Category Archives: technology

Introducing the HP Media Vault

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I would like to announce that the product I’ve been working on for the past
year has just been released. I love this product and have had a great time
working on it. One of the most gratifying parts of working on the product
was that whenever we had someone test it, we could never get it back from
them. 🙂 At first, some people didn’t even know that they needed it and yet
after they start using it, they didn’t know how they lived without it. It’s
a network-attached storage/backup device for the home called the HP Media
Vault. You can also use it in a business. I use one around work all the
time and find it just as valuable in a business environment as it is at
home. The software that comes with it automates both disk image backups as
well as file-based backups. It can be used to easily share files between a
Windows PC, a Linux workstation, or a Mac.

One of the coolest features is the ability to stream music, photos, and
videos to your TV/Stereo systems around your home by using a digital media
adapter. I’ve started a new FAQ and user group which you can find here:

http://www.k0lee.com/hpmediavault

If you compare it against similar products, I think you’ll find that it leads the field when you compare its capacity, performance, price, flexibility, and support.

U3 Smart Drive

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I recently discovered a new type of USB flash memory device called a U3 smart drive that has the potential change the way that people use PCs. I won one of these on a TechPodcast RoundTable a few weeks ago. Now that I’ve had a chance to use it for a while, I figured I’d write up a review about it.

‘U3’ is a company formed as a joint venture by two flash memory industry leaders, SanDisk and M-Systems. The U3 smart drives make data and programs completely portable between PCs. When you plug the U3 drive into any Windows PC, it carries its own ‘environment’ and makes even borrowed PCs look and feel like they’ve been instantly ‘personalized’.

The U3 smart drive concept takes advantage of the fact that most people use PCs for email, document creation/editing, and web browsing. Imagine that programs, documents, email, and web browser settings were stored on a flash drive that could be securely locked with a password. It would be possible to use even a borrowed PC just like it was your own. When you eject the drive there’d be no trace of activity left on the PC. You could then take it to another PC and start working right where you left off.

Software downloaded for the U3 installs directly on the device, not on the PC. So instead of purchasing applications and installing them on every PC you might use, you can just insert and run the program directly from the U3 flash drive.

Programs that run on a U3 device can be specially modified so as not to use the PC’s registry or leave temporary files. A free SDK is available for software vendors wishing to adapt their programs. A large number of software applications have already been ported, such as OpenOffice, Skype, Thunderbird, Firefox, as well as lot of handy utilities to help sync data between the PC and the U3 drive. Many of the programs are either free or available for a nominal fee. There are over 70 applications available, with more becoming available all the time.

A common question people ask is whether their existing flash drive can be ‘formatted’ to have U3 features. This isn’t possible because the functions are embedded in the hardware. The U3 controller chip causes the device to behave as a combination CD-ROM emulator and flash drive. The CD-ROM emulator includes an auto-launch program that takes only a small portion (~4MB) of the flash. The auto-launch program prompts the user for a password to unlock the rest of the drive (provided he has set a password). Once that part of the drive is unlocked, a small U3 icon will appear in the system tray.

Clicking on the U3 icon in the system tray brings up the U3 Launchpad, as shown below:

U3 LaunchPad

The left side of the launch pad shows the programs on the drive. The right side has all the management utilities for the device. U3 also allows the manufacturer to private brand the drive with logos and links to their websites. In the case of the drive shown in the above Launchpad, Geek Squad (BestBuy) is the reseller brand. Clicking on either of those GeekSquad logos takes you to Best Buy’s GeekSquad website.

Installing programs on the U3 drives is very easy. Just click on the download programs icon and select from any of dozens of the programs and they will automatically download and install themselves. There is also a way to use a U3 installer file and add it through the Add Programs menu item.

Of course, there is always some downside to new technology and a review wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t mention them. First of all, if you lock the device with a password, you can’t use it to move data to non-Windows platforms such as Mac or Linux computers. In addition, the programs installed on a U3 drive will only execute on a Windows PC, so the people who use Mac and Linux computers can’t take advantage of its most salient feature, i.e., executing programs directly from the flash drive. A customer can use it to share data with non-Windows systems, provided they unlock it first.

If you forget the password, there’s no way to retrieve the data (although it can provide a password hint). This security feature also means that if you were to lose the device, there are no worries about having any personal data stolen.

Currently, the largest U3 device available is 2GB, but this will continue to grow as flash drives get larger. Until flash drives got to be around 512 MB, a U3 smart drive wouldn’t have been a practical solution because of the space needed to hold applications. However, as flash drives continue to grow, its value becomes more and more compelling. The Office-like suites can take up about 200 MB each, but most of the other programs that run on these drives are only a few MB and take up only a small percentage of its capacity. It probably wouldn’t work well for very large applications like Adobe’s Photoshop or Illustrator but it will hold data from those applications, so if they are already installed on a PC, then the U3 smart drive can work with them and move data between computers like a conventional flash drive.

After using the device for a few weeks, I really appreciate the value in it. For the first time ever, my bookmarks on Firefox and IE on 4 separate computers are completely synchronized. I’ve gotten to experiment with some new MS Office-like alternatives, and the small size of the flash drive sets a new bar for portability. I’m also impressed with the RoboForm password manager that automatically recalls and fills in passwords on any website that requires them. At first, I was reluctant to commit sensitive data like passwords to anything other than my memory, but after using it for a while, and realizing that the passwords are encrypted and double password protected, I’m really enjoying the convenience of having them all entered automatically. It’s one of those applications which, once you’ve started using it, is hard to give up.

