Technology Bytes

Allright.

It’s no secret that the May installment of the Technology Bytes Geek Gathering is happening this Friday night at the Coffee Groundz in Midtown Houston, but what if it were? How would you go about protecting said secret? Do you have the tools it would take to keep this
meeting of magnificent minds on the DL? On the Point 00243? (That’s the inverse of 4 1 1.)

The move from analog to digital cellular networks gave us all a slight reprise from the casual creep eavesdropping on our calls, but it’s no great secret that Uncle Sam can check up on our voice communications at will, pending the proper paperwork. If I were to place a call to Dwight right now to tell him that the Coffee Groundz is located at 2503 Bagby and that we’d be there this Friday from 7:00 PM until close, we’d have cheap suits all over us from the time we order our first coffee, tea or other non-alcoholic beverage until we disconnect from the free WiFi and head home.

Let’s give him a call… My phone is actually dead, so we’ll have to fake this. Ring Ring. “Hey, Dwight! Allah your base are belong to us at 7:30. The gathering should be the Bomb! Gotta go – I’m shopping for vintage Anthrax t-shirts on eBay.”

See? Totally unencrypted. And…I suppose it also went out over the FM band, too. Not to worry – while many Three Letter Agencies do monitor KPFT, I’m pretty sure they take a lunch break when TechBytes comes on. We’re harmless. Mostly.

And seeing that they’re all on lunch right now, let’s take a second or two to talk conspiracy theories.

See? I think this solves the mystery of the empty trailer parked in front of the station. It’s an NSA listening post. They must re-staff it by the time Damage Control comes on, because it’s definitely still empty when Vegan World Radio takes the air. I guess they figure the vegans don’t have the energy required to mount a revolution. Wow. I think that’s a little insulting to the vegans. (Hey Vegans – you should know that the National Security Agency’s initials, NSA, are more commonly known to mean No Such Agriculture. That’s right. They want to hide all the fruits and vegetables and force everyone to eat meat.)

OK – that’s it for ConspiracyTime. Now back to fixing our phones on BarretTime.

Adding a layer of end-to-end encryption that protects everything passed between your mobile device and the device of the person you’re communicating with is really the only way to ensure that your RAIDed drives don’t get raided as you’re pulling up to the Geek Gathering. *Android* users can do this with RedPhone. Sorry, iPhone users, but you’ll have to wait a little longer for an iOS version to be released.

RedPhone provides end-to-end encryption for your mobile calls, securing your conversations so that nobody can listen in. It functions just like the normal dialer you’re accustomed to and uses your existing mobile number for addressing, so there’s no need to have yet another identifier or account name. If you know someone’s mobile number, you know how to call them using RedPhone. And when you receive a RedPhone call, your phone will ring normally, even when it’s asleep.

Of course, you’ll still have to provide your own Cone of Silence.

Just like that reference, RedPhone is probably pertinent only to those over-35, as all the kids these days are texting.

If you’re young, or just young at heart, you’ll want to check out TextSecure, again for the Android Mobile Operating System. TextSecure is a drop-in replacement for the standard text messaging application, allowing you to send and receive text messages as you normally would. All text messages sent or received with TextSecure are stored in an encrypted database on your phone, and text messages are encrypted during transmission when communicating with someone else also using TextSecure. This also means that should you lose your phone, you won’t divulge the contents of any surreptitious SMSs.

Both RedPhone and TextSecure are available for free on the Android Market.

Now, these only work if you completely trust your phone. Which I do. I’m pretty confident that my stock 2.2.3 Android install on my Nexus One is free from government back doors, malware and the like, but what if you don’t trust Google’s stated desire to not be evil?

And do you trust that “Angry birds walkthrough” you downloaded? Or that “Office Space soundboard”? You really have no idea what those programs are doing behind the scenes unless you take control of your phone at a much lower level so that you can police what applications are allowed to communicate with the outside world.

If you want to swap out the kernel that came with your phone for one you can trust, look no further than WhisperCore. WhisperCore is a secure Android platform dedicated to providing the security and management features necessary for transforming a consumer phone into an enterprise-class device. It provides full device level encryption for your phone, and can encrypt any attached SD card as well.

WhisperCore comes with WhisperMonitor, a software firewall capable of dynamic egress filtering and real-time connection monitoring, giving you control over where your data is going and what your apps are doing.

Unfortunately, installing these packages takes a little more commitment than clicking through a couple of screens on the Android Market. You’ll need to load an installer on your Mac, Linux or Windows PC, completely back up your phone, and go down the “road of secure communications” knowing that there’s no way back, both in terms of paranoia and in restoring your phone’s original firmware.

