My wife hates my alarm clock.  In fact, that last statement may be nominated for the understatement of the year award.  My alarm clock, is in fact my cell phone, and I have been using it as my alarm clock for at least the last three years, possible longer.  There are a few reasons why she hates my alarm clock.  Strike one, she does not need to wake up when I do.  Strike two, I tend to “snooze” it at least once before I actually get up.  Strike three, and the one that turns her annoyance into something far beyond, is the actual audio that I am waking up to.  Almost a year ago, I downloaded the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s “Hey Oh”, onto my phone, and have been using it as my alarm clock ever since.  I don’t think she had issues with it the first few months, but as of late, she has been very vocal with her disdain for that song.  As such, here is what I want to do…

Give me a device, which does one of two things.  Either it delivers a low level “shock”, similar to those joke pens which deliver the unsuspecting victim a nice surprise upon depressing the trigger, or, give me a device which vibrates enough to wake me a deep sleep.   This device must be something I can wear, and it must be wireless.  It also has to avoid being a distraction.  No bulky battery packs, sharp corners, etc.  Then, rather than driving my wife insane, I can wake myself up with no one the wiser, and my wife can learn to like the Red Hot Chili Peppers again.

Before I went out and designed something, I turned to the keeper of all knowledge… Google.  As always, I was presented with a myriad of information that I was able to quickly filter through and pull out the import pieces and disregard the rest.  Here is what I found:

 http://www.expansys-usa.com/p.aspx?i=163602&partner=froogle

And

http://www.ihomeaudio.com/products.asp?product_id=10247&dept_id=1006

By combining those two products, I believe I can solve my dilemma.  However, before I spend $250, I’d like to know for sure that the iHome device can, in alarm mode, rather than blast through its speakers, send the audio to this Bluetooth Bracelet.  On the iHome site we read: Controls Bluetooth-enabled cell phones and other devices; supports the Handsfree, Headset, AVRCP and A2DP Bluetooth Profiles ANDWake and Sleep to your iPhone, iPod, Bluetooth enabled device, AM/FM radio.  I am not sure the pairing options with the Bracelet, nor am I sure that if I am able to successfully pair it, it would actually do anything with the signal the iHome is sending.

Seeing as there are far smarter individuals out in the world, I would love to know if anyone has tried this, or if anyone can assure me that, based on the specifications of the two devices, what I want to accomplish can in fact be achieved using these devices.

Thoughts?

Categories: Productivity, Tech
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For those of us that spend a majority of our lives planted in a cubicle farm, waiting for the day when we are uprooted and planted in an office with real walls, this next one is for you.

My neighbor is an uber-geek, and as such, has the most incredible ideas almost constantly.  Most of which are just that, ideas.  However, his latest idea, Extreme Cubicle Makeovers, has manifested itself as an incredible pilot project just waiting to be picked up and brought mainstream.

Imagine going to work, and instead of planting yourself in the dull surroundings of your push-pin filled walls, and your post-it note covered desk, you find yourself rolling across a hardwood floor and reclining back in your executive high-back leather chair, surrounded by rich, red mahogany and gorgeous crown molding.  Hard to picture? Maybe this will help…

Categories: Uncategorized
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I was reading an article over on lifehacker, and wanted to throw out my own experiences with folder synchronization. I, like many people, find myself at different workstations for different purposes quite often. This led me to try many different synchronization methods. I wanted a tool that was easy to use, yet feature-rich, such that I could customize it to meet my needs. Some of my requirements were:

• Synch or Copy (backup versus sync)
• Exception based (I can have a broad directory defined with filters applied to ignore file types, directories, etc.)
• Ability to be scheduled
• Free or Cheap
• Trial Runs
• Smart enough to tell me when there were conflicts

I ended up finding a program by 2BrightSparks, called SyncBackSE, which is available in a free (older) version, and a relatively inexpensive ($30) version. I started out using the free version, but later purchased the full version as I was so happy with it. The free version can be downloaded here. The tool has many features that carry it well beyond my base requirements, such as backup/restore, compression, versioning and more. I’m not sure if any of those advanced functions are available in both the free and for pay versions, but I imagine most of them are. It’s a great free tool, and I had no problems shelling out the $30 for the full version given how much I was impressed by it.

