WireShark Portable

I personally love Portable Apps. Portable apps is a program which runs from a USB thumb drive and launches other portable programs such as Firefox or Open Office. But my interest peaked when I saw a portable version of Wireshark. Hacks to go anyone?

Sony Mylo is back from Repair Center

After sending my Sony Mylo back to the repair center a few weeks ago, I have finally received my replacement unit. I am delighted to say that the new unit is free of stuck pixels and seems to perform just as well as the old one.
What is your favorite device to use? Write a comment.

Upgrade for my computer....Finally!

Today I went to the Circuit City GOB (going out of business) sale. As I expected the sales were not all that great. Most of the items were 10% off from Circuit City's 50% higher than normal price. Ooh, Ahh. I saw there a terabyte internal SATA hard drive for ......drum roll please.......$219. Boo-hiss. What a ripoff. That does not mean I did not buy anything from Circuit City. I ended up buying the Half Life 2 Episode pack for $8.99. Not a bad deal considering it costs more than that on Steam.
After going and seeing the lame selection of overpriced items at Circuit City, I needed to go to Best Buy to remind myself how much fun it is to go to big box electronic stores. I spotted a Seagate 1TB hard drive there which I purchased. This is certainly a better price for a 1TB hard drive than the CC price. What will I do with that much space? Maybe I will reinstall my Windows 7 beta to that drive. This is a great upgrade now that I have a better power supply. W00t. I will write later on these two once I get around to installing them.

Windows 7 is great, possibly the best Windows yet

Prior to this year, I have never beta tested any operating systems, nor have I been an early adopter of a Windows operating system. That might all have to change now. I waited months to get this beta, since I began to hear about it in November of 2008. I am not in any way disappointed with the Windows 7 beta, build 7000.
The first thing that strikes me about the new OS, is the taskbar. This new taskbar is like a fusion of the windows Vista taskbar and the Mac OS dock. Instead of having launch icons and buttons for open programs, they are all one. Open a program from the taskbar and the icon lights up. No more tiny quicklaunch icons! The once eye candy window preview is now finally useful. Now that one taskbar icon can represent several windows (a browser window with a download window). Hover over the icon and the preview pops up then pick which window you want. Now you can unclutter your desktop by putting icons for you favorite programs in the taskbar. This does not mean that you should clutter your desktop with junk that you may download! (You should make a folder in My Documents for downloads).
Windows 7 makes it easy to use multiple monitiors, too. Press the Windows logo key and P and a small window pops up with a few options. One click you can change the configuration of your multiple monitor setup. Sure, it says projector but, thats probably what the majority of people operating a secondary display are using. All you have to do is set up your multi-monitor configuration once, then use this key combo when you want to turn enable or disable one of the monitors (for gaming or whatever).
So far I have installed two games under Windows 7. Using Steam, I installed Portal. Portal does not run nearly as smoothly as I like, most likely because of my graphics card and the high detail settings. The second game I installed, was Empire Earth. It seems to play just as well as when I run the game under XP. I have all settings turned to high and the resolution at 1680x1050.
This is about the extent to which I have used Windows 7, so I will report more on it later when I get to use it more extensively.

Traumhaus project (preview)

I've been working on a project for the German class that I am taking... and here is a preview. It is a house built to run in Portal. I have spent over 20 hours in the Hammer editor working on this project. Click the downloads link and try it today. Tell me what you think about it. However this is only a preview and is not nearly as detailed as the final version will be. Installation intructions are included in the .zip package. Portal is required to play this map.

New World Internet Speed Record

I have now just broke the world record for the fastest internet. The new record is 310,765,120 MB/s. Here is some photographic evidence of this happening.
Steam is downloading and update which took approximately 1.8 ms at this speed. Since then I have downloaded over 120 movies in Blu-Ray quality in little over two minutes. My next project will be to make a backup of all the torrents available at thepiratebay.com.

Kaspersky Internet Security follow-up

After deploying the Kaspersky Internet security (KIS) suite across my entire home network, I am now ready to give it a more thorough review. I use it six computers at my house and I have little issue with it. The one feature I like about it is that you can specify and update location other than the official Kaspersky update server. The suite tends to have update every few hours and these update are often a few megabytes in size. I use my home server to download the updates, then all the other computers download the updates from it.
In the initial setup the program presents you with a choice of security level. You can choose permissive or restrictive, the latter of which I chose for my computer. I actually had to switch to permissive recently, because I found the frequent prompts to be more annoying than Windows Vista UAC. During the install process of any piece of software, KIS would prompt anywhere from 1 to 5 times to allow or deny a certain reg key or file. When I tried to run one of my games, KIS detected the game as a keylogger. Huh? What? I had to make each game a trusted application so KIS wouldnot annoy me everytime I try to run a game. Occasionally a virus database will corrupt which is fixed simply with a program update.
All complains aside, the security suite is very good. Ever since KIS has been on my computer, I have now had any security problems whatsoever. The suite's scanner always come up negative for malware, Spybot S&D also shows negative for malware.
I would highly recommend KIS for anyone looking for a security suite, or if you are fed up with your current one.

