House of the Geek at heart

Kindle touch is on par with multi touch smart phones

2012-02-01T12:39:00.000-08:00

From the reviews, I hesitated to buy the Kindle touch version, worrying that it will be too bad compared to the smart phones the family is used to. The tiny guy likes to pinch every image on her colour picture book on the kindle phone app. It turns out that it's the best feature is the touch, especially if you are used to smart phones like iphone.

If you have kids already reading phone book thick books, e-ink is a no brainer. They don't need colour books. You can hurt their eye sight least with e-ink, reading for hours at a time.

The screen resolution of 800x600 is quite adequate for reading. The more important is the dpi. With e-ink, kindles are better than tablets and the kindle fire, and not as dense as smart phones. But you only need that density on 3 to 4 inch phones. Indeed if I can do it again, I would not pay more for smart phones like qHD or the iPhone 4 or newer HD screens in smart phones. Movies and websites look really beautiful on the tiny screens, but I think even if I ever watch a movie on it, I wouldn't mind as long as it plays.

So kindle and e-ink is best for reading, period. And cheaper than the kindle fire. If I want anything else, I have the netbook. The latest kindle screen is slightly better than the last model, and noticeably better than the 1st generations - it was reported.

Page turning or transition on the kindle is said to be like ATM machines in the 90's. That is, slow. In reality you can see the transition, but not as if you need to wait. And it is a lot faster than turning a paper book. So for web browsing, you have to expect a little delay when you fetch a new page, not to wait for the download, but for the ink to settle.

There is one home button at the bottom, and one power button on the side bottom. Contrary to some reviews, these buttons are not sensitive at all. It's pretty hard to accidentally toggle these buttons as in phones. You really don't need to use the power button often because the battery last for a month or two, and the device will go to sleep automatically. The home button is huge, and I think there is redundancy in it to last longer. So the kindle touch will outlast other devices, when it's not worthwhile to repair any malfunction buttons.

The touch screen is supposed to be resistive, meaning that you can use anything instead of your fingers. In phones they have capacitive screens to avoid triggering the phone other than your fingers. But resistive screen isn't a bad thing on the kindle at all. You can use a soft tip to type, and it will not leave grease too.

The kindle screen is like matte as compared to glossy on phones. So the kindle is more tolerable to grease. But it is just superficial. Wipe with any micro fibre cloth and it will be fine.

Basically the kindle is a mutli touch device very much like an Android 2.3 multi touch phone. You can turn pages with wiping and change font sizes with pinching. Same thing when using the browser. Because the screen is so much bigger, it is easier on the kindle than on the phone. You don't worry about too sensitive or not sensitive enough.

They have a context sensitive keyboard, which is standard on reading mode and change to web mode when browsing. But somehow not when you are entering your username and passward, so you have a relative hard time entering your email address with the standard keyboard.

Of course the touch keyboard will be superior than any physical keyboard on devices of the same size and smaller. You only need landscape mode on phones because of the keyboard size. The kindle is wide enough not to need it. And you read, you the natural mode is portrait. Though, if you have challenged eye sight or movement abilities, you may need the landscape mode, or a bigger device.

Keyboard on phones have optional sound and vibration for feedback. The kindle doesn't. But the ink color transition on the keys is a pretty good visual feedback.

Browsing is not bad at all, other than that it's black and white, do not play flash video, and have to wait a little for the ink to settle. But I can comfortably manage my emails, and browse the news for example. There is also an article mode during browsing, probably for better reading of news and such. It's neat that you will be left on the last page of your book, and also your web page always. (Not sure after completely power down.)

For the software you have the whole Amazon store. The Amazon Prime deal isn't as good as it seems. Other than the selection is probably not as many as Netflix, Amazon video don't work on Linux (used to at some point), and neither on the Wii. So you need to have a wifi TV or a cheap wifi streaming box.

Amazon Prime is limited to one new book per month. So for children readers it is obviously not enough. But there are many free books. The problem is that they don't have a precise catalogue by design. So there's an industry of paid books and subscriptions, telling you how to find free books. And you can have the free books perhaps as long as you have a kindle, not Amazon prime.

I picked the Kindle over the Nook because I'm sure the kindle books work on the phone, the computers, and I can download kindle books from the library. I think the Nook will be similar but I don't see the word Nook on the library website. I tried to install readers on Linux to read the other formats, but so far only the kindle web reader works without hassle.

As a final word, the screen savers with commercials are beautifully done. It reminds me of Casablanca the movie. It's that good.

The best way to capture, record any sound playback in Oneiric Ubuntu Linux

2012-01-19T15:28:00.000-08:00

The best means what the sound architecture designed to be used. It's lossless - the same digital signal goes to your speaker and to the file.

Any means what you hear is what you get (WYHIWYG). All you need is any sound card or USB device so you can hear anything.

The problem of Ubuntu forums is that the information isn't update and the obsolete post pull you into it like a magnet.

In Oneiric, the sound architecture is ALSA and the sound server is Pulseaudio. I have no clue what it means, but simple things become complicated and many info are obsolete.

Oneiric is bundled with the command pavucontrol, and it has no manual page for it, brilliant. You can find PulseAudio Volume Control in the dash, or just enter the command in a terminal. It has GUI. It's not just volume control, but master control of everything.

Now you need to play some sound. Play a movie file or play a youtube video, with sound of course. In the Input Device tab of pavucontrol, you should choose to show "monitors" at the bottom. For each output device, you have a corresponding monitor device as the input that you can record. Is that simple? You should see the volume meter moving up and down.

Now you need some recording software. The only thing that works for me is Audacity. It's good for many thing else. You can install it via the Ubuntu software center. Fire up audacity. There's typically nothing to set, or it doesn't matter that much. Just in case, you need to set the 4 selector right above the sound wave area to ALSA, default, default, stereo. You have to start recording with the red button or nothing will happen.

Now go back to pavucontrol. At the record tab, you should see the application Audacity. You just need to set the capture selector to "monitor of whatever sound device you are playing back". And that is one of the monitors at the Input Device tab.

The settings will be remembered on a per application basis. (I think.) So you can set the default sound device and settings for each application. And because of this, without any configurations, it always give me the wrong device during playback.

Create launcher / shortcut for applications in Ubuntu Oneiric

2012-01-05T11:56:00.000-08:00

Everybody have their little scripts for automating anything. It used to be very easy to create launchers or shortcuts for launching applications in Ubuntu. It make very little difference if the app is installed software packages or your own little script. You just right click on the desktop and create a launcher. You can even move the launcher into your desktop panels for quick launch.

Not anymore. Ubuntu Oneiric took it all away. It's still there, and very easy to use. But it was so simple and transparent that I didn't know the details before.

Basically instead of creating launcher on the desktop, you need to run from a terminal:

#gnome-desktop-item-edit --create-new ~/Desktop

It's the same as before, when you want to create a launcher on your Desktop. Give it a name, the path to the application or your script, it's done. Typically for scripts you check the item "it's application in terminals". Optionally you can change the icon by clicking on it.

You can drag your launcher icon on the desktop into the unity bar to keep it there always.

You can create a script for the above command, create a launcher for it. So you never need to type the command again. (It doesn't work without putting it in a script first.)

Basically a launcher is a simple nameXX.desktop text file anywhere. From the desktop GUI you see this as a launcher. Inside is just the name of the app, path of application or script, and path of icon.

Sometimes you can't move the launcher icon into the unity bar for various reasons. Sometimes it turns into a black block in there. There may be some legacy problems. There is an icon path where the icons are to be searched. This include ~/.icons If your script have the same name with one of the icons, the icon will be automatically loaded, which may not be your intention. Etc, etc.

Playing HD video 720p 1080p on Linux netbooks such as AO722

2012-01-02T18:02:00.000-08:00

Netbooks means weak CPU. Linux means no hardware video acceleration because of open source drivers or incomplete proprietary drivers. This is the case for Acer Aspire One 722. Because 720p can fit in the screen, so in theory it's a lot easier than rescaling the 1080p into full screen.

The bundled Movie Player (Totem) doesn't play anything HD, so I thought the AO722 is useless for video. I used another player and even 1080p can play smoothly with out of sync sound.

I spent some time investigating because, if you are given a HD video, you want to be able to view on the netbook without recoding the whole movie into 480p, which can take hours I think.

The core component of a media player is the codecs. All the players use more or less the same, such as FFmeg. The problem is these things have license restrictions, making it a nightmare to distribute. So often you are not using the best and fastest codecs. These codecs are available as plugins to overcome the license restrictions.

On the next level there's the video backend, or engine. There are basically 4, gstreamer, mplayer, vlc, xine. Gstreamer has a few plugins doing similar things. Mplayer has different branches. Xine is basically fading away but still has updates.

There are one to many GUI frontends for each engine. The default ubuntu, gnome player is Movie Player, which is actually called totem, use gstreamer. There is the Gnome-mplayer, and smplayer for the mplayer backend. There's also the mplayer-gui and mplayer can be used in the command line. Similarly there are a few xine gui's. The company Videolan makes both the frontend and backend of VLC and not used by any others.

Movie Player (Totem) and VLC don't play any HD on AO722 in any meaningful way by default. Mplayer and xine plays even 1080p smoothly. But I can't find ways to sync the audio because the video is lacking far behind.

In a faster but old machine, I discovered that only VLC can sync the audio, in the expense of some noticeable artifacts on the video.

On the AO722, I discovered that I can tweak the preferences to get a lower quality video but with perfect sync of HD 1080p (>900p) such as the Bourne Ultimatum demo clip. Try low quality, skip frames, etc.

I concluded that you can watch HD on AO722 smoothly, with compromise in quality. The problem is how to configure the player.

Totem/Gstreamer is most comprehensive. I can't believe that I couldn't find out how to install and use the ffmpeg plugins, for example. Not in the official website nor the ubuntu forums. At least not in the form I understand.

You should be able to configure a lot of things for mplayer (and xine), but the problem is too many options. There's no tutorial for crippling the player for slow machines.

I manage to tweak the VLC options to play HD with perfect sync. But some 1080p are more consuming that others. So it's not a complete solution.

Video for the browser is another story. HD on youtube is mostly mp4. It's better to use a video player to play youtube videos, mp4 or not, than using the crippled flash implementation. The VLC browser plugin doesn't work. That left us with the Gnome-player plugin. Disable other plugins and use FlashVideoReplacer extension for Firefox and you can play youtube videos just like flash, but only on youtube and a few other sites. You can play 720p with perfect sync, but not any higher. That's not a problem because youtube always give you different resolutions from 240 up to 1080p.

Free Fast VPN proxies 2

2011-12-31T12:37:00.000-08:00

For free proxies, Ultrasurf is still going strong, with constant updates to defeat censorship.

I do a lot of things on Amazon EC2, still free, including as a VPN server. You can install a proxy server but ultimately you want to use other package other than browser, and that you want encryption. A VPN may not be that slow because it uses UDP instead of TCP for transport. Your own VPN is a lot faster than a public proxy, and you won't even feel it when browsing.

I install Openvpn myself. But somebody should create an image with Openvpn securely installed, and all the configurations including the firewalls. On the client side, we need someone to show us how to configure the VPN settings in Ubuntu elegantly so that you can easily switch between VPN and no VPN. At the moment I kill the client whenever I need to switch and also set the DNS server.

I was surprised that TOR has documented how to use it as a VPN, directing all net traffic through it. It's really not that bad when it's not at the peak hours, and you can have your private TOR node on EC2 to speed things up.

TOR is supposed to be hard to trace, unless you are big brother targeting someone known. EC2 and other VPN and proxies suffers from more or less the same fate. You don't know what the server does with your real IP. Do you trust a company that you never heard of not to log your IP. Or if they are small, nobody cares what they do. It is possible that Amazon don't need to log any IP, because they are just hiring some hardware to you and you are responsible for the rules, like DMCA take downs.

Being untraceable, TOR IP's are usually banned when it matters. EC2 and other small companies (probably using EC2 or other clouds) are not likely to be banned. If you ban Amazon IP's, you are banning many services provided in the cloud. Ec2 has the advantage that whenever you reboot, you have another IP (something like that).

You need a credit/debit card to register for EC2 but a gift card will do.

Single cell phone multiple numbers (SIM method) 2

2011-12-31T11:59:00.000-08:00

Still no carrier gives you a 2nd line with a different phone number. But since the last post, things are a lot different.

If you buy direct from China, you have dual SIM card GSM phone for cheap, almost half that of my refurbished unlocked GSM phone many years ago. They use those phones when people travel, it's much cheaper to just get another SIM from the convenient store than to do cross border roaming. So you have two independent lines on a single phone, active all the time. So you don't need any magic dual sim adapter unless you still don't want to part with your old GSM phone.

The other way is of course to buy a smart phone from China, and the only choice is Android. Typically they have two sims because of the same reason above, and that it is popular to have one sim for voice, and another for broadband. So you can say money when you don't need broadband all the time. But both sim's are fully functionally.

The easiest, anywhere, is that you buy a smart phone. In Android you have Google Voice app bundled, and you have the app in iPhones. This app is pretty integrated in Android. You can set that international calls will be using Google Voice alone. Or any phone or text you send, you will be given the option of which number to use. Or of course you can start GVoice to use the other number. Also, you Google number is live all the time, direct to your phone.

You just need to signup for a Google Voice account and then ask for a new number. It's free and "permanent" except for international calls. But I think Google Voice is only available in US. The only problem is that you use Google number as your main number. I don't know if the app deals with a 2nd Google number. Also, the rule is one mobile number for one Google Voice account. You can redirect the numbers how you want it, but you need two mobile numbers to register for two accounts.

Skype is in disarray one year on. It's probably because Skype has been using a sophisticated encryption intended for desktops years ago, and it's P2P, requiring extra processing than just the calls. Typically they work but not well for the latest Android phones.

If you don't want to scrap your old phone because of the phone list, look if it supports Bluetooth. Most does. You just need to enable it and the new smart phones can import the phone list directly.

Home Security - cam, monitor and DVR (2)

2011-12-30T22:30:00.000-08:00

Update to first part.

Wifi IP CAM didn't come down in price by a lot. Direct from dhgate, it is closer to the $50 mark rather than the $100 mark. You need a portable or desktop to record the video automatically. That's not bad when you are sleeping or away from the desk.

DVR changes a lot since last time. Even in the past, it doesn't make sense to have a CMOS CAM, turns the images into analogue signal, then the DVR re-digitize the image, compress and store it in hard disk. Now, many people don't have NTSC and PAL anymore. HDMI output for a CAM is too much. So it only make sense to integrate the CAM with the DVR.

They became cheap small HD camcorders. They are everywhere but they are just not for security CAM application. You need overwrite or cycle recording. So you never need to change "tapes" or SD cards. The other very desirable feature is software motion detection - which saves a lot of storage space.

There are one in dhgate exactly that. They say it's for cars. The price is not a lot more than $50.

My old DVR is going strong. Similar things are still on sale but became more expensive now, a lot more than $50. The output of my old CAM's are still NTSC. HDMI output will be a lot more expensive.

Printing on custom paper size in Ubuntu Linux

2011-12-25T20:09:00.000-08:00

I'm so surprised that you cannot do that, not when your child is born, not when he graduate high school. Somebody is waiting for that for his grandson birth announcement.

Basically the software package will allow any paper size. But the printer typically has a list of papers, but no custom.

I was looking for something that avoid killing any of my brain cells. But actually I think that's unsolvable. I made a compromise, looking for a simple offset that I can specify to align things to where I want them. No luck.

So I decided to solve it once an for all. The problem:

Typically, you can select a paper on the printer that is not the same as the size on your package that you really want - real. Typically the printer will place the real paper in the middle of the printer paper. But for the printing, the real paper is aligned with the upper left corner of the printer paper. So there is an offset when the real paper is not aligned at the corner, but the middle.

You can set the paper margin on your package to offset this. Assuming the printer paper is larger than your real paper. And that your real paper can fed through the printer.

top margin = desired top margin
bottom margin length printer - length real + desired bottom margin
right margin = (width printer - width real) / 2 + desired right margin
left margin = (width printer - width real) / 2 + desired left margin

Since you know the dimensions of papers anyway so it's not too bad by using the calculator. You may even be able to set the software by a macro or script.

Managing EBS in EC2 for Ubuntu Linux

2011-12-16T17:42:00.000-08:00

EBS in EC2 means virtual hard drive. You are given one to start with, which is attached to your instant to run things. This is exactly the boot drive where your OS is. The free tier gives you 10GB EBS for free, but the free micro instant comes with only 8GB, which doesn't add up.

Sooner or later you need more disk space (or less). You can change the size of the boot disk but very inconvenient. First you create a snapshot (copy) of the boot drive. From the snapshot you create a volume (new drive), with bigger space. Then you stop your instant (computer), remove the boot drive and connect the new one. But you still see exactly the same old drive, because it's up to your installed OS to change the partition. In addition, you can perform a lot of operation only on an unmounted drive. So you may need another instant (like CDROM drive for the install disk) to modify your boot disk. If you modify the partitions you can easily brick the whole disk. Also, when you are working on EC2, you don't normally have GUI.

It's much easier to create a virtual empty disk drive, and mount as any directory on the file system that you desire.

First, you create a new volume on the EC2 control panel, with the capacity you needed. Then you just attach it to your instant, running or not. For Linux, the control panel will give you a new device name by default, such as /dev/sdf . If you specify sdb, the extra disk space will be mounted to /mnt later by default.

The job of visualization is completed. You need to configure your hard drives via your computer, i.e., your instant.

You need to start your instant (if not running) and then connect to it with ssh. Then you need to "format" the new hard drive.

First check if the drive is there:
#sudo fdisk -l

You will get errors because these commands are not compatible with the file system or something else on the drive.

To "format"
#sudo mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdf

The device name should be the same you have chosen at the control panel.  If you have chosen sdb for the lastest Ubuntu, all you have to is reboot at the control panel.  The drive will be mounted at /mnt.  Then you can setup directory links to this space as desired.

For any other device name or any other mount directory, you need to edit /etc/fstab. And add the line:
/dev/sdf /your/directory auto defaults,nobootwait,noatime 0 0
You can see that sdb is there already, to be mounted to /mnt.

In your boot drive, you should also create an empty directory /your/directory.  Then when you reboot via control panel, this empty directory will be replaced by the disk space of the new device.

What is out there smartphones update

2011-11-24T15:53:00.001-08:00

I almost brought a smartphone from China. But they don't have Black Friday.

The latest 4G phones are free. iPhone 4S is not free, but it's not 4G either.

Basically the latest spec, very new across all the major carriers, are qHD phones with 960 x 5??, slight less pixels than iPhone's 960x640. These Androids are pretty standard sized at less than 5" in height vs apple's 4.5". The iPhone won't fit in any women's pocket anyway. Bigger screen allows easier touch tying - keys are bigger!

8MP camera with 1080p HD video capture. Front camera 640x480(?) VGA video conference.

Android 2.3 has multi-touch, while iPhone haven't. Some brands announced that they will upgrade your phone to Android 4 pretty soon.

4G for AT&T is available in the form of LTE. It's symbolic as at the moment as even 3.5G HSPA isn't that widely available. For this reason the iPhone don't have LTE yet. LTE should be the world standard following GSM/WCDMA. But because of frequency fragmentation across the world, I doubt if the current LTE phones will work all over the world with it roll outs extensively throughout the world.

The mandatory entry level data plans are symbolic. You can't do anything smart with that. But the expensive plans more than offset by the free toys. If you don't have a pocket sized 1080p camcorder yet, you save yourself another $100. When the time comes to impress somebody with 4G speed, you can just run over the limit and pay extra for once.

Verizon and Sprint split on 4G. Verison offers LTE while Sprint has WiMax. Maybe the reason is that Sprint is on the PCS band while Verizon is on the traditional mobile band.

There are no generic qHD phones from China yet. Data at best is HSPA (HSDPA, HSUPA). And I doubt if the LTE phones they may offer at a later date will work well in both Europe and America.

Of course, you need a plan and a 2 year contract for the awesome free phones. But I can tip you off with a small secret. Third part credit checks are less dirty than carriers' own. Carrier's share non-public blacklist database, while you know what is on your credit history. So walking into a carrier's own wireless shop is the worst that you can do if your credit have problems. Third party wireless shops are better. Online check is best. They have to be automatic and in the open. So try Amazon wireless if you need to.

The what is out there buying guide for smartphones

2011-11-20T09:37:00.001-08:00

With multitouch gestures and swype, my faith in smartphones is restored. I'll probably going to try one.

Tiny physical keyboards are out, so it's really iOS (iphone) vs Android. I'm sorry to say that Apple is going in the way of the PC market. Android has taken over, huge, but Apple will remain profitable, trend setter, and cute.

Screen

The first thing to look at is the screen resolution, not the size. iPhone 4 and 4S has 960x640 pixels. At 326 ppi (pixels/inch), Apple call it retina display. If you are old enough, it should look like those light boxes for viewing films for slides. Anyway, you should not be able to see pixels.

But density and resolution isn't that crucial. It's image problem, yours. You may not want to see all of a web page in a 3+ inch screen. At that super density, it will be sharp but there's other coloring and lighting problems. I won't and can't go into that but really it's your image problem.

iPhone 3 is worthless at 1/4 of the resolution and about 1/4 of the density. There are plenty of Android devices at the same resolution and size - even cheaper.

There is the new Android phone, Galaxy Nexus, that has HD display 1280x720p. The screen is slightly larger at 4+", but that's pretty standard in Android phones. There are the odd one or two Android phones with screens slightly denser than the iPhone 4, but they don't really sell, and hard to find.

The most common Android phone has screen resolution 800x480, about 4"+. It doesn't look that much compared to iPhone 4. But imagine that the best netbook, like the MacAir, with it's screen height squeezed into less than 4 inches. You need good justification to have a higher ppi screen, other than my phone is sharper and smaller than yours.

The screen has something to do with playing back HD videos. Piping out the data via the Himi connection to the TV is easy. Decoding, resizing and filtering to display on a smaller phone screen takes more processing power. So expect jitters if you don't have HD screen, and a powerful processor.

Next criteria - carrier and network.

You still want a phone right? In US, the network is still split between AT&T and Verizon/Sprint, the same old GSM vs CDMA network. Now that GSM becomes WCDMA/3G/UMTS, it would be rather confusing.

You can't go wrong with AT&T and it's resellers. Phones will be compatible worldwide, and most phones are quad band, not limited to USA or rest of the world. Either you have to get an expansive, unlock phone without contract, or you unlock the phone yourselves if possible. In past experience, you can unlock your phone via your carrier after a few months, saying that you need to travel.

Data

Carriers find three different ways to charge you - voice, text, and data. It is ridiculous as not so long ago, text is only popular in countries such as Czech, for younger people to save money on phone bills. Now text cost more than voice, and voice is worthless. You can have free text, via data, but you need a smartphone with apps to go with it. Another justification for a smart phone.

Data speed is a major differentiator for networks. Verizon/Sprint got there first and call it 4G. The similar thing in AT&T is HSDPA for the rest of the world. These are normally included other than the most basic data package. However, unless you have a lot to upload and download in a rush, like HD video, 3G speed are decent.

High data speed is particularly relevant to WiFi tethering, where you use your phone as a WiFi router like you do at home, so all your WiFi capable devices can access the internet via your phone, anywhere where there is reception. All smartphones have WiFi and most are tethering capable, thought some cheap carrier resellers hide it. But the problem is that carriers charge an arm and a leg for it.

So I don't think data speed is relevant to average smartphone users. 3G speed is decent. Download videos you made via the SD card. And go to McDonalds if your computer need free WiFi.

iOS 5 vs Android 2.3

iOS is on the iphone 4S, not the 4, unless you hack it. Latest Android on phones is 2.3, mostly come with 2.2. Android 4 is only available on the latest Galaxy Nexus. Android 4 unifies the tablet version with the smartphone version of Androids.

The killer app for iOS 5 is Siri, the voice assistance that allows you to do very sophisticated things, according to Apple. Actually if you hack it, you can get it on iphone 4 too, and it's available to any OS soon, provided Apple don't crack down on it as in WiFi tethering. I think for average smartphones, most will be satisfied with voice to text, saving you a lot of typing.

Android has multitouch, while still hidden in iOS 5. I won't buy a smartphone without multitouch, the same that I won't get a portable without it. Considering it's cheaper than apple, it's a no brainer.

Many Android has swype out of the box, or you can install it yourself free. iPhone has it on app stores, but not as smooth and integrated. There are similar things on the Android market place with varying degree of intelligence. You can touch type without lifting your finger, by just sliding your finger on screen.

Android has better integration with Facebook, Twitter, and of course Google everything, if you like that sort of things.

Cam and Video

This are unrelated to playback on the screen. Later phones has HD video capture at 720p. The resolution is still less than 1 megapixels. At CAM mode the resolution is usually a bit higher like 3mp to 7mp. It's all about the len. There's no point to use the phone as a SLR camera. For HD video capture, it's worthwhile to get a cheap and small camcorder so you don't lost your expensive phone easily.

Most phones come with a decent len at the back, and many with an additional pinhole cam at the front for video conferencing, suitable on the go, with sufficient burring to compensate for the lack of makeup.

Plan

AT&T has the fashion accessory plan for the iPhone 4S, if you use the phone as fashion accessory only. It's $40 plus mandatory $15 data plan for the 4S. Text extra, if you don't know how to text via data. With this plan, you can't do much for the data, and hence you can't be smart much.

In contrast, it's reseller, Simple Mobile, has the $40 unlimited everything plan, up to 3G speed, upgradeable to 4G. It's BYO, bring your own phone. For iPhone 4S without contract, it can be just under $700!

Sprint reseller Virgin, has the $35 for unlimited data (4G?). It's Android lineup is pretty update and cheap too. But it's only for US and then some.

Recommendations

To maintain your international geek image without paying an arm and a leg, I recommend to get an Android direct from China, plus a Simple mobile plan.

Almost of the phones are made in China anyway. It's sort of open source hardware plus open source software Android. The display and chips are fairly standard. The best ones, 800x480, are over $200. It's International and 4G.

If you don't want that state of the art, $100 gets you a pretty smartphone and pretty display too.

Online marketplace sites like dhgate are ebay killers. There are numerous scan artists like eBay in the beginning but there are good protections in place. For standard electronics, you can get full refund if they don't ship you the numerous functions on the list.

Unlike eBay, they allows review too but people are't that talkative as in Amazon. Don't like the idea that the Chinese mafia has your name and card number in their record?

Anyway, there are plenty of reliable merchants and the units they sold worldwide is staggering.

Other reasons you need a smartphone

GPS - smartphones use network information, internet, wi-fi, in additional to satellites to provide accurate information fast. Some have turn to turn instructions and for me, a google map anywhere in the world is super for me.

Free text, free phone call via internet. But you pay the data package. A device good for HD porn will do your stuff justice.

Show your merchandise and portfolio any time. I still remember a non-story about a traveling sale person showing his next seat passenger in his brief case, electrical extension sockets with extension wire. Is that really still necessary?

A pair for grandma's and grand kids? It's so easy and so cheap with video, apart from the plans.

Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric shared network printing

2011-11-08T13:24:00.000-08:00

Shared printers over the network used to be so simple in Linux, as long as your printer is connected to any computer. Even Windows is doing quite well.

Not anymore. In Oneiric, you can't set the printer via the system settings any more. You have to go through your own internet. Browse to http://localhost:631, the standard CUPS interface.

And then what? Who cares? Can I print now?

First go to your server, the computer to which the printer is connected. Check the printer tab if you see your printer. Then go to the admin tab to enable most if not everything on the server list.

Then go to, say, your netbook. Browse to the same interface. Check the printer appears in the printer tab. Then you also have to enable most if not everything on the server list, while your netbook is obviously the client.

If I know that I would have pay a few dollars more for a wireless printer.

Reinstalled Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric 3rd time

2011-10-29T16:29:00.000-07:00

It was killing me for the AO722 as I have to do extra things each time.

First, the wired vs wireless conflict. Since the 2nd time, it wasn't a fresh install and the USB OS starts to be "intelligent". So much so that I can't even boot without an Ethernet cable connected. All the known methods do not work. Actually it can't even run on the USB drive, but can re-install itself on the hard drive.

For the resolution, recall that you need to blacklist atl1c in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf. Then you need to
#rmmod atl1c
#update-initramfs -u

Without update, the kernel will always load the atl1c it remembered.

Then disable the beep by alsamixer. Find the conexant sound card by F5. Actually muting the beep doesn't even work. You have to turn the beep volume down to zero.

The 1st reinstall, it was because of Unity / Compiz. The system menu bar disappeared and unity won't come out. I can't launch anything. I spent a few times more than the time taken to reinstall. It wasn't that I mess up the settings. I didn't even do anything. I'm certain that many things that go wrong may lead to the self disabling of unity. It may not even be hardware or desktop GUI related.

It was because all users are affected, while settings to unity and compiz are individualized. Sometimes a crippled unity2D may work. But you don't really want to keep that for long. You can always launch something via terminal - ctrl-alt-t, or bring up an independent terminal session - ctrl-alt-F1.

The 2nd reinstall was due to messing up Grub, the boot loader. All I wanted to do was to set the delay to 2 or 3 second before I can determine which OS to boot. Basically you have nothing to do that. All the docs are confusing as the new install will be Grub2, while if you have an old install, you will have Grub legacy. The recommended startup manager don't work for Grub 2. There is the Grub-customizer that can do it but it wasn't in a trusted repository.

I could have triggered a downgrade to Grub1, or I did that accidentally, or I never have Grub1. I tried to reinstall Grub2, but probably on the wrong partition as root. I have at least 7 partitions. 3 comes with windows. 1 linux swap. 1 for the OS. 1 for users. 1 unused, to grow at demand. Once that was the crippled OS with users file for temporary backup. I ended up with the Grub> prompt at boot. It is easier to reinstall than looking up the command documentary.

Even with Grub working, there was a lot of blank screens in between the so called splash screens - giving some feedback for the users that the OS is loading. It takes oneiric 30 secs to get to the login screen (only a few more seconds for Windows 7). There is 5 sec of blank screen after the bios screen, and after the Grub screen, the rest of time will be mostly blank, until the brief splash screen at the end. That would be really bad. My wife thinks it was dead.

When I accidentally have grub legacy installed, there is always a text message telling you that it's booting.

The grub-customizer can add you own image to replace the blank screen. But without animations you would think that the machine is hanged.

Its really a good idea to make a separate partition for the users, so you just overwrite the OS without copying the user files around.

First, don't encrypt your home directories or any partition containing them. Because all the user config files will be encrypted. You can't even reconfigure for them as the superuser.

The idea is simple. Install gparted to resize, create the partitions. You need one for root, the OS, and one for /home, which contains all the users. You have to run Ubuntu on the USB for example, as the partitions must be unmounted in order to modify them. You cannot unmount the OS, root partition. You just need to mount the new partition using disk utilities and copy over the old user files to the user partition.

If you are keeping the current OS, you need to remove all the old user files on /home, and make empty dummy user directory in it. You have to modify /etc/fstab and add the user partition to be mounted at /home. When you reboot everything will be the same as before, except the users will be on a different partition.

When you reinstall the OS, it's simpler. The live USB Ubuntu have all the options if you choose the custom option. You will be asked which partition for root and which one for /home etc.

Sometimes the old users will not be recognized or have errors. Sometimes it's due to file ownership. If all else fails, rename the user directory. Delete the user. Add the same user. Copy over the user files to the same place. Without a separate partition, you or the installer may accidentally erase everything. And for a clean install, you want to erase the old configurations on the OS.

There is something wrong over at Ubuntu. It looks very nice and good for a fresh install. All the geeky things are hidden or not even bundled. You may win some but if anything happens, nobody will be able to help. You don't throw the 1% existing users under the bus go get a few new recruits. The forums are not working. You have ubuntu forums and then ask ubuntu. Most of info are outdated.

Whenever you make a decision, you should consider the CIA interrogation manual, classified or unclassified. One main technique is confusion. Ubuntu is good at it now. You will pay whatever price for constant confusion to go away - buy a powerful notebook and pay up for the windows anti-virus scams, or buy a more expensive apple.

And then there is the physical abuse that don't register. In the ubuntu forums you can't search for more than once every few sec. In ask ubuntu many proxy servers or potential servers are banned.

And then there is the non-violence abuse. Posting a link to point to somewhere else is both abuse and confusion. May be really 1% should be using Ubuntu, but if there is no increase for long, there will not be a Ubuntu. On the other hand, throwing everything old under the bus will be a disaster. But if you don't develop something cool, there won't be developers left.

So, when in doubt of where to go, what to do next, consult the CIA manual.

Disable AC adaptor beep in portables in Ubuntu 11.10

2011-10-25T13:52:00.000-07:00

This is the answer to the million dollar question: disable the AC adapter / power cord beep in Acer Aspire One AO722 netbook in Ubuntu 11.10.

It is easy in Windows and perhaps earlier versions of Ubuntu.

In U11.10, you need the command line. First bring up the terminal, e.g., use ctrl-alt-t.

Then use the utility
#alsamixer

For portables there are no separate system speakers for the system beep, therefore the desktop methods won't work. For some portables, there are two devices, one for the digital HDMI and one for the analog speaker and headphones. You have to pick the correct one for the volume settings.

For the AO722, use F6 to pick the conexant sound card, rather than the first HDMI sound card.

Then use the arrow keys to get to the beep column. Type m to toggle the muting status.

