dtm-blog

Password Requirements

2013-03-25T12:29:00.001-07:00

You may recall when creating an account or when trying to change your password for an existing account you are presented with various requirements or recommendations such as:

"At Least 6 characters"
"At Least 1 Letter"
"At Least 1 Number"
"At Least 1 Capital Letter"

etc....

After reading this xkcd comic:

I became curious about the password requirements of various websites. I collected some numbers from a small batch of account creation pages from common web services. I've listed the Minimum and Maximum characters allowed and whether or not at least one Letter, CAPS, Number, or Symbol is required in the password.

I should also say that most of the websites "recommended" using most of the different combinations but they did not actually require them. Also, with a few of the websites it was not immediately obvious as to what the maximum amount of characters were allowed.

I was surprised by the results. I thought most would require at least a one letter/number combination. Creating an Apple ID appeared to be the one website that required this.

Shipping Holiday Gifts

2012-12-16T18:07:00.000-08:00

Yesterday before we started some Christmas shopping we stopped by our local FedEx shop to have some gifts shipped out. Unfortunately it was not a good experience, but don't despair, the story does get better at the end.

They did give us the option to pay for them to package the items, or for us to purchase boxes and packaging materials on the floor and then pack them ourselves. However, they were not able to quote or provide an estimate for how much it would cost to ship the items until they were "all packaged up". Initially I thought I could save money by purchasing the materials packing them myself, but we later realized it would be cheaper for us to pay them to do it.

We had to wait a considerable amount of time before they started to package the items up, despite the fact that there was only one person in front of us. In fact, the guy in front of us had it worse (we overheard his whole story) - he was trying to hurry so he could catch a flight. He had pre-packaged his item and printed out the online form in an attempt to save time so that he could simply drop off the package in the morning. He wanted to make a simple change to the address but it costed him at least a good twenty minutes, poor guy.

While we were waiting to have some of the items packaged, one of the other attendants was attempting to help us fill out forms, but kept telling us we were filling out the wrong ones. It was very confusing. By the time the items were packaged the main attendant could not correctly locate one of the addresses until we helped him. Once he completed all the computer data entry he gave us the grand total:

97 Dollars and some amount of cents that I can't remember. We said, "No thank you." We left and drove a couple of miles out of our way to stop by the local UPS store.

We entered the UPS store, and a friendly man asked us what we needed. In less than five minutes he had given us a quote, received our confirmation, packaged all our items and even accomplished a little bit of friendly small talk. We were so very satisfied with the service that we were looking for a tip jar or some kind of customer service survey to fill out. Oh, and the total for shipment was 31 dollars.

I don't know if I'll ever use the FedEx service again, certainly not if UPS services are available.

LCD Monitors in Glossy or Matte?

2010-08-10T21:41:00.000-07:00

About a month or two ago I paid a visit to the friendly local electronics retailer, Best Buy. I was in the market for a computer monitor. I had briefly looked before at other places, Costco, Office Depot, Fry's among others. My last monitor was purchased in 2006 and was starting to make an annoying humming noise when on. It was a good ol' monitor and I'll probably still use it for the xbox or something, but it needed to be replaced as the primary monitor.

However, after seeing the great selection of about 10-15 monitors that Best Buy had available, I suddenly realized something. All the monitors were practically identical. Sure, the sizes and features varied here and there but the specs didn't vary that much (720p or 1080p?). Not only that, but they all looked THE SAME. Glossy screen with glossy black casing. It's as if they guy in charge of making every computer monitor suddenly thought, "Well, pretty much EVERY hdtv available for purchase has a glossy screen and glossy black casing, so why don't we just make all computer monitors look like that too?"

I had, in the past, always thought that this "glossy screen revolution" was just a trend that would eventually go away. I loved how the first LCD monitors came in matte, getting rid of the glare suffered over the years with CRT monitors. Sure, I'd heard time and time again that a glossy screen allows for "more vibrant colors", but for the longest time I was convinced this was more of a media buzz phrase to trick people into buying crappy glossy screens. That is, until recently.

