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My Favourite Thing about Microsoft Windows

I do all my work on Virtual Machines, which are computers running on a computer. So while I sit in front of only one PC, inside it, on a typical day I could be running up to 4 different Windows machines.

And I swear, every time I turn my back, one of them is restarting itself. It closes down whatever I was working on, and just reboots.

I’m not a computer dummy, and in fact, I’m quite good at taming Windows, and securing it, so that all of my virtual machines (I have about 13 I can choose from, depending on my work load for the day) run quickly with only small amounts of RAM, and have no malware issues. But one thing I always forget to do is to neuter Windows Update — kill it so that it doesn’t run on its own.

Today, for example, I booted up my Communications VM, and not 5 minutes later, it was asking me to let it reboot for some update. Of course, I said “Not Now” because I didn’t want to interrupt my work, but a little while later, when I went upstairs to go the bathroom, it sneakily restarted itself. I return to a blank screen that says “Your computer restarted to finish an important update!”

What it really means is that what you are doing with your computer is less important than what your computers wants to do!

Many is a time that I leave work open (saved, of course, but still open) on my desktop at the end of the day, so in the morning I can pick up where I left off, only to have had one or more Windows installation decide that their priorities are superior to mine, and reboot to an empty desktop — my work, and my environment gone from memory.

Hello?! I’m the user, you’re supposed to serve me – not the other way around!

The Atomic Home

One of the things we intend to do with our new house is to make it as self-reliant as possible. We’ve lived for a long time depending on the resources of a landlord or an organization to provide the functionality we need from a home. Although we’ll probably never be one of those people who can live “off the grid” — at least not in this country — there’s a lot of things we want to learn about ensuring the independence of our own home.

There’s a lot of basics I need to learn more about, for example. I’m relatively competent with basic wiring, but the other day I removed a lightswitch in Abigail’s room to put in a dimmer, and ran into a wiring setup I’d never seen before. I can network my home and set-up my home theater better, maybe, than the average geek. But I don’t know the first thing about plumbing or carpentry, and I’d like to have at least some cursory knowledge in those areas.

A happy, and natural, side-effect of this goal is that our home will become more ‘green’ the more we lower our outside dependencies. I’ve found that regardless of your political view point or opinions on Global Warming, lately ‘green’ has been a pretty universally accepted “Good Thing” — simply because it reduces costs. Everyone wants to save money these days.

We have some large goals in this area, and some smaller ones we’re working on. My dad-in-law built his own industrial-strength wood furnace at their place in the country. This summer he hooked it up to heat the pool. For the winter he’s setting it up to heat their hot water tank, warm their house, and even pre-heat the air for the dryer. I’m not sure we’ll be able to do anything like that, but I am very interested in solar power.

Some friends of ours, who usually live in Africa, wired their place there to run completely on solar power, when its available, with a fall-back to a generator if it gets too cloudy, and once the batteries are drained. They, of course, have no other options, so were pretty motivated to get it working. They also are able to be faily picky about what appliances they run, and when. One of my goals is to get my entire home office running on solar power, falling back to grid power only when the batteries are nearly dead.

Here’s a couple of the smaller things we’re working on in the short term, that have already started saving us money:

• Timers: The home theater equipment, both upstairs and downstairs, is on timers. Most home theater devices are never really off unless you remove their power. If a device has a remote control, its drawing power even in its “off” state. LCD and Plasma TVs are fairly big offenders in this area. Your XBox 360, PS3 or Wii are also pretty bad.
  Upstairs we bought a powerbar with a timer built-in. It even has a little back-up battery so your program is never lost. Downstairs we have a more heavy-duty outdoor timer on the equipment. Late at night, a computer upstairs runs a script to cleanly shutdown itself and a remote script on the AppleTV to do the same. Shortly afterward the timer kills power to all the devices.
  Although I don’t have accurate numbers, our power bill has been below the previous “average” by $10 or more every month since we got the timers in place.
   
• Dimmers and motion sensors: We’re still rolling this plan out, but where ever possible we’ll be using these kinds of switches to provide only the light needed in a given room. In the kids rooms, in particular, we rarely want the lights on at full brightness anyway. In the garage and laundry room, a motion sensor makes lots of sense.
  These kinds of switches do mean you can’t use (cheap) CFL energy-efficient bulbs, but you can invest in dimmable CFLs, or use halogen high-efficiency bulbs which are almost as good, and don’t contain mercury.
   