The heart attack beep will be off when the power cord is attached or removed. But the beep is not altogether muted. The beep volume seemed to be coupled to the master volume or the alert volume.

Installing Ubuntu 11.10 on Acer netbook AO722

2011-10-21T16:04:00.000-07:00

The AO722 came with full Windows 7 64-bit, clumsy IE, loaded with advertising demos. It would be a great performance upgrade to switch to Ubuntu.

But you won't be able to watch Netflix. And because of open source video driver or flash plug-in, 720p HD on youtube will be stuttering.

I suggest to install via a USB flash drive. It will also be the "recovery disk" when all else fails. The alternative is to boot up Windows and install something to read the Linux disk formats.

For a fail safe install, plug in the Ethernet cable to your wireless router. At least get a cable ready. The wired driver has conflicts with the wireless Broadcom driver!

When installation is completed, the OS will suggest proprietary wireless and video drivers to install, as opposed to the bundled open source drive. Don't.

The proprietary video driver will freeze after suspend. It will not wake up. So don't do it. The default drivers are OK. But either the driver or the flash plug-in isn't good enough. You cannot not play 720p HD on youtube smoothly. Playing local files or over the local network is OK, but I haven't tried HD and other codecs.

Other than that, the screen flickers a little during boot.

If the wireless driver works, connect automatically and ask you the encryption password, savour it. Once it is working, it will not work again once you reboot it. It will then be conflicting with the Ethernet driver.

There is no other way out but to disable the Ethernet driver. Add the line:

blacklist atl1c

in the file /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf. Then run:
#update-initramfs -u

And remember to sudo. If you don't update, rebooting do not update for you. You can check with lsmod.

You can check by lsmod first. If you see atl1c and wl in the output, you are most likely using the conflicting drivers. They are the latest drivers.

A common fix is to change the boot order to network before the system disk drive. This will give time for the Ethernet driver to settle before the wireless one. But if you switch user after boot, the same thing will occur because the networking settings are per user.

If your wireless doesn't work, or you play around with the drivers until it doesn't work, it's expected. You look around the blacklist files and you will understand.

The descriptions at Broadcom are good, but some instructions do not make sense. On top of the network drivers' conflict, your wireless probably will fail changing from 11.04 to 11.10, not because of the AO722.

First check what you have by
#lshw -C network
You can see the Broadcom BM4313 hardware, and at the driver entry, wl. If you see anything else, you need to reinstall the drivers.

Then you need to see if the kernel driver is compatible:
#lsmod

You should see wl in the list. Typically, the driver will be selected for you during OS install, and will be affected by the old configurations. Typically you have to remove the bcma driver and blacklist it as above:
#rmmod bcma

The other older drivers are already blacklisted.

If there are troubles and you need to reinstall the drivers, you should install synaptic package manager first. You can search in the Ubuntu software center. You can also find the drivers in the Ubuntu software center. The problem is that after I installed it, it worked, and then I can't find the driver again in the center. Also it don't show the version numbers.

In the package manager, you search for Broadcom or bcm. What you need are two drivers:
bcmwl-kernel-source
broadcom-STA-source

You need to reboot and may need to reinstall them to get the right drivers.

Broadcom just updated their Linux wireless driver page. But I think the drivers at Ubuntu depository are almost update. But if you compile the updated Broadcom drivers on you own, you may solve the network interface conflicts.

But why you want this netbook? It fits in the glove box of my vintage. It don't cost that much if you shake it too much into disintegration. It's a fully functional computer with full 64 bit OS. At 11.6", the screen resolution of 13xx by 7xx is "bigger" than an old 17" desktop monitor. So it looks really nice if you care to sit close to it, like in the car. And you should be pleasant to read books too, and hold it like an open book if you sort out the center of gravity. It's exactly the size of a letter paper. It's so sexy that chicks finger me. Not exactly. They finger the screen as if it is an iPad, tablet, iPhone, or just point of sale check out machine.

UPDATES: upgrading kernel is a big hassle as usual. The non-compatible wireless driver came back which didn't work. I have to bring back the ethernet driver and the cable. Reinstall the working driver, and then blacklist the ethernet driver. Also, tried if the propriety driver works for new kernel. No. Reinstall.

So my new blacklist comes to:
#wireless
bcma
brcmsmac
#ethernet
atl1c
#video, just in case
fglrx

Remember to update before reboot.

For the correct driver to install, you can just search for them in Ubuntu software center
For video: xserver-xorg-video-radeon
For wireless: bcmwl-kernel-source

Via lsmod, the drivers are radeon, wl. You also have to remove the other wrong drivers first. The order is totally important.

Ubuntu 11.10 upgrade - almost a nightmare

2011-10-16T15:32:00.000-07:00

The other day a prompt popped-up, saying that Ubntu 11.10 is ready. I just pressed the button for the upgrade, thinking it was as simple as the software updates every few days. I never had any problems since the last Ubuntu upgrade.

It happened that whatever problems others have, I also have them, and then some.

Maybe because of my non-standard (sophisicated I would say) setup, like all the partial encryptions, encrypted swap space, etc, reboot failed. I started the recovery mode. I got in, but what do I do?!

I tried to look at the boot log, no clue. And before that, the boot loader complained that all my NTFS (Windows) drives have fatal errors. That was real scary.

I tried to remove the last application that appeared at the boot log out of desperation. Then the first error message came out - that the software package manager wasn't in a proper state. I ran the suggested command and it was fixed. My computer manager to crash the software package manger at half the upgrade.

But that was fixed after wasting a lot of clueless time, swapping between the recovery mode, and normal mode a few times, and using the desktop to search for answers on the web.

Now the NTFS drives. Who haven't got one or two partitions? It's not safe to get rid of Windows altogether. I still can't see the ink levels on my printer.

It happened that they took out the fix NTFS utility from the system bundle. The system cannot find the programs to check and fix the NTFS drives, causing a fatal error. It is a valid philosophy, but stupid.

NTFS support is still there. You can mount the drive and read the data as before. Just that you cannot fix the hard disk errors. For that you have to download the newer optional NTFS package. But actually it is there and installed. But for some reason they call it another name, being new and different. You can also "fix" the disk errors from other utilities like the Disk Utilities.

I think the reason for the change is that the fix disk utilities is not as good as the Windows one. I fixed it on Ubuntu. But when I check it on Windows, it still got plenty of errors.

The proper solution is to edit the /etc/fstab file. For the NTFS disks, change the last 1 to 0, telling the system not to try checking and fixing them, using a package that didn't exist.

This is fixed after booting and fixing all the drives in Ubuntu and Linux, which is a waste of time. Like testing and fixing memory first, you should check and fix all your drives first, in Windows for NTFS, and others in Ubuntu, before you do major upgrade.

And of course you should backup your home directory first.

After successful booting, of course the default desktop environment is the new unity interface. The saving grace is that it's compatible with the classic Ubuntu gnome desktop, once again. The ridiculous fact is that 11.04 was not compatible with the earlier gnome desktop.

After I played around a bit, and maybe after some coding errors, unity disappeared. Everything seemed to be working. But I don't have the Unity to launch anything, and no system bar at the top. All I got is the bar for the "file explorer".

It happened that the desktop or whatever is called Compiz, and Unity is a plug-in. Somehow Unity is disappeared and you are left with a useless desktop, unless you have some application links on the desktop.

To reset to the default state of Compiz and Unity you need to do the following:

#gconftool-2 --recursive-unset /apps/compiz-1
#unity --reset

The tricky bit is that you can't start a terminal or anything. In recovery mode you also have to login as a normal user as the desktop settings is user specific. You can also try alt-ctrl-F1 that sort of thing to get a terminal to launch the commands.

Alt-ctrl-F1 gets you to the raw linux mode, without any GUI. It's like the recovery mode but with everything else normal, except the GUI. Alt-ctrl-t is the default hot key for bringing up a terminal.

Finally, after the hens and eggs problems, it worked. And now I can move to the new Unity because it beats Windows 7.

But I'm afraid there are problems at Ubuntu. Wrong philosophy? Many heads in all directions? Heading for the wrong path? These will be next.

ps It is recommended to install the Compiz settings manager but I advice against it until you sort out all your other troubles. It sets many other things so you can't go back to default even after you completely removes Compiz and reinstall.

Modify encrypted swap partition in Ubuntu

2011-09-23T07:00:00.000-07:00

If you want to resize, merge, split, move your partitions, you may have to modify your encrypted partition too.

If you haven't got it, install GParted to view and manage your partitions.

Before you do anything serious, make a rescue disk in a USB thumb flash drive, and make sure that your computer can boot from it, and you know how to. In Ubuntu a rescue/recover disk is actually a full sized Ubuntu operating system on trial. You can use it straight from the flash drive, or install Ubuntu into your hard drive for a dual boot or pure Ubuntu system. Just don't do that and keep using it directly from flash drive.

The latest Ubuntu have GParted installed, and make sure that your thumb drive have it.

I hate to say that you should back up you data before you modify your partitions. But that's not very practical for most, unless you have a new bigger hard drive, or a huge external drive. GParted is pretty safe and I lived to tell you the story.

If you didn't setup your swap, I didn't, you may find where it is in the file /etc/fstab. You will find a line with the word swap. For a swap partition it will be at /dev/sda2 etc, but identified with the partition's UUID, a global unique code. For a swap file, it will be typically be at /swapfile.

The size of the swap file or partition will be about one to two times your system RAM. If you have ample RAM and disk space, the recommended size is equal to your RAM. But the old school of twice the RAM size doesn't matter. Now disks are half to one Terrible lot of Bytes.

Especially if you encrypted your swap file, you cannot be sure that it's functional because in GPart it show up as an unknown partition and unmounted. Don't let it fool you.

First you turn off swap:

#swapoff /dev/sda2

for swap partition or if you have a swap file

#swapoff /swapfile

Edit the /etc/fstab file:

#sudo gedit /etc/fstab

and comment out the swap file entry. If your swap isn't encrypted, now it would be a normal partition (if you reboot) and you can do anything about it with GPart for example. You can delete it or your swap file.

If your swap is encrypted, you will not be able to boot again. You have to remove the mapper. You can see at /dev/mapper what the mapped partition is, eg, cryptswap1. To remove it:

#dmsetup remove cryptswap1

Without it, you OS cannot boot even in recovery mode, as the mapper is looking for the swap partition that do not exist or defunctional one way or the other.

To setup the swap partition again. Create a partition in GPart if you don't have one already. Keep it unmounted. Format it to linux-swap.

In /etc/fstab, uncomment the old swap partition line. Instead of the UUID, you can just use the device name, /dev/sda2 for example.

You may be able to do

#swapon /dev/sda2

But if you reboot you will sure have the swap partition active.

Now you can use the ecryptfs utility to encrypt the swap file again. You can see your swap at /dev/mapper and the corresponding line added at /etc/fstab.

Remember to comment out the line for the previous swap partition in /etc/fstab. The ecryptfs utility does not do it for your.

You can use the system monitor to see how much and how often your swap partition is used.

Ubuntu startup disk on USB flash drive refuse to boot

2011-08-24T11:45:00.000-07:00

I have created a startup disk on USB thumb drive for an ancient desktop. I never tried to boot it up. Nowadays, basically it's a full copy of virgin OS on flash drive. For this reason you shouldn't bother with Windows recovery. Have Ubuntu dual boot and you can read and write your drives no matter what. A flash drive is extra protection when both boot fails. A 2 GB drive is too cheap for the postage. If you have Frys or Micro Centers, you can pick it up dirt cheap.

For strange reasons the flash drive wouldn't boot. I searched the Web. All the problems and solutions are not relevant to me. There's only one person saying that must be memory. Of course, but memory errors are the most spectacular. I'm not having anything spectacular. As a last resort I tested my memory using the memtest that comes with Ubuntu.

It wasn't surprising that I have at least a memory error. I think I spotted errors long ago. I don't believe it because it passed the BIOS tests, and Windows and Ubuntu boots well.

For no good reason I swapped the memory banks. It was scary as the motherboard refuse to boot again. It boots if I swap them back. So the simple memory tests test only some of the bytes, not all the bytes.

So I went to Micro Center to pick up some cheap memory. Memtest shows no error and everything boots, including the USB flash drive. Amen.

The life time guarantee on the memory is basically useless. By the time good memory fail, it will be obsolete, if not, dirt cheap. If you are still using your obsolete system, for memory you cannot wait for the return authorization and wait for them to sent you the memory. And if you bother to pull out the memory, it's worth while to upgrade to bigger memories.

There comes a time when obsolete parts cost more than new parts, for the hard to find factor. Basically this is driving you to give up your obsolete system and upgrade.

Epson scanner warmup problem in Linux

2011-08-24T11:13:00.000-07:00

Today I reached the holy grail, the ancient motherboard and ancient Epson scanner is working under Ubuntu, the last device that refuse to work.

With the kernel upgrade, the know problem of my most ancient motherboard is gone all of a sudden. The motherboard temperatures can be detected and I can use it to run something hot, rather than sitting pretty.

My ancient Epson USB scanner always work under Windows. But my other things wouldn't work nicely in the ancient mother boards.

Firstly, in Ubuntu, you need the sane package installed for scanners. Try type the command xsane. If you don't have it installed, follow the instructions to install it or just fire up the package manager. The sane package will be chain installed in order to get the GUI front-end working.

Type the command

#scanimage -L

to check if your scanner is recognized. For some Epson scanners, you can see the name of the so called backend, some sort of driver - plustek.

My scanner is recognized, responded, but hanged after scan started with no messages.

Ignore what Epson have to say and their recommendation of drivers for Linux. It is way too out dated.

Go to /etc/sane.d

Edit plustek.conf file (sudo)

Change
option warmup -1
to
option warmup 60

Then my scanner works. If they still don't, edit all the epson*.conf files. Comment out the scsi lines.

Fire up your scanner with xsane and be patient.

What is WiiXplorer?

2011-08-23T14:56:00.000-07:00

You don't really have a clue after reading the long list of features. But it is a must have.

It can be installed directly via the Homebrew Browser (an app on Homebrew channel). So you don't need to do anything like touching the SD card. I installed it after I installed USB Loader. It works without a hitch. I suppose it will work without the USB Loader. I have everything compatible to Wii 4.3.

Now that you need the USB drive to be at the Wii to backup all the games, you don't want to move the drive upstairs and downstairs to the PC and the Wii. Two separate drives aren't necessary better even if you have the money. You need something to connect your PC to the USB drive at the Wii.

The Wii is a pretty good SDHC card reader (and writer). You can watch your pictures and videos right on the big screen after a trip. If you can copy the card to your PC, you don't need a separate card reader.

The WiiXplorer is basically a GUI file manager, like that of any other OS. It's behavior like Windows Explorers and nautilus(?) in Ubuntu. Basically that's the tasks you do daily the most, copy, move, delete, rename files and folders.

The multi device means the SD card drive, USB drive, and SMB share on the PC over WiFi is supported. It should also support USB flash drive, but I didn't tried.

There is an icon at the top left hand corner to show what device is being displayed. If you click on it, there's choice of SD, USB, and SMB etc.

The USB drive connected to the Wii is NTFS formatted (Windows). My desktop is of course ext (Linux), but wrapped up with SMB.

It's the same SMB setup as mplayer-ce. But you can do it via the GUI when you run WiiXplorer. Remember to uncheck readonly at the PC end if you want to be able to write back to the PC drives.

So you can copy/move files from any device to any device. And you can sit at the Wii and do everything with the Wiimote, without going to your PC, as long as it is on for the SMB server.

If you download something to the PC into the SMB share folder, you can move it to any storage on the Wii. You can also move anything on the Wii storages into your PC. With this thing, you never need to go up and down stairs to install something.

But moving files over WiFi is pretty slow if you have 4GB of data. The speed is about 500 MB/s. You need 2000 sec to move 1GB of data. It's not too bad. If you want it immediately, you can carry the USB drive around, the speed is at least 20MB/s at the lower end. Otherwise you can start moving something when you are not using the Wii for an hour or two.

If you setup the Wii as an ftp server, you can sit at the computer and do everything too.

WiiXplorer also launch installed Homebrew applications according the file type. But it didn't work for me. If the image display works, then it's a compliment to mplayer-ce.

Usng WiiXplorer is obvious, except that the right click on a file is achieved via the + button. You use this button to bring up the copy-paste menu.

Wii media center limitations

2011-08-23T10:36:00.000-07:00

Last time we talked about streaming movies to the Wii directly from your computer, via wifi connection.

The Wii is not HD yet, and the connections are standard RCA jacks. You can have adapters for your PC or HDTV for cheap, but the resolution is limited to about DVD resolution of 480p, that of the Wii output.

The mplayer-ce can play almost any formats in any resolutions, but the Wii isn't fast enough for playing HD stuff. Down conversion from HD to SD is pretty intensive processing, decode HD stuff and then recode. You have to do it in your PC first. The processing takes roughly the same order of time as the movie play time, depending on your CPU.

Setting up Wii as a mega game center

2011-08-23T10:35:00.000-07:00

Instead of swapping DVD games, you can put them all on a USB drive. That's mega. You can also "exchange games" via the Internet this way.

The problem for the Wii is the versions. Software modifications are very specific to the firmware version of Wii. Since these softmods aren't updated that often, you may be using out of date instructions. There's still a possibility of bricking the wii.

The other problems are trolling. You never know what the purposes of some instructions, and the mentality of some writers.

Let me tell you a story. I overheard a kid said to his father, "You said we will go to the game shop again to get a new game. That was last January." So the kid probably got the Wii for Christmas or Thanks Giving, at the sales or not. Then he got a game probably the next year at New Year sales. Then no more games for another year, probably. So, for whatever reasons, please minimize the trolling.

So if your Wii is virgin, update to 4.3U/E/J. U for US, E for Europe, J for Japan etc. You can do everything in 4.3. If you already have homebrew something in your Wii, I don't think updating will brick it. But you will have to install homebres all over again. For this reason, you want to disable automatic updating once you complete installing everyting homebrew for 4.3.

First the trusted instructions are here at GAF, pretty good, very detailed but not too specific. The order of installation is:

Wii 4.3
Homebrew
IOS236
d2x
Configurable USB Loader

Homebrew is simply a simple way to run other applications and installers. Almost all softmods are IOS, modifying the I/O system of the Wii, say, instead of reading the DVD drive, read from the USB instead. d2x handles with some ways that games uses I/O. The USB Loader manages the games and play them.

Firstly, about the security. These installers load a lot of things directly from websites and Nintendo. So you have to trust them. If you have internet filters for your kids, typically these ware sites and even game sites are blocked by default. Then you MAY have to turn your firewall off to your Wii, and only your Wii. You can do it easily on your Wifi router by setting the DMZ option on your Wii - demilitarize zone, meaning no protection.

After installing everything, you should set the firewall to normal. The homebrew software will still download from the web, but this is normally allowed. There is no guarantee what is in your softmods. For example, the easiest method to install Homebrew is to use the letterbomb method, without actually buying an old game. But your IP and the MAC of your Wii is given away.

If you If the installation complains that it cannot download a file, search for the file directly on the internet, download it, and put it in the right place on the SD card as directed. This probably won't happen if your Wii is unprotected from the Internet. The installers actually check hash signatures, so you probably won't download the wrong files into your wii.

Before you do anything, it's best to go to Homebrew channel, get to BootMii by the Home button. Then save 512 mb of NAND memory onto the SD card. In BootMii, the wiimote won't work, use the Wii power button as next, and the reset button as select. If anything goes wrong, you can load the NAND back to the Wii and all your installations are nulled.

After installing IOS236, you should get the hell out without any further steps, step 2. To get out of step 2, you push the 2 button, confusing, isn't it? Otherwise you need to insert a real game, start it, and install IOS236 again.

Something is missing in the USB Loader instructions. I don't know what the hell he is talking about. Just download the v69 version directly. It works as instructed.

I advise using NTFS for file format, which is the usual format that comes with USB drives, which is used in Windows, Linux compatible. You have to add two lines to the config.txt file. Then you don't need to add another FAT32 petition. Just remember that in NTFS, filenames are case sensitive, while the old FAT are not.

The important thing is that, USB Loader (and a few others with similar names) put everything on the folder wbfs at root of your USB drive (single or multiple partitions). Otherwise the loader won't see them.

You can only plug the USB drive into USB1 socket, the one near the bottom or near the edge.

The loader will backup your DVD game to the USB drive via the + button. It takes a while for all 4 Gb of data. The filename will be GAMEID.iso inside the wbfs folder (or a few other alternatives).

If you somehow get DVD image files .iso files, you must lookup the correct GAMEID from the internet such as http://wiitdb.com/. Rename your file to GAMEID.iso and put it right under the wbfs folder. Or else the loader won't see the game.

If you play the same games often, you can use the SDHC cards too. You need an 8 GB for one game, and a 16 GB card for 3 games. USB flash drive should work. You don't even need a card reader for your PC. But with the USB socket at the back of the Wii, I find it not that convenient.

I have a very old SD card (up to 2 GB), but I never come across the need to use it in installing all the homebrew software. All SD cards are now SDHC. Anything other than the biggest capacity you can get it on the net for cheap. So cheap that the postage is significant. You can pick these things up like trash in shops such as Fry's and Micro Center, if you are lucky to live near one.

Sync your folder in the cloud with your local drive

2011-08-23T08:56:00.000-07:00

For backups, you sync your local folder to some servers in the cloud. Since only the updated files are copied, you can run the command via cron automatically, daily or hourly. You can do the same to encrypted files if you use ecryptfs.

For bittorrent downloads into the cloud, you can automatically sync the downloads to your local drive. With automatic sync, it's as good as downloading directly, without the hazzle of starting bt client on your computer. But the bandwidth usage increases by 50%, because the files got transferred out of the cloud twice, one for seeding and one to your computer.

The easiest way is using Ubuntu in EC2 and locally, which I am. First to copy a file or whole folder, from EC2 to hard drive. Assume you have a folder called downloads in EC2, and your default username there is ubuntu.

scp -i /home/yourusername/yourkeyfile.pem ubuntu@ec2-70-19-168-131.compute-1.amazonaws.com:downloads/foldername /home/yourusername/downloads

The advantage is that there is a counter for the percentage completion. You can custom the filenames and folder names.

If you sync the files, a single command is all you ever need, and you can put it into cron and forget about it.

rsync -e "ssh -i /home/yourusername/yourkey.pem" -av --exclude '*.part' ubuntu@ec2-33-55-444-222.compute-1.amazonaws.com:downloads ~

For bittorrents, you exclude the partial downloads and never waste bandwidth. The disadvantage is that the command is completely slient. You have no way of knowing the progress unless using other means such the system network monitor. Also the partial file is hidden somewhere, so you cannot take a peep first.

USB Flash drive shrinks in capacity due to hidden bad trash

2011-08-17T21:32:00.000-07:00

In Ubuntu, each drive has a hidden trash bin, just like in Windows. But in Ubt, "undelete" is integrated. This works for native Linux file system formats ext?, and old Windows FAT32, but somehow don't work for new Windows NTFS with multiple partitions.

Users see a single trash bin accessible via the status bar. When a drive is mounted, it's trash appears in the central trash bin. A flash drive is automatically mounted when it's inserted.

In the desktop GUI, Gnome, you cannot delete a file, but only move it to the trash. So you don't recover disk space when you remove files on the flash file. You have to empty the trash.

For some reasons, probably pulling out the flash drive without unmounting it first, and didn't empty the trash first, the trash can information got corrupted. Say the trash can cannot be emptied.

First, you have to become superuser to force delete files in trash can. You need to bring up the file explorer or file browser in Linux:

#gksu nautilus

From there you browse the the flash drive, show hidden files via options. Then you have sufficient privilege to delete files in the Trash can.

Settings up Wii as your wireless media center and free game center

2011-08-17T00:06:00.000-07:00

Why Wii? Because it's easy, parents can do it.

Why Wii? The HD version will only be launched in 2012. But you can see how popular Netfix streaming is, while most of the library are DVD's.

Why Wii? Sometimes you don't want to go to the center of the living room and watch the main TV. You don't want to sit in front of the desktop too often either. Sitting in front of a notebook is worse. Kids like their own quiet corners sometimes. I like my own space too sometimes. If you haven't throw away all your obsolete TV's, they are pretty good for Wii. Or you can pick up a decent monitor for pennies in the dollar on a garage sale. You can go to the garage with a Wii, and connect that to a TV that you didn't bother to throw away yet.

Why Wii? The Wiimote is something, though other consoles have been catching up. You can control the usual complicated media player maneuvers with your left hand. 5 year old kids surf channels and movies like a pro.

Homebrew is a generic term for all the alternative software for game consoles. For Wii there is the wiibrew.org. This site is not one of those who try to sell you something when it's free.

First you need to setup the Homebrew channel. Even wiibrew.org is not up to date. For all their methods, you need to buy a real game DVD, start playing at least once, save the game on SDHC card. Then you replace the saved games files with the hacked files.

The best is the Letterbomb method at http://please.hackmii.com/. There are videos and tutorials to help you. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYDM3D5grp0 To get your Wii MAC, go to the Wii setup menu, at the Internet options. After all that is done, you go to the Wii calendar. You can find the email on Today or on Yesterday. You can see the letter with a bomb icon. You click on it and begin to install. You install Homebrew Channel, and I suggest also bootmii for many other things.

The site didn't work for my secure Linux and secure Firefox. You may use IE or the bundled cut down browser on Ubuntu.

The current System Menu Version of the Wii is 4.3 (U for US, E for Europe etc). You should update your system to 4.3, otherwise earlier systems don't even support USB2.0. Though if you or someone have installed some hacks before, they will be deleted during System Menu update.

The Wii treats storage devices differently. The most likely to work storage is the early SC, up to 2GB. Next best is SDHC, and it works on my Wii. Then it's USB drive or flash drive. I use SDHC throughout without problems.

The next one to install is Homebrew browser, from whom you can download other games and software via wifi. wiibrew.org has a page on it.

The Wiimote is something, though other consoles also have it. With it, a simple painting game becomes a multilayer strategy game, and they are like having fun painting on the wall instead of on paper.

For the media center bit, you should install mplayer-ce via Homebrew. WiiMC is better but it didn't work for me. Mplayer-ce plays at least .mp4, .avi (xvid) and .mov files. It plays all of them on SDHC cards. It doesn't play .mov files on USB flash drive. It only plays .avi files on my desktop via file sharing with SMB. It doesn't play photos.

If you don't use wifi to transfer files, you have to copy the files to flash drive or SDHC card, carry the drive or card to the console. My old camera is good at taking pictures but very slow in transfering the files. The USB connector is at the back of the Wii which is inconvenient.

The best method is file sharing. You play the files directly on your hard drive of your computer via wifi. You do not need to copy and carry the drives and cards around. Actually no files are copied. They are like streaming to your Wii immediately. For this reason don't use ftpii, where files are actually copied, and can be slow via wifi.

The easiest file sharing method is via SMB. The beauty of Ubuntu and Linux is that it's built in. You don't need to install Samba. There are several methods to config sharing on Ubuntu but the only one works for is to open a terminal, and then the command:

#shares-admin

The app have nice GUI. You specify the folder to share where your movies will be, and select SMB as the method. You give the share a name, say wii, to identify it on the wii side. Leave the Windows tab alone as you are not sharing with Windows. I don't think you need it but I picked one of the user on the desktop as allowed user for the share folder.

On the Wii side you look for the smb.config file under apps/mplayer-ce/.

#Samba share1  (smb1:/) 
ip1=192.168.0.2
share1=wii
user1= 
pass1=

Add the share name you picked to identify the path of the shared folder. The ip is you PC, typically 192.168.0.xxxx, depending on your brand of wireless router. I also add the user name that I picked and his login password for Ubuntu. This is probably not needed or wrong way to do it. But that's what working after a lot of trouble shooting.

That is not all. The firewall at the wireless router typically do not bother with network traffic within the LAN. Unfortunately Linux has a good firewall itself. The Wii, and anything else, is not allowed to connect into Linux.

Messing with the Linux firewall is messy. But there is firestarter, that I am already using. All you need to do is to set the inbound policy. You set it to SMB/Samba at the drop down menu, and the firewall will open the ports.

Tips for bit-torrent clients in the cloud

2011-08-16T22:35:00.000-07:00

Specifically, I use Transmission as the bit-torrent client, installed on free Amazon EC2 Ubuntu Linux. There's no monitor in the cloud so I'm using the so called headless mode, or no GUI mode, or command line mode.

Actually the Transmission daemon runs forever, and except for the configuration, you never need to deal with it. You can use the web interface via the browser on your desktop.

First you must configure Transmission on EC2 by editing the settings text file. First you have to set the seeding ratio. Many trackers require the ratio to be at least 1:1. You must upload the same bytes that you download. But still you can upload a lot more than you download. This can be quite costly in EC2.

Transmission only honor the upload ratio AFTER download is completed. Because EC2 is very fast, your download is fast but your upload is even faster, which can be by a few times if all your peers are slow. So by the time your movie download is finished, you may have already uploaded 10 times the size of the movie. You have to limit your upload speed. 100 kb/s seems to be decent. If you set it too low, it will affect your download rates.

The download rate depend very much on the time of the day. You save time when everybody in your region go to sleep. The bit-torrent download could be a few times faster, and the download from EC2 to your computer could be twice. But you don't save anything, except for time.

The free EC2 only comes with about 8GB of storage. The BT client will hang because of out of storage space if somebody put together the whole season of TV shows. On the web interface, you select the torrent and then select the file tab. Just check the files you want first to be somewhat less than 8GB. When you finish downloading, you pause Transmission. Then you use remote copy or other mean to transfer the files to your desktop. Then you delete the files on EC2. Then you resume the torrent. It's strange that Transmission behave exactly as if you haven't deleted the completed files.

You want to decide if you still want the movie file while the torrent is active. VLC can read partially download files. But it will be rather complicated when the file is on EC2.

When the download is completed, you want to decide if you want the movie and download in full to your desktop. You can use a command line video editor to cut out a few minutes at random. You can download these and watch before you decide. You can use a command line video player to generate snap shot galleries for you to download and preview.

But it's simpler to just download the movie file using scp or similar. Once you started downloading, most of the Linux movie players can play the partial files. Even better, unlike bit-torrent partial files with pieces arriving in random order, you start playing the movie at the beginning while the rest is being downloaded. This is like some sort of streaming. If you are picky about movies, you may save bandwidth equal to the size of the movie.

Home made universal pet waterer

2011-08-08T15:59:00.000-07:00

Upside down bottle type of waterer is basically a waste of money, unless your dog is large. You are buying a big bottle or tank. It amazes me that people actually use these things in the office. I hate to change the bottle.

For pets that drinks less than a few liter of water, you can make a waterer in a minute, with things in your recycle bin.

All you need is to cut a hole near the bottom on a soda bottle. Then put a bottle in another container such as a plastic coffee container.

The tube and cup is optional. Without these your pet drinks from open spaces of the "coffee container".

The two pieces design makes it universal. For large pets, you can use several soda bottles with almost fitting outer container, which all feed into a single drinking cup.

For small pets, you can fit a small cup inside the cage suitable for the size of the pet and the size of the cage. The large soda bottle can stay outside.

Determining the optimal size and optimal placement of waterers also lead to 2 pieces design.

You want cups to be small to save space, keep water fresher or waste less water, reduce dust, and reduce other rubbish such as litter, food residue and animal waste. On the other hand, you need some mass so your pet cannot topple the waterer.

Soda bottle

You cannot use soft plastic bottles such as milk bottles. They cannot withstand the atmosphere pressure and will be squashed. Ordinary soda bottle will be tough enough.

You can use whatever means to make a hole, such as scissor or knife. I drill a pilot hole using a plastic drill. Then enlarge it using a wood drill. Holes have to be at least 3/8". Water will not come out of small holes at all. A larger hole allows the water and air bubbles to flow more easily. Water comes out and air comes in at the same hole, nothing you can do about that. I enlarge the hole using a rotatory drill bit for cutting plastic. But a scissor is as good as anything else.

The hole should be near the bottom to maximize the delivered water volume but enough water left to give the bottle and outer container some weight for stability. The height of the hole is also one of the variables to adjust the water level.

You can just refill the bottle at the hole so make it in a convenient place, perhaps with a 2nd hole next to it for air to get out.

The cup

Any cup will do but there may be a lot of requirements. It has to be the right size for your pet, can be fixed or cannot be toppled. I use PVC under sink drain pipes with a U section. Pets drink from one end and the "plumbing" at the other side. You can glue or use all the other methods to fix PVC piping.

The tube

As shown, you just need a tube, dipping into the outer container and the cup. You don't need to do anything as long as the tube ends are under the water line.

I use 1/4" vinyl tubes for small pets. I'm not sure if vinyl tubes are for potable water. But 1/4 tubes for connecting to fridge ice makers are readily available, but not as flexible as vinyl tubes. There are also PEX tubes surely for potable water, but I don't know how flexible they are at 1/4". For larger pets, you may want to use 3/8" or larger tubes for faster refill.

The simplest way to keep the tube in place is to drill a 1/4" hole (for 1/4 flexible tubes) on the wall of the outer container and the cup, above the water line. Then insert the tube through the hole into the water. Of course you can always use clips.

Installation

The water level at the outer container and cup need to be aligned. Otherwise the cup either overflows, draining all the water, or the water level in the cup is too low for the pet to drink from.

You can start by changing the height of the outer container little by little, such as using stacks of old CD/DVD cases. Then you fix the cup, find some objects to replace the CD cases with the same height, cut PVC tubes as legs for a stand, or make an adjustable stand.

