Print your dinner.

The fiction of Star Trek has finally met up with reality. Remember the food replicator? All you had to do was tell the ship's computer what you wanted and the meal would appear in a few moments.

Three-D printing has been with us for a while. Most of the uses have been small scale production, modelling , prototyping and mold making. Now there is a printer thanks to some very bright folks at MIT that will hold a variety of ingredients. It has the capability for very localized heating and cooling which allows for some very precise preparation.

Currently this is in a infancy stage. My guess is that we will probably see units for the home in a couple of years.  The market share will probably follow a trend similar to  the market penetration of VCRs. The early models were large, expensive and a status symbol. A couple of decades later and they are almost a throw away commodity.

Retrieving data from a dead windows laptop hard drive with an external USB HD enclosure

 As our population of windows laptops ages, we are seeing an increasing number that are failing to boot with blue screens.

1. In many cases, the data is still intact. The issue is either a hardware failure or that Windows became corrupted.

An external USB enclosure can make the retrieval of your data a whole lot easier. The first thing is that you need to determine which style of enclosure you will need. Our experience has been that most laptops that are 4 or 5 years old are newer will fit in a 3.5 inch SATA enclosure.

The steps are fairly simple

1. Power down the laptop and remove the battery
2. Carefully remove the hard drive. In many cases there will be 2 small screws on the cover. Once you have the cover off, look for a piece of tape designed to help you pull the drive out of the bay. Be careful not to put pressure on the drive or otherwise damage it.
3. Once the drive is out, remove the cage that houses it. There should be four small phillips screws on the sides.
4. The next step is a little tricky. Most drives have a proprietary plug on the pins designed to allow the drive to be dropped into the bay. You need to use a thin blade or even your fingernails to pop that off the drive. Be careful not to damage the pins.
5. Now, you should be able to insert the drive into the USB enclosure. The screw holes for the laptop drives don't match up with most 3.5 inch SATA drives but you should be able to make a good enough connection for transferring data.
6. Once you get the drive in the enclosure, connect the power and USB cables and turn it on.
7. You should see the drivers load and the drive show up in My Computer.
8. In many cases, you will probably be using Windows Vista or 7. Much of the data is located in the My Documents folder for the user under Documents and Settings folder. We have not run into any cases where the user had enabled encryption on their account. I'm not sure that the data could be easily recovered for a user who had set encryption on. When you try to open a user's folder, you will see a notification that you don't have rights to the folder. In almost all cases, you simply follow the prompts and your machine will gain access.
9. Copy any data you need to another storage device. We usually use space on a network drive.
10. Once you are done you can remove the drie and safely pack it away as a backup. If there was something like a hive failure, you can try fixing it. You might want to back up the restore points stored on the drive before attempting repairs.

In summary, the USB hard drive enclosure can be a great alternative to the costly option of sending the drive out for data recovery. Prices for that are usually in the $1000 and up range.

Use caution when doing this as it is easy to fatally damage your hard drive as you are removing it.

jce editor in Joomla and linking to internal content

The free JCE editor for Joomla adds some great functionality. One of the things it allows you to do is to easily link to content in your site.

Once you have the JCE editor installed, the process is simple

1. Make sure you set the editor to JCE in the Global Configuration
2. When you edit the article, highlight the text to use as a link
3. Click the link button.
4. You will see options for linking either to content or to menu items. Choose whichever suits your needs
5. Establish the link

Contact us at http://www.cgmsystems.com/ for Joomla development and site management

Ruh Roh- One of the Russian Spies worked at Microsoft and another wrote decision making software

One of the Russian spies recently arrested worked at Microsoft and another had a company that wrote decision making software.

One of the problems is that detecting easter eggs in software is difficult. It would be possible for someone with the right access to leave backdoors in microsoft products that would allow data to be compromised by Russian intelligence. This impacts both national security and private business in terms of industrial espionage.

The decision making software is interesting in that most of that works by putting your proposed plans and alternatives into the system and letting it walk you through the various decision trees. However an easter egg in such a program could allow that data to be easily read by a malicious third party.

Oh well, at least the russian female spies were hot.

For more info, see the Financial Times Article

HWREN1 Hi-Gain Wireless-300N Range Extender installation

We just installed an HWREN 1 Hi-Gain Wireless 300N Range Extender for a client.

The client needed to extend the range of his wireless system and the layout of the house did not lend itself to a wired solution.

The installation involved connecting the the device to the router and running the installation CD. However, after several attempts, it was not connecting. I noticed that the list of wifi sites found during the scan appeared garbled. I tried resetting the unit but the problem remained.

I had taken note of the IP address assigned during the installation. With the device still connnected to the router, I entered the IP address of the device into a browser. The id and password was admin/1234.

