Jimiz.net – Jim Becher on the web

The team over at Universal Mind has created a great brainstorming capture and sharing application called ibrainstorm. You can download this app over at itunes. This app works for both the iPhone and the iPad. What a great working app to create and share ideas.

iPad
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ibrainstorm/id382252825?mt=8

iPhone
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ibrainstorm/id382252825?mt=8

The Universal mind team had a great celebration party out at the HopCat in Grand Rapids. Congrats to the team for a well done application.

The project known as “Kin” is now being killed inside microsoft. Engadget is running a post that explains what they believe is going on.
http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/30/what-killed-the-kin/

The concept behind the Kin was to create a low price device that would allow people to stay connected to social media / cloud information. Essentially a blackberry to those not needing a blackberry. What I found interesting during the discussions of the “kin” project was how this all fit together with the upcoming windows 7 phone OS.

From the article it is unclear what Microsoft’s direction is. What I did take away was that a device that many people did not think would succeed is no longer being offered.

What are your thoughts on the KIN?

The keynote speech by Steve Jobs was great. I personally like the moment where the wifi was not working. Beyond that little issue the overall presentation was great. Especially the launch of the new iPhone. I can’t wait to get my hands on the new device. I don’t think of myself as a gadget geek, however I use the iPhone as a business tool. From email, cellphone, remote access, and notes I find that the little device is priceless. My only complaint with my current iPhone (3g) is the speed. It seems to have got slower over time.

So come the end of June I am guessing I will have a new phone, maybe even one for my wife. I’ve been with ATT since ’99, when it was ATTwireless.

There has been a lot of talk in the news about AT&T allowing people still in contract till the end of the year getting an early upgrade deal. To check if this is available to you, you only need to go online and check availability or just call *639#. ATT will text you back if the account can upgrade. As you can see, I am ready to be the proud owner of a new iPhone if I desire.

I hope everyone else has the chance to upgrade.

Lifehacker (lifehacker.com) is a productivity site that I frequent. Every year the put out a list of free applications for windows and call it the Lifehacker Pack 2010. The most recent list is out.

Lifehacker Pack 2010

This is a great list of applications that any windows user should use. From burning cd’s / Dvd’s to tools to re-install your computer software. Over the years I have found that I automatically use most of these tools. Happy Installing.

I was reading my twitter feeds and ran across a post from an individual at rackspace that was responding to an interview of why they liked working there. (NOT for the money) He referenced this great video regarding Motivation
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc&feature=player_embedded#!

It is interesting that Money only motivates so far. I have found that in the tech industry this is true. People love a challenge, they love credit (praise) and they love ownership. I agree that money needs to be part of the equation, but not the full motivation.

So what gets you up every day, and motivates you to head to work.

I get 4 magazines. Linux Journal, Wired, Inc, and Money Magazine. I really enjoy each. Inc has so much information and ideas it makes me both excited and angry when I read it each month. Money always gives me ideas and motivation to keep saving and how to continue to invest. Wired Magazine is just to keep up with trends and get some fun reading. Linux Journal is just a true love. No matter what I am doing, I enjoy reading LJ, it has so many cool ideas and gadgets.

This week while traveling I read the most recent copy of Wired. There was an article about Radio Shack. How it has changed it’s name, image, and what it sells. What I found interesting was how the franchise is changing what it’s focus is. They are moving away from hobbyist and moving to be a mobile device seller. The basis for this change is that the margin and the sales commission on a cellular phone is great money.

The change in focus means that the Do It Yourself hobbyist and tinkerer loses out. The “Shack” as they are re-branding themselves are continuing to drop inventory of the items that people have known them for. Soldering irons, transistors, circuit boards, and connectors are going away to make room for cellular accessories.

This is very sad for me to hear. After reading the article it sounds like most of this change has already happened. The article focused on one small shop that is ignoring the change and catering to the core customers that radio shack has had for years. This shop happens to be right down the road from Make (makezine.com). The “Shack” is exactly the type of shop that readers of Make, Popular science, and DIY require to do projects. The trend these days is to use and throw away. If your printer breaks, I’m guessing you are not going to spend any time trying to fix it. You will probably just junk it and buy another one. That is what most people do these days, no one tries to fix anything any more.