To start, you need to fill the bottle, raise the outer container up so the cup overflows. This get rid of air in the tube. If this doesn't work, fill the tube with water fully or partially, then insert into the outer container and cup. Try again.

Refilling the bottle

When the cup cannot be refilled by the bottle, it's time to refill. In this case, lift the bottle up will not spill any water into the outer container. There's no water in the bottle above the water level line.

If there is water remaining above the water level line, some water will spill into the outer container and then into the cup, which may overflow a bit. You have to lift the bottle swiftly and turn it horizontally so the hole is at the top.

Fill the bottle at the hole, carry it horizontally back to the outer container. Turn it vertical and slip into the outer container in one swift maneuver. It's easier than turning a water bottle upside down, and with less spills. Kids can do it, which is the goal of the design.

As long as the ends of the tubes stay in water below the level line, the system will keep on working.

Maintenance

It's trivial to dismantle the whole system to clean. You may even microwave all the plastics.

For some reason you may not want to dismount the cup from time to time. It may be mounted at a hard to reach corner, or the dismounting need a lot of work.

To keep the water fresh, you may need to drain the cup after, say, vacation. Fill the bottle nearly full. You fill a short 1/4" tube (same size as the other tubes) with water. Dip one end into the cup and drop the other end below the cup. Water will drain from the cup and being replaced from the bottle. Small particles will be sucked out of the cup. For larger particles you can use a thicker tube.

To disinfect the system, I suggest to use perfectly safe H2O2, available in drug stores at 3% strength. Drain the cup until the water left in the bottle and the outer container roughly equals the volume of H2O2 you want to add. (A 50% mixture is often suggested for disinfection.) Then pour the H2O2 into the outer container. Stop draining the cup when the water level in it starts to drop. Leave the system for a while for the H2O2 to take action.

To rinse the system, refill the bottle to full. Keep draining the cup until the water level in cup drops. Repeat.

The science and technology of wok

2011-08-07T07:17:00.000-07:00

I have a few large woks and frying pans, all ruined, by wife. The importance of wok is that, it could cure anorexia or the early development of it. My small kid would eat everything that comes out of the wok, but will make a lot of diplomatic efforts in order not to eat other things.

It was time to replace the wok, actually deep frying pan. It was always time. With all the negative news about non-stick pans, our well scratched non-stick frying pan seemed to be a health hazard.

I went to Target with all the beautiful cook wares. It was a mistake. I would think that they would have come up with a safe non-stick now. So I brought a non-stick frying pan that seemed to have an indestructible non-stick surface. They always claim that on infomercials.

The non-stick surface didn't come off this time. Perhaps wife didn't use a steel spatula to scrub on the food stain. But food stain did get on the side non-stick surface. We use intense heat, otherwise it wouldn't be stir fry.

That didn't bother me a bit, except that when the pan is heated, small brown bubbles will come out on the side like boiling. It's the same whenever we wash it, and then heat it again. I'm not worried if that's food residue like soy source, that we used a lot. But I'm worried about other chemicals.

So this IS time to get another wok. From my research last time, I know it have to be a case iron wok. (Wrong) Just that Target and most cook ware shops don't have it, at least not in the form of a wok or practical frying pan.

A wok with a flat base is basically a deep frying pan. A round normal wok is perfect if you have gas (gasoline, propane). For electric and induction you need a flat base. But a flat base wok is not really a wok. And in the western world, you need a wok ring as a stand for the round bottomed wok.

You choice of material is cast iron and carbon steel (and stainless steel). You don't want any coating on the inside or the outside. They don't last, can't stand intense heat, or they just want more of your money.

I made the silly mistake that cast iron is iron, and carbon steel is steel. I have enough stainless cookware. Each and every one have food stains on it. Wife prefer to fry in pots without the oil splashing around. The good thing about stainless steel is that even with a lot of scrub marks, the outside and inside looks decent, except for the spots with food stain on it. You can remove stains if you try hard enough, and there are chemicals to do it.

Obviously stainless steel is not a replacement for non-stick. I'm sure cast iron is the nearest thing.

Basically everything is steel or everything is carbon steel. The least refined steel is cast iron, iron with carbon content > 2%. More refined is carbon steel with less carbon content. Stainless steel is steel with chrome added so it will not rust. The lesser the amount of carbon, the harder is the steel.

The confusion with cast iron is that traditional western cast iron cook ware is very different from traditional Chinese cast iron wok. Western cast iron is thick, rough surface and I bet very non-stick. Chinese cast iron wok is not a lot different from a carbon steel wok in appearance and weight.

My explanation can be that western cast iron has higher carbon content, so they are more brittle and hence it has to be thicker. And the high carbon content cast iron is suitable to use sand mold to cast the shape of a frying pan or wok. Chinese cast iron wok has lower carbon content, hence stronger. I think they are made like pressing on a piece of red hot iron into the shape of a wok.

You can dismiss western cast iron cookware if you want Chinese style stir fry. They are good for what they are designed to cook traditionally. And I bet they are really non stick, because it doesn't matter if there is any stain on it or not. It heat up slow and is heavy.

So basically it's steel with varying carbon content, and the high carbon content "cast iron" are at the cheaper end it cost to reduce carbon content.

"Carbon steel" heat up faster, harder and in general thinner, lighter.

Basically that's all academic. It does not make that much difference if you fry on occasion or even daily, as opposed to in a Chinese restaurant. A piece of iron with 2% or 1% carbon do not make that much of a difference in a family setting.

A a piece of machine made piece of iron cannot be fragile. If you do not use your wok as a fighting shield, a cast iron wok is fine, which could still last a lifetime, what Chinese expects of their wok. And it's only $10.

Stronger carbon steel can be made thinner. It heats up faster and weight less. The weight is important as the smallest wok is some 13" diameter up to 16 or larger in restaurants. It will be your largest piece of cookware so you decide what weight you can deal with, on and off the stove, hanging it up, putting it in the cabinet, hand washing, etc.

For carbon steel I would go for those hand hammered. I bet the purpose is to make it thinner. It only cost a little extra. They have steel and they have labor. You just can't compete.

Now the only other consideration is seasoning. Before use, you have to oil it and burn it to give it a protecting and non stick surface. Many people seemed to worry about it, doing it wrong.

In iron age terms, you are adding food stain to a weapon, to use in a kitchen when you are not fighting. You just can't do it wrong.

I suppose higher carbon content cast iron have a rougher surface and holds food stain better. Food stains come off in stainless steel pots, so people are worrying that "seasoning" come off easier in carbon steel. That's laughable. No body worries about food stain coming off too easy. You can always reapply. But in normal use food will always stain your wok.

The worry is that food stain will become too thick, and come off in blocks, making the wok surface uneven. But you can deal with it one way or another, or all by itself.

Please don't say that "I need to toss it" unless you are a Chinese cook, or intended to be. It only happens, perhaps, in kitchens in Chinese restaurants. It's a hazard to do it in your own kitchen. So it doesn't need to be that light, and don't need a long and strong handle.

The most practical handle is the small loop ones holding securing with two rivets. That's indestructible and most space saving. If you want to move it when hot, you can just use two wet washing cloth. Don't move it while cooking, and you don't need to. A long handle may break at the welding point, and wooden handles are silly idea, unless you can replace it. Though the whole thing is rather cheap - a piece of iron.

If you have rust, that means your food stain is not good enough. You can just scrub off the rust and food will find it's way to stain it. The wok is iron and rust is sort of iron oxide, stable compounds what wouldn't do anything to your body. These will just pass out straight away. You won't get iron supplement either - they have to be in soluble ion form.

Now they are teaching home cooks to stain their cook ware with food, and how to make them stay. And not to use soap to wash woks. How lovely. But wife and many home makers have obsession with removing stains. That will education them good.

Surprisingly, even Chinese supermarkets don't sell authentic woks as used in Chinese homes for ages. Perhaps they are too cheap, from $10 for cast iron to $20 for hand hammered carbon steel with a steel tossing handle. You can find the Wok Shop selling woks online for at least several years. There's no other competition. They are in San Francisco China town. So you are mostly paying for the postage. If you are on a road trip there, this is your gift idea.

Protecting your files in Ubuntu Linux - encryption

2011-08-04T10:16:00.000-07:00

I always use Truecrypt to protect my files in Windows. When I moved to dual boot with Ubuntu, naturally I used Truecrypt too. The lovely thing is that I can even use the same encrypted profile for Firefox. Only that extensions and plug-ins using native compiled code will not work. But those are not much.

Now that I didn't return to Windows for months, I'm was looking for something better in Linux. And yes, ecryptfs for Ubuntu.

Truecrypt is a block device. You give it a drive, partition or file, it does whatever it likes, and implement it's file system on it, though Tc implements the same files system such as FAT or NTFS.

I never wanted to encrypt whole system, too risky if I didn't buy a new computer and start from fresh. Partitions are too troublesome because I had too many inherited from hush jobs of upgrading the hard drives a couple of times. So I use only large files as containers.

From a few to 30 Gb files, they fill up sooner or later. You end up with a couple of large files where you can fit them in, or you have to make bigger and bigger drives and setup things all over.

Truecrypt turns out to be quite reliable. I had crashes because the encrypted profiles I am constantly using. The file container became unreadable. Luckily Tc comes with it's own fix disk utility, very much like that in Windows. So I can fix my old FAT and NTFS containers even in Ubuntu. I used old FAT for a reason because they are old and contain less traces.

ecryptfs is integrated into Ubuntu, which comes with a Private directory that is not initiated. All you have to do is type in a terminal:

ecryptfs-setup-private

I didn't remember if I used this but here it says it will ask you for your login password, and generate a passphrase for you if you leave it blank.

That is it. After you login in (with password), automatically you can access your encrypted files in Private as if they are unencrypted files. When you logout or power down, nobody can in theory access your files without your passphrase.

There are tools to migrate ecryptfs to your whole home directory and even the whole system. But it looks too risky for me. Not that I know ecryptfs is risky. They way I do it will be risky. You will never know after upgrade from hard drive to hard drive and OS to OS.

The advantage of ecryptfs is that it's not a block device. It's a layer on top of the file system. So you do not need to allocate space for the container. the Private directory will grow just as any other directories.

Another critical feature of ec is that you can backup the encrypted files in .Private. This is huge for incremental backups using existing tools. Using Truecrypt, you have to copy the whole 30 Gb container everyday. Or mount the original container and then a backup container and then backup incrementally. Then unmount both after. In Linux you can just about do it without operator intervention, that is, while you are sleeping. But storing your passphrase somewhere in some form opens up chances for attacks.

The bad thing of Truecrypt is that you have to enter your passphrase every time you mount. So it's at least two passwords, one for login and one for Tc. It is even more troublesome in Linux. Because mounting is a privileged action, you need to enter your login password again every time. So there is less incentive in dismounting and mounting secret containers repeatedly. For ecryptfs, you only need to login once, the rest is automatic.

Encrypt Arbitrary Directory

Now of course you want to use folders other than Private in your home directory. Say I want to store something encrypted in my massive external drive. First of all, you may have the impression that ecryptfs only works on Linux file systems. I'm sure my external drive comes with some Windows format like NTFS, which is compatible with Linux, with or without ecryptfs. Though they don't call it NTFS in Linux.

The bad is that if you use any folders other than Private, mounting during login is not automatic. You can do it automatically but you probably don't want to. And it's conceptually simple to mount manually and dismount whenever you want to.

To setup any folders, it is:

mkdir /home/myusername/secret
mkdir /home/muusername/.secret
chmod 700 /home/username/secret

You can use any folder on any drive with Linux compatible file formats. To mount it:

sudo mount -t ecryptfs /home/myusername/.secret /home/myusername/secret

ecryptfs will ask you for a passphrase. Use defaults encryption parameters if possible, otherwise you have to remember it or be screwed if you don't remember them.

It will ask you for a passphrase for the filename encryption. The default is derived from the mount passphrase, something to do with signatures. So if you don't enter anything, all you ever need to recover data is your mount passphrase.

The mounting command is the same for the first time or not. So next time you will want to put the command in a script instead of entering all the parameters again:

sudo mount -t ecryptfs /home/myusername/.secete /home/myusername/secret -o key=passphrase,ecryptfs_cipher=aes,ecryptfs_key_bytes=16,ecryptfs_passthrough=no,
ecryptfs_enable_filename_crypto=yes

Those are the default parameters except enable filename crypto. If you don't encrypt the filenames sometimes it's as good as not encrypting. Say if the filename is the official name of a song or movie, people know the content already. It should not be difficult to proof what the encrypted content is.

To disable access to the decrypted files:

sudo umount /home/myusername/secret

You can do the same for Private without logging out.

Security

It should be noted that when the decrypted files are mounted, they are accessible to everybody according to the file system modes. Basically it's according to

chmod ugo+rwx file/directory

That means user, group, and others can be given read write or execute access. So you are not protected from system admin and it would be extremely hard to. He can get you one way or another. But it's all academic as Ubuntu is designed for personal computers and now portables and notebooks.

The only thing to worry about is malware that you may have downloaded, and execute itself with your own privilege. It's 100 to 1 chance you get it in Linux, based on the number of users. Also you should only install software in the list of official depositories.

File recovery

Normally, all you need is your encrypted files and your passphrase, called the mount passhrase, which is the encryption key.

For auto-mounted Private, there is a complication. You login password is not the key. Your mount passphrase may be entered by you or automatically generated, in which case you don't even know about it. For automount the mount passphrase has to be stored somewhere. It's encrypted by your login password and stored in a file called wrapped passphrase in ~/.ecryptfs

To be sure you can decrypt any files, you need to store the plain mount passphrase
somewhere. To get the plain mount passphrase:

ecryptfs-unwrap-passphrase /home/username/.ecryptfs/wrapped-passphrase

I print out the passhrase, put it in a secure sealed envelope, under the bottom of the tray, in a fire proof lockbox.

You can copy the whole .ecryptfs directory into a USB drive, an SD card and put it in a safe place.

Even with the complications, changing your login password is safe, all the other stuff are automated if you use the normal password change GUI or command. Admin can change your password but he will break the system. Without your old password, he should not be able to rewrap your mount passphrase.

Multiple passwords

If you mount the same directory with two passwords, you should get two sets of encrypted files. It somewhat fit my two password three type of containers system, depending on whether they need to be backuped or not. So I can put files together that needed to be backed up. So there's two password, two containers, but still three types of files.

Tips: start from empty folders and copy things into it gradually once you are familiar with it. For example, if you type in a slightly wrong password by mistake, you will think you screw up everything.

Protect swap space

Now it is a total solution as ecryptfs can protect swap space too. Though by nature hibernate and that sort of thing that need disk space will not work.

When you are multitasking, applications each take a lot of memories. For the inactive ones, their memories are swapped onto disk space to free some for other applications to use. Because swap spaces are not encrypted if you did not install systemwise encryption, files or their fragments may appear on the swap space.

This is particularly important if you edit your active clients file everyday. If you have some secret file to hide without accessing it for months and years, you can ignore this.

The developer now understands that you have to have some easy to use total solution, or few can use it, no matter how official it is.

You need to install something extra:
sudo apt-get install ecryptfs-utils cryptsetup

and that's it:
sudo ecryptfs-setup-swap

You can check as in the link above that your swap space is changed and encrypted. I did everything without any problem so far. And didn't notice any speed penalties, except for copying movies files - that's about 7 Mb/sec on slow external disks. Watching is no problem.

Plumbing pipes and fittings comparison

2011-07-29T21:34:00.000-07:00

Copper pipes must be replaced. Minute holes developed in copper pipes over time lead to leaks, and millions of homes have no insurance once that sort of flood occurred.

Replacing all the copper in the home with plastic and sell the copper will make your a fortune.

The advantage of copper remains that it is rigid metal, and you can burn it without problem. Also it act as earth point for the electrical system in homes.

Copper can be replaced by CPVC and PEX. The other camp is PVC which is not copper compatible. PVC is usually found outside houses for the main supply, and for irrigation. PVC is not usually found inside houses as it cannot be used for hot water.

If your pipes are PVC, it does not make sense to change it to something else. Unless you need to connect to metal devices. I'm not sure what the code is, but screw them together is pretty easy and leak proof. But anyway, threads are trouble.

In the copper/CPVC/PEX camp, all can be connected with push fittings. CPVC is rigid, using glues, while PEX is flexible and uses clamps.

Almost certainly PEX is the material of choice whenever you can. You don't need angle couplings to go round corners. The total number of joints is less. With clamps you can use it immediately. If you don't want to invest in a good clamp for over $100, you can get push fittings at a few dollars each.

Measurements no longer need to be accurate, as long as the pipe is longer than what you wanted. For example, to replace a broken section of copper pipe or CPVC, you need to cut pipe to exact length and use unions to connect to the old pipes. For PEX you just need two adapters and a length of pipe longer than the bad section.

Fittings/couplings/joining

Soldering copper pipes need a lot of clearance from the sides, or else you need a soldering shield. Glues are best when you have little space to work with.

Push fit need to have clearance along the pipe to push things in, and to take it out.

Soldering and gluing are rigid joints while push fit couplings can be rotated freely. This could be a good or bad point. Ball valves with push fit ends are still able to rotate after you install it. You need two hands to operate the valve handle.

Threads are trouble but they are compact compared to other reusable push fittings. In practice, never assume that they are reusable. The threads are so easily damaged when you screw it back again. Often you can't even unscrew them apart in the first place.

Gatorbite vs Sharkbite

I used both but can't comment much other than that they works. Threads always start dripping at the beginning, but somehow hard water seals the threads.

When you put two devices with push fit together, you need to use a short pipe to connect the two. It's is bulky. I was too stupid to use too short a pipe, and I can't even put the disconnect tool in place. I saw the two apart. The good thing about Sharkbite is that no matter how short the pipe left alone inside the coupling, you can take it out with a nose pillar and some patient.

Auto startup applications in Ubuntu Linux

2011-07-25T09:48:00.000-07:00

Ubuntu has a startup menu as in Windows. It's at System>Preferences>Startup Applications. It's fine if it's a GUI user application.

If your application has no GUI, such as a command or a script, you can put it in .login. Of course NOT, now they use .profile if you the default Gnome desktop.

Many applications can be a command or with GUI. You can pick one of the two methods.

Many times you have a mix of both such as in a script, or you do not want to learn both methods. Now here's some techniques for mix and match, either using .profile or Startup Applications.

First, the most troublesome are commands/apps that require privilege access. "sudo yourcommand" do not usually works in Startup. Instead you need "su-to-root -X -c command". -X means it's GUI.

To eliminate superuser password prompt on some of the apps, you can do:

sudo visudo

add the following line to the end of the file:

yourusername ALL = NOPASSWD: /usr/sbin/firestarter, command2, etc

Never force edit when there are parse errors, or you need to go into recovery mode. (The safer alternative using sudoers.d do not work using the same syntax.)

To run a command as a GUI program, all you need to do is give it a GUI terminal:

gnome-terminal -e "your command"

It's also the simplest way to say Hello World in Gnome.

Many times you don't really need the Startup App. For example, you can put this in the .profile:

truecrypt mountfile /media/truecrypt1

Obviously the best thing about Linux is that backup is easy (via a command and cron) and built-in. Backing up encrypted volumes into encrypted volumes is also the same. You just need to mount the volume as above and then backup. The alternative is to copy the whole encrypted volume, a few GB or much more usually, that you don't want to every day. You can do incremental backup every hour.

In Windows it's terrible.

Ubuntu 11.04

2011-06-21T15:43:00.000-07:00

I didn't touch Ubuntu until I have to upgrade about 2 major versions. Actually I was forced to upgrade because the old one wasn't supported any more. I kept updating by default until it was 10.04, and no more. I was happy that nothing broke. There was but you can fix it somehow or leave it alone.

Now when I was totally enjoying it, especially the gnome applets, I saw the new 11.04. I tried to upgrade and find out that I have to upgrade to 10.1x first. You have to push a button instead of by default.

After two major upgrades and fixed some broken stuff, only to find out that gnome applets are history. So what worked on my last goodies post won't work at all, or looks differently.

I like the new Unity 3D GUI. It's space saving. In MS Windows terms, the whole status bar integrates with the quick launch area, and it's auto hide. Also title bar of applications integrate with the menu bar. So it's back to Windows, you have only one bar normally visible. Also the scroll bar becomes hair lines when you are not using it.

There are themes and 3D effects but I'm not up there yet.

I switched back to the Ubuntu Classic GUI. You can do it when you login.

Ubuntu goodies

2011-06-13T17:13:00.000-07:00

My wireless router and firewall broke. Before reinforcement arrives, I found a soft firewall - Firestarter. It's better than anything else, including a hardware box.

Linux has a pretty good firewall built in. All you need is a easy to use GUI. A resident firewall manager is easier to use than any separate firewall box. Firestarter understands the software that needs external connections such as Openvpn and Tor. If you install those from the package managers, it's likely Firestarter understands it.

Being resident, Firestarter notifies you when an attempted attack occurs, which is frequent if you surf the net unprotected. Attack means attempt to connect to your machine.

You can be paranoid enough to allow selected applications to use the internet. It can be like Zone Alarm if you like to.

More useful to me is not the firewall functions. You can see active connections. I can see what traffic is routed through my VPN, my proxies, or chained. It is simple enough that I can actually make good sense of it in real time.

The bad thing is that your external IP is stored on your computer. Spyware can just read it. But still they have to get external connection to report the IP. If they get an external connection, in theory they can bypass your proxies and VPNs to get your real external IP. It's not likely though.

The other goodie is the Windows equivalent of the task bar, as shown. You can almost install or drop anything into it, plus select almost any picture for your icon.

Your can have your own script, add an icon to it, and put it on the task bar. Firstly it's so simple that you can have two versions of everything. When your fingers are on the keyboard, the need to pick up the mouse is greatly reduced. When your hand is on the mouse, the need to bring up the terminal is also greatly reduced. You can have one task bar to as many as you want.

A month without booting into Windows. When it's cool to use Google Docs, there's no need to. Google Docs is better with auto save and auto version control. The version control in Words is laughable, and therefore you probably never heard of it.

1st line of backup defence - external USB drive

2011-05-01T14:41:00.000-07:00

So I can't stand the 100 KB/s upload speed for Amazon S3. It's worse than that. The gsutil is supposed to upload in multiparts in 1MB trunks. Boto supports that. But it may be true for Google Storage, but I doubt if it's for S3 too. And I couldn't find out if there's an option to force multiparts. A 2GB file failed when > 1.5GB was uploaded.

I still like the clouds but I made a pack with the devil, brought a 1 TB external USB drive as the first line of defense. I never did that because for less you can have a bigger and faster internal drive. And you can use the older drive for backup.

You fill better if all your drives are not in the same casing. As you can see, the WD Element 1 TB can sit nicely in the smallest fire proof (1.5 hr?) safe with space to spare.

The WD Element is about 7x5x1.5 inch. It's fully enclosed except for a small power jack, a small USB 2 connector, and a small LED, all next to each other. It looks like it can survive being sprayed with a hose.

If you place the connector at the back side away from you, you will not see the LED, only a black box. And actually the LED is brighter than you think, if you are not dead center looking at it, like sitting in front of a desk looking down at the desktop.

It's pretty quiet. The plastic looked cheap but the box feels solid. I bet the drives are so small that a lot inside are padding materials to make the box quiet and feels solid. I would say it's portable if you wrap it in a little shock absorbing material just in case. It was sent to me in the mail with air bubble packages.

There is the power cord and there is the USB connector. It doesn't matter which one go first and you can't go wrong. Once it's on and connected, a WD Element icon appears on my desktop, and I'm using Ubuntu Linux! It's pre-formatted in NTFS, the Windows file system after XP. It can be used in Linux, just that you do not have undelete when you delete a file.

The 1st thing I did was ran into a Ubuntu disk utility to test the drive. I was luck that I ended up first is looking at the SMART data logged in my old disks. Failure is imminent for my oldest disk. I remembered that it was absent for a while, and I remembered it failed to spin up, sounding like a failing fridge compressor.

I downloaded some SMART in Windows but I never remembered to look at it again. In Ubuntu it is pre-installed, which may have saved my life.

I tested the WD using the disk utility. It passed the short tests, but the long ones cannot survive power management, which shut down something or put something to sleep. It would be terrible to scan the entire 1TB for errors. So I'll be watching the SMART data when there's more data stored in it.

Now the performance. It's only about 20 MB/s for backing up huge files. It's not particularly fair as I'm copying from a pretty full disk to an empty disk. For the disk read-only benchmark test it is:

Max Rate 39.2 MB/s Average Rate 37.9 MB/s Access Time 16.0 ms USB2
Max Rate 86.6 MB/s Average Rate 67.9 MB/s Access Time 13.4 ms SATA

My motherboard should support USB2.0 but I used the monitor hub. The SATA should be II, claiming up to 3 Gb/s transfer. Again one drive is pretty full and the other is empty.

If I'm copying a small file (<1G), it doesn't matter that much. If I'm backing up it will not be interactive and the time taken doesn't that much. It will matter if you need overnight to backup your things, then one night and two night will make a lot of difference.

It can't go too wrong. There are more than a thousand reviews. The model is old and established. And it's cheap.

Cloud storage solutions: s3cmd boto gsutil

2011-04-27T14:40:00.000-07:00

s3cmd is good for Amazon S3. It's in python too, so you can also use it in Windows or wrap it up. There are two things critically missing - multipart upload and parallel upload.

There is a branch on s3cmd for "parallel" upload. I downloaded, only to find out that it doesn't improve anything. I think if you are uploading to the same account via the same IP, the limiting speed is the same. That's the reason the patch wasn't added to the main s3cmd.

The multipart upload is implemented in boto. The problem is that it's just a wrapper in python for the S3 (and all AWS) API. I downloaded some user scripts that uses boto. It works but only if you just want to upload a large file to the root of a bucket.

In the search for someone embedding boto, to my surprise it is gsutil - for google storage. I understand a few things.

Now that the giant is closing in, I wonder if the incentive of updating S3 tools is great. Google Storage is slightly more expansive in storage, about the same in bandwidth, but the promotion is 100 Gb free per month! The problem is that I have no idea if they will give me an account after I submitted an almost blank form with nothing to say, and how long I have to wait.

I understand why Amazon have the 1 year free promotion. And why they recently added the multipart upload and resumable download (?) API. Everybody will switch to GS without that.

Go to gsutil in Google code to download and install. They have good instructions for that. But it wouldn't work. Because developers' Ubuntu isn't the same Ubuntu as you and me!

After installed gsutil in your home directory, you cd into gsutil, edit the gsutil file and search for the line:

def SanityCheckXmlParser(cmd):

Then, right below the line, add a line with two spaces and the word

return

That will make it work. You also need to setup ~/.boto file like this

[Credentials]
aws_access_key_id = your id key
aws_secret_access_key = your secret key

[Boto]
debug = 0
num_retries = 10

I think if you don't have anything, gsutil will ask you, but for GS only, or not.

The documentation (or lack of it) says gs:// but it will also works for s3://, exactly the same, or not. The syntax is similar to s3cmd but more like Linux.

To copy the whole directory (and subs):

gsutil cp -R mydir s3://myuniquebucket

Large files are probably uploaded in 1M chunks (or not). To copy subdirectories, -R option is necessary for s3.

Unfortunately gsutil doesn't sync. But since gsutil is rather reliable with multipart upload, you don't need to sync that often. When you added something or just wanted to check, you can use s3cmd:

s3cmd sync mydir/ s3://myuniquebucket/mydir/

Note the slashes at the end, without which s3cmd will check more than that. If s3cmd detected that you need to upload a large file, you are better off to upload the file yourself by gsutil.

Now that's the complete solution. Three packages to do something simple. You may want to pay up for the commercial software.

Now I can backup my large encrypted containers.

Multipart Parallel upload to Amazon Simple Storage Service using boto

2011-04-25T10:07:00.000-07:00

The comment I received on upload to S3 trigged me to do some research (or some googling). Life is short and we always need something to save time.

Yeah, in Windows I tried one of the free uploaders. It's like using file explorer after asking for your id key and secret key. It's fast and error free. I don't remember if I have large files in there, and I would think retries will be hidden from view.

What to look for is multipart (relatively new S3 protocol) and parallel upload, and of course automatic retry. Basically it's more like ftp, where you see the files are split into trunks and transferred in many parallel threads.

Multipart upload allow behavior like "resume". If you lost one file trunk you just need to retry that trunk. The transfer speed depends on both end of each connection, but the number of connections is not limited to one.

Most Windows uploaders have both in the commercial versions. You may or may not find it in the free versions. The problem is, I haven't booted into Windows for weeks now, and I have no intention to if not necessary.

In Linux it's a different story. Some good uploaders don't have Linux versions. s3cmd is good and free, but it doesn't support multipart nor parallelism. You can see that it upload one file at a time, with retry on errors.

After googling I came across the one and only one boto package. I also copied the one and only one complete script that demonstrate multipart and parallel upload.

First, boto is written in python, so you can also try it in Windows. Of course python is already in my Linux, and I didn't know if it was me who installed it. (I'm the only supervisor.) Also, boto is already installed, but I didn't know if it was me.

But the boto in my Linux is old. You need the latest boto, 2.x. You have to uninstall the current version using any one of the usual methods. Download boto from the official site. I unzip the .gz file using the archiver via the GUI. I don't even know the command to unzip it.

After some guessing, I figured out how to "install" the new version. You change directory to where the setup file is. Then use the command:

$python setup install

To try multipart upload, create myuniquebucket using the S3 control console, at the reduced redundancy rate, the cheaper rate. I think the rate dependents on your bucket, determined at creation.

Copy the "bio" script or any other script you want to try. I removed the reduced redundancy option in the script because it got complains from python.

To run boto, first you need to edit the ~/.boto file to declare the id key and secret key. See the official boto site. Download, modify the upload script somewhere. Then

$python s3multi.py bigfilename myuniquebucket

Maybe I post my configure file and the bio script later. This script works as intended but far from an end user product.

It is not obvious how you specify the size of the parts. If the files are over 10M you may think that the script hangs. I am getting 100K/s upload rate. You need some signs of life like in s3cmd, when the parts are large.

The script uses all your cores, or threads in a multithread CPU. For me it's two. I don't know if you can maximum my 10M cable modem connection by more parallelism.

The script uploads one file, in whole or in parts. You still need to call the script from other directory sync scripts. I do not know if the script will upload to subdirectories.

Cloud storage revisited

2011-04-23T18:12:00.000-07:00

The cheapest reliable cloud storage is Amazon S3. It's 14c for normal storage and 9c for reduced reliability, which is still way more reliable than your single hard drive.

The others can be seen as value added services, that's why it's more expensive, way more expensive. But for me sync in Linux is trivial so S3 will be the standard.

S3 is cheap but no way to compete with your own external USB drive.

My main consideration is all your photos and videos. Does it justify to store on S3 permanently, increasing every year. It doesn't matter if you lost a picture or two, a clip or two. Or does it matter if you lost an album at spring break? It's relatively expensive than a huge local drive, which is pretty safe nowadays. On the other hand they are priceless.

There are cheaper online storages much cheaper than S3. It's like a hard drive but attached remotely. The problem is that there's no guarantee how reliable it is, how they are managed, or if they will still be there next month or next year.

The only exception is Google. You can backup anything to Google Doc at $0.25/GB per year. It is competitive to a hard drive but it's very slow as I have reported. You can upload a large file to Google Doc and time it. I think Google have to throttle so all the people in the world can share it.

I thought I have found a solution, using S3 to backup and moving over permanent archives to Google Doc. Even GD is an order of magnitude slower than S3, and in turn an order of magnitude (or more) than external drive.

The software by SMEStorage supports many clouds, behaves like a dropbox, or file manager. You can also sync directories automatically as often as you like. Other than speed, you can use S3 or GD like using your own hard drive.

The catch is that, the free SMEStorage account has only 2GB storage and 1GB bandwidth per month. Over that, it's like any other paid solutions. For 1 or 2 GB, there are plenty of services for free to cater for different needs.

SMEStorage for S3 is not needed because the free software is good enough. The only good thing is that if SME is gone, the clouds like S3 or Google will still be there.

I still can't find anything to replace SMEStorage for Google Doc. But a lot of developer tools and API's are out there. May be no one is interested because GD is so slow. But probably I won't buy a lifetime $40 for the software, because I can buy a hard drive instead.

Using S3:

I have been using S3 to backup my things. The only command I use is:

s3cmd sycn /fullpath/ s3://bucketname/fullpath/

It's in a script and I don't even bother to parameterized it. I just edit it for different archives.

It's pretty slow, 100 KB/s, may be twice that overnight. I do not advice to pack the files into larger files. Typically S3 fails to upload in the middle for large files. s3cmd will attempt to repeat the upload until successful. So small files is good as you can see the progress, and any failure will only require upload again of a small file.

It's a surprise to many that the upload failure rate is pretty high, unlike any upload you ever encountered. It's that way a couple of years ago and it's the same now, at least to me. So freewares like S3 Fox [my bad, I mistakenly wrote S3 explorer], a Firefox extension, is totally useless. If you upload a large file, a movie, or many files, all the pictures, you will always miss some.

But there are also many free tools on Windows and Linux that can retry until the file successes. s3cmd is one of them. But still, if you have a large file, and repeated upload fails, the whole backup process may stall. So you will miss one overnight window to backup.