During that time I had called Hawking support. The rep seemed to be offshore but he was extremely knowledgeable and helpful. With the browser based control panel, I was able to finish the configuration.

Once the unit was configured, we placed it in what looked like a promising location between the router and the laptop. I then needed to change the settings of the laptop to havce it connect to the the Hawking device.

The range extender seems to be providing a much more stable wifi connection

Wifi Repeaters... Not just for mooching Wifi at the shore..

There are times when your wifi range jsut isn't adequate. You find that your getting a weak signal and can't easily move the Wireless access point (WAP) or your computer. One solution is a wifi repeater that will capture the signal and then rebroadcast it. All you need is a power outlet. Suppose you want to use your laptop out by the pool. You could put a repeater midway between your WAP and where you want to sit and see if you get enough signal stregnth.

There are some disadvantages. One of the most important is that it will increase the traffic on your network as any signals have to be retrransmitted.  For most people with a few users, this isn't a problem. If you had a number of users or a lot of bandwidth intensive applications, it could slow down your network.

A lot of homeowners at vacation locations such as the shore seem to leave their wireless networks unprotected. The reasons could be ignorance, a desire to make it easy to access wifi for their renters or perhaps just a desire to share with the neighborhood. If you use a repeater to grab a neighbor's signal keep in mind that could be a violation of state and federal law. You are also leaving yourself open a bit to being hacked.

Keep in mind that there are a lot of variables when working with wifi especially when trying to boost your range.

If you are interested in adding  a repeater to your wifi network, check out the following units

Online income in today's economy

I tend to over-analyze things and sometime look too much at the pessimistic side of things (resulting in a lot of rice after y2k along with a lifetime supply of other stuff). Of course, Y2K proved to be pretty much of  a non event.


Anyway, the unemployment numbers look really bleak. After a bit I started to think that might not have the impact I originally thought it did. I had not thought through the issue of unemployment benefits.

Here is my hypothesis.

1. Pay per click and CPM ads might still be strong because companies are trying to bring in whatever business they can and haven't totally slashed ad spending (in a semi related real world example, I noticed that our local food store was doing a lot of "Buy 2 to get a special price". My guess is that they were trying to increase overall sales)
 
2. High end luxury items will be affected depending on the demographics of the main customers and the real nature of the item. For example, someone who is selling high end custom wheels and rims may be experiencing a downturn while someone selling high end audio equipment is doing Ok. It will all depend on the individual marketing and the stregnth of the site.
 
3. Ecommerce sites selling lower end common items or even botique items may do OK. If someone needs their hair conditioner, they will probably still be able to afford it.
 
4. Pay per click such as adsense may do OK. More people will be sitting home with high speed internet. As long as there is an adequate inventory of ads, they will come and click. Whether those clicks are productive for the advertiser will remain to be seen.
 
So, don't give up with online earnings. It takes a while and a lot of expertise to get a site to a point where it is commercially viable so people shouldn't think that online income is a subsitute for their lost job. Instead, it may be a time of some opportunity for those who have established sites and the expertise to make them tick.

Bill would allow Obama to sieze control of the internet

I don't really who is in power, a socialist democrat or a conservative republican. There is a bill sponsered by Sen Lieberman that would give Obama a 'kill switch' for the internet. The bill is entitled Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act.  Given the actions of this administration and the heavy handed tactics, this is a truly frightening bill. As much as I trust Sarah Palin, I would not even want her to have this much power.

Obama has shown his willingness to use regulatory tricks to try to shut down opposition such as Fox News. If he has this power, he could shut down our free speach on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Declan McCullagh points out in his article that, in a time of crisis, pulling the plug on the internet could weaken us.

The question one has to ask about this is "are there ulterior motives?". Over the last 200 years, the political elite in this country have become used to a fawning media and the ability to control the news. The recent incident where a congressman attacked two students is upsetting to those who are used to contol. A decade ago the congressman or speaker's office could have made a phone call to the reporters and quashed the story. Today, it goes out on  Youtube and the power elites find themselves powerless to stop it.


This is also frightening in that an ever increasing portion of our communications is dependent on the internet. Many people have moved to Voice over IP for there phone service. Consider the following scenario. Terrorists detonate a nuclear device in a major city. The years of 'community organizing' have not prepared our commander in chief to deal with this. He panicks and pulls the plug on the internet. Now you try to call your kids at school to see if they are safe and make arrangements to get them home. You find out all of the lines are dead because Obama pulled the plug on the internet.  You try to google 'radiation pills' to find out if the pottasium iodate you have in the medicine cabinet is an antidote. Your spouse is at home trying to go online to determine what to do for your diabetic child since the pharmacy can't process your prescriptions for his insulin but there is no internet.

