Keep It Safe!

(By Mike Brinkerhoff - from Keeping Up With The Brinkerhoffs)

I hate fearmongering as much as, if not more, than the next guy... But after being personally involved in the following story, I just wanted to spread the word on an important aspect of keeping your computer safe. Well, not necessarily your computer, but your precious data. Documents, pictures, music, all the things that make your computer YOUR computer.

In case any of you have been hiding under a rock or otherwise NOT Keeping Up With the Brinkerhoffs this year, I started my own Tech Services company back in May. This post is promoting a service I offer, but I think it's an important enough service to put a break in the coverage of our adorable baby.

The Friday before Thanksgiving, I upgraded the RAM in a customer's computer.

The following Tuesday I got a call from him, saying that when he got home from work and went to check his email, the monitor stayed black, and this is all he saw:



I told him it looked like there was some kind of hard drive error, and that I could swing by and pick it up. He had wanted to upgrade it to Windows 7 anyway, so we agreed this was a good excuse to do that.

I brought the PC back to my office and pulled out the hard drive so I could copy all their data to a safe location while performing the upgrade. As soon as I plugged the drive in, it started making really loud clicking noises, occasional whirring, and more clicks. I immediately knew this was not good. Sure enough, my laptop wouldn't recognize it as a working disk, because it was no longer a working disk. It was, in fact, a dead disk.

I ended up putting in a new drive and upgrading him to Windows 7, and the computer works great again. But it's working great WITHOUT any of their data. I'm sending his dead drive to a specialist who can usually pull data off dead drives, but that isn't cheap, and it's only a "usually" not an "always".

To sum it all up, I know that many of our readers here save tons of very important data on their PCs. I also know that human nature is to WANT to make frequent backups, but typically that only happens sporadically at best.

If anyone reading this would like to protect their data, I encourage you to join my online backup program. It's a simple, Set 'n' Forget program that copies your files to my secure server every night using your Internet connection. From my central server, it's copied to additional locations to ensure that even if something fails in one location, the data will remain intact.

I like to call it "Peace of mind starting at $15 a month." And that $15 a month is good for up to 30GB of storage, from as many computers as you have in your home or office. Click Here for full details or to sign up.

Mention this blog and get 50% off the first month, making it only $7.50 to take the service for a test drive!

Geek Out! - Hatin' on itunes, The Sequel

*note* I'm a technology geek. I sometimes want to ramble on about geeky stuff that probably nobody else will care about, since you're all here to see the latest family updates... So when I'm about to go geeksplosive, I'll mark the posts Geek Out!, and you can just know to move along. Fair? I thought so!

Don't worry, there are lots of new Danee pics and other family news, which'll be up here soon! *end note*

It's been a while since I've unleashed my righteous rage against apple's scamtastic itunes empire, and if you've missed my geek'd out ranting, today's your lucky day!

Since it has been a while, you may have missed the first round... If that's true, and you're wondering why on Earth the normally level-headed and incredibly handsome Mike would be pouring haterade all over the sweet and fluffy apple, just click here. It's all explained. Then come back here and join the rest of the class. I'll wait...

Hi, welcome back!! I hope you learned something, maybe had an eye opening experience back there. Anyway, here's what's happened since I wrote that optimistic tribute to Amazon's mp3 store:

Amazon was successful in bringing all the major record labels on board, so now there's not much domestically released music that can't be found there, in deliciously unrestricted mp3 files! Earlier this year, apple finally made all of itunes DRM-Free, removing the restrictions but keeping their pesky aac file format. In 2009, there are more music players that know how to play aac than there were in 2007 when I wrote that last article, but it's still just an annoying complication in a world where "mp3" MEANS digital music.

Also since we last talked, Internet speeds have steadily risen, to where now video is being as commonly downloaded as audio was a couple years ago. There are several ways to get movies on demand over the 'net now, with Netflix offering an outstanding service to computers, xBox 360, Tivo and other set-top boxes. If you haven't tried it, it's my favorite aspect of having a Netflix account! I can add a movie to my "Instant Watch" queue, then go over to the Tivo, and it's there in the list, ready to watch right now! You get unlimited movies with your $9.99 plan, in addition to the DVDs. The quality is great - I haven't had any complaints in the last few months of watching them. My only complaint is that the selection of instant-watch movies is limited compared to what's on DVD. That, undoubtedly will change.