It’s impossible to predict the future, so there’s no way to know whether you’re reading about at an interesting curiosity, or “The Next Big Thing.” I’ve long contemplated a time where instead of lugging around a laptop computer, I could just securely connect with my data and programs on a shared PC with a real keyboard, mouse, and display. To a certain extent, the Internet has allowed some of this to occur, but it has security, availability, and performance issues that may never be completely resolved. To insure security and performance, a physical storage device along with a password will likely be required into the foreseeable future. The U3 device is well positioned to deliver these essential features.

Zen and the art…

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It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written anything so I thought I’d go ahead and put down a few words just to show what I’ve been doing. I got my motorcycle running last month but realized it had a battery that needed replacing. After doing that, I’ve been riding it nearly every day to work. I even took Terri’s bike to work one day just for the variety’s sake and it was a blast. Her Ducati Monster is light, nimble, and very powerful with lots of low end torque.

I was not looking forward to replacing the battery on the BMW. The battery was only 2 years old. I know, I know, I should have kept a trickle charger connected to it during the winter to make it last longer. The complicating factor is that the battery is buried under the fairing which is held on with 17 screws. I didn’t know how difficult it would be to remove and reinstall but it is certainly more work than on any other motorcycle I’ve owned. It turned out not to be as bad as I had imagined, probably on par with the cowlings on my plane which I’ve removed and reinstalled many, many times. Still, for having to do routine maintenance, such as topping off the water levels in the cells, 17 screws are way too many. So I replaced it with a sealed battery, which requires absolutely no maintenance.

I made the decision to go with a Hawker PC680 sealed lead acid battery from Portable Power because I’ve heard good things about these batteries on both the BMW forums as well as from my canard buddies who use them on their experimental aircraft. So I actually bought two, one for the bike and another for the plane because its battery will need replacing soon too. The only issue about these batteries is they don’t have posts like regular batteries, so I had to fabricate posts from copper pipe. It wasn’t too difficult. I just squeezed some 1/2″ dia copper pipe in a vice, bent it, drilled it, and then did some trimming on the band saw. You can see the results here.

The next item on agenda is doing the annual inspection on the airplane. It’s due this month and so I better get to it before I find myself grounded. My friend Don also wants to finish the wings on the Cozy that we’re building so it is time to get them out of his basement and to the hangar where we can fit them to the spar and fuselage and install the winglets.

I’ve heard the expression that a man’s life is complicated in proportion to the number of vehicles he owns that have internal combustion engines, and I can certainly understand that claim. What I really need is one of those Airspeeders they used to get around on the Star Wars movies. That could replace my Durango, motorcycle, and airplane in one fell swoop and would do away with those pesky internal combustion engines too .

Satellites, part deux

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The last time I blogged about satellites, it was related to Amateur (ham radio) satellites. Yesterday I read a news story about a company called World Space that had just raised a lot of money for a broadcast radio satellite system in Europe, Africa, and Asia similar to those used by XM and Sirius in North America. The man behind World Space is Noah Samara and he is a key figure in satellite radio development. I looked him up on Google and found that he had graduated from East Stroudsburg State College in Pennsylvania. I know this because he was asked to come back and give a commencement speech and I must say that it’s one of the best commencement speeches I’ve read.

I’ve always been intrigued by these new radio broadcast satellites, since I know the challenges and limitations of satellite communications and I’m pretty sure I would have been one of the people who would have questioned the technical and logistical feasibility of such a business model had I been asked for my opinion, say around 1990, when Noah started his company. And it sounds like I wouldn’t have been alone. It’s a good thing that people persevere in spite of the experts’ opinions.

I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a satellite radio, one that I could move between my car, motorcycle, and airplane and so I wanted to figure out the difference between the two approaches used by Sirius and XM. In the case of XM, they use standard geo-synchronous satellites which are located in the Clark belt, which is a ring aligned with the equator about 24,000 miles from the earth. Most communication satellites are in this location because it allows them to be weightless as they rotate with the earth. Their centripetal force exactly cancels out the gravitational pull of the earth. Therefore, they need to use little fuel to stay positioned. It’s a good thing too, since a satellite’s life expectancy is around 15 years and there are no refueling stations in the Clark belt. This also gives them the advantage of staying in one location, so high gain dish antennas can be used which means they don’t have to transmit their signal with as much power (power is also a scarce resource in space). However, that advantage is lost with satellite radio because in a mobile environment, you can’t expect to keep a highly directional dish antenna pointed at the satellite.

If you click on the image above, you’ll get a larger image which makes it easier to see all of the man-made satellites orbiting the earth in the Clark belt. If you look closer to the globe, you can see the low-earth orbiting satellites, which orbit the earth approximately every 100 minutes, flying just a few hundred miles above the surface. These are satellites used to take images such as the spy satellites and weather satellites. If you would like to see where these images came from, visit the J-Track website sponsored by NASA and select Jtrack 3D. It requires a Java applet to be downloaded to your computer, but the results are definitely worth it. You can rotate the whole image around and view these satellites from every angle.

Sirius uses a completely different approach. They use an elliptical orbit that allows the 3 satellites to spend more time directly overhead since in North America geosynchronous satellites have a low angle and can be more easily blocked by buildings, or even a passing truck.

You can see from the animation above that there is always at least one satellite over the U.S. at all times. The orbit for each satellite takes about a day.

Both companies use ground-based repeaters to help overcome the inevitable dead spots created by obstructions, but this only needs to be done in a relatively small number of urban locations. Sirius, because of the less obstructed view of the satellites needs fewer repeaters.

If you are interested in comparing the two satellite radio companies to see the features of their respective products, there is a nice chart of it here.