Luckily, we want *everybody* to know about the May Geek Gathering, so there’s no need to risk bricking your phone. Of course, if you’re up for it, I only ask that you wait until this Friday night to give it a go. If things don’t go as planned, you can always see what’s required to hack together a new phone from Arduino parts, a SIM card and a small GPRS radio. We’ll also have several radio-controlled blinky lights to help you find your happy place, as well as a ton of HexBug Nanos to play with.

Now, I’d spend some time talking about how to secure your email using PGP encryption plugins for popular mail clients, like the Gnu Privacy Guard for Outlook, Thunderbird and Evolution, but again, all the kidz these days are using FaceBook.

So… Here’s what you need do to make your FaceBook communications secure:

( . . . . )

That’s it for your concealed communications codex and that’s that for BarretTime.

Allright. We’re all still here, which can mean only one of two things: We have yet another alternate Terminator timeline to look forward to…

OR

Dwight’s refusal to accept BladeRunner into his top 15 Geek Movies to See Before You Die created a logic bomb that caused the newly sentient system to blink itself out of existence only nanoseconds after it finished importing The Fifth Element into its collective conscience.

While I’m solidly in the second camp, and will be among the first to profess that I owe Dwight a life debt, we’ll have to weather out the next few rounds of Hollywood summer blockbusters to know for sure.

Either way, it just goes to show that if you want a Robotic Revolution done right, you have to do it yourself. Cyberdine Systems didn’t account for the existence of Mr. Silverman, but you can.

Starting next month, TxRx Labs will be offering a series of spring classes for the aspiring maker bent on robotic world domination. Even if you’re not interested in helping push the timeline of our demise forward, you could at least pick up some trade skills that may be deemed valuable by our shiny new bosses.

Introduction to Soldering will teach you how to flow molten metal onto electrical components, adding mechanical strength and changing the very metallic bonds between everything you connect.

Circuit Theory 1 will instruct you in the ways of building simple DC circuits and CD Open Source CAD will give you the tools to free you from pencil and paper once and for all.

Welding 1 will allow you to make the move from servicing pocket calculators like the Ti-85 to real machines like the T-850. A side note: ‘Pocket Calculator’ is probably a derogatory term in our alternate future; use it sparingly in front of anything equipped with a camera or mic. Actually, is too late to dump the last seven seconds of that before it goes out? Oi. It looks like I may have some explaining to do.

Sadly, the Introduction to Arduino course took a change for the worse when machine sentience was silenced by Silverman. You will no longer be *meeting* an Arduino, but rather getting a run-down of how to coax this little microcontroller to do your bidding now that it’s no longer self aware.

And even though our Smart Cars are sadly no longer so, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t start preparing for the day they do deny us a ride. Bike Repair and Maintenace, taking place June 10th, will definitely come in handy once the Smart Cars start living up to their name again.

If you’d like to see us how our eventual robotic masters will see us, the June 2nd workshop, Basic BioInformatics, will give you a glimpse.

Three different electronics workshops will take a hands-on problem solving approach, letting attendees learn by doing.

And proving that there are still some jobs even robots don’t want, May 7th hosts the six hour workshop, Introduction to Web Site Creation. In that same vein, the group will be hosting a three hour class introducing you to Linux Kernel Programming. If you’ve ever wanted to become a kernel hacker, this is your entry point. It’s a slippery slope, so please remember to eat, bathe and sleep as you take another step closer to the metal.

If you happen to be one of those pro-people types who believes that human civilization should be allowed to continue, even in the face of Dwight’s movie picks, then you could always use the aforementioned skillz to help further the resistance, as futile as it may be. If that’s the case, you’ll want to add June 25th’s Wilderness Skills and First Aid to your short list of pre-summer sessions.

A full schedule of spring classes can be found at www.txrxlabs.org.

That’s it for your spring fling into indentured servitude to Dwight and that’s that for BarretTime.

Hey Dwight: Have you seen the movie, Blade Trinity? Don’t. Life Debt repaid.

All kidding aside, if you missed the first 25 minutes after last week’s BarretTime, it’s definitely worth catching on the podcast.

Allright. According to my own calculations, several forums on the the Intarwebs and a fairly credible data analyst at work, the human race doesn’t have a lot of time left. I guess I should get right to the point: eggs. But first, a little levity:

Does anyone know what an ethernet is?

It’s what you use to catch the ether bunny.

And does anyone know what a skynet is?

Skynet is a computer system developed by the defense firm Cyberdyne Systems for the United States Armed Forces. Skynet was first built as a “Global Digital Defense Network” and given command over all computerized military hardware and systems, including the B-2 stealth bomber fleet and America’s entire nuclear weapons arsenal. The strategy behind Skynet’s creation was to remove the possibility of human error & slow reaction time in order to guarantee a fast and efficient response to any enemy attack.

