Tech by PC

That is what I heard from a Microsoft trainer recently. Does anyone have any direct knowledge of whether this is true or not? The problem with any metric like this is that there are so many more variables than just Windows Vista and Windows XP. For example, take a 3-year old Windows XP machine and refresh it with a brand new PC and a fresh operating system and I guarantee help desk calls will go down, at least temporarily.

Here are some possible reasons that Vista may cut down on your help desk calls. Read the rest of this entry »

This is some good stuff. I downloaded the DirecTV2PC beta recently and have been using it to watch recorded shows in other rooms of the house. Read on for a full review with screen shots. Read the rest of this entry »

Ok, this is the last post for a while on Magic Jack. I have been using it for several days now and here is what I learned and why I will not be replacing my home phone system with it.

1. I can’t port my number. That’s right, I have found several places on the Internet that will let me port my number to them and for a small per-minute or a per month charge forward all my calls from my old number to my new number. My outgoing calls will still show as originating from Magic Jack, not my original number. This in and of itself is a dealbreaker for me. Sorry, but my phone number is plastered everywhere and it would take too long to change it, and yes people do need to get in touch with me.
2. Incoming caller-ID does not work for me. I guess this is supposed to work, but if it shows anything it is just the phone number, not a name. Call me spoiled, but I prefer to see the name and the number.
3. Voice quality is actually pretty good. I have noticed a little clicking on the line sometimes, however otherwise the sound quality is crystal clear in and out. The only issues I have had can be attributed to my cell phone when I’m calling home to talk to my wife.
4. Computer has to be on all the time. Not a problem for me. I have a few computers I leave on all the time, but in additional to being on it has to run an application that lets me interface with the Magic Jack. That program popped up in the middle of doing something a few times. In order to make it as nice as my Packet 8 system I would have to purchase and dedicate a computer to it. I could do that with an Atom PC and parts I have around for probably $100, and it would still be worth the cost considering how much money Magic Jack saves me.
5. It passes the WAF, but barely. She is willing to put up with it only because it is so inexpensive.

Magic Jack will not be staying on as our primary phone. It does a good job as a backup phone or portable one, but I can’t see a reason to replace my regualr phone service with this.

I recently bought a Magic Jack to evaluate, and I finally got around to moving the house phones over to it. Unfortunately it is not yet possible to port your number to Magic Jack, so for the time being I have forwarded my Packet 8 number to the Magic Jack number. We will see how it goes. In the mean time I am looking at ViaTalk again since I can port my number to them and it will end up being about 1/3 of the price I am paying for Packet 8. They also have many more features that Packet 8 has not even dreamed about yet. Just worried about the stability, but I will get around to that.

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In the USA we just went though a time change. The majority of the world does not do daylight savings time, however some of us are still stuck on legacy systems.

The most common answer to why daylight savings time was used is that it was good for the farmers, however this answer is largly mythological in nature. Farmers will get up and work regardless of what time the clock on the wall says it is. Another answer is to save electricity. Factories used to use daylight to augment or replace lighting during the day, so if the factory works during daylight hours, it is then saving money.

These reasons are not valid reasons anymore, if they ever were.

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Since Halloween just went by I thought I would talk about vampires. You know, things that turn into bats and suck your blood! No, I’m just kidding. Well, I am talking about Vampires, but of a different sort.

Vampires, Wall Warts, Power Brick, these are all descriptive names for those transformers that plug into your wall socket and sap power out of the wall night and day regardless of whether or not anything is connected to them. Standby power is a minimal problem, but I did a little experiment recently to find out just how minimal.

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Every time a new electric vehicle is announced or I see more information I get excited. The Mini Cooper is a letdown, however. There will only be 500 of them, their US market will be limited, and the cost is beyond reasonable. The Electric Car Blog has more details including cost on it along with some pictures. Wired also has some information. It looks nice, but looks do not justify that cost. It just sounds a lot like the EV1. Will it actually ever become a consumer car?

I am still waiting for an affordable car that can reach 50 MPH, take me at least 30 miles on a charge, and be affordable. I don’t think car manufacturers understand that the market really does exist. With gas prices going back down they seem to believe that consumer demand will also decline. There are still environmentally conscious people who would like to drive a car that does not burn fossil fuels in an inefficient manner.

Why is it so difficult to produce a trustworthy electronic voting machine? I know Maryland has had electronic voting for quite a few elections, but it seems that many places can not make it work. I have seen examples of machines that count the votes wrong during testing, favor one candidate over another, or are vulnerable to having their data compromised.

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You heard about it here and elsewhere, plus Microsoft should have been popping up in your system tray asking you to update. Did you do it? If not, now is the time to get on it. Some exploit code has been published, so this typically means that it will not be much longer before people with ill intentions integrate the code into some other type of malicious software.

Clearly this one was not quite as dire as we were led to believe, however it is a good exercise in emergency patch procedure. I recently wrote about having to delay the monthly patches a week due to some high profile visitors and a general sudden paranoia about the safety of patching. The same week I finally pushed patches with WSUS was the week this critical patch was released, so we quickly called for some downtime again with the servers and forced the patch out to all users.

I did some things a long time ago to make such an emergency patch more feasible. The first thing was to lower the interval that desktops check for the patch. Since they are checking with my WSUS server, this ads slightly more network activity, but does not slow down the WAN connection one bit. The default limit is 24 hours and I changed it to 8. This means that so long as I schedule a patch outside of 8 hours of a deadline I can hit every single computer that was turned on. The second thing was an auto-approve rule. I automatically approve every single patch that comes into my WSUS server for a computer group called Not Fully Approved, or NFA that has no computer as member. This forces the patch to immediately begin downloading so that it is immediately ready for distribution when I approve it.

I hate to make another post about Entrecard, but enough is happening there that I feel it justified. While browsing around recently I came across an article by impNERD about the problems with Entrecard. He has another post on the subject which describes many of the problems facing the community. In my opinion he is spot on with some of the problems identified, although I do not visit the Entrecard forums frequently enough to understand all the dissent that it sounds like there must be. Some of my suggestions are below.

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