The joy of hibernation for laptops

I have found that the hibernation mode is the best for my laptop. I take the laptop with me most of the time. This means i am regularly shutting it.

If i try to shut it down, that take s a lot of time. Quite often, I am in a hurry to get out the door.


I set the laptop to allow hibernation. Hibernation is a state where the contents of memory gets saved to disk and the machine shuts down completely. When you power back up, your workspace is read back into memory leaving you with all the windows you had previously.

I set the power scheme so that the machine hibernates when shut while on battery. This is done through the Control Panel, System, Power Settings. You want to pay attention to the action taken when you shut the lid when on battery.

All i need to do when leaving a location is to remove the power cord and then shut the lid. the hibernation process will finish while the laptop is in the bag .


The advantages to this setup are :

• the machine shuts down which prevents overheating. In hibernation the power is off. That also means that there is almost no battery drain.
• The time to get the machine into the travel bag is minimized.
• When you restart, all of your windows and data are where they were when you shut down. That way, you can continue where you left off without restarting apps and reloading data.

If you just put the system into the standby mode instead of hibernation, there is a slow but steady drain on the battery. If you don't plug the machine into AC power, your battery will usually be flat within a day.

I

I got a little tired of having to root through my laptop bag looking for things like earphones, usb hubs , usb cables etc.

I did a couple of simple things to get a little better organized

• I bought a pair of clear vinyl pencil cases from Officemax. The nice thing is I can easily see what is in each bag. As a bonus, it makes things a little easier for the screeners at the airport
• I had a mini set of headphones which kept getting tangled into a Gordian Knot. A really simple solution was to take an old first aid adhesive spool. I simply wind the cord from the earphones around the spool and secure that with a velcro strap. It's fast and easy.
• I bought one of those multi usb cables. It is basically a USB extension cable with an assortment of the common tips. That works great also.
• One thing I do want to get is one of those 'roll up' ethernet cables. They simply store the ethernet cable in a retractable spool.

So the end result is I got rid of all the junk and now have things organized a whole lot better.

Verizon FIOS - A wireless SSID mystery solved - Two SSIDs showing

I'm on about my fourth Actiontec router from Verizon Fios. It was working fine until today. I was just using my Samsung Saga as a calculator when a message came up asking for my key.

A little bit later I found

1. The router had reset. When I logged onto it, it was asking me to set a password
2. My network was showing.
3. I was connected using my normal SSID (A) with my wireless laptop.
4. When I went into the Basement, my samsung Saga was showing a weak signal for my SSID of (A) but showing a strong signal for the SSID on the router label.
5. The wireless settings in the router were showing the (B) SSID, not the one I had Set (A)

This was getting a bit confusing. How could my wireless laptop have a connection on my SSID (A) when it appeared that was no longer on the router. I had Verizon escalate it and the tech agreed that what I was seeing was impossible. I had to agree.

As we were talking, it hit me. I had a secondary Wireless access point set up using my SSID (A), which is near the laptop. Now, it made sense. The WAP was the one with my SSID. The router had been reset. I went back into the router and reset the SSID and Key and everything is back to normal.

The question remains as to why the router reset. We have ordered FIOS TV so perhaps the verizon people reset it for some reason. This could be a pain as I have some port forwarding set up which also got reset. Once I get it back to normal, I'll print that page out and hang it near the router and keep a copy on my laptop

Saga Saga - A tale of two browsers

So far the Samsung Saga running Window Mobile Pro 6.x has been working out great. It has Opera and Explorer installed. Having two browsers is nice because some pages load a bit slowly. If that is the case, you can switch over to your secondary browser and do some surfing there.

Also, not every site wants to work with a given mobile browser. Having more than one browser makes it more likely that you will be able to get to a site.

The downside is that you need to remember which sites work with which browsers but that isn't that hard.

I've found that enabling the mobile mode for Opera really helps the readability of most sites. To do that you go to the Opera Menu, Settings (by hitting the "up arrow" icon again) Display, Mobile view.

