Solo Technology

Need More Power

Chris — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 03:16:44 +0000

This weekend we had a bit of a family emergency and found ourselves driving 90 minutes north to find a hospital as quickly as possible. While en route we were using our smart phones for typical smart phone stuff: texting, calling, researching on the web and GPS. The phones did all that just fine.

Once we got to the hospital our phones got more use. More phone calls, more texting and some light web research.

We left the hospital (everyone was discharged and OK, thankfully!) and headed south to find the lot where a wrecked car was deposited. More phone calls, more GPS and…

Out of battery.

5 hours of steady use (not non-stop though) and both of our phones were dead. Crap!

I know there are folks out there who use their phones WAY more than I do. How are they solving battery issues? I often carry an extra charger with me to get a charge in the car but forgot it in all of the excitement when we left… What other options should I explore to be better prepared next time?

External battery-based charge packs? I remember some fun projects back in the day with AA’s and an altoid case. Solar? Good intentions?

Seriously, in this era of short battery life, what’s an effective approach?

Hyper-V VM Backups

Chris — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 05:00:53 +0000

I was looking around for a quicker and easier way to do automated backups for running Hyper-V guests as part of a recent work project. As you might guess, there are tons of options – mostly it comes down to how much you want to spend.

I had been told that Microsoft’s System Center would be the way to go, but it sure looks expensive. I made a few phone calls on that and then decided to look for something more focused at backups.

A few web searches later I turned up a product called BackupChain. I liked what I saw on their “Hyper-V Backup” link so I decided to try the free 20 day trial. 15 minutes later I had it installed and configured on three Hyper-V host servers and the first backups running.

Does just what it says on the tin and I’m now seeking the funding to purchase a few licenses. And to be clear: I’ve had no contact with the company or their marketing people. I just like the product!

I set up weekly backups for a big pile of live VMs and haven’t had to think about it since. And yes, I’ve tested restores too. That’s also dead simple – and a reasonable way to clone VMs to boot.

OneNote for Android!

Chris — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 04:56:45 +0000

Here’s my favorite headline of the day:

“OneNote Mobile for Android is now available worldwide”

Heck yeah! Or should I say, “About time?” Regardless, I’m pretty excited. This is something I’d been waiting on for a long time.

We migrated to Office 365 at work last fall and shortly after that I moved all my OneNote notebooks to our hosted SharePoint server. Sadly, this Android app (same for iPhone version as well) only syncs to SkyDrive… So tonight I spent some time moving all my notebooks back to SkyDrive.

Side note: I wasn’t in love with keeping my OneNote notebooks on hosted SharePoint. In fact, it was rather annoying with the daily password prompts… but we try to eat our own dog food, so to speak, so it was worth doing. And I’m glad to have my OneNotes back to SkyDrive.

Now, not only do I have my OneNote notebooks synchronized to all of my PCs – and web access – but now I also have direct access from my Android smart phone. Holy grail! It runs great on the phone too. Very responsive.

The feature summary is interesting — and I’ll confess I haven’t figured out how to do all this stuff yet:

Text formatting, images, and bulleted lists
To-do lists with clickable checkboxes
Quick photo capture with your phone’s camera
Quick access to recent notes
Store and access multiple OneNote notebooks
Sync to your free SkyDrive account for access anywhere
Offline access to your notes
Option to sync notebooks only over a Wi-Fi connection
Built-in spelling checker
Support for external hyperlinks
Table editing

Free to play, but once you go past 500 notes there’s a one-time fee of $4.99. Or don’t pay the fee and have read-only access to all your stuff from your phone.

I’ve only had it installed and synchronized to my phone for 3 hours, so the jury is still out on how this will fit in “productivity world” long term, but I’m very bull’ish on it. Anyone else using it and want to share thoughts?

A Quick Look at the Kindle Fire

Chris — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 01:22:15 +0000

No, I haven’t bought a Kindle Fire yet. Good grief folks, you know I never rush out and buy first gen things! However, my friend Rich (blog | twitter | G+) recently bought one and offered to let me play with it for a week or so while he’s busy working and writing. I, of course, accepted his kind offer.

I have been using the new Kindle Fire for 5 days now and first impressions are quite positive. I especially dig the size. At 7” it works well for casual and one-handed usage. I initially thought it would be too small but for most purposes it actually works just fine. Especially for book reading.

Granted, a bigger screen would be nice for web browsing… The tabbed browser is nice but the experience isn’t a whole lot improved over browsing on my phone. Certainly serviceable but a lot of zooming and panning.

I’ve read reviews that say the Fire is slow and “jerky” but I haven’t run into any of that yet. Scrolling is always fast and smooth — arguably too fast when scrolling through recently used items on the home screen. I frequently go flying right by the one I want!

I’ve done some Netflix streaming on it and find it is a great way to watch back episodes of shows. Alone. Not great for multiple viewers but that’s not a big concern for me right now. Not going to lie… If I had a Wi-Fi signal at the gym I’d use this on the stationary bikes and ellipticals just to watch shows.

Not having access to the full Android Market is a bummer. Amazon’s market is growing, but the full market has more – and seems to get updates faster too. Some big gaps there that are a bit disappointing. Sure, I’ve read there are “side load” options but should we have to?

