Picasa Web

Have you tried Google's Picasa Web? It came out a couple of weeks ago. Initially it was by "invitation" only. Technically, it still is but it seems that you get your invitation immediately. You'll need a Gmail account and then go to http://picasaweb.google.com.

You'll get 250MB of storage for free. You can bump up to 6GB for $25 per year or use more than one Gmail account. Looks to me like 250MB will last a while. More on that later.

You can upload to Picasa Web two different ways. First, you can use the typical web upload for one file at a time. Ignore the #4 FAQ that says you can't. They just want you to download the Picasa desktop client. Which leads to the second method of uploading, using the Picasa desktop client.

If you already have the Picasa desktop client, you will still need to download the v2.5 beta. It has the feature you need to post to Picasa Web directly from the Picasa desktop client.

In a nutshell, all you have to do from the Picasa desktop client is to create an album and click on the "Web Album" button.You get a prompt about what size to upload. Just let that default. Picasa will resize the pictures and upload them to Picasa Web.

If you have the v2.5 beta Picasa desktop client and you visit a Picasa Web album that allows you to download, you'll have a link on that web page that allows you to download the entire album!

I have over 250 pictures on my Picasa Web and am using 25% of my 250MB.

You'll notice that the URL has my Gmail e-mail address so you may want to setup another Gmail address for photos (and darn, you'll get another 250MB for each one that you setup).

How can I run a scheduled task without a password?

This is v2 of this post. I wrote this a couple of nights ago and waited to post it until I had tested it. See, I can't be wrong all the time.

What I was trying to do was to setup a scheduled task on my SageTV box to defrag. I set it up and kept getting "Could not start" errors. I googled it and ... Well, here's the v1 of this post.

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I just love Google. Maybe that is just the Internet and the wealth of information on it.

I'm still working on getting my SageTV box up to "unlimited" storage. Until then, I'm stuck with only 80GB and with the World Cup games on, that's kinda tight.

While I know that defragmentation doesn't give me any more space, being tight on space creates more fragmentation.

I Googled "how can i run a scheduled task without a password"and found this link as the second entry:

Scheduled Tasks - Running Tasks Without A Password
For XP Pro: Go to Start/Administrative Tools/Local Security Policy/Security Settings/Local Policies/Security OptionsAccounts: Limit local account use of blank passwords to console logon only. This is enabled by default, disable it.
For XP Home: (Keith Miller) Go to Start/Run/Regedit and navigate to this key:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Lsa
Value name: limitblankpassworduse, Type: REG_DWORD, Data: 0 (disabled) 1 (enabled)

So chalk up another problem solved to Google.

Oh, I didn't see the "Adminstrative Tools" on my Start menu so I just right-clicked on Start and chose "Explore all users". The link I needed was "Local Security Policy" in "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Administrative Tools". The target is "%SystemRoot%\system32\secpol.msc /s".

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As Paul Harvey says, "Now for the rest of the story."

That didn't fix it.

What I didn't mention in v1 was how I setup the scheduled task. I went to Start/Run and entered "cmd" to get a command prompt. Then I entered the following:

at 02:00 /every:M,T,W,Th,F,S,Su "defrag c:"

Seemed like a good idea at the time.

When the above machinations didn't fix this, I started to dig deeper. What I found is a file in c:\Windows named SchedLgU.Txt. This is the log of all the executions (or attempts in my case) of scheduled tasks.

Here's what mine said:

"Defrag.job" () 7/3/2006 5:24:01 PM ** ERROR ** Unable to start
task. The specific error is: 0x80070002: The system cannot find the
file specified. Try using the Task page Browse button to locate the
application.

Duh. I had the command in quotes and it didn't need to be. This is what it should have been:

at 02:00 /every:M,T,W,Th,F,S,Su defrag c:

Then I remembered WHY I had been doing this at the command prompt. If you use the "at" command at a command prompt to establish a scheduled task, it runs with Administrator authority and not your user account!

The fiddling with the security policy was completely unnecessary.

More Wal-Mart Technology

Remember my post a while back on technology available at Wal-Mart? And my recent post of the flat cat 5e cable from Wal-Mart?

Well, they've done it again. My son-in-law just bought a second monitor for his system at home and wanted a monitor "splitter."