You can tweak Explorer Mobile for mobile browsing by going to the menu and choosing "One Column". That usually makes pages easier to read than the full screen mode.

How to embed Youtube videos in your Blogger or other blog

There is a little trick to being able to embed a youtube video in your blogger or other blog.

Let's start with the idea that videos can be a great asset to many different types of blogs. They can add some really rich content.

The trick is to get the video embedded in Blogger.

Here is a little step by step guide

1. Start a new post in Blogger.
2. Find a video you want to include in your blog. Often you will find a video posted on another blog. Start playing the video.
3. Look at the bottom right of the youtube player. There should be a little gizmo you can click. When you click it, you will see 3 choices stacked on top of each other. Choose the bottom icon.
4. What you should see next is a choice of embed or link. You can copy the code from the embed area. Note that some Youtube publishers disable the ability to embed
5. ALTERNATE - as an alternative, you can usually double click an embedded youtube video which should pop up a new window with the Youtube page for that video. You will see the code for embedding near the top right of the Youtube page
6. Once you have the code, you can paste it into your Blog post. The trick is that you have to go into the EDIT HTML mode. Look at your compose page in blogger. You should see two tabs at the top right of where you enter the body of your post. They should be labelled EDIT HTML and COMPOSE. Normally, you work in the COMPOSE mode because you can format your text and add pictures more easily.
7. In this case, when we are in COMPOSE mode, we want to postion the cursor where we want the video to appear. It helps to have a blank line or two before and after that point.
8. Now, click the EDIT HTML tab. Your cursor should be in the correct position. Then choose and EDIT PASTE and hit RETURN. You will see about 10 lines of HTML code. That is the code to embed the video.
9. Now, you can go back to COMPOSE and finish your post. When you are done publish the post.
10. View your post to see if things went right or not.

There you have it. It should work for you. Once in a while, you will not get the entire embed code when you copy it. The code should end up being over 8 lines or so when you paste it.

enjoy!!!

Adsense mistake with allowed sites

Adsense has a feature for publishers that limits your adsense ads to those sites you specify.

I recently launched a new site. Traffic was very low. It's starting to pick up but I have not seen any adsense revenue for that site.

I went into the adsense control panel and checked things out. It turns out that I had not added the new site to the list of allowed sites for my adsense account. That makes me feel as dumb as someone wondering why the television isn't working and not checking to see if it is plugged in.

Anyway, I added the site and we'll have to see if any income starts coming in.

Samsung Saga - keeping it charged

I have found that using the web, email and some other apps seem to hit the battery hard. I did buy a car charger which works pretty well. In addition, if you have the USB data cable that will also charge it when it is plugged into my laptop.

I tried to plug the data cable into the USB power port on my Belkin Mobile Power supply. It did not seem to be charging the phone. I have to check that out a bit.

I need to make sure that I have the ability to keep the phone charged on the run. Here are a couple of thoughts

1. Buy another 110v charger and keep that handy
2. Look at the battery powered recharge packs.
3. Look into an extended life battery (about 40 bucks or so) That seems to make the unit a little bulkier.
4. rationing web use when away from a recharge source.
5. double checking to see if the USB data cable will charge the phone when the usb cable is plugged into a USB power supply.

Samsung Saga - First impressions

I just traded up from my LG Envy to a Samsung Saga.

I wanted to accomplish a couple of things with this.

1. Be able to access a couple of key sites through the phone: google adsense, adwords, go2mypc, ecollege.
2. Have better all around browsing capabilities. IE to be able to use the device to do some web searching while at clients
3. Be able to mobile blog.
4. Not have to have a seperate PDA for contact information.
5. Have better access to my email accounts.
6. To a lesser extent, have the worldphone GSM capability.

Some of the blackberrys seemed to not have the ability to work with some of the sites I need to work with. I have access to all of the sites now except ecollege. I have a call into their tech support to see if we can get it to work.

