPS. I wanted a driving one. Battery life was not only not important but turned out to be a cost issue as well. The more popular units use proprietary batteries that can only be replaced by the manufacturer. At an exhorbitant (in my opinion) cost. So battery operated was out.

I didn’t want an mp3 player (they make those). I didn’t want a multi-media viewer (they make those too). I just wanted a nice GPS.

I did want a unit with plenty of space. The 760 has a 20GB hard drive which comes pre-loaded with maps for the “lower 48″ states and Canada. I can load additional maps via USB or by the compact flash card slot. I will be taking a trip to Europe last this spring so loading the European maps might be a prudent thing to do.

The large storage space is also filled up with POI or Points of Interest. The unit quickly proved it’s value last December as we were trying to escape the snow and blizzards of the Rockies on our way home from a vacation. After reaching yet another closed road and the clock ticking towards midnight I asked my wife to punch in the closest hotel. After a few keystrokes we were informed that the nearest hotel was in the small town just 15 miles back. Oh, and the best part? The hotel phone number was part of the listing! A quick phone call and we had determine that yes, they had a room, and that no, our 115 pound dog would not be a problem, and yes, they would hold the room for us with a credit card. Nice.

I also wanted a unit that would really help me drive, not just with a visual map but with verbal directions. Some GPS units will call out, “Time to turn right… NOW” and that’s helpful when there’s only one road to turn on. But if you’ve ever navigated some of the more complicated cities (New Orleans comes to mind) you can understand the benefit of having the unit actually give you the street name you’re turning on as well. Although it might be interesting to hear the GPS lady try to pronounce “Tchoupitoulas Street”.

I did add an external antenna to the unit, not because I thought the built-in antenna would not work, but some states do not allow you to mount anything to the windshield anymore. It’s also easier to conceal the GPS when we pull into a rest stop since it’s down low in the dashboard rather than right up in plane view.

Some other nice features include:

• Automatic volume increase based on your speed
  Once you pass 45 miles per hour, the volume of the spoken directions automatically increases
• Auto “night view” mode
  When it gets dark, the unit alters the color and contrast settings automatically.
• 6 Million POI entries
  Includes gas stations, restaurants, hotels, hospitals, and many more. There are even web sites where you can download speed trap data and load that into your unit.

There are plenty more of fine features for this unit. I have used it even around town when I need to find a new location. One of the cool features that I’ve not subscribed to will allow the unit to tie into local traffic monitoring systems and automatically route you around traffic jams before you get stuck.

Now that’s a smart gadget.

Related Links

• Magellan RoadMate 760 Portable GPS Vehicle Navigation System at Amazon.com
]]> http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/2007/07/28/gadget-of-the-month-magellan-navigator/feed/ 0 http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/2007/05/08/how-much-does-the-internet-weigh/ http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/2007/05/08/how-much-does-the-internet-weigh/#comments Tue, 08 May 2007 15:04:14 +0000 Dave Rathbun http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/?p=112 The special “Science, Technology, and The Future” issue of Discover magazine arrived a few days ago. One of the articles was about how much the Internet weighs. Turns out they didn’t really solve the question that they asked, but who am I to quibble.

To start with their definition of the Internet is how much traffic there is, not how much data there is. I think that the proper definition of what the Internet “is” would be the sum total of all of the bits available, not the bits transferred. Having said that… their number for total Internet traffic was 40 petabytes, which is 40 x 10¹⁵ bytes, or a 4 followed by 16 zeros. Like this:

40 000 000 000 000 000

Give or take a byte or two. Next, they determined how much a bit weighs by figuring out how many electrons it takes to set a memory bit “on”, and they came up with 40,000 electrons for each 1 bit, and of course zero electrons for a zero bit. They made the assumption that a data stream would average half of the bits on and half off… afterall a stream of nothing but 1 bit values would not be very interesting. I think that’s a safe assumption. It turns out that each electron weighs about 2 x 10^-30 pounds. Which is to say, not much.

So take 40PB of data and reduce it by half so that we get only the 1 bits. Take that times 40,000 electrons per bit, and the weight of an individual electron, do the math… (carry the one) and you find out that the Internet weighs in at 1.3 x 10^-8 pounds, or about 0.2 millionths of an ounce. It’s about the same weight as a very small grain of sand.

For my part I’m going to start transferring a very large picture that is nothing but black white (all 1’s) just to make the Internet weigh more. Come on, who is with me? Let’s start sharing black white squares.

meh, messed up on the first release of this post. Black is, of course, #000000 and white is #FFFFFF… black just looked heavier

]]> http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/2007/05/08/how-much-does-the-internet-weigh/feed/ 4 http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/2007/04/25/gadget-of-the-month-snap-server-2200/ http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/2007/04/25/gadget-of-the-month-snap-server-2200/#comments Wed, 25 Apr 2007 21:44:44 +0000 Dave Rathbun http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/?p=55 The next post in my “GotM” series brings you the Snap Server 2200. It’s not sexy, but it does its job very well. What is that job? It’s a hard disk enclosure with an ethernet port. Plug it in to your network, run a very brief install program, and you have network-attached storage for a home or small business network.


