Now that we have a digital camera, the collection of digital photos on our home computer is growing in leaps and bounds. And as I mentioned before, we have a bunch of home videos as well. If there were a disk crash or a fire or some other disaster, we’d lose everything, so I started looking into backup strategies. A friend of Gail’s bought a big USB hard drive and backs everything up to that, but unless you store the drive somewhere else and bring it home occasionally for backups, a fire would destroy both the original and the backup, so that’s no good. I could just burn DVDs and then take them to work or something (putting them in the safety deposit box would be the best solution, but I’m way too lazy to do that) but that’s a lot of manual labour, and I’d need numerous DVDs to store everything. Too much work, and so I know that I wouldn’t do it often enough. What I need is something that does automated backups online so that the files are stored offsite, and the backups can be done automatically so I don’t need to remember to do it.

I think I’ve found the solution thanks to the Security Now! podcast. Steve Gibson talked about a tool called Jungle Disk, which uses Amazon’s S3 storage service. It’s very cheap — about 15 cents per gigabyte per month, you only pay for what you use, and there are no storage limits. You also pay 10 cents per gigabyte uploaded, and 18 cents per gigabyte downloaded. The Jungle Disk software itself is only $20, comes with free lifetime upgrades and you can install it on multiple machines. Once it’s installed and you’re hooked up to your Amazon account, Jungle Disk sets up a virtual drive on your Windows machine, so you can copy files to and from the “disk” at will, so if you want, you can essentially use it as a huge USB key (though remember the upload/download fees). It also has fully-functional automated backup software that has strong 256-bit AES encryption (which is why it was mentioned on a security podcast).

The one thing it doesn’t do is compress the data. This is supposedly because of a feature they have called block-level updates, where they backup parts of a file individually, so that if your 2GB file changes now and again but only 50 MB of the data is actually changed, it will back up just the changed parts rather than the entire file each time, saving bandwidth. Compressing a file would break this, and it’s probably true that the block-level updates save you money in the long run for large frequently-changing files, but for files that never change (like my home videos), compression would be way more useful. Plus, the block-level update feature is only available if you purchase the optional add-on service called “Jungle Disk Plus”. Maybe I’ll have to set up a cron job (or Windows equivalent) that runs once a week (the night before the backup, probably) and compresses the videos.

The ability to use the Jungle Disk service as a huge USB key is rather nice as well — if I want to transfer a file from work to home, I can just copy it up to my Jungle Disk drive at work, then copy it down at home. I’d have to pay the upload/download costs for that, but depending on the file, it may be worth it. When I’m at home, both my work and home machines use the same wireless router to connect to the internet, but neither can see the other’s shares. I don’t know why I can’t connect them to each other, and neither Gail nor I have any idea how to fix it, though admittedly our research into the problem has been minimal. In the past when I wanted to transfer a file from one machine to the other, I either used a regular USB key or burned a DVD for larger files. This gives me another option.

I wrote this article several weeks ago but never got around to posting it. I just got my first bill from Amazon Web Services for all of $1.87. I don’t quite understand it though — it says I’m using 5.305 GB of storage, but uploaded 9.217 GB of data. It backed up all of our France pictures this past weekend, so the next bill will be much higher, but we’ll see how much more it is.

Sybase started using some new VPN software recently. It has a feature that on first blush seems like a good idea, but turns out not to be. I bring my laptop home from work every night, and one of the first things I do when I turn it on is to fire up the VPN. When I leave for work in the morning, I put the computer on standby, since it’s much faster starting up when I get to work than hibernating or actually powering down. The VPN feature I’m talking about is the ability for the VPN to automatically reconnect after the network has dropped and reconnected. So I connect the VPN at home, then put the machine in standby, then bring it back up again at work. When I get to the office, the VPN can reconnect, without requiring the password. Perhaps you see where this is going.

