Since I am on vacation at  the moment, this touches close to home. Why is it nearly 2010 and we still do not have cheap ubiquitous internet access anywhere? I arrive at my in-laws house and they don’t have a wireless connection, but they do have a DSL “modem” directly connected to a laptop. Makes sense?

Lucky for me I carry a Pocket Router with me wherever I go. Hooked it up and set the laptop to connect wirelessly and the in-law (out-law) didn’t know the difference. In the mean time I have access anywhere in the house which is literally in the middle of nowhere. Next stop on my journey I actually have a cellular signal, so Verizon cell access is available to me at $15/24-hours. It is useful in an emergency, but at that cost I wouldn’t want to use it for days on end. I looked up AT&T since Verizon isn’t available in my home town and they don’t have a pay-as-you go plan for a data card. The same pocket router plugs into an available port on their wireless router. No need to configure a new access point on my computer (or my daughter’s) and there is built-in firewalling and segregation from their network just in case anything is crawling around on it.

The inbetween is where everything breaks down. Sure, almost every truck stop is now outfitted with “free wi-fi” and every cheap hotel has it, so you can just drive into the Super 8 parking lot and get online, but that certainly isn’t convenient when you just want to check your email before going to bed, or if your passenger wants to research hotels or attractions in that town that is 100 miles away while you drive.

So the United States is just too big for its own good. Either that or cell phone providers are afraid to provide affordable connectivity that is not attached to a 2-year contract. My suggestion to Verizon (or AT&T) is to change that $15 plan to $15 for 0.5 – 1GB of data but with a 1-week duration. AT&T’s $60/month plan caps at 5GB so this pay-as-you go would be close to being in line with that but without the commitment. When someone exceeds the limit they could start the week over. For everyone else who really just wants to browse the web or use email it would last a week and encourage that ubiquitous environment that everyone wants.

Now the new iPhone would actually tempt me if they allowed tethering at a reasonable price. Until that point I am 100% uninterested.

My Nuvi just started saying that the maps are outdated and need to be upgraded, probably at a cost. I have had it for about a year now, and while I don’t regret getting it there are some things about it that I think are done rather poorly. The following is my pro/con list for the Garmin Nuvi 750. 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.

December 2008 UPDATE: If television commercials are any indication, MagicJack has officially launched into the real commercial realm. For their sake they should have gotten number porting working before launching. I think they also should have found a partner of cheap Atom PCs to bundle this with as an option.

I have a few small topics that I’d like to mention that aren’t big enough for their own post yet.

The presidential debate and DirecTV

Am I the only one who has glitches throughout the broadcast? Pieces of their words are missing as the system seems to lose the stream and has to rebuild it. Then near the end one such glitch ended up with the audio and video way out of sync. The HD picture is great, but its hard to believe it costs so much for such lousy total experience. Wait, am I talking about the candidates or the DirecTV service?

MagicJack

I’ve been curious about this for a long time. How can they provide a product at such a low initial cost with no monthly fee? Well I bought one to find out since I can’t find a review of one that doesn’t sound like a paid advertisement or a baseless bash. I’ll be keeping you up to date on how that is going. My initial reactions are that the voice quality is great, and it seems like they are subsidizing the calling with advertising on the screen. Also, about all the little “rush processing” and “last chance for savings” that they try to pressure you into during the purchase process? Ignore them. You have the same opportunities after you receive it, and I chose standard shipping and got it in just a couple days.

Entrecard

I’ve commented around a few places about the ups and downs of the service. I am still happy with it, but there is a serious problem with the ranking system. Still. Any time a blog with half a dozen total posts that hasn’t been updated in a month and a half is ranked ahead of people who are obviously trying, that is a problem. I’ve figured out the system myself and am ranking between position 4-6 in the Technology section, but there are a lot of people way down the list with high quality blogs.

