Omniblog

So, yesterday in all my glorious geekiness, I thought I would wander into Fry’s and pick up some sort of USB Gigabit adapter in my quest for faster NAS access from my laptop.

Oh glory be, one exists! The Linksys Gigabit USB Adapter

(Author’s Note: I failed big time at this point. I did not read the box to check supported operating systems, seeing as Vista’s been out for quite some time, you’d think something like this would have drivers, right? I did do research for this particular product, and saw it was good, but failed to notice, even then, that Vista wasn’t supported.)

Get home, plug it up, hit the Linksys site (which half the time doesn’t come up) for newer drivers. Oh, there are drivers, from 2005. Yes, 2005, and no I am not kidding. Linksys apparently said they would have drivers sometime in 2008 after Vista’s been out for a while. Are there drivers now? No. Does the XP driver work? No. (Figured I’d at least try it.)

Moral of the story: Check the box and never assume things work with Vista. I will be taking the item back tomorrow to get my money back. The good part is it at least repackages really easy. There’s a reason I went to Netgear/D-Link and left Linksys in the dust. I checked other manufacturers for similar products but came up empty.

At this point, I will probably do all my RAW file photo editing on my main computer (quad-core, 8GB RAM, nVidia 9800). My laptop’s pretty good (dual-core, 4GB RAM, 512MB dedicated ATI graphics), but even having the pictures on my C: drive lags a bit. I will then acquire some backup software, and do automated and maybe manual back ups of my pictures.

I have now had the D-Link network storage thingy for about 5 days? I have noticed a few things that are worth noting:

1. I can’t seem to find good, free backup software. I might try whatever’s built into Vista, but I’m afraid. Supposedly the software that came with the NAS isn’t worth using.
2. Editing pictures through it on my laptop which does not have a Gigabit network connection is horrible. I might fork out some extra cash for a Gigabit connection. I’ll have to look around.
3. This is more of a software thing, but Adobe Lightroom will not create catalogs on shared, removable, or network drives. Damn. I wanted it to do this. The pictures can reside on the network storage, but not the Lightroom catalog. Hmm, I might have to get creative with this if I want to edit pictures on both the laptop and my main computer.
4. Accessing mp3 files with Winamp through the shared drive for the NAS is quite awesome until the drives go to sleep for power saving. Then you must wake the drive back up by other means (i.e. accessing the shared drive within windows usually works). During the time that the drives are asleep, the mp3 file skips like a broken record.
5. The built in FTP server for external file access rocks; however, it does present a security risk, especially if you don’t have things set up correctly, and if your users’ passwords are weak and might be subject to an outright dictionary password attack.

On another note: The Twitter experiment I posted about several weeks ago, I have started. We shall see what happens over the next month.

Yesterday, I decided to invest about $15 in a Gigabit switch and some more cash into CAT 6 cables (why, because I can and because I’m a geek, dammit) for slightly faster connectivity into the D-Link DNS-321 I reviewed yesterday.

I soon forgot then remembered that my laptop, which has the external hard drive where the majority of the data is, does not have a Gigabit NIC. However, just plugging in a Gigabit switch did help with the speed to the DNS-321. (In hindsight, the cables probably didn’t help much since it’s a 100MB connection, but eh, they were cheap.) Things definitely seemed to upload faster.

So, naturally I tried it on my main CPU, which does have a Gigabit NIC. Did it help much? Kind of, but not enough to warrant taking up my main CPU to transfer files. I tried both FTP and using the mapped drive. So, popping in a Gigabit switch did help and is well worth it. I got a D-Link 5 port Gigabit switch for $14.99 at Fry’s.

File access:

File access through the switch/home network is pretty good. I played mp3s from the DNS-321 on my laptop with Winamp with one incident of lag in a 2 hour time span. Picture access from my laptop with Photoshop to the DNS-321 was pretty good too (using the the mapped, shared drive).

All in all, I am still very impressed for what I paid and what I got.

Yesterday I finally decided it was time to bite the bullet and buy a network storage device of some sort. My brand choices were:

• Linksys
• D-Link
• Netgear

Research:

Linksys and Netgear both had awful  reviews, ok all of them had bad reviews of varying types, but, the D-Link seemed to be the best. So, I wandered into Fry’s wanting the D-Link DNS-323. Yea, they didn’t have it.

