Tech Stuff Archives - Page 8 of 22

1 deleted message in this conversation

Is it a side-effect of the new Google “Buzz” that messages that I review and delete on my BlackBerry in my gmail account are now remaining in my inbox and, when I open them, have only:

1 deleted message in this conversation. View message or delete forever.

in them?

Definitely puts a cramp in my ability to work my inbox, especially since you can’t tell from the inbox (i.e. before you open the message) that this is the situation.

I haven’t tried this with the gmail for BlackBerry app, but rather my IMAP connectivity to my gmail inbox.

Anybody else notice this this morning?

Suggestions to makers of Drive Safe.ly

I have been playing with this software for a while now. But I have found no channels for sending them feedback. So today I left the following comment in their blog post regarding their upcoming 2.0 release:

I don’t see any way to find what new features will be released with the newer version.

There does not seem to be any way to send you feedback on the product? I’ve been through the website a couple of times. Am I just missing your feedback arena?

It has excellent potential but major shortcomings:

– Need to be able to shut it up (the same way I can get my ringer to be silent by hitting the volume key) for situations where it starts reading a message and I’m focused on something else. Or if I leave the status announcement on. I’ve had it interrupt conversations in stores announcing that it’s figured out that I’m not driving anymore. This would be fine if I could just shut it up for that one announcement.

– Need to be able to discriminate between messages. I’d like to have the option to ONLY read Level 1 email messages and all texts. If you want to create a separate filter system or allow more granular discrimination, that would be great too. Allowing profiles to control this would make sense.

– Licensing is unclear – It implies that purchase applies only for life of device. Most products you pay one fee for all minor version upgrades regardless of devices. I’m a BES admin and go through devices rather too frequently to have to re-purchase all my software on a per device basis.

– Would be nice if it could parse canonicalized names and just read out the common name for folks on a corporate BES.

– Would be nice if there could be option where it won’t read non words (those with numbers? Those in blacklist?). I receive plenty of important automated notifications and would love to not have to listen to the Lotus Notes generated monitor numbers – they take a while to read out.

I think there is tremendous potential for the product but I also need it to be a bit more friendly to my needs before I invest in it.

Thanks!

Marc

New Computer coming to Bourassa central

I’ve been chafing for a little while now to upgrade my machine to 64 bit and to take advantage of the new Windows 7 64-bit operating system.

I’ve used Vista for a couple of years and really had no complaints. Once I had the UAC disabled (took all of about 15 minutes before I tired of its intrusive confirmations) the OS was pretty solid and didn’t present me with the pains that I’ve heard described by other folks. Of course I also wasn’t trying to use it in a corporate environment.

I had some particular requirements in looking for my new box. Alienware nudged out the competition by offering a factory overclocked i7-920 cpu. They also had a deal where I was able to get the 2nd video card for no extra cost.

I thought about saving some money and putting together the computer myself with individually purchased parts but the price tag for those was going to be about 75% of the cost of having the machine assembled, tested and warranteed. I figured I’d have spent quite a few hours exchanging things that were the wrong shape or that my limited understanding of todays components led me to spec incorrectly not to mention the prospect of various dud components what I would need to troubleshoot to ensure that it wasn’t a configuration issue on my part.

No, the additional cost of having them make it for me will be money well spent.

Here’s what I’ll be picking up if you’re interested:

BASE,PHOBOS,ANW-DT,AREA 51
Overclocked Intel Core i7 920 (3.2GHz, 8MB Cache)
12GB Triple Channel 1333MHz DDR3
No Keyboard
No Monitor
Dual ATI Radeon HD 5770, 1GB GDDR5
1.2TB RAID 0 (2x 640GB SATA-II, 7,200 RPM, 16MB Cache HDDs)
Cosmic Black, Alienware Area-51 Chassis, 1KW PSU
19-in-1 Media Card Reader
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium, 64bit, English
Alienware Optical Mouse, MG100
AlienFX Color, Plasma Purple
24X CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW)
Alienhead Glow
Alienware High-Performance Liquid Cooling

Vonage (2nd time around) is a charm

Even though I’d be perfectly happy just using our cell phones. Michelle is still not super comfortable with not having a landline (or at least something that approximates one). So, when AT&T was no longer able to support decent broadband to my house, I moved to Comcast’s broadband offering and then signed up with Vonage.