• Gardening and composting: Both of these are Nicole’s pet projects. I’m not really sure how composting saves money, but its certainly ‘green’ and we feel better about reducing the amount of garbage we produce. Nic’s parents have grown their own vegetables in their garden for years. They taste better, save money, and are good for the environment.
   
• Cut the cable: OK, not as green, but this is a great money saver — do you really need your $40-or-more/month cable TV? No seriously, is there anything you watch on TV that you can’t get over the Internet for free or cheap? This may be the realm of the geek for another couple years, but the technology is getting better and easier to use. We don’t need cable — not even for even for events best watched live. We watched and followed the election coverage online the other day, and not once longed for commecial interuptions.
  We could do the same thing with the telephone if I didn’t work from home. Skype provides decent telephony for free-to-cheap that’s more than sufficient for personal use. Alas, despite our efforts, it doesn’t quite hack it for business use.
   
• Use your library, buy used: We learned this lesson early from a family who is frugal, wealthy, and not at all “green.” Your local library has a massive selection of great books, and probably has a decent array of movies that are free to borrow. Your children rarely need brand new clothes or toys — used stores rock, and the clearance shelf is a great place to shop!
   
• Walk more: I’m a hypocrite here. I have bad feet, so I’d be happy to drive half a block to the mailbox — if it weren’t for Benjamin, who loves going for “wwwwalks!” One of the nicest things about living in a small town, though, is that once you get past the lame excuses, there’s really nothing you can’t walk to get. Gas is finally getting cheaper, but we’re down to one car for the winter (maybe forever) and we’d prefer not to use it unless we have to. I understand walking is good for you too…
   

Ultimately, it’d be awesome if the only service our home needed to pay an outside organization for was Internet. Its probably not feasible in North America, but the closer we can get to that goal, the more money we save.
It probably goes without saying that there are wide variety of bad habits that, if eliminated or avoided, can probably save lots of money too.

How about you? Does anyone else have any ideas for saving money, reducing your dependencies and improving the environment?

Done with Cable

In what could be described as “the straw that broke the camel’s back” I decided yesterday to never, ever pay for cable TV again.
Unfortunately, Primus isn’t working out good enough as our telephone service, so, loathe to pay the phone company, we’re going with Rogers digital home phone service. Its marginally cheaper than a normal landline, and won’t mess with my dry-loop DSL. While on the phone with Rogers, I decided to inquire about getting PBS for Benjamin. He actually pays attention to the TV now, and our selection of kids movies may not be boring him, but Nic has all of Finding Nemo memorized, and if I have to watch Flushed Away one more time…

I was frustrated to find that you can’t select “basic cable” from the automated system, but was even more so when I got through to a person and found out that the cheapest cable you can buy (and remember we only want 1 channel) was $30 a month. Apparently basic cable has been abolished in Canada, and paying $9 for channels 1-20 isn’t something you can do.

So we bought an AppleTV.

It was a gamble, predicated on the knowledge that iTunes would let us buy U.S. content while in Canada, because our billing address and credit card are both U.S. This frees us from the crappily small Canadian catalogue of video, and means we don’t have to rely on any of the crippled-but-allowed-in-Canada digital distribution systems that over-charge for their tiny library of content.

Here’s a shot of the AppleTV at work, using only its manufacturer’s intended features:

Through the power of the Internets, and a bit of hacking by yours truly, it also does what the XBox 360 can do (and more elegantly) in allowing us to access our own library of content in various media types. All our digitally stored movies, TV series, music and 7 years worth of photos can be viewed on our TV. Our favortie TV Shows are downloaded over the Internet and available immediately on the AppleTV. And if there’s a show we want to check out, we just order it from our remote control.

We will be buying a couple shows as well. If we budget $10 a month for purchased TV, thats a third what we’d pay for cable, and it lets each of us (including Abi) subscribe to one full season of a show each year. Plus I can take my show with me on my iPhone, and watch it anywhere I want.

On top of that, there’s a wonderful array of free content on the store. National Geographic, the Discovery Channel, TEDTV, and many other educational shows are available in High Definition at the touch of a button. And if you want something a little more low-brow, there’s YouTube. You can spend hours “surfing” the TV, and not have to pay a cent to any monopolistic media conglomerate, or watch a single commercial — not even on fast forward.

It was not particularly easy to find an AppleTV in Canada, and for now, our set-up requires us to maintain a U.S. credit card, but that’s something we’d intended on doing anyway. Eventually the Canadian tech industry will be forced to grow up and catch up. Hopefully our little loop-hole remains open until then.

