Category: Technology

I purchased the Premium Cloud Player from Amazon last night after reading about it on CNET. http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57483608-93/amazons-cloud-music-service-gets-scan-and-match/ . They claim to be able to scan and match your existing music from ripped CDs, iTunes, LPs and other sources and replace them with 256 kbps audio which you can download. Amazon claims a library of 20 million tracks and for their $25 fee you can have a library up to 250,000 songs on their cloud service. I did a test of some of my music. My library is over five thousand songs. I randomly picked some for uploading. Here are some preliminary results.

As you can see, the service does not match all tracks. All the above were ripped from CDs that I purchased. Miss Angie and Dan Peek are on available for purchase as MP3 downloads. Both CDs with all tracks are listed for sale as downloads on Amazon. Some Donna Summer and 2nd Chapter of Acts tracks are available on the site but not all.

The next issue is, are the cloud tracks that they matched their regular bit rate or the 256 kbps audio that they advertised? What about LPs that I recorded? Are they replaced by the super audio files that are advertised or is the program just uploading the ones that I made?

Stay Tuned…

Last night I watched the NASA channel. I rarely do but when something important happens then I will make an effort to find it on whatever obscure number it was hidden by DirecTV. I was intrigued by the Curiosity probe that was scheduled to land on Mars late last night. I even set the DVR to record it just in case my wife had me watching more tape delayed Olympic results.

The landing sequence for this one ton probe was reminiscent of a Rube Goldberg drawing.  “a comically involved, complicated invention, laboriously contrived to perform a simple operation” –Webster’s New World Dictionary
If any one step went wrong then this multi-billion dollar project would freefall on John Carter’s head and leave a smoldering crater on the Martian surface. The Curiosity probe was programmed to land with no human intervention since it takes a radio signal about 14 minutes to travel between Earth and Mars. The number of steps that needs to be executed successfully during the fall thru the atmosphere was an enormous engineering challenge. Everything happened according to design and the craft landed like it was supposed to do.

The first photo it sent back was a picture of its tire. Everyone in the Jet Propulsion Lab cheered. Think about it. You sent this complicated gizmo hundreds of millions of miles, land it right on target and to prove it works you get a photo of the tire! I’m thinking dang. My mother-in-law has a whole camera full of photos of her finger in the same frame as Alaskan glaciers and family gatherings. Heck maybe she could have been a rocket scientist too.

As I turned off the broadcast last night I had this mental picture of the JPL folks gathering at the local watering hole to celebrate. I could picture them raising a glass of beer proclaiming, “yes, as a matter of fact we are rocket scientists”.

For more info on Curiosity mission see
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/infographics/uploads/infographics/full/10776.jpg
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2012-231

Microsoft recently unveiled some prototypes of a Windows 8 Tablet called Surface. The devices are interesting because they bridge the divide between Tablet devices and laptops. They are faster than the Apple or Android counterparts and run more programs. The Intel version will run Office and most other programs that you can run on your desktop machine but in a portable format. They come with a physical keyboard as well as touch capability. They will support a midgrade CPU and solid state drive.

The Surface computers will make tablets mainstream and not just toys with email and GPS capability. The only concern I have is with the rumors that these tablets will be wifi but not 4G capable.

The tech press is divided into two camps on these Surface prototypes. One group says that Microsoft is just trying to push their hardware partners into going forward with a tablet design that is beyond what is on the market now while the others say that Microsoft needs more products for their Microsoft Stores. The wifi only capability gives some credence to the camp that believes the Surface devices are only prototypes and not the actual Windows 8 tablets that will be commercially available.

The almost simultaneous advent of Apollo (Windows Phone 8) will be an interesting twist to the roll-out of Windows 8. Microsoft is clearly pushing for a unified experience that is scalable from the smallest to the largest consumer computing experience. Both Operating Systems will be able to run virtually identical applications on either platform. Apollo is Windows 8 light and both share similar programming code.