Blogging

I saw a website of a guy who absolutely hates blogging and is quite vocal (wordy) about it. I found it ironic that while his tirade wasn’t in a blog format, it sounded just like the kind of spewing opinion that he finds offensive about blogs. There are a lot of bloggers out there trying to make a quick buck at the expense of quality, but it is so obvious when people do sponsored posts that I have no problem ignoring it and moving on to real opinion that is interesting and thought provoking. On the flip side, even his opinion was interesting enough for me to mention it here. The best thing about the Internet is that you don’t have to visit every page.

I do not want to comment much about the credit crunch except as it influences technology. I wanted to bring a warning to people who use Vonage about something from my personal experience with VoIP. SunRocket went out of business suddenly and without warning leaving me and thosands of other people without service including 911. They managed to keep some people’s lines going from what I understand, but mine was immediately cut off. Vonage’s most recent 10Q talks about their debt and gives some warnings. If you have Vonage I encourage you to take a look at their investor relations pages and read this information for yourself. I’m not suggesting that they won’t secure the financing that they need to stay in business, I’m just giving a warning that you may want to do some research now on what you would do should your phone suddenly stop working. It was a mad rush to other VoIP providers when that happened, and I was already testing Packet 8 on the 30 day free trial, so I had it relatively easy.

Just at a minimum make sure you have a cell phone handy – even one without a service plan will work fine for 911 calls and won’t cost you a penny except to keep it charged.

On the same subject, you may want to look at other publicly traded companies that you do business with to see what their financials look like. I’m not suggesting you break off with Vonage or anyone else, because that will only increase the problem, just that you make the most of the resources that you have and make smart buying decisions. It is my opinion that this thing will blow over more quickly than most people expect, but more companies will go under before it is over.

UPDATE: Vonage having trouble selling its debt.

UPDATE (10/20/2008): The criticality of the deal is over, Vonage refinanced its debt, but the terms are not great.

Battery technology is possibly one of the hottest areas of research today, at least in terms of practical application. The three most influencial sources for demand are electric cars, laptops, and cellphone/media player/gadgets. I group the last together because there is little significant difference between them as far as battery technology goes. The cellphone, media player, and gadget niche is pretty stable and its needs fulfilled. Most devices have plenty of power for normal uses and recharging them is not an inconvenience. Laptop batteries are not to that point yet. Dell and HP are working diligently to combine low drain components with extra batteries to increase the endurance of their laptops, yet extra batteries still add extra weight and charge time. Electric vehicle batteries are even further away from meeting what is required of them.

Read the rest of this entry »

Recently we went through a project to determine the best encryption software to use in our business. The projects evaluated were McAfee Safeboot, SafeNet, and GuardianEdge. Each of these three products have their respective strengths and weaknesses in an enterprise environment, but there is one problem that all three of them share, and that is that they are an enterprise solution. You wouldn’t want to use this or pay for this for home or small business use.

The best solution that I have found for the home and small business is Truecrypt. There is plenty of documentation on that site to explain how to set it up and run it. I want to describe the reasons for running it at home. Obviously an enterprise has company confidential data including trade secrets, pricing, margins, employee data, etc. that has to be protected. Hopefully they aren’t putting these things on a laptop in the first place since there is very little reason that anyone would have to have a local copy of much of this while off site, but it does happen.

Your home laptop probably doesn’t put an enterprise at risk if it is lost, however it can put you at risk. The majority of laptops that are stolen are done so just for their resale value. They get stuck on ebay or sold to a pawn shop or some guy down the street. There is less thought to the value of the data on it than the value of the hardware itself. When that is not the case, your data is completely vulnerable. If you have logged into banking websites, the tracks are probably still available. If you recently logged into your webmail then your computer may still have a cached session available for the thief. If you run an email client you likely have it set to remember your email account passwords. With that little bit of information a theif could reset your password for your bank and log in, just as one small example.

Encryption solves this problem by making it more difficult to break into your data than any value that could possibly be received from having done so. In other words, no commonly used encryption is completely foolproof, but all provide barriers to your data that would require significant computing effort to break through.