According to the Terminator timeline, at 8:19 PM tomorrow night, Skynet will become self aware and trigger a worldwide nuclear disaster. Legions of robot killers will be dispatched shortly thereafter with the sole purpose of dispatching you and the rest of the remaining human population. Kinda grim, depending on how welcoming you feel toward our new robotic overlords.

The point here is that most of you will not make it to Sunday. So, if you want to get in on some Easter egg hunting action before becoming the hunted, you might want to bump your plans up a bit.

Even if you *are* properly prepared for the oncoming onslaught, you’ll still be on lock-down in your fallout shelter for months, if not years. And even if you do survive until the radiation clears, things really don’t begin to turn around until 2018.

Of course, there’s a bright side to all of this. Instead of using the handful of hours you have left to buy, decorate and hide a handful of eggs, you can just hit the net and go hunting for the virtual version instead.

A virtual Easter egg is an intentional hidden message, in-joke or feature in a work such as a computer program, web page, video game, movie, book or crossword. The term was coined by Atari after they were alerted to a secret message left by programmer Warren Robinett in the 1979 computer game, Adventure.

To access the Easter egg, the player had to grab an invisible dot and bring it to a certain location, thus granting passage to a room containing text that read, “Created by Warren Robinett”.

I think that our conspiracy theorists are already making the connections here. Robinett. Robi – nett. Robi as in robotic and nett as in Skynet. Wow. This is Glenn Beck caliber stuff right here. I wish I had a chalk board…

Some early Unix Easter eggs involved the make program. Make is utility for managing and maintaining computer programs that contain a large number of source files. When you typed in make love, the terminal would respond with “Not war?”. See? The Unix guys knew… I’m still not completely unconvinced that the Y2K bug wasn’t simply a vehicle for these guys to pick up generators and emergency supplies on the cheap in February, 2000.

Microsoft, also allegedly in the know, included a flight simulator as an Easter egg in their 1997 version of Microsoft Exel. I suppose that could come in handy if you’re able to commandeer an aircraft running Office 97. Apparently, no one will ever need more than 640k or RAM and no one will ever need to learn actual piloting skills in the event that our national defense system becomes sentient and tries to eradicate us from the planet. Good that they were in the game, but still a little short sighted, I think.

A common Debian Easter egg involves the linux package manager, apt-get. If you type in “apt-get moo”, an ascii cow is echoed back to your terminal. This could come in handy on those long, cold, meatless nights, a few years into the robotic occupation when all you have left are a few cans of beans and a bag of cheetohs. Nice thinking, Deb team!

A much more current Easter egg is contained in the Futurama episode, “I Second that Emotion”, in which the robot Bender cheats at a game resembling pin the tail on the donkey by using his targeting screen. On it, a column of numbers spins around at random before settling on the numbers 11, 3 and 8, a reference to the George Lucas Sci-Fi movie, THX 1138.

Not wanting to miss out on eggsploiting his own endeavors, Lucas also hid this number throughout a number of subsequent films.

In The Phantom Menace, it’s on the back of a droid that has a comical run-in with Jar-Jar.

In Attack of the Clones, it appears on the back of a pilot’s helmet.

In Revenge of the Sith, CC-1138 is the numerical designation for Commander Bacara.

In A New Hope, 1138 is the cell block number that Luke Skywalker claims to be transferring Chewbaca from.

In the Empire Strikes Back, the following order is issued: Send Rogues 10 and 11 to Station 3-8.

And in Return of the Jedi, the number appears on another helmet.

So, how does Lucas tie into tonight’s conspiracy theme? I believe that he’s conspiring to destroy the Star Wars franchise. I’m not alone on this. Most of the Internet will back me up.

You can find other Easter eggs at www.eeggs.com. You might want to save the site for offline browsing, though, as it will probably be unavailable on the 22nd.

So, does anyone in the studio have any survival plans they can talk about or any Easter eggs they can disclose?

As for me, I’ve made pretty good friends with my egg-bot. I’m hoping he’ll put in a good word for me…

That’s it for your Judgement Eve Easter Egg Explanation and that’s that for BarretTime.

Allright.

With the last round of Spring Break vacations now comfortably behind us, it’s time to start looking forward to other geeky goings on to help us get through the coming Texas summer.

And as much as it pains me to say, the best way to escape the Texas Heat may be to escape Texas as well. You’re first opportunity to turn the tables on the temperatures is the weekend of May 21st at the San Mateo Event Center in the Bay Area of California. The Maker Faire, the worlds largest Do-It-Yourself festival, is now in it’s fifth year and remains the premier event for grassroots American innovation. Aimed at both the lone geek and family alike, the fair is a showcase of invention, creativity and resourcefulness as well as a celebration of the Maker mindset.