Microsoft has a golden opportunity to reign in Apple and bring competition to hand held devices. Apple can’t thrive in a competitive market because they are not willing to drop their prices beyond a certain point—even in the face of competition. Apple historically will always take shareholders over market share. The boys in Redmond might be late to the party but they will be formidable once they join the battle this fall. If the press conference is to be believed then look for ARM devices in October and Intel ones around Christmas.

Verizon is touting its new “family plan” as some type of an improvement over what I have now. How can that be?

My current plan has two smart phones and two regular phones. Look what this does to my bill.

Here are some of the details:
• A regular phone will go from 9.99 to $30.
• Talk goes from 1400 minutes to unlimited. Currently we use about 350 minutes per month.
• Texting—which most of us never use—will be unlimited. (If you really need texting you can run it thru your data plan and not pay extra. Yes, there is an app for that.)
• Data—which I do use—will go from unlimited to pay as I go.
• Currently two Gigabytes is $30, under the new plan one gigabyte will be $50. A 300 percent increase in cost!

Source http://solutions.vzwshop.com/shareeverything/?intcmp=VZW-VNT-SE-PLANRECMND

To have the same number of phones that I have now will cost $25 more under the family plan. That feels like a kick in the family plan to me. Only a mafia family could offer such a deal and expect us to like it. I would like to add more devices to my plan but not at the kind of prices that Verizon is offering. The price point is too high.

To avoid this plan you either need to upgrade your phones before the plan goes into effect later this month or pay full retail price to keep the unlimited data plan. Verizon doesn’t even offer a 4G Windows Phone and won’t until at least the fourth quarter of this year.

If AT&T will fix their network so it doesn’t drop calls and be competitively priced I just might consider switching. They clearly have a larger variety of offerings than Verizon. AT&T will respond with their idea of a family plan soon. Let’s see if they respect my budget or want to rape and pillage my wallet too.

CNET even agrees with me http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57451500-94/why-verizons-shared-data-plan-is-a-raw-deal/?tag=txt;related

My Android phone has been giving me fits for several months. When trying to run programs, it would lock-up and require me to remove the battery to re-start the phone. I often got the black screen of nothingness. Also, it would just randomly start clicking on icons and start programs all by itself. This behavior also caused me to have to pull the battery and try restarting the phone. These fits of uncontrolled behavior often caused me to pull the battery five or more times. Occasionally I could never regain control of the phone. I would just have to let it sit with the screen off and after a few hours it would behave better.

I had been holding out for a new Windows Phone 7 with a larger screen and 4G speed but I decided that I could wait no longer. Verizon has some bee up their bonnet that prevents them from competing head-to head with AT&T with Windows Phones. If AT&T made me a deal, I might be tempted to go back.
I looked at the 4G Droid phones that Verizon carries and was shocked to see that all but a new Samsung were all old versions of the Android Operating System. I know that “ice cream sandwich” is the newest version available. This is version 4 of the OS, but the new 4G Motorola phones were all stuck in version 2. What is this? Why should I pay $200 for a phone with an operating system three years and three generations behind?

As I was contemplating what to do about a new phone, I learned that my daughter had cracked the screen of her HTC Trophy. She loves the phone and it still works but since it’s not insured, she is stuck with it. She is only six months into a two year contract. This is when I learned that Verizon had pulled all the Trophy phones from their retail stores and only offered the remaining inventory online.

I decided as a stop-gap measure that I would get a phone for me that could later replace the broken one that my daughter has been using. I went to my local Best Buy store and bought myself the HTC Trophy for $30. Best Buy had six in their warehouse and shipped mine via UPS ground. I took it to the store where I had purchased it to get it activated. I logged into the phone with my Windows Live account, tested the phone and then went home and upgraded the phone to “Mango”. Then I started installing apps.