I was in the office today and at one point I was copying a 2½ MB file to my machine from the network. I’m on a gigabit switch, so copying 2½ MB should be almost instant, right? No, it took 5-10 seconds each time I did it. I didn’t do any real investigation, but I certainly wondered why it was so dog-slow. (Aside: where did the phrase “dog-slow” come from? Dogs are generally pretty fast.) It wasn’t until I was just about to leave for the day that I noticed the VPN icon in the system tray. When I arrived at work this morning, the VPN had automatically reconnected, and all of my network access all day was done through the VPN. I shut it down and tried the same file copy again — lightning-fast (Aside: that one does make sense).

The weird thing is that I do this every day, and I’ve only noticed this happening a couple of times. This the first time it’s happened and I didn’t notice within 15 minutes and shut the VPN down.

The old VPN software would drop the VPN if the network went down, and you’d have to manually reconnect it. If I rebooted my router at home, for example, this would happen. The new software has this automatic reconnection without requiring another password, which is good, but does it without notifying the user, which is not. Another example of the Law of Unintended Consequences.

We have a bunch of old videos that we took of the boys when they were younger (the video camera died a year ago and we haven’t managed to get it fixed, since it is now almost 9 years old and would probably cost as much to fix as to replace with a much smaller and better unit). I have a thing called a Dazzle, which I have used to transfer some of these videos to the PC. However, the software that comes with it isn’t so great, so to keep the video quality high enough to be watchable (I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “good”), the files are monstrously huge. There was one of Ryan’s first bath in the hospital the day after he was born which is about 32 minutes long, and the resulting .avi file was almost 7.5 GB. In total, there are something like 40 GB worth of videos on our machine and I haven’t yet converted most of the video tapes.

I started looking into backing all of this stuff up (videos and pictures primarily), and I’ll write about that later on, but I figured that there had to be a way to reduce the size of these videos without making them unwatchable. I did a bit of googling, and found that the program I was looking for was already on my system: Windows Movie Maker. In a very simple process, I imported a video file, dragged it to the playlist at the bottom, and clicked “save to my disk”. Then I pointed it at the output directory, gave the file a name (why it doesn’t default to the same name as the import file, I don’t know), and clicked “Save”. Each video takes almost as long to convert as it is long, but once it’s done, it’s way smaller, and I can’t see any difference in the quality. The 7.5 GB file turned into 95 MB. 11 videos of Ryan’s first six weeks went from 11.4 GB to 194 MB. Now, the new format is .wmv, which is Windows-specific, but I’m a Windows guy anyway, so that’s fine.

I played around with the video quality setting in Windows Movie Maker, and found that when I played the small video in full-screen mode, the quality degraded quite a bit. I re-converted them to a higher-quality setting, and the pictures are bigger (now they’re about 5% of the original size, rather than about 1%) and take longer to process, but when you watch it full-screen, the quality is pretty good. If I were to burn a DVD with that quality, it wouldn’t be fantastic, but it’d at least be watchable.

So now that these files are small, I can delete the big ones and start converting more of them without worrying about running out of disk space. I can back them up quickly without spending a fortune on bandwidth or storage (or using a hundred DVDs), and I could even post some of them to YouTube for my family to watch if I wanted.

I found a very cool site called drop.io through Lifehacker this morning, just when I needed it. I needed to send a fax yesterday, but I was at home and I don’t have a fax machine. I have a modem for my computer upstairs, but it’s not connected to the phone line (it may not even be physically installed anymore), and I don’t know if I have any fax software. I did a quick google search on free email-to-fax services, and found very little, so I was planning on waiting until Monday and just sending it from work. And then I read a posting on Lifehacker called “drop.io Adds Free, Simple Faxing”. I checked it out, and it’s just what I need.

There is no registration and they don’t ask for your email address. You just create a “drop” and you can add files to the drop by uploading them, emailing them, or faxing them (you print off a special cover page and make that the first page of the fax, then fax it to drop.io and they figure out which drop it’s for and add a pdf to that drop). Once you’ve got a drop, you can email it or fax it out, or you can give the address to other people and they can see the files from there. It’s private in that there is no directory of drops anywhere and no way to search, so to get to the drop, you have to know the name of it.