Sony Mylo Com-2

This year I did in fact receive an electronic present, the Sony Mylo Com-2. The Mylo is what Sony calls a "personal communicator". At first glance most people would assume it is a cell phone. This is not the case, however. In actuality it is a media player with Wi-Fi and messenger functionality. The Mylo features Skype, allowing you to call your friends who use Skype or call ordinary phones. With this version of the Mylo, Skype features file sending, so you can send your friends pictures that you took with the Mylo's built in 1.3 megapixel camera. In addition to Skype, the device features Yahoo messenger, AOL messenger, and Google talk messenger.
One of my favorite features is the built in RSS reader. I use it to subscribe to and download podcasts from the Internet. I no longer need to connect it to a computer to get my podcasts. The Mylo now supports widgets as well. I like the Shoutcast widget for streaming music from the Internet. I also use the Gmail notifier, the Accuweather widget, and the Google search widget. The Sony Mylo website has a number of widgets and games available for download, although the number of widgets is only about 30.
The Mylo communicator has a built in web browser which supports Flash. This is quite an improvement over the com-1 Mylo which rendered most web pages in an unusable format. Browsing the web on the Com-2 is quite doable, but is somewhat slow. Using the Com-2's touch screen, you can scroll the web page by dragging up or down in a similar fassion to the iPhone. Sometimes this motion can yield undesired results, such as highlighting everything on the page, or clicking on random links.
I am quite satisfied with the Sony Mylo Com-2 as an all around internet device and as a media player. Though I do like the Mylo, it is not without fault. I had to rebox the device, and I am in the process of getting a replacement unit from Sony. The unit I received had a pixel stuck in white on the display. This is not a huge deal, but it was annoying when watching video with black scenes.
I will post my unboxing video later along with more details at a later time.

Christmas Eve

Normally I would be posting about some great new gadget I got or something that I really hate, but not this time. I don't have anything new to report at this point in time. I am just burning some nervous energy, because its Christmas eve and I typically don't sleep well anyways. I'm just downloading some Leo Laporte podcasts on my iBook, which I posted about a few days ago. Tomorrow morning I hope to get some new device full of circuits and covered in buttons, but I don't really expect anything. That is fairly unusual for me, not expecting anything I mean. I didn't specifically ask for anything, but I guess somewhere I had a list. If I get something cool other than T-shirts in the winter, I would love to make an unboxing video of it. I have never actually made one of those videos before and it sounds like fun. Well, its back to iTunes for me.

Empire Earth (the original)

Halo 3 has gotten really old. Last Year about December it was a Christmas present. I have played it so much I am really sick and tired of it. So I decided to dust off my copy of Empire Earth. I bought it during the spring on eBay along with its expansion pack, The Art of Conquest. The boxed set is called Empire Earth Gold Edition. I introduced a friend of mine to the game. He seems to like it well enough. The graphic detail is not bad for a game made in 2003. In fact the game seemed popular enough that Sierra Entertainment made a Empire Earth 2 and 3. I haven't played either of those however. Empire Earth features a vast array of units, buildings, and heroes spanning 15 different ages. I personally like the space age the best, because it has the most units and seems to play out the quickest. The stone age takes forever to build up a sizable force, and by the time you do the enemy seems to build some towers which are way to powerful and nearly impossible to destroy and easily decimate any army you bring. The middles ages are somewhat better, because you finally get access to some siege weapons and cannons. In the space age you can choose to fight in the air, over land, floating in water, or in the vacuum of space.
If this sounds like fun to you, try and find yourself a copy online, or maybe just buy one of the newer versions of the game.

