Technology

Internet Freedom Preservation Act

rmiles7721February 13, 2008Politics, Technology

I received this email earlier while at work it best to just reproduce it here in it’s entirety. If you are in favor of the act make sure and contact your congressional representatives.

 

Last night, a bill was introduced in the U.S. House that would stop Comcast, Verizon and AT&T from controlling the free flow on information on the Internet.

The only way we can stop these gatekeepers is if we all take action to support this crucial legislation:

Tell Rep. Phil Gingrey to Support Internet Freedom

In 2006, your voice helped stop mighty phone and cable companies from gutting Net Neutrality. In 2007, you pried open their cell phone networks and gave users a choice.

This year, we’re going to stop Internet blocking and censorship once and for all.

Why This is Important: Reps. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Chip Pickering (R-Miss.) introduced the “Internet Freedom Preservation Act” (HR 5353) to stop relentless corporate attempts to set up roadblocks on the information superhighway.

It guarantees Net Neutrality by restoring it in the foundation of communications law. This bold move promises that the public — not phone and cable companies — will control the fate of the Internet.

The legislation also calls for a nationwide series of public hearings before anyone in Washington hands these gatekeepers and their lobbyists more power. (Read more about the bill here)

Take Action Now: Save the Internet

How Far We’ve Come: In 2006, more than 1.5 million Americans called on Congress to keep gatekeepers off our Internet. Last year, more than a quarter-million people sent comments to the FCC and opened up cell-phone networks to user choice and innovation.

This new bill was made possible by our amazing grassroots movement. SavetheInternet.com has brought together Democrats and Republicans, consumer groups and small businesses, bloggers and video gamers, in a new bottom-up majority that’s shaking up the status quo.

What You Can Do: For too long, communications policymaking has been rigged against us. But by taking action to support this bill, you’re telling Congress that high-priced lobbyists will no longer set the agenda.

Tell Rep. Phil Gingrey : ‘Support the Internet Freedom Preservation Act’

The purpose of the Internet is to give power over information to everyone. The role of our elected leaders is to protect our basic right to communicate from those who want to take it away from us.

We’ve started a new chapter in the fight for an open Internet. We realize that it takes more than one piece of legislation to reverse decades of corrosive telecom policies.

But with this bill — and your help — we are on our way.

Thank you,

Timothy Karr
Campaign Director
SavetheInternet.com

P.S. Bloggers, activists and Internet experts are logging on to the Free Press Action Network to discuss Net Neutrality, an open Internet and people-powered broadband policy. Join the discussion at http://www.freepress.net/action/

 

Moving to a New Server

rmiles7721February 12, 2008Blogging, Technology

My web host has suggested that I move to a new server they have online. That will be nice as it should make things a bit faster. I received this email earlier:

Hello,

Richard, after our monthly server evaluation we’ve identified that your account is one of the top 10 in terms of traffic, and hence server usage. To offset some of the load on the server we would like to move your account to our newest server called Chanel. There will be no planned downtime during the move, and you’ll benefit from the speed the new server has to offer.

Please let me know when you’d like us to schedule the move to the new Chanel server.

Thank you

That will be pretty darned nice. I have had to disable 90% of the plugins and addons for MT due to CPU usage and the fact that I couldn’t even log in. I even had to disable my server stats plugin, MT-VisitorStats because the MT dashboard refused to load even after upgrading to the newest release. It will be nice to be able to use some of them again.

RecordNations

rmiles7721January 27, 2008Technology

RecordNations offers a document scanning service as well as storage for your important documents. Their records storage lets you free up space on your servers and keep them in a secure off-site location.

Not keeping proper records cost business millions of dollars every year and sometimes entire companies go down because of lack of proper planning. Look at the woman just arrested in Florida last week. Her employer was looking to replace her and she found out and then erased 15 years of architectural records, costing the company something like $8.4 million. Had they used proper storage management and had their important records stored in a secure off-site location it never would have happened.

I used to do a bit of maintenance on a local attorney’s network but he was too cheap to buy proper storage and ended up losing his server and quite a few records in the process. I was able to recover most of them for him as added cost to his office, but had he kept his records secure somewhere else, losing a server would not have been such a big deal. He did have to reproduce most of his payroll records by hand since that was one of the things I was not able to recover.

There are plenty of document scanning services out there, so make sure that you are using one such as RecordNations. Dependable and extensive data backup experience is what you need, in addition to through security procedures.

