Computers & Technology

Old-time photographers and pros usually refer to the “power” of a lens in millimeters of focal length. This is convenient in part because lenses on pro-grade cameras are almost always detachable. A “normal” SLR or DSLR lens usually has a focal length of 50mm. A “macro” lens may be 100mm; a telephoto, 200mm. A 300mm fixed-focal length telephoto is usually a heavy, bulky thing with a lot of pulling power.

With the advent of consumer “zoom” lenses, a less technical rating system came into use, implying powers of magnification. Digital consumer cameras inaugurated the wholesale adoption of zoom lenses (non-detachable), so that it’s almost impossible to find a fixed focal length consumer camera or “pocket” camera today.

Optical magnification

My Bushnell binoculars have a rating of 7×50, meaning 50mm objective lenses having a “power” of 7x. According to Wikipedia, optical magnification is a ratio of the apparent size of an image to the true size (as viewed by the observer):

Example: The angular size of the full moon is 0.5°, in binoculars with 10x magnification it appears to subtend an angle of 5°, which is roughly 1/10th of the field of view of typical eyepieces.

Consumer “Zoom” 

In cameras, I never understood what “10X zoom” actually meant. The consumer might assume it means “10 times life-size”. But if you think about it, a 10X elephant gives the lie to any literal interpretation of this notion.

Thanks to a PC World review of consumer digital zoom cameras (August 2008, and again I was unable to find the current article online), here’s the skinny, in “Dawn of the Megazooms”, buried in a table of lens offerings for various models:

Olympus SP-570UZ 26mm to 520mm zoom (20x)
Canon Powershot S51S 36mm to 432mm zoom (12x)
Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ18K 28mm to 504mm zoom (18x)
and so forth …

Get it yet?

 The “X” power rating only refers to the range of focal lengths. It has nothing directly to do with magnification at all. You can see that my binoculars increase the angular size of an object by about 7 times. What does optical zoom represent?

It took me a while, too. The Olympus “20x” is just the ratio of the least focal length to the greatest: 20 x 26 = 520. And so on, for Canon 12 x 36 = 432, and Panasonic 18 x 28 = 504.

You can’t directly calculate optical magnification given only the size of the objective lens (the big lens at the far end). You have to know the strength of the “eyepiece” lens as well.

So the “20x” in the consumer zoom is only a measurement of the extreme ranges of zoom, from 26mm to 520mm, for example. The difficulty and cost of manufacturing a good zoom lens increases with the zoom range of this magnification. A truly professional lens of this capability can easily cost two to three times the $500 cost of the entire Olympus rated in this PC World article.

My little Leica CLUX2 pocket camera sports a 3.6 optical zoom (28-100mm), which gives me adequate options for framing 95% of the shots I’m presented with.

So beware. Once again, bigger is not always better.

Many of my friends make hardcopy prints of their photos, but I have too many images and almost never print them. But three years ago I felt an almost panicky need to buy a color printer. I found some treasured photographs and printed glossy 8×10’s so I could surround myself with framed reminders of a lost loved one.

The printer was an Epson PHOTO R340 (now discontinued). The prints were utterly stunning - I can’t tell the difference bewteen them and a Kodak enlargement. And they are a great comfort and source of happiness to me. Since then, we can bring in a camera card or USB thumb drive and order all the color copies and enlargements we want, at Long’s, Walgreen’s or elsewhere, on a few hundred thousand dollars of professional image printing equipment. Mostly these services promise 1-hour printing. This might have been a better option for me.

But the old R340 is down to 20% ink supplies. Time to re-order? OEM, or inexpensive third-party ink? Some of you may remember this controversial topic has been a favorite of mine for a very long time.

The August 2008 PC World had an interesting lab report on our choices (I was unable to find Jeff Bertolucci’s article “Cheap Ink: Will It Cost You?” online). We all know that ink cartridges are outrageously overpriced - the industry gives away the printers below cost, and makes it up on aftermarket ink resales.

Basically, you can still save some money with the third-party “generic” inks. Walgreen’s even refills old cartridges that customers bring in. But the chances are very good that you’ll notice image blemishes, or color degradation, or loss of sharpness. Worse, many of the cheaper inks fade rapidly with time. You would have to research and experiment to find out which third-party cartridges are acceptable for your purpose - and they are all different. It’s a crap shoot out there. Is this what we want for our most irreplaceable images?

Generally, manufacturer’s cartridges give visibly better prints. In fade tests, the results on some generics were deplorable after heavy UV exposures.

I have fished out old film prints from the 1960’s and 1970’s that were so grossly faded and washed out that there was no point in even trying to scan them. I did not have a lot of money for prints in those days, and feared exactly what happened, decades later, when I searched for and found them. Even then, I wondered if premium printing services (Kodak, for one) was really worth all that extra money. It would have been.

Whether on photo paper or digital printer, the quality of the ink pigment and binder is everything. Coarse or poorly ground pigments can cause clumping and jams. Unstable pigments are more sensitive to the aging effects of UV, heat and the ravages of time. Binders, the “glue” that fixes pigment particles in place, control the color flow (in the ink-jet), color creep and blur, and of course the durability of the finished print.

Given the irreplaceable value of some prints over time - particularly if you lost the negative or image - why would you choose the ink that promised the least long-term preservation value?

For my money, I’ll replace the Epson cartridges with Epson replacement cartridges, and milk those for another three years or until the ink dries up. But, next time I find that really precious image that I want to hang on the wall (and have room for), I’ll probably send it to Kodak.

CoolerMonster

Well, I can say one thing right away about the CoolerMaster Cosmos 1000 case. It’s BIG - measuring 23-1/2 x 10 inches, including helicopter-style landing skids.

Another thing: it’s QUIET. CoolerMaster really soundproofed this design well. It’s even quieter than any laptop I ever owned. I can hardly hear it at all.

I needed a new case for a new machine. I just didn’t want to take the old CoolerMaster offline for a week while completely rebuilding it and reinstalling all the software. As I use DataPort removable HD cartridges, the internal 5 inch drive bays have to all be deep to hold them. I knew from experience that the bays of some of older cases could only handle one DataPort because other parts of the internal structure got in the way.

The Cosmos has FOUR huge 120mm case fans. They can move more air and still rotate more slowly, so you don’t hear them. It has five 5″ bays, and one of these doubles as a floppy bay with a converter plate. It also has six 3.5″ drive pull-out bays down below, with handles. All the bays have quick-mount hardware, allowing you in most cases to install or remove a hard drive without using a single machine screw.

The photo above shows the completed unit with the case door open. Top to bottom bays: Pioneer SATA CD-DVD-RW, SATA DataPort (250GB Samsung), empty bay, my old Silverstone image card reader (USB2), and the Sony floppy drive unit I installed at the last minute. The other 3.5″ hard drive, my SATA Samsung 500GB music drive, is mounted internally.

To the right is the case with the front cover closed. The cover is reversible - it came opening from left-to-right, and I changed it over to left-to-right for this installation, which is already getting messy. The cable modem doesn’t enhance the appearance, but it’s cool up there, and I had no place else to put it.

The interior is quiet capacious, as you might guess, and even though the motherboard tray doesn’t slide out, there’s plenty of room to work on it.

