Photo by mastrobiggo

I have had my iPhone for a little over a month now and it is really starting to change the way I do things. Always (pretty much) on internet access and some killer apps really change the way I interact with the world around me. Here are my current top 5 killer iPhone Apps.

#5. iSSH – Yeah I am that dorky. It works surprisingly well for quick little admin tasks or server health checks. You don’t want to do a server migration using it but for tailing logs, running top or restarting a service it rocks. I HUP’ed my web server while getting a ride down the freeway yesterday. Way cool

#4 Oblique Strategies -  Brain Eno (yeah THAT Brian Eno) and Peter Schmidt used to distribute these as card decks but now they are on the iPhone. Stuck in a creative rut, need to think “outside the box” then get this handy little app, tap the screen and be prepared to change directions.

#3 PhotoNote Lite – I am to cheap to buy the full version because the free Lite version has been more than enough for me so far. This app lets you snap a pic and and notes to it. Great for remembering things like where you parked, what that sofa looks like or what your kids names are.

#2 AroundMe – Driving around and need to get gas? AroundMe can tell you where the nearest station is plus coffee, restaurants and a whole bunch of other stuff. A must have if you travel alot. I use the Yelp application a lot as well but I find AroundMe to be just a bit better in terms of finding stuff I need.

#1 Shazam – Holy crap this app saves me so much pain and sorrow. Have you ever been some place and heard a song and wondered what the song was? Shazam listens to the song then tells you want it is. So far it is perfect in my real world usage. This ends countless debates about who is singing, what band it is, when it was released etc etc etc… My brain thanks you Shazam!

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SanDisk Teams with Music Industry on New Music Format
by Paul Thurrott

Storage company SanDisk and the four largest music companies are teaming to create a new physical music format called slotMusic, which the companies hope will one day replace the audio CD. Based on the microSD flash-memory storage format that SanDisk created and sells in volume, slotMusic will provide consumers with a digital album, liner notes, lyrics, artwork, and various other extras.

The first 29 albums in the slotMusic format will be available in October through US retail giants such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart. The music will be sold in unprotected 320Kbps MP3 format, ensuring that the songs are compatible with every PC, device, and music-management software application worldwide. Albums are expected to cost about $15 each.

The new format is aimed primarily at cell phone users, many of whom already have an available microSD slot on their devices. However, because microSD compatibility isn’t common on PCs, the slotMusic albums will also come with a USB adapter so that customers can transfer the music to their PCs.

EMI, Sony BMG, Universal Music, and Warner Bros. have all agreed to test-market the new format. Albums by artists such as Leona Lewis, New Kids on the Block, Elvis Presley, Rihanna, and Weezer will be represented.

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I see a few problems with this new “format”:

–A microSD card is a hell of a lot easier to lose than a CD.

–MicroSD cards generally don’t “eject” the way regular SD cards do when you push on them.  This is fine for a cellphone, but if they want this to be the new format, they’ll need to incorporate some sort of “eject” mechanism for car stereos or other non-phone, non-PC equipment I would think.  Unless they’re assuming that by now, everyone uses their <insert mp3 player of choice here> in their cars, or that all car manufacturers are moving to in-car entertainment systems like Sync that have music storage built-in.

–Many cell phones require that you remove the battery just to get the MicroSD card in/out.  I know my RAZR and Blackberry 8830 are like this.  At a minimum, I think you have to turn the phone off to remove the card, or risk corrupting data.  Maybe I’m mistaken on that one, but that would make sense.

Maybe they’re just planning on people using the microSD card to transfer music to their phone, and not necessarily listen to the music directly from the microSD card.

Having said that, I do like that they’re releasing it in non-DRM MP3 format.  It’d be really nice if they would release it in some non-compressed lossless codec, but I guess it’s better than having silly DRM.

The article is light on details, but I’m sure we’ll hear more about it.  Anyone have any thoughts/insights on this new format?

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1. Magnetic Tape – My Vic-20 had a cassette tape I loaded and saved games to. It was slow but as a bonus you got some creepy techno music if you put in in your cassette player. Likewise tape for even large data backups is pretty much dead.

2. Film – Unless schools continue to insist that people learn on a film camera (why oh why??) Film will be relegated to snoby artsy types and be totally dead for all commercial and personal photography.