Here are my impressions of the phone thus far:
• Calls are crystal clear compared to the Droid. Often I can’t tell anyone answered the phone until they talk. When there is a pause on the other end, I often check to see if the caller is there or I dropped the call.
• The Blue Tooth is more stable and connects all the time. My Droid usually took several tries to connect successfully.
• The address book is way different than the Android phone. Windows Phone 7 integrates my Live contacts with my Facebook contacts automatically to create one unified entry for each person in the address book. It even uses the profile photo from Facebook in the tiles of the phone. With a single gesture I can find the contact and then scroll thru their information, recent posts and more.
• I’ve read much about the lack of apps for Windows Phones. I can think of three that I used that were not found for the Marketplace. Thus far, there is no Amazon app to access my music stored in their “cloud drive” or apps for the web sites Blastr or KOVR. The game I miss most is Robo Defense.
• XBOX Live Games is the game hub for the Windows Phone. It even displays my avatar from my XBOX Live account. The first time I saw him on my phone, he was playing catch with a cell phone. He tossed it into the air and would then catch it again. Clever animation.
• Loading custom ringtones into the phone is a challenge but it’s not much harder than it was setting up the Android phone. Mostly it is just a matter of having a song snippet that is the right size, length and format and then loading it with Zune.
• The battery life is slightly shorter than the Droid but can usually get me thru the work day.
• I’m still trying to master the camera features. The video is mp4 format.

Some apps on my Windows Phone include:
• Adobe Acrobat
• Amazon Kindle
• Amazon Mobile
• YouVersion Bible
• CNET
• Compass
• Connectivity Shortcuts (Blue Tooth, Wifi, etc.)
• Facebook
• DirecTV
• Fandango
• Flashlight
• Fox News
• XBOX Live Games
• iHeartRadio (Clear Channel internet app)
• Knot Guide (shows you how to tie over 90 different knots)
• Lists
• NetFlix
• Microsoft Office
• Periodic Table
• Photo Enhancer
• SimiRSS (RSS reader of course)
• Stop Watch
• SkyDrive
• Sky Map Free
• Skyrim Herbarium (in case I ever get far enough into Skyrim to use the stuff I find to make potions)
• TuneIn Radio (Internet app for most AM & FM radio stations in the US)
• Voice Recorder
• Weather
• Windows Phone News

This phone is a major step up from the fragmented world of Android. If you want better speed and stability consider Windows Phone 7 on you next phone—unless you have Verizon and then you need to wait for Windows Phone 8.

Many media stories this week have reported that HP is planning to sell their PC division. Their excuse is that sales are sluggish and the computer division has a low profit margin. This is not the real reason. Clearly their bean-counters realize that Obama-care and promises of higher taxes will kill the PC division so they are having the firesale now. The economic excuse is not present conditions but future ones that have prompted this pre-emptive fire sale.

The news for AT&T continues to be bad. First, AT&T has the most dropped calls of any U.S. cellular provider and terrible customer satisfaction results from J.D. Powers. Two weeks ago, it was reported that AT&T’s 4G speeds are actually slower than their 3G speeds. And now, AT&T has received yet another honor. Today CNET is reporting that RootMetrics has conducted a survey of AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon.

In the results shown below, Verizon clearly beats all other carriers. This news comes the day after AT&T announced that they have agreed to buy T-Mobile. Ironically, most folks that I know using T-Mobile are refugees that fled from AT&T because of their high prices and lousy service.

AT&T has become to the cellular phone industry what America Online has become to Internet service providers. If the recent data on AT&T won’t persuade you to change carriers then you deserve to wallow in mediocre technology.

Here is a sample of the press AT&T has received recently.

J.D. Power says Verizon tops in call quality
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30686_3-20039032-266.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

How AT&T Totally Flubbed 4G
“…if you stand in the same place with a “4G” phone and a “3G” phone on the same network, the 3G phone will be faster.”
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381915,00.asp

Study: Verizon fastest among 4G networks
http://reviews.cnet.com/8301-19736_7-20045376-251.html?tag=cnetRiver

It sounds like something from a big budget Hollywood movie but its true. Some clever folks strung together a series of exploits in computer software and came up with the first computer virus targeting Siemens’ computer control software for manufacturing robots. The virus is designed to steal design information and upload it to a remote server. This is industrial espionage on steroids. Oh and it also infects control systems used on nuclear powered aircraft carriers.

