So, I got a visit by a nice young college student type from Comcast. Since I get at least one mailer a month from them saying, "Hey, you already have our digital cable and our high-speed Internet service, wouldn't you like to save money by getting our digital voice service as well?" I already had my stock answer.

We get cable and broadband outages way too often. If I can go a six months or a year without them, then I'll consider digital voice service. Meantime, I like having a dial tone whenever I pick up the phone. 

Which, if I do, I will. I mean, I'm no great fan of Comcast, but it's not like I'm profoundly loyal to Qwest, either ...

Filed under :: Hi-Tech :: My Computer
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While my notebook screen is frelled. It's big and bright and shiny ...

Filed under :: Job Jollies :: My Computer
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My laptop's screen has been taking on a distinct reddish hue upon powering up the last few weeks. I remembered that well from the last time my screen backlighting crapped out on me.

I did take the precaution of letting our local Help Desk folks know -- and they assured me they'd make sure they had a spare backlight for the machine, just in case.

Well, it suddenly went completely black on me this morning. The LCD is okay -- I can just make out the outlines of windows and dialogs and the like -- but without the backlighting, it's unusable. I cycled the power and it came back on, but ... let's see if I can get it fixed now.

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So Mary brought her bright shiny new Mac Air with her, and, yes, it;'s very pretty and very thin and all. And then we started getting into the wireless network ...

And I discovered I'd turned off the security at some point a while back and never turned it back on. Oops.

So since I have to re-enable the security anyway, I decided to do a bit of digging into it. There's a lot of info out there (e.g.) ... the question is, what's reasonable security vs. possible security.

When I had security put on before, it was MAC-addressed base. I shied away from WEP because it's always seemed kind of dangerous to set a key and expect to be able to get the machines all set up right to use it (though subsequent experience at my in-laws has shown me how "easy" it can be). MAC-address (using the PC's network card address) seemed a bit more reliable.

Now, the fact is, MAC can be spoofed, so if someone knew (or could detect?) the MAC addresses authorized on the network, they could broadcast as though that MAC address and get on the system. Most security types consider MAC authentication as a belt--and-suspenders to use with some sort of encryption.

The original WiFi encryption was WEP, but it can be cracked. Nearly all security sites say instead to use WPA encryption.

But ... WPA can be cracked, too (though less easily than WEP). And it sounds like it actually slows down connectivity more than WEP (encryption/decryption always slows things down). And ...

... the fact is, I don't live in a big apartment in the city with hundreds of guys with WiFi systems all looking to either steal my bandwidth or break into my machine. I don't see a lot of folks sitting at the curb in my neighborhood, working on their laptop computers, either. 

How much security is "enough"? A security guy would tend to say, "There's no such thing." (I know -- I've had them working for me before.) But there's a cost to security, in terms of complexity (things breaking) and friction (slowing down connections). If I want the best security, I'll skip the WiFi and go with cables -- but I'm not doing that, so where's the compromise line here?

The level of security I want is like a lock on our doors -- not enough to withstand a siege (which I don't expect), but enough so that if someone walks up to the front door of the house during the day and turns the knob, the house isn't easily open. Similarly, I want something on our WiFi so that if someone's actually looking around, they see it's locked with something and don't bother stealing bandwidth or poking around at computers.

Any determined burglar can get into our house, given time. We've made a decision about the cost/inconvenience of home security; the same decision needs to be made about our network security. Just saying to throw the most powerful version of encryption and etc. onto our WiFi network is silly if the cost of doing so (fragility and lag) is too high.

So, faithful readers ... should I drop back to just MAC validation? Go to WEP? Step up to WPA? What's the actual value analysis, vs. simply making the security guys happy?

Filed under :: My Computer
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Google has issued a new "Labs Edition" of Google Talk. It pulls in some features from the Google Talk gadget -- but, unfortunately, drops file transfer (which I never use) and voice chat (which I do), so I'll not be downloading it any time soon.

Google suffers a bit from a plethora of Chat/Talk clients, just in the Windows platorm -- there's a downloadable Talk client, the new Labs Edition thereof, the Chat functionality in GMail, and the Google Gadget version (which is Flash-based in a browser). Each has a slightly different set of functions, though they all fundamentally work together, but it does make it difficult -- even though I like the client quiet a bit.