I realize that retail is changing, but a Radio Shack that does not carry a connector or soldering irons is really not that useful to me. If I need mobile accessories or a mobile phone, I’ll get that over the internet. I could order most of the supplies I need (connectors, circuit boards, etc..) online but is always costly to ship and also make sure I have the right size. I am sad to see a store like the Shack change.

For many years developers have been using the User-Agent element of the browser to detect what web browser a person is using. This is very useful for designers when they are looking to make a very functional site in older browsers or add new technology (IE 6 )

In my last post I looked at the portscan of an iPad. Today I decided to look at he header information.

I opened up wireshark (packet sniffer) and watched the iPad traffic.

If you look at this information it has some interesting bits. It does identify the actual device ‘iPad’ in the user-agent string. A developer could read the string and look for the iPad or even iPhone user-agent to target these devices.

Here is copy and past from yoyo.org to read header info from the web for my iPad.

Host: pgl.yoyo.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; U; CPU OS 3_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.10 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Mobile/7B367 Safari/531.21.10
Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Referer: http://www.google.com/search?q=view+browser+headers&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&client=safari
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive

I think it is interesting that in the string it also has OS 3_2 like Mac OS X.

Here is the header information for my iPhone.
Host: pgl.yoyo.org
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 3_1_2 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/528.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Mobile/7D11 Safari/528.16
Referer: http://www.google.com/m/search?oe=UTF-8&client=safari&hl=en&aq=0&oq=view%2520browser%2520head&aqi=g1-k18d1t0&fkt=3393&fsdt=14019&q=view+browser+headers
Accept: application/xml,application/xhtml+xml,text/html;q=0.9,text/plain;q=0.8,image/png,*/*;q=0.5
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive

The iPad is like any other device, it has your data on it. No matter if you use it at home or out in a coffee shop. You need to make sure that your data is safe. The iPad like the iPhone allows you to lock the devise from use with a 4 digit passcode.

To enable locking your screen you need to go to Settings | general | Passcode Lock

Select Turn Passcode On

You will then be asked to enter a passcode. You have to enter this in twice

You then have an option on Require Passcode (Immediately, After 1, 5, 15 min or 1, 4 hours). I use immediately.

It never hurts to add one more level of security. A passcode is a simple way to keep others out of your info / mail / information. I have set the auto-lock to 5 min on the iPad.

I was fortunate enough this morning to have an iPad delivered. It showed up around 10:10 AM. The UPS driver has 8 on his truck. He mentioned that it was the reason they were out today.

So far it has been interesting to hear all the hype by the news media. I have un-boxed and downloaded the new iTunes. I should have done that earlier. I have been ignoring the media about the iPad to make my own opinions.

I did do a quick search online to determine the best apps for this device. So far the best list I have seen is at Gizmodo : http://gizmodo.com/5507569/gizmodos-essential-ipad-apps

I’ll have to post some updates as the day goes on. It is interesting, my wife is excited as well. New toy at the house.

If you have been living in the woods or maybe have not read the paper or have internet access you might have missed all the hype about the iPad. I am really interested in how this device will work, can’t wait to get my hands on one. I’m not going to be crazy like these people
http://grandrapids.craigslist.org/sys/1670903531.html (750 seems a bit high)

However, I will get one. I am still looking for one mobile device (this is not that device) but it is closer to what I am looking for. So far in my quest for the best device I have only one machine that can even be on the list (My ThinkPad). Though I have had many close encounters. My Iphone is great (fits a problem I have) mobile email and communication. I purchased a netbook to use around the house (under the couch) when I wanted to surf. The problem was it did not have a long enough battery and the screen was too small. I ended using my macbook more than the netbook.