I had no problem installing the Antec Neopower 550 power supply, ASUS M2N-SLI motherboard, ASUS EN7600GS silent video card, or other components. All drives are SATA - this is my first installation without any IDE cables.

This is just as well, as the ASUS M2N motherboard doesn’t support legacy IDE. If you want to hang on to the IDE technology, you have to install a PCI card in a slot.

I installed four 1-GB Corsair DDR2 memory modules. Not believing that either Vista or XP-64 is quit ready for prime time, I installed Windows XP Pro in the 32 bit version, which recognizes a maximum of 3.5GB or RAM.

The Cosmos 1000 case has a shipping weight of 35 pounds. By the time I installed everything, I believe the weight was around 50 pounds, and it was an unexpected chore to lift the completed unit onto its wooden stand.

The top console houses the traditional power and reset buttons, plus (4) USB2 ports, eSATA, IE1394 (Firewire) and audio out/microphone in connections. As mentioned, I installed my “old” Silverstone USB card reader. I had purchased a nice “new” one, and prompting bent the pins in testing when I tried to insert an IBM 1 IGM CompactFlash hard drive, which is a little fatter than the nonvolatile memory cards.

Initially I feared I had ordered too much case. Indeed, it has expansion capacity I will never exploit. Its near-absolute silence, thoughtful design features and convenience of use make it a most worthwhile investment.

ASUS M2N Motherboard: as previously noted, IDE is no longer supported on this board, but there are a generous 6 SATA onboard connectors, plus support for RAID. Two onboard USB2 connectors are barely adequate, but there are four rear panel USB2 connectors as well. Audio is SoundMax 8 channel hi-def, and superlative on my early tests with my 200GB WAV music collection. I was disappointed that the driver CD was for the new Vista OS, but I was able to download and install everything I needed for XP from the excellent ASUS website.

The CPU is the AMD AM2 X2 6000+ 3GHz Athlon. The retail kit includes a beefy cooler, with factory adhesive thermal paste. I used to always use Arctic Silver thermal paste, so I monitored my AM2 installations carefully(the first one is already in Phoenix). I never saw CPU temperatures go above 40 degrees Centigrade on the ASUS mobo monitor (BIOS), with 38 being average. A lot of thought has gone into ease of assembly for these chips and coolers, and the whole installation is a piece of cake compared to the old days.

DataPort: I reviewed the DataPort cartridge system in 2002 and still use it. Currently there is only one DataPort as the carriers and cartridges for SATA are quite different than my large inventory of older IDE units, and they’re fairly expensive.

CoolerMaster internal HD Bays:

With the HD capacity above, you could almost start a server farm. I am just using the one bay. Cooling should be adequate as it’s served by one of the big 120mm fans. I took a number of other photos as assembly went along, but there are plenty of other articles (here and elsewhere) on building your own machine. Mostly, this unit was routine. To be honest, that’s the way it should be. A typical machine knockup takes about all the daylight hours of one weekend day. Software installation takes all available time in the week to follow. I would rather talk about the software this time.

Software Installation

Windows XP isn’t as facile as it could be about SATA yet. It took me three tries to get the OS installed as a C drive; twice it installed as drive E. Windows will boot into this boot drive E, but your software program installers will go bonkers, and you will have to do it over again. The trick turns out to be not to connect your other hard drives until this one is up and running as a C drive.

Networking File Sharing has become increasingly balky with every new Windows OS and Service Pack. Getting new machines to talk to the others has become an increasing frustration. It turns out the culprit and the solution here was Master Browser. This is a registry setting, and you can Google it yourself or just check out my link in the last sentence.

• Only one machine on a peer to peer home network must have this registry setting as TRUE; the others must be FALSE or blank. All of mine were false. Once I set the new Cosmos to TRUE, my problems disappeared on the whole network (I have up to three machines on at various times).

Zone Alarm firewall : I decided to give McAfee and Windows Firewall a rest and try a new suite. Zone Alarm had a 3-user suite of firewall, antivirus, antispam and anti-spyware on sale for $49.95 - same price as the single user license. Zone Alarm gives you two way firewall protection: inbound and outbound. It is “trainable” but very unobtrusive, very powerful and it does not seem to be a resource hog. I like it. I do have a hardware firewall (NetGear FR114P firewall, router and print server) but a hardware solution is not programmable on a per-application basis, and, while highly recommended, is not considered enough by itself. For one thing, the consumer hardware firewall has no outbound protection in the event malware does get through and tries to propagate itself to everybody in your address book. Zone Alarm handles all this.

Adobe PhotoShop: I am going to mention this only because of the exceptionally nice treatment Adobe Customer Service gave me not once, but twice. First, I inexplicably lost my PhotoShop CS3 upgrade CD. They deactivated the old one and shipped me a replacement for only $20, for shipping and handling. Second, when I went to install it, CS3 wouldn’t accept my “upgrade serial number” from the aged PhotoShop 4.0. And I didn’t know what the serial number of the replacement CS3 was supposed to be, either. They looked it all up and talked me through it, and didn’t offer to end the call until I confirmed I was up and running. This struck me as wonderful because (1) I already felt like a total idiot, and (2) this kind of hand-holding is very rare in today’s abrasive customer service environment. I am grateful, and Adobe won back loyalty from what had been increasing disenchantment with previous problems with the firm or its products and offers.

PGP 9.7: I’ve used PGP encryption to protect my sensitive data, going all the way back to pre-1997 Macintosh days, but I haven’t written much about it. If you leave your Quicken files and accounts on your unprotected hard drive, you’re just asking for trouble, no matter how good your firewall and security. What do you do with your old hard drives? You don’t just throw them out, do you? What if your machine is stolen? I create “PGP disks”, 128-bit encrypted file partitions about 300mb each (they can be any fixed size that fits your needs). The passphrase is so secure that it would take NSA’s supercomputers quite a while to crack it.

The whole idea of “encryption” frightens most people, but leaving my financial data unsecured is one thing I never have to worry about. For gawdsakes, don’t write down your passphrase — and don’t ever forget it! If you don’t use encryption, it might be because of intimidation, or fear of loss of data. I’ve embraced encryption in my personal computing world for over a decade. Not only is it a completely routine and easy process, I’ve never lost any data from a PGP disk. Ever.

BOINC Project SETI- this actually started this construction project. I noticed that the new M2N machine I built for Phoenix was cranking out work units faster than all of my other machines combined. Awesome! I am really not so interested in being the poor sap whose machine actually ever “discovers” intelligent signals being beamed to the massive Arecibo radio telescope. I used to use BOINC for a cancer genome project, but the project ended. I also devote some CPU time to project Einstein@Home, which detects pulsars. But, mostly, I still crank our work units for Seti@Home. I’m part of the Cloudy Nights SETI team. I guess I still have some of the old competitive spirit.

The image below shows recent average credit (March 2008). The graph doesn’t extend far back into the past, so it’s hard to get an idea of machine productivity. If you remember high school geometry, the “slope” of the curve was dramatically flatter before the first M2N went online. I’m currently cranking out over 1000 work units per day.

The next image shows the four machines online within the past 30 days. Top to bottom, Silverstone music server (living room), the new M2N machine just built, the old AMD 3800+ machine being replaced, and the new M2N machine doing part-time duty in Phoenix since February. To give you a good idea of daily output rates, the 3800+ had been doing SETI for over a year; the new M2N machine, about a week.

