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.