What he really needed is a DVI to DB15 adapter. I found one at CompUSA for $29.99.
Then I went to walmart.com looking. Amazingly, Wal-Mart had this for $14.97.
Since the pictures are slightly different, I went to belkin.com and searched to see the difference. I searched first for "F2E4162A" (CompUSA's reference) and then "HDDB15F" (Wal-Mart's reference). The results pointed to the same page!

So which would you buy?

Flat Cat 5e

With my SageTV system, I've always wrestled with network connectivity. With the original box (Dell Dimension GX150), I used a 802.11b USB 1.1 adapter. When I bumped it to 802.11g 108 Mbps, I had to get a gaming adapter since the USB 1.1 port wouldn't run that fast. Frankly, I was probably optimistic to think that the USB 1.1 port would be the limiting factor.

When I upgraded to the GX270, it had USB 2.0 but I kept the gaming adapter. I have always had questions about the speed of the 108 Mbps network. It seemed that the gaming adapter kept slowing down and then speeding up. You can't really tell much about the gaming adapter since it just looks like an Ethernet port to the PC.

I had a guy come out and look at running me Cat 5 between the SageTV box and the router but he couldn't get to the top of the wall with the router.

This week we had some tile laid and I realized that the guys that do that also lay carpet. I remembered something that I had seen at Wal-Mart. It was FLAT Cat 5e cable. It came in 3 lengths, 15 ft., 25 ft., and 50 ft. I measured and the 25 ft. would reach from the SageTV box to my closet where my networking stuff is.

The floor guy lifted up the carpet and slipped the cable under it. He had to take a coat hanger and work it under a door threshold but it worked fine. It's so FLAT.

As I thought about blogging on this, I went to the APC site looking for pictures and specifications. I didn't find anything so I just scanned some of the packaging.

SageTV PlaceShifter

One of the guys at work is a BIG soccer fan. Last week while the first round of the World Cup games were on, he was out of town and was worried that his TiVo might fill up. I told him I was recording several of the games for my son-in-law and that I'd be glad to record some for him using my SageTV system. As we talked, I remembered that Sage introduced a new feature in v5 called PlaceShifter.

PlaceShifter gives you the capability to remotely access your SageTV system. He downloaded the client and I began trying to set it up on my SageTV server. I followed all the directions carefully but it wouldn't work. You have to open a port in your router. I tried it with manual port forwarding and then with UPnP. Neither worked. I opened a support incident with Sage and sent them lots of screen captures. I exchanged e-mails with them for several days.

I finally noticed a thread on their forum on PlaceShifter and described my problem there. I got an answer back from a support person at Sage in 7 minutes! The key was "Oh -- have you restarted SageTV?" The Sage manual kinda talks about this but it's in a different section than where you have to go to setup PlaceShifter.

Anyway, that fixed it and now it works great! I found that you can buy the license for PlaceShifter for $25 from pcalchemy.com. To install the license, there is a link in the SageTV Start menu. You need to have the SageTV server stopped when you do this. You can create as many users as you want but each license gives you 1 concurrent user.

Sage has a server where your SageTV server registers its key and IP address. Then you give the PlaceShifter client that key and it uses the server to get the address of your server. From that point, you pretty much get the same experience as being in your easy chair.

Browser Share

Remember back in January when I wrote an entry on SiteMeter Statistics on this blog?

I looked again this week at the browser share numbers. Here are the 2 charts side by side:












Firefox has grown about 10% from 29% to 33%. Surprise! Surprise! IE has dropped almost the same amount that Firefox has grown. One interesting thing is that IE 7 is starting to show up.

Then I went over and looked at one of my other sites, desotonet.com. It has a different mix of browsers. Here's a table of its statistics:

Firefox only has 10.6% while IE has 86%. IE 7 shows up here too but with only about half the usage.

Kinda interesting the difference between this blog with a techie audience and desotonet.com with a more mainstream audience.

BACKUP Rises Again

As you can see in my previous post, I have a box named BACKUP in my home network. Originally it was an old HP mini-tower. It was so old that it was a hand-me-down from my mother! I loaded Windows XP Pro on it and put a 250 GB Western Digital in it. I mounted it as \\BACKUP\FILES.