So, off to the iPhone I went looking to see how well the DNS-321 is, hm, just as good as the 323, cheaper, and no internal print server (already have one of those), wait, the only reason for the price difference ($129 vs $219) might be because of the print server, oh what the hell am I thinking. So, I got it and 2 Seagate Barracuda 1TB 7200 RPM SATA drives (each were $94, limit 1 per customer, but they let me have 2 because they had a lot).

Setup:

After getting everything home, I opened up the DNS-321 and then opened the hard drives. The nice thing about the hard drives is they are sold as a kit, so I have extra SATA cables now should I need them for my main CPU. Anyway, the initial setup was a breeze:

1. Open boxes.
2. Pop open front of DNS-321.
3. Pop in hard drives.
4. Close front.
5. Plug everything in.
6. Pop in CD and run a utility to find the DNS-321 on my network.
7. Configure it using the web interface, static IP, etc.
8. Setup and format hard drives with RAID 1.
9. Create User and group.
10. Fire up FTP on the DNS-321 for easier/quicker file transfer.
11. Done.

Total time: 30 minutes or so. The hard drive formatting took the longest. Now, on to the part that’s the worst.

Moving data:

The DNS-321 has the capability for either 100MB or Gigabit ethernet; however, I have AT&T U-Verse and their little router thingy does not have Gigabit. You have to be @$%ing kidding me.

The utility that comes with the DNS-321 to find it also lets you configure a shared drive mount for it using the user you created. That part works flawlessly. Using this to copy over gigabytes of data, not so much.

As well all know Windows file/folder sharing is great, works as it should, but when you copy large amounts of data, it just blows. FTP to the rescue, maybe. The DNS-321 comes with a built in FTP server mainly for use outside of  your home network. I am using it to transfer files to the DNS-321 beacuse it’s faster than using the shared drive. Now, remember my statement about the AT&T U-Verse router not having Gigabit, yes, this is a major problem and it really sucks doing the initial upload of all of the data I want to the NAS. Since I only have to do this once, I can live.

Access performance:

Right now, I am not sure how well this works and how fast it is, but initial testing seems to be fine. I can play mp3s just fine, and access and edit pictures just fine.

Overall:

For $129, this little NAS is worth it. The RAID configuration is nice, and the web interface is easy to navigate.

Final Grade: A

I have been on Twitter for a little over 6-7 months now, I think, and I have always wondered “Where the hell do these random people that follow me come from?” Granted, half of them are spam type accounts that get removed, but still, we humans are a curious bunch.

So, I have decided to embark upon a little experiment involving a test Twitter account, and keywords.

Every few hours or so, or when I think about it, I will post tweets to my test account with nothing but random keywords that I think might trigger a follow. I will then keep track of which keywords generated followers. I can probably partially figure out why certain people followed me based on the keywords I used.

Now, here’s the part that makes this kind of tricky, I am not sure if just posting a few keywords every so often will trigger a suspicious activity warning. I am thinking not because I am not mass following people and tweeting spam. If you’ve ever seen a suspicious account before it gets suspended, you can tell.

The test account will not follow anyone, yet. As time passes, I might start following news accounts, and maybe some interesting news people, and some sports stuff. That will all depend on how many followers my keywords generate.

I will track how many are legit accounts, how many are spammish type accounts trying to promote crap, and how many are suspended accounts (or ones that eventually get suspended).

As a side note, I like the name I came up with for my test account, so I might make a different one because if it ends up my test account gets suspended, that’s gonna suck. Hm…

Some results will be posted here in a few weeks, and then again in a month.

I have never written anything about sports in general in my life. Why? Because I don’t consider myself knowledgeable enough to even attempt it without coming out sounding like a complete freakin’ idiot.

However, today is the day I come out of my sports shell and write something about the NHL Playoffs this year.

Now a little background: I love hockey, I’ve loved hockey even before hockey existed in Texas. How? Blame the Intellivision gaming system and the Ice Hockey game. I fell in love with a game with block characters that tripped each other (there was no fighting in the games back then). So, needless to say I was overjoyed when I went to my first NHL game, Dallas Stars baby! I even went to their first playoff game in Dallas. *sigh* Ah Reunion Arena, but I digress.

