I picked up a TomTom Car Kit tonight at my local Apple store.  It’s truly a Jack of All Trades, combining the functions of a mount, a charger, a hands-free bluetooth speakerphone, and an enhanced GPS chip.  One thing it is not:  Cheap.

I’ve been waiting for over a year to get a hands-free solution for my car.  I’ve looked at several bluetooth headsets, but have held off buying them because they each had some sort of shortcoming.

I’ve read that the JawBone, for example, works great, but there are sometimes fit issues, plus the idea of having to charge the headset seemed less than optimal since I wanted to use it pretty much exclusively in my car.  That, and the price tag seemed a bit steep.

I’ve looked at the various Parrot brand car kits as well.  They are supposed to be great units, but require some hard wiring, and are pricey.  The low end unit attaches to the cigarette lighter and has it’s own speaker, but it’s reported to be fairly low quality, while retaining about an $80 price tag.

I have an iGo charger and tip for my iPhone.  I think the tip for the iPhone was about $10.  I don’t recall the cost of the cable itself, but it was probably $5 to $10.

For a trip that I recently went on, we bought a Griffin Window Seat.  This is basically a mount with attachments to work with an original iPhone, an iPod Touch, or a iPhone 3G (or 3GS, since the body shape is the same).  It has no charging capability, and you can’t use any sort of case with it.  (It was fine for our trip, since it was almost solely used with an iPod Touch to play Sesame Street for our 20 month old when he started getting cranky, which can happen on a 13 hour drive.)  This mount is on the clunky side, but works.  It runs about $30.

We mostly used Navigon’s iPhone app on our trip.  We used it pretty much daily to get around the Washington DC area.  It performed pretty well, but occasionally we’d lose GPS lock.  Fortunately, this never happened at a time that we needed to turn.  Sometimes we’d come to a stop light and, while waiting for the light to change, it would adjust our position backwards, then it presumed we had turned around.  I believe our most common issue was that it would jump from the road we were driving on to a neighboring road.  In both of these last two cases, it would attempt to re-route us until it realized where we really were, which sometimes took far longer than you’d expect.  In familiar areas, this re-routing isn’t a big deal, but it is when you are very unaware of the local roads.

In my initial quick test of the TomTom Car Kit, I used it for a phone call and was happy with the speaker volume.  I was not at highway speed, though, so this may yet have issues.  I’m impressed with the GPS tracking in my limited testing.  I only used it for a short trip, but it tracked my position with much better accuracy than my iPhone alone.  It seemed to tell me to turn sooner than my iPhone alone, and reacted faster when I intentionally turned opposite to the directions Navigon gave me.  I’ll try to use it over the next few days and plan to post again with any issues I run into, if I run into any.  Oh – Note that I’m using it with Navigon, not the TomTom application.  It appears that the iPhone will prefer the TomTom GPS chip over it’s own.

At any rate, it’s not cheap, but considering that it provides similar functionality to a $30 mount, an $80 speakerphone car kit, a $15-$20 charger, and enhanced GPS (don’t have a comparable dollar value), I’d say it’s a reasonable deal if you want all this functionality wrapped up in one device.

My kids like DinerDash, and pretty much the whole generation of flash-based games that have come along since DinerDash made a big splash.  Originally, they played it on a Windows machine, but we have since added a Mac to the stable of kid accessible machines.  I tried installing BookWorm Deluxe on the kids Mac for them to try out.  Unfortunately, it only ran under my account.  All of the kids have Managed accounts to take advantage of the parental controls in Mac OS.  Most recently, I tried YoudaSushiChef, but it behaved similar to the others.  This perplexed me, as I tried setting the permissions via the GUI, to no avail.

I searched the web, thinking that lots of others must be having the same issue, using either Managed accounts or Standard accounts, but I couldn’t find a peep about it anywhere on the Internet.

The support team at YoudaGames was very nice, but not terribly helpful, almost as if they don’t even test their game on Mac OS.  (With today’s development tools, it wouldn’t surprise me.)  After exchanging a few emails with them, they offered me a refund, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet.

