Mio DigiWalker C320 GPS

Just after Christmas last year, I wrote about my Mio C310x. I was remiss in not following up. As I mentioned, my primary objective was to have a GPS for my upcoming (now completed) trip to Ireland. I never found European maps for the C310x so I returned it.

Subsequently, I came across a Mio H610 but I didn't read the specifications closely enough. The "H" stands for handheld and it was tiny! Smaller than a deck of cards. Too small for these old eyes to see while driving.

While watching the Black Friday ads, I saw that RadioShack had the Mio C320 on Doorbuster for $149.99.Well, there I was Friday morning at 5:15AM in line at the local Radio Shack. I got a C320 and was out of there by 6:10AM.

Friday afternoon I played with mounting it in my 2007 Toyota Camry SE. I discovered that the supplied bracket had a tab on the back that would fit into the CD slot on my dashboard. I put a couple of layers of black duct tape on the tab to make it a snug fit and it was perfect! So I thought.

Off I went riding around to play with my new toy. But it wouldn't sync with the GPS satellites. That was odd. It had worked inside my house. It would work when I held it in my hand but not when it was on the dash.

After about half an hour of playing, I realized that the dashboard was causing electronic interference with the GPS receiver. If I would turn the car off, the C320 would work fine. That made it less than useful however.

Back to the box and I got the windshield suction cup mount. I mounted it next to the A-pillar. I like it up there because it's pretty much in your line of sight but it is low enough that it doesn't block your visibility.

Christmas Wish List 2007

Sunpak - PlatinumPlus Tripod

My old tripod has given up the ghost.

This is on sale at BestBuy for $9.99 with free shipping through 11/24.

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Mini Extension Cords

These are hard to explain. When you plug in a little power supply (like for a camera) into a power strip, it is fat and tends to block additional plugs limiting how many gadgets you can plug into a power strip. These little short extension cords let you get more gadgets plugged into the same power strip.

I found them at RadioShack for $9.99. I would expect them to be available in the store also.

There could be more people in our family that could use these.

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6' Fiberglass Stepladder, Type II

This is available at Lowe's for $49.00.

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Philips DVP5982 DVD Player

This DVD player will upscale to HD (when we get an HD TV) and play from a USB flash drive.

This is on sale through Phillips Outlet for $39.99 with free shipping.

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Power Cradle with built-in speaker for Mio C320

This is a bracket for my new GPS.

This is on sale at Semsons for $28.99.

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Cork Pops I Wine Opener

This is an easy wine opener.

This is available at Homebrewers for $17.95 plus $7.99 shipping.

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Update 12/25/07: Thanks Santa!

Bloglines Beta

Remember way back when I wrote about Bloglines? I'm still using it. Oh, I tried Google Reader but I came back to Bloglines.

Recently, Bloglines has been offering a beta. It's all AJAX and overcomes one of the few complaints I'd had about Bloglines.

In the current Bloglines, when you click on a feed, it is loaded in the right frame and marks all the items read even if you haven't looked at them. Google Reader doesn't do that.

In the beta Bloglines, when you click on a feed, it is loaded in the right frame and the items are marked read when you look at them. Much nicer.

It's still a beta and some things are broken or flaky.

KeyTweak

This is an oldie but a goodie. I ran across my use of KeyTweak last week.

Dell, in their infinite wisdom, remapped the keyboard on their Latitude D-series. This put the Insert key right where the Home key is on ThinkPads. Needless to say, this gave me fits toggling Insert.

KeyTweak will let you remap (or in my case UNmap) any keys. The author has a great manual here.

KeyTweak doesn't have to be installed. I keep a copy on my USB key and run it from there when needed.

Damn Spam Part III

All year I've been tracking spam by recording the number of e-mails in the Spam folder in my Gmail account each Monday. Here's the chart of the results.

There's been a drop-off since early 2007 to about 1/3 of what it had been. I'm not quite sure why but I'll take it.

PS. I also want to follow-up on my previous post on Globat e-mail, Part 3. For my customer, I'm still using BellSouth (now AT&T) for spam filtering. However, I've been noticing that there was very little spam in the MailGuard folder. I'm still forwarding their e-mail through Globat so I went back over there to see what was happening.