3. DVD – With the advent of things like Apple TV, Netflix/Roku and DVR’s this is media that will die fairly soon. My daughter knows what a DVD is now (Dora!!) but she will soon forget.

4. Modems – I had a 300 baud coupler modem, my last modem was a USR HST. I still know some of the ATA command set. I am thankfully my children won’t have to deal with yelling at me for picking up the phone while they are trying to download the latest crack for DigiPaint on the Amiga like I did.

5. BBS – Kinda goes with the modem, but at least I won’t have to worry about Jack dialing long distance for hours on end to get the latest warez.

6. Land Lines – We currently do not have a phone line. We got a dry pair with DSL from Speakeasy (no PacHell yeah!) and use VOIP. That plus cell phones for everything else spell the end of POTS. My kids will only have cell service I am sure.

7. Gas Engines – By the time I have to buy Lily’s first car traditional gas engines will no longer be available. Everything will be at least hybrid, I am holding out hope for all electric. With great new tech from Tesla, GM and Toyota I am going to predict that this will come true.

8. Servers – At least as we know them, the cloud is coming baby. It is a bit like back to the future for me, I grew up dialing into big powerful Machines from my little ole TRS-80. Everything ran on those Machines I was dialing in. It is no too much unlike firing up an instance on the Amazon Compute cloud, just a heck of a lot faster.

9. TV schedules – The days of prime time are numbered. They already our at our house, we DVR everything. Just about the only thing I watch semi live is sports, but even that is on about a 30-45 minute delay. Now imagine not having broadcast TV at all. New releases every wee, downloaded to your Apple TV, Netflix box or Tivo. You would find new shows based on your current viewing habits and searches through giant archives of movies and TV.

10. Email – With SMS, Chat, Facebook and Twitter kids increasingly are not using email. Even current teens look at you funny when you want to email them. By the time Lily starts computing email will be pretty much dead, left to the spammers.

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For those of you that use linux/unix in your daily lives, or in past lives, the good folks over at hackaday.com have created a version of vi that is written in javascript and can run inside any browser that supports javascript.

Check it out here: http://www.hackaday.com/2008/07/04/javascript-vi/

I can’t say that I agree with the above blog posting that vi somehow disappeared and is no longer being used until now.  It’s always been a mainstay on my Machines, and I use it almost every day.  Not a big fan of eMacs…and never bothered to learn joe or pico.  However, that doesn’t diminish the fact that this little hack is pretty neat.

Maybe I can get Bill and Dana to add this into this site somehow. Give our loyal readers the option of posting replies in the standard reply box, or choosing to enter their comments in an embedded vi session right in the browser.

Bill…Dana…any chance you want to implement this in your oh-so-plentiful free time?

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Anyway, my response was “Honey, I don’t think we have the money right now to splurge on that.”  Well….of course, just because I said that, our Living Room TV went on the fritz.  If I had said “sure, go ahead and get it, we’re fine”, the Living Room TV would still be working fine.  I guarantee it.  It’s a Dell 17″ LCD TV that my father-in-law got for free when he bought a car back in 2004.  Worked fine for our purposes, and has served us well.  Now, when I turn it on, the video comes on for about a half-second, and then goes away.  Audio stays on the entire time.  It’s the weirdest thing.

Dell’s Tech Support was less than helpful in this case, which is odd, as I’ve called them numerous times and have never had a problem with them.  Anyway, they told me to turn on the TV, press the “Menu” button on the remote control, and reset the setting to the default TV settings.  I’m just curious if they completely missed my stating that the video is not working.  Tough to scroll through menu items when you cant’ see them.   If that didn’t work, then they said that the TV will have to be replaced.  Which brings me to the point of this post:

What do people recommend for a small (17″ or less) LCD TV for a bedroom, and a small (17″-21″) LCD for the Living Room?  I’m not looking for top-of-the-line equipment here, as we don’t watch movies on these or anything.  It’s mostly when Mom needs a break and puts the kids in front of Dora for a half-hour, just to get some peace and quiet.  Doesn’t need to be feature packed, or even HDTV.  Would love to hear suggestions from our readers.

Thanks in advance.