Mind you, AMD currently isn’t making the fastest processors, but (compared to Intel) they do give you the most bang for the buck.

SpamWasher version 2.0.1 - a friend recommended a spam intercept program, and I downloaded, tried and paid for the wrong one - but it turned out to be right for me. I like it. Here’s how it works: on installation, SpamWasher copies your email signons, and, optionally, all your trusted email addresses - for its whitelist filter. From that point on, SpamWasher gets all the email headers from your mail server(s), sorts content into “Approved” and “Spam” based on trusted lists, training and preset rules. No mail is actually downloaded to your machine. You inspect the day’s mail catch, tweak and train for any “flyers”, and send the “Wash Spam” command to delist all the spam mail headers. Opening your email client, “Send/Receive” downloads approved mail only. You can let SpamWasher do the physical spam deletes at your leisure, so there is a second chance if you make a mistake.

The concept is not new - PocoMail was doing this years ago - but I like this implementation. Despite Outlook’s strong spam filters, I think it’s better to never download suspect mail at all. And, SpamWasher has a “look ahead” feature to see if there’s mail waiting on the server, and whether it’s friend or foe, so you don’t waste a lot of time looking for mail when there isn’t any.

SuperFlexible Pro: In 2004 I reviewed SuperFlexible, this wonderful file synch product by Tobias Giesen. I still use it exclusively for incremental file backups, and I do a lot of them over the course of a week, because it’s so easy. I also use it for file-synching machines over my local network. This saved my bacon on recent machine builds, since a clone of your boot disk can get that OS license decertified under the Windows Genuine Advantage if you try to mount it on another machine - even if to only copy non-system files. Currently I lean toward only backing up personal files, and I use Superflexible exclusively for that. Backing up an OS on a disk mirror is a nice feel-good precaution, but OS and application updates and upgrades change so rapidly you’d have to do it once a week to make a backup really useful.

I really should update my review, but here’s a new example of why SuperFlexible is so great. I don’t have any spare SATA DataPort carts to clone my 200GB WAV music collection, and I’m too lazy to swap one out for a disk clone with Norton Ghost. I let SuperFlexible copy all 4,011 “songs”. SuperFlexible manages the file transfer smoothly through the Windows API. A raw Windows “drag and drop” will choke on a huge collection of files (as many of you must have noticed). Before the native Windows routine crashes completely, it will corrupt many of the files it has tried to copy. You won’t know which ones, and so will end up copying them all over again from scratch by some other method. SuperFlexible is that method.

I recommend you read my article if you have any interest in reliable, efficient solutions to file backups. Software QA analysis tells us every application has bugs by definition - even NASA software - but I’ll be darned if I can say for sure I ever personally noticed one in SuperFlexible since I started using it. And I’m in the software QA business. I look for bugs for a living.

Saving Time Is Amost Everything

Why? It leaves you more time for the important things in life, like this:

copyright ©Alex Forbes March 31, 2008

Respected audio guru Wes Phillips reviews the Linn Klimax DS network music player in the current March Stereophile magazine. It streams 124KHz 24 bit music to a hardwired home music network. If you can afford the $20,000 price tag (even money, no $19,999.99 bait-and-switch here) then you can probably also afford to hire an outside shop to rip your entire CD library to proprietary FLAC digital audio files, which you can then route through the whole house on a state of the art proprietary software platform.

If that’s too rich for your blood, there’s the $6,000McIntosh MS750 music server, reviewed by Phillips in the January issue. Phillips notes that some audiophiles have attempted to duplicate this functionality on home PC’s. I believe his phrase was “on the cheap”.

The image at the top of this article shows the Silverstone on the top left of the rack. Black cases photograph poorly. But it’s my $2,000 solution.

It seems the audio industry is starting to pay attention to audio technologies that were already available for Mac and PC in 1997. I’ve posted my articles Music Server, Music PC in Living Room Stereo (2006-2007) and Home Sound Studio (1998), describing most of the information you need to know.

My System

My system isn’t designed to “stream” audio, though it could - inter-connectivity is 100% Ethernet. It plays lossless WAVE files. I use the superlative free iTunes software to manage almost 200GB of classical and “pop” music. I rip music in the computer room, where I spend much of my time. To play in the living room, I synchronize a 300GB hard drive via Ethernet with a similarly built machine in the living room. I’m listening to Yo-Yo Ma “Cello Suites” (Sony, 1997) at the moment. In my many aural A/B comparisons, I can’t detect any differencein audio depth or quality between the original CD and the ripped file, even on the Klipschorns in Phoenix. Digital audio is digital audio. If you are as good as the original CD, you can’t get better.

All this theory falls apart if you are using “cheap” PC equipment. I have no doubt my technique would disappoint on an off-the-shelf Dell or Gateway out the door from Best Buy. But, if you own one of these machines, and it is modern (dual core, CPU 3000+), I can’t say what kind of audio processor the motherboard might offer onboard, but you can always buy a better-quality sound card. There should be no excuse for buffer underrun on a reasonably new machine, so you should still be OK, and this project might still be worthwhile for you.

Remember, I was playing stereo-quality music on a much simpler earlier-generation setup a decade ago. There just wasn’t enough bandwidth left to write articles about it at the same time.

Here in a nutshell is what I did to build my own system. Sparing no expense or cost overrun, and with the fancy Silverstone case, I managed to spend nearly $2000, but you should be able to do much better. If you are going to blow good money on a fancy PC case designed for home entertainment, take a look at the gorgeous $499 Zalman HD160 Plus Home Theatre PC Enclosure.

• Use a high end motherboard. I am using the ASUSM2N and A8N32SLI mobos.
• Look for the high end ReakTek/NVidia onboard audio processors, such as supplied with ASUS. These probably outperform low end audio cards such as Creative Labs Audigy, with a lot less drivers and things to crash.
• Use a dedicated, separate large HD exclusively for your audio library. I am using close to 2/3 of my 300GB drives. You can easily clone a dedicated drive for backup or transport.
• Use Apple iTunes to manage your growing audio library.
• Output your audio from the motherboard connector (green) to a standard stereo front end. I use a compact Denon in the computer room, and a mid-price Denon stereo receiver in the living room, but it can be any stereo amplifier you currently entrust to your very best music.
• Use the best speakers you can afford for the job, just as you do with your “regular” hi-fi.
• Buy an inexpensive A-B switch from Radio Shack so you can still pipe regular “PC sounds” through PC speakers when you are not listening to music. When all you want to do is hear the “PC Beep”, this just saves having to power the stereo on and switching it to your dedicated music server’s low-level AUX, TV, DVD or CDR connection.
• If you sync music files with a music player, or actually stream music, use Ethernet. You can NOT get the job done with wireless.
• If you want to play DVD’s on these systems, you need a DVD/CR player, and a DVD decoder. I purchased the NVidia PureVideo Gold decoderfor $29.99. So far, the highly compressed DVD audio is not up to snuff when compared to the original lossless sound track, but it still sounds pretty awesome on home entertainment speakers.
• Don’t forget to pipe your PC video (DVI or VGA) to your TV. Any modern TV has both inputs and a TV/PC input selector control. Most often, I run a slide show of my collection of digital and scanned home photos into the 36″ Samsung flat panel LCD. There is some stretching of the 1:1.5 image due to the wide screen format of modern TV’s. I have not figured out how to adjust my TV for that yet.