I have two of these devices and one of its older cousins. The newer ones each have two 500GB drives and the older one has dual 250GB units. Add that all up, and that’s a ton of storage for a home network. Yes, I have these at home. But I don’t use the full capacity, instead I have them configured as RAID devices.

Several years ago my wife’s computer had a hard-drive failure. Unfortunately that computer was the one with all of our financial records on it. And even more unfortunate (as I certainly know better) I had not backed up the data files on her computer in about seven months.

Ouch.

I was desparate enough that I sent the drive to a data recovery service, thinking that the $100 minimum fee was a bargain if I could recover the data from the disk. This service offers a “clean room” disassembly / recovery, where they remove the platters from the disk and attempt to restore them in another case. A clean room is necessary in order to avoid contaminating the disk environment. In any case, they failed to recover anything.

So, what to do? I certainly needed to make more regular backups, but that wasn’t the only answer. I needed some sort of automatic backup feature. Enter Snap, with their capability of providing inexpensive RAID solutions.

There are several implementations of RAID, two of which are supported by this device. RAID – if you didn’t know – stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks. (Wiki on RAID) RAID 0 is known as striping and is primarily used for performance. Striping is a configuration option where the drives appear to be virually “stacked” on top of one another. It increases the number of heads you have reading data simultaneously, which improves the overall performance. But I wasn’t looking for performance, I was looking for backup.

RAID 1 is known as mirroring, and that’s the configuration that I have used. (If I haven’t thrown enough acronyms at you so far, this device can also be configured as JBOD, or “just a bunch of disks”. ) A mirror actually slows down the process a bit, as everything written to one disk is then immediately written to the other disk. In that configuration the dual 500GB drives appear to be a single 500GB drive, so I have only half of the true capacity. But everything written is written twice. That’s my backup.

Since I have added these to my network I have not lost a single file due to hard-drive failure. I have had drives fail, but as long as I check the status of these appliances on a regular basis my risk is very low. On a periodic basis I copy content from one device to the other, resulting in a 4-way copy of the resulting data. This is done via a cron job on a linux server I have at my house. Yes, these drives can also be mounted on a linux box.

The best part about this gadget is that you plug it in and forget it. It just works. I have drives S, W, X, Y, and Z all mounted to various partitions on these gadgets. I have my linux server set up to connect to my web server (the one this site is hosted on, among others) and download database backups every single night, rename the files with the date, and copy them out to the “W” drive. Since backup files are small I have never bothered to delete anything, meaning I have daily backups for some of my web sites going back for many years. Do I really need that? No, of course not. But as long as I don’t run out of space, why not keep the stuff around?

A final advantage to this configuration is that since everything as far as data is stored on the network, I can upgrade my desktop or laptop at any time without having to worry about losing my data. I can also access the same files from any computer on the network. And of course the best part is that I don’t worry about losing data due to hard-drive failures.

I still make backups (not as often as I should) and store them off-site. I used to use an Iomega Jaz drive for this, then moved up to one of the first rewritable DVD drives that came out years ago. The main problem with these two options is that I have to keep a working jaz drive around to read the old media. And the rewriteable DVD is a really old model from Creative Labs that I can’t even get drivers for anymore, so I have to keep a Windows 98 system up and running to use it. Backups that are dependent on a specific hardware device are a lot less useful than simply having the data available. In fact, they might even be worse than no backups at all, since you think you have a backup but if you can’t find hardware to read it, well, you’re up that poluted stream without means of propulsion.

As long as stuff is on the network, I can access it. I like that. And it helps me sleep better at night.

]]> http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/2007/04/25/gadget-of-the-month-snap-server-2200/feed/ 4 http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/2007/03/25/gadget-of-the-month-epson-p-2000-multimedia-viewer/ http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/2007/03/25/gadget-of-the-month-epson-p-2000-multimedia-viewer/#comments Sun, 25 Mar 2007 21:11:14 +0000 Dave Rathbun http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/?p=56 The Epson P-2000 is a multi-function device that I use primarily to download and review pictures from my digital camera but it’s actually capable of quite a bit more. I purchased it after taking a 4-day camping trip a few years ago. It’s much more convenient to download my digital pictures from memory cards to this than to lug around my laptop and have to worry about running out of power.


This gadget is a few years old, so there are newer models out now with larger screens and bigger hard drives. This particular unit has a 40GB hard drive. It is more than plenty for me right now, considering that my current digital camera uses a 6mp sensor. I can take over 550 images on my 2GB flash card, then download the entire card to this device and start over. Repeat that 20 times and you might fill this up, but you would be hard-pressed to do that on even a multi-week camping trip.