The web browsing is great. I currently have Opera and Explorer as browsers. I'm mainly using Opera but there are some sites that will only run under Explorer

I haven't tried mobile blogging but it looks like things will work great. Having a real browser makes life a lot easier. I should be able to take photos and upload then right to the blog

The Saga is a great PDA. Office Mobile is included. In addition, I have my Outlook Contacts loaded

The email seems to be working great. When I set up my one pop3 account, I made absolutely sure to "Leave the messages on the server". More about that in a later post.

I haven't tried the world phone part of it yet. It seems that it will work great and I should be able to get the international data plan on a weekly basis. IE. I can dump the international data when I return.

I did find that it seemed to be draining the batteries quickly. The guy at the store suggested shutting down the wifi connection when it isn't needed. That solved the problem. You still want to have some ability to recharge on the road via either a car charger or the USB cable for your laptop (or usb power supply)

All in all, I'm really happy with it. I just set up the voice recognition which will allow hands free operation.

Look for future posts with a lot more details under the Samsung Saga tag

Using Task Manager to Diagnose and Help a slow machine

The Task Manager can be a great tool to help you diagnose and fix a slow machine. In this example, we will show you the Task Manager running on a Windows Vista Home Premium 32 bit machine. What you learn here can also apply to Windows XP and 2000.

A slow machine is often caused by one or more applications using up all of the processor capability or RAM. (not exactly the technical term but close enough). The result is a sluggish machine and a processor that generates excessive heat. The heat can start to cause damage to your machine leading to eventual failure.

First of all, let's get the Task Manager running. There are a number of ways to do this. The easiest is to press CONTROL - ALTERNATE - DELETE. In XP, you will get the task manager. In Vista, you will come to a screen with choices where you can select the Task Manager.

Once you have the task Manager running, I usually drag the corner to make it as wide as the screen. This gives you a better view of the history.

Let's go to the Performance Tab

What you are seeing above is a machine where the processor is starting to max out. In this case, the option to show each processor was chosen. The processors are at the top. You can see that both of them are starting to approach 100% usage. Shortly after this, both processors were totally pegged at 100%. Notice that the bottom graph, which shows memory usage, is pretty much OK at about 75%. When that gets over 90%, most machines will bog down.

Now, let's identify which processes are causing the problem.

To do that, we select the processes tab. Then we click on CPU until it is sorted from highest to lowest. The items at the top will change around a bit as processes use more or less power.

What we see above is that an instance, or window, of Iexplore is using 78% of the processor. Firefox is using another 12%. That is 88% of our process for just 2 windows. What we want to do is get rid of that - WARNING - killing the wrong process can crash your machine and have serious side effects. Do this at your own risk.

The simplest thing to do is to go to Internet Explorer and close all of your windows. The same thing with firefox. If that doesn't work, then you can right-click on the process and chose END PROCESS TREE - See my warning above about killing processes.

I suspected a window that I had open that was running a java based crossword puzzle. I opened that Internet Explorer Window and closed it.

Take a look at the circled portion on both processors. Closing that one window had an immediate effect. The processor usage dropped from being pegged at 100% to about 25% or so.

Quite often, this is all you have to do to get your machine responding better. The problem is that many websites use extensive Active-x, java or other applications or are just very large pages.

If you can't get the machine responding by closing the offending processes, then a reboot might work.

Google Wonder Wheel

makezine published a story on a beta test by google called "wonder wheel"

It's an interesting concept. It shows you the linkages between two people or concepts.

To learn how to take a peek at it go to Makezine's post

Resetting a lost Frontpage 2002 id and pw on an extended server

I have a bunch of sites on a host that uses the Frontpage 2002 extended server.

I had forgotten the User ID and password for one of my sites for Frontpage publishing.

When I went into the Frontpage administration panel at http://www.mysite.com/padmcgi.exe I saw an optioo to RESET USER PASSWORD. OK.. However, when you choose that option, you need to know the user ID that you are resetting. For the life of me, I couldn't remember what that was.