Google Chrome

Recently I downloaded the Google Chrome web browser. A few months ago I used a beta version of the browser. Not much has changed since the beta, at least not anything that I could notice. The browser first struck me as being almost Mac like. It has a very clean interface. No file menu and very few buttons make the interface uncluttered and slick looking. You can have your home page be a page that contains previews of your most visited websites and all of your other bookmarks. The page is not unlike the speed dial page in Opera. In Chrome you can drag your tabs out of the browser and into blank space on the desktop to create a new window out of that tab. One thing I notice about it is the fact there is no search bar to the right of the address bar. Instead you search by typing your query into the address bar. It has a few issues that I have noticed, such as flash videos occasionally fail to load. While editing my blog colors in Chrome I noticed that the preview of the colors would not refresh, so I couldn't see what the page would look like with my new colors. I would love to see Chrome work well as Firefox someday. I recommend Chrome if you are fed up with Internet Explorers error and security flaws, or you just want an overall simpler web browsing experience. You can download Chrome at www.google.com/chrome.

Apple iBook G4

I've always been a PC user. A few years ago a friend inroduced me to Linux, but I never really liked using it. Now the same friend loaned me an iBook G4. Its not particularly powerful, but it works just fine for everyday web browsing and email tasks. The Macintosh interface is very simple and easy to use. Sometimes I wish it had a right click button though. Having to press CRTL and click to bring up a context menu is somewhat annoying. Software installation is quite easy. Download the file, double click the file, and drag to the applications folder. The operating system itself appears to be quite stable as well. The hardware is also simple yet elegant. The bottom of the laptop is one solid piece except for the battery. There are no stickers, vents, or panels that clutter up the bottom.  Overall the Macintosh platform is pretty nice. Its definately not a power user's platform. However if you are looking for a stable, easy to use computer, I would suggest a Mac. Just remember, that you will have to look for software that will work on the Mac if you want to do more than check email and browse the web.

Solving problems to create bigger ones

I solve computer problems all the time. Normally when I solve problems, things are supposed to work. However this was not the result in the case of "The day before Thanksgiving server crash". I was getting ready to leave school and go home for my extended weekend, when the server crashed. I place the blame on Symantec for causing this problem. It all started with a computer in the lab that had a registry problem. I decided that I was going to Ghost the machine. I began a ghostcast from the server, but for some reason the client would not recieve from the server. I began to think that Symantec Endpoint Protection was blocking the application. I decided to disable it, but still ghost would not work. I began to uninstall Endpoint, when I discoved that I needed to use the "directed broadcast" option instead of the "multicast" option. I finished the ghostcast but the Endpoint uninstaller was locked up. So I restarted the server, and when it began to boot Windows, a "ntldr is missing" error presented itself. The server 2008 disk does not have a recovery console, so I decided that the only option was to reformat and start from scratch. About 6 hours later we had reinstalled server 2008, reconfigured DNS, DHCP, WSUS, Active Directory, Routing and Remote Access, and File Serving. Unfortunately we still have to reconnect about 30 computers back to the domain.
I love to work with computers normally, but after spending the rest of my day fixing stupid server problems, I didnt really want to look at any more computers. Why can't technology just work? Where is the self repairing technology?
I dont recommend Symantec Endpoint Protection to anyone.

Bye bye Mcafee Security Suite

I have been using the Mcafee internet security suite for about a year. I think that overall is a user friendly piece of software, it is not great for power users like myself. Its virus detection and removal rates are not as good as other antivirus programs. I also experienced on several occasions a random "your computer is not protected" in which the programs firewall and anti-virus components had shut off. Clicking the fix button always turned them back on, but I never could figures out why they did that. I'm not the only one to have that happen. My friend tells me that his Mcafee randomly turns off on him too. Additionally the user interface is great for novices, however I had a difficult time navigating the programs over-simplified menu system.
This year I will be switching all the computers in my house over to Kaspersky Internet Security 2009. I already have it installed on my computer and I am currently evaluating it so that I can get used to it. Later I will write a post with more details on Kaspersky and my experience with it.

Dual monitors

For about two months I have been using dual monitors and I have to say that it is great. Most of the time I have a web page open on the left and my email, Skype, or a document open on the right. Studies show that using two monitors increase productivity by an average of 50%. That's quite a margin. I feel like it helps me to do things quicker like writing a paper because I can have a webpage open and read it while having my paper open and typing into it.
However there are drawbacks to a dual monitor setup. Gaming on dual monitors is practically worthless. For starters a lot of games will not support it. Next you will need a powerful graphics card to run the game on both monitors with any sort of decent framerate. Lastly first person shooter games look stupid because the gap between the edges of the screens is in the middle of your view. This is extremely irritating to look at, not to mention difficult to play with. Its like walking around holding your hand in front of your face edgewise from your nose. Sure you can see everything thing, but you have to think about what you are looking at.
All in all dual monitors are great, but you will have to disable one when you fire up a game.