I don't know why S3 don't behave like ftp, when you can resume from the point of failure. That means the ftp protocol move files in trunks, while S3 don't, not in a way that you retry the fail bits. Perhaps it's the cloud feature. S3 have to handle all the uploads in the world, while ftp is end to end.

So the sync feature of s3cmd is important. I don't even look at the logs. In the morning I just run the script again. Only files not up there yet will be uploaded.

Normally you download the whole directory with a much faster speed, and compare the files to assure file integrity. (I don't know if the S3 protocol uses any checksums to guard against errors.) But for pictures, movie clips I don't bother as long as the file is up there. At most you lost one picture or clip. So you save half the bandwidth, which is the expensive part, and downloading is a lot more expensive than upload.

Small files have a disadvantage. The number of put, get, list commands are huge, when you upload, download and list the directories up on S3. One large zip file can save you hundreds and thousands of commands. But these commands are cheap, like pennies per millions. For me storage space is critical.

Unarchived files have another advantage. When I clean up my drives, I may discover a picture or an album that belongs to the year 2008, but I have already uploaded the whole year to S3. With sync, I only need to move the newly discovered stuff into the desired directory where they should have been. Then I run the sync command. Then only the new stuff will be uploaded.

Seedboxes using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud

2011-04-23T15:24:00.000-07:00

Seedboxes usually refers to virtual private servers (VPS) specially for bit-torrent uses. Without one, you can't get in private trackers, which are like private clubs for file sharing.

Even the most elite private trackers are short of unloaders. And they are paranoid of downloaders who are spies or content stealers. It's bullshit that you need to pay good money to get into it. Save your money for good HD cable service. Not that it's not worth it. But applying, interviewing, and begging is not my style. I think those running private trackers are making money in other means - such as bidding for membership, selling seedboxes.

Using AWS EC2 as seedboxes.

Availablity:

A micro-instant with 8Gb storage is free for one calendar year. You can leave it on 24/7. The normal price is pennies for an hour - in which you may be able to download a file the size of an HD movie or two, or even a whole season of TV.

Storage:

10Gb virtual hard disk space is free for a year. Additional storage is cheap and you don't need much more than that. Because it doesn't make sense to store all your files in the cloud, unless you want to host everything for a long time.

You can get a bigger drive or move content into S3 storage without paying for bandwidth (I think).

Bandwidth:

Amazon get you in the bandwidth. Currently 15 Gb in and out of EC2 is free per month. Over that, it's 10 cents / Gb in and 15 cents out. For download only, and then copy to your local drive, it's $0.25/Gb. But for private trackers a common requirement is that you also seed to a 1:1 ratio. That's $0.4/Gb. So it's up to $4 for 10 Gb, plus overheads like encryption.

Speed:

It's amazingly fast. I see speeds up to 13Mb/s for private trackers for hot torrents. Several Mb/s is usual. Typically for a public torrent in a broadband ISP connection, 400Kb/s is pretty fast and 100Kb/s is decent. So instead of hours, it's almost on demand - 10, 20 min download for a movie - make some coffee or pour some wine and you are there.

Verdict:

$4 for 10 Gb doesn't seem to make a lot of sense compared to conventional seedboxes. They usually have something like 100Gb storage with bandwidth included. EC2 can be compared to people going to the cinema once a week, and sometimes don't go at all for weeks or months. For occasionally users this means several dollars per month or much less. For now it's totally free.

Decent seedboxes cost about $20/month. You need to be heavy users to justify it. Or you can add premium channels on TV.

EC2 should be welcomed by private trackers. The speed as fast as anybody else. You can also leave it to seed forever for free (but holding up the disk space that otherwise you could download other stuff).

The problem is, the community is still hostile to EC2. Admins don't like Amazon IP's because it's as good as anonymous. And there are plenty of EC2 hackers, even using high power instants for cracking passwords. My own EC2 have people probing it non-stop. Some ban Amazon IP's altogether.

Many in the community are selling services like seedboxes, VPS, etc. They are naturally hostile to Amazon who are cutting into their business.

Other users look at EC2 as poorman's seedboxes. Actually for the same money, there are worse bargain basement seedboxes, but they are gone. The spec of EC2 is actually quite respectable - only that the bandwidth is rather expensive.

The usage:

Bit torrent client Transmission is particularly ease to use and setup. There's no need for any user setup on your desktop. Everything is controlled by your fav browser. All you need is to browse to

http://your-ec2-url:9091

Download the torrent file you want or just copy the url into Transmission. There's not much else to do. You can also set which files in the torrent pack to download, instead of the whole 4 seasons.

Once done, you can download the files to your local drive in your favorite ways - ftp, secure ftp, http download. In Linux you have additional simple commands like remote copy or secure copy via ssh.

The setup:

It's also pretty simple. Starting EC2 is covered many many times by many people. You can do it all using GUI via the browser. In Ubuntu, you just need one apt-get command to install the transmission package. It will even starts after that. That's it.

Normally you need to do a little editing on the config file. You need to add password, or whitelist your own IP or network to access the EC2 instant. And you want the downloads to your home directory instead of system directory with restricted access.

For some private trackers, you need to disable DHT, and PEX. After searching for manuals, this is:

dht-enable: false,
pex-enable: false,

Again the rest is here:
EC2 Micro Instance as a Remote Bittorrent Client

Running bittorrent on Amazon EC2

2011-04-20T14:47:00.000-07:00

EC2 Micro Instance as a Remote Bittorrent Client

I know it will be easy but not this easy in Linux. The motivation is that it's private. Nobody knows who is downloading. Amazon doesn't provide any service other than a computer so I doubt if they maintain any logs.

The other thing is that it's fast. You can download anytime without interfering with your other work. It's up to 700 kb/s and a 1G file downloads in less than 1 hr, probably much less. Downloading from EC2 to your local computer is like 600 kb/s. It all varies.

Price wise it's free for storage unless you store the file up there. You have some 15 G/b in and about the same out free per month. More than that it's in pennies. For a 1 Gb file, it will become a few GB on your bandwidth. But because it's so fast, the upload is about 10% of the file. So the total bandwidth is like 2.2 plus the encryption / packaging overheads.

Even if it's not free, it's less than a penny to turn on the EC2. It's 10/15 pennies per GB in / out. So it beats any VPN / Bit torrent / Usenet / File download plans, unless you are a heavy user.

There a good step by step guide to start the EC2 service at the link. The steps are update except for the Security Group. Now there's no from/to Port, just Port. So you just need to open the port 9091 and the range 49152-65535. (plus ssh at port 22). The range is for random port numbers, you need at least one at 51413.

Now you can control the bit torrent client from your own browser, neat!

Now for Linux/Ubuntu, the copy command is built into ssh.

scp -i yourkeyfile.pem ubuntu@yourpublicdns.com:Downloads/yourfile .

The keyfile, public DNS are the same as you start the ssh. Downloads is for Transmission you setup in the linked instructions, under your home directory. You can also use the internal IP address of your EC2 instead of the public DNA, and also in your browser.

Compare secure online and offline storages for your digital life

2011-04-16T15:29:00.000-07:00

I'm talking about storing the videos (and pictures) permanently for your whole life.

Since a decade ago, hard drives are so reliable that parallel RAID drives aren't really necessary. You need location diversity at the least. I looked at all the online storage options and they are no match for an external hard drive.

A 1 TB (1024 GB? A Terrible Blob anyway) external drive (USB) cost about $60 for the bulkier models. Whereas Amazon S3 cost 14 cents per GB per month. For the same money you can only have 36 GB in S3 for a year!

The speed of USB 2 drives are 480 Mb/s, while upload to S3 is about 100 Kb/s, a thousand times slower?

So the first line of defense is get a Terrible Blob and put it not next to your computer. For your home computer put the TB it at work and vice versa. I already have a fire proof (30 min or an hour) box for computer media. Now the media are obsolete (except for memory cards). I can put in an external drive with space to spare. Then I'll wrap it in plastic so it will survive fire and putting off the fire. You may not find a reliable airtight container to hold the drive, but making the whole thing float is easier. If you go through with that you can put a GPS inside too!

This is quite a permanent solution, part of. When the time comes, your fire proof box can hold many TB's and solid state drives/cards to replace your current TB.

The other solution is similar but very close to online backup. You buddy up with someone, or buddy up your home computer with your company computer. Get external drives or even cheaper internal drives. There are free software to do the backup between the two sites as if they are attached local drives. There are also encryption so your buddy can't see what's in your drive.

I still like the idea of online cloud backup. But you can't get away with less than 14 cent / GB / month. If that's not your only copy, you can opt for 9 cent / GB, which is already 400 times more reliable than your own disk drive, Amazon claims.

The big 3, others being Google and Microsoft, are competing for the Amazon business, so all the other clouds services will be value-added providers, that is, more expensive, usually a lot more. ADrive will give you 50GB for free but how long will it last? I can tell you that, having uploaded 50GB, you are as good as married to those guys, in order not to have to upload again.

A surprise contender seems to be Google Docs! Seems to be more than perfect except for the upload speed.

First, Google Picasa Web Album is useless. You cannot have nested folders or albums. You just can't put your whole life into it.

The Picasa software running on your computer is a rather good file management system, if only for your pictures. The Linux version works fine but does not deal with videos yet! You download via your browser and your Linux version will install it for you, with less hassle than in Windows. Picasa is very good in locating deeply nested pictures in copies of all your old hard drive images. So you will not missed in deleting some useless images. Otherwise it works fine like any file manager.

The problem with Picasa is that it does not sync with your file system. It will sync, on it's own will. If you understand that and are not confused then it's a good additional tool.

Picasa only sees images and nothing else. One good come out of it is that it's trivial to separate the images into a separate folder and move the image folder somewhere else. Then you can sync the pure image folders with albums in Picasa Web Albums. Of course you can still sync your mixed folders, but having to backup the same folder into PWA and something else is a nightmare.

Now back to Google Doc. Actually you can "copy" over your nested directories or your whole hard drive for that matter. It's video and picture aware, making you wonder why you still have PWB around? You can view pictures and stream videos, and share like Youtube.

Google Doc provides 1GB of free storage. Additional are at 25 cents / GB / year, not per month !!! So this is more like a permanent archive for your digital life. They didn't say about the reliability, in contrast to Amazon. But everybody is using Google online services and I never heard of any data lost.

The fine prints are even surprising. You can increase storage anytime and your rate prorated. It's not surprising. But if you reduce storage or unprescribed altogether, it looks like Google still keep all your data permanently, but you cannot edit or add to it. So it's more like paying $5 once and you get 20GB permanently! Of course Google can terminate and change terms of service, but this is the terms at the moment. There's no guarantee but obviously Google is not aiming to get money from storage. They want to get you to use their service and sell advertising.

Even more surprising is that pictures smaller than 800x800, and videos shorter than 15 min, are always free, that do not appear on your account. So it appears to be too good to be true. Forget about the pictures. Cutting videos into 15 min pieces is trivial, and nowadays everybody only take interesting 1-minute clips. But it seems to be true. I uploaded a video and it doesn't show up in the total usage. You can download the original, that you cannot do in PWA.

There's no worry about backup or upload/download software. It's much easier than I found out in the last few posts. For Linux you have SMEStorage software for free. You download it as in Windows, and it will install itself. You register, login and start the software via GUI. Then you have a 1TB drive attached to your PC. You can do whatever as a local drive, and everything goes to Google Doc. And you can also access it online. You can use the Linux file manager to do whatever to the files and folders like in Windows, and use any tools on Linux that can be used on ordinary local files. Actually the file manager is much better than Windows because it can have tabs, and you know it takes IE a long time to catch up with the competition.

SME software includes how to automatically sync the remote directories to your local directories, as frequently as you want. I'm pretty sure any backup software will work on the remote directories the same as local.

SMEStorage not only support Google Docs, but many storage services like Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Google Storage for developers, and many other add-on providers. Windows is everybody's bread and butter so anyone can use them. But I'm sure there are plenty of other software developers as good as SME, but they just don't bother with Linux.

For the free SME service, you can pick two storage providers, and multiple accounts on each I think. For Amazon you need to have different payment cards and perhaps phones, but for Google I wonder how many free accounts you can have.

As I have said at first, Google Doc is very slow. But everybody know it when you upload and work in Google services, same as attaching a large file to your email. It turns out to be 10 Kb/s (<20), an order of magnitude slower than Amazon's speed of 100 Kb/s (<150).

So you need overnight to upload 1GB into Google Doc. And you probably need 3 months to upload 100 GB. That's why PWA doesn't support much fancy things, and Google never worried that users will cheat their disk space. If you manage to upload 100GB to Google, you are likely to be chained to them for life.

If you have 10 to 100 GB of critical data to backup frequently, Amazon S3 is a no brainner. For videos and pictures Google Doc is as permanent as it gets, close to free if you ever need to pay for it. But if you can spare $60, an extra 1TB drive may be all that some people need.

Mother board compability with Linux

2011-04-16T13:29:00.000-07:00

I always failed to read my CPU temp from the motherboard in Linux.

The OS has little to do with how the mother board is designed in hardware. There is the memory and there is the CPU. But for personal computers, there are some communications between the OS and the motherboard. Monitoring the CPU temperature and reading from the motherboard is one of them. The others are power management such as allowing the OS to control the CPU and fan speeds.

These are the lowest level of hardware drivers. It's the manufacturers job to provide drivers and to pick some standards. However, even there are more Linux users they are still less than 1%, and most of them aren't those typically using Windows. Therefore most manufacturers just don't provide drivers for Linux. The Linux developers do it for free with the manufacturer's documents. There are also some defacto standards due to the monopoly of some critical chip manufacturers.

Devices, like printers, drivers used to be the problems with Linux. Even Vista can't be compatible to XP. But nowadays most devices should work ... to some extend. Like my printer, it's working fine on Linux, until the ink goes out. Then I realized that the ink monitor and cleaning program aren't available in Linux. I have to go back to Windows to see which ink cartridge is out!

My problem is out there for years, when my motherboard is between old and new. The old way of doing that in Linux is out and the new way hasn't work yet. So they still have the problem and nobody is going to do anything for my motherboard. There is a fix, it works for some people and I don't know how they do it.

I can always change to a new motherboard or a new nettop. But the whole point is that my PC is still way more powerful than nettops. Moving away from Windows is like a major upgrade in speed. And the current setup will last a couple more years. That is a certain. The only catch is that my CPU may overheat someday without me knowing.

So when switching to Linux a dual-boot is a very good idea. And if you are worrying about your hardware or buying something new, check the compatibility list. For the portable computers, check your power management. I'm sure standards are well established, or you can just get a Linux one. The Chrome OS is coming out. It may be good for portables but you don't want to do things differently on your top and your book.

The switch to Linux

2011-04-14T14:02:00.000-07:00

I was wrong to say that I won't blog here again. For things that will not possibly identify me personally, I don't see what will stop me from blogging something else. See how it goes.

I'm always the sort of unwilling pioneer. I was exposed to email long before most. Anybody can see that it's the future. I should have find a job doing that for whatever means, instead of complaining that I have to write a letter on paper every time. The difference is, Bill make sure that it get to everybody's desktop. But it will still takes decades now for the post office to disappear in its present from.

I'm sure they have cable TV, but the cable company did a lot of digging and other work for me when they first delivery Internet and phone to my street. They still call me a decade after to ask my opinion when they launch some new services.

I was under a lot of pressure to buy my last watch. What a relief when I heard that people with a smart phone don't wear watches! I was ahead of the era of smart phones by a few years at least.

Now I'm one of the 1% who switches to a Linux desktop. Actually I could be 1% of 1% if I wanted to be a pioneer. For example, the last reason that I didn't switch is because of Hotspot Shield. Most people having a notebook computer should have a VPN when they do anything in hotels or cafes. HSS is fast and free, and it's trivial to get rid of the ads. But it didn't support Linux. For this non-reason I put up with Windows longer. It only cost a few dollars per month or even per year. But I stuck on the free service. Not anymore.

I can say a lot of good reasons to switch but not right now. Today's topic is why I switch because I like free. And Amazon web services is free (for a calendar year).

You have to understand that trivial things necessary on your computer, perfected decades ago, became integrated part of any operating system, like Unix. But when Windows came along, all hell broke lose. This tiny "computers" have only 256K of memory! And a floppy disk!

Now Windows became the dinosaur, while Linux can do what Unix mini computers could do in a fraction of the resources of Windows, and do it faster.

Take backup. To backup to Amazon S3, you only need one command:

s3cmd sync yourfolder s3://yourbucket

Only changed or additional files will be uploaded to S3 - synchronization. You may prefer GUI but immediately you will understand that why GUI is an obstacle. The command itself is flexible, allowing any folders you want. And for different destinations, you can have another command. You can put all your customized locations in one single text file and name it "syn3", like shortening URL's. And if you copy the file into the daily jobs directory, you will never worry losing another file longer than one day old.

Nowadays installing software is easier than Windows. You don't even need to go through the browser to "download" ! If you try to run s3cmd, Ubuntu will tell you that you need to install it first by the command:

sudo apt-get install s3cmd

It's a single step to download and install, and then you can run it right away. (There's a interactive program to run first to get your S3 access keys.) Whereas in Windows you have to start the browser, find the download URL, wait for the download manager, and then run the installation program.

For me this is (one of) the killer application. And this is the only way to upload to S3. Because S3 is actually very slow (~100 kb/s) and unreliable. You always fail in the middle of uploading a large backup file. If sync fails, it will only be the current file. And if you keep syncing, all the files will be there eventually. There are similar things is Windows but you have to pay for it, or it won't be that convenient, and because of GUI, it can't be that easily customized.

And for a slightly conventional task, backing up your critical files into a separate drive daily. I have been struggling to do this for years in Windows. But in Linux, this is trivial:

rsync sourcefolder destinationfolder

Only the new and modified files will be copied. This is part of the OS 10 to 30 years ago! You can see the problem with Microsoft. First they have to strip off everything to fit in the tiny IBM box. They could have done a better job providing backup software, but they can't kill third parties for commercial reasons. You can pay but companies do that sort of business are desperate. Amateur developers come and go.

The other thing is, if you search there are lots of backup programs for Windows, many from 1st year Computer Science students, and some may crash your disk. But in Linux, the developers have some standards, even that the software is free. The bad ones will not be recommended or advertised, and the few good ones will find their way into depositories, where you can easily download and install, and even become installed by default, or part of the OS.

Suspended

2010-11-20T19:50:00.000-08:00

Dear readers,

If I carry on this blog, my personal information will be leaked and my identity exposed. So I have to suspend this blog for an unspecified period. Sure I may write somewhere else, but that will be a totally fresh start.

I may still reply to comments though.

The geek at heart

The giant magnetic door catch

2009-11-17T08:28:00.000-08:00

My door to the garage is big and heavy, and is the only door used. Any door catch cannot stand the repetitive impact due to carelessness of the kids. Also the door must be easily kept open to unload the grocery. My wife came up with the idea of magnetic catch. I went on to make one but it was rather poor until now.

You need powerful magnets such as those greater than 1 inch long, about 1/2 inch wide and 1/8 thick, available in many hardware stores, rather cheap. You need a few to stack up for power and more importantly, to adjust to suit the space between the door and the wall.

You need two different metal plates, such as those used for building decks from hardware stores. The right ones need a great force to be removed from powerful magnets above.

The larger or bigger steel plate is to be mounted to the wall, the smaller thinner one on the door. Just put the magnets on the steel plates and they can hold the door open. When you close the door, the magnets will stay with the thicker plate on the wall. That's the law of physics.

That's it. There's no need to mount anything except for screwing the plates into the wall and door. Both the door and the wall are protected by armored plates. The catch area is as big as the plates.

The fancy stuff.

You can decrease the magnet and plate size or increase the force and catch distance by mounting the wall plate at an angle. The angle is to ensure that when the door is fully open, the magnets are the door are in parallel, when the magnetic force are greatest. This can be simply done by putting something under the wall plate on one side, or a soft wooden wedge for clamping and spacing filling.

You can also put some pad materials to soften the impact and reduce noise.

Of course you can mount and fix the magnets, and use angled plates.

No pictures because the first excellent version is ugly.

The future of goods and services

2009-11-12T18:46:00.000-08:00

Your local shops are selling you things that they can survive on, not what you really need. The discrepancy is getting bigger and bigger. I get my electric toothbrushes and replacement heads from the net, cheaper and more choices.

Many goods in Target can be replaced by online purchase. Indeed I find more things that I need that is sold by Target online only, than sold at stores only.

Local stores can survive by a few things, customization, touch and feel, and knowledge. Apparel stores are doing well but once you can try on clothes by your online clone, and view yourself in all 360 degrees at home, a lot of people will stay at home instead. Lands-end had it but it was too primitive to be useful. The colors are not even accurate.

Touch and feel can't be replaced, but hardly any goods need that. And if you provide that, you risk become free demo for other online businesses.

People don't like car salesperson, but can't do without car mechanics. You go to a garage because you don't know how to do it, so you buy parts and labor from them.

For the future of goods and services, we can looking at the most expensive personal items, the house and the car. Home Depot is actually selling you knowledge, you buy from them tools and items that are designed for doing it yourself. If you don't mind things that are not completely flat and straight, you can pave your whole yard and build walls without any experience.

The high labor cost is killing the service industry such as plumbing. In many cities it's hard to find a plumber because they cannot afford to live there. You can use cowboys but there's no guarantee. To protect consumers and to protect skill labors, there are many red tapes, and a lot goes to insurance. It's crazy to find a plumber to do a job for you. If you buy all the tools and parts you only pay for a fraction of the cost for calling out a plumber.

Even the car mechanics are not safe. Local mechanics are charging an arm and a leg. But they could be forcing people to drive to Mexico for big services. It started many years ago now. If you plug a scanner into your car, you know what went wrong and what need to be replaced. Mechanics kept saying that the codes don't tell you anything and insists to charge you $40 to $100 for the diagnostics. But do you believe that the many error codes are designed to tell you something? At least they are designed for dumb mechanics.

For simple things such as fluid flush and oil change, you can drive a bit to find cheap labor, or do it yourself. You can find all sort of manuals leaked on the net - the knowledge. For diagnostics, you can do it more reliably than dumb mechanics, and replace parts yourself. It's much cheaper to get parts online, and many old cars are still supported with OEM parts.

Even car wash is a rip-off. If you want the brand new car with deep waxy look, it's hard to say. But for most people, manufacturers should use easy wash paints, available many years ago as options. These surfaces do not need waxing for 5 years. But I think most paints hardly need any waxing and special body wash. I have been using auto car wash for years. After apply "conditioner " and rinse off, no drying is necessary. Even if you go for hand wash, the chemicals are the same. The difference is that they have cheap labors holding the brush in additional to the pressure wash. And they have people to pad dry the car.

Now I tried the dry organic wash and it works fine, almost as good as auto car wash, but better because it's a hand wash. If you wash your car every week or every other week, it is just a matter of wiping the dirt off with a cloth, and then dump the cloth into the washing machine. It also works if you car is dirty. But if your car is all dirty, it's simpler go to an auto car wash, or leave it in the rain.

Also the wheels. I spray it with biodegradable detergent and leave it for one minute. Then I wipe it off with a cloth and a bucket of water. It's dirty work but just 4 wheels. And your wheels will be cleaner than any auto or hand wash joint.

My old neighbor, a classic car enthusiastic, use only a bucket of water to wash the whole car. But I think his cars are very clean. I always want to wash my own cars, if only to avoid the hassle to go to the auto wash. But the dirt water goes directly to the beaches here, if they don't get to my plants first. Now it's "dry" wash for the body and one bucket of water for the wheels. I can even do it inside the comfort of my own garage!

DNS Leak in Firefox 3.5.3 with Dynamic Proxy Switching Add-ons

2009-10-19T14:46:00.000-07:00

The DNS leak problem in a simplified scenario: the domain name in the URL address has to be converted to an IP address before the http request can be made. The DNS conversion request and the http request are two separate process performed by different servers. If you have something to hide by using an http proxy, only the http request goes through the proxy. The DNS request may or may not go through the proxy. The implication is that, for example, someone monitoring your activities at your ISP knows approximately when and which websites you are visiting, even though your http requests are encrypted and your IP hidden by the proxy.

DNS leak should be a thing of the past ever since the preference network.proxy.socks_remote_dns was introduced in Firefox 3, the value of which should be set to true to avoid leaks via about:config. However there were some changes in around Firefox 3.5 that made DNS leak possible.

I suppose that the changes are: the DNS and http request are not synchronized or loosely synchronized. This should not affect anything if the proxy selection is static, like editing the Firefox proxy option by hand. DNS leak may occur in dynamic proxy switching add-ons like FoxyProxy. There were no leaks prior to around FF v3.5.

In dynamic switching add-ons, the proxy preference is switched for the http request, but revered to the previous Firefox setting after the request. I would think that the DNS request is made before the correct proxy is selected for the next http request. The previous FoxyProxy, the new Standard and Basic versions all leak DNS requests.

To avoid leaks in FoxyProxy, one must use a sock proxy, and check the global option to use the sock proxy for DNS.

However, one of the free and fast censorship circumvention system, ultrasurf, do not allow socks. In this case, simple and static switching should be used, such as Multiproxy Switch.

There is no DNS leak if you use a VPN - all network request goes through the VPN server. However, if you use a proxy on top of a VPN, any DNS leak from the proxy will be protected by the VPN, but not both.

I use Wireshark for testing. The simple capture filter should be set to "port 53" to capture DNS requests only.

The Battle with Ants

2009-10-10T09:15:00.000-07:00

With the right climate, if you live next to some large open space not under your control, you can't really get rid of all the ants, but only manage it.

If you go to the hardware store to get some ant control stuff, you may be OK for a while, but the labels don't tell you the whole story.

You can call a pest control company. Some gave up, while one company offer to spray every two months instead of three, with expensive "organic" chemicals. It's a waste of money because there are unlimited supply of ants.

You will need the following:

ant spray (for attach to hose)
ant spot treatment (with hand pump)
ant bait
ant poison
sealant

Then you need to understand ant behavior:

nest
travel
food & water

You need to use the right strategies for:

setup environment hostile to ant
emergency treatment
regular control

Ant behavior

Ants live in cool dry places where they may also keep their nest moist. So if you have a yard the best is to cover all areas with working sprinklers, whether you have grass, plants or not.

Ants will find the shortest distance. Moist soil and dense grass or ground cover will take them forever to reach your house. They have eyes and they prefer to travel in the dark. Avoid fixtures in the yard that they can travel under, forcing them to be easily spotted.

Ants need food and water. You are nuts if you plant fruit trees when you live in a giant ant hill. The worst you can get is that ants live inside your house and go outside for food and water. You need to seal off your house. Ant colonies trapped inside the house can be eliminated sooner or later.

Ants are more active in spring due to reproduction cycle, or dry hot summer where they need shelter and water.

Environment

At outdoors, ants like to live in dry cracks like between garden walls and the pavement, between your house and concrete sidewalk, foundations for gate poles, voids in garden paving and ornaments. If you have these you need to seal off the cracks or pour in ant poison, otherwise you have to spray regularly every few months.

Ants may live in trees, typically the top, or under thick trees with loose skins. They are normally harmless but hosting large amounts of ants near your house is bad. It's easy to spray and get rid of them but it's hard to prevent ants from getting back if you have a fruit tree. Ant barriers don't work for me. Even for palm tree, you need to cut off the "fruits" before they become attractive to ants.

Ants are usually found traveling at the under side of external walls just above ground level. This means that you have nests near your house or inside. This part has also the most chance to have cracks for an older house. Avoid any plants or ornaments that make it difficult to spot the ants or any cracks.

For indoors, the most dangerous part is under the kitchen sink where there is moisture, and a lot of cracks and pipes. From there ants will travel all over the kitchen cabinets and beyond. If you can, check for perfect plumbing so your kitchen is completely dry. Seal off any voids due to piping and seal off cabinets from each other if possible. But the most important is to fix any cracks from your house to the outside.

In the kitchen place your stuff in groups such as food, eating utensils etc. Food not in the fridge should be placed in cabinets and shelves above the kitchen sink, but far from ceiling and corners. Under the kitchen sink is only suitable for stuffs that can be sprayed in an emergency, or there's no chance of chemicals getting into your body.

If ants are really desperate looking for shelter, they will enter through air vents in your drying machine, exterior exhaust fans, window frame draining holes and even cracks in the roofs. Try to make these weak points accessible to spot treatment if you have an emergency ant invasion.

Emergency Treatment

If you start treating ants and disturb the equilibrium, it may turn into an emergency at first. Ants living in your house may have to invade your kitchen once they are cut off from outside. When you destroyed an ant nest outside, the ants may have to find a new home inside your home.

If you are overwhelmed by ants inside or outside, it's likely it's time for a large area spray outside the house. Those spray bottles for attachment to a garden hose is easiest. Concentrates for dilution into large spray cans are more accurate. I always use chemicals suitable for plants and grass, unless you like to keep two separate bottles. I also use chemicals specially for ants rather than for multiple insects, unless you have other problems. Your local store usually will stock chemicals that is effective in your area, or most likely you can have a refund.

Most likely these chemicals are not instant kills. But when the chemical get to ant nests and then dry up, they are effective in repelling the ants or killing them.

Lawns in good conditions are rarely problems. Spray on gaps and cracks outside the house, dry areas at trees and brushes, foundations of paths and gates.

Emergency inside the house I use one gallon bottles with a rather powerful hand pump attached for so called spot treatment. I also use chemicals suitable for plants as that is all I need for outdoors other than emergencies. For spot treatment, the ants should die instantly, or at least act irrationally and fall off walls. Use chemical from major stores to make sure that they are safe.

You just need to spray at the corners where the ants travel, and at gaps where the ants come out. Once being forced to the open you can use a microfiber cloth or packing tape to kill the ants. A wet microfiber cloth trap more ants when you wipe at them, and more likely to kill them after you rinse and squeeze it in water.

Regular control

To avoid regular spraying with chemicals, you need to fix all the cracks in your house leading to the outside. And any outdoor fixtures that easily become ant nests. All you need is to watch and follow any long line of ants forming right outside of your house.

If there are large area of hidden voids and no plants, I would pour poison such as boric acid in the form of powder that you can get online. Boric acid is organic so it's rather safe for humans when it gradually get diluted.

If there are small cracks I would pour glue like those white glue for schools. If you cannot "pour", there are those caulk in the form of white glue, for all purpose outdoor sealing, which dries clear, non toxic too.

For larger areas of cracks you need to do proper mending, like speckling compounds for external walls. For outdoor dry areas you can seal it with sand, or sand like sealants that stick together.

Ant barrier granules are pretty useless time after time. I see ants walk straight over them.

Baiting ant outdoors is rather useless because they will just be replaced by another colony. But if your house is sealed off from ants outdoors, you can kill the ants trapped inside by baiting, instead of waiting for them to die slowing from hunger and thrust.

Baits are slow poisons that you allow the ants to bring back to their nests. It does not work for all species. So for some species you are just feeding them instead of killing them. I use boric acid powder mixed with honey and put drops of it on water proof paper under the kitchen sink and where ants are found. I guess it's effective as I can see ants that act like drunk, and have to rest before going home.

Your data not totally safe with Chinese Circumvention proxies

2009-02-12T15:47:00.000-08:00

On Jan 9, 2009, Hal Roberts reported that 3 three of the circumvention tools sells user data. The only one that I reviewed and recommended is GPass, and as I reported, it wasn't really working recently.

I'm not surprised as I never trusted anybody. These guys are the least trust worthy; just one step up from some anonymous person having some server capability hosting a CGI script. I am a little surprised that they publish aggregate data freely on partner websites, and even openly offer to sell confidential data for a fee, and only if you pass THEIR strict screening. This is sad as nobody even have a privacy policy on their websites.

The other confirmed sad news is that they actually store individual user logs, which by law they don't have to. But since they do store, by law LE like FBI can request for it, and they had been cooperating. The advantage of US freedom is again lost. In contrast there are Data Retention law in most EU countries.

Nothing important is lost, as I never use them alone, and I never invite the attention of FBI.

Long Term Practical Proxy Report

2009-01-31T12:58:00.000-08:00

All are totally free, not free trial, some with optional paid services.

Hotspot Shield is still awesome. It's fast enough for watching Hulu movies. It's VPN so it support all protocols. All network traffic such as email, IM, etc are routed through it. You can check that it's working by using WireShark or just by firing up Windows Task Manager. On the network tab there is a VPN Adaptor in addition to your original Local Network connection. Traffic in both network connection is the same as any protocol goes through the VPN Adaptor first, then being converted to encrypted OpenVPN protocol, which then go through your hardware network card. If you use WireShare, you can see the protocol conversion. There are others, but only Free Trial. AlwaysVPN started charging but the old free beta version still works, though a lot slower than Hotspot Shield.

Hotspot Shield is ad supported with a banner on top. But it's pretty easy to get rid of it. A sure thing is to use encrypted connection such as https with your bank. You can also use any of the other proxies as they are all encrypted. The advantage of using another encrypted proxy is that, Hotspot Shield knows my IP, but it doesn't know anything about where I'm visiting and the contents. I have successfully use bittorrent for a couple of hours without disconnection. A BT client which hide the BT protocol helps. The speed is decent even that other peers cannot initiate a connection to you.

I use all the other proxies because their speed varies a lot, and sometimes fail. So the necessary Firefox add-on is FoxyProxy. Forget about the fancy options, just add a proxy, give a name such as ultrareach, and then the host and port. Set leftclick option to cycle through the proxies.

