The blog

Mad about spam

Via Poynter Online comes this report:

Former WHYY reporter Rachel Buchman left this voice-mail message — with her work number — for the conservatives at Laptoplobbyist.com: “I wanted to tell you that you’re evil, horrible people. You’re awful people. You represent horrible ideas. God hates you and he wants to kill your children. You should all burn in hell. Bye.” The station says: “Rachel has decided to move forward with her career and her life.”

A follow-up story adds a few extra details:

[Buchman] says she left a nasty message for the people at Laptoplobbyist.com because she was tired of spam. “I was incensed that I wasn’t going to finally get to ask a real person to remove me from the list,” she writes. “The answering machine asked the caller to leave a name and number, and without thinking, that’s what I did.”

OK, Rachel’s message was a little over the top, but tell the truth: You’ve screamed similar sentiments at your inbox, right? For the record, I think her only mistake was leaving her work number.

PS: I won’t link to the site she called, because they really are hateful and they really do represent horrible ideas. And if they ever put me on one of their mailing lists, I’ll probably call them myself.

A silent power supply

I have an office full of PCs, and the noise from various and sundry fans sometimes gets a little annoying. So I’m intrigued by this completely fanless PurePower Power Supply from Thermaltake.

The heatpipe with glowing copper fins for thermal dissipation looks pretty cool, too. (Or maybe it just looks hot. I’m not sure.) Anyway, at $150 retail this is pretty pricy.

Anyone tried one of these things?

MCE communities

If you’re thinking about buying or building a Media Center PC, here are two communities of users that can be a big help:

  • The Green Button (TGB) is run by a couple of Media Center enthusiasts and has an excellent forum, as well as links to downloads and their own homegrown knowledge base. Warning: The site can be slow to load.
  • XPMCE.com also has an active forum. Its links to downloads and its FAQ are less complete than TGB’s.

In my research, I’ve found both forums useful.

Media Center Extender arrives

I finally got a Linksys Media Center Extender. Impressive! It plugged right in, set up quickly, and works extremely well over my wired Ethernet connection. I’m not sure how well a wireless connection would do, so I’m glad I made sure to put an Ethernet jack behind the TV when we built our house!

These things are surprisingly hard to find. I originally ordered one from Buy.com, but after I had waited three days for a confirmation I sent them an e-mail and they admitted it wasn’t in stock after all, despite what their Web page said. (This is the third time Buy.com has pulled this crap. They’re off my list of acceptable suppliers.) Next, I went to Amazon, but they said it might take a week to ship, so I ordered from Newegg.com and had the box in 48 hours.

Probably the most impressive feature is the speed and ease of managing my digital music collection, which has close to 12,000 tracks on nearly 1000 albums. It takes up to 5 seconds for the listing to appear initially, but after that, searches are nearly instantaneous, and the sound quality is exceptional.

I’m compiling a list of minor glitches I’ve encountered, but all in all the Media Center products are working spectacularly well, and I have no serious complaints.

P.S.: Amazon.com has the Linksys Media Center Extender on sale today for close to the best price I’ve seen: $250, with free shipping. Amusingly, their product details page says the box weighs 145 pounds and standard shipping will be $90. Of course, the actual weight is about 6 pounds. I sent a correction last week but they still haven’t fixed the mistake.

Building a new Media Center PC

I’m so thrilled with the way my test PC runs Windows Media Center Edition 2005 that I’m building a new MCE system from scratch. Coincidentally, Scoble pointed me to Matt Goyer, who is doing the same thing. Here are his specs:

I’m building an NTSC Media Center for my family. My requirements are that it’s in a HTPC case, has wifi, and is low cost. Here’s what I’m thinking:

  • Shuttle XPC Barebone System for Socket 478 at 533/800MHz FSB Intel CPU, Model SB65G2 $190
  • Intel Celeron D 330 2.66 GHz, 533 MHz FSB, 256K L2 Cache Processor $88
  • Seagate 200GB 7200RPM IDE Hard Drive $116
  • NEC 16X Double Layer DVD RW Drive, Black $65
  • 512MB DDR PC2700 from Crucial $83
  • Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500MCE (dual NTSC tuner)
  • ATI or NVIDIA graphics card w/s-video out

Is a Celeron going to be enough? Any way to do this cheaper?

My setup is similar:

I looked long and hard at the Shuttle XPC cases and chose the ST61G4 because it has excellent integrated graphics. In the small form factor Shuttle cases, not having an extra video card is a big deal. It also cuts down on noise, because there’s no video card fan. I read lots of reviews, too. This excellent and very thorough report from Xbit Labs probably had the biggest influence on me. I chose the refurbished processor specifically because I wanted a Northwood CPU; from everything I’ve read, the newer Prescott CPUs just get too hot. I have nothing but good things to say about the Hauppauge tuner cards. Matt chose the two-tuner version, but I am willing to go with the simpler one-tuner version because I have to go through a cable box, and the PVR-500MCE (which Matt chose) has a single coax input, with its splitter on the card itself. The only way you can use both tuners on this device is if your input comes directly from a single feed (no premium channels). (Update: I switched to the dual-tuner card a month or so later, getting a second cable box, for $5 a month, to feed it. The first input goes to the coax connector on the DVR card; the second input uses the S-video connector. Media Center manages both tuners quite nicely.)