Finally, today I was thinking about it, when it struck me…  The GUI only shows Ready and Write permissions, not Execute!

Anyhow, I opened a Terminal and did:

cd /Applications
sudo chmod -R 777 YoudaSushiChef.app

Then entered my password when prompted.

Finally, I tried launching it from one of the Kid’s accounts, and it started right up, working just like it should.  Same thing worked for BookWorm, so it will probably work for most any flash-based game on the Mac.

Overall, I am extremely happy with the CheckPoint UTM-1 Edge X boxes that my company is using in our locations.  We have segmented our network into VLANs by purpose (one for wireless, one for POS, one for Network Management, etc.) and all these segments intersect at the UTM.  Since the IPs for all these devices aren’t neatly distributed into subnets, the location’s Class C network is bridged all together, with the firewall happening on the bridge.  Everything worked fine until there was a new requirement added in.  Management wants customers to be able to wirelessly connect to a special SSID to get Internet access, like a HotSpot.  We wanted to place this on a separate subnet and have that subnet drop into the UTM, letting it handle NAT, as well as the various firewall rules needed to make sure our customers don’t end up dropping out on our network.  But, the UTM doesn’t work reliably in this manner.  Web traffic works in starts and stutters.  A wireshark trace shows lots of retransmissions, even if we are on a wired connection.  It’s so bad that loading a single web page can take many minutes, if it ever loads.  However, ICMP packets work fine, the entire time.  We tried for days to get it to work, but it continuously worked the same way.  Finally, we loaded a debug version of code onto the UTM and disabled connection caching (a suggestion given to us by CheckPoint when working a previous problem).  As soon as we did this, everything started working as we expected.  It gave us about a 10% hit to processor utilization, but that was worth it, since it actually worked.  Unfortunately, this isn’t a solution that will work in a production environment, as we can’t just have the box boot up to that mode, the command to disable conneciton caching doesn’t just disable it, it “Toggles” it, so if it’s On, it will turn it off and vice-verse. Easy right?  Just get back with CheckPoint, let them re-create it, then fix the bug and off to the races we go.

Unfortunately, a few months ago our management decided to go to a 3rd party for CheckPoint support.  So, instead of explaining all this to a CheckPoint tech, I’ve explained it all to a 3rd party, who has to go and verify that it really is broken like we say, at which time he will escalate it to CheckPoint.  It’s been a week since we opened the ticket.  Last we heard, two days ago, the tech hadn’t got the Lab set up yet.  Great going, management!  We’ve saved a little money, but we’re wasting a lot of time.

Snow Leopard was a breeze to install.  It took about an hour on each of 4 machines that I upgraded Friday night.  The upgrades went without incident on two Core 2 Duo minis, an original Core Duo iMac, and a Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro.

So, what’s new in Snow Leopard?  I won’t bore you with the features that you’ve most certainly already read about on a dozen other sites.

I know this is purely objective, but the OS does feel faster than Leopard.  Some of the speed is due to the re-write done to Finder, but I think it is in large part due to the fact that most major apps now have 64 bit support.  What’s more, I expect that as more applications are updated to 64 bit support, things will seem snappier, though Apple’s core applications are the ones that the majority of people use.

While it’s not the dramatic change from Panther to Tiger, or from Tiger to Leopard, it is a worthwhile upgrade, even if you can’t see all the changes that have taken place.  For $49, I upgraded 4 machines to the latest Mac OS, one that will be improved upon and supported for at least a few more years.  I call that a bargain.

I recently re-purposed an old G4 mac mini as a server on my local network.  Why?  Snow Leopard doesn’t support the PowerPC processor, so it’s stuck on Leopard.  And, I didn’t really need it as an end-user machine anymore.

The first thing I put on it was Squid, the venerable proxy server.  A proxy on a Mini?  Why yes.  This particular Mini has 1 GB of RAM and a 24×7 rated 60 GB 7200 RPM drive.  I have a small home network serving my family, so I’m not terribly concerned with Squid killing the hard drive from over use.