Will I buy one for myself? Hard to say… I have multiple laptops and a pretty nice little Android phone. This fits somewhere in between them in a niche I’m not completely sure I need to fill. However, if I was going to break down and buy an electronic book reader, I’d look long and hard that the Fire. Kind of like an “E-Reader with benefits.” Especially if I was also willing to shell out for Netflix and/or Amazon Prime.

It certainly is getting used a lot between myself, the wife and the kids.

This Blog – Your Kindle

7” Eee Screen Resolution Tip

Chris — Sun, 31 Jul 2011 03:26:53 +0000

I have a “classic” old Asus Eee 701 4G netbook that I like to dust off from time to time and monkey with. The size is definitely ultra-portable, and so is the keyboard which is, to be honest, why I don’t use it more often..

The biggest challenge with this thing though is screen resolution (well, and a 4GB SSD drive gets tight!). To that end, I did a bit of research and believe I finally have a solution that I’m happy with. Linux only though, Ubuntu NBR 10.04 in my case.

I’ve created two little scripts that both feature xrandr. The first is named “big” and contains one line:

xrandr --output LVDS1 --scale 1.28x1.28

The second is called “small” and looks rather similar:

xrandr --output LVDS1 --scale 1.00x1.00

I just keep ‘em in my home directory, but I did use the menu editor to add them to Accessories and then, from there, short-cuts up to Favorites for quick one-click access.

Big just makes things bigger. Basically scales the display from the default 800×480 to 1024×614’ish. I might squint a bit, but this is a much more usable resolution! Small just resets it back to the default.

Note, if you don’t want to squint, you could try the panning route instead. Try a script named “big-pan” with the following:

xrandr --output LVDS1 –panning 1024x600

Now stuff stays the original size, but you can pan around to get more effective screen size.

I have not had much luck combining scaling and scanning. Yet.

Another Tool for the Cleaning Toolbox

Chris — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 04:34:41 +0000

Like many who are responsible for curing the PCs of friends and family, I’ve been leaning on the 1-2 combo punch of Malwarebytes Anti-Malware (free) and SUPERAntiSpyware (also free) for the past year or so. Between the two of them — and judicious use of Safe Mode scanning — I’ve been able to cure most ailments that come my way.

[tip: did you know about the SUPERAntiSpyware portable version? I keep a copy on my utility USB stick updated every week or so. Handy!]

On a typical infection each will find things the other doesn’t so I don’t mind running both. Face it: the “good guys” in the fixing business are always behind the “bad guys” in the infecting business. I don’t really expect any one tool to do everything.

But I sure hate it when I still have an infected machine after repeated runs of both apps!

I now have one more tool to add to the mix: Microsoft’s System Sweeper. This is a beta product that I first learned about from the Security Now podcast (episode 303). There are downloads for 32 and 64 bit machines. Just download the proper one, run the installer and it will burn a CD image or create a bootable USB drive for you. Pop that into the infected machine and have it boot from the System Sweeper media.

When it runs you have something that looks a lot like Microsoft’s Security Essentials but it isn’t relying on the infected machine’s Operating System. Face it, Safe Mode is nice but sometimes it just isn’t good enough. Especially when you’re going after root kits! This fixes that problem and doesn’t rely on the victim’s operating system.

In the past month I’ve had System Sweeper finish the job on every machine I’ve tried it on. Brilliant little application and I now have a USB stick dedicated to it. Highly recommended.

A Brief Tussle with Personal Security

Living with Win7 Starter Edition

Chris — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 01:48:14 +0000

Several weeks ago I received a little Toshiba netbook (model NB255). Last year’s model, but sporting the dual-core Atom N455 processor, 250 GB drive — and I upgraded the RAM to 2 GB before even leaving the store. Stunning how many netbooks with 1GB RAM that can’t be upgraded! It also has the 6 cell battery and I’ve ran it for almost 6 hours on a single charge.

I absolutely adore this thing.

I really do. It goes everywhere with me now; I leave all my other “klunky” laptops on their desks now. It is easy to type on, light-weight and I find that I can very easily adapt to the lower 1024×600 resolution when on the go.

I’m still running the Windows 7 Starter edition that it came with (and dual-booting Linux of course). Generally that is fine, but there are a few minor annoyances. However, it certainly gets the job done.

For instance, not being able to change the wallpaper shouldn’t be a big deal, right? But it drove me nuts – mostly because the default is just plain and boring. I found many options and hacks on how to set your own wallpaper and settled on StarterBackgroundChanger. Great little utility that, among other things, lets me setup wallpaper slideshows and such. Highly recommended. Now I’d love to figure out a way to get it to pull pics from a feed like the Bing Dynamic Theme does.

And you know what? Upon reflection that’s really the only thing I “hacked” about Starter edition.

One more beef though: Considering how many IT pros have netbooks (and no, I can’t quantify that statement at all), I was rather disappointed to learn that I can’t install the Remote Server Administration Tools with Win7 Starter Edition. That problem is solved with an “Anytime Upgrade” up to Windows 7 Professional. Granted, that’s $120 which is half of what I paid for this thing! Not gonna happen. I’d install a MSDN version of Pro first :-p

Win7 SP1 and IE Issues