Netflix isn't the only player in the online movies game, just the best. There are several other companies including Amazon, offering the same concept. The itunes store is one of them. Through there, you can "rent" a movie for $5, or "buy" a standard-def movie for $15. A few days ago, they added hi-def movies for $20.

Okay, already I'm irritated with the whole thing! $15 is the price for a movie on DVD. $20 will get you a Blu-Ray disc. Colour me cheap, but I can't justify paying the same price for a download with no disc, no case, no liner notes, no special features, and so on. But I'll admit, that's me. Other people may not have any issues with that, and they're welcome to spend $20 on a downloaded movie.

But they'd better have a brand-spankin' new monitor hooked up to their computer if they want to watch their new hi-def entertainment in itunes, which is the only way you can watch it...



Meet HDCP. High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection. It's a system that ensures that the movie you're playing, is going to a dead-end in your monitor, and not being funneled out to a recording device. If they could find a way to ensure that only one set of eyeballs watches it, they'd add that in a heartbeat. Now watching content you've paid for is dependent on having the right kind of monitor and of course, the right kind of cable connecting it.

HDCP wasn't invented by apple, but they're among the first companies to use it to block consumers from using the content they've paid for. Conveniently, Apple would be happy to sell you a new HDCP compliant monitor...

My point? With the Netflix streaming service, I can watch movies on my computer or my Tivo, and it just works. apple has made a legacy out of ads mocking Windows for being hard to use, while their mac systems "just work".

Well, they "just work" as long as you keep re-buying your systems to stay caught up with the latest restrictive technology.

I've said it before, and I'm sure I'll say it again - don't buy from itunes. There's way too much control involved, and none of it is in your hands.

Like Sheep In The Night

Commercials don't have to be grating, claw-your-own-brain-out torture segments, interrupting almost equally grating "entertainment".

Every now and then, a commercial comes along that gives me hope, that actually seems more enjoyable than the "entertainment" that it's interrupting. I think that big football game they have every year is a good example of that.

Here's another example. Take a bunch of sheep, put them in sweaters made of LEDs, and synchronize them into the dazzling displays you see below.



Until the tagline at the end, I wouldn't have guessed this was a commercial at all! Just incredibly cool!!

Why I Blog

My cousin Marilyn did a tribute to blogging last week, and I'm borrowing her logo graphic for this post. I've written several times about how many great things I've experienced through blogging, the greatest of which is all the family members I'm growing close to after way too many years of no real communication. I've been there... No sense going there again right now!

But what I have been thinking about, that I haven't really talked about before, is why I like blogging better than the other social web stuff that's always coming and going.

For example: I had a myspace account for about 30 minutes. Hated hanging out there so much that I cancelled it less than an hour after creating it. There were several things I hated about it - for one thing, there seemed to be an overall feeling of "ick" to it. Like hanging out at WalMart. Or worse. And then there is the fact that myspace and its addicts have gone a long way to kill the web with painfully bad visual design. A fair amount of that has crept into the blog world too... When I go to a blog that has a really busy layout, say a static picture that's not toned down at all, and then has text floating above it, that's just barely two shades lighter or darker than the prevailing color of the background, and you have to scroll the text up and down to get it to stay over the parts of the background that you can actually see it against... It's pretty close to seizure inducing - certainly maddening, and bad enough that I excused myself from that party a couple years ago, when the 'space was at the peak of its popularity.

These days, the big big thing is Twitter. I don't have nearly as many reasons to explain why I'm not Twitterpated, but it really just boils down to a "so what" attitude. I really haven't ever said to myself "I wish I could let anyone and everyone know what I'm doing minute to minute."

If you're not familiar with the Twitter, it's like text messaging for the web. Messages have a really small size limit, and its claim to fame is that it's so easy and quick to let people know what you're up to, that you can update it for every little mundane thing. Being the "IT!" application right now, there are many people who literally live on it. While I've never created my own account, I've seen several other people's Twitter feeds highlighted - and sometimes ridiculed - on other blogs or sites. None of those have made me want to sign up and join the TwitterNation. No bad blood to those who do - it just gets a big "meh" from me.