There are no fees for any of this (though you can upgrade for $10 to get 1 GB of storage, otherwise each drop is limited to 100 MB), and no advertising on the web site, so I’m not sure how they make any money at this, but it’s very slick.

I recently upgraded my home computer from Windows 2000 to XP, and now it has this annoying habit. Whenever I plug my iPod in to sync / charge, it tells me “Hey! You just plugged a high-speed USB device into a low-speed USB port! If you were to plug it into a high-speed USB port, you’d get better performance. Click here to list the high-speed USB ports available.” But when I click there, it tell me that I don’t have any high-speed USB ports on my old clunker of a computer. So Windows knows that I don’t have a high-speed USB port, yet every time I plug my iPod in, it tells me I should use one.

I need to look for a registry entry called AnnoyUserByAdvisingThemToUseAHighSpeedUSBPortWhenThereIsntOne and set it to 0. Though the way Microsoft does things, it would likely be an undocumented “StopAnnoyingUser…” setting that doesn’t exist, and I would have to create it and set it to 1.

Update: If you go to device manager and find the USB driver and go to Properties, there’s a checkbox on there somewhere saying “Don’t display USB errors”. Check that and the message goes away. Of course, if I get a different USB-related error, I won’t see it either, but that doesn’t happen often anyway.

There are a few TV shows that Gail and I watch when we can — some CSIs, some Law and Orders, and NCIS (and 24, when it comes back next year). We don’t watch them live, we tape them. Yes, on actual video tapes. A few times, we’ve been watching a show and had the tape end partway through the episode. Other times I’ve forgotten to adjust the VCR for daylight savings time, and other times we’ve realized that we hadn’t seen a particular show in a while, and it turned out that the show had been moved but we didn’t adjust the VCR. A couple of weeks ago we were watching a particularly suspenseful episode of SVU when the tape suddenly stopped. We had run off the end of the tape with 5 minutes left in the show. That was the last straw. I got annoyed enough with myself that I called our cable provider the next day and upgraded our cable box to a PVR.

Now I should be able to simply say “record all new episodes of SVU” and it will do it. If the show changes time slots, it will adjust. If there’s a special episode on a different night or a two-hour episode, we’ll get it anyway. Once we have a bunch of shows taped, we can instantly look through them and see which ones we’ve seen or not seen, and watch them in any order we want. This is, of course, assuming I can figure out how to do this. I’ve set it up to record a bunch of series, but it keeps telling me that there is nothing scheduled to be recorded. I didn’t get a manual with the PVR, though Cogeco is supposedly sending me one. I found a PDF online, so I’ve been looking at that, but I can’t figure out what I’ve done wrong.

And I’m just starting to get used to this pausing live TV thing. We can pause for up to an hour and then fast forward through commercials, or rewind to see or hear something again.

The weird thing about the PVR is that there is no cable output. The old cable box had two coax jacks, one for input (i.e. from the cable jack) and one for output (to the VCR, which itself had a coax going to the TV). The new one doesn’t have coax out, so I needed another way to connect it to the TV, and unfortunately, the VCR lost out. The TV has two inputs, but each input supports two connectors (S-Video and RCA), so I can connect FOUR different video devices. So I have the DVD and PVR on one input (if the DVD is on, its signal overrides that of the PVR) and the Wii and the iPod dock on the other (similarly, the dock overrides the Wii). But there’s no easy way to connect the VCR to anything, so it’s unplugged and just sitting there. Luckily, I have the fancy remote to control everything so I don’t (and more importantly, Gail and the boys don’t) have to remember which things have to be on and off in order to make anything work. We just press the “Watch TV” or “Watch a movie” button and it does all the right things.

This is just the coolest thing. Why I didn’t get one of these PVR things a year or two ago, I don’t know.