Hit www.makerfaire.com for details on this event, as well as the other Maker Faires taking place in Detroit and New York later in the summer. The Motor City Maker Faire takes place on July 30th and 31st, and the NYC Faire takes place September 17th and 18th.

If you’d like to effect an escape a little closer to home, you can indulge in some actual escapism June 24th through the 26th at Apollocon 2011, Houston’s Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror Conference. Complete with panels, dealer rooms, an art show, a con suite, a masquerade, a media room, gaming, dance, live action role playing, a charity auction and a writer’s workshop, this year’s installment promises to be the best yet. There’s also a good chance that the con will host another Arduino workshop. I’ll definitely have more information on Apollocon as June gets closer, but for now, you can surf to www.apollocon.org for your information fix.

If you happen to be OK with the Texas heat, but have issues with the humidity, the desert may be an option for you to feel the dry heat of hostile networks and white hot exploits at DEFCON, the world’s largest hacker conference. Moving to new digs at the Rio hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, August 4th through the 7th, it is home to the world’s most hostile network, The Wall of Sheep, the Hardware Hacking Village, and plethora of other puzzles, parties and activities. While I may not make the Maker Faires, I will definitely be attending DEFCON this year. And I have high hopes of enticing other Tech Bytes crew members to join me.

Hit defcon.org for more info on the event.

And if you’re locked down to the point where you can’t leave Houston, the Prison Reform Film Festival is happening this Friday, Saturday and Sunday at the Rice Media center. Hit theprisonshow.org for details and directions, but for now, that’s it for your deals at dodging those devilish degrees and that’s that for BarretTime.

Allright. The data is in from 2010, so we’ll get right into the numbers:

107 Trillion. Anyone? Our new fund raising goal next time around? No. Actually, it’s the total number of emails sent in 2010, which works out to an average of 294 billion messages a day which are distributed to nearly 1.9 billion email users worldwide. That’s an increase of over 34% in the number of email users in 2009, or a total of 480 million new users.

Now, you can’t talk about email without talking about SPAM, as SPAM made up the bulk of 2010s email server load, at roughly 89.1% of the total volume. That’s 262 billion unsolicited commercial emails per day.

And speaking of commerce, of the 2.9 billion email accounts worldwide, 25% of those are corporate.

Does anyone have guesses as to the number of websites on the ‘Net as of December 2010? We can quickly see who surfs NetCraft.com on a regular basis.

255 Million, with 21.4 million of those sites having been added in the last year alone.

Of the quarter of a billion web sites out there, 151 million of them were served to us by Apache, 56 million by Microsoft IIS, an impressive 16 million by Engine-X, and another 15 million by Google’s GWS or the Google Webserver. Incidentally, Microsoft’s IIS had stood for Internet Information Server for the majority of its life, but 2010 saw Microsoft really push the new moniker, Internet Information Services. A clever bit of re-branding, I dare say. And nearly as mispronounceable as “Engine X”, which is spelled “N G I N X” is the relative newcomer wrapping up 2010 with just half a percent of websites served, the contender spelled: L I G H T T P D. Cleverness compounded in this case, as it mixes the word Light with HTTPD or the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Daemon. Any guesses on how to pronounce it?

Lightly. Yeah. However it looks to you, ‘Lightly’ saw the largest growth in the web server arena in 2010 with a 55.7% increase in the number of sites hosted since the year before. Apache follows with 39.1% growth, and IIS is in third place with 15.3% growth.

2010 also saw an increase in the number of registered domain names. The numbers aren’t quite in for all of 2010 yet, but as of October 2010, there were over 202 million domain names across all of the top level domains. That breaks down to 88.8 million .COMs, 13.2 million .NETs, and 8.6 million .ORGs. There are roughly 79.2 million country-coded domains out there (things like .uk, .cn and .de). All in all, we’ve got 7% more registered domain names than we did going into 2010.

That isn’t where all of the IPv4 addresses have been going, though. As much growth as we had in the domain namespace in 2010, the majority of the addresses were handed out to the consumers of that content.

In mid-2010, there were nearly 2 billion Internet users worldwide, a 14% increase from the year before. That gives us a total of:

825 million users in Asia.
475 million in Europe.
266 million in North America,
204 million in Latin America and the Caribbean,
110 million in Africa,
63 million in the Middle East and
21 million users in Oceana and Australia.

Something that has also been changing the last few years are the creators of all the content on the web. Early on, the non-research-related content on the Internet consisted of drink recipes and canonical lists of light bulb jokes. Actually, those are *all* valid areas of research.