Flock

rmiles7721January 26, 2008Technology

I started my browser up the other morning and realized that Flock had been updated again. I think I am currently running version 1.07. I am really starting to like Flock. I don’t really use the Media bar but it does support all of the Firefox plugins, or the ones I use anyway. It also seems to use less memory than Firefox and while I realize that the memory leaks in Firefox are mostly caused by 3rd party plugins, Flock doesn’t seem to have as many problems with it. It does use more and more memory than FF but I seem to be able to use it at least two or three times longer than Firefox. Pretty big difference, particularly when I am blogging.

I probably use about 10-15 different plugins on a regular basis including toolbars and a popup blocker, as well as a few others that just make it easier for me when I am surfing the web.

Cool Cell Phone Apps at Cellware

rmiles7721January 14, 2008Technology

As a web site, Cellware is still in it’s beta version but from what I have seen at the site, you couldn’t tell. It seems to be in full release to me unless they are going to be adding more features.

Cellware is a free portal for mobile downloads such as ringtones, wallpapers, video, games and applications.

In addition to being a download site you can also set up a profile and it starts looking more like a mobile social networking sort of place. Pretty cool actually. When you first sign up for a free account through Cellware it lets you invite your friends from several different services to come check it out, including MySpace, Friendster and Facebook. You can also import contacts from your webmail services as well.

Aside from the content that they have (and lots of other web sites have as well) there are several things that seem unique to Cellware. You can create your own ringtones right on the sight by uploading a file. Any music or sound file that’s on your hard drive can be uploaded and turned into a ringtone. Once it’s uploaded you use their ringtone editor to select the 20 second portion of the file that you want to keep, enter some information so that you can identify it and then save it. Then you just download it to your phone or even share it with your friends.

cellware

I have used several different sound editors to create ringtones from mp3’s in the past and it can be a pain. You have to get it the right bitrate and length and then use a program like Bitpim (which voids your warranty) to copy it over to the correct place in your phone’s file system. Cellware makes it pretty easy.

You can also use their mashup editor to mashup two different ringtones. You can put them end to end to make one long ringtone, or you can actually overlay the two. Very cool, particularly if you have an instrumental and a bit of cool spoken text or verse you want to combine. Another pretty neat option is to use their text-to-speech editor to turn text into a ringtone. They also have ringtones that contain your name or that of your friends. Nametones. Personalize your friends ringtone to the max.

One thing I did notice while browsing the Name Tones is that there are quite a few of them on the site. It would be nice if they would add links to each letter. It does let you jump five or six pages at a time, but that’s not exact. It also doesn’t let you change the view to alphabetical. It seems to be listed in order of upload rather than anything else. Of course I may just be slow on the uptake too. Their IS a search function. Once I searched for my name I managed to find four ringtones that contained it. Vain, aren’t I? Once I located the one I wanted and previewed it right there in my browser I then navigated to their WAP page from my cell phone browser, entered the download ID number and got it right on the phone.

Cellware has a pretty cool image editor as well to create and share your mobile wallpapers as well. It lets you add special effects, rotate and crop your images and then send it to your phone.

One thing you may want to check out is the fact that Cellware bases their business model on sharing their site revenue as well. As you create and upload content they share it with the content creators.

You can set up in your profile to view (or not view) certain content as well. Initially when you first sign up it only lets you see “G” rated content, which is a great thing if you have kids or teenagers that might access your account. You can choose from “G, PG,R and X” for your content viewing pleasure if you want to get a little racy with your downloads.

As more and more web sites are created as or convert to mobile sites for cell phone and smart phone use, the mobile content available will continue to improve as they have over the last couple of years. Go check out Cellware and see what I mean.

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Monitor

rmiles7721January 5, 20085Technology

Updated – I stopped at the hated Wal-Mart and picked up a Dell widescreen 19″. This is sweet. It actually has a much smaller footprint than the five year old LCD I was using. Now I can close the rolltop desk it sits on. Resolution on it is 1440×900. I feel the need for a bit of gaming. Maybe after I nap for a while. It was a long day and day number seven at work for me. I only have two more to go (if I don’t kill someone in the meantime) until I get two off in a row. That will be the first two days off I have had together since December 8th and 9th. I have actually only had two off since then, not including a half-day that I took, but still had seven hours of meetings. No wonder I have been such a bastard lately.

Damned if my monitor hasn’t crapped out on me this morning. I have known for a while that it was dying but I was hoping that it would last a little while longer. Back before Christmas I gave everyone instructions not to turn it off because I wouldn’t be able to get it back on again and they have done pretty well.