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Anyway, back to the topic at hand. In looking at ways to decrease my travelling between my parent’s house, in-laws, etc., I’ve been looking at some solutions to allow me to troubleshoot their Machines remotely. Luckily there’s numerous options available to us now. I’ll cover a few here, and only the ones I’ve used. I’m sure there are tons more out there, but I don’t have time to research all of them. So here goes…

1. VNC: Choose your flavor of VNC. I’ve used RealVNC, TightVNC, and UltraVNC. I really like UltraVNC, as it has an optional encryption plugin that will use pre-shared AES keys to encrypt all traffic. This is a must when doing remote support over the Internet. The only problem with this, is that I prefer not to leave VNC open to the world, so I try to setup firewall/port forwarding rules on the remote routers to allow my home IP to connect. Normally my home IP stays the same, but sometimes when my router needs a reboot, I lose my DHCP lease and have to get a new IP. When that happens, I have to go back to those routers, and change the port forwarding rules accordingly, which is kind of a pain.

2. Hamachi: I’ve used Hamachi in the past, mainly to share files between some friends. It’s a good tool for setting up a VPN between computers at multiple locations. I guess I missed the memo that LogMeIn bought (or maybe evolved from) Hamachi. Hamachi worked without having to configure any firewall rules. It allows you to create and connect to multiple networks and password-protect those networks. Since it is only password protection, be sure to choose a strong password. Better yet, choose a passphrase, as that will thwart most password-guessing tools. Something like “The Crow Flies At Noon” would be pretty strong. Then you can use one of the VNCs to connect to the machine, without having VNC listening directly on the Internet, and not having to worry about changing port-forwarding rules every time your DHCP lease expires.

3. Remote Desktop: This is Microsoft’s built-in remote support tool. While it’s not bad, I don’t like the fact that you don’t actually get on the console of the machine like you do with VNC. You only get the “virtual desktop”. The thing I do like about this tool, is that it would allow the remote user (parents, in-laws, etc.) to send a “Remote Help Request” to me. If this is done, you actually do get the console, and the end-user can see what you’re doing. Makes it easy to have them follow step-by-step instructions if it’s something they may have to do often. I believe there are some firewall rules you may have to configure, I don’t remember for sure. Here’s some notes from Microsoft’s Help and Support page regarding remote help requests:

• Both you and your assistant must be using either Windows Messenger or a MAPI-compliant e-mail account such as Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express.
• You and your assistant need to be connected to the Internet while using Remote Assistance.
• If Windows Firewall is turned on, Remote Assistance will temporarily open firewall ports.
• If you are working on a corporate or local area network, firewalls might stop you from using Remote Assistance. In this case, check with your network administrator before using Remote Assistance

As you can see, there are some restrictions to using this tool, so it’s not a good solution for heterogeneous environments.

4. PcAnywhere: I’ve not used this product in about 4 years, as the free tools really caught up to PcAnywhere and have matched or surpassed it for my purposes. In its prime, it was a great tool with a large feature set. If you have access to it, you can give it a try, but it’s really designed more for an enterprise environment that has some serious $$ to spend, and wants to centralize remote management of a large number of servers.

Those are the remote support tools I’ve used. If anybody has any more suggestions for other/better solutions, I’m all ears.

I’m running on 3.5 hours sleep and lots of coffee. Cranial BSOD imminent due to increasing memory leak. I’ll need a reboot soon.

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UPDATE:  Apparently i was mistaken about Microsoft’s Remote Desktop not giving you the actual console.  I hadn’t used it in a while, so I tested i out at work, and it does give you control of the console.  My bad!

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I’m writing this post kind of on a whim, as I’m sitting here staring at one of my father-in-law’s business PCs (an HP/Compaq).  It’s got a pretty blue screen (no, not THAT blue screen) and says 86% for 131062 MB formatted.  Then comes WinXP…then SP2…then the 14,000 updates that have been released since SP2 (except SP3 of course, I’m not that brave yet).  It’s normally not a huge deal, but this is the one PC that does his payroll, inventory, accounts payable/receivable, etc.  Basically it’s the lifeblood of his business.  And of course the data isn’t backed up anywhere, so if this was a REAL emergency, like a total hard drive crash or something, I’d be telling him “I’m sorry….we tried our best to resuscitate it, but there was nothing we could do.  She was just too far gone.”  As luck would have it, it’s just a few bad blocks on the drive, none of which appeared to contain any important data.  So I’m installing WinXP on a new hard drive, and making the old one a slave so they can copy their data over.  Once that’s finished, it’ll be time to DBAN and sledgehammer that drive.  Oh, and of course I’ll be mentioning (as I do about once a month) how easy it would be to setup a backup solution using an old tape drive and some free software.  Or even better, setup some NAS using FreeNAS or one of the SOHO appliances from Netgear, Buffalo, or Linksys.