I ended up buying a fairly nice Dell monitor, matte screen. It sits on my desk right next to my mac laptop, which has a glossy screen. Let me tell you, the difference is quite noticeable. I'm taking back everything I thought about glossy screens. They actually do look far superior. Most notable are black, and any of the dark shades of all the colors. Sure, they are inconvenient in many circumstances, especially on laptops. Nevertheless, once you get the thing in a suitable location that doesn't produce horrible glare, it shines.

There is a slight possibility that this mac laptop's glossy screen looks a lot better because it also happens to be LED backlit. Not sure if any companies make LED backlit matte screens, but I would be interested to see one and how it compared to the glossy version. In the meantime, I highly recommend a glossy screen for any monitor purchase.

Addition by Subtraction

2010-04-22T21:15:00.000-07:00

Over the past decade hard drive sizes have increased and their prices have dropped. All this storage capability allowed my music and photo collection size to skyrocket. As far as space was concerned, I never felt the need to delete anything. However, this lead to a huge clutter of content that became quite unusable for most intents and purposes.

With photos, you may have taken a couple shots for each scene just to ensure you get a good quality version from the set. What good is the final archive of the album if the high quality takes are hidden in the clutter of photos that didn't turn out as good? If you feel a permanent delete is too harsh, then at least put the "extras" in a subfolder or hidden location, don't let them suck the life out of the beauty of the album as a whole.

I thought to call this "pruning" your photo albums, and apparently someone else did also:
http://lifehacker.com/396758/prune-your-photo-collection-with-picasas-stars

His approach is nice. Focus on highlighting the good pictures and you'll find that the less "contributible" photos will bleed out in the end, and you can proceed to move/hide/delete them.

This starring system also works wonders with a music collection. If you have iTunes or and iPod, you can star your songs as you listen. For large music collections this is a MUST! Imagine putting your collection on shuffle and liking EVERY song that comes on. This is possible if you star your songs and create playlists based on those songs.

Twitter and RSS feeds

2010-03-06T13:46:00.000-08:00

The other day it hit me. Ever since the "Twitter Revolution" many companies, people, musicians, bands and organizations have Twitter accounts. Almost EVERYTHING has a Twitter these days, and most are used simply as if it were an RSS feed of a news section of a website (some are linked just that way, in fact). I think this is great. I remember a couple of years ago trying to gather up all the RSS feeds I could, so that I could stay up to date on all the things I like, but a bunch of the sites I wished I could follow didn't have any feeds. Most people don't know or care what an RSS or ATOM feed is, but they surely know what a Twitter is and because of that I think it has become easier for the masses to embrace this idea of posting updates on the internet.

It's as if Twitter has forced the internet world to put all of their RSS feeds in one place, and any company/thing/person that thought they didn't need or want one, now realizes the power of having one. No need to wait for a dumb commercial on TV, or an ad in the magazine or on the radio. If it's happening right now, or any time close to right now, just search for it on Twitter and it will come up.

Out of order

2009-03-27T10:36:00.000-07:00

Yup, that's right, no more than a day ago I pressed the power button on my laptop and it didn't turn on. A little surprised, I thought, "No, can't be broken. I'll figure this out."
About ten minutes later I was completely convinced that my laptop was dead. No coming back. It's up in computer heaven now.
For some reason it didn't surprise me that this has happened though. A few months ago the ethernet randomly broke, which isn't common at all and is a sign of worse things to come. Now the worst has come. Not really completely sure what happened, but I think the power supply died. The point is, it's gone and it's not coming back.
I rented a laptop from the office of OIT on campus, it's going to have to do for the remainder of the school year.
I'd like to be in the market for a new laptop, but right now I'm a broke college student, and the little money I do have has to go to other things of higher priority first. Once I look into getting a new one, I'll post some details on it.

skullcandy

2008-09-10T18:46:00.000-07:00

So my ipod headphones died on me about a month or so back and I've been meaning to buy some new ones-but just hadn't gotten to it, until this past weekend. While at the local BestBuy I decided to try out a pair of skullcandy headphones.

