404 Tech Support

Wednesday, I was able to check off another one of those things on the ‘To Do at least Once in your IT Career’ list by degaussing hard drives. Degaussing a hard drive means using a device that generates a strong electromagnetic field to wipe the data on the drive. This is an important step that I’ve mentioned before in the ‘Before you Recycle/Garbage that Old Computer‘ article to ensure your security and privacy; it is also required for compliance with state law for my office. Normally, we would use DBaN but that could take 20 to 60+ minutes per drive depending on the capacity and condition of the drive. The degaussing process takes about 20 seconds per drive (5-10 seconds per side). Since another IT office had just got the degausser, I decided to take it for a spin and wipe 250 drives in the time we would normally be able to do 8 (good) drives with DBaN.

After years of working with computers: taking out and replacing components, opening them up, upgrading them, and generally being comfortable inside them, I built my first PC years ago. I’m mostly self-taught on building computers, but I’ve got a number of from-scratch computers under my belt now and thinking about it, once you have the parts it’s pretty straight forward. This list is procedural memories from my mind, so feel free to add to this list any corrections or best practices that you have.

The inside of my apartment was a cell phone dead zone (cue creepy music left-over from Halloween) and I’ve written about the problem before. My first attempt at a solution, the zBoost zPersonal Cell Phone Signal Booster, fell flat and didn’t do anything to boost my signal (in fact, it was hard to tell if it was doing anything at all). Fortunately, Amazon allowed me to return it with no problem. My second attempt has proven to be more successful using Sprint’s Airave. The device is a femtocell meaning it acts as a mini cell tower and creates a cell phone signal instead of just repeating one by using your broadband connection and routing your calls across the Internet.

I won a Flip Video a little while back and finally had a chance to really test it out on a recent scenic trip through Colorado. I have the Flip Video Ultra, which I’ll be reviewing, and a new Flip Ultra HD version of the pocket camcorder is on the market. Flip Video started off as a creation of Pure Digital Technologies, a company which has since been bought by Cisco Systems. Despite the fact that I don’t have the latest version, the Flip Video is still an impressive device and amazingly simple to use. Hopefully this indicates a good trend for the newer Flip Video Ultra HD and Flip Video Minos.

There seems to be a lot of hoopla, brouhaha, and hullabaloo (or whatever you want to call the hype) about digital signage these days. Digital signage, at least typically with expensive systems, are a series of LCD monitors that are networked (either hard-wired or wirelessly) to a computer to display a variety of information. It might show what’s currently scheduled inside a room, upcoming events, or a map to other locations. Some might also be interactive through a touch-screen, bluetooth, or SMS text messaging. All of this seems very cutting-edge, can make for a better experience, and cut down on printing costs and time spent hanging posters.

It’s starting to get cold outside now and that’s forced me to finally start looking into a solution to my poor cell reception. The problem isn’t my carrier or my phone as I get a good signal right outside my door or right up against the window, but something with the construction of my apartment building blocks the signal. I have been getting “Signal faded, call dropped” messages for a while when I start wandering away from the window or walk back inside. This hasn’t been so terrible as I get to go sit outside and relax or go sit next to the window, but unfortunately phone calls (or at least my phone calls) are never so static. Very frequently, I need to go look something up on the computer in order to answer the whole reason somebody called, but as soon as I start heading further into the building, the call gets dropped.

This October 1st, 2009 marks one year since Comcast started enforcing their monthly bandwidth cap limit at 250GB. If a user were to go over the limit in one month, they would receive a warning by some means of communication. A second occurrence of going over the limit would result in a termination of services for a year. October 1st, 2008 I declared to be the first Net Loss Day as a result of Comcast’s move and so today, I bid you another Happy Net Loss Day.

There’s been an interesting flurry of news lately regarding the way battery life is measured. Almost any consumer that has purchased a notebook or netbook lately has likely realized that the battery life (measured in hours) that was advertised to them has been at least slightly exaggerated. That circumstance is the topic of a number of blog posts on the official AMD blog which fanned the flame of this whole thing in the first place:

• There has to be a Better Way
• Objects in the Toolbar May Be Further Away Than They Seem
• Objects in the Toolbar May Be Closer than They Seem
• MobileMark 2007, 60 nits, One Nit-Picker and You
• MobileMark 2007, the Apps, and your Notebook

I agree with the general philosophy behind these articles and trying to get away from “benchmarketing” and more towards realistic, practical numbers that are relevant to consumers. The analogy that’s been getting thrown around quite frequently is comparing battery life numbers as a car’s gas mileage being tested in neutral on a downhill track. The industry standard is currently to use BAPCo MobileMark 2007 to put a computer through a variety of tasks, but much of the time the laptop is left idle, WiFi is turned off, and the screen is very dim. MobileMark 2007, at its cheapest, costs $749. For a full perspective, you can read the full white paper that BAPCo has put out on its MobileMark 2007.