BE CAREFUL WITH THE FOLLOWING, YOU CAN SCRAMBLE THINGS OR LOCK YOURSELF OUT PERMANENTLY

So, I fired up my Core FTP and ftp'd into my host. The site lived at /var/www/sitefolder. In that folder is a folder called /var/www/sitefolder/_vti_pvt/ If you go into that folder, there is a file called ROLES. Open that file and you should see a section marked [USERS]. That will show you the users for the web. In most cases, there will only be one user and that user will be an admin.

Now that you know the ID, go back to your web based Virtual Server admin panel and choose RESET USER PASSWORD.

You will see a dropdown box where you can select the virtual server where you want to reset the password. BE CAREFUL NOT TO RESET YOUR :80 password.

In my case, I left the web name blank. I typed in the user name I had found above. SUCCESS!! it worked. !!.

So, now I am able to publish that site again.

BTW - you should be able to get FTP access for your hosting. That is independent of the Frontpage extensions security.

Cheap Hosting and Identity Theft

I was in the process of closing a hosting account where I had several sites hosted. At one time, I had my main account hosted on that site.

The host provided decent service at decent rates. I was just consolidating things a bit. They were a small company that didn't speak English well. All support was chat, ticket or email.

I migrated the remaining sites to my current host and deleted the account for each site as I went along. I could not delete the final domain, the one I used to create the hosting account. I had to go through and manually delete the files.

What did hit me though was that most hosting companies have complete access to all of your files if you are on a shared hosting plan. Most small businesses and individuals are on just such a plan.

Here is the problem. All of your emails are stored in what is basically a text file. That can be easily copied and searched. Emails are a large part of your identity with all kinds of sites: Banking, hosting, domains, auction sites, stores etc. Someone getting your user ID and password can wreak havoc.

Now, your passwords are usually encrypted. BUT, there are plenty of places where you may be getting passwords emailed to you as in the case of password resets.

So, an unscrupulous host or individual employee can get access to all kinds of sensitive information from the email file alone. In addition, some web design apps such as frontpage store form data in a plain text or html format.

What can you do about it??

• Make sure that your personal and business site is hosted on a reputable host. Deciding who is reputable is the problem. Generally, you are probably better off with the larger hosting companies.
• Be eternally vigilant for any sign of tampering with your identity.
• Try to minimize the amount of sensitive information going back and forth in emails. Try to keep your passwords organized so you are not constantly requesting your id and password. Do not use the same password for all of your sites.
• If you are using pop3 email, try to remove the messages from the server as soon as possible.
• Use different passwords for each site you visit and change those passwords periodically.

While the odds of a dishonest host stealing your personal or corporate identity is low, it is not out of the realm of possibility.

Free Upgrade for Many Norton NIS Users

Some of the older versions of Norton Internet Security will pop up a message saying you can get a free upgrade to 2009. However, when you are really ready to do it, there doesn't appear to be a way to easily start the process.

I have found that the following link seems to work to get you to where you can upgrade to 2009.

We recommend NIS 2009 as it seems to be a big improvement over some of the earlier versions.

Anyway, if you are stuck trying to get to the free upgrade try

http://www.symantec.com/home_homeoffice/support/special/upgrade2007

That should work. Of course, it will only work if you have a valid NIS license.

Your mileage may vary.

Shipping info virus scam

There have been a lot of messages in my inbox with a virus payload. The messages masquarade as messages from one of the big shipping companies: DHL, FEDEX, USPS, UPS or DHL. There is a ZIP attachment.

This is just like those scary movies where you yell at the screen "DON'T OPEN THAT DOOR".. In this case it is DON'T OPEN THAT ZIP ATTACHMENT.

The real shipping companies do not send emails with zip files attached.

Here is how one of the emails appears. Note the From Address that is not from UPS.Com and also note the ZIP file. Never click on that Zip attachment. (unless you want a severely infected computer)

Below is the result of the virus. It shows a fake alert trying to get you to buy their 'product'. You would think that a State Attorney General somewhere would get after the perpetrators.