Posts tagged review
Holiday Set Top Box Reviews
Dec 5th
I love this time of year. I live in San Diego, so the weather doesn’t get cold enough to snow, but it’s chilly enough to wear jackets. It’s like the best of both worlds here. I get the cold, but don’t have to do any shoveling or driving on icy roads. Win win!
Let’s be honest though, this time of year is not great because of the weather, it’s great because it is gift giving season. No matter if you are celebrating Christmas, Hanukah, Kwanzaa or Festivus. chances are pretty good that you are shopping for gifts, or someone is shopping for gifts for you. If you are in the market for set top boxes, then you may want to check out the review I did for this month’s Tech Chop!
In this episode I review the Mvix Ultio Pro MX 880HD, WD TV Live Plus, Boxee Box, and the Apple TV. Check it out!
www.TechChop.com
Got any questions about the devices mentioned in the show? Do you own a set top box? Maybe the Roku? Do you like the one you have? Looking to trade up? Let us know in the comments.
Is this the new I-Pad killer? Lenovo Ideapad Hybrid – Why didn’t Apple think of this?
Feb 15th
I-Pad Killer? Image courtesy: Engadget.com
Hello Boys and Girls,
It seems other companies aside from Apple are putting their thinking caps on and breaking all kinds of molds. There was a mold. Apple didn’t exactly break the mold for tablets, as shown in this nifty diagram. All they did was scale it up. An overgrown cellphone won’t last very long in today’s market.
Enter Lenovo.
From the looks of it, Lenovo has broken a mold. They have combined two mainstays of the hardware industry; tablets and netbooks, and combined them into this one nifty unit that has a detachable, wireless touchscreen, full size (by today’s standards) keyboard and a FULL OS!
The Lenovo name, to me at least, suggests some premium price point. But I know for a fact that other companies will follow suit. Maybe they won;t have detachable screens like this Hybrid Lenovo U1 pictured, but I’d be happy enough for a $400 tablet with a full OS. Wouldn’t you?
Let us know in the comments below, and don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS Feed
Commodore64 (the one you used to play Bruce Lee on) ,8,1
Ask The Admin Reviews: Host Gator
Feb 5th
Hey Kiddies, Commodore 64 here to bring another tidbit of good advice from all of us to all of you. Along with this tasty piece of techie goodness is a brief admin-ography of the history of AskTheAdmin.com. We’ve come a long way folks, and we think we’ve finally found the true nexus point of our platform needs.
HostGator!
If you’ve been following us throughout the years, you’ve probably experienced the growing pains we’ve had moving from platform to platform, host to host. Our humble beginnings on Blogger dealing with all the limitations and WYSIWYG inconsistencies, then our HUGE fiasco getting our posts, media, and comments migrated, exported, and sometimes even re-written from scratch and re-imported one by tedious one.
Following the imports to our now defunct web host, Bansal-Inc, we were plagued with outages, server errors, php errors, unexpected reboots, files disappearing (wtf?) and older versions re-appearing (seriously now, WTFluck). It was like something out of The Twilight Zone with the title of “Ghost in the Machine.” It was utter chaos.
On top of all the server-side issues, I’d like to spend a minute to mention how far WordPress has come as a platform as well as an all around user experience from front to back.
Back then, around version 2.5 or 2.6, the WYSIWYG was HORRIBLE. Having already spent many years in the field of front-end web development, the amount of “code rewriting” and “automatic formatting” that went on was horrible. Mixed into that was the advent of Windows Livewriter, which in my opinion, was too good of an editing tool to be justifiably paired with a crappy, built-in, wordpress wysiwyg from back then.
Essentially what would end up happening is that in a writers role, it wasn’t half bad. You said your peace, did a little formatting and published. But from an editor’s perspective – re-opening a post and simply switching from HTML view to Visual view would change the code drastically: replacing massive amounts of tags and flucking up all bullet points and various other elements. Aside from editing issues, plugins we were utilizing were crashing the site here and there. I remember there being a lot of fear associated with running a well-trafficked site in our situation, as it was.
Reaching out to tech support, especially when it’s overseas, was painful at best. Response times, even when they were responding, took days sometimes. We ended having to fish through our emails and find the email address of the company owner. It was only then we could get something done.
Just when we thought our problems were over… the company got sold to a web hosting service then called Inspirit Networks. We had a decent run with Inspirit. At first they were eager to please. But as time went on (we’re talking months, not years) the servers and support’s response times were getting worse and more unresponsive with each passing week. Ultimately we suffered major outages for days at a time which also seemed to strangely roll back our files to older versions. This was the last straw.
After major shopping around and considerations we decided on HostGator. The reviews were all good, and after testing their US based voice support lines, as well as chat lines we were thoroughly impressed.
Enter HostGator…
So far I’ve been personally using them for about a year now with no issues, and so far %100 uptime. Utilizing a free service called aremysitesup.com, I’ve been able to see that we have had NO DOWNTIME. The cpanel has all the options I’ve ever needed or wanted in a LAMP hosting account. We are currently running 8 different well trafficked blogs on one hosting account and see no slowdown and no issues. Truthfully, I’ve never been accustomed to being this fear-free and comfortable with my web server.