A couple years ago I wrote about how irritating classmates.com is to deal with. For years, they had the "what ever happened to that guy I went to school with" market cornered, and despite the huge amounts of advertising interspersed within all the lists of possible classmates, they also charge what always seemed to me to be ridiculous fees to actually communicate with any long lost friends. I did get re-acquainted with my high school best friend Scott through there, but I'm pretty sure we would have gotten in touch by now anyway, thanks to the other current big thing, that often runs hand-in-hand with Twitter.

I'm talking, of course, about Facebook.

I first created a Facebook account several years ago. I never actually went there, or used it for anything, but a friend had invited me, and since I'd never heard of it at the time, I signed up to see what it was all about.

In the years since, it's grown and grown, and now just about everyone in the world is on Facebook. (obviously exaggerating here, but not by too much) My aforementioned friend Scott and I keep in tough through Facebook, which is good because I will certainly never give classmates another thin dime of my money. Why would I, when virtually everyone I went to school with is on Facebook for free?

So Facebook has some pretty great things going for it...

So why don't I like it?

I know that a couple months ago, several of my blogging cousins and friends started dipping their toes into the Facebook waters, and it was abruptly stopped by a well timed email virus that did a fair amount of damage to their systems. While I'm willing to bet that the offending email and virus didn't actually come from FB, it did enough PR damage to scare them off.

But that's not what I don't like about it.

What I don't like about Facebook, is that it's too much like a Super-Sized Twitter, which also has the benefits of being able to post pictures, videos and other things you like to share. Most people link their Twitter account to their Facebook, so that their seemingly insignificant "What Am I Doing Right Now?" feed is published in both places for even more to see.

But if that's all it was, I wouldn't mind. Sometimes it's fun to know that Rob is worshipping his iphone again, or that Glen is suffering with 100 degree heat at 9:00 in the morning. And there's no denying that it's kind of exciting to get an alert that someone from high school, whose name you haven't heard for years, stumbled upon you and wants to be Facebook Friends. Of all the aspects of FB, that's the one that has most captured my interest, and kept me coming back.

But...

Once re-connected with people that I haven't seen in over 20 years, and who - and this applies to the vast majority of them - I really never had anything in common with anyway, other than that our parents bought houses in the same community, and we probably liked some of the same music, but I tend to think there's a reason we didn't stay in touch after graduation... Anyway, once re-connected with these people, your Facebook news feed quickly fills up with not only their usually innocuous status updates, but also what I call app-spam, updates from the hundreds of applications running on the site.

So while scanning down to see cool tidbits like Rachel having an exciting countdown of some sort, I have to sift through 25 different announcements that:

[NAME YOU VAGUELY RECOGNIZE] Has Just Moved Up A Level In Mob Wars!!

OH. MY. GOSH. There is NO WAY I could have gone through this day without knowing that.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!!

[ANOTHER NAME OF SOME PERSON] Has Sent You A Piece Of Flair!!

Well, it's a GOOD THING that I took my thyroid medicine this morning, otherwise I wouldn't be able to keep up with the excitement of GETTING SOME FLAIR!!

Wow.

Luckily, you can adjust the "newsfeed" to show more or less of the types of things you do or don't want to see. I've done that. It's quited things down a lot. And you know what I've found?

I can go three or four days without checking in, and when I do again, the items that were most recent at my last check, are only maybe a quarter of the way down the page. If I had all the "OH WOW, SOMEBODY IS GOING ON ANOTHER DRAGON QUEST!" noise pouring in, it would be the other way around. It's amazing how high the noise-to-signal ratio is.

I do check in once every day or two, because like I said, there are a lot of people there that I don't see anywhere else, and they occasionally have something worthwhile going on, like Glen's heatwave. And I have my blog imported to my FB, which works out well because that's where Scott (high school best friend) reads it, and comments on it, and we converse back and forth.

But it amazes me that through its premise of bite-sized chunks of info, FB has lulled the masses into thinking they have time to hang out there. After all, you rarely see more than two lines of text from any one person at any given time. But I think people would be, and ultimately will be amazed when they suddenly realize how much time they're devoting to what is 95% utter nonsense.

Getting back to the title of this post...

I blog because I can put several thoughts together, and occasionally go on rants like this. I then share my multiple thoughts with other people who also enjoy non-bite-sized chunks of info - people who also write down full length thoughts, which I enjoy reading. It's a pretty cool thing!