Globat has instituted a new mail system with a new spam filter called SpamShield Pro. It really looks like it's doing a very good job, removing most of the spam before it gets to BellSouth.

Lesson Learned

I guess I learned a lesson tonight. I should have learned it earlier.

I have a D-Link DI-624 wireless router. Last week I upgraded to WPA (should have done this much earlier). Twice since then, I've lost access to file shares through the router. A reset of the router gets everything back to working.

I checked the firmware level against the latest firmware on D-Link's site and I was a couple of revisions back. So I downloaded the .bin file and loaded it using the router's administrative page.

When it finished, it wouldn't reload the admin page like it usually does. It took a few seconds but I realized that the router had reset to its default IP range. That wasn't all that it had reset.

It was completely back at the factory defaults!

Gone was my unique IP range. Gone was my SSID. Gone was my WPA key. Gone was my port forwarding. Gone was my ntp server. Gone was my log e-mail settings. Gone was my ...

Well, you get the picture.

30 minutes later, it was pretty well back where it was. There was one difference though. I had backed up the settings to my hard drive.

ThinkVantage Active Protection System

I just built a new (to me) ThinkPad T42. I installed all the IBM Lenovo software.

Included in this is the ThinkVantage Active Protection System. I kinda knew what this was so I downloaded and installed the software.

Active Protection System uses a motion sensor on the motherboard and parks the hard drive's heads when it detects certain levels of motion.

Tonight when I went to Control Panel to update Java, I saw the ThinkVantage Active Protection System icon. With nothing else to do while Java updated, I fired this up. Here's what it looked like.

But it's realtime! As the laptop rested on my lap, it moved ever so slightly as I typed. The image of the laptop in the moved with it! Too cool.

You know what I had to do next. Yep, shake it!

IBM's description is here and there's a good independent article on it here.

Pretty nice stuff. Try that on your Dell.

TV Wiring Diagram

For all of you wondering how I have my SageTV box, a VCR/DVD, and a cable converter hooked up, here goes.


Input from the cable is split 4 ways. Leg 1 goes to VCR/DVD Antenna In. Leg 2 goes to the SageTV Antenna In. Leg 3 goes to the cable converter Antenna In. And finally, Leg 4 goes to the TV Antenna In.

The SageTV box also takes a Line In from the cable converter's Line Out. This uses the Left and Right audio outputs and an S-video output. The SageTV also outputs Line Out that goes into the TV Line 3 In.

The cable converter's ins and outs have been previously described except that the Left and Right audio outputs and Composite video are split and also go to the VCR/DVD Line 1 In. Originally, this was done so that I could record on the VCR from the cable converter which is no longer necessary.

The VCR/DVD Line Out goes into the TV's Line 1 In.

Yeah, it's a mess behind that entertainment center.

Drobo

Last Fall when we went to Sun for an executive briefing, I fell in love with their Sun Fire X4500 ("Thumper"). I joked that I wanted one for home.

Now Data Robotics has an equivalent for the home market. The underlying technology is obviously different than Sun's Thumper but the result is similar.

It's a 4-bay SATA enclosure with USB 2.0 attachment. You just stick in a couple of drives and it figures out the best way to protect as much storage as possible. There's a good illustration of how it uses a mixture of RAID and mirroring in George Ou's blog post below.

If you need more space, add another drive or just pull out the smallest drive and stick in a larger one. Oh, don't worry about moving your data off before you do this. Just yank it out with the Drobo running.

With 2 400GB drives, I get 371GB protected. If I add another 400GB drive, I go to 743GB! Don't you love RAID? (Ok, pseudo-RAID)

Here's a couple of blog posts that give a lot more details.

• Tom's Hardware
• ars technica
• TechRepublic - Shawn Morton
• TechRepublic - George Ou

It's worth a brief discussion of the related software. Data Robotics provides a Drobo Dashboard. You'd think it was not required as the Drobo presents to the operating system as a USB drive. However, currently there is a required firmware update for the Drobo that can only be installed via the Drobo Dashboard. So I installed the Dashboard.

But, it is a .NET 2.0 application. While the Drobo Dashboard was a 17MB download, the .NET Framework was a 23MB download. And now I have 3 Windows security patches to apply!