My computer has returned from the dead. I wiped the system disk on Monday and installed Windows XP. My next step was going to be to connect to the internet and run Windows Update to get SP2 and then the 90+ patches since SP2, and hope that my router was enough to protect my unpatched machine from hackers while I did this. But I heard on a Security Now! about a handy tool (Note: web site is in German) that lets you download all of the available Windows patches on a machine already connected to the ‘net, burn a CD, and then use that CD to install all the patches on the new system in one shot. Great idea, right? If only. I downloaded everything on my work machine, burned a CD, and brought it upstairs to the new machine. I tried it a number of times, and it just kept telling me that there was something wrong with my system. The message was in somewhat broken English, so I couldn’t tell exactly what was wrong. I thought maybe it required SP2 to be installed, though I was under the impression that SP2 was part of what this tool would install. I downloaded XP SP2 on my laptop and burned a CD with that, installed that, and then tried to run the update CD again, but still nothing. So much for that idea.

I installed the old Linksys network card and it connected to the wireless network immediately. I then had to revert back to my original strategy of connecting to the net and downloading the patches through Windows Update. It downloaded zillions of patches over the next few hours, but eventually it was up-to-date.

My next challenge was iTunes. As I mentioned before, I was fully ready to have to wipe my iPod, spend hours copying directories from the old iTunes directory into the new one, and then resync everything. But a comment from cahwyguy (thanks!) pointed me at a tool called CopyTrans that would repopulate iTunes from an iPod. I first renamed my old iTunes directory as a backup, then installed iTunes and ran CopyTrans. I plugged in my iPod and it sucked down everything, though it took over 12 hours to do this. After copying the data, it then spent over an hour adding each song individually to iTunes. iTunes didn’t seem to like copying the files that I had purchased from the iTunes store so I had to restore them from the backup CD I had made before. It was a long process, but when I plugged the iPod into iTunes, it synced my purchased songs again, the latest podcasts, and that was it. Snaps for CopyTrans!

Note that the version you download is the free trial version, and to get the full version you have to register. I wondered what the difference was between the two (i.e. do I need to register, or will the free version do what I want?), but there was no answer to this question on the website. Correction: there was no useful answer — this exact question appeared in their FAQ:

Q: What is the difference between the trial and the full version?
A: The trial and the full versions are the same file. The difference is that the full version has been unlocked thanks to an activation code…

OK, thanks, but that didn’t answer the real question: what can the registered version do that the trial version cannot? Luckily, the nagware dialog in the program itself answered that question. In case you’re interested, the free version will only copy up to 100 files. Since I had over 6000 files to copy, I had to register it, but this only cost about $10 so that was no big deal.

The machine is pretty much back now. I still have some more software to install, but the big things are there. The problems I was trying to solve in the first place (the wireless network issues) are mostly gone, but I’m still seeing network drops. For a while the other day, the network would drop, then it would reconnect again right away, only to drop again 10 seconds later. I was doing non-network stuff at the time so it didn’t matter, but it must have gone on for half an hour, dropping and reconnecting repeatedly. Other times over the last couple of days I haven’t seen it drop at all. I don’t think it’s a signal strength issue, because when it does connect, the signal strength is “very strong”. I tried unplugging the cordless phone in the office to see if that was interfering, but it seemed to make no difference.

I think my next strategy for dealing with this problem is “live with it”. If it gets worse I may have to alter that strategy, but I think it’ll work for now.

I’ve spent the last week or so trying to save my home computer from an untimely death. Well, not that untimely, really, it is something like a 866 MHz Pentium III that’s a few years old, but seeing as how we’re going to France this summer, I don’t really want to spend $1000 on something if I don’t really have to.

The machine is running Windows 2000, and has had a Linksys wireless card for a number of years. We started out with a Linksys wireless-B router, but then I bought a DLink wireless-G router a year or two ago. The router is in the basement and this machine is on the second floor, but we’ve had no wireless problems to speak of.

That is, until a few months ago, when we noticed that the wireless signal would suddenly drop to nothing on that machine. Usually it would come back fairly quickly, so it was just a minor annoyance. A couple of weeks ago, I was using the computer in the morning (I remember this because I submitted our income tax returns electronically that morning), and then in the afternoon the signal dropped again, but this time it didn’t come back. My work laptop and Gail’s work laptop were both fine, but the computer upstairs simply couldn’t see the network anymore. I tried rebooting a couple of times, but it was as if the network just vanished. I tried rebooting the router as well, no luck. Next step was to uninstall and reinstall the drivers, and after that didn’t work I remembered that we had an extra wireless network card sitting around from our old computer. I switched the cards and still got nothing.