Apart from the German JonDoNym (and Hotsport Shield), all are American proxies aimed to bypass Chinese censorship. The software is not open source. You don't know who is behind the software or individual servers. So use it at your own risk. Possible funding sources are Voice of America, Fulong Gong. Most are detected as virus, malware or spyware. I can assure that they are not destructed virus (so far). But I don't know if they spy on me or not. But with Hotspot Shield running under, they don't know my IP. Also, if your anti-virus or anti-spy scanner cannot set to ignore them, it's a bit inconvenient. You may have to pause your anti-virus shields momentarily when you start them. They say the Chinese report them as malware on a large scale so they are detected as such. Some malware detectors had taken them off the list but there are too many detectors.

Ironically, all the Chinese censorship bypassing proxies have heavy censorship in varying degrees. Porns are out, but it's a good thing, otherwise the servers will be a lot slower. Anti-virus companies are out if they don't take them off the virus list. They also protect surfers by disallowing websites with dubious privacy policies, even Google. That's why you need slower proxies but with less censorship.

UltraSurf is very fast most of the time. You can even watch youtube with decent speed. Censorship is heavy. Supports only http protocol.

GPass is pretty decent until recently. May be it doesn't work well with Hotspot Shield. It supports many protocols via socks, such as email clients, IM, streaming video players. It can also route through Skype, so when you are browsing something forbidden, it appears to spying eyes that you are making a phone call, or other Skype users are making p2p phone calls routing your PC.

GTunnel is currently decently fast. It also supports Skype. It's the most often detected as malware.

FreeGate is not free anymore for non-Chinese users. Phoenix is another free VPN, but the Chinese interface makes sure that non-Chinese cannot use it.

JonDoNym is pretty slow part of the day. However it's reliable when it works and censor free. But with German data retention law, it's the most traceable by court order.

TOR is only useable in a small window around UTC 8 am. But it's nearest to be untraceable.

That's what I use on a daily basis.

TrueCrypt - virtual encrypted disk

2009-01-22T11:29:00.000-08:00

TrueCrypt looks and sounds complicated, but actually it's pretty easy to use. It is not only a file or data encryption, but provides file system encryption, which makes it usable on a daily basis. I never had the patient and discipline to maintain encryption files, but now most of my secrets are encrypted on a constant basis.

All the default options will give you safe and secure encryption - you create a fixed size file that becomes a virtual disk with a drive letter (on Windows), protected by a password. When the file is mounted, you can see an additional disk drive that you can access like any others. When the file is dismounted, via TrueCrypt or by pulling the plug, the file remains an encrypted file with no known backdoors. You can exit the TrueCrypt user interface anytime while the encryption engines run in the background.

There are some actions that you may want to perform. One is under [tools], [refresh drive letters]. For some reasons, after you mount or dismount, the drive letters are not always updated. The other action is under [volumes] , [store volumes as favorite] and [mount favorite volumes]. I also put TrueCrypt into my start menu, and set it's preference to Mount favorite volume when started. So basically whenever I login to or boot up windows, I also have to login to my most used virtual disk.

The most useful feature I use is to encrypt all my surfing activities by encrypting my Firefox profile. I worked in competitive or secretive companies before. When someone quit or being fired, they may be escorted immediately by security guards out of the door. You don't even have time to erase your private bookmarks or caches. This is more real than being raid by the FBI, NSA, or US Secret Service. Smashing the harddrive is too late and hardly effective. With TrueCrypt you just need to pull the plug, or dismout gracefully when you have time.

To bring up the FireFox profile manger, edit the properties of any FireFox shortcut, find the target in the form of
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe"
and add the option
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -profilemanager

Create a TrueCrypt drive and mount it as say z. When you create a new profile, you can pick your own profile directory to be in the z drive. The default profile directory is where your current profile is at, so you can find it and copy it over if you need to.

If you have multiple profiles, you can edit any FF shortcut to go straight into that profile:
"C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -P profileName

The other useful FF option is -no-remote, so different profiles can be used at the same time.

FireFox stores everything in the profiles, history, bookmark, encrypted passwords and cache etc. So when the profile drive is not mounted, all your data are encrypted, and FF can't even run. Most add-ons also store data in the profile directory. But if you are using some extensions that handle secret or private data, you have to check.

If you use encrypted virtual drive continuously, as in using it as for FF profile, you have to avoid automatic force dismount under some circumstances. If your drive is force dismounted while in use by some application such as FF, the drive letter is not available anymore, and you have to reboot to clear it up. For security reason, drives are dismounted after certain time by default, when the screen saver is on, or other power management features.

In the pass, I had major inconveniences during upgrade of OS, either by choice or by force due to hardware replacement. I am wary of compression and backup utilities that uses proprietary formats. TrueCrypt is open source, use standard encryption, and I stord a copy of the software just in case.

TrueCrypt is safer and more secure in many ways. There is no decrypted copy at anytime, so you don't have to worry about magnetic traces on the physical devices. You can pull the plug anytime once you finished updating something - they were encrypted on the fly.

Will you lost the whole file or whole virtual disk due to hard disk corruption? Firstly, disk/file corruption doesn't happen anymore nowadays. Secondly, I don't think you will lost any more data than what you lost if the file is not encrypted. The encryption unit will be file sectors. There are redundancy to ensure that the volume can still be accessed when error occurs.

DVD's and CD's are more tricky. There are redundancy in DVD's to ensure that data can still be recovered when there are errors, comparable to hard disks. But you don't touch or smash hard drives. I would test DVD's for recoverable errors yearly or once several years. Most DVD burning utility comes with test scans. If these error occurs, it's time to make a new error free DVD. Again I don't think you will lost more data than if the disks are not encrypted. But since the encrypted file sizes are larger, you are a tiny little bit more exposed to disk corruption.

How to Erase a DVD Completely and Securely

2008-12-31T11:16:00.000-08:00

If you have a RW DVD, there are utilities to erase it, or you can overwrite it with something. Like hard disks, there may still be magnetic traces. If your DVD is +-R, write once, you can't soft erase it.

The best so far is to get a DVD shredder. I opted a while ago for the paper only shredder because the cost didn't justify the number of discs I may have to shred in the future. Also, for paper you need those cross shredder that is a lot harder to put the pieces together. For DVD there's no such fine shredding. As long as you can see a piece of silvery metal, you may be able to recover a large chunk of data or video from it. Are they real in CSI?

I have seen the microwave destruction video, taking only 5 sec. But there is a danger of harming your microwave because of the electric sparks. And there is bad smell. The metallic disc broke down pretty evenly, but the fragments are still large.

Here's what I tried, which didn't work, and don't waste your time. With a small craft drill you can destroy the surface easily using the right sander tip. But it is only skin deep. I don't even think that the plastic layer was penetrated.

I used pure sulfuric acid, which didn't do a thing because of the plastic layer protection.

It dawn on me that I have a plumbing torch. I fired it up outdoors, but surprising the DVD's are very hard to die. The plastic doesn't melt away easily, and it didn't burn. You have to melt the plastic until the inner layers are exposed, then there's a little flame and no more.

Here's the result, before I cut them up and put it in the trash a few pieces per collection day. Now, the superior part, after the torch treatment, the discs are, similar to the surface of the French desert made using the same technique, very crispy. You can crumble the discs into very fine pieces with your fingers, or you can hammer them into powder.

Early spring cleaning: secure computer data

2008-12-26T14:11:00.000-08:00

I tried to encrypt bank accounts on my laptop long ago. You wouldn't believe how many money went through the laptop. I used KeePass and TrueCrypt, but gave up, until now.

You can setup your laptop with whatever password you can create, BIOS, Windows Logon, and even the hard drive. But all are crackable.

KeePass is good, but it's standalone, not integrated with anything. You have to pull your password into the browser forms. It's not bad at all but I have alternatives.

I was using TrueCrypt for file encryption. But it was tedious on a file by file basis. You can use it to create a big encrypted drive too, but I don't trust it enough. And the backup is a problem.

Revisiting TrueCrypt again, I came across encrypting entire operating system, optionally hidden, may have a decoy too. I doubt how TC deal with it. On close look, TC decrypts on the fly, which explains it's capabilities. When you are reading a file, TC doesn't decrypt it into another file, but decrypt a portion of it at a time and hand it over to the application.

I was amazed to see how fast and painless it is to use TC. I encrypt the entire video, actually quite a lot of large video clips, and play it. You don't feel any difference with the encryption, and you don't need to wait for encryption, nor have to deal with which version of the file to keep.

So instead of dealing with passwords, I encrypt the entire profile of firefox, which allows you to specify where your profile should be. So whatever I do on the web is encrypted, history, bookmarks, passwords (now double encrypted), and everything except some extensions may put data outside of the profile directory. If the profile directory is not mounted as a drive, it's just an encrypted file with a code supposed to be unbreakable. When it's mounted, someone need to run some spyware to read the drive where my profile is, or to steal the TC password in memory, if they know I'm using TC. Keyloggers and screen capture spyware won't work because I don't type in passwords anymore.

You can encrypt the entire OS, but I'll settle with using only two different master passwords. One is the personal secrets password and one is the shared secrets password. The only difference is, you don't need to or don't want to give out the personal password even when you drop dead.

There are three types of secrets to encrypt. The first two corresponds with the two type of passwords. Being secrets, the data naturally have to be backup safely. The third type are personal secrets that don't need to be backup. You don't want others to know but you can recover the data in other ways other than backup.

The model of 2 password, 3 types of data is strange, but like bookmark, you can lost it with minor inconvenience, but you don't want others to know all your online activities, such as surfing at work. (In this case there are other logs on the company LAN but you can also bypass the company LAN.)

For each type of data, you can split them into TC drives suitable for backup. Since secrets don't change that often, some drives can be huge. Example, 4.7 GB size for DVD, or some other values customized for your online backup accounts. To backup, you just copy the 4.7 GB encrypted file into a DVD. To read, you just mount the encrypted file as a drive.

For the Firefox profile, a 200 to 500 MB file size is enough, which can be smaller. You can setup automatic backup just like any other files. Though the whole file is copied whenever you use FF. I only backup it up manually when I added new passwords. They are randomly generated, only stored in the FF password manager, and I couldn't recover it if the file get corrupted (or lost the master password for that matter).

You can still do daily incremental backup like ordinary files. But you have to do it when both the source drive and the backup drive is mounted. Once unmounted, they are just ordinary drives containing ordinary files to any application.

TC has one interesting option, to have hidden encryption. You can have two passwords to the same drive, one mounts you the outer files, and the other decrypt the hidden files. I am not sure if that's theoretically possible, as I read about it a while ago as the next big research topic, which is supposed to be difficult. But for ordinary people, if you give them a password, they will believe what they decrypt is all what you have. TC seem to claim that others cannot know the existence of hidden files. It will not be easy, but I'm not sure it's impossible.

How to fix Christmas Lights

2008-12-26T11:41:00.000-08:00

When I hanged the Christmas lights early, a section didn't light up. Unlike previous years, there are no apparently faulty bulbs in the section. I searched the web for short cuts and I found it - beepers. Those electric current detectors that you are supposed to use before drilling anything on the walls.

I had one, but unfortunately it also detect metal at an right angle to the current detector. Basically it beeps all the time, with a lot of false positive and false negatives. But since I was well trained on this beeper, it wasn't difficult to find the faulty bulb. It's a lot faster than swapping the bulbs one by one.

Unfortunately, a neighbor's kid shake the lights after I hanged them, and turned off a whole segment. The beeper worked poorly when the lights are in place, because the bulbs aren't far apart enough, and you have little control of their position, such as next to some metals.

Also, as I found out later, when multiple bulbs are loose from their socket, it's a nightmare.

So I took out the good old multimeter. After some thought I found a way to do it, better than swapping bulbs, and better than beepers, unless your beeper is high quality and the light bulbs are not close together.

First, set the meter to >120V (or 240V), wear insulated glove if you need to. Took off the bulb in question from it's socket. Probe one contact in the socket, and probe one prong of the main plug to the whole light chain. There are only 4 possibilities, one will give you a reading if the socket and the chain up to the socket is normal. That's how to find faulty bulbs or lose sockets. You don't need to swap all the 4 possibilities. After you get the reading for a working socket, the probe on the main plug don't need to change, and the other probe just follow the direction of wiring.

You can also do a continuity test instead of a live test, but it's less fun without the bulbs lighting up. I can be more formal about it, but I doubt if there's anything to simplify, and that Christmas is already over.

Early spring cleaning: videos

2008-12-25T17:41:00.000-08:00

What started the early spring cleaning is the real mpeg4 codecs, and the death of analogue TV.

After dragging on for a couple of years, finally the real mpeg4 standard appears as H.264, the video and audio codecs are simply called advanced AVC and AAC, with the container file format mp4. Open source software are freely available. If future players will play only one standard, this is it. AVC is used for Blu-ray so it's future proof. AAC isn't, but used in ipods, so it's not going to go away. Unless you are making sound for movies, there's no point to use the new Dolby Digital standards, even if you can get hold of some software.

DVD will be around for a long time, but there's no point storing video in it. You can store a lot more files on it and play it on the computer, or send it to the digital TV.

It's a joy to to the spring cleaning. Home movies can be 5 times or more compressed than DVD, and 25 times smaller than DV from camcorders. You clean up and have a lot more spaces. I got my 320G hard disk because of the videos. Now I have space to play with a lot of other things, like operating systems and virtual machines.

I still have some valuable home movies in VHS-C tapes!!. They are the best, not because of the format, but they use big lenses back then on big machines. The camcorder broke down a long time ago. A few years after that, I realize that we cannot get back the quality without buying a new but old VHS-C camcorder. There are same version loaded on to VHS tapes, and we still have the VHS-C to VHS adapter that hopefully works.

Surprisingly, I just searched online and found that plenty of VHS-C camcorders still on sale, while I thought digital DV tapes are already obsolete.

Of course there are format conversion shops. Firstly, you shouldn't easily trust them. Historically at busy times such as Christmas, when you send your films to develop, it could be lost forever. And I listened to online forums too much, and I believed that you have to touch up the videos and use manual settings to get the best out of the videos. This is plain wrong for home movies and I should have picked the best format or best solution at the moment rather than waiting for the future.

I have both PAL and NTSC VHS library to covert. I brought a dual standard player for the purpose but other than one or two conversions, it's sitting on the garage. I also have a analog to digital box for capturing the video, but I used it for something else and it broke long ago.

I have a DV camcorder with an analog input, designed for people moving from analog to digital. I never did the conversion seriously because I usually ran out of DV tapes, and I was convinced that the DV standard is bad for converting to DVD directly without some sort of color space compensation. I hope it doesn't break down anytime soon, otherwise I have to buy a useless DV camcorder for the purpose. There used to be PC graphic cards capable of TV capture, which give you twice for the same money. But now it's worthless because analog TV is dead. Also, I never brought any graphics card anymore, all integrated, there's no need to unless you are a true gamer.

Now most of the library in in DV tapes. I didn't know how to deal with it before. Compress to DVD and it would have been playing in blu-ray discs for years to come. But I was let to believe that the conversion need some compensation on the color space. And I was let to believe that noisy home movies will benefit a lot from noise filtering and color adjustment before compression. After a couple of years staying in the garage, I don't believe in the crap anymore. Home movie is home movie, that's little you can do about it, and the quality doesn't matter that much, the content is. So I brought bigger and bigger hard drives, and I load DV tapes into it, because it's cheaper and more convenient than tapes.

The other reason I didn't convert DV is because of interleaving. I don't believe the free interleavers are good enough and I had a hard time picking the right one. Also, I believe interleaved source, if compressed to DVD, will look better in analog TV. On the other hand, I was more like to watch in the computer, where interleaved version is more appropriate, and more future proof. Mpeg4 standard such as Divx and Xvid offers so much more compression, and had stand alone players for it. I was so tempted but it turns out that blu-ray players don't support, only DVD.

I don't care to put clips in DVD anymore or blu-ray for that matter. The only function is to impress kids after their birthday party. I got Sony Scenarist and used it a lot, but all comes to nothing. Even the full features of a DVD is quite coomplex, and the software cost a lot. So I don't bother anymore. A clip is a clip no matter where you see it.

So the target is set. I hope to finish everything before the next decade! Hopefully the PAL & NTSC VHS player doesn't break down, now that they don't make it anymore. Same for my DV camcorder, which plays the DV and converts the VHS too. And I will be watching the price of VHS-C camcorders. If they ever drops down to $100, it's worthwhile to buy one instead of sending the tapes to conversion shops, if the tapes are still working. And if I have the money, the time, and the motivation. Watching time flying by isn't always a good thing.

Free Fast VPN Proxies

2008-12-01T16:37:00.000-08:00

Updates:Free Fast VPN proxies 2

Can it be true? OMG it is for now. Not only that, I can make up a chain as secure as JonDo and even more secure and a lot faster. I think this is because a lot of networks are blocking Social Networks and Youtube etc. Entrepreneurs raise to the occasion. I didn't know why I missed these last time I looked. I did find and tried a few that was bad.

The best seems to be Ultrasurf. I think it's designed for internet cafe in China. You plug in the USB drive, run ultrasurf, which will fire up Internet Explorer. When you quit IE, no trace will be left, it claims. You can use any browser and ultrasurf is just a proxy client. I used it a while back and it was perfect, but not as fast as now. Bandwidth is perhaps cheaper now, and now China is unblocking many sites, lightening the workload of this bypass servers. However, it has ties to Fulon Gong, and perhaps funded by it.

At the time I was using it, I felt the tiny program is untrustworthy, but not in a technical way. The home page is Chinese for example. I thought it could come and go as other tiny proxy servers, and that like many proxy servers, the aim may be just to collect data for sale. Now it seems to direct url's that don't seem safe, and cause conflict, such as utilities that flag ultrasurf as virus.

You can call it a VPN as it's an encrypted proxy. However, it just divert browser traffic. The encryption is claimed to be better than the industry, that is, better than the browser uses. So nobody can ear drop on your traffic, nobody knows what you surf, and the target sites don't know your identity. However, ultrasurf have everything in their server log. You don't know if there's any security risks because it's not open source. The performance is best and passed the hulu.com test. You can watch a movie with encryption!

BTW I tried the gladder, a later software to bypass the Chinese Great Wall. But to my surprise, it's a transparent proxy, even though the traffic is encrypted. The only reason for that is to avoid spammers flooding to the server. But it's too risky to review your ID to the target sites.

The next best is Hotspot Shield. It calls itself a VPN, quite rightly so because it's not a proxy client like others at the application level. You don't even need to set your browser. The traffic in your network is diverted to the proxy server. You can make sure all other users in your home PC are proxified without doing anything themselves. When you launch Hotspot Shield, it forces to launch a browser, but once after that, you can close and fire other browsers at will.

Hotspot Shield is similar to Ultrasurf, passed the Hulu test, quite reliable so far. Again it's not open source. It's ad supported, but the top banner don't appear all the time. For example, you can watch Hulu move full screen. It's a little slower than ultrasurf at times, but still much faster than JonDo and TOR.

It's a true VPN because when you open a command prompt and run ipconfig, the external IP address is changed to a private one. I ran bittorent on it and works without modifying any setting! Another proof is that the download rate is slower by several times. It wouldn't matter when you are in no rush, an hour of download time and several hours don't matter that much. But the problem is that free VPN can't be reliable. When the server is busy, you are thrown out of the private network. So the download went much faster in the middle. You have to manually reconnect to the network.

So Hotspot VPN is only suitable for browsing. When the VPN is down there is no warning other than that the icon turn red - you are suddenly using your own IP without other warning. You have to reconnect again manually.

Another surprise is that I found lots of fast SSL CGI Proxy at FreeProxies. Many are SSL proxies. For the bad, they are the usual trouble makers, pop-ups, top banner ad that distracts, strip a lot of things and can't support a lot of things. It didn't pass the Hulu test but you can surf most other sites. And blockers can deal with the rest, only sacrificing some real estate at top of browser.

The good thing about CGI proxy is that you can chain it with the VPN proxies above, and even add it to JonDo and TOR. You can have one tab that is proxified and the other not. When the banner is at top, you know it's working. When you see the address starts with https, you know SSL is in effect.

TOR Approach

2008-10-29T19:25:00.000-07:00

Although TOR and JonDo aim at the same thing, their approach is different. JonDo traffic path is static, protected by the in dependency of screened companies. TOR seems to rely on randomness and safety by numbers.

Everybody can be a TOR relay, even your PC. TOR also changes path every 10 min or so, very much unlike JonDo. So unlike JonDo, it's pretty hard to sniff the entry and exit nodes because they changes for a particular connection.

TOR has a P2P feature that should be helping it's speed. If you run a relay, it should help with the network traffic, hence helping yourself at the same time. However, individuals don't want to be exit nodes, whose IP's will be exposed to whatever TOR users are doing. There is the option to avoid this. Also, since TOR allows all sort of network traffic, not only http, I suspect that it got slowed down a lot by bit torrent users.

Because of the large numbers of nodes across many countries, TOR probably will least be affected by data retention. However, there needs to be alerts when all nodes are in Germany.

When you sniff on a single entry or single exis node, because TOR path changes very often, any user will bound to pass through these nodes at times. This can be avoided by limiting the number of entry (or exit too?) nodes to hop.

JonDo avoid crooked nodes by legal contracts and inspections. In TOR, any crooked node can join the network at any time. If your adversary install larger numbers of high capacity nodes into the network, your anonmity can seriously be affected. The entry nodes have your IP, while the exit nodes have the URL and unencrypted contents. Again, it needs only one uncompromised node to protect your identity.

TOR seems to be usable during early morning in Europe. It's fail safe to download the TOR browser bundle, which include the TOR client, a GUI controller, a browser, and a software proxy to filter out unsafe content. The bundle also comes with a "universal" IM client, with your IP protected by TOR. But a few of the popular IM services won't work.

TOR has some interesting features, such as publishing web content on your PC while hiding your IP. The same hidden service is used in the TORchat bundle, which is a secure serverless chat client, where each user is only identified by a static long code word.

Interestingly, one can chain TOR and JonDo together using the proxy option in JonDo. In theory it doesn' t make the path more secure. But practically, the more nodes are included, it is less likely for rogue nodes to break anonymity, less likely for court orders to be effective.

Practical JonDo

2008-10-28T12:25:00.000-07:00

Because the speed of JonDo is pretty decent, and free, I recommend it for many causal uses. As a matter of fact, I'm now writing this blog via JonDo.

I will certainly use it in internet cafes, wired or wireless, if I want privacy. I'll also use it at work or school to keep my secret from IT people. It's the encryption, for both your urls and content.

I will use it to secure yahoo web mail. It's encrypted only when you login, meaning that your password and your username is secret, but your email content can be sniffed by neighbors and IT coworkers. JonDo encrypts the whole thing, as in the secure option in Gmail. At the email servers, still somebody may like to peep at emails, but they have no idea who the emails belong to.

There's no strong reason to hide your IP, because in theory it need court orders to reveal your IDs, but if you know the right person in Earthlink, maybe a beer will do.

Very often, you want to change your IP often. For dial-up, it should be different everytime. For most broadband ISP's, you can "reset" you IP everyday without too much trouble. (You are still traceable.) You want to have different IP's so others can't put two and two together. For example, if you have two email accounts, you don't want the recipient to know that you are the same person. It's elementary for discussion board trolls. In the blogosphere, you can spread your personal details in different blogs or comments without fear of identification in real life. Say if you have 3 dogs and 2 twins living in a small town in Washington with a name called John, our neighbor will immediately thinks that it's you. Wordpress logs IP's automatically, and you can add scripts to other blogs to log statistics and IP's.

Actually, JonDo is pretty weak in protecting your ID, because they have only a few IPs. So even your IP is well hidden, it's easy to know that it's the same person calling. For example, how many JonDo users will be visiting your blog? Yeah, about one. Even worse, the few JonDo users are seen as one, and that's a hard time to convince webmasters otherwise. Also, in TOR it can be seen that you are visiting from all over the world, but JonDo only visits from Germany.

For the JonDo client, there's no need to set anything, but you have to pick the cascade yourself. For any paid cascade, they have 3 mixes to be safe, but there could be only 50 users, which may not satisfy your security requirements. For the free cascades, they all have only two mixes, while there is the test service where both mixes are run by the same university, mostly likely side by side. With at most a few thousands users, the traffic can be very different in different cascades, so you have to select the faster and safer cascade from time to time, manually. This is not going to change with the ramping up of paid services.

For the browser, I can only recommend JonDoFox, basically FireFox 3 with correct settings and loads of extensions, some even cannot be modified. If you see how much extensions they put in to secure the browser, you probably won't want to set it up yourself. The setup up provide you with a portable version, which is standalone Firefox, and a profile to be used for your installed version of Firefox.

When you start FF, you will be asked if you want which profile to use, "default", your old profile you have been using, or "JonDoFox", the new profile. If you don't want that trouble, copy the FF short cut, right click on it to edit the property, add to the target path. Instead of

"..../firefox.exe"

you have ".../firefox.exe" -P JonDoFox

You can do the same for your old "default" profile.

If you want to use JonDoFox for everything other than your most secret activities, you have to use a lot of the 4 icons at bottom right. Cookies, Ads, scripts are normally disallowed, which make it totally unusually for most websites. You have to give temporary permissions, or add to the exceptions (white list). The actions are self explanatory if you click on the icons left and right.

Finally, there is the proxy switch on the bottom right most. You can turn off JonDo, switch to other proxies and even to TOR. But I don't know how secure the TOR option (if you have installed TOR or Vidalia) is. The TOR bundle seems to be less restrictive on the web contents, but the TOR button has some unexpected behavior that claims to be security fixes. Though the FF in TOR bundle wasn't that update.

JonDo Architecture

2008-10-28T09:23:00.000-07:00

To use the JonDoNym system to protect your online anonymity, you have to have 3 things. A configured browser - I recommend JonDoFox. JonDo the client software, and Java runtime, in which the client runs on.

As just an encrypted secure tunnel with anonymous proxy, it's pretty fast and reliable. It reminded me of Safeweb at the height of the tech boom. Even if you use the more secure free two stage mixes, it's pretty fast most of the day, sufficient to do any surfing, other than youtube videos. I'm surprised it only get a few thousand users, because I would use it to secure unsecure emails such as yahoo, and to bypass school and company firewalls (if JonDo wasn't banned), and at least to hide what I'm surfing at work - that I used Safeweb for.

JonDo, same as TOR, is aimed to provide an untraceable proxy, your target website cannot trace back to you. And nobody can sniff what you are doing - the website address and contents are delivered to you encrypted.

The concept or "architecture" of JonDo is quite different from TOR. JonDo proxy is only for html traffic (though you can get over it). Because of the limited applications, the number of users and traffic are very reasonable for interactive surfing.

The server providers of JonDo are supposed to be independent companies/organizations, certified by JonDo, a company that came out of research in Germany universities. The client and server software are open source. That can exclude some bad things about using other proxies.

Ideally, you want 3 stages called mixes, in 3 independent companies, best in 3 different uncooperative countries. The first mix knows who you are (your IP), but not what you are doing (encrypted). The last stage only knows what web pages you are looking at, but have no idea who you are. So you are pretty secured if there is the middle mix, who knows nothing, to increase untraceability. It needs all mixes in your chosen cascade to cooperate together to sell you out. There's no point to setup a single company and try to collect private data and sell it. Someone may want to create three front companies, but since they have to sign a contract, it will be criminal fraud if being discovered. The people behind it are from the universities, at it for a long time now, and the software are open source, so there's some guarantee of integrity. There are also some privacy advocate groups involved, probably guaranteed by their charter and mission statements.

So at least you will not be scammed by somebody in their basements. And indeed court orders had been served on the companies to discover something, proving that it works (to some extend).

The weakness is that by German law, starting from 1/1/2009, ISP's have to log everything, and it seems that the JonDoNym companies have to store enough things such as decryption keys so users and URL's can be traced after the fact. This data retention is for 6 month or a year I think. This is only a problem because all (?) of the mix operators are now in Germany. It is not a problem if someone setup foreign companies. It is also not a problem if what you are doing won't be inviting court orders in Germany.

Sometimes court order is not as powerful as bribing insiders or implants. Without the data retention law, it's pretty safe because thetr are no logs. With data retention, you have to obtain logs in several independent companies, which makes it more difficult. These companies should be careful about the logs because they are in it for the money, fame, or their charter. If security breaches went public, their money making ability will be compromised, their advertising less desirable, and their ability doubted. Also when you add some encrypted proxy somewhere they can't even find the targets to bribe.

There are other form of attacks for other purposes. Assume there is no data retention or your adversary cannot get a court order. Your adversary can observe some traffic points in the internet - generally called sniffing. Sniffing can be easy - your adversary just need to get to the local network to sniff the traffic. In monitoring you they just need to be your neighbor on the same cable network, or sort of "wire-tap" your DSL phoneline or digital cable.

If you are monitored, the simplest mix of JonDo allow you to hide your URL's and content because of encryption. They can also compromise or sniff the final mix, where the target URL's have to be in the clear. When there are only 500 odd users, it's not difficult to guess who you are, what your secret email address and your handle in some special forums. Sniffing usually comes with statistical timing analysis. Your outgoing page loading activities corresponds with that on the final mix, so your destination can be identified and more. Adding your own encrypted proxies will move the target so it's rather difficult to hit.

The number of targets in Jondo is pretty small. Apart from the users can be as low as a few hundred, there are only a few cascades with same or perhaps different IP's. The target website can sniff the inputs to collect a few hundred suspects, or do timing analysis to pinpoint. At the cascade input, your IP is clear.

The future of JonDo is less bright after the data retention act. Without data retention, it's bullet proof, and sniffing and timing analysis fails when user numbers get large. If I were a criminal I will finance some front companies to setup free or cheap mixes, so I can use it safely. TOR maybe better but you have little control over the servers and relays. Without data retention, I don't think there will be big spenders like major crooks. And since JonDo charges by total traffic, it's doesn't sound competition for causal users, who may just want to bypass their myspace block at work. I can see that paid users are about 100 total at times. I don't know how they pay for those servers, which have to be pretty big, not your PC as in TOR. For a few dollars a month, you can get enrypted proxies (or VPN). But I will be careful before handing over my credit card number over to crooks in their basement. And I'm sure the data collected will worth something and they will sell it. Also, their fast free service may be their undoing.

Usable CGI proxies

2008-10-26T13:03:00.000-07:00

The only usable proxies are TOR, JonDo and some CGI proxies. Still, they all have weakness, but much less than a single proxy that you don't know anything about the server.

I have a browser extension that can download large free proxy lists automatically in any reasonable format, test which one works, check if there's any IP list, test the level of anonymity, rank the fastest ones, connect, use, and keep checking the rest for fastest ones in case the current proxy stalls. It's pretty good, but the more you test, the less likely the proxy will work when you switch to it. The other proxy approach provide more features than this. So I gave it up until I resurrected it when dealing with Wikipedia - they ban any proxies, including TOR, as soon as someone deface their pages. So I have the only effective weapon against Wikipedia. I have fresh proxies faster than they can ban.

So called CGI proxies are web based, like using gmail instead of outlook. Basically most of the free CGI proxies are copies of the software by one guy. There's no point to use other software because it's well tested, unless for commercial use that have to pay. You can google CGIproxy for examples, but there should be a more specific keyword to search for these proxies easily.

The main difference between CGI proxies and port based proxies is that CGI proxies want to be found, while port proxies are usually exposed by ignorant or accident. Or, since CGI proxies are web based, it's not difficult to find the web page. Why? Because anybody can download the software into some cheap hosting company. You can use it yourself, sell subscription to others, or sell advertising. Even if it's for personal use and you don't sell anything, you want others to use it to increase security.

The main advantage of CGI proxy is that they are reliably chainable. Instead of entering the URL of your desired website, you enter the URL of another CGI proxy. You get yourself a two proxy chain, and you can do more times.

The main disadvantage, or main advantage at the same time, is that the website content can't get to your browser directly, as in port proxies. So exotic contents don't always work, but most do. But since the content cannot get through otherwise, you can easily determine visually that the proxy or proxy chain is working.

With TOR and JonDo, CGI proxies are not really very useful, except for the encrypted ones. The free CGIProxy includes SSL encryption, but most servers don't allow it because of load. Though I have found a few commercial operators that allow free trials. If you chain a SSL CGI proxy at the end of TOR or JonDo, certainly it will increase your security unless the proxy is compromised.

It's very worthwhile to setup your own CGI proxy as part of your total chain. You can setup a few around the world with different juridision, paying for it with anonymous money if possible, and allow other people to use for deniablity.

If you connect to your own CGIproxy directly, nobody can sniff your traffic, as in wiretapping. Not even your ISP.

If your CGI proxy is at the end of the chain, nobody else know what is the target website. But the target website can trace back to your proxy server, and hence you, if the account need your ID to register.

Proxies don't work

2008-10-25T10:18:00.000-07:00

After so many years, there are still many merchants on the net trying to make money from proxies. Before wasting your time, proxies mostly don't work, even though the impression when you google proxy is opposite.

If you pay for proxy service, you have be very careful, and see if there's any guarantee that the company doesn't sell you out. The sites you visit doesn't know your IP, but the proxy service know everything about you better than your ISP does. Your enemy just need to gain access to the proxy company, via bribing, infiltration, or social engineering. There are saying that most proxy companies are collecting data for profit.