Meanwhile, no sign of any changes or improvements in the problems with Google Calendar Sync for Outlook. Disappointing.

UPDATE: More official Google news on the subject.

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Got an email today that Comcast is now offering (in its never-ending but doomed-to-failure bid to make Comcast Internet subscribers consider the whole Comcast portal to be their "home") free access to Plaxo's premium services ("a $50 value at no extra charge!").

Plaxo is a social site that I've actually played with before -- you tag folks as "friends" or "business associates," etc. You can set up feeds for their blogs, too.

I've also noticed it previously because it was one of the services mentioned for synchronizing Outlook/Exchange and Google Calendar (among others). If that actually worked, that would be awfully nice. I've been continuing to monitor the Google Calendar support forum, and while "Becky" there clearly realized they've released a very squirrelly product,  there's no sign of an update since the initial 3/5 release.

(I tried reactivating it. and, as it had eventually started doing, it once again crashed Outlook.)

So I downloaded the Plaxo agents for syncing things -- and basically it's a matter of syncing various things to the Plaxo calendar, i.e., it serves as a middle-man. But I thought I'd take another look at the capabilities before I installed, because I've had a lot of concerns over bad calendar syncing -- and, to be honest, I really don't want to frell up my work calendar.

Alas, it's the Same Old Story:

• Some people swear Plaxo is the greatest thing since sliced bread.
• Some people swear Plaxo destroyed their calendars, their marriages, and their lives.
• Some people swear that Product X is much better than Plaxo.

The complaints have to do with duplication of appointments, inability to handle recurrent appointments, inability to handle exceptions to recurrent appointments, etc. Nothing as dire as the complaints about Google Sync, but enough to make me shy away.

The real problem is, this isn't critical, just a serious convenience. I already have my Outlook calendar at all times, courtesy of my Blackberry. What I want is to be able to see it overlaid on my Google Calendars, so that when a question comes up of whether I can do X in time slot Y, I can see if the work stuff interferes, too.

So ... still in a holding pattern. Alas.

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1. You can append a string to your Gmail account with a plus sign. This will automatically route the mail through to that name to your account -- which you can then see (and filter on). 

So, for example, if you put in an e-mail address on a donation to Group X, you can use mygoogleid+groupx@gmail.com. The mail then comes in to the mygoogleid account, but with that suffix. I can see if Group X sells my e-mail to anyone, I can easily filter (or auto-delete) all the mail that comes in to that address, etc.

2. You can put all the dots in your name (or not) that you want in Gmail and they'll be ignored. So if you have fredsmith as an ID, you can use fred.smith or fredsmith or f.reds.mith and the mail will go through. This could be handy both for you as the account owner (to put that in public displays of your account name so that people can more easily read it), or you as someone sending to a Gmail account (so that you can more easily read it).

3. You can set up an online chat link on your blog, web page, etc., with Google Talk. This might not be helpful for blogging, but could be for business. The user doesn't need a Google Talk account, and it will reflect your on/offline/busy status.

Filed under :: Blogging :: My Computer
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Google has announced a sync tool between Outlook and Google Calendar. Yow! 

It can be done as a 2-way sync, or 1-way (either way).

I'll be reading the documentation (and help forum) very carefully before doing it, but that would make my life soooooo happy.

UPDATE: Problem #1 - at the moment, it's only between the default Exchange calendar and the primary Google calendar. Which is not what I want. I want to keep my primary GCal as my personal calendar. Hrm.

UPDATE: Per the FAQ: "No, it's not possible to sync events on secondary calendars at this time." Here's the problem (writing it out for purposes of maybe figuring out something around it). My Primary GCal is personal, associated with my primary Gmail ID. 

I don't want to turn that into my business calendar mirror. I get invites to my primary Gmail account that are personal, and I don't want to have to move them into a secondary. By the same token, I don't want to co-mingle my personal and professional calendar -- having my personal appointments sync up to Outlook, or my business appointments showing up in my personal GCal. (Or do I? No, I don't. That's what the whole secondary calendar structure is for. I want to be able to see it sometimes and not see it other times.)

Harrumph. I'm pretty certain that secondary calendars will work for this sooner or later. I just wish it was now. Maybe just as well -- let Google shake the bugs out.

