Pecha Kucha Birmingham Volume 5–including me!

Back in October last year I wrote a post called “Do Something That Scares You” where I talked about pushing some personal boundaries by speaking at Pecha Kucha Coventry.

I should really have called this post “Do Something Really Stupid” as I’m doing it again!

This time it’ll be at the Birmingham event on the 18th April at Fredericks Bar in the Jewellery Quarter. Doors open at 7pm.

I’ll be giving pretty much the same presentation about Bletchley Park that I did last time but with a couple of tweaks.

I actually think from one point of view doing this a second time is actually harder than the first as I’ll know exactly what’s coming!

The Pecha Kucha evenings are a great night out so I’d recommend you come and check it out. You can always nip to the bar something whilst I’m on.  

Tickets are available here and are completely free!

Robert Crane–Search Server Express and SBS 2011

At the last AMITPRO meeting I was asked about having SharePoint search more than just the lists and libraries within the SharePoint site. Part of thinking is that if users became accustomed to browsing to the SharePoint site to complete this common task (search!) it may help with general adoption of SharePoint as another tool in the business.

My answer to the question was you could use something like Search Server Express. It’s a free product provided by Microsoft and can be used for searching SharePoint sites, file shares and even other websites (whether you’d want or should index something like Google for example is another discussion altogether!)

What I didn’t touch on was the practicalities of actually doing this in an SBS environment. In SBS 2008 you can’t safely install it directly onto the server so you’re only other option was to put it on it’s own server.

However…help is at hand!

Robert Crane, author of the Windows SharePoint Operations Guide has put together a complete guide to getting Search Server Express running on SharePoint 2011.

It does come with a massive “use at your own risk” disclaimer but the steps are straightforward and there also instructions to remove the product if needed.

Once finished you’ll end up with a dedicated search site that can search for information from a variety of sources (e.g http://companyweb/search)

Robert has posted the details for getting up and running on his blog. The full guide which goes into more details is available here for £6.24.

I’ve seen the guide and it’s well worth the money!

Go check it out

Protecting Your Gmail Account with Two Factor Authentication.

It’s not always obvious but your email account is one of the most important things you have on the Internet. (Jeff Attwood wrote a really good post about this back in 2008!)

Your email account is like the keys to the city because when you sign up for just about any service on the Internet they’ll ask you for your email address. If you forget your login details guess where they’ll send your password reminder?

This means if someone can get access to your email account getting into anything else is pretty simple. Also consider that email accounts now give us gigabytes of storage so we rarely delete emails meaning it’s not difficult to browse through old messages and figure out what accounts to target.

So why is it a big deal? Your money and your identity!

If you pay for stuff online it’s highly likely you’ll be using something like PayPal.

Once this person has your email address resetting the passwords to those other services is a bit of a doddle and they are free to do whatever they want with your cash! Yes you may eventually realise what’s going on and cancel the card but how long will that take and how much inconvenience will it cause?

On top of all this your Gmail account password can also be used in lots of other places like Google Docs, YouTube, Google Reader.

More and more websites are allowing you to sign in with credentials from other websites.

So what to do?

First make sure you’ve got a good password..that goes without saying. If you want an additional layer of security you should think about activating two factor authentication for your Google account.

What’s two factor authentication?

To login to a website at the moment all you have is something you know.

The problem with that is if someone else knows the same thing you can’t do much about it.

Two Factor Authentication means that as well as something you know you also rely on something you have.

If you’ve worked in a large enough company you’ll have already seen this in action with something like a SecurID from RSA (if you work in the SMB market AuthAnvil is a good option)

Google are calling this “Two Step Verification” – presumably to make it sound a little less scary.

All well and good but Google aren’t going to hand out tokens to everyone right?

In a manner of speaking yes they do.

There is one thing that just about everyone who uses a computer will have on their person at all times

A mobile phone.

Here’s how it works.

Each time you logon with your username and password Google can send a text message to a designated mobile phone. (They provide backup options too – they’ll even call you and read the code to you!)

You can’t login until you’ve provided the code.

You can then optionally choose to stay logged into that computer for 30 days.

This means if anyone else guesses your password they still won’t be able to login!

There is also an app you can use as an alternative way to do this that effectively turns your phone into a SecurID token and doesn’t even require an active internet connection. This is called Google Authenticator.

It’s worth mentioning that other services also have similar schemes

Hotmail will send you single use code via text message if you’re on a computer you wouldn’t normally use. These codes expire after 15 minutes and you enter it instead of your password. It’s not quite two factor authentication but would stop a keyboard logger from stealing your password. Details on that are here.