These days we can spend our time concentrating on publishing quality content rather than keeping our sites running and healthy.
Edit: We now have our own coupon discount code at Gator, which means we can pass along a savings of $9.94 off of your initial purchase with Gatorhost.
Use discount code “asktheadmin” to get your discount today!
This is commodore64 signing off.
Let us know what your web hosting experiences were in the comments below…
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Hey Cheapskate, Burn ISOs for free on any Windows Platform!
Aug 4th
So you don’t want to dole out the big bucks for some fancy smancy cd/dvd authoring suite just to burn cd’s and disk images? Or how about you don’t want the bloat from said suite?
No it’s probably that you are just like me and a big cheapskate when it comes to buying software!
Either which way this little free solution should float your boat. Check it out!
Reader NotBurntYet wrote in:
I need to burn an ISO on Windows Vista. Long story short I uninstalled the 7gb cd burning suite that came with the machine. I have been able to burn cd’s from Explorer with Windows built in capability. BUT (you knew that was coming) I can not burn ISO’s! I have a older copy of Nero but it is not compatible with Vista! HELP ME! I need to burn my game and can we make it free??
NotBurntYet, Ohio
Hey NotBurntYet, we have a solution for you – real simple like and best of all FREE! It is called ISORECORDER. ISO Recorder is a Window’s power tool that’s installer is around 1.2 mb. It seems to work for all the newer operating systems – XP or better. After you install it you can now automagically “burn CD and DVD images (DVD support is only available on Windows Vista), copy disks, make images of the existing data CDs and DVDs and create ISO images from a content of a disk folder” And all this from the context menu (Right Clicking). Lets check it out:
Download the appropriate package for your Operating System:
XP SP1 or No Service Pack
XP SP2, XP SP2 64 bit, and 2003
VISTA 32
VISTA 64
Next right click on the image you want to burn:
From there the steps are self explanatory – asking you where and how you want to burn from a simple little interface that looks like this:
You can also use ISORecorder as I said to make images dumb quick from cd’s or dvd’s in explorer as well like so:
Cool free stuff with a tiny little foot print! Add this to the how to get Windows XP running on an older machine and yourself a powerful older machine (with burner!) that does not need a huge amount of memory to run!
Hate Telemarketers? Use This Nifty Tool to Look Them Up
Mar 24th
I don’t know anyone who doesn’t get a call from a telemarketer at least once a week if not much more. They’ll call and leave no message and annoy the heck out of you.
Unfortunately, some of these calls are actually made by criminals who try to get your personal information.
News articles over the past few days discuss about people trying to scam you out of your money or your private information. Scammers posing as US Department of Revenue employees, local bank employees, even police officers, have all been in the news over the past few days.
There’s a website called CallCatalog.com that uses crowd sourcing to grow their database of telemarketers. Crowd sourcing is basically when you, I, and everyone else go there and upload our experiences; it then shares it with everyone else. Sort of like a social network. When you go to their website, you put the phone number of the caller you want to lookup in the yellow box at the top of the page. It then presents information on what other people have written about these callers.
You can also post your own complaint.
Their blog also provides some additional information about how to deal with telemarketers and unwanted callers. Check them out.
Open Source E-Mail Encryption
Aug 11th
“…Perhaps you think your email is legitimate enough that encryption is unwarranted. If you really are a law-abiding citizen with nothing to hide, then why don’t you always send your paper mail on postcards? Why not submit to drug testing on demand? Why require a warrant for police searches of your house? Are you trying to hide something? If you hide your mail inside envelopes, does that mean you must be a subversive or a drug dealer, or maybe a paranoid nut?…”
-Philip Zimmerman, Creater of PGP
Of course it doesn’t, it simply means you value your privacy.
PGP, or more specifically OpenPGP is a great, and more importantly FREE method of securing your data and your e-mails. You don’t want “The Man” reading your e-mails, and neither do I.
There are many PGP and OpenPGP programs out there, but the one that is the most versatile that I have seen is called GnuPG. It comes in some form for every operating system. It comes standard with Ubuntu Linux, and there are versions for Windows and MAC.
If you are a fan of Mozilla Firefox, and Thunderbird like I am, then you will be happy to know that there are GnuPG plugins for both of them. Enigmail for Thunderbird, and FireGPG for Firefox. Of course you have to have GnuPG installed for the plugins to work.
If you have any doubts on the strength of the encryption, it uses PKI and the encryption keys can go up to 4096 bits, which is so strong that if you take all of the computing power on the planet it would still take something ridiculous like 10 billion years to crack (Give or take). I also found a quaint little article here about how the FBI has problems cracking PGP.
“So ya ya ya, yackity smackity… where do I download this fantastic software?”
I thought you would never ask. You can download it from the following sites:
Enjoy!
Originally Posted on Bauer-Power by El Di Pablo