Conclusions:

All in all, I couldn’t be happier with my new setup. Due to the convenience of my vast iTunes library, I almost never play a vinyl LP or a CD. I can get home-theater quality audio out of my PC any time I want - no pressure to upgrade those ancient PC speakers.

Supposing you do have $100,000 to invest in a home entertainment system (I don’t),  a $20,000 solution might sound attractive if it solves your audio delivery needs once and for all. It doesn’t.

Why would you want to invest that kind of money and time in a proprietary software system. and in proprietary audio file formats, that might not even be supported in 10 years?With lossless WAVE, and a hard-drive-based file management system based on Windows NTFS or Apple formats, you could start all over without re-recording if you had to. And what of the all-important playlist? Would you have to enter it all in by hand again? With Apple iTunes, the whole thing can be exported to XML. From there you can go to Oracle, mySQL, FileMaker, Access or anywhere you want to go.

You only have to get burned once with hundreds of hours invested in a dead-end file format. Yes, I can convert one or two Quicken 2003 files to Quicken 2007. I can’t reasonably do this with thousands of audio files, nor do I have a spare week or two to figure out how to accurately convert a playlist database format.

A standardized, off-the-shelf solution built with mainstream software and file protocols has much to recommend it. I can rip a CD with my system in a few minutes, at rip speeds of 16-27x, building the playless at the same time in iTunes without typing a thing. With over 4,000 songs in the database, this has still consumed (I’m guessing) over a hundred hours. I can be reasonably confident I’ll never have to do it again. Purchasers of the $6,000-$20,000 systems can not.

I may not own SACD disks or a player to handle them. My most expensive speakers were only $800 each (unfinished Klipschorns, in 1979). I know full well that there is a higher audio standard out there somewhere. But if you haven’t heard Waylon Jennings, E. Power Biggs, the Brandenburg Concertos or the awesome Powaqqattsi (Plillp Glass) on Klipschorns, maybe you don’t realize how much there is in the “old” standard.

Maybe there’s a reason why interest in the old vinyl LP is picking up again. The honest sound is there. In a Stereophilediscussion of the deteriorating sound quality of some current CD’s, I was horrified to learn that some of them use indiscriminant compression, almost like the MP3 files. Thus, even our source material isn’t lossless - the loss is already engineered in.

In the same discussion, mention was made of the awesome old direct-to-disc half-speed mastering recording technology, as exemplified by recording engineers like my half-brother Stan Ricker on the old Mobile Fidelity label. Yes, Virginia, you can really hear an astounding difference.

I’ve hard many friends comment they “can’t hear the difference” between compressed and lossless audio. It’s a fact - good compressed audio sounds good. But you can’t do this comparison by memory: “I heard the lossless version, and it didn’t sound any better” doesn’t hold water when you do a direct A/B comparison (switch back and forth between two reasonably synched recordings). You don’t have to have perfect pitch and golden ears to experience the depth of the difference.

For heaven’s sake, don’t degrade your music collection by recording it in a lossy format just to save on disk space. Why would you, when you can buy half a terabyte of storage for around $200?

My Music Server solution is probably one of those cases where “cheaper” really is “better”.  Existing mainstream technologies plus better quality components in every link in the chain equal a lifetime of musical satisfaction.

This month’s PC World magazine is celebrating their 25th anniversary, which pretty much coincides with the rollout of the IBM PC. Holy cow, has it been that long?

I bought my first personal computer, an Apple II with two 5-1/4 inch floppy drives and 48KB of RAM, in 1979. By 1982 PC Magazine was launched to cover the new IBM PC. (PC World was a spin-off startup after the earlier PC Magazine was sold to new owners, in the same year).

I and my friends enviously eyed the handsome IBM PC and the new upstart IBM PC Jr. But, in 1985, I bought my first Mac, a 512K. It still took a long time to fill up a 3-1/2 inch floppy. But the “PC” appellation was appropriated by popular usage to the IBM/DOS world, and later, of course, to Windows machines.

Before switching over to Wintel in 1997, I rode the personal computing technology explosion on a wave of successive generations of Macintoshes.

America and the whole world rode the same wave. From where I stand, it wasn’t so much the hackneyed phrase “paradigm shift” that described this era. It was the slow, logical, inexorable change built of many smaller incremental but dramatic changes. Think for a moment how the hard drive, or the CD-ROM, has impacted your world today (not to mention the internet, which started on mainframe-like institutional machines but quickly interfaced everywhere).

Whatever the era was, however historians will later define the PC age,  it changed forever the way we work, communicate, shop, bank, game, explore and travel, research, write, listen to music,  photograph, and wage war.

Like the automobile of the last century, PC’s became indispensable. But I digress. Holy cow, has it been that long?

I had occasion to have to re-burn a family photo CD I had mailed to a nephew a year ago.

I prepared to use Roxio EZ Media Creator 7 to burn a new CD. It already had the serial from whenever I installed it, but now, it wanted to re-register. Roxio reported back to me that the serial had been “disabled”.

I paid good money for this software. Fraud? Dishonesty? An overly manipulative method to coerce me into upgrading?

I have a newer version, also paid for in full, but I had just installed it on a machine in Phoenix. I am not one to go back to a vendor and haggle for weeks over my rights. Usually, that’s just the end of the line for that vendor.

I have friends who are good at using the native software provided with an OS to get a task accomplished, so what would they do?

I uninstalled the existing Roxio product, put a CD in the burner, selected the JPG folder I wanted to put on CD, and right-clicked it. What would happen? I just used “Send To” to send it to the CD drive. In less than a minute I had my photo CD.

How would my nephew view it if he didn’t have dedicated image editing or viewing software? I right-clicked the CD drive icon and selected “Autoplay”. Windows Media player gave me a slide show that rivals any of my favorite software.

Good-bye forever, Roxio!

I’m training a new Spam manager program to block unwanted mail and content patterns, while “Trusting” mail from friends. For a while, this requires me to spend a little more time looking at my junk mail than normal. I’m proud to report: the quality hasn’t improved.

There are the obligatory messages inviting the reader to lengthen the male member – ”Be the stallion you always wanted to be”, or to buy Cialis – ”nitrates are also found in amyl nitrate or poppers“, the ad hints.

There’s an invitation to receive your FREE Visa card instantly - itself suspicious - from what appears to be a possibly legitimate Las Vegas business venture. But SpamWasher has identified it as “suspicious”.

There are a couple of friendly ladies who are bored this afternoon and would like to send me some nice pictures, or just chat with me.

Clearly, we have found the bottom of the advertising food chain, where the snails and the flatworms crawl. No part of the carcass is inedible. It’s a comfort to know that when we turn on the TV, we are subjected to just another part of the same inexorable cycle.

But, hold the phone Mynra, they’re giving away iPods - mail this to 12 of your friends!

We’re working our way through Summitlake.com departments to convert most HTML pages into this WordPress department. As you’d note in today’s “What’s New” posting, it’s now the turn of our Computers & Technology department. We won’t repeat all that here.

