Peter Staack Product Testimonials & Reviews

For about a year, I've been using 2BrightSparks' SyncBack Freeware, and have grown quite fond of it. I've employed quite a few different freeware and paid synchronization apps over the last few decades, and none have ever really thrilled me. Most were bloated with useless features, unstable, or lacked features I needed for automated or manual synchronization and backups. But SyncBack Freeware has the perfect balance of simplicity and features for my needs.

The installer is under 2MB, and the program folder (with all of my profiles and months of log files) is under 10MB. Idle, it's only using 3MB of RAM. Even when it's running, it doesn't drag your system down too much, other than the HDD is working. Since it's pretty lightweight, it runs fine on some of my older Windows 2000 workstations, and even a 9 year old NT4 workstation.

It's easy to set up various synchronization and backup profiles for folders, files and so-on. You can set rules for overwrites, copies, and incremental copies. My particular favorite features is using Boolean operators to create filters, based on file names, dates and even some meta info. It has options for safe-writing, verifications, saving to FTP or network devices, ZIP compression with password protection & encryption, scheduling & automation, hot-key activation, system priority, can auto-close an application before running a profile, can run applications or scripts before running a profile, and a whole host of features. There's a button the quickly switches between simple mode, and advanced mode, and the help files are pretty good. I have several profiles configured to incrementally backup vital data on a local disk and FTP, using compression & encryption, generate PAR2 parity files, and email errors to several address. But, for simple jobs, often it just takes a few clicks to set up a basic profile, and get going.

2BrightSparks has earned industry recognition for the quality of their SyncBack programs, which include a $30 advanced version and a $50 professional version. I for one am a big fan of SyncBack Freeware for my own uses, and will likely be switching clients over to their professional edition, once our current solution (below) has changes version (unless they have free upgrades). To-date, it's my favorite synchronization and backup solution, and recommend it to anyone IT-minded, who requires a competent app with a clean spartan interface.

A fairly-close second place, for favorite sync/backup app, would be GFI Backup, which is also packed with features - compression, encryption, FTP/network, filters, etc. - but just doesn't run as well on some of the older sub-1GHz CPU workstations I manage. It's a bit heftier than the very lightweight SyncBack, but will run fine on any PC built within the last few years. I've been using their Business Edition, for several of my clients, but they also have a free Home Edition which works very well. The interface for both, are beginner-friendly; which actually makes it a little bit cumbersome for advanced users, who don't require having their hands held at every step. GFI Backup is the program I recommend for people who need a backup solution, who aren't super tech-savvy.

Cross-posted to my LiveJournal - 2BrightSparks SyncBack Freeware File & Folder Synchronization Software

The first completed chapter of Metal Gear Solid Philanthropy, The Overnight Nation, is available to watch streaming or for download (total run time 1 hour, 10 minutes including extra features after the credits). Although you can watch the stream, below, the visual effects and audio are good enough to warrant downloading the higher-fidelity versions.

Click For Download Options
This non-profit fan movie, by Giacomo Talamin and presented by Hive Division, is better than many theatrical releases. The story is engrossing, while staying reasonably true to the source material (with events taking place largely in 2007, after the founding of the anti-Metal Gear group, Philanthropy, presumibly before the tanker incident). The acting is pretty competent, with a few moments seeming a little quirky and forced - but actually very-well emulating the style of Hideo Kojima, which has similar moments. As stated, the effects are very good, considering its grassroots origin. The 3D, matting, lighting, environmental and special effects are all a step above many direct-to-DVD films, and even some lower-budget theatrical releases. The audio is exceptional, except for the levels on a few bits of dialogue - again, emulating a few quirks native to the Metal Gear Solid games. The score is very good, suiting the movie very well. The costumes and makeup are on par with many direct-to-DVD films, and low-budget theatrical releases. The props and weaponry are good, though some of the tactics are a little strange... But - again - fit perfectly within Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear world.

In all, I thought it was really good, and I heartily recommend it to any Metal Gear fan, who is willing to give it a chance. I look forward to additional chapters. It's very apparent a lot of care and work has gone into its production. I hope as much, or more, care and consideration for the source material is taken by the official theatrical production, due out in a year or so.
Screen Captures (click each to see full version):

Cross-posted to my LiveJournal, TV/Movie Blog, and even my little Anime Blog.

Between my 3 biggest clients, I've inherited most of the day-to-day packing and shipping responsibilities - right on top of my dozens of other duties. When we were exclusively using UPS and FedEx, it took a real dent in my daily schedule because the system was so arduous. We started using their webpage to print labels, which was quicker, but still really time consuming. As well, they weren't as inexpensive as DHL - which we started using exclusively, right until they discontinued their United States domestic service. Bummer. Reluctant to go back to using UPS or FedEx, we gave the United States Postal Service a try, and have been pleased ever since.

For a while, we used their desktop app for everything, but recently they've overhauled their online Click-n-Ship service, on the USPS.com webpage. After working out a few small bugs in the first month, I think USPS online shipping has been GREAT! The interface was easy, and everyone at the office could use the same login. We use USPS Priority Mail and Express Mail on a daily basis, and one of my clients uses Media Mail and Parcel Post regularly. With very-rare exception, packages are delivered quickly and in exceptional shape (though I do take some credit for being a very efficient packer) right to our clients' doors or mailboxes. The few insurance claims we've had to make were painless. Package tracking works reasonably well for Priority Mail, and a little better for Express. If you print online, you get free delivery confirmation, and a small discount. For instance, USPS Priority Mail flat-rate envelope is normally $4.95 delivered anywhere in the US... but if you print the label online, it's only $4.80. And, the postage for packages and express mail is regularly less than UPS or FedEx, including extra services like signature confirmation and insurance. For international delivery, the savings are often more significant, especially if we don't have to pay an overseas brokerage fee like with UPS.

After 6 months of printing USPS labels online, exclusively, my biggest volume client has saved around $1900 in shipping compared to similar service from UPS and FedEx, with fewer lost or damaged packages. Flat rate boxes have been a real money saver, when shipping small heavy items. I estimate, they've also saved about $50 ~ $60 on packing supplies, since we frequently use the free boxes provided by the USPS. With the free daily carrier pickup, which is easy to schedule online, that's another $200 ~ $300 savings. Awesome!

Cross-posted on my Livejournal - USPS.com - Print Shipping Labels & Postage Online - Free Pickup!

Now that I've gotten my monthly "how the hell my client screwed up ANOTHER computer" rant out of my system, I just wanted to list my usual computer rescue kit.

First is BartPE, which enables you to make a Windows XP base preinstalled environment, which you can boot into from a CD. When a Windows system isn't working, I can boot it up with this CD, and run apps to clean it up or rescue data. I usually rely on a generic USB drive loaded with such great portable apps (they run right off of the USB drive, without having to install on the hard drive) as...

• ClamWin Portable - ClamWin antivirus scanner, in a neat tidy little package that's easy to keep up-to-date.


• Dr.WEB CureIt Portable - Another full antivirus & malware scanner, made portable.


• Norton Security Scan Portable - Scans for a broad array of malware and security gaps.


• Multi Virus Cleaner '09 - Also scans for malware and infections.


• Kaspersky Removal Tools - A whole bunch of virus-specific removal tools, from Afcore to XCP.


• Avast Virus Cleaner - Detects and cleans a select list of common viruses and malware.


• McAfee AVERT Stinger - Another virus and malware remover.


• Avira AntiVir Removal Tool - Removes a wider array of malware.


• Sophos Anti Rootkit - Scans for rootkits on your drives.


• TestDisk - Scans and mounts damaged partitions, and recovers boot sectors, MFTs and other data


• SoftPerfect File Recovery, ADRC, Roadkils Undelete & Undelete Plus - Recovers data from hard drives and removable media.


• CCleaner Portable - My favorite junk-file and registry cleaner, in a portable format.


• Revo Uninstaller Portable - The best uninstaller, which also removes orphaned files, in a portable format.


• DriverGrabber & Driver Backup - Backs up your system and 3rd party drivers, if you need to restore.


• Explorer++ - A powerful multi-window file explorer with optional thumbnails.
  
• 7Zip Portable - Top-quality compression and decompression, including RAR.


• Eraser - Completely erases & overwrites files, including DOD/NSA approved and Gutmann methods, free space wipe, secure file moving, and disk nuking and creating a nuke boot disk.


• CheckDisk - Freeware portable version of CheckDisk.


• Auslogics Disk Defrag - Great disk defrag app, portable.


• System Explorer - Portable version of the task manager.


• ShowMyPC - A good VNC remote control server and client.


• Sumatra PDF - Portable PDF viewer.


• HoverSnap & AVI SCreen - Take screen captures and record Windows.


• Infra Recorder - Portable CD/DVD burning app.


• Opera Portable - Awesome internet browser, portable.

If you hunt around, there are also a ton of password recovery tools, Windows key extractors, registry editors, notepads, file editors, FTP clients & servers, and utilities for just about any job. You can load a ton of them on a 1+ GB USB drive, in case you need 'em. I periodically update the antivirus and browsers, to the latest versions, and I keep the drive and boot CDs in a safe spot. They've rescued many computers, on the brink of death, with very little muss or fuss. There's only a few rare cases when these fail, and I have to I roll up my sleeves, break out a Linux PE and get my hands dirty.
Cross-posted on my LiveJournal - BartPE & Portable Apps - Computer Life Raft

Lyoto Machida UFC Light Heavyweight Champ All Photos, Courtesy of ZUFFA, LLC. Click For UFC98 Streaming Video

      UFC 98 was a pretty good show, with several interesting fights. The bad blood between former UFC Welterweight Champs Matt Serra and Matt Hughes culminated in a great back-and-forth battle, with both fighters displaying their strengths, and Hughes walking away with a unanimous decision victory. But, the big thrill - even though I honestly saw it coming months in advance - was the undefeated Lyoto "The Dragon" Machida beating the previously-undefeated "Sugar" Rashad Evans for the UFC Light-Heavyweight title. Although I was rooting for Machida, the truth is that Evans is VERY capable of knocking any fighter out in the blink of an eye, and was on the edge of my seat the entire fight. To the untrained eye, there wasn't much action, but you could see them feeling each other out and trying to find any flaw they could exploit. Both quick and seemingly-unorthodox strikers, with knockout power, you could see them switch up stances, feigning, and reading each other for minutes at a time. After some quick encounters, Machida managed to drop Evans with an expertly-timed low-kick, straight-right combination, and press him until Rashad regained his balance. Into the second round, Machida caught Evans in an exchange with a stiff left, and kept on top of him with a Chuck Liddell-like flurry of punches, before putting Rashad to sleep with another left on the button

"Oh shi..."

.

      I admit, I was a little late to jump on the Lyoto Machida bandwagon. While he held early victories over future champions Rich Franklin and "The Prodigy" B.J. Penn, they occurred early in each fighters' careers, so you could accept them being flukes. As well, being associated with Antonio Inoki, who always seems to inspire rumors of fight fixing and shady-doings, didn't help his credibility. But, after seeing more and more footage, and reading about his style, I was intrigued. Here was an elusive fighter, with very precise Karate striking - which is very hard to predict, since kicks aren't telegraphed as much, and even harder to counter since strikes are often thrown with the head back and out of range. He's pretty much been training in street-modified Shotokan Karate, with his father Master Yoshizo Machida, since he was a baby. To add to it, Lyoto has trained in Sumo (effective takedown defense), and recently earned his BJJ black belt from the legendary Nogueira brothers. That's a hell of a skill-set, and he's put it to good use by earning an increasingly-impressive string of victories over some serious competition - including a dominant performance against another former champ, Tito Ortiz. To date, nobody has really even caught Machida and done any kind of damage to him. Taking the title from a still-evolving Rashad Evans further showcases how his relatively unique style, on top of his great physical and mental conditioning, is proving to be effective in MMA.

