Category: software

WIndows 8, Mountain Lion, and Ubuntu 12

I have to do a 10pm web site rollout tonight, so I find myself at home with some time to kill. I haven’t gotten much of a chance to play around with Windows 8, so I decided to download the 90-day eval, and install it on my old laptop. I have the ISO downloaded and ready to go now. However, I had installed Ubuntu 11 on the laptop back in February. I haven’t really played around with it much since then, and I was ready to wipe it out, but when I turned it on, I got an update message letting me know that I could update it to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. Well, I decided I’d rather upgrade the Ubuntu install on this laptop rather than wiping it out and starting over with Windows 8. It’s running now, and seems to be chugging along smoothly.

I did a little searching, and it looks like 12.04.1 was only just released. There’s an article about it on ZDNet, dated yesterday. And I guess the original 12.04 release was a few months back, based on the date on this Lifehacker article.

There’s been a lot of OS-related news lately, with Mountain Lion just released and Windows 8 nearing general availability. My old 2007 MacBook can’t handle Mountain Lion, so I’m sticking with plain-old Lion on that for now. I’m tentatively planning to buy myself a new MacBook Pro early next year, but I’m not really that worried about it right now. And I’m curious about Windows 8, but not that enthusiastic about it, given what I already know. I read an interesting CNET article this morning, comparing Mountain Lion and Windows 8. I think I agree with his conclusions, for the most part.

I will likely upgrade both my Windows desktop and laptop to Windows 8, when the consumer version is released, but I’m not that excited about it. Meanwhile, maybe I’ll play around with Ubuntu a bit more!

IPredator

I keep thinking that I ought to sign up for a third-party VPN service, so I can put all my traffic through an encrypted tunnel when I’m on public (or quasi-public) wifi. I meant to do something before I went off to San Diego, but I just didn’t get around to it. Some of the services I’ve seen are fairly expensive. These guys, for instance, are $15/month.

I just found one that’s reasonably simple and inexpensive: IPredator. It’s € 15 for 3 months, which comes out to about $22 US. So, about $7 per month. And it doesn’t auto-renew, so if I stop using it, I can just let the account go inactive until I decide to start using it again.

I have it set up on my Mac, iPhone, and iPad now. Setup was easy enough, and the speed seems reasonable. I need to do some more experimenting on that front.

I’m curious to see if it will work on the wifi at my office. We have a SonicWall security device on our network now, and it can be a bit agressive about blocking stuff. I’m not sure if it will let the VPN traffic through or not.

no more iGoogle

I’ve had my home page set to iGoogle for several years now, on all of my home computers. (Prior to that, I was using my.yahoo.com.) I just found out that it’s set to be discontinued. I don’t really understand why they’d be discontinuing something that can’t be costing them much money, and that entices people to have a nice big Google search bar on their home page. It’s not scheduled to disappear until late next year, but I decided to switch over to something else now anyway. The only reasonable alternative I could fine was Netvibes. If you go to their home page right now, they’re pushing their corporate dashboard stuff, but you can still sign up for a free account and use it like iGoogle. It’s pretty nice, though the page is slower to load than my iGoogle page is.

Windows backup weirdness

I hadn’t done a backup of my main home desktop PC in a while, so I decided to get one done today. I’ve previously used the built-in Windows 7 Backup, and, more recently, Crash Plan. I’ve had problems with both, so I needed to find another backup program.  I have a 1 TB drive, about 70% full, and two 500 GB drives that I can use for the backup. So, I need a program that can split the backup across two drives, which turns out to be more of a limiting factor than you’d think it would be. I’m currently running a backup with Macrium Reflect Free, which *should* be able to split the backup between two drives, though I’m not sure if it will or not.