What would be glorious, is if this was the only computer I had to work on.  Unfortunately, it’s not.

My little brother is back from Florida for a couple days, and his girlfriend’s laptop (HP) is acting up, so I told him I’d look at it.  Can’t really turn him down.  He helped me demolish an entire basement bathroom and laundry room for nothing.  Least I can do is take a look at his laptop.

My parent’s computer, after running for about 10 mintues, now says “Thermal Shutdown” and turns itself off.   Apparently the fans on  the back are not running as they should.  Luckily Dell’s sending a Tech with some spare parts out to them next week.  God love Dell’s on-site warranties.

Not to mention the 6 computers I have sitting in my office right now…3 or 4 of which I think are still useful enough to turn into a FreeNAS box, a VPN, an Edubuntu box for the kids, and who knows what the other one will be.

Update…I’m now in the “Look, it’s got a GUI, but still has 38 minutes left to install WinXP” phase.  I guess I should breath a sigh of relief that he’s not running Vista.  Too bad I can’t turn him onto Linux…but it’s tough to teach an old dog new tricks.  It’s even more tough to teach an old father-in-law new tricks.

Check out this t-shirt that my wife bought me a while back.  I think I need to start wearing it more often.

Oh well.  I’ll be up for the next 3 hours installing drivers, hotfixes, patches, service packs, etc.  Hope your evening is more enjoyable than mine.

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Check it out – Link

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Link

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When most people hear mp3 player, they immediately think iPod, and for good reason.  However, me being a cheapskate, and not having the foresight to see that someone would actually release a toilet paper dispense that you can connect your iPod to, I decided to purchase a cheaper mp3 player.  I went with the name I trusted most for PCs:  Dell.  What?  You didn’t know that Dell made an mp3 player?  Yeah, most people didn’t know that, as they didn’t really publicize it much.  Well, I bought a 15GB mp3 player called the Jukebox.  The interface is a little clunky, it weighs as much as some new laptops, and it’s a little embarrassing, but you know what?  It still works.  This thing has been dropped on the cement from 3-4 feet in the air more times than I can count.  Every now and then it will freeze up and I’ll have to get a paperclip and do a hard reset on the device, but that’s why i keep a paperclip attached to it at all times.  Sometimes I hear a clicking noise coming from it, but I try to convince myself that I’m just hearing things and it’s not really the hard drive preparing for a major crash.  Either way, I’ve gotten almost 8 years use out of it, so if it did go belly-up, I wouldn’t be too upset.  When was the last time you had a cellphone, computer, mp3 player, etc. for 8 years?  Not many last that long…

Let’s talk old computers.  In a previous post, I mentioned using an older computer as an educational tool for your kids using the Edubuntu operating system & applications.  Now, what do you do with 4 computers, including the first Pentium you ever owned?  Lots of sentimental value sitting in those 133 MHz and 16MB of RAM.  And let’s not forget about the massive 1.6 GB hard drive that couldn’t even contain, let alone run, Windows XP with MS Office these days.  It did pretty well with Win98 though.  It got me through most of college.  While I have grand dreams of setting up an OpenVPN system, FreeNAS box, and a couple other things that would make my life much easier, finding time to actually get those running is proving to be a challenge.  Not to mention I live in an older home with questionable wiring.  Who knows if the circuit feeding my office can even handle all of that.  I guess I’ll try and find out one day.

How about old video game consoles?  It wasn’t until just a couple years ago that I parted ways with my old Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis.  I loved playing those games, but I just can’t seem to find the time these days.  Today’s game consoles are just way to much for me.  There’s like 8 buttons, force feedback, joysticks, and all sorts of stuff you have to do just to play. What happened to the good old days of running, jumping, shooting things, and that was about it?  Man I feel old…

I’m sure there’s a host of other items I’m forgetting about that I could talk about (old cellphones, network equipment that’s been obsolete for ages, etc.), but I’m writing a blog post here, not a novel.

What items do you have that really should be upgraded, but for some reason you keep holding onto them?

In a later post, I’ll find some creative ways to reinvent those old devices, or at least provide some methods to safely dispose of, or donate, those types of items.  Stay tuned…

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