Plus, there are several companies out there who will take your blog and publish it into a keepsake book, a real journal of your life, which will last beyond the craze of online publishing, or Twittering, or texting... Something you can put in a time capsule for your children and/or grandchildren. Something real.

Holy Crap, I sound OLD!!

Over the past few months, I've realized that despite the other options out there, this blogging thing is cool, and is what I like to do.

Thank you Marilyn, for inspiring me to take a closer look at it.

Oh, and Marilyn has a brother, my cousin Mitch. He's not one to ever let a mockable moment go by, so this week he paid tribute to his sister's previous week's blog-love-fest with his own modified logo...



It was cool last week. And it's cool this week, and I'm guessing it'll still be cool next week.

Amazing View Of The Inauguration

Just for a moment, throw out the political views and agendas involved, and just take in the scope of this week's Inauguration.

The estimates of 1.8 million people seem to be agreed upon, and the visual spectacle of seeing all of those people in one place is a powerful sight.

Undoubtedly, nearly everyone there was packing some sort of camera... Certainly there were professional and press photographers lining the entire perimeter.

One such photographer used a robotic camera mount called a Gigapan to stitch together 220 shots to make a monstrous, 1,474 Megapixel image that you can zoom through, pan around, take in the massive event in amazing clarity.

Check it out!

For more details on how the picture was created, go here.

(thanks to Gizmodo for the original article)

Geek Out - Tech Support for Viewing Our Blog

My dear sister Susan has once again inspired a post. This time it wasn't a post on her own blog (possibly because there hasn't been a new one for five days) but rather a comment she left here, about a problem she's having viewing things.



As a matter of fact, I DO have suggestions! I had a suspicion what the problem was, and then I checked in with StatCounter to confirm it. Susan is running her monitor at a very low resolution, 800 by 600. Those numbers represent how many dots make up the picture on the screen.

The higher you have your resolution set, the more information you can fit on your screen. The trade-off, is that the things on your screen get smaller to make room for all that increased info.

Further complicating things, is that modern LCD Flat Panel displays have a "Native" resolution, that they were designed to run at. Older, tube-based monitors could switch between a wide variety of modes, and show all of them well. But that pretty, slim monitor on your desk now only wants to show the resolution it was designed to run, and if the results are "too small" for your eyes, you can force it to display the lower resolution for bigger everything, but the clarity goes way, way down as a result.

The standard native resolution for LCD Monitors in the 17 to 19 inch models is 1280 by 1024. Smaller screens operate at 1024 by 768, which is the default setting that Windows uses if it can't tell what the capabilities of your particular monitor are.

Most of the default Blog templates are designed so that they'll work at any resolution greater than 800 by 600. The problem is, they don't grow with larger monitors - everything is shown in a column approximately 450 dots wide. It was making me claustrophobic, especially at home, where our 19" widescreen LCD monitor runs at 1440 dots across. It was frustrating seeing nearly 2/3 of my screen just left blank, while pictures had to be shrunk down to fit in the column. So I switched to this current template, which grows to match the size of the monitor it's being viewed on, and allows me to put pictures that are twice the size of those the old one allowed.

I tested the format and larger pictures on resolutions as low as 1024 by 768, and found it to work, so I made the switch. I just wasn't expecting anyone to view it at a lower resolution.

Here's what you saw if you tried to read yesterday's Rodney and Jim strip at 800 by 600:



It's exactly as Susan described, with our Sunday Funnyboys only partly visible. Of course, there is the scroll bar at the bottom, that can be used to move things around so you can see the whole thing. One good thing is that the template does format text to fit the smaller screen, so posts that have words instead of just pictures will be fully readable.

Here is the same shot, at the default 1024 by 768:



The entire strip fits on the screen! This was how I tested it before going live with the new format. Finally, here is what my stats show most people see, with their monitors running at 1280 by 1024:



Everything right where it should be, no need to scroll back and forth, only up and down to see additional posts.

So to sum it up for Susan's question, you can scroll to the side to view the whole picture, or increase the resolution of your monitor.
(right click on the desktop, properties, settings, move the bar to the right)

I hope this helps, Sue!

If anyone else has any tech questions, feel free to ask! After all, it's what I do...