There are two types of encryption most commonly used by consumers. First is the built in encryption with their computer. For Windows users that would be Microsoft’s file and folder encryption which is activated simply by right clicking on the file or folder, clicking properties, advanced, and then checking the box that says to encrypt. Note that you have to have a password specified for your account, and I’m just speaking about modern versions of Windows. There are two inherent dangers with this type of encryption. First, it is all tied to your windows password. In other words, if someone gets your password, they have your encrypted files. Second, it is easy to forget to encrypt important files including paging file, temporary files, etc.

The solution is full disk encryption which encrypts everything on your hard drive including temporary and swap files and makes it all inaccessible without a bootloader password. The password you generate should be significantly difficult. I use a combination of phrases and random characters and numbers. With recent versions of the software Truecrypt is capable of allowing suspend to disk with your bootloader password required to boot back into the system.

Having this protection on your laptop gives you peace of mind when there are times that you must leave your laptop in a less secure place. There are some concerns about your encryption key being in memory if the system is in a sleep state, and it is true that someone could compromise your laptop in that state IF they were prepared to do so. In Vista it is easy to set a timer on the sleep so that after a certain amount of time the system will wake up and go into hibernation. There is also a possibility that within a few minutes of the system being off that the data would still remain in RAM to be retrieved by someone who really knows what they are doing. In other words, there is little reason to be concerned about these vulnerabilities. If you worry then just hibernate or power off your system and wait two minutes before leaving it alone.

I would also like to say that I’ve had it installed on my laptop for a long time and have never noticed a performance problem.

In my previous post on Cellular One I mentioned that they have handed off the local towers to AT&T. Fellow blogger Dan Brantley mentioned his experience with such a transition. Well, I can report that some of that is coming true here. In addition to running down the battery on my Blackberry, my wife’s phone (which has already transitioned to AT&T) lost its SIM card today. I pulled it out and put it back in and all is well for the moment, but that kind of stuff just never happened before.

I understand that management finally got wind about the roaming. I passed the information up earlier, but I write so many emails I’m sure it got lost. I understand that we have worked out the new contract, but have no idea what kind of terms they worked out. My guess is that it was a two year contract, but at the rate we add phones that’s probably not a problem.

I did some more looking at phones and the one I’m interested in is not out yet. I want something that looks like the Blackberry Curve, with a full keyboard, but in a flip model. At least I haven’t seen it yet. Going by what Blackberry says is available for AT&T I’ll probably go with the 8820 if I’m given a choice. If I get one of those without a full keyboard I’ll have to yank the SIM and put it in my old phone because I can’t stand that predictive typing stuff.

I noticed over on Mobile Tech News that they say the 8220 has a full QWERTY keyboard. If it does, then I’m interested, but I can’t tell from the pictures that Blackberry has whether or not this is true. I did a google image search and everything is small, but it seems to me that there is no full QWERTY keyboard there. Someone correct me or confirm this?

I live in a region that AT&T recently took over from Cellular One. All my household phones were switched over rather easily months ago. We don’t talk much except to eachother, so the prepaid phones have been the cheapest route to go there. My work phone is a Blackberry 8300 and so far has not been converted to AT&T’s network. I noticed late last week that the roaming triangle started appearing on my phone even while at home and work which have always been prime locations for signal. The phone must have started searching for a non-roaming tower because I can’t run more than a day without a battery charge now. It is quite frustrating. I never had this problem in non-ATT areas before. I asked around a bit at work and everyone’s phone is doing the same thing now.

I understand that we’re supposed to be either getting new phones or new SIM cards for our existing phones. I’m wondering what the holdup is.

I’m really hoping for a new phone. It’s not that I don’t like my 8300, but so many advancements have happened since then. The GPS function is one of the most interesting, however I’ve also noticed that the newer models have a more responsive interface than mine. Of course there’s the storm/thunder too, but I’m not sure how I would like a keyboard that didn’t have a raised surface.