The “weirdness” referenced in the title of this post is with regard to the speed of the backup. This is a desktop PC, and I’ve never really tweaked the power settings on it. I have the display set to blank after 10 minutes, but my assumption has always been that the PC will keep running at full speed, if it’s doing something, like a backup. When I started the backup, it was running at about 300 Mb/sec. That seemed like a good speed, and I expected it to get done fairly quickly. I’ve noticed, though, that if I check on it after it’s been running for awhile, it shows at 100 Mb/s.  If I sit in front of it for a few minutes, it gets back up to about 300 Mb/s. But, if I step away for an hour, then come back, it’s back down to 100 Mb/s. So, clearly, something is happening to slow it down after a certain period of keyboard/mouse inactivity. So, I’ve switched the power settings from “recommended” to “high performance”, thinking that maybe it’s going into a low-power mode or something, but I don’t think that’s helped. Which could mean that some other background process is kicking in after a few minutes of keyboard/mouse inactivity and slowing things down. All very frustrating. We’ll see if I can manage to get a backup done before the NFC Championship game is over.

laptop stuff

We’re in the middle of Hurricane Irene right now, but my part of Somerville is fine, and we haven’t lost power. I’ve been using this time to finish setting up my new ThinkPad, and to wipe my old Inspiron and Aspire One.
For the Aspire One, I uninstalled a few programs, let Windows apply a bunch of pending updates, then created a new account and wiped out my old one.  I gave that machine away yesterday, before the storm hit.
For the Dell Inspiron, I had too much stuff on there to easily clean up, so I just did a clean install of Windows 7 on that, created a user account, and ran updates to get it (mostly) current.  I think that’s ready to sell now.
On the ThinkPad, I’d done most of the quick installs already — Firefox, Notepad++, and a bunch of stuff like that. Yesterday, I took care of the two major installs: Office 2010 and Visual Studio 2010.  Now, I’m letting the system pull down and install updates for both of those programs.
Over all, I think I’ve probably pulled down 5 or 10 GB of updates over my internet connection this weekend.  Thank god I don’t have a data cap on my Optimum Online account!

kicking and screaming

OK, I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into 2011. I finally upgraded my home desktop machine to Firefox 4 and IE 9. (The work machine, of course, has had both installed for quite a while.)
I didn’t want to upgrade either until I was sure at least one of them would work with LogMeIn. It does seem to work OK in both Firefox 4 and IE 9 now, so there’s no reason for me to not upgrade now.
On a related issue, I was testing HTML 5 video in IE 9 last week, and ran into a really annoying problem.  For some crazy reason, my work machine has Windows 7 N on it, the version without Media Player. Well, it turns out that IE 9 won’t play HTML 5 video if Media Player isn’t installed. And it won’t show you a useful error message either.  It just won’t play. I eventually figured this out, and installed the Media Feature Pack for Windows 7 N. Now, all is well.

done with taxes

I managed to talk myself into doing my taxes before the SuperBowl started. I bought TurboTax this year instead of the H&R Block At Home (aka TaxCut) software, which I’ve been using for more than 10 years. I was curious about TurboTax, since I’ve never used it before, but it turns out that there’s not much of a difference between them. Either one is fine.
I think this may be the earliest I’ve done my taxes in years. I usually wait until around St. Patrick’s Day to file.

DropBox

I finally decided to switch from Windows Live Sync (aka FolderShare) to DropBox. I’ve got it installed on my desktop, Dell laptop, MacBook, and Acer netbook now, and I’ve moved everything from FolderShare to DropBox.

The main problem with FolderShare is that it doesn’t actually store any of your stuff, it just enables you to sync a folder between shared computers. So, to sync two computers, for instance, you need to have them both turned on and connected to the internet at the same time. For me, this has been leading to occasional problems, where I wind up with two versions of the same file, or I need to turn on my desktop computer to get the latest version of a file down to my laptop, for instance.

DropBox stores your stuff in the cloud, so it shouldn’t be a problem to get a shared file from one computer to another without needing them both on at the same time. We’ll see how it works in practice, but so far, so good.