I was surprised at how well it worked.  I don’t think there’s really a noticeable slowdown when surfing from my Core 2 Duo 2.26 Ghz mini, even when opening multiple tabs at the same time.  And once I’ve surfed to a site once, it should have some of the images cached, speeding things up that much more the next time I visit.

So, we’ve now used this for a few weeks and all seems well, except one thing.  I really wanted to use something like Privoxy with Squid to block ads, but there is no longer a download for Privoxy for Mac OS X.  (I think it’s still possible with Fink, but didn’t want to go down that path)

I remembered previously reading about a Mac proxy server specifically for blocking ads, so I searched and found GlimmerBlocker.  It’s a pretty configurable proxy server (configurable via the System Preferences pane).  I was pleased that it can also point to a proxy server, so I configured it to point to Squid.  Chained in this way, the results get filtered by GlimmerBlocker and cached by Squid.

So far, I have four machines using this, and the old G4 is working fine handling all the requests.  There are many fewer ads showing up on my kid’s machines now, which is the real reason for doing this… I mean, have you seen some of the ads on MySpace?

Back when I “hacked” my Wii (installed cIOS Rev 10) to allow my games to run off of a USB hard drive, I had to switch over to using Wireless instead of my USB Ethernet adapter.  You see, Rev 10 would only let me use either my USB Ethernet adapter, or my USB hard drive.  My problem with this is that the Wii doesn’t support Enterprise Authentication on wireless, and I don’t really trust anything less with wireless.  Anyhow, I set up another SSID running WPA-PSK just for the Wii and placed it on another subnet, on the other side of my firewall from my secured LAN.  Problem solved, right?  It was until very recently…  PlayOn just added support for the Wii so you can now watch Hulu, NetFlix, etc on your Wii.  In my case, however, from this separate subnet my Wii could not see my PlayOn server.

Back a few weeks ago I had read that running Rev 12 of cIOS would let you use an additional USB port for other USB devices.  So, I upgraded last night from Rev 10 of cIOS to Rev 12.  (Yes, I know that Rev 13, 13b, and 14 are also out, but I’m not one for the bleeding edge unless there’s a real need.)

After upgrading to Rev 12, I moved my USB drive to the other USB port (it only works from one of them now), attached my USB Ethernet adapter to the newly vacated USB port, and was up and running on the network with wired Ethernet connectivity.

At this point, I was able to find my PlayOn server and navigate the interface to watch a few shows.  The quality isn’t nearly as good as watching PlayOn on my SageTV HD200, but navigation of the shows from Hulu is much faster, and you can’t screw up (like you can with the HD200) and accidentally restart the show by trying to fast forward past a commercial.  PlayOn states that they plan to add support for rewinding and fast-forwarding on the Wii, so that will be a plus.  This is the first time they actually have control of the 10 foot user interface, so I expect they will make this nice, as it will directly drive sales.

The bottom line?  Even with the reduced video quality, it was still very watchable.  There were occasional issues with the playback (very brief audio pausing mostly), but you don’t need to worry – Just watch and the interruptions aren’t bad enough to really take away from the experience…

With BootMii, if you install it in “boot2″, you can pretty much do anything (software wise) you want to your Wii.  Once you make a good backup of your NAND memory, if you brick your Wii, or otherwise hose it, you can simply restore to the backup you made with BootMii.  Now that I know about it, I wouldn’t recommend updating any Wii without it!

Ideally, you want to install BootMii and take a good backup of your system before you do any hacking that results in anything being on your Wii permanently (like patching your IOS).  Your NAND memory (basically, where the OS lives) can be completely backed up and later restored.

Note:  I believe BootMii Beta 3 has an issue restoring that requires you to make a change to be able to successfully restore a backup.

