Computer

A BIOS Update is one of those things that can steal much of your time - even though it should be something really fast. I wanted to update the BIOS of my old laptop, a Toshiba Portege M100. Toshiba seemed to provide only a Windows Utility to do that job. Since there was no important data on my laptop, I quickly delted my Ubuntu installation and installed Windows7.

The update program complained some missing Toshiba tools which I could download and install after a while as well. But the I thought I coudl finally update the BIOS, I was greeted by:

"user is not authorized to update bios"

I tried this, I tried that, I googled and only found suggestions that did not for me and many others. Well, maybe Windows7 is too new. So I installed WinXP. Something I though I would never have to do again. After installing the different Toshiba tools here as well, I was still greeted by the same message. Narf.

After some more searching, I finally found an alternative page from Toshiba with a different version of the updating tool. It contained the means to create a bootable disc and CD:

Toshiba Portege M100 BIOS Update

Luckily I read the instructions to learn that I had to press 'C' to boot from the CD. The normal way to choose the medium in the initial start-up screen did not work.

I have found some history while cleaning up my room. I really had no idea that I still have some of these old floppy disks hidden away in my room. When I started with computers, these kind of disks were already being less used in favor of their smaller, yet bigger successor.

But now the big question is: What shall I do with these? True, I could just throw them away, after all, I do not even have a drive to read these anymore. (Though I am sure I can find some at my university, considering what is stored there in those basements...). But the nerd in me is wondering: Are there any fun things to with these nowadays. Any smart/stupid/silly hacks? Or shall I keep them to show them to my kids one day?

Here is a picture of what my mouse did the last 7hrs on my desktop:

Related to my last entry, here is a short video about the power of Open Data.

Now which the public being able to assume a role of a gatekeeper to channel the evergrowing stream of information, I better keep in mind: Never trust the statistics that you did not forge yourself. Increasing mediacompetence and questioning the sources will probably be key-abilities in the future.

I have been wondering for a while about options to back up my collection of photos and other important data that I do not want to loose. These days I am hardly using an optical drive anymore, so burning DVDs is not really a future proof option. Also it can get tedious to back up new pictures. I was most tempted to get a local backup-solution like an external hard-drive or network-attached storage system (NAS). This does appeal to the nerd inside me of course. More hardware to play with. But still that was not easing all my concerns. What if someone breaks into my room or there is damage due to water or fire. It might seem a bit far fetched, but it is still a concern that I have.

I am already using Dropbox to sync my important and/or mostly needed data between my computer and laptop. It was really useful when I was in Taiwan as well. I just arrived there, got my workstation and after having installed the client and going out to lunch I had all my data (and some music) already available. But the paid storage on Dropbox is too pricey. I would buy more hard-drives for a local backup for that money. (If you want to test Dropbox, feel free to use my referrallink for some extra free space).

Anyways, now I am paying a really reasonable price for a network storage with a German company (but I do not feel like advertising for them, still testing). I got 100GB storage space and I can connect to it using a multitude of secure protocols. And currently I am backing up all my pictures there. This will take quite a while.

But I got me thinking: I do occasionally upload my pictures to Google’s Picasaweb to share them with my friends. If I run out of space there, I can buy more space from them. Wouldn’t it be a nice solution if I could connect Picasaweb or flickr to my netstorage? I would be keeping my data on my drive and grant those services access to my storage in order to use them. I could use Google Documents or Zoho to work on my office files and keep them in one location.

By keeping the data in one place, I could simply change from using Picasaweb or flickr to another third service without having to upload all my pictures again. With the Cloud-Concept getting more and more popular, I hope to see more flexible solutions being developed. Instead of giving your data to one of the big companies with a multitude of services like Google or Apple or uploading it maybe redundantly to various locations, it would be preferable to keep my data in one spot that I control and still use the various services to work with my data.

Also developers of web-applications would benefit from this. Instead of competing about attractive solutions for the user to upload and store the files that the application is working with, the developer can focus more on enhancing the actual service.

My laptop is already a few years old, but still working rather well for me. As far as I know I am the third owner . Over the time (and probably mostly while in my care), it got a few scratches here and there.



Time for a new look.



Now my laptop is pretending to be more eco friendly.

Since about a month ago, after many years, I assembled myself a new computer which is running Windows 7 now. It had the strange habit of waking up from the sleep-mode by itself at night. And I just could not find out why. It was not magic packets or the network card, it was not my wireless keyboard / mouse sending random signals (check this link for info on that).

In the end, it was just the media center trying to update itself. This little annoyance can be turned off / changed in the Task Scheduler.

I used to spend a lot of time regularly visiting news pages, my friends blogs and some other pages just to check of they have new content available or not. Naturally this was often a big waste of time. Fortunately then RSS became more and more popular and I was able to subscribe to feed of the new articles of the pages that I am regularly visiting and by doing this, I can simply view all of the updates in one go.

Usually most blogs provide naturally such an rss-feed that people can subscribe to. Sadly some of my friends have customized their blogs in a way that disabled or removed these rss-feeds and I do visit their blogs a lot less. (Those of you using nomadlife: sorry, no rss feeds available there either).

But yesterday my feed reader gave me a little shock when all of the articles were all of a sudden marked as unread...

For the past weeks, I have been sort of evaluating Twitter, a web-service that allows you post your short messages and status updates thanks to its accessible API from a multitude of applications. You are able to follow anyone's updates if you want to and build a group. And you are able to tune into this group's chatter at time, since usually someone is always posting something.

It is also possible to show messages from the twitter-network that contain a certain keyword, for example "German" or "facebook". This feature has been the only one that has some sort of use. It should be very easy to catch certain current events.

I assume that most of you are using the internet on a daily basis with little care about how it works and how it got to be where it is today. Here is a not-too-technical movie about the birth and growth of the Internet.

Animated History of the Internet