The problem was that \\BACKUP\FILES kept disappearing. When it did, even restarting the box didn't remedy it. I'd have to drag the box out of the closet (remember how I like to run systems headless) and open the case and wiggle all the cables. Then it'd go through this "No operating system found" routine until it'd all work again. I'd button it up and back to the closet it'd go.

This got old after the second time so I looked for alternatives. I figured it had something to do with the IDE controllers on the old HP. I had an old ThinkPad 600E and a USB/IDE enclosure but the ThinkPad didn't support USB 2.0. I found this on BuyExtras.com for $12.95 and I had a port replicator for the 600E that had an Ethernet port.

Now the 600E is BACKUP. Unfortunately, I'm still having problems with the Western Digital. I wonder if it is the way I have it jumpered. I hope that's it. It'll run for a day or two and then just disappear.

Home LAN

Here's a diagram of my home LAN:

How To Mount ISOs

The other day when I was working on UN-Authoring DVDs, I needed to see what files were in ISO images I had saved of video DVDs. I could have burned them to DVDs but I knew I really didn't want/need the DVD disks at that time, only the files within them.

So off I went Googling and came across Microsoft's Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel. Besides the unwieldy name, it's "unsupported" (more on that in a minute).

You can download it from Microsoft here. There's a good write-up on it here including the following readme file.

Readme for Virtual CD-ROM Control Panel v2.0.1.1

THIS TOOL IS UNSUPPORT BY MICROSOFT PRODUCT SUPPORT SERVICES


System Requirements
===================
- Windows XP Home or Windows XP Professional

Installation instructions
=========================
1. Copy VCdRom.sys to your %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder.
2. Execute VCdControlTool.exe
3. Click "Driver control"
4. If the "Install Driver" button is available, click it. Navigate to the %systemroot%\system32\drivers folder, select VCdRom.sys, and click Open.
5. Click "Start"
6. Click OK
7. Click "Add Drive" to add a drive to the drive list. Ensure that the drive added is not a local drive. If it is, continue to click "Add Drive" until an unused drive letter is available.
8. Select an unused drive letter from the drive list and click "Mount".
9. Navigate to the image file, select it, and click "OK". UNC naming conventions should not be used, however mapped network drives should be OK.

You may now use the drive letter as if it were a local CD-ROM device. When you are finished you may unmount, stop, and remove the driver from memory using the driver control.

It may not be the friendliest thing I've found but it works great.

Regarding support, just to show you how deeply it's embedded in Microsoft, look at this Knowledge Base article.

PowerPod

While I learned a lot at ASUG, I didn't really get packed very well for that trip. As I sat in the Memphis airport leaving that Sunday, I realized that I didn't bring the charger for my Treo. When we landed in Orlando, I made a mad dash to a gadget store and picked up a PowerPod from EarHugger.

Here's what it looks like:
Interestingly, EarHugger doesn't say much about it. I found this description at 21st-century-goods.com:

The PowerPod features:

• Cord retracts into charger for easy storage
• LED shows connection made to phone
• Charge phone while talking
• Charges cell phones from 4 different power sources
• Standard wall plug, computer USB Port, 9-Volt battery and car cigarette lighter
• Comes with 5 adapters
• Most Nokia, Motorola, palmOne Treo, BlackBerry and Kyocera phones
• Folded size approximately 4" x 3" x 1"

You kinda have to know the code that the BlackBerry uses a mini-USB connection for charging (why doesn't everybody?). What that means to me is that I can use the PowerPod to charge my Plantronics Discovery 640 Bluetooth headset also. Pretty cool.

You can buy one here.

Father's Day Wish List 2006

Seidio Stereo Adapter

This will let me use iPod stereo headsets to listen to movies on my Treo.

You can order it here.

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Travel Sentry Certified Luggage Lock

This will let us lock our luggage and still let the TSA check it.

You can order it here or just drive to Target. We probably need 4 (2 sets of 2).

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Kingston Technologies 512MB DDR SDRAM


(KVR400/512R)

Hopefully, this will speed up our desktop PC.

You can order it here or drive to CircuitCity. I need 2 of them!