How does this system compare to Matt’s? Well, I’m spending a few bucks more on the Shuttle case, but the net cost is actually going to be less, because I don’t need a separate video card. I’m paying about $86 more for the CPU, but I think the performance boost from a Pentium 4 at 3GHz on an 800MHz FSB is worth it when compared to a 2.66GHz Celeron on a 533MHz bus. Everything else is about the same, cost-wise.

All the pieces should be here this week. Whether I’ll actually put everything together this week is questionable, as I have several deadlines. I’ll probably steal 10 minutes here and 15 minutes there and build it a little at a time.

When all is said and done, I hope to have the best of both worlds: The Cox HDTV-PVR recording anything I intend to watch in HDTV, and the MCE box doing lots of other stuff, especially movies on non-HD premium channels. The recording capacity of the HDTV-PVR box is so limited it’s not practical for everyday use. The digital music and photo features of the MCE box are killer as well. But that’s a topic for another post…

Update 27-Dec-2006: The Shuttle system is now a doorstop. Details here and here.

The (continued) decline of the PC press

Alan Meckler offers up his thoughts on PC Magazine The Barometer:

The Internet is killing PC Magazine and its competitor PC World … just as it has killed several other books over the previous few years. The information in these magazines is dated by the time it is published because of the speed of Internet publishing. Price guides and comparisons are nice to see in print, but this information is more readily updated and found on hundreds of Web sites that are changed daily.

I have long been predicting the further decline of trade and tech print magazines. This latest news from Ziff Davis only reconfirms what we have all been watching — a very slow but steady decline and death of computer magazines.

A while back I snagged a three-year subscription to PC Magazine’s electronic edition for something like 12 cents an issue. It arrives via the Zinio Reader, and for the last few months I haven’t even bothered opening it. I didn’t renew my PC World subscription either. PC Magazine’s Web site is a pitiful joke, as I and others have blogged before.

So, how long before PC Mag is gone completely? Anyone want to start a pool?

How long will you survive without SP2?

The folks at Techweb claim that without SP2 or a third-party firewall, your computer will fall to hacker bots in just four minutes:

AvanteGarde deployed half a dozen systems in “honeypot” style, using default security settings. It then analyzed the machines’ performance by tallying the attacks, counting the number of compromises, and timing how long it took an attack to successfully hijack a computer once it was connected to the Internet.

The six machines were equipped with Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 1 (SP1), Microsoft Windows XP SP1 with the free ZoneAlarm personal firewall, Microsoft Windows XP SP2, Macintosh OS X 10.3.5, and Linspire’s distribution of Linux.

Not surprisingly, Windows XP SP1 sans third-party firewall had the poorest showing.

“In some instances, someone had taken complete control of the machine in as little as 30 seconds,” said Marcus Colombano, a partner with AvanteGarde, and, along with former hacker Kevin Mitnick, a co-investigator in the experiment. “The average was just four minutes. Think about that. Plug in a new PC–and many are still sold with Windows XP SP1–to a DSL line, go get a cup of coffee, and come back to find your machine has been taken over.”

Windows XP SP1 with the for-free ZoneAlarm firewall, however, as well as Windows XP SP2, fared much better. Although both configurations were probed by attackers, neither was compromised during the two weeks.

Still waiting for more proof?

I’ll say it again: Tens of millions of computers are running SP2 successfully. If you try to install it and you have problems, that means you have an issue with your hardware or your software. In either case, it should be relatively easy to find and fix. That won’t be the case if your machine is compromised by a worm, a virus, or a virulent piece of spyware.

More on the Comcast DVR

Years ago, I worked with John Montgomery at Ziff-Davis’s PC Computing. Now, he’s a mucky-muck at Microsoft. And he has a very entertaining blog, in a geeky sort of way. I liked his comparo on the new Comcast DVR. I’m still deciding whether I like the Cox/Scientific Atlanta combo. The HD is awesome, the DVR software is, well, frustrating. Most importantly, it is in imminent danger of failing the WA (Wife Acceptance) test.

The Media Center PC continues to impress. It is on the verge of moving into the den, to take over standard-definition TV recording duties from the Tivo. Although I would be much happier if I could get a Media Center Extender instead.

A spammer with gall

I just received a lovely piece of e-mail from someone who claims his name is David Van Nuys, President of e-FocusGroups.com. Of course, he wants me to take a survey, in exchange for which he will enter my name in a contest where I will have a chance to be one of five lucky people to earn $200. It’s a common racket, of course, and I ignored it, as I always do. But my favorite part of the e-mail was this:

Your privacy is extremely important to us. You are receiving this promotional message as a member of Permission!
[URL deleted] By continuing to receive emails from Permission! you agree to the Permission! Privacy Policy at [Web site address deleted].

Imagine that. By continuing to receive their e-mail messages, I agree to their privacy policy, even though I never asked to be put on their list. Takes some nerve, doesn’t it?

I decided to visit David’s Web site, where I read this profile of David Van Nuys:

David’s skills are not only technical. He is, even more importantly, a “people” person. A professional psychologist, David has extensive training and experience in such areas as organizational development, group dynamics, and psychotherapy. Having led groups of one sort or another all his professional life, he is good both at creating a supportive atmosphere and at “cutting through the bull” to get at key issues.

Guess what? I’m pretty good at cutting through the bull, too. David, you’re an asshole. And a spammer. I’d love to tell you that via e-mail, but your e-mail address isn’t on your Web site. Isn’t that ironic?