Click here to see UFC98, streaming at 300k, 700k, and 1200k high quality, in case you missed it!
      The current list of UFC champs seems like the most dynamic bunch of fighters to date, all being considered among the very best in their respective specialized styles, while continuing to build on top of it. UFC Lightweight Champ B.J. Penn's moniker, "The Prodigy," describes him to a tee - he's a world-renowned BJJ expert, with just about as many wins from strikes as submissions. UFC Welterweight Champ, Georges "Rush" St-Pierre, is another Karate-inspired fighter, with swift and lethal circular-style Kyokushin striking and movement, who is also expertly versed in wrestling and submissions. UFC Middleweight Champ, Anderson "The Spider" Silva (left), is one of the most skilled and lightning-fast Muay Thai kickboxers in MMA history, who is also a Nogueira BJJ black belt and argued to be the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world today. The interim UFC Heavyweight Champ, Frank Mir, is and extremely-dangerous Ricardo Pires BJJ black belt, with expanding Kenpo and Muay Thai skills, who managed to be the first person in the history of MMA to stop Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira while on the comeback trail from a heinous motorcycle accident that would have killed of permanently crippled most people. The current UFC Heavyweight Champ, Brock Lesnar, is a freestyle wrestling monster and NCAA Division I Champ so physically gifted, he managed to defeat the legendary Randy Couture to earn the belt after only 3 professional fights. And, the sick thing is, despite this eclectic collection of supermen holding UFC gold, there always seems to be new fighters showing up in each respective division who - with some time and the proper guidance - could be even more monstrous. The level of competition, even on the smallest shows, has leaped up at a tremendous rate in just the last 2 or 3 years. MMA, as a sport, is just exploding with new talent, and ever-evolving dangerous skill-sets making their way to the top. I for one welcome our future rulers.
Cross-posted to my TV Blog and LiveJournal.

      Look at how happy that scale is! Honestly, I'm pretty happy with it, too. I only paid a measly $10 for it, expecting to get a novelty scale that's only so-so... But, I've been using it all day, and it's a GREAT multi-purpose scale!

      I weighed several different things we had around the office, compared the results to our recently-calibrated postage scale, and it was SPOT-FREAKIN'-ON. It's exactly as well-calibrated as our $75 postage scale, in several different units - whole lbs. & oz., lbs. (down to 1/100th), oz (down to 1/10th), kg, and Chinese jīn. Since it's a hanging scale, it's better suited for irregular items, which often don't easily fit on our platform scale. As well, it has a higher capacity than our postage scales - up to 88 lbs. (though I've only tested it up to 46.5 lbs.). It's battery operated, using two "AA" style batteries, making it even more versatile than our other scales. It's simple to zero, so I can use several harness rigs with it. And, personally, I like how happy it looks, with it's smiling face buttons. Considering how crazy I get answering stupid didn't RTFM customer questions all day long, every little thing that cheers my grumpy ass up is much appreciated.

      This scale gets pretty good reviews, too, on DealExtreme. If anyone needs a good multi-purpose or mailing scale, this oughtta do the trick. I've already let a bunch of my pals, who make a living on eBay, know about it. It's a really nice scale, for so cheap.

        One of the more-curious skills I acquired over the years is lock picking and locksmithing. I picked it up while hanging out with a guy whose parents ran a repossessions & foreclosure agency, while taking classes at CLC in Grayslake. Honestly, it doesn't have much practical use for me. I don't foresee becoming a professional locksmith, or engaging in advanced locksport. As well, if I needed to enter a locked room, in an emergency situation, I'd find a simpler or quicker means. Still, I think it's at least somewhat handy in the event I, or someone I know, gets locked out, and don't want to risk damaging anything. As well, it's a fun craft, and something neat to show-off to comrades.

        I had a really simple hand-made tension wrench, half diamond pick, and a snake rake that I made from metal bristles from railway sweepers I found along the local tracks. They were OK, at best, but at least they were free. A decent lock picking set was too expensive for my blood, and any of the trigger and battery lock picks were even more expensive. I made a few bump keys, which were cheap, but reasonably effective for years (in recent years, more and more locks are becoming bump-resistant).

        With very amateur tools, no real practical applications, and a loaded work schedule, it's been years since I've practiced lock picking. But, now, I've found several places to order professional locksmith tools for exceptional prices. They have column lock picks, padlock picks, manual pick guns, electronic pick guns, tool kits and more for a fraction of the cost they were years ago. I picked up a simple lock pick set for only $7 and a few extra tension wrenches. Hopefully I've still got a feel for it, but I'm thrilled that there's no shortage of videos and guides for lock picking.

Hah, I remember playing with my friends with a pair of crummy walkie talkies that were like 6 or 7 lbs, had terrible range, and had even poorer sound-quality than a McDonald's Drive-thru speaker. Still, they were tons of fun, and we eventually rigged them into sound-activated perimeter alarms before we screwed them up (I think we overloaded the transmitter).

Check THESE out - wrist watch walkie talkies! Man, I would have loved to have these when I was a kid. Even though they're considered toys, at only $42 for the pair (free shipping), they're so totally cooler than any walkie talkie I had as a kid or the first professional two-way radios I used. Even if the specs are half of what they claim (1.5 mile range, 22 FRS/GMRS channels), they're pretty sweet for so cheap. And, they have an even smaller pair of wrist watch walkies, for around the same price.

Something I've always thought should have been integrated into Microsoft Windows, since the addition of the Windows Taskbar, was the ability to organize items in the taskbar. I tend to like to have my most common or useful apps and windows on the left. Over the years, I've adapted by open items in a specific order to keep maintain this layout, and groan whenever something messes the order up. I've tried several 3rd party apps that enable you to organize the taskbar, but they always added in other features I didn't want, or used more system resources than I felt was necessary for something so seemingly simple.

For the last few weeks, I've been running Taskix 2.0 Beta, by Robust IT, on my Windows Vista, XP, and one of my 2000 systems. It's a freeware app that lets you organize the taskbar, and offers a few other simple features that you can easily enable or disable with just a few clicks of the mouse. Taskix has been rock-solid, works exactly as one would expect, and - best of all - uses very little system resources.

Visit Taskix.RobustIT.com to get Taskix! If you find it useful, be sure to send them a donation to support their effort!

      TigerDirect.com has a sweet deal on a monster barebones PC kit - Quad-Core 2.66GHz Intel i7 920 CPU, Asus P6T LGA 1366 motherboard (with 1 PCIeX1, 3 PCIeX16 slots, and 6 SATA 3.0Gb/s hookups), 12GB (2x6GB) PC12800 triple-channel DDR3-1600MHz, Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB hard drive with 32MB buffer memory, in a spacious high-airflow black case with a goof 650-watt power supply - for only $900, after a $10 rebate. Pieced together from other suppliers, the same components would cost around $1100~$1200. Toss in a good PCIe 2.0 video card, a 64-bit OS that supports 12GB RAM (I'm partial to Windows Vista Ultimate or Windows 7), and that's a pretty boss system for just over a grand.

      On the low-end, you can get a dual-core 3.73GHz Intel Pentium D, a decent PCIe 2.0 motherboard with onboard NVIDIA GeForce 7050/610i graphics, and 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2-800MHz PC6400 in a fairly-nice ATX mid-tower with 300 watt power supply - for only $199, after a small rebate. Heck... Shopping around, the Pentium D 965 chip alone is $100 ~ $175 at other places. They also have lots of cheap SATA drives, and entry-to-mid-level graphics cards on sale. Not a bad little system, for a pretty sweet price, IMO. If you don't already have an OS, you can get Vista Home Premium fairly cheap, right now. Vista Home Basic and XP are also good deals, if you can find 'em and don't need Premium. As well, several Linux builds might do the trick, and save even more loot.

      If you're willing to devote an hour or two to putting a barebones system together, and load the OS, TigerDirect.com always has these sweet deals on barebones systems. So far, we've also gotten a number of recertified systems, at awesome prices ($300~$600 systems for between $90~$230), that have operated flawlessly 5~10 hours a day, 5+ days a week. The only two times we got a faulty component, their customer service was quick to ship out a replacement for exchange. Yeah, it's not as easy as going to a store, but the savings make up for it. And, it's really not that difficult these days. The last fully-loaded PC I put together was WAY less complicated than putting together the IKEA chair my boss got for his office.

        For the past few years, all of my footwear (save for a pair of cheap sandals) have come from LAPoliceGear.com. They regularly have fantastic sales on top-quality tactical boots and duty shoes, that just boggle the mind. Today, we happen to have just such a deal... 8" side-zip Altama LiteSpeed tactical boots (right) are 60% off their regular price! They have a sweet multi-direction lug style tread, which is good for most all surfaces, molded reinforced midsole and ankle protection, zipper silencer, and breathable antimicrobial fabric. Most of these style boots are designed for heavy-duty use, comfort, stability, stealth on most hard surfaces, and just plain look nice whether on the trails or dressed up for the office.

        LA Police Gear has excellent customer service, and lighting fast fulfillment. I just recently got an awesome pair of magnum boots at 60% off, but I otherwise wouldn't hesitate to jump on this deal FAST - especially since size 13 sells out quickly. LA Police Gear also has everyday good deals on other duty gear and wearables, and periodic super-sales. Sign up for their email list on their webpage, to get the latest deals forwarded to your attention, because they usually sell out quick!

      One of my clients wanted me to build a pretty nice gaming PC for him and his kids, and my rep at TigerDirect.com was happy to help me pick out the components. When it was all in the shopping cart, the total was just under $1000 (after two rebates) for what should be a $1800 ~ $2000 system.

• Asus P6T LGA 1366 Board • Core i7 920 / 2.66GHz • 12GB 1600MHz PC12800 DDR3 • 1GB PCIe2 GeForce 9500 GT SLI

• 7200RPM SATA-G3 1.5TB HDD • Sony DVD±RW / BluRay Drive • CoolerMaster ATX Case • 750 Watt Power Supply

      I slapped it together, yesterday, in less than an hour, and booted it up with a Slax Linux Live CD as a sanity test. Today, I installed Windows Vista Ultimate 64 on it, which was a breeze - all the hardware was detected and drivers were installed automatically. With 12GB of RAM, and no pagefile, the disk activity was almost nil - even when running OpenOffice Suite, Gimp Image Manipulation, and playing music with GOM Media Player. They left me their HL2 CDs, so tonight I'll try it out and see how it plays. I've also gotta set up SyncBack so they can easily back up their files onto a big slow portable hard drive. After that, it's in their hands.

      Luckily, this guy is a pretty sensible computer user. Compared to several other local clients, who can mysteriously reformat entire systems by accident despite my best efforts to safeguard the system, I've never had any major "WTF" calls from them. Even his kids are pretty good users, and know what not to click. He knows how to do basic hardware installation, so if he gets a duplicate SLI video card to run in parallel, or another hard drive, I'd have faith in him installing it on his own.

      I've gotta say, this is a pretty sweet rig, but I'm still pretty happy with the new system I have at work, and my other PCs. None of my own systems are nearly as fast, especially since I'm underclocking the processor and RAM in my notebook (dynamic frequency scaling) and two desktops (manual), but they're all rock-friggin-solid - not a single freeze-up or crash, since I got 'em. Microsoft Vista gets a bum rap... IMO it's a great operating system, if you're willing to configure it to suit your needs. It's not even hard to configure Vista. Just Google around for Vista tweaks, and you'll find a number of guides that practically do all the work for you.

Over the near-10 years I've had my Ford Escort, I've taken my car to a handful of different places for service. I've taken it to the local dealer once, and regretted it - They tried to charge us for work that wasn't done (we mark all our belts, hoses, and cables with UV markers). I've had break work done at a break specialist (Midas) and regretted it - rear breaks seized up at 65MPH on the Edens, due to faulty installation. I've gotten oil changes at two different oil change specialists, and have regretted it - both forgot to reattach the front-end cowl, which ended up being scraped to hell under my car after hitting a bump. I've had mixed results from the local tire shop, who did a good job installing a set of tires and changing my oil a few times, but twice the screwed up a front-end alignment - once resulting in my car nearly flipping over while turning on the expressway.

To date, the only place that has ever done a satisfactory job, each and every time, has been D&R Autoworks in Highland Park. They fixed my car up real nice after I was rear-ended, they've fixed every screw-up that other service stations did, and are now the only place I ever take my car for service. Same holds true for my parents' cars. Even though I can get an oil change and tire rotations cheaper at other places, I just don't trust my car (and my ass, since I'm the one driving it) anywhere else. After all the other close calls and screw-ups, I can't even imagine what disaster would result, if I took my car to some another hack shop.