Facebook will send you a code via text message when you login to a computer it doesn’t recognise (you can authorise your computers) they call this “Login Approvals”. Details are here. Only thing I’ll say about this is that when I tried to set it up I gave up after 30 minutes as I didn’t receive the first text message!

I’m talking specifically about Gmail here though as it was the first account I held that offered this extra security.

Setting it up is pretty straightforward.

1) Visit this link: https://www.google.com/accounts/SmsAuthConfig and sign in.

2) From the drop-down menu, select the country where your phone is registered, and enter your phone number in the box.

3) Choose whether you’d like to receive your codes by text or by voice call. You can always change this later.

4) Enter your phone number, then click Send verification code to receive a code on your phone.

5) Enter the code from the text or voice message into the box, then click Verify.

6) Next you’ll be asked whether you want to remember the computer you are using. If you check the box, you won’t need to enter a code to sign on with this computer for the next 30 days. Don’t check this box if you are using a public computer or a device that you don’t regularly use to sign in.

7) Click Turn on 2-step verification to finish the process!

Done! At this stage if you wanted to use the Google Authenticator app you can set this up with these instructions.

The only other thing left to consider are any applications that may be accessing your account where you can’t use the verification process. You may be checking your email via Outlook or via an app on your phone for example. It’s designed to ask for a user name and password and doesn’t know anything about verification codes.

To get around this you can generate an application specific password. This is a password that when Google receives it in combination with your user name won’t ask for verification. Google will generate a password for you that you enter into the application. It doesn’t get used anywhere else so you don’t have to memorise it.

These passwords can be revoked at any time if you’re worried it may have been compromised or if you want to generate a new one. Google has good setup instructions for this here. (otherwise this post would end up even longer than it is!)

Hopefully all this makes sense and it’ll at least make you think about how you secure your important accounts. It’s good that companies are taking steps to help improve security which will only improve over time but ultimately you’re responsible for your own data.

Retro Computer Museum – Event – April 2012

It’s not really a massive secret I’m a little partial to a spot of retro gaming.

Back in 2010 I first visited the Retro Computer Museum and I’ve been quite a few times since.

The guys there work really hard and put in a lot of their free time in keeping everything running smoothly. What’s really great about any event they put on is that all of their “exhibits” are setup and ready for you to play. Nothing is hidden behind glass cases so if you quite fancy playing some of those games from yesteryear then it’s worth taking a look at their next event.

It’s on Saturday 7th and Sunday 8th of April at the Snibston Discovery Museum. I’ve been to the venue before and that’s worth a visit anyway but with the added bonus of checking out the RCM stuff it’ll make for a great trip.

Tickets are available here.

Hope to see you there, I’ll be taking on all comers at Super Streetfighter 2 for the Super Nintendo.

How To Spam Friends and Irritate People

If you write anything on the Internet that you want people to read there are now lots of different ways for people to find out you have new content.

When I first started blogging there were generally three practical options.

1) Subscribe to the RSS feed (if it had one) and keep a regular eye on your news reader

2) Subscribe to the sites mailing list (if it had one!) and you’d get an email whenever something new was added.

3) Visit the website regularly – which if we’re honest it’s not very practical if there are lots of sites you frequent!

As a writer you didn’t have to do much for any of these to work as the first two options could be handled by your blogging software and the third one has nothing to do with you.

The web is much more crowded place now so getting yourself heard needs a bit more work. Fortunately if you want to let people know about your new content you can harness the power of social media.

The great thing about this is that if you write content that’s of interest to your audience they’ll use social media to promote your content for you via likes, shares and retweets which in turn drives more traffic to your site.

You can start the process off by creating accounts on social media networks so your audience can subscribe to you. Each time you create new content you can push notifications out through these accounts and links to your new content will appear in front of your readers eyes on their timelines and follow lists. You can even automate this process so you don’t have to lift a finger!

However, it’s not quite that simple as everyone has different habits on social networks.

As an example.

Mr Anderson is very selective about who he follows and keeps that list quite small to ensure that he can keep up with everything that’s posted. This allows him to read every single thing that comes his way. If we use Twitter as an example he may only follow 100 people at a maximum.

Mr Smith, however follows EVERYBODY. This could be anything between 500-5000  different people which means anything that appears in his timeline generally flies from view within a couple of seconds. Getting Mr Smith to read something of YOURS is usually down to timing and luck.