I’ve always liked Vonage (router fun notwithstanding), I only stopped using it before because I was obligated at the time to take AT&T’s POTS (Plain Ol’ Telephone System) line along with my DSL connection and it didn’t make sense to keep both landline options.

The current Vonage offering is much friendlier for non-tech users and, with greater broadband speeds available, QOS doesn’t seem to be an issue. Basically, you get a little appliance with a friendly orange screen that tells you the current date and alerts you to any issues and prompts you with instructions for those issues should they occur. i.e. your Internet connection is not available, check your modem, etc.

The recommended way (from Vonage) to set up your system is to put the Vonage router between your modem and your internal router (if you have one). I don’t like the idea of Vonage being a potential choke-point for my system (although it would probably be fine) so I ended up plugging it into my router and then assigning priority QOS to the Vonage router/appliance’s MAC address. Again, you probably don’t need to do this, but since I can, and it’s easy, why not?

You can also set things up so that your entire house is wired for Vonage. Just disconnect Ma Bell entirely. I have one of the more modern interface boxes outside so all I need to do is disconnect a the incoming telephone plug (RJ11 I believe is what it’s called) and I can completely isolate my home from the telco. Then, using a male-to-male connector such as you get with any modem, plug your Vonage router/appliance into one of your phone jacks and every wired phone in your house is hooked up to Vonage.

We don’t need anything fancy for our home setup so I just picked up an AT&T (I know, I know… the irony) cordless phone set to replace the aging ones we already had and just plugged those into the Vonage router/appliance.

Now we have caller id, local, free long distance throughout Canada and the U.S. and a raft of other features that we may or may not ever use. We could have ported our phone number as well, but with Google voice that’s not really necessary.

BTW, ping me if you want a Google Voice invite. I’ve still got two left as of this posting.

Bose CineMate Digital Home Theater Speaker System

I was in Sams Club a couple of weeks ago and saw this home theater system was on sale so I noted it down and came home to check it out. While reading about it on Amazon I saw that it was pretty highly rated and nearly $100 less expensive. So I went ahead and ordered one.

I already have a Samsung LN52A650 TV through which I want to view my Samsung BD-P2500 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player, my DirecTV HR-23 DVR my legacy DirecTV TIVO player and my ancient VHS tape player (yeah, still have some stuff that I haven’t replaced on VHS tape).

When I first purchased my TV I had also picked up a Sony HTCT100 Sound Bar with which I was unimpressed. But, on its own, the Samsung TV sound turned out to be less satisfactory than I had originally thought. There have been times I even needed to resort to turning on subtitles for ENGLISH movies because the vocal output was simply unable to overcome the other sounds and effects being offered.

Also, complexity is a big deal. Where the Sony soundbar had me hooking up all of my media sources to it and then using IT to control what played through the TV set, the Bose CineMate takes the results of whatever I elect to pump through the TV and then enhances the output. So I don’t have to worry about compatibility with the sound system (HDMI in or whatever), nor do I have to tweak the home theater system for particular inputs.

The improvement in sound quality is absolute and immediate. There are no adjustments to make, it’s either going to work or it isn’t. In my case it worked magnificently. I used the remake of “The Day the Earth Stood Still” for my testing and I am astonished how well the Bose system enhanced and separated out the sounds. The bass is deep and booming and the voices are crystal clear.

Also, any specialized mating (the Samsung TV and Blu-Ray player talk with each other and negotiate the video input settings) are retained because the Blu-Ray still gets to talk directly to the TV.

The widely touted universal remote control is both the icing on the cake and the one item I will ding Bose for on this offering. First, the remote is of a reasonable size, very clear how to operate and well thought out. My wife finally has a clear view of what she’s supposed to press in order to get the Satellite receiver, TV and sound all functioning so she can watch her shows.

The universal controls all of my devices with one, very weird, exception: The pause button doesn’t work for the Samsung BD-P2500 1080p Blu-ray Disc Player. There is only one code available to program Samsung Blu-Ray players into the remote, so it’s not like I got it wrong. Contacting Bose’s customer support yielded the lame response:

*****To reply to this message, please select the reply button. To help us expedite your inquiry, please be sure to include our original response.******

Mr Bourassa,

The remote does not control all functions of all systems. A universal learning remote such as the Phillips Pronto would be able to learn all functions of any component, but these remotes are significantly more expensive.

