Remote Control with LogMeIn

I had heard vaguely about LogMeIn before, but then they bought Hamachi, a product that I use and love, mainly because it is simple and effective. Today I was forced to use LogMeIn to solve a problem and install some software.
It works. Very well. It's not as powerful as Remote Administrator, but if you need to connect to a PC to sort out something on the screen, LogMeIn is great. And it's free, just like Hamachi. And you don't have to be a rocket scientist to get it to work.
I'm not about to uninstall Remote Administrator anytime soon, because it allows me to copy files as well as do remote control, but for simple support I think LogMeIn is brilliant.

Backups with SyncToy

Microsoft SyncToy is the only reason I can find to go throught the pain of installing and updating the .NET framework. After all, it makes sense to download 35MB worth of software and patches just to run a 1.35MB application, doesn't it? This is a simple, yet brilliantly effective application.
You set it up to copy files from one point to another, typically from a hard drive to a removable or networked one. You can tell it to copy only newer or updated files, and synchronise the directories with several other options. it's like an automated, intelligent copy program. Like xcopy with a brain. Thanks to David Young at Funky Penguin for this tip.

DVDs and the Law of Unintended Consequences

Consumers don't like to be ripped off. When is the movie industry going to realise this? Their greedy little minds are forever trying to come up with schemes to rip off the public and make more money, but in the end the consumer always finds a way to get even.
This weekend is a case in point. We rented a DVD from a respectable video store in the area. They are busy selling off all their old VHS videos because most people rent DVDs instead. We bought a few. We also hired a Shakespeare play, "Twelfth Night". It wouldn't play. Something about regional settings. Trust a Sony DVD player to come up with that nonsense. It's a good job I didn't buy the DVD player. I wouldn't buy a Sony one if you paid me to do so.
So when a friend popped round later in the day I asked him about this, and he mentioned a program called "DVD Shrink" that would allow me to copy the original movie onto a DVD-R, which would then work in the DVD player. I downloaded it and discovered that the movie in question was set for region 4 (Australia) instead of region 2 (Europe and South Africa). I clicked OK to accept the region setting, and then ripped the DVD.
Everything worked fine until I tried "Much Ado About Nothing", whereupon I was told that I needed to change my regional setting back to 2, and that I only had 3 changes left. What!? A quick look at the properties of my DVD hardware confirmed the bad news. Every time you change a region the hardware gets messed with.
It's a good job that Microsoft had the good manners to let me know. I guess their programmers have been stung by this before. Anyway, I was now fed up that simply because someone sent the wrong zone DVD to our shop, I was damned if my hardware would get damaged in the process. A quick search of my hardware model led me to this site, which explains why DVD drives are defective by design.
I also tracked down "DVD Region Killer", a program that bypasses the problem, and "DiscInfo", a program that tells you the state of your DVD hardware.
So in order to protect my own hardware I am forced to bypass the manuafacturer's greedy DRM system. In the process I have been introduced to a cheap and effective way of copying rented DVDs. We tried recording a scene from "Chariots of Fire" from DVD to VHS tape for Penny's teaching prac, with disasterous results. Now we'll just copy the entire movie instead.
That's the Law of Unintended Consequences: They tried to stop me from renting pirate DVDs, and all they succeeded in doing was force me to find out how to copy legitimate ones instead. Here's another unintended consequence: by preventing people from taping DVDs onto VHS, they supposedly encouraged consumers to buy DVD players and buy DVD copies of movies they already own. The people who spent the most money in this way were, of course, the video rental shops. Now they are having to sell off their old VHS tapes because consumers want to rent the DVD instead. The movie companies are screwing their own distribution chain. Once consumers find how simple and easy it is to keep a copy of the rented DVD, they may stop buying fake DVDs from the people who sell them at the traffic lights. Was that the intended consequence? I doubt it.
If you are a movie industry lawyer reading this, consider the following before you sue me: I have already paid royalties to your company by purchasing the DVD drive in my laptop. It was nice of you to pass on 0% of this royalty to your artists. Secondly, I have paid another royalty when I bought the blank DVR-R disc, even though most of the discs are used for data backups. Again, 0% goes to the artists. Thirdly, I will have paid a third royalty when I rent the DVD from the video shop. Thank you for passing on a 1% royalty to the artists. You are most generous.

Keep your cool while using your notebook

After my disaster with the "blower" that sucks, I bought the Antec Notebook Cooler. My laptop is now an extra 2cm above the ground, with the cooler underneath. It uses two cyclone fans to draw air from the underside of the laptop and extract it to the back and the right. The photo shows the top part. The two darker circles are where the fans extract the air and eject it out of the sides. Basicaly this turns the bottom of your notebook into a cooling area. I may need to modify it a bit to get it to keep Penny's ThinkPad R31 sufficiently cool, since its fan has stopped working reliably and the hard drive overheats when you run Spinrite.
The power is obtained from a USB connection, and they thoughtfully allow the USB connection to daisy-chain with another device, so Penny can still use her USB mouse and the cooler fan. The photo* abve shows the power cable plugging in to the USB connector on the left.
This photo* shows a close-up of one of the two fans.
This photo* shows the ThinkPad R31 on top of the Notebook Cooler. As you can see from the ruler on the right, the keyboard sits about 4-5cm above the desk.