It is passed from computer to computer via USB drives. It starts with .lnk shortcut files in Windows. Windows runs these files in the background and the malware installs a rootkit. The virus propagates to any other USB drive that subsequently attached to an infected computer. The Trojan is designed to infect WinCC software. Its sole purpose is to steal design information in control systems. It uses a hardcoded password in the Siemens software; for fans of the movie Wargames it is a backdoor password used by Siemens.

See the complete article in CNET News. http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-20011159-245.html?tag=topStories3

I agreed to upgrade a laptop for my wife’s friend last week. I have Acronis True Image Software and a USB connected external hard drive so I figure this is easy money right? NOT!

I took the laptop home and went to work. The laptop is a Dell that is about three or four years old. I made a full backup of the drive, inserted to 160 GB drive that replaced to 36GB drive. My first indication that all was not well was when the system was booted via the Acronis disk and the software could not see my removable drive. I had to copy the image file from my removal drive to my desktop computer. Only in one of the Public folders in my Vista machine could the backup file be seen via the Network option on the Acronis software. After the backup was completed, I booted up the computer and was greeted by a 36 GB hard drive that should have been 160 GB!

After much research I found that I was the victim of proprietary and hidden software that Dell stuck on their hard drive! I was not a happy camper. Acronis has an article on their support website called “HPA Makes the Cloned Drive Display Wrong Capacity.” While this is great information, it does nothing to fix my problem.

Most of the solutions that I found on the Internet were dangerous and/or dubious. One family of solutions involved using the Windows Repair Console. The owner of the laptop could not provide the master Administrative password so I was stuck and could not use most solutions. For those not yet familiar with this problem, when Windows is first installed it prompts you for a password. Whatever you type will be the only password that you can use three years from now to access the utilities on your Windows installation CD. Otherwise you get to wipe your hard drive and reinstall everything in your computer. Refer to http://www.goodells.net/dellrestore/hpa-issues.htm

So what I knew at this point is that any solution involves fixing the Master Boot Record (MBR) on the laptop. The other part of the solution involved killing the HPA software that made my new hard drive exactly the same capacity as the old drive. Once this size change is made on the drive, both the BIOS and the Windows installation program see the drive capacity as being the same as the old drive. You can even delete the partition and reformat and the new disk will still be the same size as the old drive!

Some Internet solutions say you must find a hexadecimal editor and edit the MBR on original disk. If you do this and screw-up you just lost all the data and you know that the owner of the laptop has never made a backup CD of all her vacation photos from her trip to Europe last year. After editing the MBR then they say make your backup and restore on the new disk. Yeah, Sure!

So the Master Boot Record must be killed, fixed, replaced or otherwise deal with to fix the computer. Then the drive size must be repaired. To repair the drive the only option that seemed to work was from Hitachi. Download the Feature Tool from this page. Get the ISO image file and make a CD. The program is bootable and simple to run. I will tell you when to use the disk in a moment.

The Hitachi tool will let the computer see the whole drive but what then? I found the answer on this discussion thread. http://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?s=984536e28c3c7ee064a0e7d6e054dc57&t=167401&page=2 The solutions proposed on this page mostly don’t work but there is a nugget in their that rang a loud bell in my mind. To get the space back on the drive one of the postings references Acronis Secure Zone. They said create a Secure Zone of any size and then delete it and pick the option to allocate any unused space to the partition that you select.

What I’m telling you now took me five nights staying up past one in the morning to figure out. Yeah much of the time was waiting for my Vista computer to send restore files via my home network to the laptop. I did 12 to 18 restorations during the period to find a fix.

I kept refining my attempts and this is what finally worked:

1. I restored everything from the old drive to the new one: C:\, the MBR and the two hidden partitions that Acronis found on the Dell laptop. Elapse time for this step about three hours.