By this point, I was ready to toss the whole thing out the window, but I managed to contain myself and simply moved the computer downstairs so I could plug it directly into the router. (Imagine using a wired connection! That’s so 1998.) It seemed unlikely that both the network cards would stop working, so perhaps the firmware upgrade I did on the router a couple of months ago, combined with the old network cards and the fact that the machine is running Windows 2000 all combined to form a configuration untested by the Linksys and DLink QA people. So I went to Future Shop and bought a new DLink wireless card. I made sure the card was compatible with Windows 2000 — I figured a brand new DLink card plus a DLink router with the latest firmware plus a supported operating system should mean a functional system.

I got the card home, and as soon as I opened the box, I ran into yet another problem. The quick install guide said “Do NOT install the card in the computer until the drivers are installed” but there was another piece of paper in the box that said “Install the card, then click Cancel when the Found New Hardware dialog appears, then install the drivers”. So which is it — card first, or drivers first? If the piece of paper said “the quick install guide is wrong, you need to do this”, then I would know that the piece of paper was added later to avoid reprinting the entire quick install guide, but there was no such message. I think I chose to install the drivers first and then the card (because that’s what you had to do with the Linksys cards), and of course that didn’t work. I had to uninstall everything, uninstall the card from Windows (though I didn’t physically remove it), then reboot the machine and install the drivers after the card. Still nothing, so I looked on the DLink web site and downloaded the latest drivers for this card and installed those. Finally, the computer recognized the card, found the network, and seemed to have connectivity. I held my breath and unplugged the network cable, then surfed the net for the next few minutes to make sure that I was actually reading real non-cached data from the internet. I rebooted the machine at least once to make sure everything was fine after a reboot, and it was still good. I shut the machine down and brought it back upstairs. Problem solved, right? Wrong.

As you may have expected from the previous troubles, it didn’t work when I got upstairs. But it wasn’t that the card couldn’t find the network, the computer didn’t recognize the card anymore. If the card couldn’t find the network, I could understand it to some extent — maybe there’s some interference from the cordless phone or something, but interference wouldn’t explain Windows not seeing the card itself.

I am at a loss. I have now tried three different wireless cards in this computer and none of them work. I will probably try uninstalling the drivers and card (including physically removing it) and starting over one more time, but I must say that have very little confidence. I have begun the process of copying all the important data from the C: drive over to the D: drive (which contains my iTunes library, lots of digital pictures, videos of the kids and stuff like that) to prepare for paving the C: drive and installing Windows XP on it. I briefly thought about just upgrading to XP rather than installing from scratch, but if there’s something screwy in the registry or some corrupted system file that’s causing all these problems, an upgrade may not fix it, so I’ll format the partition before installing the new OS. I’ve already vacuumed the dust out of the computer and run a low-level disk maintenance utility to make sure the disk itself is OK. It is possible, however, that the real problem is on the motherboard or the PCI slots or something, in which case the re-install will be fruitless. If we still have no wireless network after I’m all done, then it will all have been for nothing and then I’ll have to buy a new machine. Or just live with a computer that’s not connected to the internet. Rrrrrrrriiiiight.

I’m also a little worried about reinstalling iTunes — I’m pretty much expecting iTunes to wipe my iPod completely and then have to resync all 60+ GB of music and video. I’ve already backed up my iTunes purchases to CD, so all I should have to do there is put the CD in and click “Restore”. As for the rest of the CDs, I’m hoping that I can just point iTunes at my current directory and have it recognize it or import it, but I don’t think it works like that. At worst, I should be able to create a new iTunes directory and then drag & drop all 500+ albums from the old one. It will be a slow process, but not as slow as having to go through all my CDs again and re-rip them. If that happens, I will be very put out.

If I end up having to wipe the disk and reinstall the OS, I won’t be doing that until early next week. If you, dear reader, have any suggestions, feel free to leave me a comment.