For sale

One 4GB iPhone. Like new. Anyone want it?

Update: Actually, on second thought, if AT&T is charging $30 a month for data, I don’t even want to know what Rogers is charging. The GPS would be really nice, but I think I’ll save my money and just get a Garmin or a TomTom. If we still lived in the States, it would be a different story…

List of things that don’t work properly in Canada…

- My iPhone: No EDGE (unless I have a couple thousand dollars a month I want to give to Rogers to use their stupid data network) means all of my phone’s advanced features are disabled unless I’m near an open WiFi hotspot.

- My XBox 360: Movie rentals cost nearly twice as much here, and if I want them, I’ll have to discard my existing Gamertag and XBLM points.

- The Internet: All (legal) digital distribution systems, upon detecting that you’re in Canada, refuse to deliver content to you. Why? Because if the Canadian government can’t charge tax on it, then we’re not allowed to have it.

I never thought I’d say this, but at the moment, I miss the States and am totally fed-up with this backward country right now. Its looking more and more like I’m going to have to give Rogers some of my money, just to get even close to the kind of technology we had in the States… and that’s not acceptable. A more monopolistic, anti-competitive, consumer-abusive company has never before existed.

It’s 2008, Canada. Turn off the hockey game, and get with the program. We look like a bunch of cavemen up here. Unbridled capitalism may come with its own set of problems, but at least our American friends don’t have to bang rocks together to make fire…

Behold the power of my new work computer!

So since I’m working off site, I need to take a little piece of the office with me. Rather than load up 4 physical server machines, my boss decided it was best to buy me one big one, which will run 4 virtual servers on it.

So we got me one of these. A PowerEdge 1900.
The picture doesn’t give you a good idea of the size — the depth of the machine is the length of my leg. Its huge, and it sounds like a jet engine taking off when you first start it up. Its got a Quad Core Xeon, with room for another Quad Core if I need one later, a 500GB 10,000 RPM Hard Drive, and a whopping 16GB of RAM.

Six-teen.

It weighs 100 pounds, and can run 8 computers inside it, via Microsoft’s HyperV technology, without breaking a sweat.

Paired with my workstation (which is small by comparison: only a dual core CPU with 4GB of RAM) which will be running 2 virtual workstations inside of it, I’ll have enough horsepower to do… whatever I want. At any given time in my home office, I’ll have the resources of 8 computers at my finger tips.

If only just one of them was a Mac…

I Hate Ma Bell

The only thing more annoying than dealing with Ontario Health Care is dealing with Ontario Internet Providers. It is unfathomably difficult to get uncapped, un-shaped Internet in Ontario. You cannot imagine.

In short, there are only two services (lower than T1) that offer it. Rogers Business High Speed, and Bell Business Ultra High Speed. No independent DSL ISPs are able to offer un-shaped Internet, even on a dry-loop — Bell only wholesales their Residential network (yes, that includes TekSavvy.)

Rogers offers un-crippled business-class Internet, but not if the location you’re installing it at is zoned as residential. Have a home office, or a small business run from your home? Sorry, you’re screwed.

Bell will sell you business-class, uncrippled Internet for your home office/small office, but they charge 1.5 times what Rogers charges, and 3 times their residential (shaped and capped) Internet.

And what they don’t tell you, in their righteous indignation about “protecting the world from file sharing pirates,” is that their shaping technology throttles any encrypted traffic. That includes online banking, and VPN access to a remote office. Your 6MBPS DSL becomes 30KBPS DSL as soon as you encrypt the traffic!
And what’s worse? No one at Bell even knows what “traffic shaping” is. Trying to get information from them on who you can pay and how much, to get real Internet, is like trying to get a newborn to stop pooping her pants. They just don’t know how.

Don’t even get me started on the cell phone companies — and don’t get Nicole started on OHIP. You may have heard me bash certain American policies and bureaucracies, but I’ll tell you what, moving to Canada is like moving backward in time 15 years.

It’s like we’ve spent 2.5 years living as the Jetsons, and now we have to figure out how to live as the Flintstones…

R2D2 Projector

Had we been unable to have children… I would have settled for one of these instead.

Make sure you watch the video, its very drool-worthy!

Photoshop Ideas?