Anyway, back to the subject at hand. Since hockey left ESPN thanks to the strike a few years ago, it’s been hard for me to keep up since it all moved over to Versus. Now that I have changed TV providers, I can watch Versus a bit more. Woot!

Let’s start by saying: 3 out of 4 Semifinal games are going to a game 7. (who would’ve thunk the Blackhawks would win in 6? Wait, the Blackhawks are good? Holy shit, what happened?) That alone speaks volumes, but not nearly as many volumes as the players involved in one of the series.

Penguins vs Capitals: It’s the dream match up: Sidney vs Alex. That’s Crosby and Ovechkin. The 2 phenoms that came around a few years ago and went to the Penguins and Capitals, respectively. Let me tell you, these guys can play, and play well. This series has been a lot of fun to watch. I will definitely be tuning into game 7 tonight. It’s hockey central in my house tonight. (Let’s go Pens!)

Hurricanes vs Bruins: Unfortunately, I’ve really only watched one game of this series, and that’s game 6 last night. I did watch the Hurricanes a few years back win it all and thought their goalie, Cam Ward, was quite awesome. Last night, he was still quite awesome, but something was missing. So, onward to a game 7. Not sure if the Canes can pull it off as the Bruins will be at home, but don’t be surprised if they do.

Ducks vs Red Wings: First of all, thank God they dropped the “Mighty” from their name. That was just lame. I think the Red Wings have too many good weapons to not win this series, but I am still a bit surprised it went to 7 games. However, with players like Selanne, both Niedermayers, Pronger (I must’ve missed him leaving the Blues), and both goalies, I can see them pulling it off. On the other hand, this is the Red Wings, octopus anyone? I mean, the Red Wings: Datsyuk, Draper, Holmstrom, Hossa, Zetterberg, Chelios, Lidstrom, and of course, Osgood. Yea, I see the Red Wings winning Game 7.

Lord Stanley’s Cup: Who do I think will play, and who do I think will win? That’s a good question. My money’s on the Red Wings vs the Penguins. Who do I think will win it all? As much as I want to say the Penguins, I can’t (sorry Doug!). The Red Wings are too experienced, albeit kinda old too, but alas, the Red Wings will win in 5 or 6. It won’t be a sweep. The Penguins will make it interesting, but not interesting enough to win.

Recently, someone at Time decided to write an article expressing their opinion on what not to do on Facebook. A list of 10 things that are big nono’s if you don’t want to lose friends, respect, or anything else.

“How Not to be Hated on Facebook” – Time.com.

After reading said article, my first thought was “This should be, well, read the subject of this Blog post.”

Now, I will give them some credit on a few things that do make some sense, but 98% of it is just way off base, IMO.

Let’s start at #1 “Stop taking quizzes….”

• These have existed for quite some time in other various formats, and are just plain silly. They are nothing new, just new to Facebook. Sure, most people probably don’t care what fruit you are, but at the same time, they’re all in fun. I am guilty of doing a few just to see what the outcome is. No one should remove you as a friend because you choose to have fun on Facebook. God forbid we have fun. Your friends can also click something to make the results not publish. I’ve done that on a few to spare my friends the spam, but if the outcome is somewhat funny, sure, I’ll publish the results.

#2 (This one probably irritates me the most) “If you sync your Twitter account to Facebook so that you fill others’ news feeds with a constant stream of mundane updates and references to people with little @ symbols before their names, be prepared for people to de-friend you”

• Holy shit. Did I just read that? Hello, what age are we in again? Last I checked, Twitter was mini updates about oneself without all the Facebook garbage. Plus, it’s a great RSS replacement. So, if there are people on your friends list that don’t understand what Twitter is, and there were some on mine but I helped them out, then for the love of technology, explain it to them. I have 2 friends on Facebook that post the occasional Twitter type message in their status (with the Twitter @), and I don’t care. What do you think Facebook is you fuckchimp? It’s full of updates without the Twitterish stuff, or did you miss the part of “Facebook Status”? Sounds like you did. Thanks for trying to make people understand that Twitter and Facebook can’t coexist. You failed.
• Besides, who the hell would de-friend you because you sync up your Facebook and Twitter. Some friend you have there, eh? Facebook is full of silly updates like *gasp* Twitter. I think my head just exploded from reading this one.
• Also, most people I know don’t sync every single retweet or anything else up with their Facebook. They use their own judgement on what to publish to both, and what to leave on just Twitter or just Facebook.