It's also cool that D&R is pretty conveniently located, have after-hours drop off (since my work schedule is pretty full), and have a pretty nice waiting room with free WiFi, big screen TV, coffee, and they occasionally set up a putting green. Not that I've ever had to wait very long. Their staff, particularly Dan and Brian, know their stuff and are always willing to answer my numerous questions. Any time I describe an odd noise, strange feeling, or other irregularity with my car (which happens often, since the Ford Escort's front end is so damned fragile) they pinpoint it right away and figure out how to fix it right away, since they seem to stock plenty of Ford OEM and compatible parts.

D&R Autoworks is located on 2366 Skokie Hwy., in Highland Park, IL. Call 847-433-4343 of visit drautoworks.com to schedule an appointment.

Cross-posted on my Personal LiveJournal - D&R Autoworks, Highland Park - The Only Place I Take My Car

I've set up all my non-Mac using clients with 3-button (or more) mice, for their computers, so I often remove the [X] close button from tabs in Mozilla Firefox. They've all learned to close tabs with the middle-click, so the close button becomes just a nuisance when one accidentally clicks on it when trying to access a tab. Luckily, it's a breeze to remove them from Firefox.

First step should ALWAYS be to back up your Firefox profile using MozBackup or Firefox Environment Backup Extension (FEBE) - or both. Then type about:config in the Firefox address bar. In the search bar that comes up, look for browser.tabs.closeButtons. Once it comes up, you can click on it and change the integer value to 2 to deactivate the close button on all tabs (1 seems to be the default, with all tabs showing the close button, and 0 sets it so only the active tabs has the close button).

Well, it's about time... While it's never been a huge problem for me, having only owned 5 cellular phones (3 of which sharing the same charger), I know it's been and endless source of aggravation for many other cellphone owners to try and match up chargers. When it comes to computers and machinery, I know the pains of proprietary parts, so I can at least relate to those who have struggled to figure out what charger goes with what phone or grabbing the wrong one and not realizing until it's too late to go look for the other. So, it's cool that the GSM Association and Open Mobile Terminal Platform (OMTP) group have finally agreed to implement a universal cellphone charger, among the major handset manufacturers.

And, the winner is... MicroUSB! Half the thickness of MiniUSB, featuring a stronger connection between plug and receptacle, and rated for 10,000 connect-disconnect cycles, I really like the MicroUSB over MiniUSB. Already, many phones - my Virgin Mobile TNT (Kyocera Adreno S2400), included - use MicroUSB to recharge or for data transfer. By 2012, most handsets should then feature the MicroUSB port for recharging. I can now recharge my phone from my computer or surge protectors with USB power, using a MicroUSB cable, or share a charger with 3 other people at the office (with one lone iPhone user, which will likely remain with a proprietary hookup).

Here's a gameplay trailer from the very-good game Tomb Raider Underground. I've played the PS3 version for a little more than an hour, and the Xbox 360 version for only a half hour. The 360 version was actually a lot smoother and better looking, but the PS3 was certainly no slouch and I still like the DualShock 3 more than the 360 controller, in general. The game plays really well, and I enjoy the degree of interaction with the very VERY expansive levels (at least the ones I've played and seen so far). It definitely brings back the fond memories I have of the first Tomb Raider games, and excuses the poor attempts that came later. Definitely a game I want to play more of, when (if) I ever get a 7th generation console.

I've personalized my Firefox 3 browser pretty heavily, to suit my needs at work and at home... That's why I use Firefox more than any other browser (I still use Opera fairly regularly, and IE only when absolutely necessary). However, it took a lot of work to configure each of my Firefox profiles the way I like it, and it would be a royal pain if I had to do it over from scratch. Fortunately, I'm very VERY good at backing up settings, files and directories at work and at home. Just about any important file, I back up on a weekly to hourly basis on a second slower hard drive. I have monthly archives, compressed with WinRAR with PAR2 parity files. Depending on the importance of the archives, I save the data on DVDs, portable hard drives, across other systems on a network, and/or even off-site on my FTP. As such, I always appreciate when a tool comes along that makes it easier. For backing up my Mozilla Firefox profiles, my personal favorite tool is MozBackup, by Pavel Cvrcek.

MozBackup is VERY simple to use, and thoroughly backs up bookmarks, settings, about:config tweaks, extensions, themes, history, saved passwords, auto-complete data, sidebars, cache files and other files essential to customizing Mozilla Firefox. It saves them in compressed archives, which you can easily make PAR2 parity files for, and save - no need to dig through Windows Users directories, and copying multiple profile directories. It does all the dirty work for you, when backing up your profiles. Should you need to revert to a previous configuration, or you have to reinstall, it's easy to restore from saved profiles with just a few button clicks.

This has come in real handy when migrating Mozilla Firefox to certain workstations on a network. I was able to configure one system for general browsing, for everyone at the office, and then migrate the profile to each system using MozBackup. As well, if I install an extension that is difficult to remove, or irreparably damages the browser, I was able to jump back to a clean profile in minutes. In all, MozBackup has probably saved me 4 or 5 hours, to-date - and MozBackup was totally free. What a deal!

MozBackup also works with the Thunderbird mail client, Sunbird, Flock, SeaMonkey, Netscape and portable installs of Firefox. Visit the official MozBackup webpage for more details, or for a free download.

Cross-posted to my Livejournal - MozBackup - Backup & Restore Firefox Profile Settings, Bookmarks & Extensions

I wrapped up another quick infomercial spot for a client, and was grabbing snippets for my portfolio. While looking over other clips, it occurred to me... Over half of them feature royalty free music and sound effects from Bjorn Lynne and Tommy Tallarico.

Whenever foundries have sales, I like to pick up assorted royalty free fonts, clip art, photographs, sound effects and music. Often times, I get bulk packages for $20 ~ $100, of which I'll eventually use here and there. I've never singled out a modern composer/designer before, with the sole exception of Bjorn Lynne and Tommy Tallarico (and a few loops and stingers by Emmett Cooke).

Tommy Tallarico should need no introduction to anyone who's been involved in the game industry in the last decade - He's composed music for many acclaimed games, IMO his best being Wild 9 and Earthworm Jim 1 & 2, and has had plenty of face time on G4 TV. His studio produces an invaluable volume of around 20,000 sound effects and musical stingers, for something like $400 with a discount - The SFX Kit - and was worth every penny. Unlike many other collections, this was better suited for user interfaces, web design, games, animations and videos. They're fairly unique in most fields, so you won't likely have many overlaps with other projects, unlike the BBC and DeWolfe collections whose effects I hear all the time (I hear their shotgun blast and camel sounds effect all the time).

Bjørn Lynne is fairly popular amongst us Amiga gamers, or fans of electronic dance/trance music. I bought one of my favorite CD's from him, Chris Huelsbeck's epic Turrican 1 & 2 soundtrack (back when it was still hard to get game soundtracks). I use a lot of his loops and stingers for presentations, webpages, live product demonstrations and more. Almost any good music and sound effect foundry has Bjorn Lynne's work on it.

Since I'm really REALLY not a musician... In all honesty, I don't even listen to much music. All my music comes from $5 PC speakers, or a cheap-o MP3 player. As such, I depend on high-quality royalty free composers to cover my butt. Audio is often a big, if under appreciated, part of presentation, so I depend on great composers like these.

Cross-posted on my Livejournal - Bjorn Lynne & Tommy Tallrico Royalty Free Music and Sound Effects

My favorite read is Backwoods Home Magazine, one of the best resources for off-grid and self-reliant lifestyles. They have lots of articles on construction, gardening, farming, crafts, building, and much more in a very no-frills easy-to-read manner. Even better, they have a vast archive of articles and blogs, with illustrations and photos, on their webpage. Their top contributors include the likes of firearms self-defense expert Massad Ayoob, off-grid energy independence expert Jeff Yago, and other experiences craftsmen and primitive-living gurus.

The very first article I read, and one of my favorites, was a 1997 article by J.D. Hooker, on the practical value of inexpensive Russian military surplus firearms. David Lee's guide to making a highly efficient barrel stove, and Jackie Clay's articles about building a log home are among my many favorite Backwoods Home Magazine articles I've read over the years. Backwoods Home Magazine, and their information-rich website, are both fun reads for avid outdoors people and curious city-slickers alike.

Cross-posted on my personal Livejournal - Backwoods Home Magazine - Practical Ideas For Self-Reliant Living

It's safe to say I'm fairly big into self-defense. I have decent knives stashed all over my home, car and offices. I carry a good quality quick-draw folding knife on my all the time. As well, I have a number of blunt tools which I can wield quite well.

Of them, though, the BudK Impact Baton I got last year is my favorite. For only $12.99 I got a nice collapsing steel-spring baton - 17" open, and 7" closed. It snaps right open with a flick of the wrist, has a nice heft to it, the handle texture is enough to get a good grip but doesn't hinder movement, and it packs a wallop!

I keep mine easily accessible in my car, and can quickly place it in one of my cargo or tool pockets, if I think I may need it. I treat the black-finish steel spring with some silicone to resist rust, and to make it easier to snap open.

I've had a lot of practice using batons (though recently I've taken a liking to landscaping spikes, with tape handles), and it really handles well. With the way the spring snaps, I can use it as a deterrent, for defense, or even debilitation depending on the kind of strike. Since only the handle is completely firm, it also makes the baton harder to take away from me, if I have a good grip on it. It's a little shorter than other batons, but I still like less-expensive spring-style baton over the more expensive solid-segment telescoping batons 16" ~ 21" batons. Longer or non-collapsible batons certainly have their advantages, but easy portability isn't one of them. And, if the SHTF enough that I'd consider a longer baton, I'd rather have a good ol' crowbar. If it's good enough for Gordon Freeman, it's good enough for me.

Cross-posted to my LiveJournal - Bud K Impact Baton

Except for a web browser and email client, no program gets more use in our office than ThumbsPlus Pro 7.0. We've been regularly using ThumbsPlus since version 4, and it has saved us many hours, and tons of aggrivation, with all of it's image editing and organizing features. TP 7.0 has been the best and most-stable version to-date, with support for even more image and document formats, more robust editing, and better automation.

We work with literal THOUSANDS of artwork files and web images for our customers, in many different formats. Sorting through all the different versions can be a chore, even with our intuitive naming systems. ThumbsPlus Pro 7.0 makes it easy to add keywords and IPTC info to images, so we can quickly search for them. As well, it automatically generates thumbnails of all images, for fast browsing. This makes sorting through images much more painless, than it once was before we started using ThumbsPlus. We can also generate quick contact sheets at various sizes and resolutions for print or screen viewing.

When it comes to image editing, it has many of the most important features covered - orientation, resolution, size, hue, gamma, brightness, contrast, and more. It has a number of effects like blur, sharpen, noise, etc. ThumbPlus also has automatic procedures like red-eye removal, noise & artifact cleanup, video deinterlace, lighting adjustment, tone overlays, and more. It won't replace Adobe Photoshop for complicated image manipulation, but it's perfect for more mundane tasks that don't require the more resource-hungry Photoshop.

A real time saver for our web design has been the ThumbsPlus automation tools. ThumbsPlus 7 can quickly and easily convert file formats, supporting JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TGA, TIFF, JPG2000, and more. It automates all of the different edits and procedures listed above. ThumbsPlus can also generate separate thumbnail images, and web-interactive HTML galleries.

ThumbsPlus 7.0 SP2 is available for Windows XP, 2000, 2003 and Vista. You can even try it out, before buying it. For my line of work, it was an easy decision to get a pro license for ThumbsPlus. It's saved me a lot of time and effort, and was worth every penny.

Cross-posted to my LiveJournal - ThumbsPlus Pro Image Editor & Organizer

After searching on Google, it seems a large number of blogs and forums were spammed with an automated post from iijiivei. The subject was "My Question about," and the post asked "How i may contact admin this site? I have a question."

My guess is that it's a bot trying to trick people into posting working email addresses, to cull and then sell to spammers. DO NOT give your email address out to iijiivei. In general, if you publicly post an email address, you should always post it as an image and try to obscure it a little, so most bots can't read it. Here's an example of how I obscured my email address in an image.