Now a word about what’s actually happening. The total number of posts won’t change that much. When we created this WordPress department, it inherited a huge number of “legacy” HTML documents. In the interest of time, we didn’t add the text of all those articles to WordPress. Instead, we created WordPress posts containing SUMMARY paragraphs and links to the old documents. Think of these as “placeholders”.

Now, those placeholders are being replaced by the complete articles. The older HTML pages are deleted as we go.

Very large articles, such as our “C++ Glossary” or “Almost Pretty Good” feature article, don’t get imported into WordPress. The placeholders now appear as “Pages” in the right-hand WordPress menu links, so you always know where to find them.

As always, it takes quite a bit of manual effort to convert these HTML pages, one at a time. We’ve lived with the old “hybrid” system of HTML-and-WordPress for over a couple of years. It’s frustrating for us from the viewpoint of web development, so it must be more frustrating for our readers. When it’s all over, hopefully by the end of the year, it’ll be easier than ever before to find content at Summitlake.com — and thanks for your patience and support!

Having dumped the intrusive, in-your-face resource hog Norton a year ago, I’ve been using McAfee. Actually, I get it free as a benefit of being on the ComCast broadband network. I’m still very pleased with McAfee overall, but herein lies a cautionary tale with an as-yet unlearned moral to the story.

I actually started this article on 12/29/2007, and found the draft today, 1/12/2008. Nasty computer crashes caused me to forget all about posting this article.

My free ComCast-McAfee 1 year subscription had expired. I installed the new free subscription directly over the old one, and that turned out to be a BIG mistake. Then, I was unable to uninstall the old one.

To make a long story very short, to uninstall McAfee completely, go to the WikiHow site for their article on the topic (linked here). Read and follow the instructions. Then install your new McAfee, if that’s what your mission statement is. I am again happy with McAfee and everything seems to have been running fine since.

I posted an article in my Notes earlier this morning called “Schrödinger’s Cat and Less Famous Felines“. This is not so much a shameless plug for my article as an observation that we do not really have a WordPress home for articles of a scientific orientation. Articles on cosmology end up, naturally enough, in Astronomy, while articles on computers and Silicon Valley type technologies go here. Most of everything else touching on scientific progress goes into My Notes.

I’m really jazzed about WordPress. It appears I first switched to it (from MoveableType) in June of 2004. I know a lot more about it now, of course, and I like it even more, and have it running eight major departments at Summitlake.com. The downside is that it takes eight separate WP installations to run those departments, and eight databases, and that takes a lot of maintenance - especially for the frequent but desirable upgrades.  I’m loathe to add a ninth department.

The upside is separation of all the eggs in the basket. If something goes wrong with one database or installation, I don’t have to fix all eight of them. There is a WP version that supports multiple installations with one code install, but it’s a side branch of the main product, and upgrades for bug fixes and anti-spam are infrequent from what I can tell. My take is that we need to stay on the cutting edge of anti-spam just to stay even, so I’ll live with the multiple installs.

I haven’t found any new spam comments in my departments since the installation of version 2.3.1 a month ago. However, my Spam Karma 2 hasn’t registered any new detections to kill, either - not sure what that means.

Counters: I also note that my page counters, installed in the right hand menu of each department, often increment two or three at a time, inflating the page hit count. My Notes just celebrated its 100,000th visitor, but it sounds like that’s really more like 30-40,000 visitors. Not bad, nonetheless.

The future: most new content seems to go into WordPress. It is still a lot easier to compose pages that are really content-rich (images, tables, forms and such) in old-fashioned HTML. The Writing department may remain primarily HTML for years. I have learned how to load content-rich pages into custom WordPress page templates. The conversion to mySQL/WordPress could take years, unless I write automated conversion routines, but we’re at least getting closer to the day when the confusing dichotomy between the HTML and WordPress worlds at Summitlake.com may finally be resolved.

First it was the cable internet connection. Then it was the living room PC I use as a music server. And then it was the Terminix report. This was supposed to be the Phoenix vacation where I dabble a little at the chores and relax a lot. It turned out to be more work than I signed on for. It sounds like “bad juju” to me.

I first heard the term “bad juju” on Deadliest Catch, the Discovery series on king crab fishing in the Bering Sea. The captain used the phrase. He and the crew had a bad day. I looked the term up on the internet. In Western vernacular it seem to stem loosely from a West African concept meaning “bad luck”. Supposedly it is attributed to a malevolent force, such as a voodoo hex.

When I called Cox Communications, the cable people, their computerized phone system danced me through the Diagnostic Waltz - “take all the time you need, and say ‘continue’ when you’re done” - but I had already done all the checking of power, plugs, modem light status, and so forth. I lied to the computer. You know the drill. Just tell it what it wants to hear.

Finally it let me connect to a real person. I told them I just installed a brand new cable modem, because I was pretty sure the ancient original modem was crapping out, and I gave them the MAC address of the modem so they could hard-code it into their system. But they still couldn’t see my modem. “It has to be between the wall and your computer”, he said. So we scheduled a service call for Tuesday morning.

Thinking about that later, I found a short piece of coaxial cable out of a closet, and tried the substitution test. The modem worked. It had to be the cable, then. But, cautious old bird that I am, I decided to wait before canceling the service call. I waited several hours and canceled it.

I also called the Terminix people and got an appointment for Wednesday morning. I recently saw evidence that the house has termites. But how soon did I catch it?

And I left the computer on all night.

The next morning I could see in SETI-BOINC’s message log that it had downloaded more work during the night, and the internet was still open. Guess that solved THAT problem! Well, half an hour later, the internet went out again.

Meanwhile, I’d discovered the evening before that the living room PC wouldn’t start. Power connected, you press the Start button, and nothing happens. Absolutely nothing. No hard drive lights, no motherboard beeps, no fans, no BIOS, no nothing.

I tried a different power outlet. I tried a different power cord. I removed the case panel and saw that the motherboard light was glowing green. Unplugging again, I checked for loose connections. Still nothing. What if it was the Start switch itself?

The Start switch on the front panel of a PC is just a spring loaded temporary contact switch of the kind engineers call “make-break”. Depressed once, it briefly completes an electrical circuit to activate some other component, like a switching circuit, or a starter relay on a car. It doesn’t carry the real current load, it just sends a signal. Unless physically abused, there’s not much that can go wrong with it. And you don’t keep spares in a parts box.

So I carefully unplugged the tiny blue and white power switch lead wires from their motherboard pins, and shorted across those pins. That’s all the switch does. But it didn’t start.

That means it had to be either the power supply, or the motherboard itself. But, mind you, I didn’t do a damned thing to them — it worked two weekends ago, and didn’t work Tuesday. If it was the power supply, why was the motherboard light on? If it was the motherboard, how could a motherboard fail while being left “off” for two weeks?

Here’s my theory:

Normally in Phoenix we don’t just power off the computers. We shut off the electrical outlet that feeds it. And I cover the equipment with plastic to protect against the dust that still manages to blow in from the dry desert dust storms.

But in the living room, that PC is connected to a plug strip with the stereo, which gets power all the time even when off. So, the PC power supply is “on” all the time too, energizing the motherboard enough with several different voltages to it can activate all systems when the Start button is depressed. Just because the motherboard light is green doesn’t mean the power supply is able to deliver all the voltages to power the fans, hard drives, peripherals and motherboard itself. That’s why the motherboard has a 20 or 24 pin power connector, instead of only two pins.