2. Then I got my old DOS 6.22 bootable CD with Windows 3.11 and Norton Desktop on it and booted up the computer. Any bootable DOS disk that you can get will work as long as FDISK is on the disk. At the DOS prompt type A:\ FDISK /MBR and press enter.
(Even though it says A Drive, this command knows to run on the C Drive.) Remove the disk.
Insert the Hitachi disk, reboot computer and start via this CD and then follow instructions to resize the new hard disk.
To restore the drive to its full capacity you need to remove HPA on the target drive:

5. Click on the “Features” menu or press Alt-F keys and select “Change Capacity”;
6. You should see “Manufacturing values” and “Current values” on the appeared window;
7. Click “Options” and choose “Maximum Capacity” from the list. The appropriate value will be automatically entered in the “New Capacity” field;
8. Click OK.
http://www.acronis.com/r/support/en/kb/907/Removing_HPA.txt

At this point if you want to start Windows and look in Disk Management you will see the balance of the drive as unallocated space.
Warning: Don’t delete the other two partitions that you see via Disk Management Console. If you do the computer will not boot because your boot.ini file will then not match your computer configuration.
Elapse time for these steps is about ten minutes.

3. Lastly, get your Acronis CD again and boot the computer. Create a Secure Zone on the unallocated space on the drive. As you go through the process DO NOT SELECT ANY DRIVE OR PARTION. Leave all check boxes empty. Keep going Next. The program will automatically select space on the unallocated portion of the disk. The partition can be any size.

4. After the Secure Zone partition is created restart the wizard for Secure Zone again. This time delete the partition you just made. As you go through the screens you will see one with your disk partitions. Select the one that is labeled as C Drive. On my computer the other two partitions had no drive label. This selection allocates all unused space on the entire drive (not just the Secure Zone you are deleting) to your C drive. This is what you want. Click on Proceed. In fifteen more minutes you are done.

That’s it, enjoy your upgraded machine.

In the course of reloading my Windows Vista drive, I needed to install some components of Windows Live programs. The Photo Gallery and the Toolbar for Internet Explorer are the main ones I was after. The Photo Gallery program is better than the one that came with Vista. The toolbar has been the keeper of all my passwords for many years. When I went to the website and hit Download I ended-up with the entire suite of Windows Live programs in one shot. The toolbar had been completely redone. Gone were all the icons that I was used to seeing. Most were now just large rectangles of text that I could click on. OK, different doesn’t necessarily mean good or bad.

I looked for my friend that kept all passwords and it was not there. After much searching I finally found the Form Fill Add-On button by our friends at Windows Live. I downloaded the button and it went through the installation process but was never added to the toolbar. After much searching I discovered that the Form Fill button does not work on the new toolbar! There is not one made. If I want it, I have to download something from some third party programmer with no affiliation with either Windows Live or Microsoft. Sorry, I will not trust all my passwords to some unknown programmer in Eastern Europe.

Disappointed, I decided to remove the toolbar and install the old one. However, using Add and Remove Programs in the Control Panel will not let you uninstall any Windows Live component. Not even if I booted into Safe Mode! Both Windows Live and Microsoft searches were no help. Finally, I turned to Google and found the answer.

http://messengergeek.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!E3785B1281BBDA1!1271.entry

Find Windows Live application on this page. Follow these instructions.
To uninstall Windows Live Toolbar, click Start, then type/paste the following in the Start Search box and press Enter:
msiexec /x

This will uninstall only the new version of Windows Live Toolbar so you can keep the other Windows Live applications. Then you can install the good ole Toolbar that supports saving passwords.

Old Windows Live Toolbar
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=6AD4D337-C3B9-42E4-B8A3-35A0BD9DB2BB&displaylang=en

Form Fill Tool Button
http://gallery.live.com/liveitemdetail.aspx?bt=2&li=4dab8a8c-3f1e-41c6-ba8c-44b500149134