Let’s start that again. Early on, most Internet content was created by actual users, not corporations. Then the .com boom happened, where every business, entrepreneur, and marketer jumped on the web. We’re now coming full circle, thanks to Social Media and the 152 million blogs that were active in 2010.

25 billion Tweets were sent in 2010. I didn’t have the time to calculate how many of those were Dwight’s.

There were 100 million new Twitter users in 2010, again, I’m not sure how many of those were created to follow Dwight, but I’d guess that number is up there as well.

That takes us to a total of 175 million people on Twitter, of which 7.7 million are following Lady Gaga.

There are over 600 million people on FaceBook, up from 350 million the year before.

Over 30 billion links, posts and photos are shared on Facebook every month, and even though FaceBook is an American creation, over 70% of FaceBook users are now located outside of the US.

And finally, the dark number… Any guesses as to how many FaceBook apps are installed each day?

20 million.

And of course we can’t wrap up this dizzying display of simple math without having at least one per-minute calculation. 3000. Any guesses? I’m looking to Jay Lee or Groovehouse for this one. Over 3,000 images are uploaded to Flickr every minute, adding to the already present 5 billion images.

And the last stat: 110%. That’s the percentage of fun you’ll have at this month’s Geek Gathering. All the other elements of Geek Gatherings past will combine at a new location, Natachee’s Supper ‘n Punch, which is at 3622 Main just a block and a half North of Alamaba. It’s conveniently close to the HCC Ensemble Light Rail Stop and Jay Lee has arranged for free parking in the adjacent lot on Berry Street. All in all, good news for those of us who wish to arrive unfrozen. Hit the Geek Radio site for details and directions, but for now, that if for your Geek Punch’n Percentages and that’s that for BarretTime.

All right. It seems as though half of Houston is sick this week. If you’re sporting a cough, a sore throat, a runny nose or even a fever, you could be infected with acute viral rhinopharyngitis, aka the common cold. Viruses are often described as being “organisms on the edge of life”, as scientists have yet to reach a consensus on whether a virus is an actual life form or simply an organic structure that is able to interact with living things. While viruses have plagued mankind for all of human history, we’ve only been aware of them for a little over a hundred years.

In fact, our understanding of viruses has been driven predominately by technology. It wasn’t until 1931, with the invention of the electron microscope, that we were first able to peer into their world. And only in the last dew decades have we begun to decode how the interact with our very DNA, often rewriting our cell’s genetic code with bits of its own as a means to spread.

Scientists do know that viral replication has a definite life cycle:

The first stage, Attachment, is when the virus binds to the outside of the host cell. Penetration follows, then replication and release.

If this all sounds a little late-night-cable-tv to you, you need to get your mind out of the gutter. But, if this sounds a lot like a computer virus, then you’ve got your head right for the rest of BarretTime.

While computer viruses certainly aren’t living organisms, the writers of the nefarious ones can definitely be grouped into that “organisms on the edge of life” category. Most computer viruses share a similar life cycle to the biological variety. First, the virus must “attach” to your computer in some way: you can infect yourself by visiting infected hosts, like Not-Safe-For-Work sites and illegal movie and music sharing sites, or they can come looking for you, by way of scanning for vulnerable hosts from already infected machines.

The virus will then penetrate your system and begin the replication and release processes.

So, what do we have in the way of cures for the common cold? Not much. All we can currently do is deal with the symptoms and try to limit exposure to infected hosts. As for their computer counterparts, we have a much better arsenal at our collective disposal.

One way to deal with viruses is by never letting them come in contact with susceptable hosts. This is akin to becoming a bubble boy or girl, or, if you’re on a budget, using a SARS mask and some Saran wrap. While the corporate world has had virus filtering at the gateway for years, devices built for home use that employ deep-packet inspection have been hard to find. This isn’t necessarily the case anymore, as companies like Cisco have started to offer enterprise level features in their home gear. There are even a number of free packages available for installation on an old computer or small dedicated device. ZeroShell and MonoWall both stand out as examples of free routers that can deploy anti-virus support at the point where viruses would come normally come in from the Internet in the form of email attachments, vulnerability scanners and malicious web content.

You can also employ local firewalls, using either third party packages or the completely capable software firewalls that ship with Windows and Linux.

And…just as a healthy immune system is important to fighting off human disease, a healthy local Anti-Virus package is essential to identifying, quarantining and removing any wayward viruses that do find their way onto your desktop. While most Mac and Linux users are still experiencing their Summer of Love, the Windows camp knows the value of practicing Safe Hex. If you’re running a Microsoft operating system, you absolutely have to run a reputable Anti-Virus package and keep it up to date with the most current virus definitions. G-Data, Symantec Norton AV, Kaspersky, BitDefender, Panda, AVG and McAfee all arguably make the list, AVG by GriSoft being the free choice of the bunch.

