Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

I’m heading down to a conference where pretty much everyone will be using wifi to stay connected to the net. It’s simple because the wifi access points are open and you can easily connect.
The problem is that pretty much anyone can see what you are doing, except if you take special precautions. For the most part, transmission is in the clear and an eavesdropper can see what you type. That includes user names, passwords, and anything else you do online.
I’ve been to a few conferences with many people using wifi on open access points and it’s amazing what you can see. Wifi sniffers are easy to find and they show everything flying by in the airwaves. An unscrupulous person could have dozens of usernames and passwords in a couple minutes.

There are several solutions to protect yourself. If you have some tech saavy you can ensure you are only using secure email and SSL secured web sites, but for most of us, this is a pain.
The simplest solution is to use a Virtual Private Network, commonly called a VPN. A VPN is a way to tunnel your internet traffic through a secure pipeline that eavesdroppers can’t see through. VPNs are typically used by businesses to ensure that their networks are secure from snooping when staff connect to them via modems or wifi.

Once your data is in a secure tunnel, you can do whatever you want and people can’t intercept your data.
Again, the super tech saavy, can build their own VPN and proxy servers to allow themselves to surf securely. I tried to do it myself, and I decided it was a huge pain in the ass.
Luckily for me I found a service that provides me with a VPN and secure access for a fairly inexpensive rate. HotSpotVPN is made for people that want to attach to open wifi hotspots but be secure. I gave the service a try and it seems to work well. Speed is the real key to pulling this off. To do the encryption and proxy redirection uses resources and you usually see the impact as reduced effective bandwidth.

Here’s the speed of the VPN sitting the dining room connecting via 802.11b to my DSL line. Pretty good. I wouldn’t want to move gigabytes of data, but great for email, surfing, and blogging.

This is the speed of my wifi access without the VPN. Almost three times as fast. This will be the first time I’m using HotSpotVPN and will be able to give a better report on performance in a few days.
I think it’s a reasonable compromise. A drop in speed to protect my usernames and password from flying around in the open.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

I’m leaving in a couple hours for San Diego to speak at the Emerging Technologies Conference. I’m talking about Disney’s use of RSS syndication.
I’ll try to blog about what I see and hear at the conference. It should be very interesting.

Greatest. Flash. Evar. !!!1!!
(at least until the next good one…)

Just in case anyone else has this problem and doesn’t want to spend an hour figuring it out…
If you are loading Windows XP onto a computer with a serial ATA (SATA) hard drive, you will have to manually load the SATA drivers.
As suggested on this usenet post, you need to put the drivers on a floppy disk.
Copy the drivers from motherboard support CD *\DriverDisk\SATA\*.* into root directory of floppy disk. (i.e. root directory of floppy disk should contain \pide and \sata folders, txtsetup.oem, etc. files.)
Then, boot system by Windows XP installation CD, when the message “Press F6 if you need to install a third party SCSI or RAID driver” shows up, press “F6”. Then, press “S” to specify additional device when next screen pops up. Put the driver floppy disk you made in and press enter to continue. If the floppy disk is made successfully, the installation program will ask for selecting driver. Please then select “VIA Serial ATA RAID Controller(Windows XP)”.) After SATA driver loaded and Windows XP can recognize the SATA HDD, you can continue to install Windows XP as usual.
This should work fine if you have the drivers on a CD somewhere.
Here’s what not to do:
1) Pull floppy drive from another computer
2) Get lazy and not install the floppy, simply hang it by cables on the side of computer
3) After using floppy, allow the exposed circuitboard to touch the case
4) Watch smoke come from the floppy drive since the power was shorted out
5) Toss floppy drive in the trash

My Mom uncorks a political rant on her weblog.
Here’s a tasty quote:
“But I ask you when did Usama bin Laden start being pronounced Saddam Hussein.”

As I mentioned before, I picked up a Nokia 3650 phone and have been running around taking pictures.
Here’s one I took today on my way to a meeting at work:

The phone has so many functions, I still haven’t figured out how to do one tenth of what it can do.
In other news, I bought the full set of Giant Robot DVDs.

For those that don’t know, Johnny Sokko and Giant Robot is a series from Japan in the late 60s that was dubbed into English and shown in the US in the 70s, when I was a young boy.
My brother and I loved Giant Robot because he was controlled by the young boy, Johnny Sokko. We could easily imagine ourselves being Johnny and would often act out Giant Robots movements.

I played the first episode for the girls yesterday and they loved it. Thanks to the interent, almost anything from my memory is instantly available to me.

Sleep beckons…
For the Superbowl, we made yet another Turducken.

Here is demonstrate the layered Turducken
The stuffing wasn’t quite as tasty this year, but it was still enjoyable.
On Saturday I switched Michele and I over to T-mobile and we both picked up new Nokia 3650 phones.
We are still learning how to program and use them, but soon enough I will have some sort of moblog/photoblog going. All in due time.

Our CD library has been ripped to MP3s.
The process took about 4 days. I ripped on two computers at night and Michele helped out during the day ripping a stack of CDs, even though she thinks I’m a data hog.
The end result:

Over 5000 songs taking up just over 30 gigs of space. Not bad for a library.

Here are the bags of ripped CDs before I put them away. Out of the almost 400 we ripped, only 5 had problems that wouldn’t let the CD-ROM read them. I’ll probably pick up a CD polisher and see if I can fix them. The girls’ game CDs could use a little polishing.
In other news, Zoe entered her first Science Fair.

She won the ‘Most Fun’ award for her investigation. I’m so proud.

Some listeners to Indie 103.1, the new radio station in Los Angeles, have been having a discussion in the comments of one of my post about the station.
To make things a little simpler, I’ve made a forum of Indie 103.1 listeners to use.
Introducing the Indie 103.1 Forum.
Please enjoy responsibly.

I listened.
Rather than sending my CDs off to be ripped, I’ve decided to rip my CDs myself.
I played around the last two days and finally got going in earnest tonight. Due to a little tweaking and unsing Musicmatch Jukebox Plus, I can rip most CDs at 30x speed. That means that most CDs are done in 2-3 minutes.
I’ve got two computers going and the CDs are going in and out about as fast as I can spin around in the chair. I can’t really do much else, even read since I’m getting interrupted every few minutes.
It’s suprising to me how fast it is going, several hundred CDs have been ripped already.