I woke up this morning and have been messing with it for a while but it is completely dead. So much for that. I suppose a trip to the Wal Mart is called for this morning before I go to work. I keep a $0 balance on one card but had planned to keep it that way, so much for that.

Meedio Download

rmiles7721December 31, 2007Entertainment, Technology

Sorry about the slow loading times for the site today. I’m not real sure what’s up but it appears to be hanging up on MyBlogLog’s JavaScript tracking widget. I will give it another hour or so before I yank it from the site.

I have been getting quite a few hits lately from the post I put up a couple of years ago when Meedio and crew sold out to Yahoo and crapped all over the users that had donated and purchased Meedio from them. Anyhow, at that point I was hosting Meedio here for download but the bandwidth got to be too much and I took the file offline.

Here is a link for anyone interested in downloading Meedio. It seems to be pretty reliable. I will also see if I can locate some others when I have the time and post them as well as others.

http://members.chello.be/sf15418/MEEDIO.1.41.setup.exe

 

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Home Computer Repair

rmiles7721December 30, 20071Technology

I used to do quite a bit of PC repair and home networking stuff, particularly when I was working in the IT department at our home office. People still want me to work on their computers but I really just don’t have the time to devote to it anymore. I don’t do custom-built computers any more and I very rarely even give any kind of tech advice.

That’s one of the cool things about services like Fast-teks. They specialize in home computer repair and troubleshooting. In addition to troubleshooting and repair they also work on virus, worm and spyware removal, wireless networking, data backup and recovery, high speed Internet setup, software training and several other services as well.

Fast-Teks is partnered with CompUSA as well as Tiger Direct and Dr.Backup so you know you are getting technicians that know what they are doing when you call Fast-Teks.

Plasma Lifts

rmiles7721December 23, 2007Entertainment, Technology

I think I found a gadget that I want to get. I have been considering getting a plasma TV later on in the year to replace my aging television and hook to my HTPC but one of the things I want to make sure and do is to keep it low key. I came across a plasma lift that’s built in to a cabinet that looks really cool. Set right I would be able to keep it in front of a picture or something on the wall behind it and then only have the Plasma TV come up when it was needed. Pretty cool actually.

Speaking of the HTPC, I should have all of the equipment I need to build a new one by February or so. I am looking forward to it. My ten-year-old asked me the other night when I was going to put BeyondTV back on. The whole family got used to being able to watch what they want and pause and skip commercials and when I took it out they hated it.

Getting Debate Videos on my Phone

rmiles7721December 22, 2007Technology

I did a write-up on Avot mV and their official blog a couple of months ago and what they had to offer mobile users. Since then the site has really improved and now they also have the political debates that have taken place recently on Avot mV channels. There are channels for republican ads as well as another one for democratic candidates.

If you want to check it out from your PC prior to using it on your mobile phone they have a desktop PC widget on the website so you can see what kind of videos are available. What’s cool is that you should be able to access the site not only from Pocket PC/SmartPhones and iPhones but regular mobile browsers as well, such as the one included with the Motorola Razr. I just tried it from my wife’s Razr and it worked very well, particularly since Verizon has recently expanded their broadband area so that I can access it from my house. No more 2400 baud speeds when I am on the Internet from my phone. Very sweet.

I had a few issues connecting to the site tonight from my phone, apparently Verizon has a DNS server down or something, but I have been able to get to the site using both Pocket IE as well as Opera Mini. The nice thing about using the Samsung that I will most likely replace in the next two months is the slider QWERTY keyboard. It makes getting to the site even better because I can view it in landscape mode.

Anyway, Avot mV is for mobile users what Youtube is for PCs. It allows me to have unlimited access to any web based video. Supposedly I should be able to play videos from Youtube and MySpace on my phone but I always seem to have problems and until earlier this evening I have never had one accessing Avot mV. You can check out their product site to get more information about Avot mV and what they have to offer. Their corporate site offers more insight into the technology behind the streaming video services offered as well as news updates.

One of the cool things is that it’s easy to search videos, just by typing a few characters to go on rather than full titles and words. You can also personalize the video listings based on your preferences, organize them into playlists and use Avot mV’s integrated messaging features to share your videos with your friends and family members. Did I mention it’s free? Yeah, that’s right. Obviously it’s going to use whatever air or data time you have set up for your plan, in my case I already pay for an unlimited data plan because of email so it really is free. It works on most carriers including support for 3G, EDGE, EV-DO, and WiFi.