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Griffin’s iTrip FM Transmitter for the iPod has Benefits Beyond FM Transmitting

by Matthew Krieger

Posted on November 25, 2007
Filed Under Miscellaneous | Leave a Comment

Griffin Technology’s iTrip FM Transmitter for the iPod has benefits beyond just wirelessly transmitting your content to your car radio or home stereo system. The device has a mini-USB port so you can charge and sync your iPod without Apple’s annoying proprietary cable. I move my iPod around a lot and I frequently don’t have an Apple cable where and when I need one.

The benefit of mini-USB is that it’s been adopted as a standard for both data and charging in many portable electronics devices, so you tend to always have a cable around. And if a cable breaks (it does happen) you just replace it with another one, cheaply.

You can find a new iTrip on eBay under $10 (not including shipping, but all-in you’ll pay under $18). I’ve seen iPod sync cables (especially in brick and mortar stores) for rarely under $15 and sometimes over $25.

Mo’ Floppies Mo’ Problems

by Matthew Krieger

Posted on November 16, 2007
Filed Under Consumer Electronics, Miscellaneous | 2 Comments

I found a stack of 5 ¼” floppy disks while rifling through some old boxes today. The disks were labeled “Full Backup” and were from early 1991. The capacity of a double-density 5 ¼” floppy disk is about 1.2 MB. Amazing. Today I back up about 10.3 gigabytes, which is small by comparison to people who shoot a lot of digital photos or video. Doing some simple math (1 GB = 1024 MB, and let’s assume the floppy disk was full at 1.2 MB – I’m not going to try and find a 5 ¼” disk drive to check it), my data volume has grown 8,789 times the 1991 amount.

In another useless mathematical exercise, assume that a 5 ¼” floppy disk is 1.5 mm thick and (who would have guessed??) 5 ¼” wide. To hold my current backup set I’d need a stack of floppy disks 43 feet high or 3845 feet (about 3/4 miles) if placed end to end.

Finally, let’s assume that in 1991 it cost $20 for a box of 10 5 ¼” floppy disks (my memory may be way off, but unlike what my girlfriend tells me, I don’t live in the past), so $2 per disk. To store my 10.3 GB on floppies would cost $17,578 ($1,707 per GB). Today you can get a 500 GB hard drive for $100 (20 cents per GB). So buy this ridiculously rough measure, storage has gotten 8,535 times cheaper since then.

Providers Should NEVER Ask for Your Password

by Matthew Krieger

Posted on July 16, 2007
Filed Under Internet, Miscellaneous | 3 Comments

I’m in the process of switching my mobile plan from Verizon Wireless to Sprint.  While verifying my identity during several calls to customer service, I was very surprised that the reps asked me for my account password as part of the questions.  No one should ever ask for this information, and you should never provide it if asked!  With most* online services, all you need is a username and password to get complete access to an account.  This gives the rep complete access without an audit trail, should the rep wish to conduct abuse (unlikely, but a highly unsecure process nonetheless.)

* More and more online services, especially financial institutions, are requiring information in addition to your username and password before granting account access.  However these cases are still few and far between.

It’s bad enough that we all have our social security numbers and credit card numbers floating around as easy fodder for identity theft, so we should avoid giving away the keys to the kingdom while we’re at it.

This was timely as there have been some blog posts lately regarding websites whose internal system constraints or politics (my own assumptions) force less secure passwords (ironically, the post I linked to is about a financial service).  After having it drilled into my head over the years (and coming to the same conclusion myself) that a 6-character password doesn’t provide appropriate security, it’s too bad that some websites actually won’t let you choose longer ones.

Back to Sprint – I hope they reconsider their policy around establishing customer identity on the phone.  At a minimum, asking for your password undermines efforts to establish trust in an increasingly online and digital world.