A human can read it just fine, but it may prove more difficult for most common bots to cull. If you're at higher risk of being spammed, you can then go even further with obscuring the email address within the graphic, to stop all but the best OCR programs out there.

Cross-posted on my LiveJournal.

Laptop computer theft has become a very common occurrence, as more and more people are taking them everywhere they go. Recently, more and more people have been able to recover stolen laptops using their wits, and software that enabled them to track the computer via IP address and even remote monitor it. There are a lot of alternatives, but I've recently taken to using Adeona - named after the Roman Goddess of Safe Return, who was said to protect and guide home children who've left their parents' home - a free open source tracking application, designed under lead Ph.D. students on the project Gabriel Maganis and Thomas Ristenpart, working with University of Washington faculty members Tadayoshi Kohno and Arvind Krishnamurthy.

After installing a very small, unobtrusive client app, the user is then given a key to later track that machine down should it go missing. On MacOS X, it enables you to activate the webcam, and take snapshots. I've tested it out on a WinXP SP3 work laptop, playing musical proxies with my laptop, and was able to determine the network each time. Behind transparent proxies, I could trace it back to the source, and was then able to login to it via Remote Administrator, giving me full control. As well, I could also activate the remote hard drive encryption lock, if I wanted to completely secure the system remotely.

While I obviously can't trace it beyond any anonymous proxies or large network firewalls (at least not without the help of law enforcement), and it's actually not that difficult to terminate the Adeona client service, generally most thefts of opportunity aren't going to be committed by IT experts. Against a savvy and determined computer criminal, no measure of security is completely infallible. However, Adeona seems more than sufficient in cases where someone swipes a laptop. Adeona, paired with other remote security applications (Radmin, No-IP, Bitlocker Remote, Guardian Edge, etc.) and good system security practices (AES encrypting, and regularly backing up valuable software), make a formidable tool in protecting and recovering a stolen laptop.

Cross posted on my Personal LiveJournal - Adeona Free Open Source Laptop Tracking

I saw an ad on TV a few days back for Fancast.com (a product of Comcast, my cable and internet provider), touting access to numerous tv shows available streaming for play anytime. Most of the times I decide hit such video hosting and video aggregation sites, it's loaded with garbage shows from the murky depths of cable TV and reality TV, and has nothing of interest to me. But, I had some time to kill this weekend, so I gave it the benefit of the doubt, and checked it out... Man, was I pleasantly surprised!

Fancast.com has hours and hours of programing, including many recent shows I regular watch, including Kitchen Nightmares, CSI, CSI: NY, Burn Notice, In Plain Sight, Psych, Monk, DEA, Cops, Heroes, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and more. I was able to catch up on episodes I've missed, in the past, and re-watch some favorites (I had to re-watch some of the worst of Kitchen Nightmares, including the Sebastian's train wreck episode).

Even better, they have TONS of classic TV shows that I enjoy - Hawaii Five-O, Perry Mason, Adam-12, MacGyver, Airwolf, The Pretender, the original I Spy, Twin Peaks, Hill Street Blues, Knight Rider, The Incredible Hulk, The A-Team, Emergency!, the original 1952~1969 Dragnet, the 2003 reboot of Dragnet, Peacemakers, Kojak and tons more.

Providing the original content providers doesn't change, that's months and months of watching for me, and what little free time I have to enjoy. As well, the FLV videos are pretty decent quality, even in full-screen mode, and have limited commercial interruptions - generally only 10 ~ 15 seconds per break. I spent most of today backing up my computers at work and home, and leisurely watching episodes of Hawaii Five-O (they have over 50 episodes from 1968~1970). I've been calling my cat "Danno," all afternoon, to which she just stares at me like I'm insane. Thanks, Fancast.com!
Cross-posted on my LiveJournal - Hours and Hours of Free TV Programming, Streaming At Fancast.com

I've been running Windows Vista ReadyBoost on my laptop, with a fairly decent 1GB USB flash drive, for a few weeks. It did speed the startup of my most commonly-used applications (ThumbsPlus, Illustrator, Firefox, Remote Administrator, OpenOffice Writer and WinRAR), though only marginally. I didn't notice much at first, but my timer doesn't lie, stuff was a second or more faster to open.

Last week, there was a great deal on a name-brand 2GB 150x SD card. It's a bigger / faster drive on a faster bus, a smaller form factor, and I get a USB port back for only $30. Yay, TigerDirect!

I configured the whole 1.8GB active volume on the SD card for ReadyBoost... And, you know what? It actually did bump things up a little bit more. Again, it's not a huge leap in performance, but every little bit helps. It even boosted the score of my Windows Experience Index disk rating, presumably because my hard drive isn't working as hard as a SuperFetch scratch disk. Well, I'm guessing. I admit, I don't really know the nitty-gritty of ReadyBoost, though one can read up more on Tom Archer's blog entry, featuring Microsoft Windows Client Performance Program Manager Program Manager Matt Ayers.

Cross-posted on my LiveJournal - Microsoft Windows Vista ReadyBoost

Type III parachute cord, aka 550 cord (after it's 550lbs. minimum breaking strength) or paracord, is great stuff. Lightweight nylon kernmantle rope, which was originally used in the suspension lines of parachutes, can be used in all kinds of situations... Lashing things together, hanging things, binding feet for climbing trees, wrapping around handles for extra grip, restraining someone, pulling apart the kern for sewing or fishing, making traps, as line for a shelter, as an improvised weapon, as an emergency torch (it burns slowly) and probably thousands of other ideas.

I always keep 3' of braided paracord in my back pocket, have 50' in my car, 30' in my bug-out bag, and 10' hanks at work and in my room. If I plan on hitting the trails, I might wrap an extra 10' around my waist, as well as what I have in my pack. Braiding it is a great way to save space, and avoid tangles, but a little time consuming for all but a few feet at a time. Luckily, Tough Gear Inc. sells several really neat braided-paracord accessories at SurvivalStraps.com. They have rifle slings, bracelets, zipper-pulls, key fobs, watch bands, dog collars, and other useful designs that have the added benefit of being several feet of paracord that can be used in an emergency. They also donate a portion of their profits to the Wounded Warrior Project.

Cross-posted on my LiveJournal - SurvivalStraps.com.

Although I'm a pretty low-risk internet user - no P2P, no alt.binaries.*, no warez, and I run a myriad of real-time security and antispyware apps - I'm still very cautious when I receive files from users. I've seen a lot of people do a lot of stupid things, so I don't trust any file that was sent to me. In particular, I've gotten Word DOC files from clients that had malicious scripts embedded in them, that I'm sure the sender was unaware of (they're too green to have knowingly attached 'em). So, when I get a file sent to me, it first has to pass my primary real-time antivirus - Avast Profession Edition. When I save it, it's scanned again as it's written to my HD. As a final precaution, I rely on the free VirusTotal.com file scan.

What sets it apart from other scanners is that Hispasec Sistemas' VirusTotal service incorporates over 30 different computer virus scanning engines in one. Featuring some esteemed engines like F-Secure, Avira AntiVir, Kaspersky, TrendMicro, BitDefender, GData, Sophos, Avast, AVG and more, it improves your odds of determining if a file is safe or not. You can upload the files via their web interface, install their Windows context menu uploader, or email suspect files to scan@virustotal.com (under 10MB, subject "SCAN"). While nothing is foolproof, I figure getting the opinion of over 30 up-to-date antivirus engines oughtta yield better odds than just one engine.

Cross-posted on my personal LiveJournal - VirusTotal Review. Yup.

I'm a big advocate of backing up sensitive data and configurations... Okay, honestly, I'm probably a little OCD about it (at work, they call it eOCD. Regardless, I've never lost any vital data, and any time I have to reinstall a system, it's often a piece of cake.

My install of Firefox 3.0.1 is pretty heavily customized, from search engines, specialty character encoding, proxy-bank switching, bookmarks, and dozens of sweet add-ons. As such, I regularly backup my profiles folder. I copy it, archive it using WinZip, and make parity files. Although my data is safe, and I can recover it. But I'll have to shut down Firefox in order to back it up, which isn't always easy while I'm working, and although I can copy the configuration files I often have to re-install the extensions from scratch. Chuck Baker's Firefox Environment Backup Extension (a.k.a. FEBE) makes it a lot easier to automatically backup, and later reinstall, all facets of Firefox.

With a few simple mouse-clicks, you can back everything up without even shutting down Firefox. You can configure what is and isn't backed up, and where it's backed up (allowing you to later archive the data). Best of all, you can schedule automatic backups. Then, when you need to reinstall, or if you want to migrate your configuration to another system, you can install FEBE and run a restore, easy-peasy. So far, it's worked great in my tests, and duplicating my Firefox configuration between work and home PCs.

I'll still do manual backups, but I can do so a little less frequently, knowing FEBE is taking up all of the slack. And, best of all, it a free add-on to Firefox, available here. If you use FEBE, and find it as useful as I have, be sure to give a small donation to Chuck Baker for his great Firefox Environment Backup Extension (link at the bottom of his page).

Cross posted on my personal LiveJournal - FEBE Review. Wow.

Somehow, three of my computers running Win2000 SP4 and one running WinXP SP3 all lost the capability to print emails from MS Outlook and Outlook Express. When one tried to print, before the usual print interface comes up, I would get a Line 1344 Script Error.

I Googled around, and found that some registry lines must have been deleted during an update, or while running maintenance (perhaps a CCleaner registry scrub). Several of the posts had ideas, but nothing solid. I finally found a post by hedgemon56, that detailed what registry entries had to be added in, in order to fix the problem. Instead of using RegEdit (redgedt32.exe) to manually add in the appropriate keys and values, I copied all the entries and pasted them into Notepad. I saved them as a REG file, right-clicked on the file, and then merged the keys into the existing registry - quick and easy!

Anyone who experiences this same line 1344 script error, printing in Outlook or Outlook Express, can try the same steps... Download this ZIP compressed file. Extract the REG file somewhere on your system. Right-click on the REG file, and select "Merge" to merge it with the existing registry. It worked instantaneously for me, without having to reset the system or even restart Outlook Express.

In most places, fire extinguishers are prevalent, yet often go unseen by most people. The concept of a fire extinguisher is simple, and yet I've experienced many people who don't know how to use one safely and/or effectively. The first Tuesday of every month, I inspect all the fire extinguishers I own, as well as at my main clients' office. While I made my rounds, my boss mentioned he had a close call a few weeks ago, where a short circuit in a faulty GFCI (ground fault circuit interrupter - i.e., those electrical sockets with the red and black buttons) started smoldering at one of his construction projects, and he couldn't get the fire extinguisher to work. It started a small fire before the power was cut, but they were able to quickly smother it. He asked about it, and I figured he made the same mistake that a lot of people make - trying to pull the pin, while holding the handle.

IMO, it's a design fault that when holding many fire extinguishers by the handle, it pinches the pin and makes it difficult or impossible to pull. This is magnified when panic sets in, and people death-grip the handles, holding the pin in place like a vice. Maybe there's a sound reason for this design, but really I can't figure it out. There are documented cases of victims killed in fires being found clutching fully-charged extinguishers with the pin still in, presumably due to this design issue.

The way I've always been trained, and the way I trained others (my boss isn't at the office much, and must have missed my drills) is to place the extinguisher on the ground first, brace the cylinder with your left hand, and finally pull the pin with the right hand. Once the pin is extracted, you then lift the extinguisher with your right hand, extend the hose with your left (or brace the cylinder if there is no hose), and aim at the base of the fire. Finally, squeeze the trigger and then sweep back and forth until the fire is out. When a fire extinguisher has been discharged, protocol is to lay it on its side so others know it has been used (particularly helpful for rescuers).

Lately, I've been seeing good deals on Kidde "Full Home" 3-A:40-B:C fire extinguishers, which are suitable for homes, small offices, kitchens, small garages, and small work areas. I picked up several of them (shown above-right), and the really sleek sliver Kidde "Electronics" 1-A:10-B:C (shown left) fire extinguishers for pretty cheap. It's cool I can afford a bigger 1-A:10-B:C extinguisher for my car, for the price of most bare-minimum 1-A:5-B:C extinguishers at other stores. Chances are, they'll all go a whole decade unused before I replace them, but it's good to have them around if/when sλit happens.