They are the in-ear type of headphones, with the little jelly plastic things on the end. Priced at a mere $20 dollars, i got my monies worth. They actually work quite well. I had been wearing them here and there during the weekend....but the real test came on monday when I went to study in the Clyde building lounge. They passed the test with flying colors. If you've ever been in the clyde lounge you know there are usually always a lot of people studying there. Well I had just sat down to start studying and was putting my headphones on when some super loud douche sat down next to me because his buddies were one table over from mine. I was pretty upset because I like my peace and quiet when studying. However, my anger left when I put my new headphones on and pressed the play button on the ipod. All the blabbing was instantly and greatly muffled by my music. Not just any music though, but a very peaceful quiet like orchestra soundtrack song, even this masked the loud annoyance of the dude sitting next to me. (so you can imagine how well "regular" "loud" music would block noise out)

While I'm sure the brand doesn't matter to much, as long as you get a pair of in-ear headphones I guarantee you'll be satisfied, I sure am. Downsides are sometimes while walking they can come loose from the ear, and also they work so well sometimes you can't hear most anything around you, so be careful wearing them. Although, if your goal is to avoid anyone trying to say hi to you, then these are the way to go.

mini portable data center

2008-05-06T10:53:00.000-07:00

After years of messing with hords of cable mess and big bulky computer cases, I finally decided to clean up. This combined with the fact that a few months ago one of my hard drives crashed and I lost some pictures, I realized that I needed to get a solution and get it quick. After hearing about a few companies building "portable data centers" in shipping containers, I thought I might apply the same idea to a much smaller scale that a poor college student can afford.

One of sun mircosystems portable data centers:

Initial Project Scope:

-Large enough to contain all equipment, but small enough to be "portable" (fit in the trunk of a sedan?)
-One "box" with only two cables coming out, Power and Ethernet
-Uninterrupted power
-Physically Secure (can be locked)

With these specifications in mind, I ended up buying a toolbox with wheels from lowes hardware store. It looks something like this:
I picked up two small used UPS units at the byu computer surplus sale, and an old laptop from my new roomate (i still have to pay him). I installed the latest ubuntu distro, and plugged in my 750gig and 500gig hard drives. I had some trouble with rsync not liking the ntfs partitions that my hard drives had, so I had to re-format them to ext3. I added a nice crontab to have the data synced from one drive to another each night.

I had looked into a program called FlyBack, which is bascially a python written GUI that is designed similar to Time Machine for leopard. It was nice and slick, but didn't allow the freedom that comes from writing your own stuff to cron, so I didn't use it.

My crontab:
0 3 * * * rsync -a -r --delete /media/usb0/data/ /media/usb1/data

(i had to install a package called "usbmount" for the usb drives to auto-mount upon booting)

After getting all the logistics working I put all the pieces inside the toolbox, cutting a few necessary holes in the back. One problem I ran into was overheating. The hard drives were getting pretty warm. I fixed this by temporarily moving the hot drive into the lower well ventilated section. I might have to add some fans at some point.

All in all it turned out very well. It does the job, and does it well. I'd like to add more hard drives for increased snapshot redundency. For the most part this thing was a hackjob, and requires computer nerd skills to get working. If you have enough money, and you already own a Mac with Leopard installed, I would recommend getting the product "Time Capsule". It's really the best thing since sliced bread, and so easy even a caveman can use it.
Whatever you end up getting, you should get something. Because if you aren't backing up your data now then chances are you WILL lose it. Buy an external hard drive, burn dvds, do whatever it takes. Just make sure you have more than one copy, in more than one place. That way if your house burns down or your hard drive crashes you don't lose all those pictures, mp3s, or whatever ones and zeros you hold precious.

using itunes to semi-solve multiple genre angst

2008-04-07T15:21:00.000-07:00

If you've ever been bored enough to try and organize your music library by cleaning up the "genre" fields, you may have at some point wished you could assign multiple genre's to a song. Sometimes you want a song to show up under "rock" and "alternative", etc. I'm not sure why the mp3 gods didn't implement this as a standard with the newest version of the mp3 tag. I've done my fair share of googling to try and find a solution. However, while messing around with playlists in itunes I stumbled upon a way to remedy one's desire for multiple genres.