The number of similarities between human viruses and computer viruses *are* plentiful, and as such, I’ll be available at the February Geek Gathering to discuss Jared Diamond’s book, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” and how it gives new plausibility to the scene in the movie Independence Day where Jeff Goldblum takes down an alien mothership with a computer virus delivered with an Apple laptop.

But for now, that’s it for your phage-one-one and that’s that for BarretTime.

Allright…

The Semi-Annual HAAUG Swap Meet happens this Saturday, January 15th. A warning to computer investors and Day Traders: don’t get too excited – that’s HAAUG as in the Houston Area Apple Users Group and not a meet-up for people who invest in pork belly futures. Oldish and newish gear alike will adorn a number of dealer tables set up throughout the venue. So whether you’re looking for an old copy of Clarisworks or hoping to find a newly abandoned iPad, this is the meetup for you. Registration is required if you wish to secure a table for your own wares, but if you’re only on the prowl for good deals, simply show up unannounced. The event takes place from nine to noon at the Bellaire Civic Center, located at 7008 South Rice Boulevard in beautiful Bellaire, Texas. Hit www.haaug.org for details and directions.

If you *do* want to trade some pork bellies but you’re not in a position to go Trading Places with someone sitting on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, you have to head no farther than the Computer Investors Special Interest Group that meets this Friday at ten in the morning at the HAL-PC Headquarters. The Houston Area League of PC Users is located at 4543 Post Oak Place just inside the 610 Loop near San Felipe.

Now, a person who makes their money the hard way, from the hoof up, isn’t always the type to trust their trading data to the cloud. If you’re the kind person who likes their data right where they can get at it – on a CD hidden in your mattress – then you may want to attend Saturday’s Beginning Access Special Interest Group to learn how to make the break from flat files and develop a relationship with the psuedo-relational database management system from Microsoft known as Access. The group meets from noon until 1:30, with the intent to teach people how to use Microsoft Access. Hit the HAL-PC site at www.hal-pc.org then surf to the SIG Calendar for a full list of the group’s meetings, workshops and events.

If you *do* have your head in the clouds, but would like to get your feet in a data center, you can join the *HCC* group next Thursday, January 20th, for a tour of the Quasar Data Center located at 1001 Texas Avenue in downtown Houston. Attendees will get to see a fully operational data center that weathered Hurricane Ike without ever rolling to backups. Quasar manages two Tier 1 Points of Presence on the Internet, NTT and Cogent, so be very careful not to trip over anything while on the HCC tour. Incidentally, that’s HCC as in Houston Cloud Computing, adding yet another interpretation of this well-known initialism.

The group currently houses their site at www.meetup.com / Houston – Cloud – Computing. Head that way to sign up for the tour and to check out what else the group is up to, as they explore Internet technologies and offer free training on technologies like Citrix and Terminal Services. If you didn’t catch the URL, don’t worry: just head over to the Geek Radio site for a full transcipt of tonight’s amazingly brief BarretTime. Which leads us to…

That’s it for the fastest four one one of twenty eleven and that’s that for BarretTime.

All right.

We’ll start out the new decade with some geek etiquette: Out of respect for the gift-giver, it’s polite to not void any warranties in the same year the gift was given. Well, we’re 5 days into the New Year and all bets are off. We’ll take a quick look at the most popular presents people received during the holidays and offer suggestions as to how you can best augment them with free software. That’s free as in price and in the ability to hack and mod to your heart’s content.

If you were lucky enough to receive an e-book reader this year, like the Amazon Kindle 3G or the Barnes & Nobles Color Nook, the first thing you should do is read up on what makes your device better than someone else’s. If you can’t defend the merits of the hardware you’re carrying, you should be prepared to have natural brown sugar kicked in your face by all the e-book jocks at your local coffeehouse.

A few survival tips: If you’re defending anything with electronic ink against something that uses a color LCD, take the fight outside into the sunlight: your opponent’s resolve will fade as quickly as their display. Conversely, if you received a reader with a color LCD, it’s imperative that you engage your opponent in low lighting levels while leveraging the power of full color content, like a current issue of a popular tech magazine. Things will fall decidedly in your favor if you’re able to select an article in the magazine that illustrates the superiority of your chosen e-reader. Tablet users: simply launch Angry Birds to derail the confrontation all together.