If you're curious, bored, or genuinely want to know (dying in a fire probably isn't much fun) you can learn truckloads more at FireExtinguisher.com. They feature animations about how to inspect fire extinguishers, how to identify the different types of fires, how to effectively use extinguishers, what the rating codes mean and more. Finally, an all-Flash webpage that I actually like!

Cross posted on my personal LiveJournal - Fire Extinguishers. Yeah.

I'm in a pretty good mood today, and I owe it all to something so simple... Edamame (枝豆)! and I had tuna sammiches, curly fries, and Target's house brand steam-in-bag edamame. Everything was good, but the Target brand edamame was particularly good. Compared to fresh edamame from Mitsuwa, local grocery stores, and one of the Japanese restaurants my family and I used to go to - it was probably the freshest I've had. Best of all, they were pretty cheap, too. I love my neighborhood Super Target! They have some of the best grocery prices in the area.

I've been buzzing-happy about it since last night. I'm a simple creature, like that... Really basic stuff like good food and playing with pets is all it takes to cheer me up, and put me in a good mood. It probably doesn't hurt that edamame is particularly healthy, and is shown to help regulate mood by keeping blood-sugar levels steady and providing omega-3 fatty acids.

Edamame are just humble soybeans that haven't fully ripened, which are cooked in the pod and sometimes marinated or flavored. Methods vary, but you generally just pop the beans out of the pod into your mouth to eat. They are super rich in fiber, carbohydrates, protein, omega-3 fatty acids, vitamin A, vitamin B and calcium. The USDA recognizes it as one of the healthiest snacks you can indulge in. Nice!.

# posted by Peter Staack : 5:12 PM  0 Comments

One of my customers has a shiny fancy notebook / tablet style laptop PC, running Windows Vista Home Premium. It's got all the bells and whistles you'd expect of an expensive laptop. And, for the 4th time since he's bought it, I've had to resurrect it from seeming death.

He's like the grim reaper of electronics, with a history of bricking all sorts of computers, meters, cameras, and phones. Despite running the award winning top-ranked anti-virus, Avira AntiVir 8, the award winning Comodo Firewall, and all of the Vista security features, he's still managed to catch some nasty viruses (or "virii", if you prefer). He's gotten better about disabling security features and disregarding security warnings, and it's been almost 3 months since the last near-FUBAR. But today his laptop would freeze just past POST and prelim boot loader, and he needs it working for a meeting this weekend.

Luckily, I had a FREE Avira AntiVir Rescue CD handy, to purge the system of whatever virus was causing the problems in a few minutes (his hard drive is pretty empty). I have two or three of these CDs at every one of my offices, at my parents' house, and my condo (most as current as June '08). So far, it's been a silver bullet, never failing to find and remove the malicious files. Then, I used a Vista SP1 System Recovery / Rescue Disk that I had built the last time he had problems, and we were able to boot 'er up like new. Now, I'm running a deep scan using the award-winning Kaspersky Lab's Free Virus Scan just to be safe. I might also run the free Avast Home Edition on there, too, if I have time to spare. Although it's a little disturbing how frequently I've had to rescue his system from himself, at least it's been really easy each time with the right tools.

If you want to build your own Vista SP1 System Rescue / Recover CD, you can follow these quick steps to build one. There is also a 120MB downloadable ISO available, that works well.

Trackmania Nations Forever is available for free on Steam... As a long-time fan of the 4D Stunts DOS game, I enjoy Trackmania's wild arcade-feel stunt and speed racing. Especially love all the gravity-defying loops, jumps, wall climbs, and other impossible odds at break-neck speeds. However, last night (or rather early this morning) I think I played a little too much, and everything around me started looking like a a racetrack. I was analyzing how I could cut the corner into my kitchen to save a thousandth of a second, I though of putting a ramp up my stairs, and when I was checking my email before going to bed...

˙ʇɐɔ ʎɯ ɹǝʌo dɯnɾ ƃuıʎɟǝp-ɥʇɐǝp ɐ ǝɹoɟǝq ʇou ʇnq 'ʇɥƃıu ɐ ʇı pǝllɐɔ ı uǝɥʍ s,ʇɐɥʇ
˙sǝʎǝ ɹood ʎɯ ɹoɟ ʎzɐɹɔ ooʇ ǝlʇʇıl ɐ puɐ 'uʍop-ǝpısdn 'ƃuıdool-ʎpǝdool sɐʍ ʇxǝʇ ǝɥʇ llɐ˙˙˙

Not surprisingly, I had dreams of doing barrel rolls and jumps over blimps in my little Ford Escort. Hah... Usually it only takes one medium sized pothole, and I need front-end realignment on that thing. I can't even imagine the damage an airborne 540° would do to it.

Weird mental effects aside, It's just such an incredibly fun game! It's one of the easiest games to start playing, but takes lots of practice to improve your time and start winning medals. the minimum specs are really low, too, so it'll run silky smooth on any system built in the last 5 or so years. The online games are fun, too, if multiplayer is your thing (it's not really mine). And, come one... It's FREE!

I received a Maxtor OneTouch III Mini Edition 160GB USB 2.0 portable hard drive, featuring a 2.5" disk, on my birthday a while back. My dad managed to get a pair of them (one for him, one for me) for a pretty good deal. While I already have several portable hard drives, including a very high-end SCSI portable and several mid-to-high-range 3.5" disk-based USB 2.0 / FireWire / eSATA drives, this tiny Maxtor has quickly become my favorite portable drive.

My other "portable" drives are really just external drives that I -could- move around, but don't. They're big, they're heavy, most are fragile (since the drives inside were intended to mounted in a PC case), and they require an external power supply. Each one of the wall-warts weigh as much as the disk itself, and as luck would have it, the power for all of my computers are hard to access. Generally, I use them for archival storage or redundant backup (I keep them in a fire safe, when not in use), but avoid moving them around any more than necessary.

The Maxtor OneTouch III Mini is small, lightweight, and - best of all - doesn't require an external power supply. It draws all the necessary power from USB, which is great! The whole package fits perfectly in a spare impact-resistant 5m waterproof clamshell carrying case I had sitting around, so I can carry it around anywhere I damn well please. The 2.5" disk inside is a hearty notebook drive, so it's more resistant to shock (even though I'm very careful the drive, it makes me feel better knowing). It runs cooler than any of my other external drives, and doesn't require a fan. It quickly and effortlessly mounts on all of my Windows 2000, NT 4 (with hacked USB drivers), and XP Pro workstations and our RHEL ES server. Vista and MacOS X had no problems either, mounting them in seconds.

Out of the box, it performed pretty good against comparably priced 2.5" portable drives. After tweaking it, the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini runs circles around my boss' Ultra Disk2Go drive. I mean, it kicks the dirt out of it in benchmark tests!

I reformatted it as NTFS, I upped the cluster size to 32Kb (I don't save many small files to it), I slightly increased the size of the MFT (Master File Table), I moved the MFT back on the disk to give it more room to expand, I disabled short file names, I disabled "last accessed" writing, native NTFS compression was disabled by the new cluster size (which is fine, since I rely on WinRAR with PAR2 parity files for safe and effective compression), I disabled file indexing, and I defragment the drive with PerfectDisk 8.0 as needed (though PD needs an update to defrag cluster sizes larger than 4Kb).

Property tweaked, I get sequential read/write speeds near my top-of-the-line external hard disk drive. Random read/writes are respectable, and only slightly slower than the 3.5" disks - but most of my operations are moving large WinRAR archives, so it's a non-issue. It's plenty fast that I could run simple apps from it (though I don't), stream media from it, and I can run real-time Triple-DES and AES-Twofish-Serpent encryption on it using the wonderful (and free) TrueCrypt encryption application.

I haven't tried the pack-in software... Honestly, I never use pack-in software. There's almost always a better 3rd party application out there (frequently for free). Still, from the reviews I've read, the pack-in software does work as advertised.

Even at regular store prices, cost-per-gigabyte, the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini is pretty reasonable. It costs much less per GB than higher-end 2.5" drives, with comparable speeds, and significantly less than large T1 non-volatile flash memory drives. It's a few pennies more expensive per GB than the 3.5" drives, but makes up for it by being far smaller and more easily portable, without the need for a fan or having to carry a bulky external power supply. In short, the Maxtor OneTouch III Mini is everything I want in a portable hard drive, and I use it daily.

Vantage Apparel Style# 1835 Polynosic Herringbone Shirt

Polynosic material is a highly-refined long-fiber blend of polyester and high wet modulus rayon viscose (aka HWM Rayon, known for it's high strength when wet) with a silky feel and luster that is popular in high-end clothing, bedding and even a flexible insulator for electrical cables. It wicks moisture from the wearer, giving it a nice cool feeling on the skin. It's machine washable, resisting color fading, shrinking and wrinkles - and is generally cheaper than real silk.

I have one polynosic long-sleeve oxford that I almost never wear, since there's a lot of dirty work among all my duties... But, without a doubt, it is one of the most comfortable dress shirts I own. It takes embroidery reasonably well, for such a supple material. Only a handful of my suppliers have polynosic shirts, but they're starting to catch on in popularity and are showing up in more and more department stores.

Quick polynosic care tip: To further prevent wrinkles (they already go a good job), machine wash cold with just a little detergent. Then lightly dry for 30~40 minutes (depending on dryer) until they are only slightly damp, then hang to dry. In general, I do this with all my office shirts, and they retain their colorfastness, resist shrinking and don't require ironing like they did before I started washing like this.

It's been almost a full day now, since loading the official release of Firefox 3 on my laptop (Vista Home Premium) and office desktop (Win2000). All of my webpage designs are rendering exactly how I want them, with a few bonuses that previously only worked in IE and Opera. As well, all of the pages I frequently visit are rendering perfectly.

2/3rds of the extensions I had loaded are still supported by Firefox 3. The ones that aren't supported were discontinued because 3.0 natively supports those features - with the exception of "Copy Plain Text." Hopefully that'll be updated, soon, as I hate copying text formatting. The improved Zoom feature works great, too. I've also noticed that after a whole day of regular browsing, Firefox 3.0 isn't hogging up as much memory as the previous version did. I usually had to reset Firefox a few times during the day, but so far I haven't had to reset once. I was also pleasantly surprised how easy it was to migrate over my bookmarks, quick search and settings. Actually, it did most of the work for me (I only had to import bookmarks from my backup).

I've got my fingers crossed that Firefox 3.0 continues to work well. It's rare that I upgrade hardware or software upon release, since I often like to wait until the first few patches and updates roll out, but Firefox 3.0 really sounded good.

Also, in other news, I managed to crash my new Vista Home Premium laptop for the first time... Whodunit? I had to use Internet Explorer 7 to test a new design. While testing, I followed a link to a friend's DevArt page, and BAM!! ...the screen flickered, and the system froze. I had to hard-power off the system. That strengthens my resolve to almost NEVER use Internet Explorer ever again, unless otherwise forced to.

I've had my new Toshiba Satellite laptop, running Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium, for several months now. After uninstalling a ton of unwanted glut (most-importantly IE7), adding my personal favorite apps (particularly Avast 4.8 Pro & Firefox 2), and a whole slew of registry tweaks, I have to admit... I really like Vista!

Even after years of tweaks and 3 service packs, I never got XP to run the way I wanted it. I was always having to reconfigure or restore the OS, and many apps that wound up corrupted in some fashion. That's why I stuck with Windows 2000 Professional for so long, and skipped XP in all but two company laptops that had it pre-loaded. It still took 2 ~ 3 weeks of trimming and reshaping to get Vista running the way I liked it, but at present it has exceeded my expectations by leaps and bounds.

I was able to talk our CEO into letting me upgrade to Photoshop CS3 (I've had Illustrator CS3 for a while, but only PS7) and it sings on Vista, especially when multi-tasking. The only weak link in the system is that Firefox 2 is still a memory hog, but I hear good things about Firefox 3 plugging a lot of leaks. In the mean time, I have Opera, which works great.

Windows 2000 will still remain my primary OS for my existing home and office workstations, but I now have no reservations getting Windows Vista along with it - especially since I documented all the trims and tweaks I made.