Google Street View

When I was driving down Poplar Pike last Thursday just after lunch, I saw this little Mini backing out of this driveway. It backed out onto Poplar Pike and proceeded East in front of me. It had blinking lights so I just assumed it was a mail carrier. As we stopped at Hacks Cross Road, I realized it had lettering across the back saying "Survey Vehicle" and a funky looking gadget on top. I had spotted a camera car for Google Street View!

He turned South and paused right on the railroad tracks. I can only presume he was trying to get a comprehensive shot of the grade crossing.

He went on South on Hacks Cross Road and turned East onto Ridgetown Lane.

So when the Google Street View for Memphis is available, remember you heard it here first. And look for the silver Camry on Poplar Pike near Hacks Cross Road!

doPDF

One of my many quests is for a lightweight, free, PDF creator. I know there're tons of them around but they all seem to either require ghostscript or put a watermark on the output.

The other day, I came across doPDF. I saved it away for a rainy day.

Well, that day came around today. It's a quick download and install. It works well too.

But...

I archive copies of my phone bill (around 30 pages and no, I don't have an iPhone). The copy created with doPDF was 745KB and the copy created with Adobe Acrobat 6.0 was 93KB. doPDF was set at 300 dpi and Acrobat at 600 dpi.

Hmmm.

doPDF worked fine but 8 times bigger is really too much.

Western Digital My Book 500GB

I've been using IDE drives in USB/Firewire enclosures for add-on storage, a 200GB and a 250 GB. I had filled up the 250GB and switched to the 200GB. But I didn't want to eat up all my UPS power with both of them running so I turned off the 250GB. The downside is that then I couldn't tell what I had on the 250GB. Duh!

One of my RSS feeds came up with "Western Digital 500GB 7200 RPM USB 2.0 External Hard Drive - My Book Essential Edition for a low $114.75 - 10% off using Paypal = $103.27 free shipping."

Not bad. And it's quiet as a mouse.

Globat e-mail, Part 3

I resell web hosting and e-mail from an account at Globat. I've written about them several times (Cheap Web Hosting, Globat e-mail, Globat e-mail, Part 2, and Globat Support). Overall, these have been satisfactory in the end.

A couple of weeks ago, my customer called me complaining about spam. I looked around on Globat and found that they have a facility called GloSpamShield. It looked like a pretty good system so I tried to order it. I got several different stories but in the end they added it to my account for $29.95. So far, so good.

Then I went to my control panel to enable it. It wouldn't enable on any of my accounts. To make a long story a little shorter, an escalation to Lou Rio got Luis Banda on it and he got all but one enabled. That one NEVER got enabled. That problem might have been a sign I should have heeded.

The default level is "Medium" and is the recommended starting point. At that level, my customer didn't see any difference in spam so I bumped it to "Medium - High." Then pretty much everything got blocked. So I turned on "Held E-mails." It worked very differently on different accounts. Some would have lots of held e-mails and some would have none. There was no rhyme nor reason.

After a number of tickets with Globat support, I gave up and went to turn off GloSpamShield. It wouldn't turn off! At this point, Luis Banda quit responding. I had to contact billing and request a credit for GloSpamShield which they promptly gave AND turned off the feature. I guess money talks.

Whew. I thought I was done but I had just started.

My customer called me fuming! He sent an e-mail to a bank to meet a deadline and it was rejected by Globat as being "unsolicited bulk e-mail." This guy sends less than 10 e-mails a week.

A panic call to Globat revealed that this domain had been blacklisted. They agreed to whitelist it immediately but could never explain why it had been blacklisted.

This e-mail rejection and promised whitelisting has happened 3 times so far. Each time, I have been assured that the domain was whitelisted and that they would get me an explanation. None has been forthcoming.

Today, I think I figured it out. In attempting to rescue this customer, I created new e-mail accounts at another ISP and forwarded the Globat e-mail accounts to them. Remember that these are virgin e-mail accounts. Never been seen or used. Oh, and the account names aren't subject to dictionary attacks.

Within 48 hours, these new mailboxes are now getting bounced e-mails saying that they have sent virus infested e-mail. The only way that spammers could have gotten these e-mail accounts is to have hacked into Globat's mail servers' forwarding information.

And I'm still not getting any response from Globat support.

ThinkPad T42

The screen on my ThinkPad T20 got too pink and the 256MB of RAM just didn't cut it. I came across a T42 on RetroBox and went for it. It's 1.7GHz and 1GB or RAM. Much better.