From a writers perspective Mr Anderson is great as you know if you post something once he’s going to see it and if he really likes it he’ll retweet and share with his followers.

That doesn’t mean Mr Smith isn’t important too but if you post something once you’ve got to get the timing spot on.

You also have to take Mr Smiths reading habits into account. He may only check his account a couple of times a day. Before he starts work and during lunch for example.

So the solution is to post about your new content several times and ensure you do it at certain times of the day when you think the people you want to get in front of will read it. If you post enough times Mr Smith may eventually pick it up. It’s highly likely he’ll still miss it which means he could be missing out on some information that’s important to him. Conversely the writer is missing out readers purely because of bad timing and luck. 

But what about poor Mr Anderson?

If he only follows a smaller amount of people he’s going to see the same content from you posted again and again. You’re now “spamming his timeline” and if you do it enough you may irritate him to the point that it’s not long before he’s clicking the “unfollow” button.

I am in a position where the number of people who read my content doesn’t directly cost me business but if I was trying to generate an income from my site or if it was a key part of a wider marketing strategy it’s something I’d be very worried about!

So what to do?

No idea if I’m honest.

At the moment I cater mostly to Mr Smith. If I’ve written something I’ll share it several times but I’m very conscious of how many times I do this and how much time I leave before re-posting.

I also know that even after doing all that work getting Mr Smith to catch your notification is still hit and miss. On a couple of occasions I’ve had a conversation with someone around a topic I’ve recently blogged about but they’ve missed in their social media timelines.

If you write online content I’d love to hear your thoughts on this?

Conversely, if you read a lot of online content I’d like to hear your thoughts too. Does it irritate you when you get your timeline spammed? Do you understand it’s part of how people get their message out or is that not enough something you’d considered?

Gadget Review–The Fridge Friend

I was recently asked by Carla at IdeasByNet if I’d take a look at a “Fridge Friend”.

Since I’m always interested in new gadgets I was more than happy to take a look!

The Fridge Friend allows you to record short video messages and has a magnet in the back so that it will easily stick to your fridge (the clue is in name!)

The main idea is that you can replace the traditional “can you pick up some milk” post-it notes you may leave for another member of your family.

You could also leave yourself a message telling you that you’ll only regret eating the bar of chocolate that’s on the top shelf of the fridge unless you go and do some exercise first.

Or if you’re just a child at heart then leaving silly noises for other family members to discover is another option (I’ve not done that…honest)

It’s a doddle to use. Stick a couple of AAA batteries in, put it on something made of metal and turn it on!

There are only two buttons, on/off/play and record/stop/delete and once you’ve recorded a message the power light will occasionally blink to get your attention. It’ll allow you to keep 15 records that are up to 80 seconds in length.

While using the device there are various on-screen icons to let you know what you’re doing. A big red light in corner when you’re recording. A trash can to indicate which button is to delete, etc. I thought this was a pretty nice touch as I’ve used other devices where you have to memorise the instructions to figure out how to do anything. .

It’s not badly styled so doesn’t stick out in a big way and the magnet keeps it in place nicely.

The video quality is actually pretty good in natural lighting which brings me onto the first of two things I think could be improved.

Under the right lighting conditions, which in my house meant daylight, the image quality was really good. However, the quality was significantly different when it was dark outside and I was using just the kitchen light. It’s possible this might change with a better light as I’m using an energy saver bulb so it’s not all that bright. (where are those affordable LED lights!?)

If I was going to be picky about anything else it would be that the sound quality could be better. This could be because the speaker is on the back and sounds a bit muffled. It’s not so bad that you can’t tell what’s being said but you do sometimes have to listen carefully.

Both of things things aren’t a huge problem for what the device is. It’s not a media tablet designed to play high definition audio! It’s just meant for quick and easy memo style videos and it does that just fine.

They RRP for £24.99 and if you’re interest in one the contact details are on the IdeasByNet home page.

** Usual Review Disclaimer – IdeasByNet kindly sent me one of these to try free of charge **

Buffalo Linkstation LS-WXL–Can’t Login

Wow…a technical post! These have been a bit thin on the ground recently!

I wasn’t able to get at the web interface or the shares on a LinkStation LS-WXL we have on one of our clients sites.

I was able to ping it..but that was all! Having asked the client to power cycle it I still couldn’t do anything with it so I duly went to site.

I fired up the NAS Navigator software which found the device ok. However it reported the NAS was in EM Mode which is Emergency Mode (or Emergency Mode Mode if you’re picky about how these things are written) which basically means the device couldn’t load the firmware from the hard disk.