* Click for a more detailed image.

TrueCrypt shortcuts that saves time and keeps files safe

TrueCrypt is brilliant. It creates a virtual drive where everything stored in the drive is protected by encryption. Given the sensitive nature of Men's Clinic data on my laptop, I can now ensure that this data is completely meaningless to anyone who steals my laptop.
I can also keep a backup on site at the client's premises where no-one except those who know the passphrase can open it. To get access to the drive quickly, I have a shortcut on my desktop that runs a batch file. The batch file contains the following:

@echo off
if not exist x:\nul goto TCMount
start x:\dev\clinic
goto END
:TCMount
echo Please enter TrueCrypt password
"C:\Program Files\TrueCrypt\TrueCrypt.exe" _
/l X /v D:\DonnDev.pgd /q
start x:\dev\clinic
:END

What does it do? It checks to see if drive X: exists, and if so, opens the directory. if not, it uses TrueCrypt to mount the directory (after asking for the passphrase) and then opens the directory. Either way, by the time it has finished the directory is open and I can begin work. Simple, yet so effective.

Note: the underscore indicates that the line continues, i.e. the line beginning "C:\ .." ends with "... /q". If you add "/c y /m ts" at the end, TrueCrypt will remember your password until you reboot, and time stamp the volume file each time you open it, so that backups work correctly.

TrueCrypt web site

The Refund Dance begins

Last Thursday I collected my order number 76744 from Digital Planet. The one with 2 of 3 items being faulty. Last Friday morning I called their number and arranged to return the faulty ones when I collected order number 77568. No problem, they said on the phone. But life is never that simple.
When I arrived to collect the order today, no-one knew anything about the faulty items, or the replacement flash drive that I requested. Then they pointed out that the goods were being returned on day 8 and they have to be returned within 7 days. After explaining my story again they were very nice and said they would speak to the suppliers. They gave me a receipt for the Legend Flash Drive and the Antec Super Cyclone Blower (it sucks, it doesn't blow; when the fan turns at all).
Now I guess we just have to wait for the wheels of bureaucracy to grind on and hopefully get a refund in the next week or so. Thank goodness I paid by credit card.
Update 10th November 2006: The Legend Flash Drive has finally been replaced. The supplier didn't have stock. The "blower" was replaced on 17th October, so no refund was needed.

The Citizen gets it

There was a time in the 1990's that I did some work for the Citizen classifieds. I wrote their Ad Lib! classified ads program, which worked on a strange network of XT-class PCs with 20MB hard drives, using XyWrite III Plus as the word processor, and Clipper as the database. In those days the paper was owned by Perskor. I always joked that and their definition of affirmative action was employing people who spoke English.
Now the Citizen is owned by Caxton's, and while I have no time for one of their directors who cheated me out of several thousand Rands a while back, they have finally got a web site and a daily podcast. The mind boggles.
And it's quite good too. Much better than the segmented MoneyWeb one, or the nonexistent 702 or Star ones. Why a radio station can't do a podcast beats me.
In fact it's better than good. It's brilliant! It's professional, clearly read and to the point. 3 minutes is plenty of time to cover the headlines, and its much safer to listen to than trying to read their billboards when driving. The guys who write their billboards come up with some absolute gem headlines. Great stuff!

US Military reaches new levels of stupidity

"Tommy Thompson, former Secretary of Health and Human Services joined the board of VeriChip Corporation after leaving his Bush administration cabinet post. Shortly thereafter, he went on national television recommending that all Americans get chipped as a way to link to their medical records. He also suggested the VeriChip could replace military dog tags, and a spokesman boasted that the company had been in talks with the Pentagon."
This guy has to be the dumbest man on the planet if he wasn't so obviously greedy. Imagine a troop of Marines walking through an urban alleyway somewhere in Iraq. They're the only humans in the entire area with VeriChips inserted under their skin. You can use a simple scanning device to pick up the existence of these chips, similar to the security detectors in shops.
They walk past a wooden door and there is a loud explosion. No more Marines. Other people had been walking past the same door all day, but since they didn't have VeriChips on them, or RFID tags in their American passports, they didn't trigger the bomb.
I think this is a brilliant idea. It maximizes American casualties and reduces collateral damagae to Iraqi civilians. All courtesy of the Bush administration.

From Spychips.com: VeriChip - Immigrants - Guest Workers