Thank you for contacting Bose Corporation.
Richard Card
Product and Technical Support Team
————————————————-
Bose Corporation
US Telephone: (800)367-4008
International Tel: (508)766-1900
Email: http://www.bose.com/ContactUs
Fax: (508)766-1919
Telephone Hours: Mon-Fri 8:30AM-9:00PM, Sat 9:00AM-5:00PM (EST)
————————————————-
[massive footer pushing 3.2.1 system removed]——————————
Technical Support Information:

[Email Id:blah]
[Email Agent Id:blah]
[Queue Id:blah]

—–Original Message—–

Thank you for your response.

Do you know if this flaw has been corrected in the universal remotes offered
with the later Cinemate systems.

I can understand some of the more specialized features not being represented
in a universal remote, but “Pause” is a pretty basic DVD function to be
lacking.

Thanks,

Marc

On Sat, Oct 3, 2009 at 4:29 PM, <support@bose.com> wrote:

> *****To reply to this message, please select the reply button. To help us
> expedite your inquiry, please be sure to include our original
> response.******
>
> Mr Bourassa,
>
> Thank you for your inquiry. The remote code 21099 is the correct code for
> te Sausung BD-P2500. We are aware that this does not allow control of all
> remote functions, but there is no alternative code or workaround (other than
> to use the remote that came with the Samsung). Sorry we could not assist you
> with this.
>
> Thank you for contacting Bose Corporation.
> Richard Card
> Product and Technical Support Team
> ——————————

——————-
> Bose Corporation
> US Telephone: (800)367-4008
> International Tel: (508)766-1900
> Email: http://www.bose.com/ContactUs
> Fax: (508)766-1919
> Telephone Hours: Mon-Fri 8:30AM-9:00PM, Sat 9:00AM-5:00PM (EST)
> ————————————————-
[massive footer pushing 3.2.1 system removed]
> ——————————
> Technical Support Information:
> [Email Id:blah]
> [Email Agent Id:blah]
> [Queue Id:blah]
>
>
>
> —–Original Message—–
>
> Request Type: Setup and System Install
>
>
> Request Message: I have a Samsung Blu-Ray DVD player (model BD-P2500) for
> which the only code available (20199) for the Cinemate remote control does
> not allow pause to work.
>
> My TV and DirecTV Satellite/DVR player work properly(pause works for the
> DVR just fine). So I am confident that it is not a hardware problem with the
> pause button. Do you have an alternate code suggestion or a workaround that
> can be used so the Universal remote can fully control my system?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Marc

Apparently it was unclear to the rep that there are only 5 things that most of us want our DVD remote controls to do: Play, Stop, Fast Forward, Rewind and Pause. Anybody who watches TV with a spouse or kid knows that pause is essential.

This wasn’t a deal breaker for *me* but I wanted to mention it in case it was for others.

Some of the other Amazon.com reviews for this device whined about it being inferior because it does not accept digital input. But I think, for the average Joe who just wants really nice sound for a reasonable price AND an uncomplicated setup, this is definitely the system to get. It is absolutely simple to set up, there are NO adjustments or tweaks that are even possible to make and the sound is wonderful.

MagicJack – adipiscor, experior, remitto

Also loosely (and probably poorly) translated – To Acquire, To Try, To Return.

I had heard about MagicJack from our local consumer advisor “Clark Howard“. The idea is that you get this USB dongle-like piece of hardware that you plug into your computer, it runs a bit of software that allows your computer to work with it and control a soft phone, and you plug any normal phone into the other end of the MagicJack appliance and you can make calls through your computer and broadband connection for next to nothing.

I had recently switched from AT&T to Comcast and Michelle wanted to have a landline (or equivalent) as she’s got a real bee in her bonnet about using a cell phone when she’s at home.

The MagicJack proposition is pretty simple, you pay $20 (Plus $6.95 s&h) for the dongle-device and then you pay $19.95 a year thereafter for unlimited local and long distance calling thereafter. At least long distance to Canada and within the United States. I didn’t pay too much attention long distance rates to other locales as I seldom call those.

The website is pretty sparse, I suppose that’s a good thing, but it didn’t give me a great sense of permanence. And the video of the kid talking to the MagicJack guy on the main page is just plain creepy.

I have to say the upsell when you’re trying to make the purchase is pretty annoying, it’s on a par with GoDaddy.com. There are about a half dozen screens you need to click through offering you a second MagicJack for X dollars, upgrade NOW for 5 Years at a reduced cost and on and on. But after wading through all that crap you finally can click to have the MagicJack sent to you.