The first question was go to Vista or not? Sure, why not?

I installed Vista Home Premium using the clean install from an upgrade DVD. Worked like a charm and quick, taking about an hour and a half.

But...

Vista didn't find a video driver. No problem, I thought. Windows Update will fix that. Nope. No driver there. No problem, I thought. It was an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 so off I went to the ATI site. Nope. No driver there. No problem, I thought. Off to ThinkWiki. Nope. No driver there. Problem.

I finally found a post on Microsoft's TechNet forum that gave a bizarre workaround but it worked. Kinda.

This gave me most of the expected features and controls for the video adapter but, alas, no Aero. Seems that the 7500 doesn't have Pixel Shading 2! So close, yet so far.

Onward.

I ran through much of my normal install process and went to connect to my server where my printers are. No go. Vista said the print spooler wasn't running on the XP system. But it was. Fiddle, fiddle, and suddenly without explanation they worked.

In summary, that's how the whole experience went. What was expected to work didn't. Sometimes there was a fix or workaround and sometimes there wasn't.

Just to get a sense, go to Lenovo's "Drivers and software" page and note the dearth of support for Vista. Missing are items like Audio (worked), Trusted Platform Module (TPM), Intel SpeedStep Applet, Intel Chipset, Presentation Director, LCD/Monitor, and of course ATI Radeon/FireGL. Some of these could be included in the Vista base code.

That got me to thinking about what Alex Rublowsky of Microsoft had told me in an Executive Briefing in Redmond November 3, 2005 - "When Vista ships, 3 year old systems will run it." Not even close. And this T42 is an enterprise class system built in August 2004.

In the end, I punted and went back to XP Pro. Felt like an old pair of shoes.

Site Meter

I've used Site Meter for a long time on a variety of web pages including this blog. It's always been a solid set of statistics and very dependable.

This spring, when I went to check my statistics on this blog, I got some odd results. The problem has since been corrected. I quickly hit PrtSc and captured the erroneous output.

Being the nice guy that I am, I e-mailed it to Site Meter. 2 days later I got a reply.

Dear Ben,

Thank you very much for sending this through.

We attempted a launch of the new sitemeter site on Tuesday. Unfortunately we encountered problems and had to revert back to the old site.

This information was useful as we tried and diagnose the problem.

I have upgraded you to a Free lifetime paid account for taking the time to send this along.

Sincerely,

The Sitemeter Team

Now, I wasn't familiar with the "paid" Site Meter account so here's the difference.

Above is the "free" service.

Above is the "Plus" service.

Pretty nice guys.

Gallery2

I have photos scattered ALL over. My dream is to get these all in one place with the best of all presentations. The ultimate would be a lot like Google's Picasa Web Albums but with just a few more bells and whistles - things like the ability to store full resolution images.

My web host (Globat) gives me 100GB of web space so it seemed like the logical thing to do was to put the photos there. Now all I needed was some software to run there.

I searched high and low and found Gallery2 from Menalto. This is a SourceForge project, natch. There's a site that lets you play with all the themes for Gallery2.

Well, it seemed like a good idea.

Gallery2 has a nice php installer. You just upload it to your web site and run it. (Oh, don't forget to set the permissions.) It will actually copy the Gallery2 files to your web server, unpack them, and take you step-by-step through the install. Only one call to Globat to get the MySQL database setup. (Good support, by the way.)

So far, so good. But it was early.

The Gallery2 upload process(es), while a diverse collection, weren't nearly as smooth as my benchmark Picasa Web.

The results of the upload were pretty good. It created thumbnails and 640x480 images at the same time. Well, almost. One image of the 24 that I uploaded as a trial didn't get a thumbnail so it loaded the 4MB picture every time you went to the album page.

Some of the pictures needed to be rotated so I went into Edit Photo and rotated one. That's when I got the (first) server error. And the thumbnail went away, permanently.

It went downhill from there. The forums had lots of suggestions including recompiling the image toolkit. I don't recall having to do this with Picasa Web.

At this point, Gallery2 is pretty well hosed. Me too.

Draggable Google Maps

This has been blogged everywhere but I felt like it warranted my following up on since I had blogged on the issue previously.