Then… I got a Mac The tool above is not cross-platform, which is probably my only gripe with it. So, I started down the path again, and ended up finding a tool that functions very similar to SyncBackSE, yet designed for the Mac. Unfortunately, the tool I found was not free, but still relatively inexpensive at the same $30 price tag. The tool is written by Econ Technologies, and is named ChronoSync. I don’t believe it has many of the more advanced features as SyncBackSE, but had all the basic features I needed, and was within my budget. They have a trial available if you want to give it a whirl. If you do, let me know your impressions.

Now, with these two tools running on my Mac and my PC, I’ve been able to keep certain common files synced between devices. Typically utilizing a common file share somewhere on my network, limiting the need to have both devices running all the time. I primarily use this setup for backing up and synchronizing my photography collections, which total around 40GB right now. It’s not a perfect setup, but it has served me quite well over the last 2-3 years.

Categories: Productivity, Tech
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I had an interesting call the other day from a nephew of mine. He recently purchased a new Laptop, maybe 6 months ago, which came pre-installed with Windows Vista. Quick Note: I am NOT a fan of Vista. According to my nephew, he was in the middle of an automated update from Vista (I don’t know if it was SP1, or some other hotfix), when his laptop kicked into hibernate mode. He must have been running on battery, as I don’t believe Windows lets a machine hibernate during an update, even if the power saver profile has a time limit set. When he went to power it back on, it boots up, says it is finishing an update, then kicks off a restart, and goes through the whole process all over again. Infinite loop.

He first wants to know if he can somehow fix Vista, which I wanted to tell him yes, by installed Windows XP, but that is probably not the answer he was looking for. We tried the normal scenario of booting into safe-mode, last known good state, etc., with no luck. I could probably have tinkered with it further, had I had the machine in front of me, but given he is in the Air Force, some 2 days drive away, that’s probably not going to happen. So now comes the next question. If I can’t fix it over the phone, how do I get to a point where he can save his data?

Me personally, I would boot from a *nix Live Distribution, and then transfer everything to an external hard drive. However, I am a bit worried about throwing Linux at someone that is technology challenged. Then you run into the challenge of NTFS not being fully supported in *nix, which could pose data access problems. I’ll admit I haven’t used any NTFS access from Linux in a while, so maybe that is not an issue anymore. I may still send him that route, but what other options are out there?

That is when I turned to Google. I honestly don’t know how I accomplished anything prior to Web Search tools being useful, but that is another story. There are a lot of solutions out there, and I don’t have the luxury of time to try them all. The first one that caught my eye was VistaPE. Essentially, with VistaPE, you use their free software to build a Live boot disk of Vista, that is stripped of most features. You can pick and choose which features, drivers, etc. you want to load in, and then build a custom boot disk. I’m very interested in this, but don’t have the luxury of time right now to do this, so I kept searching.

I ran across a company called Paragon Software, that makes a tool called Hard Disk Manager Suite, which allows you to perform a lot of functions around your Hard Disk (go figure). I decided to download and give the 30 day trial a whirl, and see if it was something I could throw at my nephew. The short answer being, almost. If someone who doesn’t understand the inner workings of Windows directory structure, external storage, network drive mappings, etc., were to try and use the tool, I think they would probably break something. However, if someone with more experience were to walk them through the tool, in person or remote, it could be very useful.

So, that is where I am at. I have the CD, and am going to ship it to my Nephew, and see if we can make it work, with me guiding him remotely over the phone. I’ll post an update once we go through the process, and let you know how it works out.

Tags: system recovery live distribution windows vista
Categories: Tech
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I have several photo galleries around the internet, some that I have probably forgotten about as well I’m sure. In the past, I’ve used Gallery, an open source gallery program, but haven’t looked at it in some time now. I decided to give it another go, and so far have been quite pleased. However, I am very picky about the look and feel of my sites, and change my mind often. I’m never quite satisfied with provided themes, and often times cannot find 3rd party themes either. Now that I had a new install of Gallery2, I started my theme search.

During this search, I ran across the following blog. The owner’s name is Rui Pereira, who appears to be an avid Web developer. Among other things, he has created a theme for Gallery, which I absolutely love. The only issue I had, was that it only worked with Wordpress as a companion. In order to use it, I was going to have to switch to Wordpress, instead of Drupal. Seeing as I only blog once a month or so, this wasn’t that hard of a decision.

So, with that, I updated this site to now utilize Wordpress as the blogging software, with Rui’s Gallery2 integration for the Photo page. I added a few custom header images from my photography collection, but other than that, this is a fairly stock install.

Tell me what you think.

Categories: Tech
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