And the living room gets up to 120 degrees between visits in the summer when the air conditioning is off. And that PC was sitting under a plastic shroud. I think the poor power supply cooked itself to death.

I bought the new power supply at Fry’s, a Vantec 380 watt (hey, it’s an older mobo) and installed it. That solved the problem. And now it has its own plug strip, and no plastic shroud.

The story never ends there, does it? I had to hit the PF1 key to get BIOS to continue to boot. Floppy drive failure. I’d forgotten: I’d bought a new Sony floppy drive months ago - Sony is the only brand that lasts more than a week, which is why it costs about twenty bucks instead of about seven. I could have installed the new floppy while I was in there, but heck, I forgot about it. Wait a minute, the old floppy IS a Sony. And the new one has the same issue, whatever it is.

The termite guy came out and I signed the contract for about a grand. A crew will be out Saturday to kill the subterranean termites in their nests.

And I write this on NotePad, since the internet wasn’t available when I started this post. A nifty old program called Neotrace pings all the circuits between here and kingdom come. When everything works, there’s about 15 nodes between this house and Summitlake.com (the server’s in Utah). When I started this post, the first node was c-76-111-37-196.hshd1.gn.cox.net, and there was no response. Then I got all 15 nodes and downloaded the email. Then I got no responses again.

If you’ve been in this situation yourself, you’re asking, do I have cable TV, and is it working? Yes, and yes.

Maybe it’s the termites.

If you’re a Mac owner, there are some pretty cool products for those times when you have to run Windows.

As I understand it, those products include software that comes with the Mac OS itself. Pictured here is a third-party product, Parallels. There is certainly enough top-quality software for most Mac needs, including Office for Mac, but there are additional thousands of good programs that, for better or for worse, are only written for the PC.

According to the vendor, you can:

I have the opposite challenge. Instead of running Windows on an Intel-based Mac, I want to run the Mac OS on an Intel-based PC. And I don’t want it emulated, I want it native, running on top of the unix layer. That’ll never happen, but that’s what it would take to move me back to Mac software.

I bailed out of the Mac community in 1997, so it’s been an honest ten years now. I never had a problem with Mac software; it’s the best in the world. It sets the standards. It raises the bar, and the others follow. When there is Apple-coded software available for my PC (such as iTunes), it beats the PC offering (such as Windows Media whatchamacallit) hands down.

When Apple pulled the plug on the “Mac clones” in 1997, I bought my first PC, a well-constructed Micron. Ever since, I’ve built my own boxes. The current motherboard, an ASUS A8N32-SLI, is something like the fourth generation mobo (I think I’ve lost count) on my CoolerMaster case, an ASUS power supply, an ASUS graphics board, 2GB Corsair SDRAM, and a dual-core AMD 3800+ CPU. I have DataPort hard drive cartridges, set up just the way I want them. It’s not the fastest machine in the world, but it’s faster than I need. For reliability, it’s just as good as any of the excellent Mac boxes I ever owned.

You can’t build your own Mac. Probably never will be able to. It would seem Apple has control issues and just can’t let go. That’s fine. I just don’t have the time or resources to support two platforms. If you own a Mac, you have every reason to be proud of it. I just like the independence of being able to vote with my feet. Despite the legendary reputation of Mac owners for marching to a different drumbeat, there’s Apple’s paranoid insistence it has to be Apple’s drumbeat.

Personally, I believe that if you could run Mac OS and Apple software on a PC, it would be a crippling blow to Microsoft. It’s not true that Microsoft OS and software is “so crappy” - after all, it runs the world. What is true is that Apple codes to levels of perfection and sheer design excellence that few software CEO’s have the vision or stamina for.

It isn’t always the sheer pleasure I really crave, but there’s no question that I get everything done the way I want it with just my Wintel-based software. After a little learning curve building my own machines, I’m quite happy marching to my own drumbeat.

Category Five Hurricane: Winds greater than 155 mph (135 kt or 249 km/hr). Storm surge generally greater than 18 ft above normal. Complete roof failure on many residences and industrial buildings.

Category 5 Cable (UTP) (Unshielded Twisted Pair) : A multipair (usually 4 pair) high performance cable that consists of twisted pair conductors, used mainly for data transmission. Note: The twisting of the pairs gives the cable a certain amount of immunity from the infiltration of unwanted interference. category-5 UTP cabling systems are by far, the most common (compared to SCTP) in the United States. Basic cat 5 cable was designed for characteristics of up to 100 MHz. Category 5 cable is typically used for Ethernet networks running at 10 or 100 Mbps.

Quotation: It’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good.

Translation: Alex must be having network troubles again.

Background: that’s right, I learned how to reduce a hurricane to a feeble wind by forcing it through a 60-foot length of cheap made-in-China CAT5 ethernet cable. If it were water, this would be like the reduction of the Niagara to the dripping of a leaky faucet.

Project: Replace the wireless router with the old wired NetGear FR114P. I got sick and tired of the low throughput and connectivity hassles of the much-vaunted G standard wireless. Run CAT5 into living room. Goal: increase throughput.

Progress: solved, but the path to the solution was a new form of brownian motion.

Steps Taken: bought CAT5 crimping tool, connectors, snagness rubber “boots”, and a $29.95 250′ roll of bulk CAT5e cable, made in China, branded as Belkin. When that did not work, investigated. Others had had the same problem with long runs. Wish I had read the product reviews before buying:

“Cons: For longer cable runs you’ll find you cannot even get a signal through it. Perhaps I got a bad lot or something. At 10 meters, packet loss rates go as high as 6%. At 50 meters, no signal is transmitted and your network is officially dead. I connected two FreeBSD (flavor of Unix) machines and conducted a number of tests with this cable. Unfortunately I can’t really recommend it to anyone for these reasons.”

Procedure Used: I have never put together an ethernet cable before, so naturally I was hesitant to put together a 60-100′ run on my first try. Learning to flatten four round twisted color-coded pairs into a “flat ribbon cable” in the correct 8-pin sequence, trimming to 1/2 inch while pinching the flat 8-conductor ribbon in place with thumbnail, and inserting and crimping into the clear plastic connector is do-able. I practiced on a short test cable first, repairing an old store-bought cable, and it seemed to work great.

I stapled in half of the living room run (I have done this part before). Once I was able to determine how long the routed cable actually needed to be, I cut it, and doubled back to the computer room for a substitution test. I was able to connect to the internet, but the Local Area Connection properties box kept cycling between “establishing ip address” and “disconnected”. I dismissed this as some sort of strange ground loop, since I had connected to several outside websites. This is a textbook example of the tester not believing his own test results.

I completed a masterful concealed run into the apartment living room and connected to the PC there which acts as my music server. The ethernet connection didn’t work at all. The little activity LED’s didn’t even blink. Hmmm. Did I do something wrong?

I thought of using a hub as a “repeater”, “booster” or signal amplifier. All I had was the first one I ever bought, an old yellowed plastic Linksys whose throughout went to hell back in around 1999. It still worked - sort of. I got USB-1 speeds through my “Belkin” bulk cable. So, I bought a modern little NetGear FS-105. They’re cheap enough, and you can always use them.