I'm Just Not Sure

When I went to ASUG a couple of weeks ago, I took 2 SD cards - a 1GB in the Treo to use for audio recording and note taking and a 512MB full of movies and podcasts. I took a wired headset for the Treo to use to listen with but with my luck it was bad. So I wanted to use my laptop to watch the movies on the airplane. But I didn't take my USB SD reader!

When I got back, I got to looking for a USB SD reader to keep on my keyring. There were several choices that called themselves "keyrings" but they didn't have a loop on them or the loop was on the removable top (don't get me started on that!).

I finally found the I-Rock IR8200 at Newegg.com for $12.99 and $4.99 shipping. Here's what it looks like:

You can't tell from this picture but mentioned in one of the comments was that there was a loop on the swivel cover for the USB plug. I could use that to put it on my keyring.

So I ordered one and it came in today.

It's larger than I hoped (but honestly not larger than I expected). Here's how it compares to my Sandisk Micro USB drive and an SD card:

So now, what to do? It's really bigger than I will tolerate in my pocket. I could put it in my laptop case but that's where the regular USB SD reader was when I needed it. Maybe with the keyring loop I can attach it to something like the retractable keyring I keep my RSA token on.

90 Seconds

That's how long it took. To backup a week's work of changes with Tivoli Continuous Data Protection. In my last post on Tivoli CDP, I hadn't configured a remote backup.

I configured one using an old 30GB IDE hard drive with a USB 2.0 adapter. It took a couple of hours to synchronize the first time and then I removed it. I threw it in my trunk to keep it separate from the PC.

Each weekend, I bring it in the house and plug it in. This week (a typical week), it took 90 seconds after Windows recognized it to completely synchronize with Tivoli CDP.

Awesome.

Wedding Slide Show

My daughter got married in early May. In the tradition of Ole Miss sorority girls, they had to have a video at the rehearsal dinner. While a friend at work does this for weddings and church events, I figured that doing it myself would give me more time to get ready.

With all the video software that I have, I thought that I must have something that will do that. My first attempt was with Pinnacle Studio 10. It seemed easy to put together but when I rotated the pictures, the aspect ratio got all messed up. And Studio 10 is SO slow on my Athlon XP 2000. Studio 8 is faster but it wouldn't rotate the pictures.

So I went off to try other programs I had. I tried them all. Ulead DVD MovieFactory is my favorite DVD authoring program and it has a slide show feature. Most of them are more capable with photo management than Studio but they all seemed to have a problem when I played their discs in my DVD player.

The timing of the stills was inconsistent and the music would jump every now and then. I tried burning SVCDs and DVDs with the same results. Finally, I took one of the CDs and looked at the files. To my surprise, even with 15 minutes of slides and music, the CD was relatively empty.

What was happening was that DVDs and (S)VCDs have an alternative format for slide shows that has the DVD player play the still photos subject to the timing that is specified and, at the same time, play the music.

The closest thing I found to documentation of this is the VCD File/Folder Structure on VideoHelp.com. This shows that on (S)VCDs, the folder SEGMENT can contain up to 999 stills in resolution 704x576 or 352x288. Folder CDDA contains the CD audio files.

What I think was happening with the timing was that the DVD player isn't as consistent as I wanted it to be. So what to do?

I went BACK to Studio 8. But beforehand, I used Picasa to select the pictures and to do the necessary rotation and cropping. Then I exported them from Picasa to a folder on my desktop. Then I imported them into Studio. Worked like a charm except that I lost the sequence so I had to rejuggle them in Studio. Not a big deal.

To avoid the timing problems with the DVD player, I had Studio render the slide show as a video, not a collection of stills. This made the DVD player think that it was just playing a normal video. Of course, the files were much larger but that had never been a problem anyway. Also, as a work-in-progress, I had Studio render it as a Windows Media file that was 5-6MB and posted it on the web for the bride and groom to preview.

In the end, I created 2 SVCDs, one for the rehearsal dinner with about 15 minutes of slides and music and another for the reception with more than 30 minutes of slides and music. If I'd needed more time, I could have used Studio to create DVDs rather than SVCDs.

Oh, one other thing. I wanted the reception video to play continuously. Studio didn't do that. I un-authored the SVCD and used Ulead DVD MovieFactory to author another SVCD with the option to play continuously!