Grab it here:  bootmii.org

I picked up TomTom for my iPhone this weekend and tried it out today.  A few observations.  First, the bad:

1.  The battery gets seriously drained using TomTom.  After using it on the way to work (15-20 minute trip), my battery was down to under 50% (probably started around 70-75% of a full charge).  Lightly using my iPhone for phone calls, web surfing, etc and I was down to 20%.  Using TomTom when driving home put my down to almost nothing.
2. It doesn’t make the GPS tracking built into the iPhone any better.  It occasionally showed me hopping to adjacent roads, which started it recalculating the route.  It also seems to assume that I’m continuing on forward sometimes when I have come to a stop light, which also causes re-routing to occur.
3. Listening to a podcast interfered with the driving directions.  I could hear the podcast and it would pause when TomTom should have been giving me driving directions, but there were no directions.  The podcast then continued after a few moments, abruptly.
4. It doesn’t speak the road names.  Not a super-big deal to me, but I’ve never used a GPS that does, so perhaps I don’t know what I’m missing.

The Good:

1. Selection of voices is nice.  I was a bit shocked to see just how many you had to pick from that spoke English.  I wouldn’t be surprised if TomTom comes out with Voice Packs that you can buy and install from within the application itself.
2. Speed Limits – It has a database of speed limits and lets you know (by lighting up a small portion of the display in red) if you are speeding.  Unfortunately, a stretch of road I was travelling today had the speed limits changed about a  year or so ago, and TomTom still thought the old limits were in effect.  This is a very nice feature though!
3. Easy to Navigate the app – It seems pretty straight forward to use.  Rotating the view works well.
4. POI Database seems pretty up-to-date (not that I’ve used it extensively yet).  The ability to call a POI from directly within the app is a nice touch too.

Jury is still out:

1. IQ Routes – Sounds like a really good feature.  I can’t say whether it’s any good yet or not, as I seem to have IQ Routes built into my brain.  (It basically suggested the same way I already drive to get to and from work, but then I go there every day)
2. Map data – I was disappointed that the map data for the I-95/I-10 interchange wasn’t completely up-to-date.  To be fair, though, it is still under construction, but it is such a major interchange, I’d think they’d keep it very updated.  They do have a major mall that was put in within about the last two years, so they aren’t too badly out-of-date.  Can’t say if this is bad or good yet.  I don’t know how the competition lines up here, since I’ve only tried G-Map.  I also don’t know if TomTom is planning to put out Map updates on a regular basis as free updates, or if they plan to put a “store” within the TomTom app to let you buy updates.

So, I think my #1 and #2 Bad issues, battery life and GPS tracking, will probably be addressed by the TomTom accessory, and #3 and #4 should be able to be addressed in software.  Honestly, though, I don’t see how any software can compensate for the relatively poor GPS chip that’s built into the phone, so this is probably one area that TomTom has their competitors beat, as I’ve not heard of any other GPS maker that is planning a hardware accessory to address this issue.  If TomTom can just get this unit shipping at a price that doesn’t break the bank!

Personally, I think that TomTom would best benefit from getting out of the standalone unit business.  As more and more people see that you can get basic GPS with an application on a phone, fewer people are likely to be interested in the standalone hardware.  Not to mention that they probably make more profit selling an iPhone app (even after Apple’s 30% cut) than they make from selling a $129 standalone GPS unit.

Back some time ago, I complained that I would need to upgrade all three of the Seagate 500 GB drives in my ReadyNAS Pro to expand my storage.  That’s not entirely true, as I could add more drives, but given the reliability of these drives, I thought it best not to. I had my eye on the 1 TB Western Digital RE3 drive.  At $159 each, though, that was an expensive proposition.  In checking around a bit, I found that Amazon had the 500 GB version of the RE3 for about $85, but was shocked to see the 750 GB version of the RE3 for about $93 each.  I ordered 3 with Amazon’s free shipping and they arrived today.  (I just checked and they are now $100.15 each)

I removed disk 1 and swapped it with a new RE3.  Within a few minutes. it was busy re-syncing with the new drive.   Almost exactly two hours later, it was done.