UPDATE: Wait, maybe it will work ... Per the FAQ: 

If your Microsoft Outlook events aren't being transferred to Google Calendar, check to see if the email address associated with Google Calendar is listed as the organizer or a guest of the event. Please note that it's not currently possible to sync events with Google Calendar Sync if you're not the organizer nor a guest.

To sync all events between Microsoft Outlook and Google Calendar, the email address associated with Google Calendar needs to match the email address associated with Microsoft Outlook. For example, if you're using user1@domain.com with your Outlook Calendar, enter user1@domain.com in the Google Calendar Sync Settings window, and then view your synced events with the Google Calendar associated with your user1@domain.com email address. If you don't yet have Google Calendar set up with your user1@domain.com email address, just visit the Google Calendar homepage and click on "Create a new Google Account."

Keep in mind that you can view the events from your user1@domain.com email address with any Google Calendar you currently have associated with your other email address. Simply share calendars between the Google Calendar associated with user1@domain.com and the Google Calendar associated with your other email address.

That tells me I *can't* set up a sync between my "dave@work" addy and my "dave@gmail" addy. I need to create a new GCal for dave@work, then authorize it ot be seen as an "Other" calendar for dave@gmail. Yeah -- that should work!

We'll see.

UPDATE: Okay, set up a dave@work Google account. Downloaded the sync agent. Setting a one-way from Outlook to GCal (we'll play with two-way once we're sure it's solid-solid-solid). So right now it's updating the 3,000-odd calendar appointments in there ...

UPDATE: Potential issue: The updating doesn't take place between the Exchange server and Google, but on the PC/client. That means the sync process requires Outlook to be open in order to see the account. Which may mean that every [user-defined interval] the client will (like when I first started) try to fire off Outlook. Ick. Yeah, I have Outlook set to prompt me before it fires off, but it's still annoying. And enough to make me leave the interval set to a long time (default, 2 hours).

UPDATE: So the "open" message doesn't open the full Outlook app, just enough to read/write the files in a coordinated basis (about 115K footprint in memory). Still annoying. More annoying is that it seems to really want to hang up on the last few percent of all records to sync -- very slowly going forward a record every couple of minutes. Not quite sure why.

Filed under :: My Computer
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Adobe Postscript Display Format (PDF) files are one the great wonders of the past decade or so -- a completely portable format for documents, letting you create something that anyone can read, even if they don't have the original application that created it.

Unfortunately, Adobe, with it's various versions of it's Acrobat tool for reading and creating PDF files,  has been insistent on (a) jacking up the price of everything PDF-related other than their free reader, (b) adding eleventy zillion bells and whistles to said applications ("It's a portable document creator! No, it's a forms tool! No, it's for annotations!   No, it's a dessert topping!"), and (c) building applications, even the basic reader, that are slower than molasses and huge memory hogs.

So I'm not playing that game any more. On my machine I now have:

1. FoxitReader, a free, fast PDF reader. And for a very little bit of trouble, I've upgraded it for free to a version that allows annotations on PDF files (which is great for typing up forms rather than printing and handwriting on them -- the bane of any school-age parent's existence).

2. PDFCreator, a free open source tool that lets you create PDF files just like Acrobat Writer does. Only, y'know, for free. And fast. (Foxit has a PDF creator, too, but I didn't see it.)

Recommended.

Filed under :: My Computer
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Okay, this is either going to be really useful, or one more way of cluttering up my life. Jott is an online service that (in its simplest form) lets you call their number, dictate up to a 30 second message, then forward that message (as text) to an e-mail or SMS address. It serves as a cross between scribbling notes on paper and stuffing them in your pocket and carrying around one of those little mini-recorders to dictate notes (and it does the transcription for you).

You can also set up Jott to send messages to others (Margie: "It had better not be 'be sure and pick up the milk' kind of messages") or even to various services -- there are options to Jott messages to Google Calendar, Blogger, and a host of other sites and services.

For my purposes, this lets me use Gmail as a To Do list. I can send Jotts to it (via a speed dial on my cell phone), create a filter/label so that they all bundle together, etc. I'm playing with it right now, but even as a remote note taking tool, I can see the value.

At the moment, it is free (in beta).

(via PC World) 

Filed under :: My Computer :: My Mobile / PDA
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