Open Source Irony

by Matthew Krieger

Posted on May 24, 2007
Filed Under Miscellaneous | Leave a Comment

Given Microsoft’s recent claims that the free and open-source software movement is violating 235 of it’s patents, the following statement* made by an Ubuntu spokesman is ironic (emphasis mine):

Microsoft has stated that Silverlight is a cross-platform plug-in. ‘Cross-platform’ does not mean ‘two-platform,’ and if the Microsoft team needs help getting this to work on Ubuntu, we would be delighted to help them accelerate that. If it’s open source—who knows? There might finally be some Microsoft code in a Linux distribution.

(* The context of the above statement is around Microsoft’s Silverlight product which runs on Windows and Mac.)

To be fair, I don’t know if any of the 235 alleged patent violations are source code related because Microsoft isn’t making the specifics of their claims public at this point.

IE Friendly

by Matthew Krieger

Posted on March 8, 2007
Filed Under Miscellaneous | 3 Comments

I resolved the issues that caused my blog to display improperly in Internet Explorer 7.  If you only have (or prefer) IE 7, there should be no display problems at this point.

Some Lesser Known Google Search Tips

by Matthew Krieger

Posted on March 1, 2007
Filed Under Internet, Miscellaneous | Leave a Comment

Google’s Matt Cutts recently appeared on Episodes 137 and 138 of DL.TV with a handful of not so well-known but very handy Google search tips.  Some highlights from the list include (paraphrased):

• Include quotes around your query to get results that contain exactly the text you enter, in the order you enter it.  This is helpful when you want to narrow down your search and you know the exact expression you are searching for.  For example, type “loose lips sink ships” to find all exact matches (returned 193,000) of that phrase.  If you search for loose lips sink ships without the quotes, you will likely get many more results (returned 583,000), since you will be including pages that contain all those words but not necessary that exact phrase.
• Phrase your query in the way in which the result might appear.  For example, if you want to find out the height of Mount Everest, try the query “mount everest is * feet high”.  The query is written in a way in which the result is likely to appear on a web page.  The height (the variable piece of information you are trying to find) is specified as an asterisk.  In the results, the height will replace the asterisk.  Note that I included quotes since I expected the results to appear exactly as I wrote in the query.
• Search for ranges of numerical values in a query.  For example, you are interested in Mount Everest base camps between 10000 and 20000 feet.  Include the range separated by a “..” as in the query mount everest base camp 10000..20000.  Note that I left off the quotes since I didn’t really know how the words would appear.  Alternatively, you could search for DVD players in the $100 to $300 range with the query dvd player $100..$300.
• Exclude certain keywords by using the minus sign.  For example, you are interested in ribs, but not the pork variety, you could query on ribs -pork.  This will return results containing the word ribs but not pork.

These are just a few of the many Google search tips that are available. 

IE Unfriendly

by Matthew Krieger

Posted on February 19, 2007
Filed Under Miscellaneous | Leave a Comment

My blog doesn’t render properly in Internet Explorer 7. I’m using the Vertigo theme by Brian Gardner. His Vertigo demo page renders perfectly in IE 7 so I may have introduced a problem when I was customizing the page templates. According to Google Analytics, 64.52% of you aren’t seeing the problem. :) (It’s actually 71% since 18% of the IE users are running IE 6.)

I’ve Been BlitzKrieged!

by Matthew Krieger

Posted on January 6, 2007
Filed Under Miscellaneous | Leave a Comment

This is apparently what happens to your Google AdSense ads when you’ve got no content and your name is Krieger.  Translated to German, krieg (as in blitzkrieg) means war.  krieger translates to warrior, fighter or soldier.

  

 

 

 

 

 

Auf Wiedersehen!

A Blog is Born

by Matthew Krieger

Posted on December 31, 2006
Filed Under Miscellaneous | Leave a Comment

And so Kriegster.com is born, weighing in at 49 words and 1 post.

Right now this blog is just a statistic in a sea of blogs but I hope to make a mark, and maybe even say an interesting thing or two.

Looking forward to 2007 – Happy New Year!

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