Wordpress - backing up your database
July 28, 2008
Here’s another short video on something I get asked alot - how do i backup my website? In this one, I show you how to backup your database if you use Wordpress. Keep in mind this is only half of the project. You’ll also have to backup the website folder (images, folders and many other important items). For this I use Filezilla, a very good free FTP (File Transfer Protocol) program. I cover Filezilla’s use in a seperate video.
PS: You can play the video in full screen by clicking the small looking monitor at the bottom of the player labeled “full screen toggle.”
iPhone Stock Levels - non-existant?
July 25, 2008
It’s been 9 days since I reserved my iPhone at the local AT&T store in Olympia, WA and still nothing. When making the reservation with my credit card at the store the clerks said the wait could be as long as 7-10 days but that they have been coming in alot sooner than that (really?). Well now I’m seeing news reports of having to wait up to a month to get your phone. What a dissapointment! I’m a recent convert to Mac and have really been enjoying using the computer and was expecting better delivery on a stupid phone. But alass, I will wait - hopefully, not much longer.
iPhone 3g Release with AT&T - Epic Fail
July 11, 2008
- At least here in Olympia Washington. The morning of the release, I decided to take a drive down to the local AT&T store to see if there was anyone in line. I went by the store the evening before at around 8 PM and there were two guys already there in lawn chairs. That evening, reports were leaning towards smaller lines and less hoopla with this latest release. At that point, folks were just not expecting a bang - well, no beans. I got to the store just after 9 AM expecting a smooth process and saw a line of about 50 or so people. I made contact with a guy that just left the store and he told me he had just purchased the last 16gig iPhone :( He said they were going to keep selling and ship the phones as they became available. He also said they were unable to activate his phone in the store and that he had to do it from home using iTunes and his Internet connection.
It still surprises me that you can have two big companies like AT&T and Apple get together to sell a telephone and do such a poor job of it. How can this happen? My guess is that they intentionally underestimated the demand thus offsetting their risk by placing the disadvantage onto the customer. This translated into unwitting customers standing in long lines to buy a telephone the stores didn’t’ even have in stock to sell. This is exacerbate by AT&T not being able to activate the phones they did sell in store.
I think it’s time to stop the “protectionism” attitude that I so frequently see with Apple/Mac products. It’s time to send them a shout-out and let them know they did a really crappy job on this one.
No More Free Passes. Come on Apple, your a big boy now.
Comcast - Upsteam increase to 3 megs?
June 12, 2008
Good news Comcast users. Yesterday, while conducting several bandwidth speedtests over at www.speedtest.net I noticed something pretty interesting. The upload speeds on my Comcast cable modem was pushing 3 megs! This is significant in that just days ago it was around 1/2 that. I first noticed it yesterday (June 11, 2008) while uploading a 95meg tutorial video I had just created to the Blip.tv and YouTube.com sites. The very large movie file just seemed to zip right to both websites.
Now I don’t have a business account but do pay an additional $10 per month for a tad more bandwidth/bursting over a normal account. I did notice downstream seemed to peg out at around 22-26 megs, which is pretty significant. This, of course, changes around mid-evening but never get really lower than 16 megs. Still, for me, the move to 3 megs upstream is a better option for me. Right now, 16 - 26 megs down is serving me VERY well.
How’s does your speed look compared to this? Go over to Speedtest.net and see. So far, I’m happy with Comcastic!
My setup:
- Connection: Wireless Buffalo brand Ethernet bridge at computer
- Buffalo wireless router on the other end
- Comcast provided cable modem
Installing Skype on Windows XP
May 26, 2008
I often get asked how to you use and setup Skype to make calls on the AntiqueHorns.com web show. So instead of repeating the same information over and over I decided to make a short video covering this exact process. It’s relatively easy but in case you still have problems, please feel free to contact me with your questions.
Youtube Pulls Chris Pirillo’s Advertising?
May 15, 2008
Today (5/16/2008), while watching Chris Pirillo record one of his CNN segments, someone in his chatroom mentioned ads and his Youtube videos. So I decided to look around his Youtube channel and it was apparent to me that many of his latest videos had the advertisements removed from the lower left corner of each clip.
Why is this a big deal? Well, Chris uses this lower portion of his screen area to promote his sponsors while streaming live from his home. In addition, he records the clips (now pushing 1300) and pushes them out to Youtube where they are seen by many more thousands people than his live steam.
One of his videos has over 6 million views with others are in the hundreds of thousands! That’s a lot of coverage for his sponsors on Youtube’s dime. If this is indeed Youtube’s effort to enforce one of their policies, it may have a significant effect on Chris’ ability to sell advertising for his shows.
My guess is one of two thing have happened here:
- Youtube whacked the ads for a policy/terms of use violation (see below) - this area of the video is also used by Youtube to display their advertising over your content.
- It was an oversight on the person encoding and uploading Chris’ videos to Youtube?
4. General Use of the Website—Permissions and Restrictions
use of the Website or its related services (such as the Embeddable Player), for the primary purpose of gaining advertising or subscription revenue;
YouTube hereby grants you permission to access and use the Website as set forth in these Terms of Service, provided that:
D. You agree not to use the Website, including the YouTube Embeddable Player for any commercial use, without the prior written authorization of YouTube. Prohibited commercial uses include any of the following actions taken without YouTube’s express approval:
The Youtube terms mention “written permission.” Is this a simple matter of Chris obtaining permission or a matter of sharing revenue with Youtube in order to keep his ads in place? Only two entities know for sure so the rest of us will have wait it out and see what happens.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments below:
Gordon
Comcast - The Speed Test
April 23, 2008
I’ve been hearing a lot of rumblings lately about Comcast, slow speeds and traffic shaping by some of the web’s more popular pundints. Fortunately, I’ve never really shared their experiences with slow speeds or traffic shaping. Now, I’ve been a Comcast customer since moving to the Seattle metro area back in 2002 and have only had a few issues with outages, but nothing more. Our household is a heavy user of bandwidth as we have a VOIP (Vonage) telephone and at least 3 computers connected to the Internet 24 hours per day. During the daytime there are usually several streams getting pulled down from UStream.tv or Leo’s site over at Twit.tv on top of the usual web browsing, FTP’ing and remote office connections about 10 hours a day.
