I had been toying with the idea to upgrade the overall security of my home network for quite a while now. I have a wireline and a wireless network at home (to keep the tinkering interesting). After having achieved a somewhat decent security level over the wireless connections into the basement and having played with various software firewalls in addition to the hardware firewall in my router, I had to change topics for a little bit. So I tried to see what can be done in terms of ongoing surfing.

Over the last several years I had been using IE in its various versions, tried to keep up with the ongoing patch levels… tried Netscape Mosaic for a while, experimented with some other no one browsers as well. Due to personal complacency and simple laziness, I ended up using IE on 99% of my systems.

But…. a few weeks ago I ended up installing Firefox just for kicks. Plain and simple standard version. Started to read about it on various sites and blogs to see what it could do and offer for me as standard run of the mill user Not until this weekend, did it actually occur to me to put the pieces together and try to dig a little deeper in the touted plug ins and options that are floating around there. I also have to admit that I was somewhat lured into Firefox by the testimonials and recommendations of family while being in Germany last week. Being back and getting up early because of the two spoiled rotten dogs needing to go outside, I actually started tinkering with the idle icon on the desktop.

Firefox does have some very neat features I had not heard about before!! Other than the tons of handy add-ons, such as the web developer plug in, integrated previews of links and images, I really love the integration with Free Download Manager (FDM). Granted it has to be accomplished via FlashGot, but once installed, it works like a charm! I didn’t even have to configure it for FDM use (I cannot give up my use of FDM!!). The thing that amazed me the most, was the easy integration for downloads in general via the pop up window that just simply lets me install stuff via a single easy click. After I had installed the first plug in and having been surfing on various other tabs and separate windows, the install informed me that I had to close all Firefox windows to complete the installation. Well, dog gone it. Should I bookmark all the sites I still wanted to look at and hadn’t? Would I find the same sites again when I brought up Firefox after the successful installation, … stuck in a dilemma. I clicked on the button to close all open windows and decided to just deal with it later… *still thinking in IE dimensions and short comings*

The installation completes and barely 5 seconds later, Firefox reopens a new window. I was still deep in thought as to what I had actually typed into my Google search window to get to the results list I had before. Before I could even realize it, the screen showed 4 open Firefox windows. Huh?? Clicking on the first one, it was the window (including tabs!!!) that I had open before… somewhat incredulous I look at the other 3 windows and guess what, those were the exact sites I had open before I so bravely allowed the installation to complete. I was in shock!

Being the skeptic I am, I thought that could only be a coincidence. Kinda like the well known existing feature that auto recovers on an application failure…. So I tried it again. And again.

After 3 times of performing this highly investigative little project, I am hooked. Firefox forever! Oh, and I also downloaded Thunderbird just now. And I ordered a T-Shirt!

Ran across the Google Zeitgeist (pre 2007) site that lists the most popular key words or searches that run across Google. They even “analyze” social and cultural events in order to correlate them with their current searches. Very cool.

Also check out the Zeitgeist replacement – Hot Trends, updated in regular intervals. As if one really needed to know what other people are searching for on the web…. H*** yeah!

Auf einer meiner Streifzuege durch die Auswanderer-Foren hatte einer der Mitposter einen Link zu einer Schwaebischen Version von Star Wars auf YouTube gepostet. Mein Gott, was habe ich gelacht….! Will Euch das auf keinen Fall vorenthalten.

Es scheint, als ob es noch mehr dieser Schwaebischen Vertonungen verschiedener Medien auf You Tube gibt. Enjoy!!

• Virales Marketing im Todesstern Stuttgart (Star Wars)
• Gangs of New York – Kampf um die Wurst
• The Osbournes
• Ritter der Kokusnuss
• Ernst und Heinrich – Mir Schwoba 

Und noch jede Menge mehr

As of this past Friday we no longer subscribe to Vonage service.

Starting at about the beginning of this year, my phone calls to overseas began to drop, had a horrible voice quality and repeated re-dials didnt’ really help the situation either. Studying the FAQ section of Vonage, there was a suggestion to specifically set QoS for the voice transmitting ports on the VoIP router. Sounded good, so I did that. That alleviated the problem for a few more weeks (see previous post) and I almost thought we were through with the issues.

About 3 months ago, the issues started to re-surface. My international calls quickly turned into a marathon of how many words / how much conversation can one fit into each conversation segment before the line droped again. Each segment also started with each party continually repeating “Hallo…. Hallo…. can you hear me?” It always was a unilateral conversation. I heard them, but they never heard me. Another re-dial attempt.

