Category Archives: Technology

This is the good stuff that makes the world go round.

All About Scams and ID Theft

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Two different events conspired to make today suck: an email purporting to be from the FBI and US Mail from a former employer telling me that my identity may have been stolen.

The FBI mail is the typical Internet scam, but this time with more legit looking information and 50% less bad grammar.  It tells me that:

your e-mail address was among the e-mails that won this year promo award of UK National Lottery, that is the fund that was transferred to Africa , and it has been recovered.

Of course, I completely forgot about that lotto ticket I picked up when I was in London five years ago.  How silly of me, and how wonderful that the FBI took the time to track it down for me.  I’m sure someone will fall for this but it’s just another hoax in my inbox.

This second one is more serious.  It seems that a former employer who will remain nameless contracted with an accounting firm which had my personal identification (and that of others) on a laptop.  That laptop was stolen and the firm, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, says it had all kinds of security to keep my information safe, and that I shouldn’t worry.  Sounds fine until you read the next paragraph:

… as the laptop was in use at the time of the theft, we cannot be certain that these security measures were enabled.

So now I’m told that someone can go out and masquerade as me, creating new bank accounts, credit cards and personal loans and that all PWC can say is sorry, we’re not liable?  I realize that the 21st century was going to be new and exciting but I didn’t realize that personal or corporate responsibility wasn’t one of the 20th century carry-overs. Shameful, I say.

fbivspwc

Windows 7 makes networked media work

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I readily admit that I am hard on computers, I really do break them on a regular basis while seeming to find the absolute limits of what they are capable of.  So with more than a little trepidation I installed the Release Candidate build (7100) of Windows 7 and set it to work scanning my overly large and complicated media library.

As a primer, it should be noted that my music library alone is somewhere over 30,000 songs and many of them have horribly broken tags that I refuse to fix, left over from many, many sessions of ripping the original CDs over the years.  Every version of Windows Media Player ever released has choked on them at some point.  ITunes is beyond worthless, freezing and locking up during the scan process and never fully recovering.  Winamp has long since bit the dust and even the mighty VLC goes down for the count when so many tracks are added to its “media library.”  My hopes for WMP 12 doing any better were very low.

Imagine my surprise when, after mere hours, it responded by downloading album artwork and behaving very snappily when searching through the volumes of tunes I have given it.  Better still, none of these tracks were located on the PC where Windows 7 resides: they were on a network attached storage device, the Netgear ReadyNAS.  Searching for tracks: quick.  Playing tracks: near instantaneous.  Exploring the library in Media Center: darn right blissful.  All this from a Microsoft product?  Color me impressed.  My next run at it will be to fire up another system and try streaming from one W7 system to another, both inside and outside the home network.  The nets say it’s possible, but we shall see.

Windows 7 Windows Media Player 12

Worst Service Nominees

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worst-customer-servic2

I have recently had the great displeasure of participating in three different levels of grief and suffering with three different technology companies.  All three were so terrible that I felt compelled to write about it and post the results here, in the unlikely hope that someone might learn from my pain.  So here it goes…

Adobe: decided that it is OK to hang up on my calls twice for support to activate a product that I had purchased, transfer me between two different call centers and different support staffs in India, force me to repeat the same trouble-shooting steps no less than 8 separate times, and to, in the end, blame me for causing a problem which could only be repaired by tweaking their own registration servers. Just to get Photoshop to run.

HP:spent the better part of three hours bouncing my call between different call centers, different divisions of the company, taking over remote control of my PC, forcibly causing the loss of installed drivers and patches and lecturing me extensively on how I knew nothing about computer hardware to troubleshoot a problem, only to claim that the “outgoing phone lines are down” so that they couldn’t call me back for three days.  In the end, I relented and used the combination of the Internets free help (from other poor, tortured HP owners souls) and a Linux boot CD to restore functions to my USB ports.