What attracted me to this device when it first came out was the pixel density of the screen. The screen is just under 4 inches (measured diagonally) but it has over 200 pixels per inch. That’s more than double the density on a standard computer screen screen. What it means is I can display an image at full screen and get incredibly sharp and vivid detail. I can zoom in and really get an idea of the quality of the picture. It sure beats trying to ascertain the true quality of the image on the tiny LCD screen on the back of my camera, but doesn’t require me to lug around and boot up a laptop computer. Here is a quote with some technical specs for this unit:

The Epson P-4000 and the Epson P-2000 both offer Epson’s exclusive Photo Fine technology, which utilizes two core techniques-ultra fine precision processing and the capability to deliver three colors (red, green and blue) per pixel. Additionally, this unique technology provides an incredible pixel density of 212 pixels per inch, which ensures that every detail of downloaded images is displayed with vibrancy and clarity. Typical digital camera viewing panels and competitive viewer products only offer one color per pixel and approximately 80-100 pixels per inch.

Source: PhotoShopNews.com

Epson also supports the RAW format used by Nikon (my camera of choice) and Canon, at least. It may do more but I didn’t research that.

What makes it qualify as a gadget? Well, it also can play movies and mp3 files. I can select a bunch of photographs, assign some background music, and play a slide show through a television connection. I can attach it to my laptop via USB and it appears as an external hard drive. So it has quite a few different features that make it a really useful gadget to have around.

Related Links

• See this item at Amazon.com
• Epson P-5000 (updated version) on Epson.com
]]> http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/2007/03/25/gadget-of-the-month-epson-p-2000-multimedia-viewer/feed/ 0 http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/2007/03/02/insert-disk-2/ http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/2007/03/02/insert-disk-2/#comments Fri, 02 Mar 2007 16:17:00 +0000 Dave Rathbun http://www.phpbbdoctor.com/blog/?p=96 A long time ago I worked in the technical support department for a software company. This company made what was – at the time – the number one backup utility for personal computers. The product was named FastBack, and it would dump your hard-drive to floppies faster than any other product on the market.

Working in technical support was my first computer-related job. And it was also a source for some humor.

I am sure that you’ve seen some of the jokes circulating around the Internet about tech support calls and the customers that make them … interesting. One of my favorites is the customer who broke his “cup holder” and wanted to get it replaced. Think about it, you’ll get it eventually. It helps if you pop open your cdrom drive and take a good look at it.

But this is my own story, and I think it’s a good one. I call it, “Users will do exactly what you tell them to do, no more, no less.”

This particular tech support call started out poorly, as the customer was already extremely agitated before they called. One of the challenges of being on the other side of a tech support call, especially for something as sensitive as backup utility responsible for preserving the customer’s important data, is to try to remain calm and collected even while you’re being screamed at. In this case, it was a complaint that I had never heard before. The customer was complaining that there wasn’t enough “space” to backup her entire harddrive.

Now this didn’t make any sense to me. The program would prompt for the first disk, write to it, and then prompt for disk two, disk three, and continue on until the entire contents of the hard drive was safely saved to floppies. As long as you had enough floppy disks (and time) you could back up anything. At the time the most popular format for floppy disks was the 5 1/4″ disk; the 3 1/2″ disk format was used on the Mac and on the IBM PS/2, but most computers had one (or two) 5 1/4″ floppy drives.

For those of you too young to remember any of this, these were drives A: and B: … explains why your hard-drive is disk C:.

Anyway, to get back to the story… once everyone got calmed down I started walking the customer through the backup process. The backup started with no issues. As expected, the program requested that the customer “insert disk two…” so they did. We continued talking through the process while the program requested “insert disk three” which was also accomplished. It was at this point I started hearing some strange noises over the phone. When I asked the customer, they said it was from their floppy drive.

Now there had not been any noises when we started, so I asked the customer about the sounds. They said that it always started making noises about this time in the backup process, and it was about now that the backup process failed because they could not insert another disk. This was all very confusing, as I had never heard of a floppy drive degrading so predictably.

Now prescient blog readers might be ahead of me on this one.

The customer was doing exactly what the program instructions said.

Insert disk one…
Insert disk two…
Insert disk three…

What’s missing?

Insert disk one…
Remove disk one…
Insert disk two…
Remove disk two…
Insert disk three…

The customer had managed to cram three floppy disks into their drive! I was able to put the customer on hold quickly enough to avoid having them hear me laugh. And laugh. And laugh. Once I collected myself again I took the customer off of hold and asked them to cancel the backup process. We started over, and I specifically requested that they remove disk one prior to inserting disk two.

Amazingly, it worked.

So it turned out the “space” they were running out of was not related to hard disk space or floppy disk capacity, but the actual physical space within their floppy drive.

True story.

Related Links

• Wiki on FGS FastBack
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