UN-Authoring DVDs

A friend of mine at work is going to Italy this summer. I have been squirreling away travelogue shows for the last couple of years. I have my SageTV box setup to record anything by Rick Steves, Rudy Maxa, Samantha Brown or several other travel shows.

I wait until I have enough shows in a series to fill up a DVD, generally 6 for a 1/2 hour show or 4 for a 1 hour show, and then burn a DVD for that series. In 2 years, I have more than a dozen DVDs full of travel shows.

As you'd expect, there were a lot of shows on Italy but scattered over 6-7 DVDs. I didn't want to copy all those DVDs so I went looking for a way to consolidate the shows on Italy onto a minimum number of DVDs.

I'd played with Ulead DVD MovieFactory 3.0 SE (DVD MF) and remembered that it has a feature that will allow you to import video from a DVD (unencrypted). I played with this some and found that it puts the video in ...\Ulead DVD MovieFactory\3.0\Import_DVD as plain MPEG2s.

This seemed like just what I wanted but... As you know, for me, nothing is simple. There were more files in this folder than segments I had imported!

It turns out that DVDs have a folder VIDEO_TS that contains the .VOB files. However, .VOB files don't exceed 1GB. When the segment that I had imported crossed into 2 of these .VOB files, DVD MF created 2 MPEG2 files.

How to get them back together? I remembered that VideoReDo has some kind of capability to consolidate files and went looking. It will join multiple video segments into a single file and does it quick! VideoReDo is still one of my favorite programs.

So with this, I combined the files as needed and used DVD MF to author DVDs with just the Italy shows on them.

Bon journo!

Treo 650 Recap - Part II

I remembered that I had omitted a couple of things in my Treo 650 Recap so here goes.

I searched high and low for a holster for the 650. I like simplicity so I was picky. Then I ran across a blog entry (which I can't find again) where the guy had used a iPod case! My daughter had an iPod and hadn't ever used the case. This was right before Christmas so I bought her a "cool" iPod case with a hole in it for the spin wheel and a transparent window for the display. She was thrilled and I took her Apple case.

The case has worked great. It probably isn't as sturdy as some made-for-phone cases but it has been fine. I broke off the belt clip when I got in the car with it on my left hip rather than my right hip. The Apple store was on my way back to work so I just replaced it. Of course, it was pricey there but convenient.

My other challenge has been a Bluetooth headset. Frugal that I am, I jumped on an IOGear headset from buy.com for $29.95 (no longer on sale). The first one I got rattled! There was something loose in it. I exchanged it but the second one sounded like crap. I bought a Motorola H500 from the local Cingular store. I never could get the volume to be loud enough. I'd have to actually press my hand against the headset to be able to hear. So back to Cingular it went. This time I got a Plantronics Discovery 640. It is the in-ear style and it works fine.

I read somewhere later that the Treo 650 doesn't have a strong outbound signal on the Bluetooth so you need a headset that has plenty of amplification. Seems that the Motorola H50 doesn't have much amplification. I'm sure the in-ear fitting of the Plantronics 640 helps as well.

GoogleSightseeing

I made it on GoogleSightseeing! My submission on Avebury is here. You can see my pictures starting here.

Tivoli Continuous Data Protection

I had lunch with Mark Lewis of EMC this week. Well, me and about 20 other people did. Over lunch, we talked about lots of things but especially backup.

Maybe you'll remember back in October when I whined about my backups. It hasn't gotten any better. I did find out what was wrong with my DVD burners. They had dropped out of DMA mode from getting so many errors on my cheap media. I guess you get what you pay for.

Anyway, I am still tired of backing up EVERYTHING each month. And then I don't have a backup in between.

In the October post, I talked about IBM's VitalFile Backup. It has now come out of their skunkworks and is called Tivoli Continuous Data Protection - same function, just a new name.

I had some time this weekend so I installed it on my "server." So far it looks pretty good. It runs as a Java application and you interact with it through the browser.

When you start it up, it walks you through a wizard. I didn't screen shot that but here's a screen that shows you the choices you make about their "Continuous" backup:


I pointed it at my second internal hard drive and told it to use up to 50 GBs. It didn't use nearly that much (more later) but seemed to stop and start unless I gave it a really BIG number here.

