Category: Geek Stuff

Tech tips for nerds!

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Stay away from Belkin?

If you’ve owned a computer for any length of time, you’ve probably heard of Belkin, a company that makes peripherials and accessories like USB hubs, KVMs, cables, and wireless networking devices. Due to the company’s ruthless marketing, Belkin accessories are sometimes be the only brand available at many big-box stores like Best Buy and Circuit City. Like Monster Cable, Belkin products always felt like robust and quality products (which is no doubt why the company was able to get in the door of corporate giants like Best Buy). But us geeks never really warmed to them. It always seemed as if something was wrong with their products, as if they didn’t quite work as advertised.

Well, we now know why. Sort of. Last week, news hit the Internet that the company was paying people to post good reviews of their products at sites like Amazon.com and Newegg.com. That in itself is bad, but it’s hardly the crime of the century. That is, until people alleging to be current and former Belkin employees opened the floodgates with tales about the company’s sordid business practices.

The allegations include:

– Not just paying for positive Belkin reviews, but also paying for negative reviews of competitor’s products.

– Sending hardware with custom firmware (operating systems) to reviewers, in order to hide bugs in their production hardware.

– Putting Microsoft and Apple hardware certification logos on products that had not earned them.

– Releasing “blatantly inaccurate” test results to make their products look better against the competition.

– Giving bonuses to business units with the most positive reviews per quarter, regardless of the rate of return of the product (the theory here being that even if a product sucks, the number of consumers that actually return a $25 product would be vanishingly small).

– Rigging demos hardware at trade shows. While I’m sure Belkin isn’t the only company to do this, the example given – running cables underneath (or behind) furniture so that a “wireless” media server is actually “wired” – is pretty damn awful.

You can read the whole sad tale here. In the meantime, I suggest you stay away from Belkin products until all this shakes out!

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SMS via Email

Did you know that you can send SMS messages via email? It’s something that’s been around for ages, but many people never use – except us IT folk, who often set up server monitoring programs to send an email out when something goes wrong.

To send SMS messages via email, all you’ve gotta do is address the email to the proper carrier (see below). Keep in mind that your email will still be limited to 160 characters, like any other text message. As far as I know, email to SMS works with these carriers, and requires nothing at all special – all email services and all email clients are supported:

T-Mobile: phonenumber@tmomail.net
Virgin Mobile: phonenumber@vmobl.com
Sprint: phonenumber@messaging.sprintpcs.com
Verizon: phonenumber@vtext.com
AT&T: phonenumber@txt.att.net
Alltel: phonenumber@message.alltel.com

Remember, “phone number” means the complete 10-digit number – using 7 digits won’t work.

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Goodbye, Old Friend!

Back in 1999, computer hardware was far more expensive than it is today. At the time, the difference between “top of the line” and “middle of the road” in processors was (looking back on it today) laughable. Back then, people seriously agonized over whether to buy the 500MHz or 533MHz processor; it was a clock difference of only 33MHz. But back then every megahertz counted, even if those 33 MHz cost you an extra $100.

I wanted a new computer at the time, as my PII-300 box was getting a bit long in the tooth. The only problem was that the high-end Intel processor of the time – the Pentium III 933 – was incredibly expensive… like, “well over $1000” expensive. I simply didn’t have that much scratch at the time.

And this is where the Abit BP-6 motherboard came in. The Abit BP-6 was a wonderful feat of hacker engineering. At the time, Intel didn’t allow Celeron processors to be used in SMP (multi-processor) systems; the BP-6 changed all that. Using Intel’s legendary 440BX chipset, the BP-6 board allowed end-users to use two inexpensive Celeron chips in place of  a single high-end Pentium III processor. So instead of buying a $1200 PIII-933 processor, the BP-6 allowed me to buy two $150 Celeron 466 chips. Sure, two Celeron 466 processors working together wouldn’t be as fast as a single PIII-933… but performance would be very close, close enough to justify the $900 savings. The BP-6 was also one of the first boards to heavily advertise its overclocking features, so people lucky enough to get a closely-matched pair of the “special” Celeron 300A MHz chips got the same performance for even fewer dollars (because the Celeron chips were essentially a Pentium II without the L2 cache, the 300MHz “Mendocino” Celerons could easily run at the Pentium II’s 100MHz FSB speed, thus they could easily be overclocked to 450MHz).