An old mountain-man trick, when your homestead was being invaded by ants, was to plant a perimeter of mint (being sure to use a barrier to keep mint from overgrowing into the yard). Ants simply hate mint, and avoid crossing through any patches. Mint oil not only kills ants upon contact (it overwhelms their senses and invades their spiracles so they quickly suffocate), but it both neutralizes pheromone trails left by scout ants and repels other ants in the area. As well, a smear of mint oil in key spots in the home can help keep ants at bay.

Over the last year, I've been using Victor Poison-Free Aerosol Ant & Roach Spray. The ingredients are pure mentha arvensis (corn mint) oil, sodium lauryl sulfate (a mild surficant used in shampoo and soap), water and CO2 propellant. It's all edible ingredients, safe for people and pets (including cats, as corn mint oil is phenol-free, unlike other essential oils linked to insect repellents). While not everyone likes the scent, I'm quite fond of it. And, really, anything is better than those nasty poison sprays. Best of all, the stuff WORKS GREAT! It kills ants in seconds, when directly sprayed, and works for weeks to repel other ants when sprayed near entry points. One of my main clients work in a large basement office, where ants were a problem. In the year + we've been using the spray, there have been no more problems with ants. I genuinely haven't seen an ant anywhere in my office, since spraying all the corners and hanging-ceiling tiles.

Although it doesn't harm cats, I've also noticed office cats stay away from places that were sprayed, so it's nice not having them crawling around behind the desks and tangling up all the cables. It also doesn't discolor painted, finished or carpeted areas. It took us 9 months to go through one can of the stuff, so it's pretty economical. Victor Poison-Free Aerosol Ant & Roach Spray definitely gets my thumbs-up.

Alternatively, there's a spray that has rosemary oil or eucalyptus oils as their base, which also work well. They each have their own particular scent, so you have other alternatives if mint isn't to your liking.

I never through I'd love a cat litter, but this stuff is freakin' magic in a bag.

Feline Pine Cat Litter is the dream litter I've been waiting 20+ years for. I've always adored cats, and my folks have generally had at least one cat at any time. As a sort of nature-freak, I've never been squeamish around animal scat, but I hated cleaning my cats' litter... because I HATE CLAY LITTER!! The silica dust makes me sneeze like hell, and I can't imagine it's all that healthy to be breathing. The weird, and totally ineffective, "odor neutralizers" that manufacturers add to the litter also smells worse than the cat poop it tries to mask up. It smells like embalming fluid, and probably isn't all too healthy, either. But, for a long time, that was the only alternative. The crystal litters started becoming popular, but even that stuff isn't all that great for similar reasons. Fast-forward to 2006, I finally get a kitty of my own... A great breed of cat that I paid a lot of money for. I'll be damned if my cat and I have to deal with lousy cat litter, so when I saw Feline Pine at Target (on sale, too) I figured I'd give it a shot.

This stuff KICKS ASS. Feline Pine cat litter is extruded pine pellets with a loose natural binding. So damn simple, but really effective. There is no dust at all when I pour it into the litter box, or when the kitty scratches at it. There's no smell of death from it. It just smells like pine, which my inner-lumberjack enjoys. The pine absorbs kitty-pee on contact, and neutralizes the smell. I can't smell any cat urine, even after 2 weeks. Cleaning up feces is simple. Very little litter is lost when scooping, and it breaks down quickly so it flushes easily.

I'm sure it seems kinda lame that I'm so stoked about cat litter, but considering I've been scooping cat litter several times a day for a good portion of my life, I can't help it. And, it's better for my cat, that crappy old-school litter. I'll take a bullet for my kitty, so at the very least I oughtta be pleased with this stuff. Feline Pine gets my highest (if a little crazy) praise.

Fun Trivia - This stuff makes a good good mulch for gardens, and can be used as an alternative fuel in a pellet stove, in a pinch.

At work, we have a whole bank of Hewlett Packard Laserjet 4+ printers. These babies are the workhorses of the business. All orders, documents and the smaller product instruction sheets run through them. We get our refill toner in bulk from a local guy, so we can reuse toner/drum cartridges over and over until the drum gets worn out, and print quality declines. In the past, we would then replace the cartridge with another compatible unit in the $30 range. Not a bad deal, but now I'm reconditioning the old carts with a new RX-023OPC Photo-Optic Drum, dumping the waste toner, and cleaning it. It's cheaper, it's pretty easy, and it keeps our trash volume down (the city actually weighs our garbage and bills us if we go over our limit). We've been using the ReChargX™ replacement drums since 2006, and the print quality and lifespan have been excellent over an expected duty cycle.

We also use ReChargX™ refill toner for our Brother MFC-8500, which has been kind of picky when it comes to toner grades. Good stuff. The fax/printer works just fine, and it's a lot cheaper than buying toner from Brother.

TonerRefillKits.com has always delivered quickly, and we've never had a problem with their merchandise. Good company to consider when you need toner or certain accessories for laser printers.

I have been getting parts from Precision Roller for years now, mostly for our Konica 1212 workhorse copier. They consistently have the best prices for OEM and compatible parts, as well as a great selection. Recently the entire fuser assembly of our Konica 1212 needed to be rebuilt (it had gone years without any problems). The upper fuser roller's PTFE coating finally crapped out, and a piece of paper was cooked entirely around the roller. The lower pressure roller, the clearing roller, several of the wires, and a picker finger all needed to be replaced. I also figured I'd replace the toner recover blade.

No big surprise to me, Precision Roller had them all in stock (some OEM some compatible), and were the cheapest... several parts, they were cheaper by half the price. The parts arrived neatly packed in a timely fashion, and we had the ol' Konica 1212 spitting out copies in less than an hour. Over the years, we've had to do a lot of maintenance on this copier, due to the high volume of copies we produce. If it weren't for Precision Roller's awesome prices, we probably would have just replaced the entire copier by now. but, since we can regularly maintain it with low-priced replacement parts, we've been able to save money using a copier we've come to appreciate (the 1212 is so freakin' easy, even our CEO can use all it's features). Their prices for toner for copiers (always shop around for printer toner) are also really good. I also got my StrapLite from them, which I seem to have become famous for.

As mentioned in my testimonial for Precision Roller, I got a handy little doodad from them as a gift, the StrapLite. Except when I'm at home, taking it easy, I'm pretty much always wearing mine. Regularly affixed to my belt, it can pretty much be strapped to anything, for easy use. What exactly is it? It's damn simple, but works so well... It holds your Mini Maglite^® or other compatible AA flashlight with a versatile Velco strap, which you can either draw to use or turn on while still in the rugged holster. This means you always have a flashlight easily accessible, or you can have hands-free directional light. It can be strapped to your arm, to a headband, a belt (which I often do), to your bicycle, a tent pole, any handle on your car, a shovel, extendable poles for long reach, many camcorders... hell, I think you get the idea.

It's a really great tool for anyone who works on equipment, does regular inspections, outdoors activities, emergencies or for weirdos like me who just can't bear to have at least 2 sources of light at any given time (at home, I have literally dozens of different lights). They're only $15 at PrecisionRoller.com.

I got three very big projects done over the weekend (only sleeping 4 hours total), which should pay well. So, to treat myself (something I rarely do) I ordered myself a few knives, tools and a nice collapsible baton from BudK at a great price, since they were having a special (sign up for their email specials for details). I also got myself an AWESOME deal on Magnum Phantom V-Lite 8" Side Zip Boot.. Regularly $110, they are on clearance for only $40!! They are some bad-ass S.W.A.T. operator style boots, offering heavy-duty support and easy zip-on / zip-off. LA Police Gear frequently has fantastic deals on boots and other tactical gear, but this is one of the best deals I've seen. Lucky me!

I've recently mailed in my application for the BATFE Curio & Relic Collectors License. With my pristine background, I should likely get it - hopefully sooner than later - and I aim to purchase a ČZ vz. 82 semi-auto pistol. Shortly after, if I have the funds, I'm also gonna pounce on a Swiss K31 carbine, before they disappear. An SKS and Mosin Nagant can wait a little, since they still aren't too scarce. Both are hearty military surplus firearms known for good reliability, and pretty good accuracy (for their price). While 9x18mm can be had pretty cheap, still, 7.5x55mm Swiss is kind of pricey - but I really don't plan to plink with the K31. I'll have a Simonov or Kalashnikov for plinking sooner or later (or even a Ruger 10/22 if a deal falls in my lap). I'll eventually be reloading ammo, since the price of virgin ammo is getting out of control, I won't be reloading any time soon, 'till I move out of the condo.

Last Sunday, April 6th 2008, I went to the Pioneer Valley Sportsman's Association Gun Show at the DuPage County Fairgrounds in Wheaton, Illinois. Since the giant Lake County Gun Show was killed in 2000 by Grayslake Communist Mayor Pat Carey, it's been the only gun show that's within a reasonable distance from me. It's a modest little gun show with a very laid-back and friendly attitude (a lot of old-timers and hunters, without any super-macho showboat attitude), that features a fair variety of firearms, tools, books, hunting & fishing equipment, memorabilia, and accessories. At the show, I ran into Chris Arnold, who was demonstrating his product - NanoLube™.

I'm generally very skeptical of any product, and particularly dubious of any "miracle products." I've seen demonstrations of other supposed "nanolubricants" (mechanical lubricants depending on nanoid particles to reduce friction, instead of traditional liquid chemical lubricants) and wasn't very impressed. They operated as well as any commercial oil I've used. One product I tested at a MedTrade show actually increased friction on a scooter I tested it on (the wheel moved like mud, and it scoured the bearings). As such, I've depended on the usual lubricating products - WD40 for penetration and water displacement, silicone spray for water protection and use on some high-density plastic parts, PTFE spray for plastics and rubber, graphite for high or low temperature equipment, and medium-to-high viscosity oil for general lubrication. That's how it's been for generations, on both sides of my family.

Chris had noticed I was carrying a pocket knife, and offered a free demonstration of NanoLube™ on it. I daily carry a really nice spring-assisted liner lock folding knife, that my roommate, Crystal, bought for me at the last show. With minimal effort, it quickly snaps open with authority. I've tweaked the action on the knife, and I clean it daily, regularly treating it with good ol' Hoppe's Lubricating Oil - and it performs marvelously. Chris casually described how his NanoLube™ features 4nm spherical synthetic diamonds, which his literature calls Non Detonation NanoDiamond™ (or NDN™), suspended in natural or synthetic oils. I figured I'd let him give it a shot... I figured, if it worked as well as any other oil, that's fine. And if it doesn't work, I could remove it the next time I cleaned my knife.

Initially, the action on the knife felt as good as it ever has. It's always had an almost-imperceptible catch right upon release, that you can just barely feel and hear. After the first 5-or-so flips, though, it actually went away. I slowly cammed the knife, and the little catch was definitely gone. Throughout the day, I kept checking it, and the knife's action genuinely felt improved. Today, a full week later, it continues to move silky-smooth. Upon inspection (yeah, I inspect my knives weekly... I'm crazy like that) there wasn't ANY debris in the suspension. Normally, after a weeks usage, there's going to be at least some debris in the oil (generally, that's how oil works, it lubricates until it becomes saturated with particles, and needs replacement). It looks like NanoLube™ is the real deal!

My boss, and a few of my clients, are real gearheads. I've passed on the literature to them, and they seem genuinely interested (mainly because I never get excited about a product, unless it really works). I'd like to see how NanoLube™ performs on my boss' model trains, cars and scooters. If he likes it, I wouldn't be surprised if he stocks up on the stuff for treating some of the medical products we sell (which will be nice, because I'll have access to it). I bet this stuff will be great for a wheelchair, or an assistive lift.
Anyone interested, can check out Chris Arnold's NanoLube™ webpage to read up on the product, or order some to try. Once I start fishing, shooting or trekking more, I'll be sure to pick some up. In the mean time, I'll keep testing in on my knife (which gets a LOT of usage).

Monotype's Arial, or Arial MT, or Sonoran San Serif some old-school designers... I use this font more than any other font in my advertisements, user interfaces and layouts. As well, I see it regularly used in the works of hundreds of others. Based on Monotype's Grotesque, it has become the most common Haas/Linotype's Helvetica knock-off thanks to it's default inclusion in most popular computer operating systems, and being one of the 10 core web fonts. The latest OTF version of Arial describes itself, through its embedded description, as...