WHY: So why the iPad. First, I think it is a great device. Easy on (this is important). It can surf the web, I know because I do this enough on my iphone. The iPad will allow you to use ebooks (some may disagree, but I have not bought a kindle yet and this may have more features).

WHO: I think the initial users of the iPad may be Apple lovers and those who need gadgets (or want gadgets). The others will use it similar to a tablet, note taking, surfing, all around connected device.

In reality, it is not much different than the old PDA or Palm Pilots. It will have your contacts, calendar, and info (and a lot more). I can remember a Palm III costing at least 300 bucks.

As with the iPhone I can already see this being jail broke, hacked, and modded. Time will tell if the iPad is a success or just another Segway.

I use SSH a lot. I use it for secure surfing at coffee shops (SSH secure browsing) This keeps people from watching / sniffing what I am doing on public wifi. I also use it to keep in contact with people (IRC) and access to files at home.

In some locations I am unable to get an SSH (port 22) connection out of a firewall. In these instances, I use ajaxterm . It is a web based terminal window.

I recently updated my linux box and had to re-install this wonderful tool. I followed the quick install (sudo apt-get install ajaxterm). After the quick install the app worked but did not run as I liked it. I wanted to run this under https.
I followed the guided install at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/AjaxTerm.

However I will add these instructions to complete the install. If you have not used ssl on your machine and follow the instructions above you may get “Invalid command ‘SSLEngine’, perhaps misspelled or defined by a module not included in the server “.

This is due to not having run “sudo a2enmod ssl” which adds the ssl module to apache.
I then ran into : “SSLCertificateFile: file ‘/etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem’ does not exist”
To correct this issue I had to generate the default certificate for the machine.

Code:
sudo apt-get install ssl-cert
sudo mkdir /etc/apache2/ssl
sudo make-ssl-cert /usr/share/ssl-cert/ssleay.cnf /etc/apache2/ssl/apache.pem

After these simple steps, I am up and running on Ajaxterm over ssl. So I can quickly connect to my home machine from any web browser.

I recently had the need to reload two machines and get them ready to re-use or resell. I have many copies of XP and started to look for the install CD. After not finding the CD, and being too lazy to burn one from an ISO file, I started thinking why did I need cds / DVDs for install. My linux LIVE disk and install are all on USB thumb drives. Why couldn’t I make USB drive that had my install media for XP, vista , and Windows.

After a little searching I found some methods that use “Bart PE” and some other slipstream ideas. It looked like I would be able to create a one use USB drive (XP or Vista) but not all versions.

I ended up using (WintoFlash) to create my bootable USB drive. I only tried this with XP but it mentioned that it works with other versions of windows.

I am now armed with a XP rescue USB that I can re-install an OS.

I use windows media center on my home theater / basement Projector. Thanks to the wonderful message I got from Comcast that my area is going all digital, I won’t be able to use my system much longer.

1st on my Media center / TiVo I lost the channel data (comcast no longer provides this to analog users) I have preferred basic
2nd – they are making me get a Digital cable box to use (has it’s own remote, and does the channel changing)
3rd – as far as I know there are not any options with a tuner card that will do or contain a cable card (since I have 2 tuners – I would need two of them)
- here is a quick post list of options with the DTA http://getsatisfaction.com/comcast/topics/using_pc_tv_card_and_windows_media_center_with_comcast_digital_tv_converter_box

I am a bit angry at comcast for this change. I get the new and improved service, but what about us techies and people using newer technology.

The primary laptop that I use (Thinkpad) just got re-installed tonight. I was using the Beta / RC of Windows 7 Since Nov of 2008. I just realized that it was due to expire in the next 2 weeks. Early last year I purchased 3 copies of windows 7 Premium for 50 dollars each on Amazon during a pre-order event. I just had never taken the time to re-image / install.

The wonderful thing about this install was that there was no upgrade. You just get the joy of a fresh install.

I did use my new favorite installer (http://www.allmyapps.com) to get all my easy applications back.

The site iisinformation.com has recently gone through a re-launch. Head on over to www.iisinformation.com to check it out.

The move from community server to wordpress was successful.