The NetGear wouldn’t connect at all.

Solution: At my age I have finally learned not to let pride turn a short project into a big one just to prove a point. Despite hard evidence that others experienced the same problem, I considered that I really haven’t had a lot of experience making up my own cables, and when I read up on it, I discovered I had broken a couple of rules, including going around sharp door moulding corners, and using insulated metal cable staples as fasteners. But I had done this before, in Phoenix.

I went down to Radio Shack and bought a prefab Cat5e 100′ cable. I didn’t even blink an eye when the clerk determined I’d be paying $69.95, because that’s what Staples wants for a similar product, which is what started this project in the first place. The Radio Shack prefab cable worked like a charm when it replaced the home-made Belkin cable, giving me about the same throughput as the local cables in the computer room — without any ethernet hub “booster” at all.

Conclusion: Don’t buy cheap cable. $29.95 didn’t seem like much for a 250′ bulk roll, but I didn’t have a lot of different grades to choose from. I had never encountered a cable failure before. Shielded solid-conductor cable is preferred, if you can find it. Although one should be able to run CAT5 to up to 100 meters (328 feet), we’ve shown that even much shorter runs can be a problem if something’s not right. In this case, I think it’s fair to put at least most of the blame on the cable.

OTHER THINGS I LEARNED

Pride says I should pack up the rest of my “Belkin” cable, gird my loins and call NewEgg Customer Service about an RMA to drive to UPS, ship back this product, and get back my $29.95. I’m sure they’ll be real nice, but I know I’m not going to do that. Common sense says that if I’m only out $29.95, the solution is known, and the problem is solved, I’m lucky, so why press my luck? What’s actually going to happen is I won’t use it even for short runs, and it will sit around until I get tired of looking at it, and then I’ll throw it in the dumpster.

The only other thing is, the 100′ Radio Shack prefab cable is about 40′ too long. Once thrown from the horse, you’ve got to get back on. I can’t have that kind of wiring mess behind the stereo in my living room. You just KNOW it’s only a matter of time until I shorten it to 60′ and try putting my own connector on the shortened $69.95 cord!

No, it’s not a drum, it’s a custom PC enclosure made of maple, and accepts the standard build-it-yourself PC hardware.

I’ve got to admit this is way cool. I’m not a musician, but if I were a drummer, or just the music lover that I am with lots of room to display nice things, I would have to have one of these. In my apartment I can always plead, “but where would I put it?”

BUT … for Phoenix, I’m already thinking how great this would look in the big living room there for my music server. The CoolerMaster just looks out of place. These are available as 20″ mid-towers or 22″ tower models, with 3-5 3.5″ internal bays. Tower models are available with optional external 5.25 bays (One would need these, for example, for DataPort drive enclosures).

You can check out these ingenious and highly original enclosures yourself at the website of Spotswood Custom Computers Inc.

Some people love shopping trips. They thrill to the sale, the newspaper inserts, the call of the malls. I’m the opposite. I dislike crowds, parking lots, poorly-trained or intrusive salespeople, cluttered store aisles, and sales hype.

I’ll drive to the store if I need something today: groceries, pool supplies, or something I want to see first-hand before I buy. I worked in retail sales for eleven years, so I appreciate it when I find good service, selections and price at a store (increasingly rare).

And I know better when I don’t get that shopping experience. Anyone can tell you when they don’t enjoy a shopping experience. I can tell you why, and enumerate the marketing tenets that were violated.

For everything else, what works for me is the internet. Many folks aren’t completely comfortable with internet shopping yet, and that’s fine. If I know what I want, can wait for delivery, and have a vendor I can trust, I can avoid tying up the better part of my whole morning, afternoon or evening with a shopping trip. On top of the convenience, shopping by internet saves me hundreds of hours and miles of driving a year: it’s comparatively “Green”.

That’s my take on it, anyway. The newspapers and internet are full of comparisons of both kinds of shopping. It’s not news any more. The internet as “shopping appliance” is here to stay. I use it to buy most of my durable consumer goods - even a car. I use it to get my news. I read my daily comic strips online. I do my banking and pay my bills online. I buy my clothes, computer parts, software, camera gear, books and music, kitchenware, bathware, gadgets, pipe tobacco, telescope gear, and magazine subscriptions online.

The real point of this article follows. In kind of a “Eureka moment” this morning, I realized just how far the internet has integrated itself into our daily lives.

It started out this morning as an email-sorting chore. For over a decade, I have always maintained two mail folders called “Shopping” and “Vendors”. “Vendors” was for computer-related purchases, such as memory or motherboards. “Shopping” was for everything else.

That only seemed to be a sensible division because, ten years ago, there wasn’t so much to buy on the internet, and I didn’t completely trust the security of the proliferation of new web page storefronts. “Apple” had its own subfolder in “Vendors”. So did all the shareware vendors. So did “Mac Connection” and (later) “PC Connection”. And, in “Shopping”, you could soon find “LL Bean” and a few others.

I was an early shareware adopter. And there wasn’t really any other way to buy it but through the internet. So I took the plunge earlier than most. As an aside, even the concept of “shareware” is less relevant today: most of the surviving major players are run as a business, the products are more robust, and you may be able to try them, but if you like them, you’ll buy them.

The distinction between “Shopping” and “Vendor” for me was clear-cut and easy, at first. But what if the vendor was an internet supplier? Well, that was computer-related, so it became another subfolder in “Vendors.”

But what do you do with “Verizon Wireless”? ViewSonic (the TV, or the computer monitor)? “Sudoku”, played as a computer game? Online subscriptions? Books on programming and computers?

Recently I bought several books on Perl and web programming in PDF format (Adobe Acrobat), from O’Reilly Publishing, so I could reference them from anywhere I had my computer. There’s a whole new kind of services supplier that doesn’t neatly fit into either “goods” or “computers”.

Sorting out unfiled email this morning, I realized times had changed. I could no longer decide where a lot of mail should be filed. I did decide that it no longer made any difference what kind of goods or services were ordered.

I created a new Outlook data file called “SHOPPING”. I emptied the contents of the old “Shopping” and “Vendors” folders into the new file. SHOPPING now contains about 150 subfolders. Basically, these are my paperless receipts, order and correspondence files on everything I buy that doesn’t involve getting into the car and driving to a store.

Maybe software and hardware orders were such a big proportion of my total internet purchases that they deserved their own category, at one time. They aren’t now. They’re just “SHOPPING”.

I think DataDesk has been in the slow process of going out of business for about a decade, but not enough people ever show up at the office at one time to close it. I think they congregate there mainly to party when someone actually buys a keyboard.

I agree they are the most brilliantly designed ergonomic keyboards ever made. But they were noisy. Complaints at the office made me retire mine - people thought I was “angry” when I was typing, until I figured out what was going on, explained, and apologized.

My theory about your question on lackluster marketing: most people don’t really know how to type. I don’t mean they aren’t competent enough, only that most of them learned on disposable $15 keyboards and have no conception of how a good keyboard touch increases both speed and accuracy. Anyone who used a Selectric typewriter regularly knows what I mean: I did, and it trained me so that flow-of-typing habits still help with the cheap keyboards they farm out today.