I tried out my unit for about 10 days before I got an RMA off of the website and returned it. The first thing I noticed was that the unit really doesn’t play nice with Google Voice, which I’ve been using for years now and rather like. When you want to add a new phone number to your Google Voice account you get a confirmation number which you are supposed to punch into your phone when the Google Voice system calls you. Through MagicJack I couldn’t hear the Google Voice prompts so I had to just guess at when to type in the confirmation code. This happened for both mine and Michelle’s Google Voice lines as I was setting them up on separate days.

I also had that weird happening where iTunes would only play through my telephone until I rebooted the computer after I had first set up the MagicJack on my system.

If that were the end of it I suppose I would have been OK with it. After all $20 a year for phone service is pretty darned good. But I kind of wanted it to be reliable too.

I found that, about half to a third of the time, I could not pick up my Google Voice calls through the MagicJack phone line. If you’re not familiar with Google Voice, it defaults to a “presentation mode” where, when you pick up the phone, it will announce the caller and give you the option to pick it up, send to voicemail, record or ignore the call. I’d pick up the phone, the call would be announced and then none of my keypresses would be passed through to Google Voice. So I’d quickly need to pick up my cell phone to answer the call.

More frustrating, about one in five calls would end up being just crap. Either I or the other person on the line could not understand the other (it seemed to be one way failing at a time).

Finally, a couple of times during my testing, the MagicJack software simply stopped. No crash, no warning dialog, it just wasn’t running anymore. The first time I was at home and I just unplugged and re-plugged in the dongle-device. But the second time Michelle was home alone and, as far as she was concerned, the phone system just wasn’t working. My computer is always locked by default and it’s not really her forte, nor her desire, to troubleshoot the phone system when she wants to use it.

So I’d say that MagicJack is probably worthwhile for a modestly tech-savvy person living alone who leaves their computer on all the time and who hasn’t just simply moved to a cell-phone only existence.

For me, I’ve now re-upped with Vonage and things have been very smooth. Having the dedicated router for the phone (rather than relying on a computer being on) is a big plus. Also, the Vonage connection is rock-solid and I’ve had no problems at all with it working with Google Voice. I don’t install my Vonage router in the prescribed method (cable modem — Vonage Router — Linksys router) because I prefer to keep control over my system directly, so I have my Vonage router plugged into my Linksys WRT54G with DD-WRT firmware and have assigned it a permanent IP AND set the Quality of Service so that the Vonage router gets priority. Haven’t had ANY issues so far…

But, since nobody is perfect, I’ll keep an eye on it for a while 🙂

iTunes 9.1 – Smart Playlist Sort Order Still Wonky

In iTunes, I use a Smart Playlist to keep track of and to order my podcasts.

I like to order them by assigning to them a rating each morning before I head out on my daily travels. There are a few podcasts to which I assign 5 stars that take priority over everything – current news – then there are things in which I am very interested so they get 4 stars and then 3 and fewer stars are given to nice-to-hear shows.

I’ve lately taken to using the “Sort Artist” column to sub-sort the podcasts. By putting in the date (i.e. 20090924) it keeps them in order of receipt from oldest to newest. The end result is that I don’t end up listening to all my same-named podcasts clustered together but rather hear them interspersed among each other in the order in which they were published.

My expectation is that, on my iPod, the sort order will be the same as it is in iTunes. Not so anymore. Nowadays, the order somewhat follows the primary sort (I sort on “Rating” and everything else follows). On the iPod, rather than sorting from most to fewest stars, it currently sorts the opposite way and the sort within the stars follows absolutely no rhyme or reason – not alphabetically either by “Sort Artist” or by “Name”.

In fact, I took some time yesterday to experiment and it does not sort on ANY of the hidden sort fields or any visible fields for that matter.

I tried the suggestion of right-clicking on the playlist and clicking “Copy to Play Order” but this has absolutely no effect. I further tried editing the Smart Playlist and unchecking the “Live Updating” checkbox. This only resulted in NONE of my podcasts showing up in the iPod playlist, even though all looked fine in iTunes.

I understand that this is a major glitch in iTunes and have read many posts of folks complaining about this, so I suppose I’ll sit pretty while waiting for Apple to get around to fixing it. This post is mostly for folks who are experiencing the same issue to stumble across to see what I’ve tried and to know that their issue is shared.