A good example is multiproxy.org, which website still exists. It was about the only practical free software that make use of free proxies around the world. It seems OK at first but one day the software stopped working. It appeared that the free software is spyware, sending all your URL data back to base. When the operation went burst, the servers stopped working and hence the software stopped too, failing to communicate with base.

It's the same if you pay for some VPN service. You can have a private, secure connection between your home and company. You can have a private tunnel to bypass your company/school network, hence no censoring. But if you surf via the VPN, they have your ID and your data. For big companies, at least they have screened people and you can sue them if they do anything wrong. But for some companies with only a name, what can you do about it?

Software merchants may want to give you the impression that there are infinite numbers of proxies in the world for you to use. But actually most can be thought of as PC's or small systems whose owners don't know basic protection about their computers. Once they notice something going through, they will close the port. If not, then the computer will be overloaded and unusable most of the time.

There are indeed some proxies for public use, such as CODEEN. But usually they are overloaded, and usually you can only read, not posting anything, nor even login. Otherwise, it's criminal's heaven.

There are some web based CGI proxies that are easy to use. But these guys can be anybody. The reason that more CGI proxies are available because they can place advertisements. Also, some guys just want to attract lots of traffic to his machine so he can deny that he didn't do it himself. To void trouble, most CGI proxies avoid secure connection (https) and disable the ability to post, which otherwise would become heaven for spammers (and many other types).

You can chain proxies together so it's almost impossible for the target site to trace even in real time. However, it's almost impossible for normal people to do this just to protest their privacy. It's already difficult to find a public proxy that works for a while.

And since most free proxies don't support https, it's very easy to mislead users that they are secure. Say if you login to Google mail, it use secure https for login and then switch back to unsecure http. If you are not careful, you will login successfully, but not using any proxy, and you don't even know about it. Your IP may not appear on the email headers, but Google have info about your real IP, which can be obtained by court order (how about bribe, social engineering?).

In conclusion, nothing really works, and trust no one.

Practical Anonymity on the Internet

2008-10-25T09:21:00.000-07:00

Whatever you type into the address/search bar of Chrome, the Google browser, it goes to Google. Of course Google has been doing it for a long time, every search is archived. If you volunteered by logging in, all the info goes to your hidden profile, such as web history. If you don't login, they have your IP anyway, which can easily be used to link to you one day. For example, with the website you visited, they know where you live, what are your kid's schools, which company you work for, your bank, and where you shop most, etc. With these info, it's easy to know which IP belongs to the same person, and one day link to your real ID. It's a big brother's world.

Imagine if Google brought up an ISP tomorrow! Whatever you do on the web, someone in Google can be able to know about it, and they know your real name and address too. Maybe every politician will be up in arms about it. Also Google's moto is do no evil. So that's not that alarming.

However, how about 10 or 20 years from now, Google and and a few ISP will be brought up by a Chinese company, still controlled by the communists? Immediately they can find out who were, say, human right activists causing trouble many years ago.

With all the talk about online privacy, my guest estimate is that at most only several thousand people in the whole world is taking it seriously daily. That's the number of people using JonDo, and perhaps more using TOR, the only two practical and reasonably safe systems.

How to make high quality youtube video and embed them

2008-07-30T21:56:00.000-07:00

The steps is based on the findings in this video. If you need step by step instructions, play it, otherwise read my post that follows.

It's well known that you can link to the high quality version. If the url of the video is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLtTNE61iik, the video of the HQ version is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLtTNE61iik&fmt=18

To embed is slightly different. The code to append to the url on the embed codes is
&ap=%2526fmt%3D18. Note that the url appears twice in the embed codes.

To ensure you have the HQ version, you need to do a few things.

Size: it must be 480x360 or above. If you have 4:3, the maximum dimension is 640x480. If you have wide screen 16:9, you can just use 640x360 without letter boxing yourself.

Frame rate: 24 fps works (vimeo uses), PAL is 25 and NTSC is 29.97. 30 fps will work too. Use 24 min.

Video codec: youtube said Divx or Xvid. Actually H.264 will work too. The trick is to configure the codec to use CBR (constant bit rate) and force the bit rate to over 1000 kbps.

File format: avi or mp4 will work (mov and wmv should do too). Strictly speaking H.264 and mp4 is the "real" mpeg4 standard.

Audio: MP3 and AAC will do. AAC is the "real" mpeg4 standard.

Free software is either Avidemux for mp4 compliance, or VirtualDub for popularity.

Avidemux: choose x264 for video AAC for audio and mp4 for file format. In the first main option menu, select encoding mode to be Constant Bitrate, and use the default 1500 kb/s. All codecs are built-in. If you want smaller files you can use 2 passes. Avidemux will do it automatically whereas in VirtualDub you have to config the codec twice, as in video above.

VirtualDub: you have to install the Video For Windows codec x264vfw. (Google for the download link.) As the video above suggests, name the output .avi file, select x264 codec. Configure the codec - the first bitrate option is Multipass - 1st pass. This allow us to pick the target bit rate - set as 1000 kb/s or higher. Then save as xxx.avi. For the 2nd pass, configure the codec to use Multipass - N pass, while everything the same. Then save as xxx.avi and overwrite the file in the 2nd pass.

Of course, if you upload to Vimeo instead, you have full 1280x720 resolution, HD 720p resolution, which is as good as 1024p until your TV is bigger than 50" and you sit close to it. (from some reviews)

For any resolution I use Avidemux x264/AAC/MP4. Vimeo is less fussy about the codec configuration. It accepts the default variable bit rate, while Youtube have to be constant bit rate larger than 600 kb/s to differentiate between "high def" and normal def.

Reverse Osmosis system components

2008-07-07T19:16:00.000-07:00

I didn't make a simple list of the brand names that I trusted before. Here it is.

Valve's and T's (& tubing) $30 John Guest
Filter 1 $10 MatrikX
Filter 2 $10 MatrikX
Filter 3 $15 MatrikX
Filter 4 $15 Omnipure
Membrane $40 Filmtec
Flow restrictor $15
Permeate Pump $45 Aquatec
"90%" cut-off valve $15 Hydronamic
4 Gallon Tank $70 ROPRO
Faucet $30 Touch-Flo
TDS meter $15 Hana
Flow meter $30 DigiFlow
Filter housing $60
check valve $7 (instead of air-gap faucet)
Total $407

The price were a while ago. Google manufacturer's name or on eBay, so you get good price. From time to time, people just buy in bulk and sell them separately on eBay close to wholesale price but still make a profit. It's difficult to bait and switch and I think it's impossible to have fake items.

To see what you get for $390 see this Flomatic system I just came across. It's completely NSF certified (like mine) and it looks very much like my system (and any other system) except for the integration (to save labor cost for them probably). However, there is no pump, so the performance is inferior and probably the filters and membrane are not the best.

John Guest is the patented name of the tubing connection system and also the manufacturer of a few things. JG is the easiest system - leak proof. Valve is important because I told you before Lowes sell valves near ice maker tubings that carries a health warning. JG is NSF certified. All it's valves come with a beautifully fine JG symbol on it. You need a very fine plastic moulding process to copy that. If you have the tech and money to imitate it or fake it, you should have done a lot of other things than making some valves. JG make tubings too, though you can also find NSF certified tubings in hardware stores.

MatrikX filters are well known and well established, certified. Also a solid piece of work holding in your hands. The paper labels are well printed and now there are trademarks moulded on the filter housing, if I remembered correctly. Again if you can make that solid piece of fine work, so heavy, for $10, you can make a lot of other things to make money. Prefilters are for chlorine absorption to protect the membrane, though you can add some fancy filtering capabilities. Since my TDS readings are the same when the filters are new and a few years later, they are working as they should.

Omnipure is similar. MatrikX is the master of block carbon for prefilters, while Ominpure is the master of granular carbon for post filter - not for chlorine absorption. I think it's there to eliminate the taste due to bladder in the tank, at least my 1st cheap tank. Fine labels are printed directly on the housing.

Flow restricter doesn't matter because it's on the brine (waste water) path. But you do need to have the correct flow rate to match your membrane.

There is only one manufacturer for the permeate pump, Aquatec, who also makes a lot of other electric pumps for years. It's a certified component. The pump is completely sealed in tough plastic. The protective plastic doesn't look beautiful but it works - I measured the pressure and TDS. Not anybody can make something like that work - on and on 24/7/52. The smaller one is quiet but limited to 50 gpd and below (check).

The "90%" automatic cutoff valve from Hydronamic is a bit of mystery. They make a lot of other conventional RO valves with typically 60% cutoff. I bet they have some certified 60% valves but I didn't remember if I checked. It's has been a while now but the 90% valve is still not on their website while others are there. But there are no other valves like that on the market. There are controversy about the run away of the term 90%. They aren't - I talked to the manufacturer. But it's not really their fault because they don't sell retail. They do promise to check my valve and replace it if it doesn't goes up to 85%. But I changed my mind about it. Firstly, the value shouldn't relate to water quality - the pump make sure of that by isolating the two parts. The tank should fill more due to higher pressure but 4Gal is more than enough for me - there's no smaller one. I have at least 70 psi input feed, 90% gives 63 psi, higher than most people's main water pressure! My valve is probably 70%, a lot lower than 85% but at 50 psi it's supposed to be the standard main pressure! Conventional 50% valve doesn't have anything wrong in them. But now I know some fridge need 30 psi for ice maker. So you need at least 50 psi at the input.

ROPRO tank makes the others look like toys. It's certified, indestructible, beautiful and space saving. If you stand it upright, make sure your cabinet can stand the pressure, 4 gal per 9" diameter. You can stand it sideways or anyway you want. My 1st metal tank dented, chipped, and leak air. I need to pump it like a tire once a while near the end, and water smell of rubber. Never need to do anything about the ROPRO. The name is mounded on the housing. Actually I wanted to buy a certified metal tank to save money but the retailer give me this for the same price. I bet he didn't sell inferior metal tanks anymore and ran out of stock.

Everybody use Touch-flo faucet because any designer faucet cost $100 to hundreds. Touch-flo's are certified. Now they comes with tubings attached so you save a lot of terrible work at the deepest corners under the sink. The ones I got do not have markings on the faucet because most OEM's use them. They are sold in complete systems by other manufacturers - with or without their brand names etched on the faucet. Forget about air-gap - they can be very noisy and you need extra tubing and connections. It's the same as the air-gap on your dish washer. Just add a check valve so when your kitchen sink blocks, the waste water won't go back to foul your drinking water. I don't think it's a real problem, as long as you remember to disconnect the brine tube from the kitchen sink drain, like a manual on-off valve, before you pour poisonous drain cleaning chemicals down the drain.

Get a TDS meter, so you installation is fail safe. You can't get 95% TDS rejection any other way.

Flowmeter is rather new, in a form suitable for RO systems, monitoring a few different filters and tell you when to change it if you input sufficient data. I haven't tried it. It's rather bulky, a box stick to the front of you system with 3/4" connector. But I think replacing one of the 3 prefilter housing with this will make more sense. It's not certified I think but it claims they use certified material. That's very true, as long as they use certified plastic in contact with drinking water, it should be OK. That goes for the filter housing too. I don't think you can get branded name housing with NSF certification at a good price. But really it's a piece of plastic - if they use appropriate material, and the mold is fine and doesn't leak, how wrong can it be?

The law of juggling and the U-defense in desktop tower defense

2008-01-23T17:02:00.000-08:00

As you have seen from previous videos, juggling is required to get high score, and to survive the 100 levels. This is a study to find successful juggling strategies and to simplify juggling, so easy that nobody hates it anymore.

For various reasons, the line of creeps in your maze will grow longer and longer, making it impossible to block your creeps in the maze by selling and building towers in different places.

To be successful you have to minimize the line of creeps, and to be able to shorten the line.

Minimizing the length of the line of creeps is easy to say:

The creeps on the two entrance should enter you maze at the same time. For the worse timing, you have lines of creeps twice as long.
Creeps should come out at the same time rather than gradually, using the "send next creeps button".

What prevents the creeps from coming out altogether is the flying creeps. If two waves come out at the same time they will easily overwhelm your air defenses. So basically you sent 7 level of creeps together if possible and keep them in by juggling. When the air creeps are about to clear you send another 6 levels together, but time their entrance so that they will join the creeps already in the maze.

To be able to shorten the line of creeps in the maze keep you in an invincible position. For this I came up with the U-defense. But sadly, after I reinvented it, I spot something similar in the videos that was not obvious because of the fast play speed.

The maze shown is a straight forward implementation of a double U-defense. The middle 4x6 towers are about enough to deploy air defense in a mix of swarm, boost and snap towers. The lower right corner shows the two exits of the maze. One of the exist are always blocked. Since you can actually shorten the line of creeps, other strategy isn't that important, unless you reach the point of aiming at the highest score.

The critical tower are the two towers marked "g", which can be seen as a return valve by passing a large U shaped path. When the creeps enter the U, they are slowed down. When they passed the U and then returns because of blocking, if the U valve is open, the later creeps to return will catch up with the earlier creeps, shortening the line of creeps!

The timing principle is simple. When the first creep enters and exits the U, passing the g-tower the 2nd time, this g valve can be open at the exact time but no earlier. If the valve is opened earlier, other creeps will find a short cut and pass the first creep to lengthen the line of creeps. Now when the exit is blocked and the first creep returns, it will return via the g-valve, catching up with other creeps returning not from the g-valve. So the line of creeps is shortened.

The juggling sequence is very simple. One of the exits is blocked. When the first creep passes through the middle of the U, it's time to sell the valve and the blocking tower in the other exit at the same time. It's so simple you can't forget it, and there's no extra difficulty other than simple juggling. When the selling is complete, you block the current exit, so some creeps return via the normal path and some return via the valve. After the last creep returns via the valve, block it. Then rest a little and do the same for the other path. Note that this timing is for the maximum sell time. When selling is fast at the beginning of the game, you can sell the valve-tower and the block-tower later.

Personal computer regular maintenance

2008-01-13T12:47:00.000-08:00

Do PCs, like cars, need oil and filter change? Sure, unless you, like many people, replace whole desktops or laptops every two years. But even if you do, you will have measurable benefits by doing regular maintenance.

The efficiency of air cooling systems using fans and heat sinks degrade with time. Most PCs have mechanisms to slow down the processor when over heating occurs. Typically mobile processors in laptops slow down significantly after long use, especially with the fan grills blocked. Slow down support is built into mobile processors. Desktop processors didn't, not until the latest ones. You also need system board level and operating system level support. So, if you keep the fans and heat sinks at top form, your PC runs fast and runs safe.

One more thing you may need to do is to reapply thermal paste between the CPU and the head sink. The chewing gum like paste that comes with new CPU's last for years. But once you disconnect the CPU from the heat sink, the paste will be very bad to reuse. So if you build your own system, you get only one chance if you want a good thermal contact. They are not supposed to be good anyway. Circuit City has a lot of more fluid like thermal compounds on sale, which claim to be better. But I just discovered that they don't last that long. But replying them is trivial.

Other maintenance include cleaning the monitor and keyboard. They are hardly life threatening, unless you have a wife like mine. I have quality screen cleaning fluid and micro fiber cloth for my expensive monitor. Normally it's quite dusty as I believe cleaning cause degradation. I only clean it when I need to calibrate color for example, or to view some very high quality image, or just it's too dirty to look at. But once I left my monitor alone for a while, my wife cleaned it like windows, not the software kind but the glass kind. I was horrified by the marks left on my dear monitor. I could image how she cleaned windows, spray on some Windex, and rub it hard with a towel, OMG. Luckily, after I wipe the screen repeatedly with my cleaning fluid, there didn't seem to be any harm done.

When do you need to do maintenance work? I had no choice because my system board alarm went off due to over heating. Lesson number one, you must turn on the temperature monitor alarms. In the past, I use the system board software utilities when the board is new, to verify that everything is working and no overheating. After that, I tend to ignore those utilities because they are quite primitive software from hardware manufacturers, a pain to use. But I learned to keep them on when the system boots, it will be useful years later.

My CPU reaches 60 deg C whenever the anti virus software is scanning my disks. The CPU usage is only some 50%. So I know there must be something wrong. Lesson number two, on a brand new PC, record the fan speed and temperatures when your PC is doing something heavy continuously, such as anti virus scanning, and playing videos. So when your fan speed or temperatures are significantly higher at the same conditions, you know it's time. Or, you can just wait for the alarms to go off.

I clean the heat sinks on the system board using a can of compressed gas duster for computers, which you can find in hardware stores nowadays. I also use it for all the fans in the power supply and in the case. Otherwise, it's hard to wipe the fans clean. I also use the duster to blow away dust from the system board components, and the keyboard. These are hardly necessary but feel good.

Don't mix thermal paste, old and new. The thermal paste that comes with retail processors are hard to remove completely. But those semi-fluid thermal paste are easy. You just need rubbing alcohol and they disappear completely. Then you reapply a drop or two of paste. These paste are usually contained in a tiny syringe, sufficient to be applied for a 100 years. But you are supposed to store them upright. I did keep the syringe upright after I was done installing my new system.

By the way, hot laptops cause low sperm counts, or something like that.

Second additional mobile line (VoIP)

2008-01-08T20:51:00.000-08:00

The most straight forward is the Mobile Line 2 service. As the name says, you get another phone line (and number) on your existing mobile phone without affecting your carrier plans. All of these "virtual" phone services route calls via the Internet (VoIP) to be cost efficient. To use the service you need to download an application to your smart phone, which include many Java enabled phones. The cost is $9.99 per month plus less than $0.03 per minute. The cost is higher but comparable to a 2nd prepaid SIM card at low usage. There's no mention of International calls out of USA.

The better service seems to be TalkPlus. You can use smart phones including the iPhone, or dumb phones with just a browser. The cost is $9.99 per month with plenty of minutes included. International calls cost extra but cheap. You can get an international number too.

You can get a virtual phone number for free or very cheap. Incoming calls are easy. The problem is outgoing calls. There's no problem if your recipients take anonymous calls with blocked caller IDs, or you can call your recipients using any phones and ask them to call you back on your virtual number. For example, Skype out do not have outgoing caller IDs.

Google's GrandCentral is the exception. It's free for the moment but you have outgoing caller ID. The philosophy is to have a universal phone number to replace all your other numbers. But of course you can use this number as a 2nd mobile phone line. The added advantage is that you can use any phones when you have internet access. For mobile phones you just need a browser.

These mobile services all use your carrier's airtime for the duration of the call, and need a data plan for accessing the internet to setup the calls. For prepaid phones, the most expensive can be $0.25 per minute and a few cents per kilobytes. AT &T Cingular prepaid includes data plan, while Virgin phones typically weren't even internet capable. Typically a GrandCentral call uses less than $0.10 (prepaid) for data plus airtime.

Perhaps to limit free usage, you can only call somebody if you add it to the contact list first. This is a small deal but the funny thing is that you cannot add contacts at the mobile version of the site. Otherwise to call your contacts or return incoming calls via your mobile is simple, using one-click on the entry. My mobile phone works fine but one day I couldn't call anymore. I exchanged emails with Google support for a while but they couldn't solve the problem. My phone isn't too new or too smart or too old. It was on the compatible list of TalkPlus.

There is a little known service, or little thought of service that compliments any of the above services. You can call from any phone as if you are calling from your virtual number. You can setup calls using the internet, or via a toll free number. It's TalkPlus when you don't have or don't want to use your mobile phone. You can choose any phone number that you want your recipient to return your calls. It's GrandCentral when you can dial any number directly even with your cell phone.

It's the caller ID spoofing service such as Spooftel. It had been available for a couple of years now. You can just select your caller ID to your virtual number or any number you want. They don't have a mobile website so you may have to use the toll free access if you don't have a computer and internet. But you can always call somebody with a computer to connect the call for you. The cost is $0.10 per minute. Together with free GrandCentral, the combination is cheaper than the cheapest prepaid card. It's really pay as you go because the minutes do not expire.

The catch is, the bill to outlaw caller ID spoofing is at it's final stages, with the latest action last December. The bill is sort of agreed by all parties for a year now. Maybe there are as little as a few more months to go, or maybe a year. Maybe the cutoff date will be set further ahead to give some time for people to get ready.

ps I agree that carriers are trying to block the new VoIP services. When the mobile GrandCentral launched, it worked flawlessly. Then a couple of months ago I could access the mobile site but couldn't call. Now I can't even access the mobile site.

GC support didn't know what's the problem, and I haven't see any conspiracy theory yet. But I see good reason to block these services. When GC forward calls to your mobile, you can have the caller ID set to your GC number. If you add this number to your fav numbers, you have unlimited incoming calls for everybody calling your GC number.

Single cell phone multiple numbers (SIM method)

2008-01-08T11:05:00.000-08:00

Two lines (two numbers) on one mobile phone is a popular demand. All non-ancient GSM phones support multiple lines, but it seems that no carrier in the world bother to support it. This is true a couple of years ago to last two years, not very true now, but the biggest and most popular carriers don't bother. Now still no US carrier bothers. Now the phones are so smart that you can do a lot of things to by pass the carriers, forcing some carriers to compete. The smaller carriers might just as well provide some fringe benefits to increase head count.

For GSM and 3G(UMTS) you can play around with the SIM cards. For other carriers, you can call via some calling card like services, or Internet services.

You can buy a super SIM card, together with a card reader and writer. You copy all your carrier SIM cards over to your own super SIM card. I heard that 3G SIM's are not possible to copy due to encryption. The original SIMs have to be compatible to your super SIM and to your phone, which makes this the most problematic method, though the most elegant.

The most common method is to get a dual-SIM adapter. I think Magicsim is the most common brand on eBay and I had one, long before they have a brand name and a website online. SIM's have some sort of standards, including V1, V2 and 3G. There are also different memory sizes, 32K, 64K to 128K (3G). Make sure that your phone is on the adapter compatible list. I don' t know if it's possible that some carrier SIM's can cause further compatibility problems. But I don't think it will be if your phone is a 3G or late GSM model.

There are two types of dual-SIM adapters. The simpler type looks like three SIM cards connected together. There are two holders for your carrier SIM cards. You insert the third card into the SIM compartment of your phone. This type requires that your battery compartment isn't too tight to contain the extra thickness of the SIM cards. You are OK if your phone is on the compatibility list. I would recommend this though I had the other type.

The second dual-SIM adapter requires you to cut out the central bit of your SIM cards, and put them into a SIM card that holds your two little cut out pieces. The adapter in the form of a SIM card is slightly thicker than an ordinary SIM card, so it might not fit if your SIM compartment is super thin. Or the contact may be loose so they provide you with sponge fillers for a tight fit.

The cut out type adapters sound dangerous and difficult. It's yes or no. SIM cards don't cost much if you know where to find, and if you have a plan your carrier may replace it for you. Unless you make very stupid cuts, even if the adapter doesn't work, they provide two holders for you to hold your cards for use as if they are not cut. I advise to get a SIM cutter, which I didn't. I just used a scissor. I intended to cut a little larger than the template, then gradually reduce the size to fit the adapter. But I ended up simply chopped off the excess with one simple cut per straight edge.

The two cut out SIM cards should look exactly like two miniature SIM cards, but not mine. After a little trimming they can go inside the adapter. But with some loose space one of the miniature card can move a little inside. It didn't work at first, or it didn't work reliably. But once I swapped the two miniature cards, they fit better and never gave me problems. Maybe after a year the SIM's are lose again. So I pull out and plug in the cards again and added the sponge filler to hold the cards tighter. It works fine now.

I brought a 64K SIM served by AT&T (previously Cingular). It was another eBay order without phone and plan. It was for the GoPhone, prepaid or with a monthly plan. It might be possible that the carrier may not activate some cards, they way they are sold or according to their serial numbers. My SIMs are OK but probably because I wanted to port my old phone number to the prepaid phone(!), I went through several operators. Virgin had better service and better deal, but they are not GSM, reselling Sprint airtime.

I had a carrier unlocked GSM phone for traveling. I don't think you need an unlock phone when you are using two SIMs from the same carrier. If you ask, a nice carrier may unlock the phone for you after 6 months. But most phones are trivial to unlock yourself. For Moto you only need to download some software to the PC and a standard mini USB cable. I don't know about the latest 3G phones but you always search unlock hacks specific for your phone. If you travel abroad those Blade Runner (the movie) type shops will unlock it for you free if you buy anything trivial.

Adapters cost little but you pay for those guys who buy it in bulk and resell on eBay. Same for SIM cards. US carriers don't sell SIM cards directly without anything to go with it. But somehow you can get it on eBay. Abroad, SIM cards with airtime are cheaper than refilling the airtime itself.

At any one time, only one SIM and one number is active. In the older adapters, you switch off the phone and then back on to switch SIM cards, hence your number. In the newer ones, you dial 001 and then hangup to use SIM card number one, and so on. With better compatibility, you can pick SIM1 or SIM2 on your phone menu. You can also rotate the cards at fixed intervals, x minutes for the 1st and y minutes for the 2nd. This way, you can receive all your voicemail and other alerts without having to manually switch the SIM cards. But I don't feel comfortable doing this. My adapter doesn't work in this mode anyway.

Normally you set your phone to forward on unavailable to the other number, so you will not miss any calls. But there are minor problems. You don't know if the call is forwarded or not. You just have the caller ID. So if you do not know the person, you don't know which number the caller called. And be very careful if your numbers aren't public. Your line 1 calls will be forwarded to line 2, and voice mail will be left on your line 2 account. The system default message is to announce your line 2 phone number, thought the caller called your line 1 number. The same problem occurs again if line 1 is supposed to be for John and line 2 for Peter. On the voice mail greetings you have to swap the greetings for John and Peter. But when you sometimes turned off the call forward for some reasons, you have to swap the greetings. So carrying two phones isn't a bad idea.

The cheapest way to keep an extra number this way is prepaid, roughly $100 a year or $25 for 3 months from various carriers, if you call very little. It's difficult to compare exactly because most have some refill bonus. Most carrier will allow you to go offline a few months while keeping your number. It's much cheaper if your usage patterns allow for that. AT&T (Cingular) has 3G, T-mobile still haven't make the announcement. And of course AT&T has the iPhone. With the constant cat and mouse unlock the iPhone game, no way AT&T is going to unlock your iPhone for your travels.

By the way, there are phones holding two SIM cards. But I bet they aren't too good as the demand is perhaps 1 in 1,000 or 100,000. And then there's a version of Blackberry from Verzion, which provides CDMA2000 technology, but also duals as a GSM phone for you to travel. Of course the GSM phone is unlocked for foreign carriers. And since you already picked Verizon, they are not afraid that you want to switch to GSM/3G carriers. But if money is no object, there are other more elegant ways to have a 2nd phone number with a smart phone.

The Internet or calling card like methods will be next.

Updates

Desktop Tower Defence - top score video cure additiction

2008-01-06T12:38:00.000-08:00

Finally I came across something that can cure the DTD addiction. It's video on how the top scores are made. You can learn a lot, but you may also give up altogether - as I said, the game isn't great after all. So if you want to play your own way and improve at your own pace, skip the videos.

Before the video's and the analysis of the top score strategies, I can disclose some tools that may help you to have more fun. In the challenge mode, there is the 3K Fixed game. Instead of 80 gold at the start of the Hard game mode, you have 3,000, but you can't add anything afterwards. It's a fast way to test out your maze, compare your weapons, and measure the unlisted properties of the weapons, such as how much the freeze towers slow creeps down. The weapons, if available, are the same across the games, but the health of the creeps are not all the same across games.

The other useful game is the 100K Gold in the fun mode. It's the same as 3K except that you can play as in the normal mode after spending the initial gold. Even better, there are 100 levels instead of 50 in the main game, everything else being equal. So you have more gold to spend on the first 50 levels and hence more flexibility to test things out.

Finally, there's The 100 in the challenge mode. It's the same as the hard mode but with 50 more levels. So it's exactly the 100K Gold but you have only 80 gold initially as in The 100 game. The 100 doesn't help you with anything but this is simply a superset of the hard mode with more levels. You may or may not want to start with this game rather than the main game. Because the high score strategies are different - that works for 50 levels doesn't work for another extra 50.

Other modes and games are deviations from the main game. For example, some guys hate juggling, the selling and buying of the towers. It became less of a strategy game than a shoot-them game. But then there's not as much challenge because of the limitations of the game.

I used a spread sheet (Open Office) that contains data of gold earned at each level, the health of creeps at each level, and all the measurable properties of weapons, like firing rate. So you can calculate to some degree how much fire power you need at each point and if you can afford them. I also use the Open Office drawing package to help with designing mazes and acting as blue prints during the games. But with modes such as 100K, the need for these outside tools are less. Also, if you see the videos, precise optimizations are either not necessary nor not possible at the end.

I think there's some sort of collective conspiracy in the DTD forum, which missed a lot of critical information, perhaps in order to keep new players interested in the game. Firstly, as I expected, many top scores are fake. They play some other modes and hack the submission forms to change the name of the game to get impossible high scores. Or they can just hack the flash code downloaded to everybody's computer during play. So the top players started to post their fast forward video on Youtube.

The first video I recommend is a classic strategy for the main game DTD 1.5 Hard, with no juggling, or even no selling at all.

Notice it's so easy using only one Swam (6) tower and all Squirt towers. I have done similar things before but I gave up because it wasn't likely to beat the high score. The strategy is easy. I have calculated that I need the equivalent of 4 swan 6 towers to kill the air bosses. When I saw this, I went back to my spread sheet and calculated if I reduce the sw6 to 2, then I need about 7 squirt 6 towers. So I need only two boost 5 towers and one sw6 to give the equivalent of 2 sw6 towers, cheaper that way. And since building extra sq 6 towers is more economical than adding boost towers, it's pretty easy to place the sq towers without worrying packing them together to touch the boost towers. There are more than enough fire power and enough money left for two frost 5 towers to slow down the air bosses to receive sufficient hits.

As for the maze, I said that the optimum pattern for sq towers is the cross, proportional in size to their firing range. But with two or more sq packed together, the cross doesn't make much sense any more. I used the drawing package to draw range circles on each sq. I think the optimum pattern is like peeling an apple - something like the maze in the video. It's not neat, but it doesn't matter because there are more than enough fire power.

With this setup, a new player and an old player differ only in how fast they hit the send-creeps early-button to add extra scores. Very soon you will hit near the high score of this strategy. Note that the no selling is a self imposed rule. The nearest game is the 3K fixed game if you want to fight for the top spot, but 3K is easier because some bosses are less powerful I think.

The next video is the top score of DTD 1.5 Hard:

Basically the guy almost managed to send the creeps altogether, and kill them gradually long after the last creeps came out into the maze. You need always to build enough sw towers to kill the air creeps, because you can't keep them in the maze. Sq towers aren't useful to air defense at all because they will always be distracted by the land creeps. So only bash towers are useful. Since you have very little money left for it, you don't worrying how to put more of them together with boost towers.

The maze isn't that important as long as you have two alternative paths, gold efficient at the beginning, and space efficient at the end. My staggered DNA pattern works rather well, with three DNA pattern on each path, and utilizing the remaining desktop space as maze. But since you have to share the pellet towers in the two paths to save gold and space, the DNA pattern aren't necessary.

The surprise is the splash towers. Not only that they fire at everybody in range, but they are completely frozen for a long time. I gave them up because of the seemingly weak power for the money. But the freezing allows the other weapons to be many times more effective. So killing the air bosses becomes very easy.

After I saw the true master at play, I decided that this isn't my game. It's all about timing, more of a shoot-them-all game than a war strategy game. Getting the timing right initially is hard but there's not much potential to optimize.

I could have completely cured of the addiction if I hadn't see the 10K fun:

The juggling strategy for the hard mode won't work anymore over 50 levels. But, you can't survive without a little bit of juggling. So it's a balanced game. But at the end, you have to use a lot of splash towers, and reserve a large central area for all the towers. So there aren't much variation to the maze and the use of the splash towers become more of a shoot-them-all game.

Desktop Tower Defence - not so great after all

2007-12-21T14:26:00.000-08:00

After some scientific research, the whole game is reduced into a spread sheet. There are not enough randomness to sustain the game. Only the spawn creeps have some randomness in the way they spawn into several smaller creeps. Also the creeps are dumb. Once you figure out a good way to kill the creeps, they are all dead sooner or later. The mazes don't make a lot of difference when at the end it's all about fire power.

Most weapons are smoke screens on the hard mode for example. You have little choice on a few of the useful weapons.

After I killed all the creeps with ease, I researched how the highest scores are achieved. I think they are smoke screens too. The scores with videos to back up aren't that high. I think many high scores in the scoreboard are categorized by mistake or deliberately. I looked at the associated mazes. Though mazes don't tell you the full story because it's a snapshot of the final moment, but some mazes contain too much money in it for the hard mode. Maybe the money is possible at the very end, but then it's unrelated to how to pass the most difficult stages.

After so long, I should think the highest score gurus would have come out to explain how they invented the winning strategy and earn the bragging right. Perhaps they want to keep it a secret because the game is so simple. Once they tell you everybody know how to beat it with ease, unlike every other console games. Perhaps the scoreboard is really one big smoke screen to keep people playing.

The challenge mode and fun mode are giveaways. The game itself doesn't have that much variation. By using totally different rules, you are playing different games when the original game is done and dead.

Killing all creeps gives you about 7,000 points. If you send the creeps earlier you earn more points. These extra points are about linear, more or less the same at every level. So to get some of the high scores, almost you have to send all creeps at once, which isn't possible. I estimated the max scores possible is about 10,000. I don't know how some 14,000 can be achieved in the hard mode.