I gave it a few more minutes to be 100% sure it was done, then swapped out drive 2.  Same as the first, almost two hours exactly.

After this rebuild was complete, the ReadyNAS told me that it had found space that could be used to expand capacity and that it would perform an expansion during the next reboot.

The last disk swap went uneventfully.  The next afternoon, I rebooted the ReadyNAS and it automatically expanded the volume, giving me about another 500 GB of RAID protected storage.

So, while this was not as easy as expanding a Drobo, it definitely falls squarely in the “pretty easy” category.  Considering that it was my data at stake, I’m very glad this post is practically a non-issue sort of post…

Perhaps it’s the fact that it is 3 AM now, and I’m really tired…  But I really think I want a Drobo.

Currently, I’m using the excellent ReadyNAS Pro Pioneer, which comes with a huge up-front price tag.  It is approved for use with mostly “Enterprise” level drives, which are also quite pricey.  Currently, I have three 500 GB Seagate drives of a model that, according to what I’ve read, have a horrid failure rate.  (A fact I only found out after one of mine started producing a significant number of errors.)

Anyhow, it is recommended to keep the drives all the same model.  I could simply add another of the same drive, but I’m not about to drop another dime on a bad model of drive.  Don’t get me wrong – I’ve had plenty of other Seagates that have worked fine, but a few of their recent models have had issues, and this happens to be one of them.

So, with that in mind, I really need to replace all three of these drives, one after the other.  What, you say?  Yes!  With X-RAID, only once the final drive has been replaced and integrated into the array will it upgrade the capacity of the array.  Now, it is impressive that it will do this, especially while still serving users, but this isn’t exactly the most home-user friendly way to do things.

Back to my issue, though.  I’d like to replace my drives with ones from the Western Digital Enterprise line that were about $159 each from Newegg.com the last time I checked.  Add shipping to that, and you’re talking close to $500.  In the end, I would have doubled my redundant capacity from the approximately 1 TB to 2 TB.

If I had a Drobo, on the other hand, I could just buy whichever model of drive is currently on sale, of whatever capacity I like, slap it in, and it will automatically maximize your redundant capacity.

Heck, if I simply took the three 500 GB drives I have now that the ReadyNAS gives me a total of 918 GB of usable space.  According to the Drobo Calculator tool, I’d have 929.3 GB of usable space on a Drobo with those same drives.  Somehow, it squeezes an extra 10 GB of drive space out of the same three drives… ??

What I’m really getting at is if I had a drobo with these three drives and ran low on capacity, I could just buy one of the recent $80 1 TB specials I’ve seen, and my redundant capacity would jump from 929.3 GB to 1.4 TB.  Then, I’d have added 50% more redundant storage for very little money.  If within a few months I ran low again, just grab whichever drive is the best value at the time, say another 1 TB drive, replace an existing 500 GB drive, and I’m at 1.8 TB.

Now, some smartie pants is almost sure to offer to trade me, as the Pro Pioneer is still worth over $1000 with these three crummy drives in it.. (Heck, it may be worth that even without these three drives!)

I know that the Drobo isn’t really a NAS, unless you buy the droboshare, which is basically an Ethernet to USB bridge, if I understand it right.  That’s another $200.

I know too that there are apps that run on the Pro, many of them ported by Netgear customers..  But, I did not know that the same thing exists for the Drobo/DroboShare.  There is a catalog of a about a dozen or so droboApps ranging from media servers, rsync, SSH, a torrent client, a web and FTP server, etc…    Not quite the selection of Netgear, but not too shabby either…

Anyhow, a Drobo would fit nicely with what I need right now…  I’ve actually often admired it, but never truely considered buying one because of the lack of power in the box (the 1st gen one, at least), and the lack of network connectivity (without buying an add-on)…

Who knows, perhaps I’ll buy one and sell my ReadyNAS Pro, using the left over money to buy a Droboshare and a larger capacity drive or two.