Abit BP6

I put together my BP6 with two Celeron 466 processors, a then-outrageous 512MB of RAM, and the largest hard drive I could find at the time. Since Windows 9x couldn’t handle multiple processors, I installed Windows NT Workstation 4 on this new box… and then went to town. This computer and I went through a lot together. We learned a lot about IT and computers together. I was an official Microsoft beta tester at the time and would soon be constantly installing (and reinstalling) beta versions of Windows NT 5.0 (later named Windows 2000). I got my first taste of Linux on this computer. I fell in love with the BeOS on this computer. I soon got a TV tuner card, and learned all the ins and outs of video capture on that computer.

Continue reading “Goodbye, Old Friend!”

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Slimming Down AVG

There are many companies out there that offer a free antivirus programs to home users. Avast! is one, as is Avira, BitDefender, and AVG. AVG, however, appears to be the sole vendor to offer a free antivirus program for the x64 versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista. And since I just got a new x64 computer running Vista Home Premium, I was in the market for a new AV solution. So I downloaded and installed AVG Free 8… only to recoil at how bloated the whole thing had become!

AVG Free 8 has, in my opinion, two big problems: the Link Scanner and the Notification Area.

According to About.com, Link Scanner is “a tool that protects the user from visiting malformed sites from a search engine. So for example, if you were to open up Google and type ‘skiing’ and Google returned 100 sites concerning skiing, Link Scanner would visit each of those sites and determine if you were at risk by clicking on any of the supplied links”. This is a giant waste of bandwidth for nearly everyone involved – especially since the same types of sites that Link Scanner blocks are easily blocked by Internet Explorer and Firefox’s phishing filters, as well as OpenDNS’s servers if you use that service. More importantly, Link Scanner visibly slows down Google and adds these annoying green icons all over your results page:

AVG Link Scanner

So – how do you disable the Link Scanner?

Continue reading “Slimming Down AVG”

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Windows 7: MP3 Warning!

The latest beta (test) version of Microsoft Windows – currently known as “Windows 7” – leaked to the Internet just before Christmas. Millions have downloaded it illegally… but you might want to hold off on actually installing it. Microsoft recently admitted to a bug in the included Windows Media Player 12 which can delete the first couple of seconds of every mp3 file it plays!

What actually happens is that Windows will corrupt any MP3 file with a header larger than 16KB if that file’s metadata is overwritten. So your data will become corrupted if you manually edit the ID3 tags in Windows Explorer *or* have WMP set to automatically fetch the artwork and other information over the Internet (which is the default setting if you picked the “Express Setup” of WMP 12).

This bug applies to leaked build 7000 of Windows 7 only. It does not apply to any other Microsoft operating system, or any other build of Windows 7. Although Microsoft is working on a patch for this, you can avoid it completely by not using WMP12 or using any built-in tool for editing metadata. Risk takers are advised to turn off the “download artwork” option if they must use WMP12 in Windows 7.

Read more about it here.

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Fixing ESPN’s Site

ESPN’s website has an annoying “feature”: a video player that starts playing the latest sports highlights as soon as you load the ESPN.com page. This makes it difficult to stealthily check scores at work, it makes the page load slowly… and it’s just all around annoying.

You can stop the video player from appearing by creating an ESPN.com account and disabling the player in the user preferences. But that’s a pain, especially if you don’t want to give ESPN your information. If you use Firefox and have AdBlock Plus installed, you can easily disable the player by opening the AdBlock preferences and adding the following to a new filter:

http://sports.espn.go.com/broadband/mpf/players/*

Thanks to this site for the tip!

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R.I.P. VHS

Earlier this year, Japanese electronics giant JVC announced that it would cease production of standalone VHS video cassette recorders. While a few companies continue to produce VHS-DVD combo machines, JVC was the last company that made standalone boxes.