#3 “Don’t friend someone you don’t actually know”

• Now, 99.9% of the time, I would agree with this one; however, with the explosion of friend type games on Facebook like Mafia Wars, there are groups to have people add others to their friends list for the sole purpose of growing their little family in the game. Chances are, most of your friends don’t play. So, you are going to add complete strangers. Is it risky? Sure, but I have not had a single privacy issue with these people I add. We only add each other for one purpose. I block their updates, and I’ve had a few make complete inane comments about something I posted, so I removed them from my friends list. But in general, yea this is a bad idea. However use your discretion on who you add, but then again, you have a brain and probably already know this.

#4 “If you must friend someone you don’t know, include a message explaining why you are doing so. For example, ‘Hi, I’m your cousin’s roommate!’ would suffice.”

• I have one word to say about this, and then I will leave it alone: “Duh” Moving on…

#5 “Actually, no. Why would your cousin’s roommate want to be your friend? That’s still weird.”

• You could’ve rolled #3, #4, and #5 all into one list item. I think you are stretching to find 10 things not to do in Facebook, so you take one item and stretch it to 3 because you can’t think of 2 other things to write. Again, you fail. And, unfortunately I must use this phrase: epic fail.

#6 “Don’t invite people to events if they don’t live in your city. I’m glad you still live in our old college town, but guess what? I don’t. Even if I did, I still wouldn’t waste my Friday night listening to you play music at that vegan coffee shop I frequented when I was 19 because I couldn’t get into bars.”

• Ok, I have a real issue with this one too. This person who wrote this sounds like Cameron from Ferris Bueller “If you stuck a lump of coal up this person’s ass, in 2 weeks you’d have a diamond.” God, lighten up. Chances are they did a blanket invite so they didn’t have to figure out who to invite and who not to invite. I’ve gotten some pretty cool invites to some events that were not in Austin that I actually thought about going to. Example: a friend of mine from high school, his band was playing with Tenacious D for NYE in LA. That would’ve been a blast.
• Besides, how unsupportive can you be of your friends. If you don’t like them, nor like what they do, why did you add them in the first place? You are sounding more stupid with each number. “[W]ouldn’t waste my time…”, you can politely click “No” in the invite and move on. I do it. So can you. I have more to write on this, but it’s all garbled in my head, so I will move on. I think you all get my point.

#7 “I’m sorry your grandfather died of emphysema, but I will not join your ’cause.’”

• See above: unsupportive. Yes, I do understand the reasoning here, but they just lost someone they loved, and that was close to them. I have not really gotten many of these cause invitations for the reason listed here. Again, you can politely click “No” and move on.

#8 “Make sure all your photos are rotated in the proper direction. How will people know how fun your Fourth of July barbecue was if every picture looks like you fell over?”

• Ok, this one I do agree with 100%.

#9 “If you create a group called ‘Lost my cell phone; need your numbers!,’ I will join, but I won’t give you my number.”

• Can I just say something: If you, yes you – author of this article, have friends that do this, then, well, ugh. Plus, if they are your friend, they should have other ways of contacting you besides Facebook. Chances are they will send an email outside of Facebook requesting numbers or what not. or you will have common friends and it will trickle down that way. Without getting really mean, I am just going to leave it at that and move on to the last one.

#10 “Cryptic status updates about your mental state — ‘Rachel is trying so hard,’ ‘Rachel wishes things were different,’ ‘Rachel is starting her life over’ — don’t make you sound intriguing, just lonely and pathetic.”

• Fortunately I kind of agree with this one too, however most of the people I know don’t do this. Sounds like the author of this article has some pretty interesting friends.

That’s it, I think I figured it out. The author of this article has friends that have done one of the ten things listed here at some point, and so they figured they’d write an article about it. I think most of the stuff listed here has probably happened to most of us, but I think all ten things listed here have probably only happened to the author.

Be careful with your Facebook kids, use your discretion and common sense with anything: status updates, pictures, even your cell phone number.

There are more articles from Time on Facebook, and I will surely be commenting on those in the coming days. They are just as much fun to read as this one.