AT&T: sent me around and around in circles for more than a week, trying to explain to me that “new services are available in your area”, but then deciding that no service has been improved, but that they can save me money if only I would switch to a new plan.  This led to nearly a week without any working DSL service, a series of confused support technicians, a promise of a new DSL modem that never appeared and a considerably more expensive bill than I started with for the same level of service I had before.  Extra pain points are awarded for having the local repair truck workers tell me that in 30 days or so fiber will be available in my area that will render all of this moot.

So who is the winner of this round?

My Latest Vista Test: Network Throttling

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Over the past couple of weeks I have been copying large amounts of data back and forth from my desktop PCs and my ReadyNAS in order to facilitate clearing some local hard disk space and to really, honestly begin scheduled backups.  Today while copying a particularly large file (greater than 2GB if you must know) I found that the transfer rate to the ReadyNAS was a measly 10 MB/s.  I have a gigabit network setup and this represents less than 10% of the available capacity.  Obviously something is up.

I have my full-time, every-day PC running Vista with SP1 and for the most part this is a very stable and good performing platform.  I have thrown a lot of modern hardware at it, including 4GB of DDR2 RAM, two NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards in SLI mode and an AMD Phenom 9950 quad core CPU, so Vista can really go fast.  However, to test out the theory that Vista might be taunting me I fired up one of my spare PCs running Windows XP with SP3.  Sure enough, transferring files to and from the NAS with XP works fine at over 22 MB/s.  Something must really be hosed with Vista, IMHO.

So, off to Google I go in search of answers, and low-and-behold I found this article at ZDNet explaning what I feared: Vista thinks it is smarter than me when it comes to prioritizing what needs to get done on the PC.  Whenever the media sub-system in Vista is active with either audio or video playback the network connection gets crunched down to its lowest level.  No matter what I tweak, disable or alter Vista will not transfer at a respectable speed unless all audio and video sources stop.  This includes playback inside of a browser such as IE7 or Firefox.  I take a deep breath and sigh.

So now I must sit in silence or play music on a separate PC if I want full network capability on my main work machine.  For this fine, new feature I award Windows Vista the “Poo of the Day” award.  I’m sure more of these awards will follow soon enough.  Windows 7 can’t get here soon enough.

Vista is blocking the tubes.

When Malware Attacks, I Should Listen

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When your computer begins to slow down and then do strange things, you really do need to pay close attention because it is trying to tell you something.  In my case Vista was attempting to communicate in a very inept way that it had been attacked by some malware and was in the process of going down the drain.

First I noticed the hard drive LED flashing rapidly all the time.  Next I found that the machine wouldn’t stay in sleep mode any longer.  Browser windows would pop open for no good reason.  It was time to make a trip to my old friend MSConfig and enable the clean-boot options.  Only after booting into Safe Mode with everything disabled (and my system all but useless) did I find the culprit files hiding and renaming themselves in the Windows/System32 directory.

What followed were many reboots, the forced termination of IE7 and Explorer.exe, a reload of some critical OS files from DVD, then a determined and lengthy process of online virus scanning.  Only when all of these processes were completed was the threat finally removed.  I must once again return to my old paranoid ways: never install anything from the internet directly onto my critical PC AND always keep some kind of security (the dreaded User Account Control) turned on to slow down an attack.

And to think I was worried about being bored this holiday week.  Shame on me.

Last.fm integration for streaming radio sites

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I was in a mood today to make my music listening habits a bit more social, but I found that my two current music services, Pandora and Slacker, don’t naively support sending data to Last.fm.  No problem, I thought, some enterprising hacker out there has solved this problem already.  Right I was, and now you too can have the scrobble ability if you use these two services AND also use Firefox with them:

So long as Firefox continues to be friendly with these plug-ins I’ll be using them to share the music.  That said, I’ll be impressed if this integration works for more than 6 months.  Time will tell.

Last.fm Pandora Slacker Firefox Greasemonkey

The Continuing Sadness that is the HR20

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DirecTV HR20

It has been almost a year since I was forced to give up my wonderful HD-Tivo box for the “improved” DirecTV version called the HR20.  Since I’ve had the box I’ve needed to make a lot of adjustments, but one new adjustment just isn’t sitting well with me: lock ups and reboots once per week.