As I said earlier, one of the capabilities I was looking for was "the ability to set specific waypoints along the way thereby sending the route along something other than the shortest/quickest route."

maps.ask.com let you set waypoints but you would know that Google would do it slicker.

With the new extension to Google's directions, you just grab a segment and drag it to where you want it to run. It recalculates the route including timings and distances.

Of course, it's all done in Ajax so it drives my 600MHz 256MB ThinkPad into the ground. Looks like it's time for an upgrade.

Wonder why it took Google so long to catch up with ask.com?

Verizon BlackBerry 8830

My company has cellular agreements with Cingular (AT&T) and Verizon. Those with Verizon phones who travel internationally have had to take a second GSM phone with them. Verizon recently introduced the BlackBerry 8830 which has both a CDMA radio and a GSM radio.

When I traveled to Ireland recently, I took one of the evaluation units with me. It still had a sticker on it that said "Property of Research in Motion." I stopped by the local Verizon store to get them to show me how to work the GPS (more later) and they had never seen one!

Oh, on GPS. In spite of the indication from the BlackBerry 8830's web page that it has GPS (expand Features), the Verizon site doesn't mention it and Verizon's Customer Service said it didn't. I sure wish I had GPS in Ireland!

The Verizon BlackBerry 8830 worked fine in Ireland. I switched my Lotus Notes e-mail over to it from my Treo 650 running BlackBerry Connect. Each night, I would fire up the 8830 and let it download my e-mail. Verizon has a roaming agreement with Vodafone and that's the only network I observed the 8830 connecting to. I didn't try to get it to connect to other GSM networks.

One thing I particularly wanted to test was the dialing strings required in that GSM uses the "+" followed by the country code followed by the local number. Consequently, I have all the phone numbers in my Treo specified as "+CAAALLL-LLLL." On the 8830, I just put the 10-digit local number. I was worried that the 8830 would be confused by the "+" when in CDMA mode although I never tried it.

My findings were that the 8830 realized it was in GSM mode and inserted "+C" (where "C" seemed to default to "1") so the call was placed properly. This was just what you would want the 8830 to do.

Incoming calls worked fine also. One one occasion, I had problems placing calls in that I got "Call Forwarding - Conditional" and the call failed. After retrying it a couple of times it always went through. Changing the dialing string to explicitly include "+1" or "0011" didn't matter.

I still prefer my Treo 650 to the BlackBerry 8830. The keyboard feels too "smooth." There isn't enough tactile feel to the keys. You can't easily tell when you move from key to key. Also, the "pearl" roller-ball is sluggish when the device is busy otherwise, e.g. downloading e-mail. The roller-ball doesn't have any feedback when it is clicked.

The BlackBerry operating system and GUI are obviously different from the Treo 650 and my experience is probably more indicative of this than any real problems with the BlackBerry. It's been almost 2 years since I've used a BlackBerry 7290.

Excel 2007 Default Template (Updated)

This is an update to a former post of the same title.

Remember at the end of my first post on Word 2007, I promised some information on Excel 2007. This is it.

I had the same kind of issue with Excel 2007 that I'd had with Word 2007. That is the default formatting uses the Calibri font that users without Office 2007 probably won't have.

Fortunately, it's easier to solve in Excel than in Word.

Just click on the Office button, click on "Excel Options" near the bottom right and choose "Popular."

Go down to the "When creating new workbooks" section and find the "Use this font" drop-down box. Change this to Arial and click Ok.

Restart Excel and you're done.

Many thanks to Helen Bradley for setting me straight.

PCs for Seniors

In the spirit of my previous post on DVDs for Seniors, this blog post inspired me to write this post.

One problem I've had to overcome is that they kept moving the icons all over the desktop. I found a program called IconLock written in 1999 by PC Magazine. The article is still available. You can download it here.

While the article says "IconLock runs under Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT 4," I've found that it runs fine under Windows XP. Do be sure that you exercise all the desktop and Start menu items that they'll need to use as you can't completely lock it down or they won't be able to launch items on the desktop or even from the Start menu.

One other tip. I setup a Blogger blog that I set as the homepage on their Internet Explorer. With that I can add links to their homepage from anywhere and all they have to do is close and reopen Internet Explorer and the new link will be right there in front of them!

As I mentioned earlier, I use LogMeIn for remote control. Works perfectly and the price is right!