"Contemporary sans serif design, Arial contains more humanist characteristics than many of its predecessors and as such is more in tune with the mood of the last decades of the twentieth century. The overall treatment of curves is softer and fuller than in most industrial style sans serif faces. Terminal strokes are cut on the diagonal which helps to give the face a less mechanical appearance. Arial is an extremely versatile family of typefaces which can be used with equal success for text setting in reports, presentations, magazines etc, and for display use in newspapers, advertising and promotions."

"When in doubt, use Helvetica" was one of the first lessons in page layout I was ever taught. Back when Apple and Adobe were the shiznit tag-team of design, and PostScript was the de facto page description king, I depended on Helvetica quite often. When PostScript started to wane in popularity to the numerous clones and fledgling standards, right at the end of the 1980's and in the beginning of the 1990's, Monotype's Arial started to make more and more appearances. Because Arial shared so many characteristics of Helvetica (it's essentially a paraphrasing of Helvetica), Arial became a common replacement for Helvetica in these standards. Many people who thought they were printing Helvetica were unknowingly printing Arial, and only a trained eye could tell the difference.

Microsoft's popularity was skyrocketing (at the time an Intel PC running the reliable Windows NT 3.5 kernel was 1/2 the cost of a comparable Mac, and AMD and Cyrix PCs almost 1/3rd the cost), so their adoption of TrueType (ironically designed by Apple) - including the less-expensive Arial fonts - was a big deal. As Windows OSes took over the marketplace, Arial tagged along as the #1 Helvetica substitute for casual home users. For these new casual designers using Windows, the tagline has since became "When in doubt, use Arial."

There's still a lot of designers that look down their noses at Arial. It is, after all, a modified knock-off of one of the most widely used and revered sans-serif typefaces. Despite that, I've always felt it was an improvement. To me, Arial is a nicer, more organic looking font than Helvetica. For people with poor eyesight (which makes up a majority of the markets I design for), it's undeniably one of the best fonts in terms of legibility. Arial is also a target for anti-Microsoft zealotry, since it rode MS's coattails to popularity.

Love it or hate it, Arial is everywhere - and is probably sticking around for quite some time to come.

So far Ron Paul is standing out as my favorite pick for the '08 election, despite his lagging in polls worrying me that he won't pick up the Republican nomination. I don't see eye-to-eye with him on every policy (I never do, since I'm so widely spread across the political spectrum), but his strong adherence to the Constitution - especially the 2nd Amendment, his paring of wasteful federal government agencies and needless bureaucracies, support of steep tax reforms and focus on tougher border patrol is pretty cool by me.

I'm still not clear on his views on foreign affairs, since his vote for "non-intervention" in '02 doesn't jive with his support of military force against terrorism in '01 (though just about everyone is guilty of knee-jerk reactions immediately after 09/11/01), and I'm really not on the anti-abortion bandwagon. Still, I share more similar political views with Ron Paul than any candidate so far.

Yeah, I've never liked a candidate very much, to date (even before I could vote), and all of the candidates I would back was just the "lesser evil" in my opinion, since the guy who got the party nod has always been too extremely to the left or right. For instance, I supported Reagan, Bush, Dole and W only because I disliked Mondale, Dukakis, Perot, Kerry more. I really REALLY dislike Gore and Lieberman, and I was surprisingly indifferent about Bill Clinton. But, to date, my vote has been had by simply being less of an extremist anti-Constitutional douchebag than the other candidate.

Although I'm presently not 100% thrilled with Paul, but he's way WAY ahead of any other candidate that's come by in my 30 years. However, Paul just jumped up a few more points in the "Peter Staack's Cluttered Brain Poll", when Glenn Jacobs (a.k.a., the WWE's Big Red Machine, KANE) announced his endorsement of Ron Paul. Kane's no dummy, and having read a number of his commentaries, I find we have many similar political views. Plus, I can't help feeling a kind of kinship with a well-read and articulate fellow who happens to be very large and everyone thinks is a homicidal maniac.

I've had a lot more time to play with the IOGEAR Powerline Networking Kit that we got from TigerDirect.com for $75, and I've got to say I think it's great!

To reiterate, all you do is:
      1. Plug one unit into a wall outlet.
      2. Connect that unit to your router or hub.
      3. Plug the other unit into a wall.
      4. Connect that unit to your computer's network adapter.

It's as simple as advertised, but we've actually been getting peak transfer speeds above the 14 Mbps on the box, as well as good sustained rates. While, it's not necessary, since our company has such modest networking needs, it's still nice to know the bandwidth is available and the Homeplugs are working as advertised.

We keep them plugged in all the time, which is notable because several people who have used other brand Ethernet-over-powerline adapters told us they get VERY hot, and need to be unplugged when not in use. The IOGEAR units don't get very hot at all. They only get a little above room temperature, so we have no qualms using them all the time.

One of our guys are the warehouse got a set of these to connect his game consoles, after he heard me talking about the unit. He brought his set over, so we could see if we could crack in, but were locked-out as advertised. Without the custom password used on the two units, there was no way another Homeplug could reasonably connect. Of course 54-bit DES isn't bulletproof, but it's plenty tough for most home and small office usage.

Unless your network demands are really REALLY steep, or you're working with absolutely top-secret data, I heartily recommend the IOGEAR Powerline Networking Kit as a low-cost simple way to extend your network, when other means aren't as easy or inexpensive.

Here's a list of survival-related things I carry on me, every day (revised 05-21-08):

• High-quality liner-lock folding pocketknife with pocket clip, serrations, and easy one-hand opening. This is a very sturdy knife, honed to a razor-sharp edge (I can literally shave with it), that I keep clipped to my pocket. I can draw and open this knife in 1 second.


• Leatherman Kick multitool, featuring pliers, knife, screwdrivers, can opener, ruler edges, and wire cutters/strippers in a leather belt-pouch.


• StrapLite flashlight holder and a Mini Maglite 2-AA flashlight. Strapped to my belt, I can turn it on and have hands-free light, or quickly draw it for use. I modified my everyday Maglite to use a bright LED bulb array that can be used continuously for 10+ hours on two AA batteries, and a switch at the bottom for one-handed operation. If I need to, I can switch with any of my other Mini Maglites (I have 4 or 5). I can also easily attach the StrapLite to a bike, tool, or even a headband for additional hand-free usage.


• Bright LED keychain flashlight. It's small, efficient, and handy to use. It's bright enough to see what I'm doing, or to signal. My keys are all silenced, so they don't make noise.
  
• Maglite Solitaire keychain flashlight. It's also small, but has an adjustable spot or can be used like a candle to light a larger area. I almost never use it, but it's so small, I carry it around just in case.


• Wallet with chain. I reinforced the grommet on the wallet and replaced the weaker j-hook with a stronger split keyring, to attach the wallet to the chain. The chain makes it difficult for would-be pickpockets to lift, and ensures I never leave it. I keep my IDs and certification in my wallet, as well as first aid cards and a list of local and federal emergency numbers.


• Kyocera K10 phone, with Virgin Mobile pay-as-you-go service. It's a no frills phone that's very dependable (good battery life, good signal, solid phone), with an equally no-frills service that's fairly reliable (digital/analog quad-band with emergency 911/112/999 GPS). Service only costs me $20 every 3 months. On it, I have stored numbers to just about every police and fire department in northeastern Illinois, and several notable federal agencies. It even has a flashlight on it.


• Military dogtags pinned to the inside of each of my boots, with emergency information, for worst-case scenarios. I also have "in case of emergency" info in my wallet, and on my phone.


• I also have several spare safety pins connected to my boot liner, a few feet of paracord wound up in my back pocket, and two feet of duct tape wrapped around my flashlight in case I ever need them. They've come in handy numerous times.

In my car:

• A small all-purpose survival pack (large liner-lock knife with serrated blade, foldable mini shovel, rain gear, 3 space blankets, lighters, magnesium & flint fire starter, easy-to-light fire sticks, 6 candles, waterproof/windproof matches, compass, signal mirror, 120dB whistles, sewing kit, fishing kit, paperclips, assorted safety pins, water purification tablets, emergency food tablets, emergency towels, duct tape, paracord, dynamo-rechargeable LED mini-flashlight, mini carabiners, 1 heavy-duty carabiner, first aid cards, basic first aid supplies, thick wool socks, ziplock bags, and PVC tubing). This is supplemental to my full bug-out bag that I keep in my room. Someday, if I have two hours, I'll list everything in there.


• Knives, knives and more knives! I have a Tactical Warrior knife hanging from my rearview mirror (the sheath also has a rescue whistle), a fully-loaded survival knife with slingshot (shown to the left), and several small daggers hidden in my trunk, under my hood, in the undercarriage, under the hood, and elsewhere. There's also a nice 440 steel tanto in the trunk, which is good for defense or even splitting logs. They were only $2 each, so why not?


• Camp axe. Never head into the woods without one.


• Collapsible steel self-defense baton. This sucker HURTS, and can be used to smash out a window in an emergency.


• Large steel landscaping spike, with duct-tape handle, attached to the driver-side door. It also makes a good emergency escape tool, or a baton.


• Safety seatbelt cutter on my passenger-side visor.


• Several bottles of water.


• Good quality 10-person first aid kid, emergency triage field kit, detailed first aid manual and basic National Audubon Society survival guide with North American edible plant guide.


• Two 2007 US road atlases (one Rand McNally, and one AAA), assorted Illinois and Great Lakes maps, Canadian maps (Ontario and Manitoba), a map of Mexico, local topographical maps, maps to my friend's family bomb shelter, a folder of local Google Maps and several maps I made of local stores.
  
• 2 fire extinguishers - One small 1-A:5-B:C automotive extinguisher that's in my trunk, thats easy to quickly access, and a larger all-purpose 1-A:10-B:C extinguisher that's strapped further back in the trunk.


• Rechargeable automobile jump-starter with with 12V plug and work light. I use a bike combo-lock to attach it to the frame of my car.


• A good two-stroke hand pump for tires, with pressure gauge.


• Heavy-duty down-filled winter vest, and spare Vietnam War surplus jacket (supplemental to the warm clothes I'll wear in the winter).


• Surplus army wool blanket, and a small tarp (combined with space blankets and warm clothes, allow for survival in the car or a windproof shelter in weather as low as -30°F).


• Lots of rope. 50' of all-purpose braided ½ diameter nylon rope. Three 10' hanks of all-purpose heavier-duty twisted polypropylene rope. Two 50' hanks of 3/16" diameter paracord. I also have a package of assorted bungee tie-downs, and light-load carabiners. I even have a card with knots on them, because I honestly forget more advanced knots.


• Automotive maintenance kit which includes a can of Fix-a-Flat, spray defroster/deicer (which also makes a good fire-starter), a radiator patch kit, a small bottle of crushed rock salt and limestone pebbles for traction, two squeegees, two small ice-scrapers, one large scraper with brush, a collapsible snow shovel, spare tire nuts, adjustable wrenches, socket wrench set, tape measure, Allen wrench set, vice-grip pliers, assorted screwdrivers, backup winter driver-side wiper blade, WD40, a hacksaw, water-carrying bags, assorted O-clamps, assorted fuses, 12 gauge wire, assorted nylon fasteners, assorted nylon tie-downs, 12v adjustable flood/spot light, car jack, tire iron and spare tire.


• Lots and lots of tape. 60 yard roll of 3" wide waterproof duct tape. 30 yard roll of 3" heavy-duty high-temperature waterproof "100 MPH" duct tape. 100 yard roll of 3" wide black gaffers tape. A small roll of clear packaging tape.


• A clipboard with notepad, blank envelopes, and two pens. I also have two small notepads in the glovebox, a small Post-It notepad, several reliable pens, and two good old-fashioned pencils.


• Accident investigation sheets, with info form & illustrations, insurance policy info, a tear-off slip for other parties. I also keep a copy of Secretary of State's Rules of the Road manual, and a simple water-resistant digital camera with flash (uses batteries from my flashlight) to document accidents.