Now the Speedtest.net image I’ve displayed in this post shows one of our better connection speeds; we typically attain speeds varying between 22 megs down and a pretty steady 1.2 to 1.5 megs up.
Much of the complaints I’ve heard all seem to have a common theme - Bittorrents and their supposed value to download Linux distros. I don’t use bittorrents. Why? Because with my current connection speed, downloading files via FTP or HTTP work just as fast, if not faster.
So, are these guys really worried about using bittorrent and it getting blocked or throttled at Comcast? I think a better reason for the complaints centers around the simple fact that they (nor do I) want anything or anyone limiting Internet connections speeds. Herein lies the problem with the focus of their complaints - the simple fact is Comcast limits/adjusts bandwidth because their networks get bogged down with people downloading less than legal software and movies. I think you will agree, the main reason people use bittorrent is to download pirated (illegal) software and movies with little chance of getting caught. If they stopped the “I can’t download my Linux” schpiel, their argument would a much more validity with me.
Hey, what do I know? It’s just my two cents on the topic. What do you think? Let me know in the comment section below.
eBay, PayPal and the High Costs
March 19, 2008
Recently, I’ve been listing several of my parent’s antique items on eBay with a fair amount of success. Up until today, I never really paid attention to all the fees associated with selling on eBay and then taking payments via PayPal. I just finished listing and selling one of my father’s many antique brass musical instruments, a circa 1840 Prussian Soprano Cornet in B flat. When I finally got the invoice, I was shocked. This horn sold for $1,902.77 and $58.25 for shipping to Germany via US Postal Service Priority Mail International. The buyer used PayPal and I assumed used a credit card.
eBay Fee List:
- Featured Plus Fee $24.95
- Insertion Fee $4.00
- Picture Pack Fee $1.00
- Reserve Price Fee $16.98
-
Final Valuation Fee $49.85
Total: $96.78
+ PayPal Fees:
-
Payment Fee $76.78
-
Grand Total: $173.56
Logitech Gets the Boot
February 2, 2008
Too Little Too Late - For me at least. I’m referring to my latest technology purchase that turned out worst than imagined. Last fall I purchased Logitech’s Bluetooth “Laser” diNovo™ Media Desktop™ from the local Fry’s Electronics store in Renton, WA for right around $200.00 USD. It is a sleek looking keyboard, mouse and media pad combo that connects wirelessly via Bluetooth and what drew me to it was “laptop like” keyboard. Both the media pad and keyboard use double A batteries while the mouse is rechargeable with its own stand for your desktop.
Now there are plenty of reviews already out there about this keyboard configuration and my purpose is not to simply a rehash all these again. I wanted to bring attention to the fact that Logitech Software is so bad that makes a wonderful piece of hardware something you don’t want to use. My problems with the setup began right from the start. Several things about the software will simply drive you nuts. I know that software company’s release updates to their software, but I mean, c’mon already, this thing was expensive.
First, the set point software for the keyboard would continuously and mistakenly report that your keyboard batteries were critically low. I don’t know
how many spendy double A Duracell and Energizer batteries I’ve put into this thing. No more than 20 minutes after installing the new batteries, I get this ridiculous low battery critical warning from the Logitech Software. A second major issue with the software is how often it dropped the connection with each of the devices. Now I spend a large amount of time on my computer every day, about 6 to 10, and would normally have my keyboard, media pad, or mouse disconnect from the Bluetooth receiver several times during the day. I was forever pressing the reset button on the back of each device trying to get then reconnected to my computer. The connection was never reestablished on my first attempt.
So as of this writing, Logitech has updated its Set Point software with version 4.4 for my operating system (Vista Ultimate 64-bit). I’ve installed the update and it seems to have corrected the persistent low battery warnings but had problems on the initial connections with all three devices. It took about 4-5 attempts to get the keyboard connected.Too Little Too late. I’ve decided to ditch my Logitech hardware, uninstall the software and go with Microsoft wireless RF mouse and Enermax Aurora Premium keyboard. I hope this goes well, I’m tired of spending money on stuff that doesn’t work.
Texting Scam - Thanks At&t, Verisign
January 27, 2008
I’m not sure how this happens but for the past three months I’ve been billed by my wireless provider, AT&T, for “m-Qube” internet services (Ringtones?) for $9.99 plus tax. I called AT&T each time and asked what this was and why I was being charged for something I never ordered; they could not give me an answer. Each time the customer service representative seemed to work through a process of removing me from this fraudulent service. They even initiated a stop purchase service where each line on the account is prevented from downloading any type of content without first entering a special PIN number. Well, guess what? None of it worked. After explaining all this to the latest customer service rep tonight at AT&T, I opted to change the telephone number.
I strongly suggest that you review your next wireless bill and look for any reference to m-Qube. Regardless of whom your cell provider is, m-Qube can and will attack and bill you. If you see m-Qube on your bill, treat it like a CANCER! Cancel your account if you have to, or at a minimum, change your number. Anything less will not work.
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