For those into Photoshop, but who don’t consider themselves geeky enough to check the other blog, I put up a little tutorial on Codepoetry on a new trick I figured out and have been using a lot lately for the photos on the site. Check it out if you happen to be sitting around… waiting for a baby to arrive… with nothing else to do…

PS: Someone from Microsoft commented on the geek blog! Its moving up in the world!

Things I Like

Literally, we’re sitting around waiting for something to happen. We can’t plan any outings, or date nights, we can’t even travel too far from home. We just sit here, watching TV, playing with Ben, and waiting for something to break… literally.

So to pass the time, here are some geeky gadgets we’ve recently acquired or fallen in love with.

This is our new monitor: a Dell SP2008WFP. Its not an Apple monitor, although its hooked up to our Mac Mini, but that’s OK, because the equivalent Apple Studio Display is $350 more, and nowhere near as nice.
This guy has a gorgeous 20” glossy screen, wide-ratio, of course. Has a 2000:1 contrast ratio 4 USB ports, and a built-in webcam. For those of us not rich enough to have an iMac, or with employers not cool enough to spring for MacBooks, this Dell monitor is perfect. Couple it with an adjustable height stand and its ideal for video conferencing.

Speaking of which, if you don’t have Skype, get it now. It’ll probably never completely replace our other IM clients, but its unimaginably cool being able to have a video chat whenever you want, with people all around the world — regardless of what kind of computer they’re using. We use Skype to talk to my parents in Malaysia and Nic’s parents in Ontario, chat with friends in Colorado, and maybe soon, my brother and sister Alberta.
Skype lets our friends and family see Benjamin as he grows up, and eliminates the miles between us and the people we care about. And its dead simple to use.

This was my Christmas present from Nic’s parents. Its worth about $60, but in one use saved us $150. Its an ODBII code reader.
The automotive industry has almost as many acronyms as the computer industry, and honestly I have no idea what ODBII stands for. But its the standard that all modern car manufacturers are required to adhere to for diagnostic reporting. Simply put, you hook this thing up to your car and it tells you whats wrong.

Most car dealerships charge and arm and a leg to “diagnose” a problem whenever your “Service Engine” light comes on, but in most cases all they do is hook up their own ODBII computer and the car reports the problem. Couple this device with a table of car codes, and you can probably eliminate most trips to the dealership. For example, last time my light came on, the car was telling me that my emissions were 20% below top-performance standards. Since it was 0 degrees outside at the time, I figured that was OK and cleared the code myself. Had it been a more significant problem, at least we’d have the information we needed to decide if and when we wanted to take it in.

And finally a round-up of software that is the new hotness:

Plaxo has been around for a very long time, and has, at points in its history, been somewhat evil. They seem to have cleaned themselves up lately, though, and they happen to be the only game in town that will let you synchronize your address book between multiple Macs and multiple Windows PCs. They even support Thunderbird.
It can’t be that difficult to exchange vCard data, but for some reason neither Microsoft nor Apple (nor any other third party) has stepped up to the plate to make this happen (although Kerio does a good job, if you can afford to run your own server). So despite my aversion to giving anyone my contact data, Plaxo does the trick.

Mozy is one of many automatic online back-up systems. But its got a tiny footprint when running, works seamlessly on both Mac and Windows, and gives you up to 2GB of free online storage.
Mozy runs continuously on our Mac at home, and between that and a small partition for limited Time Machine use, we never have to sweat about losing our day-to-day files.
We have other solutions for backing up the bigger stuff — including our 13GB music library, and 7ish GB photo library. But for our finances, e-mail and other personal documents and correspondence, Mozy is elegant and worry-free.

FolderShare was recently bought-out by Microsoft and became Windows Live FolderShare — but not before they rolled out a decent Mac client. I’ll likely move to DropBox once they let me into their Beta, because it looks pretty sweet, but until then FolderShare does the job.
Our useage for it is pretty limited. Multiple computers end up with an assortment of files on the desktop — notes to ourselves, URLs to check out later, spreadsheets (Nicole makes a spreadsheet for everything), and we usually end up mailing them back and forth to ourselves, just to get them on the computer we wanted to use.
FolderShare eliminates that by setting up a sync folder on each of your machines. Whatever you drop onto that folder is instantly copied over to all your other computers. And when you update a file on any one of them, the updates are pushed to all the others. Its simple, its fast and its mostly invisible (save for the annoying and pointless dock icon in OS X… why?!)

Well… still no baby yet. I guess I’ll go back to watching TV.

Our new favorite show is Firefly — an old school western series… except its in space. Totally under-rated. Joss Whedon is a genius.