So this is my final take on the game, unless some guru come out and explain how they earn high scores. And it have to be interesting, that is, related to real war strategy.

Swarm tower: it's much more efficient for air defense than squirt towers. It had to be at the dead center of the desktop. When you have two, put the 2nd one next to the dead center. The upgrade sequence is simple. When you are at level 7xN, your tower should be SW N. But you don't need any swarm for the first flying creeps when N=1. This assumes that you have a strong enough squirt tower to help with air defense, not busy with other creeps.

For level 7x7, you need two equivalent sw6 towers, such as one sw6 touching two bo5 (50% boost) towers. For level 7x8, flying bosses, you need the equivalent of four sw6 towers, such as two sw6 touching four bo5 towers. Also for the flying bosses you need two frost towers, fr6, to cover both boss.

There could be variations that I didn't exhaust. If you only slow down only one boss, each boss in theory absorb twice the fire power. I did tried with one fr6 to slow down one boss. It worked pretty good but not very consistent. If you need two fr6 to slow down one boss, it doesn't save you $250. You can have five bo5 (maximum boost towers) touching one sw6. It's not too good but it works better with an extra sw5 touching four bo5. I didn't exhaust all these, but the money saved doesn't seem to be that great, so you don't gain a lot of fire power for the other creeps.

You need only one bash tower, the priority of upgrade. It kills all creeps all at once passing through, the strategy to have high scores by sending the next wave of creeps early. But you cannot have bash alone because they cannot kill any boss for their short range. The best "maze" for bash is the cross but degenerates into one square block, and you try to surround the bash so creeps have to run along it on all four sides. See DNA defense in earlier post. But this conflicts with boost towers, which has to touch the bash.

The compromise for the bash maze is for the tower to touch two (or even three) boost towers. There are still three sides for the creeps to run along. This still look somewhat like the DNA defense.

You need only one squirt tower. You need a long range weapon to kill the bosses, and certainly the spawns. It's sufficient if this tower is boosted by two (or three) boost towers. The best maze is a cross three square in width initially, and five square in width at the end. You force the creeps to run around your cross. Your cross have to be small to survive the initial attacks with little money, and enlarging your cross is easy and cheap to do, but very effective. You should integrate one corner or one side of the cross with the bash maze.

You upgrade your squirt along with the bash. You need a spread sheet to be optimum. But simply put, you upgrade when you have money, bash first, until you bay $290 for the squirt before $260 for the bash. And it doesn't matter that much if you are good.

So you have one bash, one squirt, and one swarm. When they are all upgraded to the full, you try to touch them as much as possible with 4 or even more boost towers. When you get to the flying bosses, you need in addition one sw6 touching 4 bo5, and two fr6 covering each flight path.

You also need the so called juggling to send the creeps back and forth at some point. With my sufficient fire power, you can keep juggling to a minimum. Juggling means you don't have good design and enough fire power. The creeps will accumulate and divert fire power if you juggle too much.

For the last two bosses, you must send them out together, so no remaining creeps are to be released. All maze blocks part of the creep's entrance so they are forced into the heart of the maze. When no more creeps are released, you can just unblock the entrance, and block the exit of the maze, so the creeps have to go all the way back to where they started. For a good design they will be killed before they reach the entrance. There are no extra maze needed for juggling.

The only other case you need juggling is for the spawns, especially for the bosses at level 48. But since the next creeps are flying with no more creeps coming out for a long time, you can do the same as the final bosses. But if the spawns aren't killed soon enough, the squirts will be diverting fire power from the flying creeps. Anyway, a little juggling can save you a lot of money for other things. In practice, you need to add a little extra maze such as the DNA pattern to slow down the creeps at the entrance and exit, to give you enough response time to sell and buy blocks.

One possible variation, if boosting the frost towers further slow down the creeps, it would be very useful. But I doubt it, the game isn't that complicated, such as that the boost towers don't boost each other. And if the slow down can be boosted, the game would be too easy.

Triple Cross Defense

2007-11-30T10:32:00.000-08:00

After managing to kill everything at the Desktop Tower Defense, I was trying to be scientific to get higher scores. I used the Flying Boss at the easy and normal modes for measuring the effectiveness of the towers, when only one defense tower is present. You need a strong boss to survive after the assault so you can measure the residue health points.

The main deduction is the firing rate which isn't disclosed in the game. It confirms that the Swarm towers are much more effective than the Squirt towers. And that it's always much more cost efficient to upgrade than to duplicate one. And since Swarm towers are for air defense only, we have to have a mixed defense with Sw towers. Though I manage to kill all flying creeps with Sq towers only except for the Flying Bosses.

Looking at the range data explains a lot of things. Why the DNA² defense is so effective with a Bash tower inside, but doesn't work that well when putting other things inside, or to join the basic unit into larger chains. It confirms what I have been doing is right, wrapping the creep's path around Sq towers, which seemed to be in conflict with the square defense.

Trying to force the creeps around your tower for as long as possible, the basic pattern is a cross build from squares, with your tower in the middle. You try to block the creeps to run around your cross. For maximum range of an Sq (90), the size of a cross is 5 squares in width. For short range weapons such as Bash towers (50), the cross degenerates into a single square, which explains the effectiveness of the square defense. For long ranges, variations of the cross maze are possible, as long as the creeps are forced to run around the circle within range.

Frost towers are the big surprise. They slows down the creeps from a factor of 0.85 to 0.6. So for $200, you can increase the damage of a tower by 1/0.6, or 66%. This is in a way much cheaper than a Boost tower, which cost $500 for 50%. Though they work differently. The frost towers slow down the creeps that pass through, while the Bo's increases the damage of the towers touching them.

Before building the most effective maze, we need to know what weapons are needed and how many of them. Oh yes, it's hen and egg, as the maze determines the total damage that a tower inflicts on the creeps.

Anyway the Flying bosses are one of the most difficult to kill. It turns out that you need 4 Sw6 (Swarm tower level 6, or Storm tower) and 4 Sq6 with Fr6. You can have more Sw and less Sq but the Sq are shared with ground defense. With Boost towers, it's never worthwhile to build more than two towers. So all you need is two Sw6 and two Sq6, all touching two Bo5 (50% boost). Fr6 has the same range as Sw6, so you probably need two Fr6 to cover the two Sw6's, ensuring a consistent 0.6 air speed reduction.

Spawn creeps are the most difficult to kill land creeps. When you kill one, two little spawn creeps are born with half the strength each. So the Spawns are effectively twice as strong as any others in the same level. It also means that you can not kill them with a short range weapon no matter how strong.

So the defense is based on three crosses, one for Ba (which degenerates into a square), and two for the two Sq, which are sufficient for land defense as well as air. You can do without Ba's but since they splashes (killing everyone within range), I think it's the key to high score by sending in creeps earlier. I doubt if you can do without Sq's because given enough time with a proper cross, it provides the most damage per unit cost.

So the basic strategy is for the Ba to at least kill the first generation Spawns, and then the other Sq's take over. Each Ba can deliver three blows when creeps (speed factor 1) are forced to run along it on all 4 sides. The upgrade sequence is something like this, the first is the level number which are spawns.

6 sq3
13 ba1 sq4 sw2
20 ba3 sq5 sw3
27 ba4 sq6 sw4
34 ba5 sq6 sq5 sw5
41 ba6 sq6x2 sw6
48 all +80% fr6
55 ba6 sq6x2 sw6x2 +100% fr6x2

Initially you have to merge a square, as in the DNA ² defense earlier, with a small cross 3 square wide. Any larger you are wasting resources and wouldn't survive the attacks. When you reach sq6 you have to knock down the borders and enlarge the cross to 5 square wide if possible. When you have two sq you merge the two crosses together side by side overlapping. The total range are halved due to overlapping, but the fire power is doubled there. This also allows mounting space for touching Bo's and Sw's. The first Sw must be in the dead center of the desktop where the Flying bosses pass through.

The other way to force creeps running around your guns is to sell a Pellet tower to open up some 2nd passage and block the 1st passage. It's no fun as it's increasing slow to sell towers. You might save time by having three or more openings so one is open, one is closed and the other is being sold. But I don't think it's the road to high score, which needs a high kill rate. My strategy kill everything without selling and juggling except for the 2nd last Morph Bosses. You may go to the scoreboard to see my humble scores - theplayer, and there is a group score with me in it - players.

Now perhaps when there's nothing to discover, I might go back to my real desktop, top score or not.

Desktop Tower Defender

2007-11-15T14:33:00.000-08:00

I stumbled upon this game and I was addicted. This is the winning strategy.

If you like Ages of the Empire but have no patient, this is for you. There are sufficient variations to apply your warfare theories but the rules are limited so the game can be defeated with not too much practice and research. So, it won't last forever, and you will be back to your real desktop very soon.

The weapons:

The Pellet tower is like Napoleon's foot soldiers. They can hold their lines well, their fire power is decent, but they fire too slow. You needs lot of them. Although their damage/cost is good, the (rate of damage) / cost is poor compared to the Squirt Tower which fires much more rapidly. They do not worth upgrading for more damages. However, like pawns in chess, they are very important. They are cheap, they are plenty, they are disposable.

The Squirt Tower is like machine guns or cannons. The rate of damage / cost is best as they fire non-stop. This is the main weapon of choice.

The Bash Tower is like a land mine redeployed in a short time after every explosion. Or it's like a fixed cannon. It has the best damage/cost ratio. It fires very slow but it damages enemies all around it. It's complements the Squirt Tower.

The Swarm Tower is like anti-aircraft artillery. It fires 4 missiles at the same time. It's a little slower than the Squirt Tower, which is for air and ground, while the Swarm Tower is for air defense only. I'm sure this is necessary. In the beginning, Pe and Sq are good at defending the first wave. When all the weapons are upgraded, the Sq seems to be increasing effective. There is a strange value for the last upgrade. It is apparent that it's better to build another tower than paying for the final upgrade. Anyway, one tower is about enough to kill off all aircrafts, except for the flying BOSS, which are almost impossible to kill. But I'm getting there.

All other weapons are not worth it. They do not have sufficient damage at the final upgrade. Just the Sq and Ba can get the job done. The dart tower is pretty good at the Groups but redundant when you fire power increases. I still don't find the Ink Tower effective against anything. The Snap Tower is just too weak for the big Bosses.

One useful piece is the Frost Tower, which slows your enemy down.

The Boost Tower is only useful if you have several towers placed around it. It's may be useful in the final stages when you have a lot of money and a lot of weapons. For example, it only make sense if you have three Sw towers put together to use Bo. Otherwise it's better to buy another one.

The basic strategy is to slow your enemy down to absorb fire. It's the classic square formations to defend against cavalry charge. For the desktop, I came up with the DNA² defense based on this formation of Pe's. Obviously Pe's are used because they are the cheapest. You replace some Pe's with other weapons, and put others around it.

I think it's the cheapest way to get your enemy run the most, taking fire at all sides, it's also the most compact in terms of area.

Of course you don't use only one. The pattern can be repeated indefinitely, can be packed very closely to fit your desktop defense space. You can rotate it, flip it, to form long strands something like DNA spirals. Typically you shape your strands so you have plenty of spaces in the middle of the desktop for deployment additional weapons, typically air defense.

Actually you don't need anything else but Pe's in the DNA² formation. You don't need rapid fire Sq because 10 Pe's firing at random is as good as a Sq. However, the Spawn are pretty good at spoiling things. Distributed fire by Pe's cannot deal with Spawns effectively. Every time you kill a big Spawn, you get lots of little Spawns. There's no way to really slow them down and you have to kill them several times. So you need concentrated fire power other than plenty of Pe's.

It should be noted that the Spawns can pass through the gaps some of the times when the squares are barely touching. But when they pass through one formation, they will be caught in the next. Just remember to block those vulnerable corners where the Spawns can escape to their home base. Even for this weakness, the DNA² is still much more effective when the enemies have to pass on all 4 sides of a middle square.

The deployment:

Basically you block your enemies so they only charge through your square formations. Obviously the first middle square should be a Ba. Then you need a Sq concentrated at the first corner of entry. The position is crucial. If you put it on a middle square it performs poorly. It shoots everywhere instead of concentrating on where you need it. It's optional to have a second Sq at the entrance corner of the 2nd DNA formation. Typically Spawns pass through the 1st formation will be killed in the 2nd.

The upgrade strategy:

A few of the DNA formation can kill most enemies, with just a Ba and two Sq's. You want the most concentrated fire power. So you upgrade the Ba and the Sq on the same first DNA formation as soon as you can. The 2nd Sq should be one or two upgrades behind. I think on the final upgrade, the Sq are more effective with rapid fire, but of course the Ba's damage is impressive. If you survive the initial assaults, it doesn't really matter you upgrade the Ba or Sq first, as long as you don't upgrade all two Sq first. Save some money for the Ba.

Also you need to upgrade the Sw's regularly for each air assault. When you reach the final upgrade, you should buy yourself another Sw just short or the final upgrade. But I'm not sure the final upgrade is useful. It looks like it's better to have two instead of going for the final upgrade.

Mobility:

With the simple strategies you can kill most enemies except for two types of Bosses, the Morph Bosses and the Flying Bosses. Some other bosses are pretty hard to kill too. With mobility, you can certainly kill everything on the ground.

You can trap your enemies within your DNA² formations by blocking and unblocking exits. They just run around absorbing fire. Therefore only one Ba and one Sq or two will be sufficient.

For mobility to work, you need two strands of formation. When you block one all the enemies have to go back for the opening in the 2nd strand. Timing is very important because unblocking becomes increasingly slow. You want to keep all enemies running pass your Ba again and again. You need very long strands, with 6 or more middle squares each. So you have plenty of time to unblock and block your exits.

Ultimate defense:

I can kill everything except for the flying bosses, which you cannot slow down. With 4 final upgraded Sw I manage to kill 2/3 of a flying boss. So I'm close. I'm not sure Sw is the way to go. Super guns in form of Sq are pretty good. The Bo's are pretty effective and money saving when you have a bunch of Sw and Sq trying to shoot down the flying bosses.

I have no idea how the other defenders defend. I looked at the top score once and the winning pattern is rather misleading. The person could be hiding his tracks in the final stage by selling things and buying things not needed.

I'm sure there are totally different strategies. I rather not look at them because it's part of the fun. I prefer my style, more like a warfare strategy game than shoot them down types.

Google blogroll released

2007-11-06T19:44:00.000-08:00

Of course it only make sense to generate blogrolls within Google reader - you list the blogs you read in your reader. Google reader has clips to allow you to list the feed items, but not just the source as in a blogroll. Now the Google blogroll is a slight modification of the clips, in turn is just some particular display of a feed.

I have already done a very flexible feed displayer a couple of months ago. One use of it is for blogrolls generated from Google reader. It's a lot more flexible because it's a client side script, it's a couple of months ahead too.

The essential laptop repair tool

2007-10-31T14:33:00.000-07:00

What takes it so long to design a desoldering tool that works?

The weakest link on my laptop broke - the power connector. After getting a set of precision screw driver from Lowes, I dissembled my laptop for the first time. I hope it's a simple job to replace the DC connector. But I was hopelessly wrong. The DC connector contacts needed resoldering. To get to the system board, I needed to take some components apart first. I kept unscrewing things, hoping the next screw would be the last. But I ended up taking everything apart, with little hope of putting them together correctly again. There are so many bit and pieces here and there, connectors all over, and miniature screws of different sizes that I couldn't even see properly with my naked eyes.

I took everything apart, just to find out that I could not clear the DC power connector's soldering holes. The tiny holes are filled with old solder. I could not insert the connector into position to resolder.

My classic solder sucker, in the form of a syringe, never really worked. The recoil action will pull the tip away from compact electronics, nowhere near the holes to be desoldered. I saw this new type of sucker on the Radioshack website, and something else. It's promising so I went to have a look.

I saw some standalone rubber like squeezing pumps, which make a lot of sense compared to plungers. But I don't know if there is enough suction. Then I checkout this monster combing a pump and a high wattage soldering iron. It just make so much sense. My only reservations are that if a lot of heat is needed to apply to the board, and if the board is more likely to be damaged. The other question is if this is any good, why take it so long to see something like this?

I think a lot of designers don't like to be seen holding a soldering iron. Many hobbyist don't want to be associated with repair technicians. Repair technicians are proud of their skills. So nobody needs a desoldering tool that actually works.

Perhaps it's the cost. The classic plunger last a long time, suitable for the salary and budget of repair technicians. Rubber squeezers would have to be replaced frequently. Now this monster cost more than a standard soldering iron. In the past this wouldn't be popular. But now, material and things are so cheap that a soldering iron cost next to nothing, and the two in one desoldering cost next to next to nothing.

I can vouch for it. Nothing can be more compact than a laptop. I just heat that thing up, apply solder, release the pump, and the soldering tags on the board are clean as new. What took it so long to appear on the market? Though it can be dangerous. If you squeeze the bulb by accident, steam and molten solder will blow out.

Now laptop repair or upgrade is so simple after all! I was so surprised to find out that Dell published excellent repair guides on their website. I wasted so much time searching for repair guides on the web, and taking things apart myself.

Without the guide it's hopeless to put things together again. Dell listed all the screws sizes, their numbers, and where they should be used. Dell also listed the sequences to do things, for example, if you want to get to the system board, what else you have to disassemble first. I did managed to put everything together easily. But since I didn't follow procedure to take it apart, I made some mistakes. The score:

1 screw missing
2 screws unused
blue tooth module damaged

The laptop is working fine without the screws. I never used the bluetooth module anyway. A working laptop again - priceless.

I think my time are wisely invested. The laptop was never used as anything other than a browser, and a video player. I did some work on it but I prefer to work on the desk and a desktop is much more economical to upgrade frequently. A desktop is always more powerful than a laptop too.

When my laptop can't keep up with windows and fat software, I can always load linux, which would turn it into a faster browser and video player. Beats the $300 laptops at the moment.

Book review: The 4-hour work week

2007-10-13T11:02:00.000-07:00

Tim has a blog to promote his book. I was reluctant to write a review on his book or his blog, because a book once I trashed, kept rising fast on the Amazon rank. His did get a lot of publicity everywhere, including TV. His book did get to the top of the New York Times best sellers' list. I was really disappointed by the non-fiction buying public. Don't they watch enough infomercial already?

I do agree with him on a few things. His favorite cities were San Francisco, Tokyo, Frankfurt and Buenos Aires, in descending order of living expenses. I would add London on top though. I also share his taste of Trade Joe's wine, well received by wine experts, but at only a few dollars a bottle.

First, let's look at his qualification. He called himself a serial entrepreneur, but never reviewed what his past or current business were. Understandably, his wasn't proud of his businesses, otherwise he wouldn't use the term serial. If you get something big going, you want to build it up to rival Bill Gates, Google or many other smaller flies that the big guys will acquire.

He's in the business to make money. Not that much obviously, because he is arguing that he's the new rich. He has plenty of leisure time, a very high quality of living. That's not surprising if he enjoys wine at a few dollars a bottle, while in a classy restaurant you don't even get a glass.

How does he qualifies to write such a book? He does have an ivy league education, and a short time as a corporate slave, that's about it. Obviously to work 4 hours a week to need to get some business going. But then you don't even need to work 4 hours. I think there's a misunderstanding by the book buyers. He's telling you the methodology to work 4 hours a week, not how to make enough money so that you don't need to work so much hours!

It's so obvious to me that the book is another of his business. He's doing it to finance his working 4 hours a week. But he's not telling you how to find money. Do I need somebody to tell me how to work 4 hours a week when I have enough money?

It look so like infomercial, for example, the bald guy who sell you a stock market analysis and trading software tool that guarantee you to make money. But if you get an edge in the stock market, do you really need to tell others charging $50 each? But who cares, USA is a self help country. If you have something to say that will improve people's life, earnings, or wrinkles, the infomercial will work, books will sell.

But I understand. The infomercial guru, who wrote books about non effective drugs, and effective alternative treatments that the drug company don't want you to know. He was investigated by the FDA, banned from doing many things. He found a way to get back to American satellite TV via a British broadcasting company. He sells new books about weight loss, but bundled with his old alternative medicines books for free, but most of the time he talked about the old books rather than the new one. Obviously he got around some loop holes to continue his ways. Accidentally finding myself watching him when his ad popped-up, he did have some points. But it was like brain washing.

So how many people will treat books and infomercial as brain washing Trojan horses. Your teacher says you always have to have a critical mind. You should be critical before you open yourself to possible brain washing. It's easier to be critical before watching or reading than while you were being brain wash. When you were eating popcorns, you will be much less critical about the movie. But then, if you don't read it for yourself, you may never know, or miss out. That's the whole point. People are afraid to miss out big, but not afraid to to lose a few dollars to buy a book. That's how authors earn big money.

As for the content, he doesn't review much outside of the book, or he doesn't have much to offer. I didn't read it, don't want to buy it as a principle. The big things he used for promotion was - read email only twice a day! Oh my god! I couldn't agree more. People used to do it when they login first thing in the morning, and logout when they go home, before Windows or Dos. But do I need to buy a book for this? Get a paperless life by opting for online statements. Who doesn't? Pay a dollar to get yourself off junk mails. Well, I don't know that. Maybe the book is worth it after all. Wait a minute, what's that to do with working 4 hours a week? Light years apart.

As for the underlining big picture, there's nothing new as opposite to what Tim says. Living simple was already a movement, or a trend, since the last boom and bust economic cycle, maybe a lot earlier than that. Maybe the boom of the late 90's made people forget all about it.

Outsourcing is big, but he promotes it down to personal level. Pay somebody to do your laundry for you for each piece of work. Pay a peanut salary for an well educated Indian as your remote personal assistant. Advertise on Craig's List to find somebody to cook authentic Curry Vandaloo for you for a few dollars a meal. Most of these won't work for the majority of people, or, it wouldn't worth it.

I think he's big because he used the Internet quite well. He has a huge geek following as he called himself the new rich of the digital age. Every webmaster big and small dreams to be him, harding working at all, spent most of his time flash packing all over the world. So he got great exposure on the net, all giving him positive mentions without discussing substance of the contents.

Excuse me, but I have to pick on him about his substance. He made videos and that's suppose not to be easy to forget. One video is about teaching pen flipping, that's what all students in Asia do. Is he real? They are doing it for generations already. If you give a Japanese retired CEO a pen, he will flip it unconsciously. The other video is about how to wear a tie properly - the Windor knot. Oh please! Every British male do that, as do all males the world over except for Americans. It's the same thing that the American turn cricket to baseball, and soccer/ruby into football. You won't find any other men if the world who would wear an unsymmetrical tie. If you do, he is the sort of person who would be proud of the American way, and he will call it the American style.

Let me share with you a practical proverb. Doing most things is like paddling against the river flow, if you don't go forward, you will be carried backwards. By all means look for a balanced life, but trying to keep still on a flowing river is not wise.

Exploiting the ant algorithms

2007-09-27T13:39:00.000-07:00

You can make use of the ants behavior to help get rid of them, or even use them to help you in productive ways.

As the insect terminators would say, we live in an ant hill. The entire neighborhood sits on hills, with large amount of steep, unbuildable spaces around houses that you don't have access. Even if you get rid of all ants around your property, if your yard is in any way still inhabitable for the ants after the chemicals subside, they will certainly come back. There's an unlimited supply of them.

At first I used to spray all around the house and yard with chemical spray that is attached to the hose, suitable for lawns and plants. It's effective but it doesn't last. Also it's also difficult to isolate yourself from the insecticides. You breath the water vapors with chemicals in it, the vapor blow back by the wind all over you. Then we call in the terminators. It's not any better, because they recommend to spray for you every three month standard. It's not termination. In out area, the standard won't work. Some recommend to spray every other month, using expensive but safer chemicals.

Basically it's a waster of money. When I don't see the ants eye to eye, they don't bother me. Not that they destroy anything significant. When there are two many of them coming to attack everything, I can just spray around. Just 10 min's of work, using a whole bottle of lawn insecticide. And then I went for a decontamination shower.

But I didn't do it anymore. I observed that the ant algorithms are very simple:
* ants only live in hidden dry areas
* ants need water and food
* ants travel in the shortest paths

My new strategy is draw them out, find the colony and kill them all. You don't really need to draw them out. After intense heat wave, they will go out in search of water. After heavy rain, they will move their flooded colony to a new dryer place. When I want to draw them out when I want, I would flood the boundary of the yard or any possible dry spots around the house. Also, dog food pellets are the best bait, never fails, while the ant baits with poisons in hardware stores never work.

Once the ants need to go out, they are very much exposed. They like to travel on flat surfaces without obstacles, even if they are exposed out in the open, under intense heat and sunlight. They don't like to travel across plants or soil, which are obstacle courses compared to flat stones or concrete. So if you fill any gaps in your stone or concrete pathway with paving sand for example, the ants will certainly march along the surface of the pathway.

Other favorite places where ants like to travel are fences, the outdoor damp prove course several inches above base level of the house.

Ants are easy to find in these areas in plain sight. They just don't like to hide under grass or ground cover. Follow the line and you know where their colonies are.

To kill them I use a hand operated spray, with chemicals that can be used on fruits. It doesn't take much spray to flood their colony with insecticides. And if you like, you can spray on the whole line of ants sometimes a 100 feet long, often made up of most of the colony.

The ants come because there's some food. It's time to harvest the fruits before the ants. Or your sprinklers do not cover all the lawn, with some dry spots. Or you have some cracks outside the house, allowing the ants to get in for a cool dry shelter. Without ants, these spots are hard to find. Ants are just so useful!

Mexican Drip Irrigation

2007-09-25T14:55:00.000-07:00

My house has a standard 1/2 irrigation system. However, the previous owner must had designed the layout and laid the pipes himself. Nothing is right. Grass is supposed to grow right up to the edge of the house and the fences. It is extremely difficult to cover all the areas to be watered.

But that doesn't bother my gardener. He adjusted all the sprinklers so that all green things are covered. He doesn't care how much water is wasted. He doesn't care about water damage to the stucco. Those are not his problems. I changed new quality spray heads and adjust the spraying distance without success.

Out of frustration I changed to drip irrigation gradually. Initially it looked good. Though the 1/2 underground pipes are fixed, I can now place 1/4 tubes over the ground wherever I wanted, so the tiny, precise spray heads are right next to the plants. Can't do anything about the standard pop-up sprinklers, but with the help of fixed drip irrigation spray heads, I can cover grass that the pop-ups cannot.

The problem is, the 1/4 adapters got blown off by the water pressure, or the spray heads got blown off. But I cannot install a pressure reducer that is usual for drip irrigation. My system is mixed. Though this could be done if I change over completely. Luckily I didn't. Silly me. Recently, when I replaced the shut-off valve to the yard, I discovered that my pressure regulator deals with water to my house only. All other water are not regulated.

So my irrigation system was at over 100 psi. No matter the electric valves cannot be adjusted and so short lived. No matter something burst all the time. No matter all the sprinklers and spray heads seem to be out of control with water spraying everything. No matter it was so difficult to adjust the volume of everything. No matter that when something was wrong with my neighbor's swimming pool plumbing, we both burst some sprinklers together.

The major problem was my gardener, his successors, and their whole team members. When they clear weeds they will clear the over ground 1/4 tubes too. Or they will cut the spray heads off without knowing. It's not surprising because often they destroy indestructible pop-up sprinklers with their mowers.

Gradually I moved back to a standard 1/2 system, leaving nothing over ground to be destroyed. My 1/4 system resigned to the garage.

Until recently it dawned on me that I was visiting the wrong department for drip irrigation. I used to get everything from the garden center - the 1/2 to 1/4 adapters, the tubes, the spray heads, the connectors. Either they are too tough to join together, or too easy to connect but will be immediately blown off when water pressure is applied.

I also used the standard plumbing department for 1/2 tubes and connectors. I tried to add something rigid, like splitting one outlet into two, before converting it to 1/4 at the end, which is much less rigid.

It suddenly dawned on me that the ice making, 1/4 tubing department, that I visited many times for my reverse osmosis system, are compatible with the 1/4 drip irrigations. I never realized that the drip irrigation uses standard 1/4 tubes. That made a lot of difference.

Now instead of the T's and couplers from hell, I just use quick connect. It's a few dollars a piece but saving my fingers is priceless. The 1/2 to 1/4 adapters are industrial strength, not plastic toys as from the drip department. Now designing and installing the system is a joy.

Now I have more tricks to fix the system in place. In the past I rely on stakes to hold the tubes and spray heads. Now I can use rigid 1/4 tubes as far as I can. In the past my stakes get bigger and bigger so as to survive the onslaught of my gardeners and their teams. Now I use custom made acrylic pieces to hold the tubes and spray heads, and glue or screw the whole thing to something rigid. As the acrylic is crystal clear. The whole thing can look good or not visible at all.

One final thing. All spray heads are directly pushed or screwed into the end of tube directly. I will now only use the screw ones which is easier. And before screwing them into the tubes, I apply some gorilla glue. In the past you can hardly reuse the spray head this way. Now all the spray heads are mostly attached to half an inch of tube, to be pushed effortlessly into quick connectors.

Now I can add something, change the spray heads, replace damaged materials fast. Don't know why don't sell it that way, instead of in 3 separate areas of the plumbing department.

Scam: reverse osmosis permeate pump and valve

2007-09-22T12:52:00.000-07:00

Not exactly scam, but depends on who and how they sell it. The permeate pump is certified, made of harmless material, and won't fall apart, but it is the magic bullet as claimed in the manufacturer's Aquatec website? No. But since they only sell it to distributors, they give you no specification and they are not responsible how you use it. But now these companies know that nothing can stop people selling things to individuals on eBay, they are a bit careful on their website, in order not to develop a scandal.

Many pumps are sold to retrofit existing systems. But notice the 75 psi feed input on the main diagram on their website. If you haven't got that pressure, it very doubtful it will work well. And if you got all that pressure, it's doubtful if you need a pump to get good results.

Standard main water pressure depends on water district, but should be 50 psi, which is the value for sprinkler specification. You may get higher pressure if you live uphills in individual houses, where the water pressure gradually decrease downhills to 50 psi for houses at the bottom. In this case you need a pressure regulator, which is usually factory preset to 50 to 60 psi, with 75 psi as the absolute rating. So basically, now that the permeate pump isn't new anymore, Aquatec is basically saying you need a booster pump without admitting it. A booster pump cost twice as much and gives you a lot of improvement if your feed is just 50 psi. It's crazy if you use a booster pump plus a permeate pump. Since I have 75 psi without the need for a booster pump, I'm OK. It wouldn't work well for 60 psi, and I can prove it.

When the tank is empty, that is, no back pressure to the membrane, the membrane sees the full pressure of about 70 psi. The pump is supposed to maintain the back pressure to at most a few psi so the full 70 psi pressure is maintained at all times. With the right flow restrictor, there should be enough pressure and flow in the brine/concentrate to do that. But I found out that the recovery rate have to be high at about 25%. Which means that the drinking water to waste water ratio is 1:3. This is far from the usual 1:4, or 20%, and far from the specified Filmtec membrane recovery of 15%.

But all is not lost. At 70 psi, even 25% recovery gives 98% stable rejection, which is the same specified rejection at 50 psi and 15% recovery. So with a virtual booster pump, and a permeate pump, I can't get better rejection but I waste half the water, 1:3 recovery instead of 1:6 recovery.

It won't work if you don't have 75 psi main feed. Say at 60 psi feed, you have about 50 psi across the membrane, and clearly at this pressure, you need 15% recovery to achieve anywhere near 98% rejection. 25% recovery is far off.

It's doubtful if you need any pump when you have 75 psi pressure. A 75 gpd membrane becomes 110 gpd which is a hell lot of water. But since the pressure is constant across the membrane, it's easy to design your system, and the performance is guaranteed under all circumstances. In other words, peace of mind.

In pumpless systems, basically the water is excellent when the tank is empty. Then the water tend to get worse as the tank fills up, or you waste a lot more water without realizing it, that's what Aquatec is trying to market their pumps. With typical usage, the system works most often when only a few cup or a kettle of water is being drawn from the tank. The water is worse or wasting most water when the pressure across the membrane is often 50% to 33% of an empty tank.

Actually I would like to write software to design residential systems. Dow has free software but far too complex and did not give out parameters for the residential membranes. So I couldn't do anything but to use 75 psi main pressure. The pressure is constant and everything is constant so it's easy to design.

And now the cutoff valve. It's not cheap at 1/3 of the pump price. But does it worth it? Nobody claims that it's necessary but say enough that you will buy it. I was surprised to find out that the valve don't cutoff at 90%, but about the same as the old valves about 66%. I talked to the distributors and manufacturer and it seems that they are well prepared. The distributor send me over to the manufacturer, who promise to test it and replace it if it's defective. But I am not to expect 90%, but 85% depending on pressure.

I almost sent it off when I realized that now the cutoff pressure of my tank will be the main pressure of most people, at 50 psi. It will be crazy to increase that to 65 psi. I don't need that and the pump may not work at that pressure. Also, the valve turn back on at 30 psi, giving 20 psi of hysteresis so the system won't turn on and off whenever people drawn a glass of water or a kettle of water. I don't know if my old valve do that. But since the new valve has JG connectors that are easy for me to measure things, and that the tubings are fitted already, I rather not go back to the old one.

Previously I have doubts about measuring pressure when water is flowing. But I find that it's very accurate, the dynamic pressure into the tank equals exactly the static pressure when the tank is isolated. After all, what else can it be? Now I left the pressure gauge dangling in a T piece somewhere in the water path. And since I needed a tank shutoff valve as an adapter for the standard gauge, I can shut off the valve so the gauge isn't in contact with potable water when not in use.