If you own an iPHone or an iPod Touch, and you like doing Sudoku puzzles, then y0u must have:

Sudoku Grab

For only $0.99, you can get the coolest, and best, app I have seen yet.

What does it do? Easy:

1. Find a sudoku puzzle online, in a newspaper, etc.
2. Open Sudoku Grab.
3. Take a picture of the puzzle (Yes! A picture! Even take a picture of a puzzle from a computer screen.)
4. Let the program figure out where the puzzle is located in the picture.
5. Fix the numbers in the puzzle if necessary.
6. Save it.

Voila, instant Sudoku puzzle. The whole process takes maybe a minute. It has a lot of cool features once you get the puzzle into the program and start working on it. I have not yet gotten that far into using these features. One thing is for sure, it will buzz at you when you enter a number in the wrong spot.

Well worth the $0.99.

You can read more about it here: http://sudokugrab.blogspot.com/2009/03/getting-started-with-version-11.html

Now go get it, and happy Sudokuing.

So, now that you have signed up for a Twitter account, customized it, and started tweeting, you might be wondering: Do I have to use the Twitter website for updating my Twitter?

The answer: no. There are all sorts of clients available for Mac, Windows, even your cell phone.

Note: Since I have no experience with the Mac clients, those won’t be covered. I’d recommend Googling for Mac client information.

I will focus this post on 3 areas:

- Windows clients
- iPhone clients
- Blackberry clients

Windows Clients

As there are lots of Windows clients, I will only cover the 2 I have used.

Note: These Twitter clients require an additional piece of software called Adobe AIR. Don’t worry about what that means. If the site, or whatever, tells you you need it, it is completely safe to install.

DestroyTwitter: Good, and simple. The interface is neat, and the setup/configuration/customization is easy.

TweetDeck:This one is just freaking cool. It’s the one I use because of the customization. The best part (IMO): You can group Tweets together. So I have one group for Friends, one for News, one for Sports, one for Weather, and one for Politics. Then you check off which member meets the criteria for each group. It makes it a bit easier to follow. When you add someone new, don’t forget to put them in a group.

Blackberry Clients

Twitterberry: This is really the only one I used for any length of time (before switching back to my iPhone). It’s easy and serves it’s purpose.

Blackbird: I tried to use this one, but it’s pretty weird. I only had it on my Blackberry for about 15 minutes.

iPhone Clients

Twitterfon: Best free one out there.

Tweetie: Costs money, but you can do more with it like look at Twitter profiles, manage multiple accounts, etc. I switched from Tiwtterfon to Tweetie.

Any client that doesn’t have a link here, you can Google and find it. They are all pretty easy to use, and simple to install and configure.

Happy Tweeting!

As usual, if you have any questions, do not hesitate to leave a comment, or contact me.

@mdmcaus on Twitter

I did it. I reactivated my iPhone because not only am I a gadget geek, but because I’m a technology whore.

I also got a taste of the new apps store stuff thanks to my sister. The Facebook app, MySpace app, a twitter app, and many other things are just plain better than they are on a Blackberry.

Now, before you slap me for the above statement, let me clarify with this:

Blackberry (non-Storm) vs iPhone – is this even an apples to apples comparison? No. Why? iPhone has touch screen, 99.9% of Blackberries don’t. So, yes the apps are going to be better, but they are actually better by a lot.

And, the side bonus, I save $15 a month on my bill. Woot.

The other part that got me to switch back over: About a year ago my World of Warcraft account was hacked. (Thankfully, a friend called me while it was happening, so I interrupted the hacker.) Ever since then, Blizzard has come out with an Authenticator which is a random number generator thingy similar to ones that companies use for VPN access. When you setup your account for it, there’s an extra step to logging in because you must enter the number from the Authenticator. They make a free one for the iPhone. (the other is $6.50) So, download from Apps Store, activate account, and voila, secure.

The other part of this story, I tried to go in and get a 3G iPhone, but because I wasn’t far enough along into my Blackberry Bold contract (Gads, I am a whore, aren’t i?), I would’ve had to pay full price for the 8GB 3G iPhone which is: $600. Jumpin Jesus on a Pogo Stick. So, back to the old one I went.

My name is Michael, and I’m a gadget and technology whore, and I approve this message.