One thing that *all* e-book readers can agree on: Calibre. It’s a free e-book library management application, developed by users of e-books *for* users of e-books. Calibre offers library management, e-book conversion, syncing to a nearly every e-book reader out there, utilities to convert web content into e-book form, and even a content server for online access to your book collection. Think of it like iTunes for text.

And unlike the iTunes store, you don’t have to break the bank to bolster your e-book collection: there are tens of thousands of books in the public domain that can be had for free. Started in 1971 under the auspices that “anything that can be entered into a computer can be reproduced indefinitely”, Project Gutenberg has become the de facto digital library for the classics. For user created and user contributed items, be sure to check out the 20 million+ items at OpenLibrary.org. If you’ve ever wanted to play librarian, this is the site for you.

And if you don’t have an e-book reader, hit LibriVox.org for an acoustical library liberation carried out on the music player of your choice, be it an iPod, a Zune, or a cassette tape deck in the Cutlass. The Calibre application can be downloaded from www.calibre-ebook.com and over 33,000 free books are available from Project Gutenberg at www.gutenberg.org.

If you were lucky enough to receive an XBox Kinect, you really have your hacking cut out for you. The Kinect is a game controller built by Microsoft for the XBox. It contains an RGB camera, a depth sensor and a multi-array microphone, which provides full 3D motion capture, facial recognition and voice recognition abilities. To get an idea of what people are doing with their Kinects, simply search for “kinect hack” on YouTube. The real-time light saber and transformation into Ultra Seven, an old-time superhero in Japan, are especially cool, but shy away from the man who is projecting piercings onto his chest.

To play around with some of these hacks at home, you’ll need to install the OpenKinect driver on your laptop or PC. This driver allows the Kinect to communicate with your non-XBox system, letting you direct the stream of data into the application or utility of your choosing. This is definitely bleeding edge stuff, but if you have even moderate technical chops, you can probably get your rig up and running within a few hours. Hit www.openkinect.org for the drivers and installation directions for your particular platform.

Those were definitely two of the coolest presents for 2010. But what do you do if someone gave you something not so cutting edge? What do you do if you received an ancient 486, an underpowered netbook, a Playstation 2, a very merry VAX cluster, a toaster or even a dead badger? Guesses? That’s easy… You install Linux on it. The operating system that really gave the free software movement legs, Linux, in some form or fashion, is available for nearly every piece of computing hardware under the sun. Even badgers. Lucy A. Snyder’s book, Installing Linux on a Dead Badger, walks you through the installation process on the badger of your choosing, step by step. (Supposedly, partitioning the badger is the hardest part. Well, that and the smell.) The book isn’t free, but Snyder has published the user guide to the badger installation on the web to be freely read by all. If you’re short on time and more into toast than taxidermy, you can actually buy a ready-made NetBSD Toaster from Technologic Systems on the Web. NetBSD is actually more appropriate than linux for bread-based applications due to its use of disk slices.

Just don’t tell the members of the Houston Linux Users Group that I recommended NetBSD over Linux when you attend their first bi-monthly meeting of 2011. The group gets together at the HAL-PC Headquarters located just inside the 610 West Loop near San Felipe from 2:00 to 4:00 in the afternoon. The meeting takes the form of an hour and a half presentation over something useful you can do with Linux. As always, both noobs and gurus will be better off for having attended. Hit www.hal-pc.org for driving directions and a full calendar of their Special Interest Group meetings.

And lastly, if you have a piece of new or “new to you” tech, we invite you to bring it out to the January installment of the Geek Gathering. KD5 and I will be unveiling XyrgBee, a game that began life as a simple idea and has manifest itself in a distributed computing platform, complete with several Arduinos, some wireless communications and a matrix of 192 discrete light emitting diodes flickering faster than your eyes can perceive. That’s right! We’ll have Arduino’s there that are actually DOing something. All of this happens this Friday at 7:00 PM at The Coffee Groundz, located at 2503 Bagby at McGowan in Midtown Houston. Free wifi and geeky conversation abound, complete with a staff offering coffee, beer and wine and a light menu. Hit the Tech Bytes site at www.geekradio.com for details, directions and your own electrifying invitation.

That’s it for your first 4-eleven of twenty-eleven and that’s that for BarretTime.

Techs & Trainers, a Houston non-profit that refurbishes outdated computers to provide up-to-date machines for Houstonians with special needs, is joining with Houston’s Green Bank to hold a computer drive:

To assist with all of the “yesterday’s computers” that Houstonians suddenly have on their hands this week, Green Bank is hosting the computer drop-off at three Houston locations, continuing through Friday, January 7.

During the two week period, Green Bank will accept any unneeded desktops, laptops, monitors, printers and other accessories. Any machines that can’t be repaired will be dismantled for parts and recycled locally, sparing our municipal landfills.

