Al's Blog-o-Sphere

I’m writing this post using a new web browser, Google Chrome. It’s a brand-new offering from Google, which besides being the top search engine on Teh Interwebs, has also come up with some pretty neat free applications over the past few years. This is it’s latest.

So, who needs another web browser, don’t we already have Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, and a bunch of lesser-known ones? Continue Reading…

On February 17, 2009 all full-power broadcast television stations in the United States will stop broadcasting on analog airwaves and begin broadcasting only in digital. Digital broadcasting will allow stations to offer improved picture and sound quality and additional channels.

My prediction, should you care, is this will be the beginning of the end of over-the-air Television.

Oh, sure, I’ve seen Digital TV. I have one. I have it connected to a full-sized, rotating antenna. It takes that much to get it to work.

Continue Reading…

If a gang of burglars were caught robbing a department store one night, you’d say to throw the book at them. You’d be glad they were caught and think the Police were doing a great job and be happy for the store stopping a loss that raises costs and prices for all of us, right?

But what if you found out that the persons caught stealing from the store found the door unlocked and just helped themselves? Maybe you wouldn’t feel so sympathetic toward the store with the inept security. Maybe you’d feel that, while it was still wrong to take something from the store, those who did were lured into doing it by the open door. Maybe you’d wonder if you wanted to do business with the store.

Well, that’s exactly the situation with the recent arrests and indictment of 11 people who got caught stealing millions of credit card numbers from a bunch of major name retail companies through their wide-open wireless network. Apparently, they put in wireless network equipment and left it unencrypted, leaving them with less security than I use for my home network. Continue Reading…

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After quite a bit of playing around, the mini PC is finally pretty much done. I got the OSx86 partition running and the menu at bootup to choose between operating systems is tweaked to work with all three. Almost everything that should work, works on all three OS’s – sound, network, video, DVD burning. Even filesharing with my local network is almost there and that’s sometimes problematic even between two Windoze computers.

After some time playing around with Windows XP, Ubuntu Linux and Mac OSX Leopard, I’m getting used to finding my way around them pretty well. Continue Reading…