You see, DirecTV doesn’t seem to understand the concept of QA or beta testing.  Whenever they get a new update for the software inside the HR20 they just push it out the door to millions of customers.  For anyone that has ever gotten a bad update on their computer, you know what happens sometimes… things just fall apart.  Well, in my case I lose TV programs and the PVR just stops working.

Normally this would seem to be just a silly rant, after all, it is only TV, right?  Well, what if you paid nearly $100 a month for that TV signal and some of the programs provided were watch-it-once-then-it’s-gone sorts of things?  That’s what I have and that is why I’m so mad about this latest round of mess ups from DirecTV. 

The best part is that they kept me waiting on the phone for 48 minutes the other day just to tell me to reformat my PVR (that didn’t work) and that yes, Virginia, they have a problem and they don’t know if/whether they will fix it and if they do/don’t they won’t call me back to confirm the fix (or not).  Great customer service!

Retail Rip-Off: HDMI cables

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If you have a new HDTV set and are looking to hook up some glorious Blu-ray or PS3 goodness you know that you will have to run to the store and purchase one special component not bundled with any device shipping in quantity: an HDMI cable.

Unlike the days of old when you could run into your local Radio Shack and pickup whatever cheap cables they had on hand and make the new device work, in today’s digital era you are treated the one of the greatest fleecings in modern retail sales history.  You see, Monster, the cable provider of over-priced and over-hyped speaker cables from days past has moved in and pushed just about every other provider of HDMI cables off the shelves, leaving only their own brand at the most outrageous prices.  And the problem is that retailers gladly let them do this because the margins (that’s the money retailers actually make on each good sold) can be 50%, 100%, even 200% on these cables.  Typical devices like TV’s and cameras sometimes net the retailer less than 10% margin.

I don’t begrudge Monster on pushing their cables on the unsuspecting and clueless at the store, that is their business after all.  My problem is that their retail strategy has pushed every other provider of similar products to do similarly stupid things, like raise the price for the same product.  Don’t believe me about nearly all of the cables being the same regardless of price?  Go look at this article on Gizmodo and tell me that you don’t cringe after reading how badly we’re getting ripped off.

The point to this whole story is this:  I had to have a new HDMI cable for some new hardware at home, I can’t go get the cheap cables because they simply don’t exist locally any more, and I got ripped off to the tune of $22.99 for a $5 cable.  Next time no matter how badly I need one of these things, I’m headed to Monoprice where saner heads (and prices) reign.

HDMI cable

The Hoopty DTV Antenna

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If someone ever wanted to know what lengths I would go to in order to get high def TV programming, this is it.  With a large helping of PVC pipe, fittings, caps, a half mile of coax, an indoor FM antenna, a UHF/VHF combiner, some bolts, wing nuts, washers and a bonafide real antenna (DB2) I have produced this monster eyesore on my patio deck.

DTVAntenna

It points toward Sutro Tower where most of the Bay Area’s HDTV transmission antennas are located and it doesn’t do half bad, considering I’m more than 50 miles away.  It’s reasonably weatherproof and it doesn’t cost a fortune (at least not yet).  It picks up almost all the stations I care about and feeds them to my DirecTV HR20 and Windows Vista Media Center PC.  It is even reasonably wind-proof, as evidenced by recent 40+ MPH winds. 

In short, it seems to work pretty well even if it is sad to look at.

AT&T / Cingular: The Final Insult

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Today, as if things weren’t just swell enough (said with tongue firmly in cheek) AT&T ships me a bill for cellular service that took place in September. Funny how they conveniently forgot that I canceled that service on September 3rd.  Funnier still, seeing as because their deliberate degrading of the wireless network knocked me completely offline for the entire month of August and most of July.

The sad part is that they wanted another $40 just to part company with them, even though I had already done all the paperwork at the store back on September 3rd. After a lot of negotiation they grudgingly “decided” to offer me a refund.  They wanted to know if there was anything else they could do for me at the end of the call…. and I sat wondering “where’s my working phone service and credit for many years of being a loyal customer?”

Customer  service, indeed.