Oh, Obama, won't mind, like everything else, HIS internet will be working and dozens of govenrment agents will be looking after HIS family... Let them eat cakes.

• The senate version of the bill
• PrisonPlanet article
• Article by Declan McCullagh of ZDnet

Verifying a blogger hosted blog in google webmaster tools and submitting a sitemap

Google recently ended FTP hosting for blogs. We went throught the conversion process with no problem.

One of the side effects of the change was that the blogs were now at http://blog.oursite.com/  instead of www.oursite.com/blog.

The first step was to set up a new site in webmaster tools for the blog. That involved simply creating a new site in WMT of http://blog.oursite.com/ . The verification appeared to be a little tricky. With the new hosting, we weren't sure if it was possible to add a file. You can also verify via a DNS record which would probably be a more elegant solution. However, we didn't have the time to work through that. The easiest way was to set up a meta tag. We are using the layout tools with the gadgets. All we needed to do was select EDIT HTML and paste the metatag into the template.

One word of warning. There may be situations were you lose the metatags and will have to reinsert them. The same technique should work for the Yahoo site manager as well.

We were using the atom feed for the google webmaster tools of www.oursite.com/atom.xml.   There wasn't any easily found documentation on the site feed name. Through some simple trial and error, we found that the site feed was simply http://blog.oursite.com/atom.xml.  or, as it looks in webmaster tools /atom.xml.

Waterproof Phone Pouches

Nothing says "ruined phone" like a good dousing with salt water. We were watching the festivities at our local boat ramp. Most of the people going out in their boats had cell phones... in their shirt or pants pocket. One good wave over the bow and you end up with an expensive paperweight. There are any number of good waterproof pouches available to help protect your phone and camera

 Now that it's summer and time for boating and the beach, consider getting a waterproof pouch for your phone. 

Showing a Fabrik Form in a Joomla Article

If you want to show a fabrik form inside a Joomla Article, you can do that by the following

1. Download the Fabrik Plugin, currently Fabrik Plugin 2.0.rc5
2. Make sure the plugin is enabled. It will be labeled Fabrik
3. Make a note of the syntax. If your form is #2, then you can insert the form with {fabrik view=form id=2}

Note - Fabrik is a Joomla extension that allows you to easily create forms.

Bucks County Fios now requires port 587 for outgoing mail (SMTP)

My outgoing mail suddently stopped working today. I had forgotten about a verizon email stating that I had to change my outgoing smtp port from 25 to 587. This is in a supposed effort to slow down spam from infected machines.

We use our own domain for mail.

The process is pretty straightforward but it did involve a few steps

1. Change the outgoing server from mydomain.com to outgoing.verizon.net
2. Change the outgoing mail port (SMTP) from 25 to 587
3. Set the outgoing server to "My server requires authentication" and enter my VERIZON user id and password (not the id and password for my email). Fortunately the verizon tech was able to reset the password. Don't forget to change it since it expires in 24 hours.

I still have to figure out how to configure the mail settings on my verizon samsung saga phone. We get lousy cellular coverage at home and I often end up using the wireless for connectivity.

Formatting tables in Joomla

We have been using the JCE editor with Joomla. Even though it offers more capability than the TinyMCE editor that comes with Joomla, we still had difficulty working with tables.

An interim solution is to simply copy to the table to MS Word, format it, and then copy it back to the Joomla article.

It can be a ltttle tricky to select the table using the JCE Editor in Joomla. Instead of a blank line, put a line of text before and after the the table. You can use a SHIFT-CLICK to select those text lines and the table in between.

Secure Google Search

Google has released a secure search in beta (test mode). This will, to some degree, hide your search terms and results from third parties on your network. This will help hide your searches from your boss at work, other visitors at a hotel or at school.

Keep in mind that this is in a test mode at this time. Also, once you click on one of the search results it is quite probable that the URL and page data would be visible. Another factor to consider is that google will store your search queries.

Is it worth the trouble? For home use, probably not. Most schools and corporate IT departments will still be able to figure out if you are using the internet inappropriately. However, in cases such as working on sensitive projects while traveling and/or using guest internet connections, it would probably be worth the effort. Currently the encrypted version of google search can be accessed by https://www.google.com.




For more information, see the google article

Joomlatwork free set patch and FTP settings

We are working with a new site and uploaded the Joomlatwork free SEF patch for 1.5.17. Depsite a couple of tries, we were not seeing the SEO tab in the configuration manager.

It turned out that we had Filezilla set to 'overwrite if newer'. Some of the 1.5.17 Joomla files were newer than the SEF patch files resulting in an incomplete upload of the patch.

Once we changed the settings to "Overwrite" and re-uploaded the SEF patch, things worked great. we could now see the SEO tab and the field for inputting Title information in the Article manager