If you click on file, you should see an option that says "new smart playlist". There are many powerful options available, probably the most important being the "live updating" option. This means that any changes you make to your library, whether you're importing new songs, changing tag information, or deleting songs, the playlist will automatically stay up to date for you, obviously. Clicking the plus or minus button allows you to add/remove rules.
Granted, in order to get multiple genres working you're going to have to do a little back-end work before you can actually use smart playlists to emulate mutiple genres. The method I use is this: If you want a song to contain mutiple genres, you could for example make this the genre of a song:

Rock Alternative Grunge

Each desired genre separated by a space. This will look kind of sloppy if you ever view you're library by genre, but once you've tagged all your music with whatever genre you want you can then create a smart playlist such as this:

As shown, this smart playlist will look at the genre of all songs and if they contain the word "Alternative" then they will be in this playlist. At this point you will have a playlist that is a perfect representation of all songs "Alternative". Now you just need to repeat this pattern for all genres you would like to have, and all of your genres can be accessed through these playlists. (you would no longer go to the genre section when wanting to search by genre) But trust me, it can be time consuming.

Pros:
-"solves" mutiple genre problem
-keeps playlist up-to-date
-unlocks the true power of your music library
-totally rocks

Cons:
-time consuming to set up
-ONLY native to itunes (if you take your music library to any other program then you lose this wonderness)
-depending on how meticulous you are, it can make browsing your music by genre a pain

Staying Informed

2008-02-08T09:23:00.000-08:00

Have you ever had one of those days where something happens in the world and you're the last one to know about it? I used to have days like that, but not since I started using google reader.
Do you ever find yourself wanting to read daily news/updates on multiple websites? There were times when I had so many news websites I wanted to read that it was too much to keep track of.

If you don't already use google reader, I'll give you a few reasons why you should:

All your news in one place - instead of loading ten different websites to read, you just load one that displays all your news chronologically

Never miss a post - even if the internets were out of your reach yesterday, google reader will still keep the posts until you've read them (although this can lead to a large list of unread items)

Searchable news - anything, from the title to body of the post can be easily searched with a familiar google search bar. so if you want to look up that old post from a month ago you can!

Not only news - almost all websites these days support some type of feed. Church news, BYU news, ESPN news, Peoples blogs, you tube postings, facebook updates, picasa album posts and so much more!!! (maybe even cougar board, but i'm not sure I'll have to check for you justin...) There will usually be a link that says something like "subscribe" or something to that effect. If you can find a link on the website you want to subscribe to google reader has a search feature when you click on "add subscription" on the main page.

So there it is. Google Reader is the best way to stay up to date on pretty much anything. But before you jump right in let me give you a few tips:

use tags! -helps you organize your sites into groups so if you wanted to only read sports stuff for example, you can just click on the sports tag (its similar to the function of labels in gmail)

show updated - it makes it easier to see what you haven't read if it only shows the updated posts. once you have read a post it will disappear but can easily be found again by searching or by switching to the show all option

mouse or keyboard? - at first i would only use the scroll wheel on the mouse to move through the entries, but then I discovered the keyboard shortcuts "spacebar" and "J" which will allow you to cycle through the entries much quicker and aren't as loud as the mouse wheel can be.

Welcome

2008-02-07T13:30:00.000-08:00

Thank you for visiting my new blog. I'll try and keep my postings as awesome as possible, but some normal ones might slip through. Basically this blog has no theme, just life in general.