And I was never trained in touch typing. I have a modified hunt-and-peck method that’s improved over the last 50 years so that I can still hit bursts of 70 wpm with low error rates. But I was never so good as with the Selectric, with DataDesk following as a close second.

That is what today’s consumer doesn’t understand, and can’t help but not understand - there is nothing on the market to offer them much comparison, except DataDesk, this one company that gave up trying to compete with the throwaway keyboards.

I have a couple of the older KeyTronic “Lifetime” series that are still working. Newer ones are not made in Mexico, but overseas, and don’t hold up. When they’re gone, I guess it’s back to PaperMate.

Thanks for writing!

Alex

How to troubleshoot a printer that won’t print:

Works every time.

Today’s news reveals rumors that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are exploring bids to acquire the premier internet advertisement firm DoubleClick, for something in the range of $3 billion. It’s even on the radio, but this may be stale. WikiPedia states Google has reached a deal to acquire DoubleClick for $3.1 billion.

For investors and tech analysts, the move may be seen as part of the continuing marketplace effort to consolidate internet content presentation with advertising marketing. The economists might describe this as a horizontal monopoly: except for subscription and grant sites, there is no revenue derived purely from content presentation. This fact of life places the burden of sustainable big-ticket content delivery entirely upon the marketing of advertising. A quick read of the business spin confirms our worst suspicion: text-based ad margins and popups aren’t enough. The business sector feels it must take internet revenue generation to the professionals.

The same folks who bring you the TV ads are very interested in consolidating their death grip on the next big frontier, internet marketing. This sounds like good news for investors. What about us?

For computer geeks and home users, DoubleClick is more familiarly known as the spyware folks. Every spyware application, no matter how primitive, knows to remove DoubleClick tracking cookies. What are they?

The DoubleClick cookie is tamer than I thought. Mostly, it stores “public domain” information like IP address, OS type, local time, and the location information derived from IP address. This part of the HTTP envelope is a fact of life; anyone can record this in a cookie unless cookie blocking is turned on. And, blocking a cookie doesn’t mean statistical information can’t be recorded by the program capturing the envelope. Freeware proxy servers (for anonymous surfing) may be the next big thing.

Additionally, DoubleClick records the website and page being visited and information about the ad that was placed. I didn’t realize it also stores information about the number of times we’ve seen the ad, and a user list, and that number can be capped - before we get so irritated we swear never to patronize the sponsor.

You can opt out of DoubleClick. What you get is another cookie, which suppresses information gathering about how many times you’ve seen the ad. And it doesn’t stop the ads - you still see them (unless you have a blocker). Great.

Google started out as a great gallant knight on shining steed. They brought us Google Earth, Google Mail, Google Desktop - a huge information machine at our fingertips. This DoubleClick move is a huge step closer to marrying the Internet to what we hate about network TV: the mindless, intrusive infestation of irritating ads, which, like the products they peddle, are an insult to our intelligence.

This is a shotgun wedding.

I hate to see it, but I have to admit it was inevitable. As people turn from television to alternate forms of entertainment, education and information, did we really think Madison Avenue was going to let us slip from their grasp so painlessly?

For now we must continue to run our spyware cleaners and blockers. It appears we’ll have to add Google to our list of sites where extra protection must be worn. There’s little point in opting out of DoubleClick, but for the first time ever, opting out of Google seems to hold some attraction.

===========

Click this link to see a page listing all the cookies and popups blocked in a 7-minute surfing session of my favorite comics.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) — Dell Inc., the world’s second-largest personal computer maker, said Thursday an internal financial audit found evidence of misconduct, accounting errors and deficiencies in its financial controls. source: CNNMoney.com

Gee, who did the statements this year, Customer Service?

From BBC.org (2-19-07):

UN warns on password ‘explosion’ The proliferation of passwords is putting privacy at risk.
Growing use of the web is stripping people of their personal privacy, warns a UN agency report.
The number of passwords and logins web users need makes it inevitable they will re-use phrases, warned the International Telecommunications Union.
Re-using these identifiers puts people at serious risk of falling victim to identity theft, said the ITU report.

Who could not agree completely with this statement? I just registered for a year of services with Consumer Reports this morning. First order of business: picking a user ID and password. Hey, it’s just an online magazine subscription, right? Wrong; it’s also my credit card data.

This rules out all my favorite standbys that I can still use for truly harmless things like a user group forum. The name of my cat, high school, or first car won’t cut it elsewhere.

Let me be the first to admit that there is no way I can mentally keep track of all my passwords, at work, or at home. I don’t even try. In fact, we can formulate this as a principle:

If you can remember your password (and the dozens of others you use daily), it’s probably insecure.

If you could tell another person what your password was, and that person could remember it without writing it down, that’s another way to tell your password is probably insecure.

Let’s face it, most of us use real dictionary words and names, or parts of them, as filler. Why? They’re memory crutches, that’s why. I can remember Monique57 better than 3cAm24Zr any day of the week. But Monique57 is really just a dictionary name plus a two-number string. Password-crunching programs just eat up this kind of password for breakfast!

As the BBC quote from the United Nations suggests, it only takes a few different random passwords of the strength 3cAm24Zr, and I’m solidly in Information Overload. I just can’t keep them all straight in my head!

You will probably have a strong master password, to log in to your OS session, for example. One or two of these is all most of us should bother to try to remember, since even these should be changed every 60-90 days.

At home I use two password utilities to help organize and enter my passwords.

Obviously you also want a very strong password for the vaults where your passwords are stored. You can find so many discussions of “strong” and “strong enough” on the web we are not going to explore this in any depth. A consensus would probably indicate that your secure password should consist of at least 8 characters, include numeric and alphabetic characters, and contain mixed upper and lower case letters.

We’re also not going to go into whole data encryption here (where, even if you access the data, it won’t do you any good). All my local Quicken files and other financial data are encrypted by PGP. It would take the CIA or NASA computers quite a while to crack the level of security PGP makes available to home computing.

But you may also do your banking online, or manage a portfolio of stocks and bonds or mutual funds, and that may include savings accounts like ING Direct.

You cannot use a form-filler like RoboForm on a super-secure site like ING. Critical steps are done by images and pattern recognition. You may click a virtual numeric data entry pad to access your account. These measures defeat clandestine keypad loggers and packet sniffers.

You also can’t use any of these utilities while logging into Windows, since, duh, you’re not logged into Windows. I do keep my Windows login passwords in my wallet, since I just don’t know what else to do. If you come up to me with a silenced automatic and demand my wallet, I’m going to give you my wallet anyway.

My workplace does not allow non-authorized software on its machines, not even a password vault. Here, I created an Excel spreadsheet for all my various passwords, and password-protected the worksheet. Simple, but effective enough.

If this were a magazine article (assuming I was also paid by word count) we could now pad the article with three strategies for you to consider: beginner’s, intermediate, and advanced.

But that’s all fairy-tale stuff anyway. You know your own situation. You know what you want. You know what you need to do. We’ve mentioned a couple of tools to make the job easier. Once we bootstrap you past the I-can’t-remember-any-more-passwords barrier, it gets easier and easier to manage more complex passwords and more of them. If you’re losing too much computer time to pawing through stacks of post-it notes for the password to that site you visited just last year, this article might just help you retake control over the process. Less worry about identity theft. More quality surf time … a winning situation!