About 4 weeks ago, said problem now also increased in frequency when making local or US calls. The quality degraded quickly on pretty much every single call.

While it most likely is not attributable to Vonage as a service, I am fairly confident it is due to the broadband technology I am using here at the house. Although we have a cable modem, the provider does not guarantee dedicated bandwidth for each user. Instead, all users on the same neighborhood block share the available bandwidth. Logically, the bandwidth available for each user starts to decrease at certain times of the day / week when more and more neighbors start to surf the Internet. Quite a few in my neighborhood also work from home during the day as do I on certain days.

Unfortunately, my current provider is the only one I can get at the house. Can’t get DSL at all, which guarantees dedicated bandwidth for each user. From conversations with other Vonage users utilizing DSL / ISDN, their quality of calls is very close to regular landline quality…

Result: Experiment closed, moving on… back at AT&T

Truth or fiction???

Youtube: The Internet Crashed

It’s alive! As of this afternoon, the new toy is indeed alive and kicking….

Surprisingly enough, the install of all components and drivers was fairly easy and straightforward. At this point, I am not going to install any RAID configs or SLI, as I only have one huge HD and one simple monitor anyway… the setup doesn’t have to be overkill, just because I can….

Currently, two major resource consuming applications are installing and I am anxious to see how they run. On the old machine (granted on a Celeron processor), the apps worked, but were sooooo slow at times it wasn’t even funny any more. One of the newer games even refused to install at all! Tells you what I am running

My chosen graphics card is the Nvidia eGeForce 8600; while it is a little on the high end side costwise, it is certainly worth every single last cent. I already ran a highly graphics intense game just now and the rendering of the environment, characters is aweseome!

This just as a quick update….

Went to the computer store yesterday. Initially only intended to get some additional memory for the basement computer…. got that. And a whole lot more…..

Since the current computer has an outdated CPU socket for which I cannot get faster CPUs… I decided to get a new computer while I was at the store.. ended up with a brand new high end gaming chassis that even supports Nvidia’s SLI technology (don’t have it enabled though, yet). Have a dual core Pentium CPU, motherboard that can support 1333 front bus (the respective CPU won’t be available until later this year), a blazingly fast Nvidia graphics card (PCI X16), huge hard drive (decided to only go with one hard drive, even though the new motherboard supports several RAID configs… and the new quad core CPU)… cost me close to 1K for it all…. but I hope to not having to touch the guts of it again for the next 5 years at least…. let’s see how my new strategy game behaves on the thing…

Since we deceided to cut the cord almost a year ago, I thought it would be time to provide an update on our usage so far.

I really can’t think of anything that would cause us to re-consider our decision, even after a full year. The only noteworthy issue was trying to have a phone conversation while being online at the same time, which caused the voice to be badly distorted. Timing calls with computer activity in our house was not a viable option.

While trying to find some pointers on how to remedy this situation for good, I ran across this post on our device manufacturer’s knowledge base site. Admittedly, I am not the person to first read the entire handbook or destrcution booklet when I buy a new toy, so I must have missed that little tidbit of information at the very beginning. The knowledge base provides a very simple and highly effective solution to our problem: prioritize packet traffic!

Using the handy dandy web utiliy of our VoIP router, navigating to the QoS tab, I prioritize the recommended ports (#256 and #512) and voila… No further issues to report since this change. Even when one of my downloads is burning rubber at 200 KB/s, the call taking place in parallel is very clear.

Now I just have to figure out, how I can have my online radio channel join in the fun at the same time.

We cut the cord and switched to Vonage this week. While gaining a bunch of call features, we also slashed the monthly phone budget in half!

Initially, I was sceptical as to whether my broadband connection could guarantee me a somehwat equal voice quality than the traditional phone line. Especially since my Internet connection speed noticeably slows down during certain hours of the day, i.e. more users getting on and sharing the same bandwidth. Since I have activated the service however, I have not experienced the tell-tale mechanical sound that the Internet connection produces on occasion when using voice chat or listening to online radio stations. As such, so far so good.

When the first initial calls came in, I was impressed by the functionality offered by the even simplest and most inexpensive plan (which we chose). The user website is intuitive to navigate, even for my not always quite tech savy hubby. Since I am online pretty much all the time and either in email or have the user interface up, any calls (that I may have missed) are listed on the site in real time! I am wowed. Voicemails trigger an email notification instantaneously. Retrieving the voicemail is super simple. The quality of the wave file is even astonishing. And I can download it …..

According to the user manual and the other tabs on the user site, there are so many other features that I have not had the chance yet to take a look at or play with. They sure sound interesting, like call hunt. I will report back in a few weeks …..