Dropbox – My Experiences

About 10 or 12 years ago, there were a number of sites selling storage on the web. One of them I used for a while was XDrive.

At the time, I thought it was pretty cool. You could get up to 100 megabytes of storage for free! Courtesy of the Wayback machine at archive. org, here is what XDrive’s web site looked like back in 2000.

Here is what their web site looks like now. As you can see, they’re no longer in business. Myself, I stopped using them and their competitors after a while because in most cases, the interfaces were clumsy and really not all that easy to use. It became more convenient to use a flash or thumb drive, which were starting to get popular and less expensive.

That’s pretty much how I operated over the years. I would see other online storage operations come and go, and I didn’t pay much attention. About a year and half ago, I read about Dropbox and didn’t really think much of it at the time.

Recently, I was reading an article in MaximumPC magazine where they showed how to keep track of your passwords using a combination of the open source password tracker program KeePass and Dropbox.

In working through hows this should work, I decided to sign up for the basic 2Gb free Dropbox account.

Read more…

Change SSL Certificate from 1024 bit to 2048 bit on II6

Just a short posting in this subject. I needed to renew our SSL certificate on one of our Windows Server 2003 machines. We’ve always used GoDaddy, and never had a problem renewing in the past.

This time around, GoDaddy no longer issues 1024 bit certificates. You have to replace those with a minimum of 2048.

I attempted to just replace the 1024 bit certificate with a 2048 bit replacement and found that I could not do that on II6. Save yourself a little aggravation. You have to remove the old 1024 bit certificate and then install the new 2048 bit certificate in its place. Doesn’t take too long at all.

Why I stopped using Blogger – Redux

As I posted on 3/29,  I had finally come to the conclusion that Google’s Blogger service was seriously broken.

Since that time, I’ve continued to read the Blogger help forums (it’s actually like not being able to look away from a car accident),  and searching blogs continues not working.

Additionally, it appears that if any appreciable change is made to a blog, such as changing from the generic blogspot domain to a custom domain, for example, you get treated to having your comments disappear. Sometimes they come back, sometimes they don’t.

The one issue that bothers me the most, is that blogs continue to be deleted as spam blogs, when they aren’t. It’s been said by Google and some of their unofficial support staff that this happens because the spammers are just too good and that in a lot of cases they are scraping legit blogs which makes it difficult for Google’s automated spam checker to tell which is spam and which is legit.

I think it’s more of a case that Google just doesn’t have their act together. I’m seeing more and more cases of private blogs (not visible to the public) getting whacked by their spam checker. Here is a case of a poor soul with what he thought was a blog visible only to him getting deleted as a spam blog:

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/blogger/thread?tid=5197024060933acb&hl=en

Shoddy operation, Google, just plain shoddy. Obviously, this content can’t be scraped by spammers, and if the content is not available to the public, why is Google scanning it?

It just amazes me that Google can be so good at something like GMail, and yet so entirely bad with something like Blogger or Google Groups, which is a subject for another day.

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Platinum Tools Precision Screwdriver Set

When working on a desktop or notebook computer, it’s alway advisable to use quality tools. There is nothing worse than having to do a screw extraction because you used an inferior screwdriver and managed to strip the screw head. It’s definitely time and money lost.

I’ve been looking for a quality screwdriver set, particularly for working on notebooks. During my search I came across what looked to be the answer, the Platinum Tools screwdriver set – 33 piece.

I bought it at   Cyberguys, and it was reasonably priced at $27.44 with shipping.  Here’s what you get:

Pozi Drive PZ1 and PZ0

Phillips 000, 00, 0, 1

Slotted 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0. 3.5, 4.0

Torx 4.5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 20

Hex 0.7, 0.9, 1.3, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, 4.0

M5 Socket, M6 Socket, M4 Shaft

The screwdriver itself has a soft handle (which I like), and the tail end rotates, so you can hold it there and stabilize it even while turning the screwdriver. As you can see from the pictures, the screwdriver itself can be extended to a 9.5″ length. None of the pieces in this set look or feel cheap and look to last a long time. I’ve already used it during a couple of recent projects and was impressed with the quality.

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Clear Wireless Broadband Review

Just recently, I signed up for Clearwire’s Wireless Broadband Service. It’s known commercially as “Clear“.

I got the $55 home and mobile setup. Sadly, I wasn’t paying attention and missed out on a $50 per month for life on the same setup.

Rather than be tied down to a 2 year contract, I purchased the modems for each service outright. I did the sign up on line, giving them my credit card information and a couple of days later, received two boxes at my doorstep.

One box contained the The CLEAR Modem – Series M, for my connection at home,

and the other contained the Clear 4G Mobile USB adapter, for “on the go” usage.

The Mobile USB Adapter came with a universal joint type extender. I guess you would use that if you were unable to get to your USB port directly. I could see that as an issue as the Mobile Adapter  was huge.