Camping tech

2007-09-14T18:22:00.000-07:00

Most CA state camp grounds have free Wi-Fi access. It's a simple thing to do but made me think of an unrelated question: can we be modern nomads? For the rules, state parks usually have 1 or 2 week maximum stay per camp site, 1 month max stay per year within a county. It's not much but there are local sites that do not belong to the states, and there are federal sites. And there are 52 states!

But would you do that? Kids need to go to school, and that's that. Though home schooled kids aren't that rare, so moving every other week may not be too bad.

I love outdoors. Half a lifetime ago, space was so precious that I rather go camping when I could, even in tropically wet weather, walking for hours with all equipment on my shoulders. Tents weren't even draft and water proof.

I touched a tent again a couple of years ago. I saw one small and cheap on sale and picked it up for earthquake preparation. And forgot about it.

It turns out that Rangers looking after the camp sites have rather dangerous jobs. For popular beaches near urban centers, there's the drunks. Now for remote sites, they often go into heavy gun fights with the pot growers, with millions worth of pots at sake. Other than those, crimes usually aren't premeditated. You don't plan to rob somebody random in remote areas. Without premeditation, it's hard to get away with it, such as the Yosemite killings. For the good part, no where else in the world you get to live in a free gated community, with armed guards until 10 pm, then total lock down until dawn. Here I bet criminals can't run, they can only drive. I doubt if anyone will try to do the hard work when they can't get in or get away with a car.

Tasers are going to be very affordable, may be as popular as pepper sprays. You can also draw up visible and invisible boundaries with infrared, laser and lots of cams. But for the moment, camping is still a very much friendly family affair. The rangers will check you up at least twice a day. When the sites aren't too busy, they will remember you if your clean car looks out of place, thinking that you are newbies and needs extra attention. Sites owned by rich counties are even better.

The bad thing about camping in CA is that you are basically living on dirt. You don't have a lawn if you don't have sprinklers, unless you camp by the river. But most "rivers" dries up in summer, while winter is too cold. So you have to have tents for bed rooms, that you only get in for sleeping, when you are presumably clean. You need separate living spaces, sheltered from the sun, and preferably from insects. You also need changing rooms too. You don't want to walk in and out of bedrooms with feet full of dirt. You also don't want to kick everybody out of the living rooms just to change into some special gear, such as swim suit. And for the beaches, you need to bring a cabana to the water front.

Modern materials are amazing. My cheap made in China tents and canopies has very light flexible support poles, wafer thin fabric. But still I couldn't manage to make a hole in anything. All zippers are still working. The fine insect screen didn't break at all even after attacked all night by raccoons. I can carry all the "rooms" easily in my trunk, and I can erect huge canopies alone.

That's why I don't fancy RV's. It's two cramped in comparison.

As for creature comfort, you are spoiled for choice in chairs and beds, king size down to twin, high tech air bed, or self inflated. Satellite TV dish are portable. If you don't like the free WiFi access, there's the true satellite broadband service. Food is always great, briquettes are always better than gas grill back home. The match lighted ones are as convenient as butane gas.

Now the dreaded loo. Public showers aren't that bad. Typically hot showers are coin operated with a large gas boiler, giving decent pressure and volume. If you are fuzzy you can bring your own shower tent. With solar heating and battery pumps, a private shower room can be barely decent. Of course RV's all got these, and with electricity hookups, RV's can afford decent heaters and powerful pumps.

The public toilets are very clean, but only in the morning right after they cleaned it. At busy seasons it's terrible after an hour or two, even though most campers try to minimize their mess. Imagine McDonald only clean it's toilets once a day! Some more remote places are called environmental sites, where there are only so called chemical toilets. Terrible! terrible! I would rather die of blocking.

RV seems to be a lot better with it's own toilet. You still need to deal with the mess but it's your own toilet and your own mess.

But not anymore. It must be fairly new, because the majority of toilets for sale are till big buckets. You store your mess in it, may be put some fragrance in it after every use, and god knows how you empty that and clean that afterward.

Now there are high absorbency powder to turn liquid waste into jelly, and semi solid waste will become more solid with odor reduced. Instead of a bucket, you empty into a toilet seat with big plastic bags underneath. Whenever you want, you seal the plastic bag with another, throwing the whole thing into trash. I suppose the concept isn't that new. But now all the materials are biodegradable, the water tight plastic bags degenerates within 6 months. It was approved by everybody, endorsed by me. Now a toilet/shower tent is lighter than a typical camping chair. You can have your out house wherever you want, with a view if you want. The worst nightmare becomes a joy. RV's aren't that good. There's totally no mess to deal with. The plastic bags aren't cheap, but I'll still go for it if they sell it like crack.

Maybe someday dry toilets are the way to go back home. The flush toilet has been haled as a great invention, but may be a big mistake. Dry toilets do not waste water. A out house in the yard is no problem at all. You can have one for each in the family if you want. For apartments you can have ventilation rooms, which are easier to build than conventional toilets. Perhaps doing it in a slightly larger closet is good. Houses can be smaller without the toilets, and it's simpler without all the plumbings.

The perfect geek material

2007-09-12T14:37:00.001-07:00

I never like wood, but I thought it was the only material that you can custom in your garage. Over the years I have a circular saw to cut 2"x4" beams for play things, now the saw is being recalled. I also have a little power sander to smooth the coarse wood so as for the surface not to be too tough for the touch. I once brought a jigsaw to build a custom corner table. I thought it was good but it got thrown away. An fake antique table replaced it.

I was looking for something to replace the cardbox in the yard, when I come across acrylic. I thought it was perfect. It's look like glass, lighter but tougher. And you can cut it to size with a knife. Perfect, just what I needed. So I designed a rather complicated box with lots of compartments, doors and openings in it, using a free CAD package.

I fit my design into a 2'x4' flat piece of acrylic at 1/8" thick. When the piece comes, it was perfect. It really looks good, crystal clear. It was protected by plastic film so you cannot scratch it while cutting it. The thickness is just right. It's just tough for you to build a strong box. Any thicker cost a lot more, and any thinner it feels plastic instead of glass. But there's one catch. There's no way you can cut it with a knife, at least not a decent long edge.

So I brought out my jigsaw. It's tough work. It's very slow to cut through the acrylic compared to wood that is a lot thicker, which is expected. Also, you cannot make a straight cut with a jigsaw, unless you have a decent work bench, which I don't. I should have ordered custom cutting which is more expensive than the material itself. At least for the long cuts, I should use some help. But I soldiered on.

The good thing is that, at a right saw speed, the blade create just enough heat to melt through the acrylic, but not too much melting, giving a nice smooth edge. The saw dust are basically acrylic melted into tiny beads. It's everywhere but a lot more pleasant than wood dust and it's much easy to clean.

The bad - the unexpected jigsaw instead of a knife leaves me with rectangles big and small, all without straight edges and right angles! I know it would be a challenge to fit the pieces together. Also, the dimensions are more than 1/8" off after cutting. So I have to run through the CAD package to made alterations as I went along.

Luckily I brought some small right angled wedges to help to glue the pieces together at the corner, and some squared tubes to help with the squareness of my box. And I settled for some toxic solvents for a quick welding of the pieces, instead of using slow solvents and requiring clamps that I don't have, and don't know how to apply in small spaces.

You can imagine the final box is comparable to a cardboard box using coarse tapes to stick the pieces together. But acrylic is something. You can see the glue, it's clear but there are bubbles in it. It's hard not to use excessive glue for the uneven pieces. It drys hard and visible, but it's as clear as the acrylic. Basically it's just acrylic melted and reformed. The wedges at the corners are ugly, no sides are straight and barely square. No edges are smooth.

But the whole junk is rather addictive to look at. It's my junk and it's like glass suspending in glass. You got to enjoy the fine details, like uneven application of the glues on the edges and hinges. The curved edges, and the blurred edges just like glass. Best of all, it's tough and highly functional. If I order custom cutting for the large pieces, or invest in a bench saw, it would be perfect the 2nd time round.

I can imagine 1/16" thick sheets will be perfect for delicate things, such as custom electronic enclosures. You should be able to cut it accurately using knifes. Polish the edges and use thin glues that make perfect invisible joints. You can drill small accurate holes, or cut out large portions for a screen mount etc. You can order custom laser cutting for you name to stick on it too.

The major problem I had was needing a lot of motors with gearboxes to mount on my beautiful junk. It's just too expensive compared to the whole box, and looked ugly. You can get bare motors a lot cheaper, compact and powerful. But without gears and crank arms they are useless. So after exhausting the web to find something suitable, I cut a little piece of acrylic as the crank arm and drill a hole in it. I put the bare motor shaft in it and glue them together using gorilla glue. It surprised me that now it's a very tough crank arm! The rest of the problem is mounting the motor onto the box. It just need another small piece and screws to clamp the motor securely in place. Now even the motor mount and the crank arm are transparent and look good, with screw suspending in mid air.

I fell in love.

Prototyping down memory lane

2007-09-12T12:36:00.000-07:00

It is also a story of what can go wrong went wrong.

Remember I needed some basic electronics for a useful purpose. So I went ahead to design and build a circuit. I want it to be battery or DC adapter operated, it's also a battery backup and charger. The backup and charger part turns out to be rather complicated, which explains my chargers are so bad. I can use lithium batteries and make use of a single chip to do all I wanted, but the chip is used for cell phones, surface mount with no leads, only tiny pads under the chip. No way I can deal with that by hand. So I give that up for the moment and the circuit is strictly Either battery OR DC adapter.

I actually never build much circuits. The kits on sale are rather tame. If they are any good they would design consumer products. Also, you just learn soldering if you build those. I did build something important once with a lot of chips with wrapping tools. With low power you need low noise, together with surface mount components, wire wrapping are way out of fashion. I hate using solderless prototyping boards. I don't need to test everything first. And it's too expensive to use the boards as the final product.

However, once upon a time copper becomes previous metal. So the prototyping boards with lots of copper strips disappeared. The best I can find is some rather expensive boards with just holes on it and a solder tag around it. (But somehow the PCBs plated with coppers are still around, but I have no patient for the slow turn around of making PCBs). I made the mistake of trying it assuming the lack of rails is no big deal.

Firstly, the real time clock and alarm I ripped off from a timer switch is too good, it worked on 1V instead of 3V on my circuit. I knew about it but I thought CMOS would work with wide voltages but not for that clock. So I added another battery to supply the clock and added a transistor to pull up the alarm signal up to 3V.

I chose components to minimize chip and connection count. But the choice of components off the shelf is limited. More importantly, I misread an unimportant part of my own circuit, the gates are to be repeated on all signals in the bus, but I allocated components and space just for one signal. So I have no chips or no space for all the signals. But I can live with that for a prototype.

Without ground and supply rails, the soldering is a nightmare. Every connection is by a wire, and I didn't have the magnet wires, insulated wires with coating that melts when soldered. So I have to strip every wire before soldering using a blunt, large soldering iron. When I brought the iron, I wanted one that is powerful enough to for thick electrical repairs, and also doubles for electronic work if I ever needed. So the tip always touch two chip leads when soldering. It's a nightmare. But I soldered on hoping to get out of hell as soon as possible.

At the end it was spaghettis over and under a plate in 3-D. It was hell. Worse, nothing works that surprised me. The IO drivers all don't work so I don't know what's going on. And I have only a hand held multimeter to trouble shoot. Funny that the main fault was laughable. I used CMOS design for the first time as my real circuit needed to be low powered. The basic quad NAND gates have different pin outs with the TTL versions!!! Just 1 in the 4 gates have different pin outs, but just enough to make everything not working. I vaguely remember that it was to differentiate that it is CMOS rather than TTL. But nowadays you will use the same pinouts, even if it cost you more to manufacturer. But now the CMOS pinout is history and you have to remain compatible.

And since the circuit was a hopeless mess of spaghettis, I had to find another fresh circuit board to start over. Luckily I found an ancient copper stripped board in my garage just enough to fit the chips that I have. It now looks better but still a lot of spaghettis, but less painful to build.

The circuit at least work as expected but a lot of strange happenings, like on and off of motors and LED's when not expected. The power on reset doesn't work as the microprocessor in the real time clock takes a few seconds to reset, while my own circuit resets for a much shorter time. Now it's a random start, but since I cut down the number of states due to insufficient space and chips, it's only head and tails.

The manual reset doesn't work either. I suppose the pull-up resistor is too large to save current. But I can always reset by touching the contact with a wire connected to ground or supply.

The unexpected on and off is due to a long alarm signal. I have a timer circuit to control the width of the pulse, and to isolated the alarm signal once activated. But I got it wrong assuming it's trivial. So I have to indulge into some Boolean math to arrive at an asynchronous finite state circuit with minimum gates, which have to be a modern classic. But I needed 3 NAND gates. So instead of blinking LED's to save current, some are not blinking to save some gates for the modern classic.

It's working now for weeks on two AA batteries. But very recently I found out that the sparks of a small motor nearby will cause the circuit to change state for certain. It's no big deal as I have to redesign the whole thing anyway.

The perfect reverse osmosis system

2007-09-12T00:06:00.000-07:00

Perfect also means a good price :-)

The feed shut off valve is not enough. It takes forever to shut off the system and restart. I suggest to add a plastic ball valve right after the feed valve. Surprisingly, the ball valve carried at Lowes carry a cancer causing material warning, but it's sold along side NSF approved tubings. I would buy a valve with John Guest connectors. And since JG seemed to be patented, there's always a minute but ultra fine JG symbol somewhere, even though the manufacturer's name wasn't on the component. This is very typical. Manufacturers don't normally make all the component of an RO system. So they mainly sell to OEM's, unmarked or marked with the OEM's name. BTW, JG is also a company producing many components.

You can easily find NSF approved 1/4" tubing in hardware stores, for fridge ice makers. For the filter housings, what can go wrong? It's hard to check if those components are NSF approved, as most makers sell them to OEM's. And then the whole system is approved rather than individual components. But I bet all housings are made of FDA approved food grade plastics, and that any housing looks like any others. But I'm not so sure about the O-rings used to seal the filters. There are NSF or FDA approved O-rings on sale fit for standard housings. And there are approved silicon grease to be applied on the O-rings to seal.

There are typically up to 3 pre filters about 10" long for residential use. The main purpose is to remove chlorine which attacks the membrane. But I made the mistake of choosing too good prefilters. The worse mistake is to use a 0.2 micron ceramic filter. When I looked at the data sheet, the pressure drop across the filter is 15 psi, though at a very high flow rate which doesn't occur at residential systems. So at 50 psi input feed, you could lose a lot of pressure just across one filter alone. The filters to buy are Matrikx branded. They have a stable and clear line of products. They have a good name and a lot of systems use them (I guess). They provide datasheets. You can get the top ones at as low as $10.

The static pressure is easy to measure. A pressure gauge costs a few dollars from hardware stores. Screw it on a garden tap, 3/4", and you get the static pressure, when all other taps are closed. For 1/4" RO systems, you just unscrew the 3/4" adapter typical on gauges, and you can screw the gauge directly into a JG ball valve for RO tanks. Now you just insert any tube into the valve and you get the static pressure with the valve open. But measuring the pressure when water is flowing is tricky. If the water don't flow, there's no pressure drop across the pre filters. I've seen attaching a gauge to a T adapter. Water is flowing straight through and the pressure is seemed to measure perpendicularly to the flow.

Filtered drinking water is measured in gpd, gallon per day, while the stated flow rate for pre-filters is typcally gpm, per minute. So the stated pressure drop at the high flow rate may not apply at very low flow rates. Anyway since I cannot know this, I minimize the pressure drop by choosing suitable filters.

I'll start with a 5 micron sediment filter, if you water supply isn't that dirty. Coarser filter is associated with larger dirt capacity and less pressure drop, a few psi. Then the 20,000 gal carbon chlorine filter is a no brainer. If you don't really know how much water you drink, it guarantees you only need to change filter once a year. If you know, you save money and time because the chlorine capacity is a lot larger than other filters, you only need to change filters once a long time. I estimated that the water passing through my filter will be 5,000 to 10,000 gal, so I only need to change filters once 2 to 4 years, considering the chlorine capacity alone. It also good for filtering VOC if by chance you got it, volatile organic compounds, which are basically vapor gas that the RO membrane can't deal with. The pressure drop is less than 3.5 psi and the size is about 0.6 micron.

It just happened that I have a 3 stage housing so I have to pick one more. Another same carbon filter is OK but there are a lot of other choices probably for non RO systems. The mistake I made was picking a 0.2 um one with a psi drop of 15, making it unsuitable for RO systems. The choice is between certified lead or bacteria rejection. Since my water feed is very decent, and since the membrane will deal with that at sub micron levels, I settled on a 0.5 um carbon filter with 8 psi drop, with half the chlorine capacity. There is some cyst reduction, bacteria that isn't killed by chlorine. Other reasons are price and availability.

The most important component used to be the membrane. But as I said, pumps cost a lot more. The only membrane to get is Filmtec, certified for 96 to 98% rejection. And 75 gpd is the only capacity you want. Any larger the rejection drops to 90%, and any other brands is just as good. Even if you don't drink that much water, the tank refills fast. And since you don't have 50 psi as assumed by most components, you have more design flexibility and more choice of good filters. After all, it's just $30.

15% to 20% of water pass through the membrane, while the rest go down the drain. What makes water pass through the membrane is a flow restrictor on the brine side (waste water) of the membrane. Interestingly, almost certainly you have a wrong flow restrictor. If you have a 75 gpd membrane, waste water is 4 times that, arriving at about 800 mL per minute, which is the standard restrictor to use. But, the Filmtec membrane recovery is 15% rather than 20%, which requires a larger capacity. Also, instead of 75 gpd at 50 psi, you have 40 psi across the membrane if you are lucky. And for pumpless systems, you have just about 20 psi when the tank is almost full.

You don't have much control over pressure unless you have a booster pump to vary the input psi, and a permeate pump to maintain a constant pressure across the membrane. In my area we need a pressure regulator so I can increase that to 100 psi risking bursting pipes anytime, or decrease at the expense of weaker showers. Other than that you can buy filters with larger or smaller psi drops. However since you can't measure that reliably, I suggest to get a few flow restrictors, test the system performance with a TDS meter, pick the best one and return the rest !!

It's worthwhile to make a bypass path across the restrictor, controlled by a ball valve. It's called flushing the membrane when you by pass the restrictor, when all water goes to drain to clean the membrane. With JG connectors, it only cost you a minute to make. NSF components are not required at the brine side. Expensive systems used to have that path, and of course a timer to flush everyday for a few minutes. Membranes need flushing regularly only if your system is at 98% I guess. It's easy to achieve over 95% and never flush. At $30 it's worthwhile to change the filter every year. But if you use it for a few years for the full design life, you feel better to flush every few months or a year. The waste water are black, mostly carbon resides from the filters.

After the invention of the "affordable" permeate filter, it's clear that prior pumpless systems are toys. No matter how good your filters and membranes are, you only operates at a fraction of the pressure. The pump comes with a new hydraulic valve, which cutoff the supply when the tank pressure is 90% of the feed, and turns on the supply when the pressure drops below 70%. Since the membrane always see full pressure, the high cut off allows the tank to fill more water at higher pressure, and the on pressure prevents starting the system every time for a minute when you just pour a glass of water. The higher pressure is important if previously your RO water can't get through to the fridge to make ice. Previously standard valves cut off at 66%, leaving you with 33% pressure across the membrane. Permeate pump not only save you water, because less water flows through, you get longer filter and membrane life.

The final filter is always after the tank. I wondered why. Until one day I tasted the tank water and it smells and taste like rubber. I think it's a taste of the bladder inside for cheap tanks at least. It's also a good idea to filter the water when you drink it, not when you store it in a tank. I always use NSF certified Omnipure. Unlike Matrikx carbon block filters, which are designed for chlorine capacity and minimize carbon residues clogging the membrane, the final filters are carbon granulates design for maximum bad taste reduction. And I can vouch for it. These filters are smaller and have a much lower capacity as the drinking water to total water ratio is at least 1 to 4 or 6. But still you may need to change every 6 month instead of a year.

Cheap tanks rust easily on the outside and taste like rubber. They also lost pressure fast. There's a tire like bladder inside. When you lost pressure, you need to pump water out using a tire pump, measure the air pressure at 7 psi for typical tanks. Of course you better get a new tank when you lost pressure. The one to get is Flowmatic RO Pro tank. It's NSF listed. It's plastic so it doesn't rust, at least on the outside. The shape and color is a lot more pleasant than metal tanks. It fits well under the sink like a tall slim guy rather than a short fat guy with a beer belly. 4 gallon total is about the largest size that fit comfortably under the sink with space for other things. Practically you get only 2+ gallon for pumpless systems, or 3+ with a permeate pump. You also get a nice reserve in earthquake zones, enough for at least 6 people's maximum drinking needs for one day, but a least a few days for survival.

You have little choice about the faucet. A designer faucet cost you more than all the other components. Most people use Touch Flo faucets, look decent, cheap, and NSF listed. There was a settlement about lead many years ago. So they won't make the mistake twice. An ordinary drill and a special bit from hardware stores will make an extra hole on your sink, but depending on the material, I still have nightmares about it. But in my neighborhood, you can't find people to come in and drill a hole for you, not at a price you want to pay. You rather hire any heavy machinery you need from the hardware stores and blast everything yourself.

You need an air gap somewhere to prevent back flow of waste water. If the law allows you can use a check valve instead. Air gap at the faucet is a bad idea unless the faucet comes with tubings attached. It's a nightmare to attach all the tubes under the sink for a compact faucet at the very corner. You can use the air gap for the dishwasher. There are air gaps designed for that with extra RO input.

A digital TDS meter is a must. It's cheap and compact anyway. It's a measure of the conductivity of the water, which reflects directly the dissolved solids in the water. And since only the membrane can remove dissolved solids, the meter tells you how well your system is doing, if put together correctly at all. Typically for hard water, the supply is 400 ppm. If the RO water is 20 ppm, you get 95% rejection. It can be addictive. If you are a Monk person, it's worthwhile to get one of those that mounted on the sink to give readings continuously.

The other parameters that indicates your system is working correctly is a flow rate meter. But it's rather not necessary. You just need a measuring cup and a stopwatch. You get a good idea of the flow rate out of the restrictor and out of the membrane (when the tank is shut off). Restrictors can be inaccurate because of deposits, which is at higher concentration at the brine side.

Now there are low cost total volume flow meters on the market made of FDA approved plastic. You can program 5 reminders to change your filters according to total volume passing through. Nobody have a good idea how much water they actually use. Filters are either changed prematurely along with all other filters, or way too late. So the saving in filter cost will make the meter virtually free. You also get peace of mind. But you need to know the design capacity of the filters. But actually you need two, since there are three flow volumes in the system, the supply, the permeate (drinking) and brine (waste). Since the permeate and brine are never exactly 1:4 or any other ratio as designed, you need two meters to get all the three flow volumes, unless you have a good idea what the measured ratio actually is.

You need to disinfect and clean the system on a regularly basis, say once a year. The membrane is tricky if you decide to keep it for a few years. It can only tolerate low concentrations of chemicals and you need to pump the solutions through the membrane constantly for limited time. The details are on their website. I would rather flow it away after a year, or just soak it. To disinfect you need H2O2 from pharmacy and dilute about 10 times (check website). I'll soak it in the filter housing instead of pumping it for the recommended period. I have no pump. Then I'll put fresh solution in the empty filter housings, put the membrane back in it's housing, and turn on the feed supply. The H2O2 gets pumped across the membrane, but further diluted.

But if you actually bother to disinfect the membrane, you might just as well buy NaOH and HCL solutions from science stores and perform the alkaline and acidic cleaning steps as recommended.

Before the membrane, you can just as well pump higher concentration of cleaning and disinfecting solutions around the system, the tank, the tubes and the filter housings. Then using the tank to pump the solutions all the way to the fridge. Of course you need to pump a lot of fresh water to get rid of the solutions, and throw away the ice.

I think that's about it. Now the cost.

JG Valve's and T's $30
Filter housing $60
Filter 1 $10
Filter 2 $10
Filter 3 $15
Filter 4 $15
Membrane $40
Pump $45
cut-off valve $15
Tank $70
Faucet $30
TDS meter $20
Flow meter $30
Total $390

This is the retail component prices. If you buy in bulk and sell whole systems, you make a decent profit without much work. The JG connectors are a snap to use.

The perfect water

2007-09-11T22:13:00.001-07:00

First of all, most reverse osmosis system are designed to have a recovery of 20%, that is, for every 1 cup you drink, you throw away 4 cup. That sounds a lot, but you actually don't drink that much water. Baths and lawns are a lot more wasteful. More so is flushing the toilet. Somewhere in the world use sea water or reclaimed water to flush. Also, bottle water, such as the famous Fuji water now widely available in Trader Joe, seems a lot more wasteful, pumping up deep ancient water and bring it over from so far away, in plastic bottles. Also many beverages you drink use RO water anyway. In good restaurants, if you don't want bottled water, they will give you tap water, filtered to taste good. It's worthwhile to include RO to avoid liabilities as bacteria and virus can hardly pass through. It's easy to achieve zero waste. You can feed the water to your irrigation system, or pump it back to the hot water supply.

RO systems used to be very expensive, $1000?, and still are, $500?. Some years back some cheap RO systems appear on the market aimed at the masses at $100. The performance in terms of rejection rate of total dissolved solids (TDS) is 85%, compared to top of the line systems at 98%. 85 is a lot less than 98, but filtering out 85% of what need not be there sounds enough for a try. The DS are basically the hardness of the water, naturally occurring materials. But here we use Colorado river which is really hard. And if something goes wrong for a short while in the public system, softening the impact by 85% isn't that bad. And if you can filter out 85% of the bacteria, that's good enough without costing an arm and a leg. It's not that I couldn't afford expensive systems. But like computers, I don't know what components they put in. You cannot test it, for example, how much lead it rejects. You have to trust them. But I rather not.

But the cheap pumpless systems are a joke. The stated performance is for full water pressure, typically 50 psi (sorry rest of the world). But once the system starts working, the pressure across the RO membrane falls. These systems typically stops when the tank pressure reaches 30 psi, by this time the pressure across the membrane is only 20 psi, a fraction of the stated performance.

Typically small manufacturers don't know what exactly happens as the operating points drift away from the optimum point where all the components are guaranteed. But as long as the final TDS reading looks good, they are selling it. Typically, the rejection rate maintains at low pressure, at the expense of wasting much more water! Not just 20%, but 10% and less.

To control the pressure, you need a pump. But pump's able to deal with 50 psi are not toys. Just a booster pump cost more than a cheap RO system. The alternative is to use an open tank and let the RO water flows into the tank slowly. So you are fortunate if you are a fish. For aquarium applications, the water is as good as any top of the line systems. But without a pressurized tank, you either go fetch water from under sink, or use a delivery pump. So a pump again, though at lower pressure the pump is cheaper, but not by a lot needing NSF testing. And you start to worry about the air quality, and air borne bacteria. Until the permeate pump, which is a lot cheaper without electricity and at lower pressure. Basically it's a weak hydraulic pump, pumping filtered water into the pressurized tank. With a pump, the pressure of the tank is isolated from the membrane. So the membrane is seeing the full water pressure all the time.

I'm going to describe safe materials and the correct design of an RO system. Indeed if there are not so many one man company selling put together systems, I may start selling too.

Reliable precision vacation automatic dog feeder and waterer 2

2007-08-16T17:09:00.000-07:00

With a little time, my feeder has improved a great deal. I found out by accident that corrugated cardboard box can be treated like wood. You can screw them, bolt them and nut them, glue them, tie them, and best of all, they comes in with most mail orders over the Internet.

Now the feeder is almost like my original simple vision. Find or make a box that is large enough to hold one meal. Use the side with the smallest dimension as the door. Drill two hold to mount the motor, using small bolts and nuts. My toy motor kit comes with a gear box that can mount a rotating arm. The arm is used to keep the door shut. When the motor rotates, the arm rotates away and opens the door for the dry food to drop down. You can drop down a tray of wet food too.

The rest you need is a 7 day timer to turn on the dc adaptor, which in turn drives the motor for a minute. For each day (or meal) you need three components, box with motor, dc adaptor and timer. They work independently so it's highly reliable. There's no single point of failure. And unlike commercial ones that uses a single "valve" to move the dog food, my design allows you to put whatever you want into the box precisely - medicine, treats for different days of the week.

I mount the boxes near the top of a large cardboard box, and tie the large box to garden furniture. There is no mess as the food will not drop outside of the large box, and the dog can't possibly move the box tied to something heavy.

There are plenty of automatic waterers, basically like the toilet tank that will automatically fill themselves and shut off when full. But the commercial ones are far too small, and far too expensive compared to the toilet flush valve.

I was looking to build something to mount a small float valve when I found something better. It was a float valve designed for cattle. I just mount it on a bucket with the supplied hardware and attach a garden hose to it. The large volume in the bucket acts as a large dead weight so I don't need to fix it to anything. Even if the water supply is cut off, the bucketful can last for days.

Now it may be getting even better and more interesting. I'm going to build a reliable circuit so I can get rid of the adapters and the timers. There will only be one power supply, which can be AC indoors, DC outdoors or battery operated. Before that it's a bit daunting to set up all the timers and adapters and boxes.

Nowadays it's amazing with the net. You get electronic components from 1 to 1 million over the Internet, and you are welcomed the same. And there's the online datasheets for you to design like a pro. There are free circuit design software for you to download so you will be biased to a supplier's components. Then some other free software will turn your design into state of the art circuit boards. It's a little expensive to make a single product. But if you make a few to give it to family and friends, the cost isn't that bad.

Inevitably, I can't rely on cardboard boxes. They have to be replaced all the time. Again thanks to the Internet, you can use any materials you desire, from carbon fiber to metals to plastics. You just draw your parts on a free CAD package, push a button, and the price will be quoted to you. For my case acrylic is suitable. I can cut and glue it myself or I can find laser machines to cut the pieces for me with high precision.

If I go through with these, someday I may get rid of the bucket and turn the automatic waterer into a sculptured acrylic fountain.

Vacation automatic dog feeder for large breeds

2007-08-06T08:24:00.000-07:00

The background is that I have just two days to find an automatic feeder so I can escape for a few days. Feeders are too expensive or not good enough to be sold in stores, so you can return easily. I couldn't find one and couldn't wait for mail order, so I have to build one. I don't even have time to wait for mail order components. And since I have no time to test the feeder, it must be very reliable.

For the first draft I can think of timer and sprinkler valves. For off the shelf components, I have to use one timer per day to activate something. Water is a good counter weight to bring food down from somewhere. Tubes can be custom made easily. Now sprinkler timers have 7 day program and each has at least alternate day programs. So I can save half the number of timers. I wasn't expecting too much of a vacation, just a weekend get away or up to a week will be good enough. It turn out that one timer per two days isn't a reality and so many custom pipes become a nightmare.

Then came the thought of a toy car coming out from somewhere to bring the food. A car each day. But now cars all come with remote control, so I have to rip off the remote control to get to the electronics, which adds to another level of unreliability. And also, the battery saving features in the cars may do something unexpected.

Fry's save the day. Now instead of an Outpost website, they put their name on it. I found toy motors online and found it in their stores too. Motors are everywhere, but theirs are kits, complete with gears box and mounting screws. Surprisingly it's purely made in Japan, and I don't know how they justify the low tech manufacturing, though the plastic gears are rather precise.

At the end, it become something like this, for each day:

One AC 7 day timer - reliable and easy to program, you can't go wrong
One AC to DC adaptor - to get 3 V for battery operated motor. With the exchangeable plugs, the motor wires can be clipped to the plugs without soldering.
One motor with low gear ratio and mounted wheel.
One heavy plank wood beam 1" x 2" in cross section
A tray large enough for one portion of dog food
Sewing thread to pull the tray
A table in the yard
Optionally a large bowl to receive the dog food

The motor is mounted at the end of the wood beam, which overhangs on the table. When the motor is on, it will coil the sewing thread and pull the tray of food. The tray is initially at the edge of the table, next to the beam as a sliding guide. Pulled by the motor at the end of the overhanging beam, the tray will fall off the table, and the food will fall down onto the ground or a huge bowl. Food pellets will fall everywhere due to the inaccurate trajectory of the tray. So you need a huge bowl to receive it or let it fall on the ground. You can also wrap the dog food in a bag if the bag is eatable or the dog will not eat it, you get the idea.

The gear ratio has to be low enough that the motor is powerful enough to overcome friction, and powerful enough to pull the thread to breaking point after the dog food is delivered to the ground. Since the thread is attached to the wheel and to the tray, the string thread has to break or it will be chaos. The mounted wheel isn't important as long as the thread has something to tie to. The powerful motor will ensure that the thread will coil up somewhere and pull the tray along the beam.

The beauty of it is the reliability. If anything fails the dog just miss one meal. Unlike the other feeders, the dog will starve for a week and die.

I have been thinking of improving it so it can be used daily to save labor. However, you need something like a grain screw as in the commercial feeders. If I can find something like that, I can attach it to an electric drill, which could be rather reliable. Though the amount of dog food delivered will not be exact.

There are also other toy motor kids that allow you to build a conveyor belt for example. You might be able to build a single feeding machine instead of 7 machine if you leave for a week. For reliability, you can use two machines, one for the even and one for the odd days.