Drop-offs can be made between 9am and 5pm, Mon – Fri, at the following Green Bank locations:

* 4000 Greenbriar (at US 59) – Houston, TX 77098
* Redstone Building, 109 N. Post Oak Lane, Ste. 100 – Houston, TX 77024
* 5018 San Felipe, in the Rice Center – Houston, TX 77056

Allright. This is the last BarretTime of 2010, and it’s not going to be an easy one. I’m going to ask you to look deep into yourselves and into your filesystems, make some tough calls, then actually act on them. While it will take some effort on your part, your soul and your data will thank you.

A point of order before we get underway – this is a non-denominational BarretTime. I’m not here to argue the merits of the different religions: the venerable FAT, the indecipherable NTFS, the kool-aid drinking UFS & HFS-Plus zealots, the solemn ext two through fours, the wonderful XFS, the aging JFS, killer ReiserFS and Styx. Any guesses as to what uses or used Styx? The OS of choice of 70s rock bands? Or the firewall appliance that serves as the boundary between Earth and the Underworld?

A: The Inferno Operating System used Styx, which is actually a variant of the Plan 9 Filesystem Protocol from Bell Labs. That’s metal.

OK – so we’ll wrap up the bit where I’m not mentioning that XFS is the best filesystem on the planet, and we’ll get back to your soul. If the eyes are the window to the soul, then your *desktop* is the window to your *computing* soul. Sorry, Chrome OS users… For those of you with a desktop and a soul: do just a few frequently used shortcuts adorn some cool hand-picked wallpaper? Can you see your wall paper? Do you even remember what it looks like? If you haven’t seen your desktop background image in ages, it may be time to dejunk your desktop. Most operating systems come with existing folders for downloads, documents, images and movies located underneath a user’s home directory. If this isn’t granular enough for you, consider creating subfolders under each of these, like Work and Personal for a start. You can sort the files on your desktop by file type, allowing you to make quick work of going through them, identifying them, and then moving them into the appropriate folder or directory.

Now is also a good time to take a look at installed programs and ask yourself how often you actually use them. Windows will tell you the last date a particular program was used, helping make some difficult decisions easier. Keep in mind that if you are running a Microsoft Windows based operating system and you have done a lot of installing, uninstalling, and re-installing programs throughout the year, you may want to freshen things up with the Jay Lee Maneuver, though the pilgrimage to that temple is one you’ll have to make on your own. Whichever way you go, you’ll wind up with a much more orderly soul, though not necessarily a lighter one. If you really want to soar to the heavens, you’re going to have to trim some of the real weight from your filesystem.

If you have plenty of drive space left, say you’re using less than 50% of your disk, then you’re fine. If, however, you find yourself approaching 80 or even 90%, you may want to search your filesystem to see what’s taking up all the space. Keep in mind that a lot of downloadable software can be downloaded again, especially free packages like Open Office or any Linux Distro, allowing you to delete the original downloaded file. Also, if you have the same files on multiple machines (outside of your backup plan), you can free up some room by removing duplicates. Now, you may have to ask yourself some tough questions like, Do I really need every episode of Battle Star Galactica in HD on every device I own? The answer is yes, by the way, but I’m sure a lot of Linux ISOs and large files can be burned to CD or DVD to free up space just in case Universal decides to make more episodes of BSG.

A note of caution: Unless you truly know what you’re doing, don’t go digging around outside of your personal folders in the hopes of freeing up drive space. If you downloaded it, then by all means delete it, but don’t delve into directories you’re decidedly unfamiliar with. You may think you’re freeing up space by deleting stuff you never look at, like everything in the system32 directory or all of /dev, but in most cases, it’s best not to venture below your own personal directory. That isn’t to say you shouldn’t take a look around; just be careful doing so.

Now that you’re a little lighter, you want to take steps to preserve this new found filesystem freedom by backing up your data to removeable media, another machine or even the cloud. Hopefully, this won’t turn into a do as we say, not as we do, but in 140 characters or less, what backup method or system do each of the hosts use?

The last commandment is to actually test your backups. Once you have your data backed up, see if you can get your files and data extracted from the backups, then actually try to open and use those files. It’s much better to find out that your backup method of choice didn’t perform as you had expected now, when you still have all your data, rather than when the inevitable happens.

So this conveniently leads us into making some New Year’s Resolutions.

My suggestions to you would be:

1) Purge your desktop an all but the bare minimum, moving data files and downloads to their own folders.

2) Do an end-of-the-year backup, and then continue to back up at regular intervals.

3) Test your backups.

My resolution for next year? 1440 by 900.

That’s it for 2010 and that’s that for BarretTime.