Had to ditch WP-SpamFree

I was using WP-SpamFree to control comment SPAM. But a few of my friends let me know that their comments were being refused as SPAM after they invested however long crafting a thoughtful message. Who knows how many others were being affected as I presume those folks who don’t even know me would just get ticked off and move on to some other part of the Internet.

I contacted the WP-SpamFree folks and all they would tell me was that the commenter’s machines had software on them that is usually associated with spammers. They declined to elaborate and wouldn’t respond at all when I suggested that a whitelist or some other override vehicle would probably be apt where you *know* the submitter and always want them to be able to comment.

I presume that, if my friends logged in, there would be no issue but it seems that a lot of folks don’t like doing that so I would be happy enough just putting in all their known addresses and then whitelisting those.

Anyway, I’ve had to switch to a different SPAM comment preventer solution so I hope the issue goes away without suddenly incurring a ton of comment SPAM.

BTW to be complete, here is the text of the error they received:

Your location has been identified as part of a reported spam network.
Comments have been disabled to prevent spam.

MagicJack + iTunes 9 + Vista Home Premium SP2 = Weird

*Updated September 23, 2009 *

After upgrading to iTunes 9.1 and rebooting, all is well. I’m pretty sure the real issue is the MagicJack. I’m seeing lots of weirdness from it. I’ll play with it for another week and then decide whether to go for Vonage instead. Had trouble verifying my phone in Google Voice. Sometimes I can’t pick up the phone (press 1 when presented with a call from Google voice) other times it picks up but one or the other end of the conversation can’t hear the other.

* End Update *

After performing a bunch of updates on my home machine beginning with the SP2 update for Vista home Premium, I went to play something on my freshly-updated-to-version-9 iTunes and… no sound.

So, while I’m trying to figure out what’s going on with that (all other sounds are playing just fine – media player, streaming videos) Michelle is trying to configure her Google Voice number to point to our new Magic Jack number. When she initiated the verification call to her phone, lo and behold, my iTunes music was playing.

Still trying to work *that* out…

I can’t believe I’m going to patronize Comcast again :(

After being with AT&T for about 3 years, I find that their U-verse rollout is conflicting with my DSL connectivity. According to a guy I know at AT&T I’m far enough away from the nearest Central Office that they have a special profile for me (anybody my distance from the CO). I’m about 18,000 feet away and that’s apparently a pretty big deal.

As I understand it, this particular profile can cause interference with U-verse transmissions and so I’m being scaled back to some other profile. The long and short of it is that my AT&T DSL keeps dropping which I noted as a problem in my blog a couple of months ago. After verifying that all wires were properly attached to things they needed to be attached to, the tech changed my profile and made a few other soft adjustments and everything settled down and worked perfectly. However, he warned me that this could change at any time. It’s just that he knew that nobody was using U-Verse on my … what do you call it .. trunk? Node? Who knows? So this wouldn’t adversely affect anybody.

This worked great for about a month but, as of yesterday, it seems that the profile has been reset again. This happened once before but then switched back on its own. My little DSL light (on my modem) has been flashing red fairly regularly whenever I want to surf the web. I’m told my best option would be to downgrade my service to a 3 Mbps or possibly some kind of 1 Mbps connection in order to guarantee stability.

So, I checked out Satellite (why does Hughes NOT give you ANY technical details on their site?), Wi-Max (not in my area yet) and looked into various local providers but it appears that I really can only choose between my two duopoly-mates AT&T or Comcast.

Looking on Comcast’s site I saw a plan (“Performance” 15 Mbps down / 3 Mpbs up ) that would be $19.99 / month for the first 6 months and then $42.99 thereafter. Then I found that that deal only applied if you got cable too. So the price otherwise will be a straight $59.99 / month.

I found a deal that offered the same $19.99 *plus* a $125 Amazon gift card but then found that was only for 6 Mbps / maybe 1 Mbps. To get to the “Performance” plan performance I’d end up paying $69.99 / month. Man! Comcast definitely makes sure you will pay every last cent to them even if they offer you a deal, it seems you will repay the offer in spades.

So, I reluctantly went back to the original Comcast site and filled everything in again (I canceled the original order when I found out that the small print prevented me from getting any kind of deal) and found that this time it let me right through. So, for Internet service ONLY I now seem to qualify for $19.99 per month and $42.99 after 6 months. I went so far as to confirm this with the Comcast rep that comes up in chat mode when you submit your order and all seems copacetic.

I get the new service installed on Tuesday (maybe) so we’ll see…