Notice off to the right there's a list of inclusions. I generally took their defaults but probably should have thought more about all the Office extensions. I was amazed how much of those there were outside of My Documents that I didn't really care about. Oh, I deleted their "*.123" entry!

You go through pages setting up schedules (for remote backups) and exclusions. I left remote backups disabled for now and again pretty much took their defaults on exclusions.

Then you get the following "Backup everything now" screen. This takes a loooooong time. I ended up with about 12 GB backed up and it took 3-4 hours.


The remote backup they're talking about is a network or removable drive. Here's the configuration for it. As I mentioned, I have it disabled for now.


Finally, here's the startup screen when you hit it as http://localhost:9003/


You can see I have almost 29000 files protected by Tivoli CDP for almost 12 GB. My next challenge is to enable remote backup to a USB drive and keep it off site.

Treo 650 Recap

I just realized that I had never recapped what I did with my Treo 650 so here goes.

I got it just before Christmas. My objective was to consolidate my gadgets. My boss walked into a conference room where I had spread out in front of me my SonyEricsson T616, my Sony Clie NX50, and my BlackBerry 7290! He said he had never seen anyone with so many gadgets. The phone was on a personal account which is why I didn't use the phone on the BlackBerry. I used the BlackBerry for work e-mail and calendaring. I used the Clie as a PDA, note taking and audio recording. I had tried to use the BlackBerry for note taking but I couldn't get the data from the BlackBerry to my laptop. It doesn't support the file transfer protocol. I've been told that later models do support this.

One thing I loved on the BlackBerry was the way it capitalized letters. If you hold a key down for a little longer, it capitalizes the letter. The Treo didn't do that which made typing harder - 2 strokes for each capital letter. The Treo does some "smart" typing, e.g. it capitalizes the next letter after a period and a space and it inserts an apostrophe in contractions like "didnt." KeyCaps600 fixed this right away. Makes the Treo work just like the BlackBerry.

Next was a capability I loved on the Clie - Graffiti. Now the Treo as it comes from PalmOne inexplicably doesn't support Graffiti. Almost as easy as KeyCaps600 fixed the capitalization, GraffitiAnywhere gave me Graffiti. But, it was Graffiti 2. The Clie had Graffiti 1. Besides the couple of letters different between 1 and 2, some of the letters and control strokes seemed to be problematic, e.g. a "l" followed by a space would never come out right. The Graffiti 2 "i" is a downward stroke with a dot over it. Using GraffitiAnywhere, you had to use a upward right to left stroke to create a dot. I never could get it right.

I found a Graffiti 1 library for GraffitiAnywhere. That got back all the Graffiti 1 strokes but I can't make any punctuation work. So I compromised. For me, the speed and accuracy of Graffiti 1 was worth not being able to make punctuation. I just use the Treo keyboard for punctuation. When I'm taking notes in a hurry, I just skip punctuation and insert them afterwards.

One of the other things I used on the Clie was the Voice Recorder application. I played with a lot of applications and ended up with SoundRec. Here's the whole story.

The Treo doesn't have much memory but most programs will run off of an SD card and most will let you direct their output to an SD card, e.g. the camera. Not all SD cards are created equally and the story is here.

The Treo had a good File Manager application and I found FileZ with equivalent (and more) function. I don't think I could get along without it. Oh, so you don't find yourself in the same situation that I did, add a Favorites button that runs FileZ before you need it.

Life isn't all work so I added a Tetris knock-off blocks133.

My other entertainment is watching videos. The way to do this is described here.

Whew! That's enough for tonight. Leave me a comment if you have any questions.

Interesting Gadget

Mediagate Portable MPEG4 Player USB 2.0 External Drive Case Enclosure

• Portable MPEG4 Player is a perfect portable entertainment box with MPEG4 playback and comes with an internal 2.5" HDD (Optional)
• Download any music, movie or photo to Portable MPEG4 Player through the supplied USB cable from your computer and bring it over wherever
• Just connect by Audio-Video cable to a monitor in a car or a TV at home and operate it by the supplied remote control
• It is also an external USB HDD (2.5 inch) which is more durable compared to 3.5 inch and it looks very slim and compact with aluminum cover