They also included a miniature USB drive with the Clear Connection Manager software. Nice touch, but I didn’t really need it as I had already downloaded the software from their web site.

The Series M Modem didn’t look much different than a regular DSL or cable modem. This also was a little bigger than I thought.

One confusing thing occurred. When you buy the two modems as I did, you actually have two accounts under your name. A little hard to describe,

but it was confusing during the setup, until I called their tech support line and it was explained to me. It does make sense when you realize that each modem is for a separate account as you could cancel either one and still maintain service.

Setup was painless. With the Mobile USB Adapter, you load theconnection manager software. Stick the adapter in the the USB slot, and after a moment, the connection is made. This being wireless, your location is going to be important for how you connect. Using this adapter at home on my notebook, I managed to get a consistent 6Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up. Pings were about 62ms. Not bad at all.

Taking that same notebook into my office, in an office inside a building, I had widely variable results for download, everything from 900k/s download to 2.5Mb/s download. Uploads seemed to stay at around 1Mb/s. Pings were averaging around 100ms. Not  bad but not great.

The Series M Modem at home didn’t even need the connection software. I just hooked it to one of my desktops and got a clean 6Mb/s down and 1Mb/s up with pings in the 60-70ms range.

I’m not ready to make these guys my primary provider, but so far, the service has been good.

One thing I have to mention, and the last picture does not do it credit. The connection light on the USB mobile adapter is as bright as a searchlight! And as you use the connection, it constantly flickers.

I had the lights off in the one room while it was on, and it looked like a light show was going on. I found it very distracting while trying to use the notebook. I could only imagine how it would look to someone sitting next to you on a commuter train. Reading the Clearwire forum at dslreports.com, provided me with a solution. I used a felt tip marker and covered the connection light. It does not eliminate the light, but it cuts down the brightness considerably.

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Why I stopped using Blogger

I first joined Blogger back in 2004. I didn’t start blogging in earnest until last year. The nice thing about Blogger is that it’s free. Unfortunately, the bad thing about Blogger is that it’s free.

That may seem to be a contradiction, but it’s true. Blogger is free and there are a lot of great tools that they give you. This also attracts a lot of people who attempt to use Blogger as a spamming tool. Blogger is a huge operation and they use automated tools to try and stop the spammers.

While using Blogger, I was a frequent reader of their help forums. I learned  a lot just by reading the questions and answers that were being given. It was there that I found out that I was not alone with not being able to search my blog posts. This problem has gone unsolved by Google since last July. This was my first reason for not using Blogger any more.

Over time, I saw an increase in people complaining about there blogs being deleted as spam blogs. I started looking at the cached version of their blogs on Google search.

I found that in a lot of cases, the blogs being deleted did not appear to be spam blogs. Of course, a lot of them appeared to be just that, spam blogs.

Read more…

Microsoft Security Essentials Upgrade

I’ve been using Avast for my anti-virus program for the past few years on the various notebooks and desktops that I use. When I bought the Latitude D620, I decided to load it up with Microsoft Security Essentials, the free successor to Windows OneCare. OneCare never had a good reputation and you actually had to pay for it.

I’ve been using it for a few weeks now and it’s really performed well, working in the background, and updating itself effortlessly. It even fired off a couple of warnings on a couple of admin tools I had on a USB stick when I plugged it on.

So today, I get a pop up telling me to upgrade. These days, I’m a lot more suspicious and decided to check the Microsoft forums to see if there was talk of an upgrade, and there was.

Also, when I brought the program up, there were notifications (see the picture) to upgrade. After upgrading, I had to go through the usual restart. Over all, the process was painless and shouldn’t cause even the least experienced user any problems.

At this point, I have to say that Microsoft has done something right, and after some more testing, I may deploy this to some of my other computers.

Centering Sidebar Titles in Blogger

After making the switch back to Blogger as my host (even though they still haven’t fixed the blog search!), I used the same template that I had used before. It’s the Grey Blogger Theme from lawnydesigns.com . I didn’t like the default color, so I had changed that some time back.

Once I was moved back in, I decided that I didn’t like that the titles for the widgets in the sidebar were all left justified. I wanted them all to be centered, as I thought that would be a cleaner look.

I went to Edit HTML in the Layout section and looked through the code and found that the side bar widgets could be surrounded with a div expression:

The picture shows how it looked in my case. All I did was look for “sidebar” in the code. Your template may have a different design, but I think it could be made to work just the same.

Update:

I’ve switched to one of the new Template Designer templates that Blogger came out with on 3/11. I don’t know at this time whether I’ll keep it or not. (03/15/10)

Update 2:

I’ve switched back to my web hosting account and WordPress.  What I mentioned above still works for Blogger templates, though. (03/17/10)

EZ Upgrade Universal

I like this product and would certainly recommend it to anyone who needs to hook up a notebook drive to an external enclosure.

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