• A spare deactivated digital/analog tri-band cellphone with really good modular antenna, a new fully-charged 3rd party battery, a car-charger (same one for my phone), and a small adapter that lets you power the phone with AA batteries (which I use for my flashlight). By federal mandate, all modern cellular phones - even without a SIM card or service plan - can dial 911/999 for emergencies.


• Universal 12v power adapter kit that plugs into my lighter, and has assorted plugs for cellphones and other DC-powered or rechargeable devices.


• Dynamo crank / 12 V DC / AC / rechargeable LED flashlight with AM/FM/WB radio, siren, and optional AA battery power.


• Michelin Hydroedge tires, which are among the best tires available for my Ford Escort. They have saved my life numerous times, driving the gauntlet known as Deerfield and Highland Park.


• Photocopies of the warranties and service perks for my high-end winter tires, exhaust system, brakes, shoes, belts, alternator, and other auto parts/work.


• VIN etched on several other hidden locations on the car.


• I have some assorted personal amenities and sundries including two compact and one large golf umbrella, towels, paper towels, tissues, antibacterial hand-wipes, gum, floss, Febreeze fabric refresher spray, ear plugs, sunglasses, sunscreen, insect repellent, safety glasses, plastic shopping bags, garbage bags, a mylar cooler-bag, and other odds-n-ends.

So, pretty much everywhere I go, I'm well-prepared for all types of situations and emergencies. Although it seems like a lot, it's actually all pretty conveniently packed up and doesn't take much space (I can still seat 4 passengers and still have 1/2 of trunk space left). People who know me might occasionally joke me about being paranoid, right up until they need something - and I happen to have it.

A few weeks back, two of our sales people were out for the week (one on vacation, the other recovering from surgery), so I had several computers to play around with. I figured I'd test the security of our "encrypted" database, including personal data and credit info, by trying to hack a backup. I was going to break up the decryption process over several workstations, and hopefully crack the database in a day or two. It turns out I didn't need the extra computing power, though...

DeCrypto-K was able to find the cipher key saved right in the program directory where the database is saved. It blew up the 8-bit PKZIP1 encrypted database into a delimited text file, in less than a minute, on a 1.1GHz laptop. Weak! That's the downside of our sales software. It was designed in 1989 by a 3-person company, using mostly open source technology, to the tune of $3000 for the source code. It would have been insecure, even when it was new, but relied on the fact that our various sales-servers have all been completely inaccessible from beyond our in-house hardware. Our entire sales-entry and bookkeeping hardware is closed off.

So, while inherently secure from hackers, it just bugs me. Since it was a slow week for phone calls (none of our ads are in circulation yet), I worked in more-modern encryption into our system without any hit to performance. I've had three of our laptops and one unused desktop trying to decrypt the database since Monday, to no avail. I figure I'll let it go till Friday (or, until the power goes out here AGAIN).

I have TrueCrypt to thank for easily implementing modern cryptology into our system. TrueCrypt frickin' ROCKS. Oh, and it's TOTALLY FREE OPEN SOURCE!

If you're looking to secure files and folders, give the TrueCrypt client a try. You make an encrypted volume, and hide it as a file somewhere on your system. When you want to access it, you can then (with a strong password) mount the encrypted volume as a hard drive. It supports AES, Blowfish, CAST5, Serpent, TripleDES, and Twofish and can even cascade them for additional security. What's even COOLER is that you can encrypt hidden volumes inside other encrypted volumes. You have two passwords, one for the outer volume and one for the hidden volume. You enter one password for the outer volume. Enter the other password, and it mounts the hidden volume instead. What's cool about this is that you can hide secured data in the hidden volume, and put diversionary files in the outer volume. Nice!

Click here for CNET's review, or to download TrueCrypt

One of my smaller home-office clients called EARLY this morning, and was having problems with their personal computer. It was acting sluggish, their firewall was going nuts, and their browser homepage was hijacked.

I told them to have McAfee VirusScan Plus 2007 scan the system, and by the time I got there, I'd check out the results. When I got there, McAfee was STILL running, after two hours. After it finally wrapped up, it didn't find squat. It gleefully chimed there were no viruses, while the CPU was still running some hidden application and the firewall was going crazy.

Luckily, Lavasoft AdAware sniffed out the bastard that was running in the background, in under a minute. Their firewall was preventing all the outbound spam messages. AdAware sniped the bot, easy as pie. I ran SpyBot Search & Destroy, and it cleared out a few other small issues. Man, I love the AdAware / SpyBot S&D tag team!

Not pleased with McAfee sitting there like a lump, hogging almost 25% of the system resources and giving nothing in return, I talked my client into letting me replace it. We loaded the critically acclaimed (CNET scored it a 5 out of 5, tied for their top antivirus pick) FREE Avast Antivirus Home Edition, and registered it. Upon it's initial startup, it scanned the resident memory, and found nothing (AdAware had already done it's work). We ran a boot-time scan, and Avast found several infected files that McAfee failed to notice. Nice!

My client is upgrading to the Avast Professional Edition (same one we I use at the office) for $40. Unfortunately, there's no refund available for McAfee, but at least it licenses them to make rescue disks in the event of a boot-sector virus. I also clued them into the FREE AVG Antivirus (tied with Avast for CNET's top antivirus pick), as a good second opinion.

Click Here For Free Avast Antirivus Home Edition

We have multiple Dymo label printers at our office. Our workhorses are the Dymo LabelWriter 400 Turbos and a Dymo LabelWriter 330, which we use for all our mailings. They're really fast high-quality thermal label printers that we hooked up to our network, and can even print postage on in a pinch (though we mostly rely on our NeoPost IJ40). We love the printers, but our single hangup has been finding Dymo 30252 labels. They're not cheap. Even in bulk, you could pay upwards of 4¢ to 6¢ per label (typically on rolls of 350) for the official Dymo labels.

Sometime last year, we found LabelValue.com. They had low prices on official Dymo 30252 address labels. We also noticed they have compatible 30252 address labels that were much MUCH cheaper. We ordered a few rolls of the officials and two rolls of the compatibles, so we could test them out head-to-head. We've always had mixed results with compatible 3rd party products, but the compatible 30252 address labels worked great. We've been using them since, and haven't had any problems. On top of the great deal on the compatible 30252 labels (tenths of a cent per label), they have free shipping... Not the "wait a few weeks for delivery" free delivery, either. They were QUICK. We've gotten our labels less than 48 hours after placing an order. Nice!

I love my rice cooker. IMO, it's the best $30 I ever spent.



I own the Oster Inspire Multi-Use Deluxe Rice Cooker, which I got at Target. It has gotten mixed reviews, but to date it has performed better than any rice cooker I've ever had. Rice is one of the bigger parts of my diet, and it cooks rice well. It's not good with cheapie rice, but if you spend a few dollars extra to get the good name brand rice or rice from the Asian supermarkets, it does a good job. But where it REALLY shines, is as a crock pot. This bad boy makes some kick ass stews and it's a wizard with veggies. I'd say 50%-80% of my diet is veggies, so I like to think I know good veggies when I eat 'em (Cracker Barrell's green beans and their boiled cabbage bring tears to my eyes). The veggies come out nice and firm, with all their flavor in tact, infused with whatever broth that was added in. You know what? Tonight, I had some awesome beef & veggie stew, and I would have hugged that rice cooker if it wasn't scalding hot!



I also love the George Foreman Next Grilleration with Removable Plates. It cooks food MUCH quicker and more thoroughly than on the range or in the oven. It's great with fish and veggies. It really helps reduce the fat from cuts of meat, as well. I'm looking forward to using it more, this season.



Yeah yeah... I to think it's amusing that a guy who so easily gets angry with people, romancing his kitchen appliances. I take my food seriously. Good food fuels my rage, baby!

I remain frosty, and true... My lifelong boycott of Sony Products is still going strong. This obviously predates the Sony rootkit fiasco, though rootkit reaffirms my distrust for all things Sony.

Aside from 3rd party Playstation and Playstation 2 software (of which, Sony gets only a modest cut, as they start competing with Microsoft in earnest), I haven't willingly bought anything with a Sony decal on it EVER IN MY LIFE, with the exception of two PS2 titles developed by Sony 2nd parties and published by SCEA (Primal for $11, Ico for $15, and I'll get Shadow of the Colossus when it's cheaper) and 3 PSX titles (Tomba, Tobal no. 1, and Syphon Filter). I have no CDs published by a Sony studio. I have very few movies produced or published by a Sony studio. I once bought an off-lease 17" CRT monitor for pretty cheap, and it just happened to be a Sony (and still works, though is slow to power up). I got Sony brand speakers for my roommate Crizl, but it's technically her purchase (and they were manufactured by Samhongsa, not Sony).

To date, my family, coworkers and friends have owned many Sony products, all of which performed marginal-to-poor and many failed shortly after the warranted period, with one notable exception... Crizl's voodoo influence over Sony products is staggering. She owns one of only two, out of literal hundreds confirmed defective by friends, known working SCPH-30000 PS2s (the original North American release), she had a Discman that survived 5+ years of near-continuous use, and her PSX still works (though, is retired). Crizl aside, everyone I know, who has had Sony products, have had nothing but trouble (mostly for me, because I have to fix them):

4 Sony Vaio workstations... All died, due to motherboard failure (1 capacitor explosion that nearly started a fire, 1 corrupted BIOS that can't be flashed and has no recovery ROM, and 2 just won't power up). Even when they still worked, they performed piss-poor. The Windows image on the installation CDs were corrupted, as were most of the hardware drivers. All of the Sony apps (which I couldn't uninstall without it pulling drivers) were garbage. Even after reformatting and installing MD5 verified copies of Win2k from two official licensed Microsoft published CDs, half of the devices had no drivers available from Sony, and it still performed poorly compared to other systems in its class with the same CPU. Vaio PC customer service were retarded, and of absolutely no help.

EVERY SCPH-30000 PS2, save two. Of all my friends and colleagues, several of which are Sony retailers, only two still have working SCPH-30000 PS2s. One is alive due to Crizl's supernatural ability. The other has only been used a few times, and spends the rest of the time in a dry and cool basement. Otherwise, we can confirm over 300 dead or malfunctioning SCPH-30000 units due to various reasons (most stemming from CD motor, drive bay motor or misaligned laser).

2 SCPH-70001 (slim) PS2s... Steffannee's takes forever to boot many titles. Some titles won't boot at all. Alex's died mysteriously, but was replaced with a unit featuring a newer GH-032 motor.

1 Sony Vaio laptop... The Pentium M permanently seized, due to system constantly overheating with normal use. Screen had dead pixels less than 4 months after purchase. The DV port worked only once.

1 Sony Handycam... Servo motors for optics died. There is no manual focus, so everything was out of focus. The recharger base needed to be replaced less than 6 months after purchase, as the original transformer started leaking electrolyte. Tape bay no longer ejects.

1 Sony CCD Camcorder... Simply stopped working. Screen powers on, but nothing else responds. Tape bay also doesn't eject.

6 various Sony TVs... 4 tuners stopped working within a year of purchase. 1 electron gun died 2 years after purchase. All (except the one that died), formed severely warped aperture grilles after 18 months, which I couldn't fix, even using the magnet/drill degaussing trick.

2 Sony Playstation Portables... Two of the kids at work got PSP's, and both had to replace them. Both had dead pixels, and one wouldn't even turn on, right out of the box. One of the replacements' battery doesn't seem to keep a charge for very long. The second works, for now, though has an intermittent sticky face-button.

In short, I say "forget you, Sony!" If I can help it, I'll never ever knowingly buy a Sony branded product unless it's either below-cost closeout priced or the rare software title. If we're getting a PS3, Crizl's getting it - not me.

Anyone who knows me has probably already heard me raving about Matt Furey's Combat Conditioning program. I just want to make it official, in writing, this book kicks ass. I've always been fond of bodyweight and isometric exercises, because it gives you practical strength without making you look like a steroid freak. This book features the BEST of the best of this type of workouts. Hell, I can't believe I ever stayed in shape without this routine. My body was practically falling apart, after living in Evanston. Combat Conditioning really worked wonders, considering my limited time schedule and having no room for workout equipment. Hell, Matt Furey has all sorts of cool stuff on his site - www.MattFurey.com