Misc

Just came across AirSet and I like it! It’s a shared calendar and contact application. Maybe there are a lot of them out there that compare favorably to this but I’m not aware of them. There are a couple of nice things:

1) it’s calendar and contacts
2) you can set up multiple groups and have calendars for each of them
3) you’ve got a personal calendar which can show all of the appts from all of the groups
4) you can control what shows up
5) updates you make, regardless of whether it’s on your cell phone or the web site, show up immediately in everyone’s view

Update 6/12/2006: Just spoke with my brother and he told me about Planzo. Doesn’t look like it does phone but I haven’t really checked it out yet. GW Bush has a Planzo calendar here and so does Condi so it looks like they have a sense of humor.

Even with the SPamLookup MT plug-in, I got over 200 comment SPAM in the past 2 days. Until I put up some new content, I’m turning off comments. Email me if you want to comment.

Wikipedia is a constant source of amazement to me. If this article is to be believed, you’re better off to plug your laptop into a power source whenever you have the chance and, above all, do not run it through a deep discharge cycle!

Microsoft has released a new version of SyncToy. Download from here.

I got in excess of 40 blog spams last night so I’ve set this up to require registration. Drop me an email if you’re having problems. You can send to tony(nospam) — at — tonys-links — dot — com. Just remember to remove the (nospam).

Update: March 31, 2006: It looks like I don’t understand registration, particularly when it comes to comments so I’m opening comments back up. My apologies to those few of you who sent me email asking about how to actually make a comment. It may be that I’ll have to upgrade to the most recent version of Movable Type (currently 3.2) but I’ll let you know how things develop.

And I haven’t forgotten about my promise to post more about the software and sites that I find useful for my new phone. That’s still coming.

Been getting an extreme amount of blog spam recently so I’m suspending comments for a little while. I’ll let you know when they’re back.

Update, March 25, 2006: I’ve turned comments back on.

CompUSA has the D-Link DP-301U USB print server on sale for $29.99 after a total of $20 in mail-in rebates, and that’s a reasonable price. The problem is, it doesn’t support multi-function printers nor does it support most of the bi-directional information flow that most modern printers use to report ink status, paper jams and such. So, the question is, aside from price, why would you get one of them when you can get a print server that provides much more function? Something like the Keyspan 4-Port Print Server, the more versatile Keyspan USB Server which, besides printers, allows you to share scanners, cameras, USB storage devices and such, or any of the Silex SX1000U USB Print Server, the Silex SX-2000U2 High Speed USB Device Server that supports USB 2.0, or even the Silex SX-3700WB Wireless USB Device Server.

The other day, a friend of mine was asking about the Buffalo TeraStation 1.0 TB. Now, that’s not interesting in itself, because he’s had a SnapServer for years (I didn’t provide a link to his particular appliance because I don’t think they market it anymore). What’s interesting is that they’re becoming more common, even at $600, $700, $800, heck another friend of mine bought one a few months ago for $900. Not a bad price for 1TB of storage, but still a chunk of money to lay out.

That got me to thinking about a device another friend told me about a while back, the Linksys NSLU2 NAS adapter. It’s a standalone unit into which you plug USB disks. And the interesting thing about that is that it runs Linux … and there are firmwares available to turn it into an email server, an OpenVPN server, a print server, even a webcam server. Run on over to the NSLU2-Linux site, which is the source for all of this.

And, last but not least, it reminded me that the last firmware I’d downloaded for my own Tritton Technologies SimpleNAS ignored the seconds field of a file’s timestamp, making it pretty useless as a backup target for something like Microsoft’s SyncToy. So, I headed on over to Tritton’s downloads page and saw that they’ve released a new version (well, back in October). I intend to load that up as soon as I get done here and bring my own, simple little NAS back into service.

Update, 1/23/2006: I installed the updated firmware on my NAS. The update was a breeze and it even retained my previous settings, something that a lot of other pieces of hardware don’t or won’t do. Anyway, now I am happily syncing with accurate seconds and everything!

Have you ever wanted to figure out where that funky piece of spam or other email originated? I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve explained it to a lot of people but I’ve never found a clear, annotated description of how to do it. Well, with a caveat, this page has a good introduction to how to trace it.

The caveat is this: it’s easy to put fake headers on the email — they will be propogated to the next mail server and carried throughout the sever chain. How is this done? By simply including them in the message! Why is this possible? Because Received headers are a part of the data stream passed from one mail server to the other. If someone is faking email, they can easily include fake Received headers.

Yes, Received headers can be fakes! But, and here’s the good part, once the message starts its journey, subsequent entries on the Received chain are legit.

So, how do you account for that? By tracing from the top of the email — start from your mail server (which you know you can trust). As you parse the header, determine for yourself if you can trust that machine’s information. If so, try the next one. If not, the last one you parsed is really the first machine in the chain.

The motherboard in my home-built PC is an ASUS A8N-E. It’s an nForce4 AMD motherboard with not only the standard ATA interface, now known as Parallel ATA or PATA, but the newer Serial ATA or SATA and an Nvidia RAID controller. I started with a single SATA drive and planned to upgrade to a RAID1 configuration for my boot drive at a later date. One of my favorite stores, Central Computer, offered some discounts over the holidays and I picked up a second, identical drive and decided to try to RAID my existing XP Pro installation. Simple, right? Wrong!

To even be able to boot a RAIDed system, you’ve got to have installed the RAID drivers and, without an existing RAID on the system, they (or at least the nVidia ones) don’t install! Now, you’d think this would all be pretty well documented in various forums (fora?) around the Internet but I couldn’t find anything to really help me and, believe me, I did a lot of searching! So, I managed to create a RAID using my second SATA and a third that I had on-hand to hold backups and such. That allowed me to get my drivers installed (and also the nVidia XP-based RAID manager software). Then I backed up my system, undid the RAID, RAIDed my boot volume, restored the system to the newly RAIDed boot volume and, fortunately, that worked! Kudos to Acronis True Image for supporting RAID.

A simple matter of about 4 evenings work split up between searching the Internet, downloading drivers, installing, uninstalling, backing up, restoring and a lot of luck!