So it was only a matter of time before companies stopped selling pre-recorded VHS tapes, too. And that happened this week. Distribution Video Audio (DVA), the last major distributor of pre-recorded VHS cassettes, announced that it will stop shipping tapes by the end of the year, and that any stock left over after January 1, 2009 will either be given away or tossed in the dumpster.

The last major Hollywood film to be distributed on VHS came out in 2006. Since then, DVA has distributed previously-viewed, overstock, and public domain VHS tapes to libraries, dollar stores, military bases and cruise ships. But now this will cease, and Luddities everywhere will be forced to upgrade to DVRs or recordable DVD decks.

Read more about it here.

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Those Punk Kids!

maryland_license_plateThis is hilarious! Guess what bored teenagers in Maryland are doing?

They’re using templates found on the Internet to create fake license plates, which they then print up on glossy paper with a color inkjet printer. The fake plate is then taped over the pranksters’ genuine plate. They then run a red light or speed in an area known to have traffic cameras, just to get their friends or teachers in trouble with the law!

It seems the cameras Maryland uses for speeding and red light enforcement aren’t smart enough to figure out that the plate is either a copy, or that the fake plate is on the wrong make and model car. So angry teens can easily get back at the bully that threw them into the lockers, or the teacher that assigned too much homework one weekend.

OK, I guess it wouldn’t be that funny if it were you that got punk’d in this way… but as a non-involved observer, I still find it quite amusing.

Read more about it here.

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Monday Randomness…

– The (New York) Daily News stole the Empire State Building recently for an in-depth article about the growing problem of mortgage fraud. In mortgage fraud, scammers generally forge paperwork with local governments to transfer property to their aliases; they then use the property to apply for mortgages. They then take the money and split. In most cases, the genuine property owner has no idea the scam has even happened until a foreclosure crew shows up to seize property due to the unpaid, illicit mortgage. In the Daily News’ case, the newspaper’s forged documents contained several “tells” that should have tipped off the people in the NYC deeds office: star of the original King Kong film Fay Ray was listed as a witness, bank robber Willie Sutton was listed as notary, and the company purchasing the iconic New York building was “Nelots Properties LLC” (stolen spelled backwards). You should check out the article; it’s a good read!

– Watch out: Microsoft is planning to make their own version of WordPress.

– Shopping at a Circuit City liquidation sale? Be careful! The closing Circuit City stores are no longer owned by the company but by a liquidator who apparently has no qualms about doubling the MSRP on electronics and taking a discount off that absurdly high price. For example, one woman stopped by a closing Circuit City in Parker, Colorado looking for a deal on a Sony BDP-S350 Blu-Ray DVD player. She’d seen the player at Best Buy for $299 and Amazon for $249, and figured Circuit City’s “50% Off” offer might save her a few ducats. However, the liquidator’s “saleperson” assured the shopper that their price of $309 was a huge 50% discount over their “list price” of $618!

– Good karma and “get well” wishes to Carolina Panthers owner Jerry Richardson, who is now on the heart transplant waiting list. I’m not a fan of your team sir, but you are, by all accounts, a good man and a swell NFL owner. Get well soon, and God Bless!

– With his win against the Ratbirds yesterday, Ben Roethlisberger became the first quarterback in NFL history to win 50 games in his first 5 seasons. Congrats, Ben! It’s been a hell of a ride so far!

– Epic Carnival – a website that’s half pictures of hot celebrity chicks and half snarky NFL news, a mash-up of The Superficial and a slightly more serious Kissing Suzy Kolber, if you will – has become one of my favorite new sites. Check out this list of Top 10 amazing but true NFL facts. Some excerpts: “There is, in fact, no NFL law on the books that prevents the Cardinals from hosting a playoff game”… “Minnesota actually trailed for most of its game against Detroit, and became the first professional football team ever to be concerned when Gus Frerotte got hurt”… and “Despite the fact that he’s been on the losing end of a great deal of football games, Terrell Owens still screams and cries like a little girl when it happens again.”