* Disclaimer – if you try anything I mention below you run the risk of data loss – it’s not my fault if you lose anything! *

So the normal advice for getting out of EM Mode is to download the latest firmware version and install that, which I did. However, once I’d done this I wasn’t able to login with the password that had been previously set. The default password didn’t work either.

My next plan of action was to perform a factory reset.

The steps for this are:

Power the NAS off, hold the function button on the back and power it back on, once you start to get some flashing lights on the front press the function button again.

It took a little while to get the timing right for this but it appeared to work as the IP address reset back to default.

I still couldn’t login though.

A little puzzled I decided to investigate my options as to cracking the password. There is a lively community around the Buffalo NAS devices where they modify the stock firmware to do lots of things it wasn’t originally intended for (media servers, etc)

I did come across a couple of potential options but nothing really worked and I was very worried about totally “bricking” the device.

So my next train of thought had me wondering that if the main firmware is ran from the hard disk, what would I do if a hard drive needed to be replaced?

Not a stupid question apparently, using information from this guide and this guide, I managed to get it working.

In short, if the device can’t find anything to boot from it’ll look for a TFTP server on 192.168.11.1 – it’ll then use this to load a very basic firmware which can then be discovered in NAS Navigator where you can then reload the latest firmware.

Here’s what I did:

I took the hard disks out, plugged them into my PC and removed all the listed volumes (there were several)

Next I set the IP address on my laptop to 192.168.11.1

Then I downloaded and ran the TFTP Bootloader

I put the drives back into the NAS and started it up. It booted and the status light on the front flashed red to indicate there was nothing to boot from.

Pressing the function button caused it to connect to the TFTP server and download the boot files.

After a bit of waiting around the device finally appeared back in the NAS Navigator software which also indicated the NAS was in EM Mode.

I was then able to use the firmware update utility to force a reload (using this guide) and rebuild the partition table.

Once this completed ok I reset my static IP on my laptop and on the NAS using NAS Navigator I was able to browse to the web interface and login with the default user name and password.

However everything was in Japanese!

To change this back to English

Click the second tab from the right (System)
Click the first sub-tab from left (Settings)
Click third bar from top, or lowest bar (Language)
Click the bottom button (modify)
Change display and Windows languages to English and then click left button (Save)

Done!

I was then able to set up the NAS again.

The biggest downside to this was I obviously lost all the data on the device. It wasn’t a big deal in this scenario but there is an excellent article that talks about NAS recovery. It covers a lot of the things I’ve mentioned above as well as additional areas such as attempting to copy the data from the hard disks.

I’m still not entirely sure why this all happened in the first place but I’m glad I managed to get it back up and running again – these notes are so I’ve got the process written down somewhere – maybe it’ll help someone else too!

Some useful community resources I used during all of this:

http://buffalo.nas-central.org

http://forums.buffalotech.com

http://forum.buffalo.nas-central.org

I remember 2011 like it was only last week

Ah…the obligatory end of year, start of year post!

This time last year I was writing about how challenging 2010 had been.

I’m pleased to report that on the whole 2011 didn’t throw up as many major problems as the previous year.

We’ve settled quite nicely into our new house, Bryony’s hearing didn’t get any worse and I managed to start playing football again after recovering from my knee operation as well as losing a couple of stone in weight as a by-product of that. (Christmas may have undone a little of that work though!)

On the geek front I purchased an Amazon Kindle, a HP TouchPad and a Windows Phone.

I also expanded my collection of retro games and consoles alongside visits to Replay Expo and the Retro Computer Museum. 

On the gaming side of things Portal 2 was without a doubt the highlight of my gaming year. I’ve not played as many games on my Xbox as in previous years on account of spending so much time on the retro stuff but Portal 2 was so refreshing and entertaining I’m glad it had some of my attention (taking nothing away from Arkham City which I’m thoroughly enjoying at the moment!)

On the personal front I stepped out of my comfort zone and spoke at a Pecha Kucha event in Coventry as well as realising the writers block I had was actually a symptom of not spending enough time resting and thinking about something other than work. I celebrated 10 years of being with my significant other, Bryony and wrote all about how the Internet changed my life!

In sadder news, Tony Sale passed away. I visited Bletchley Park the weekend beforehand and as ever it was great to see the fruits of his labour. He’ll also have been pleased to know that Bletchley Park’s future is safe.

On the business side of things 2011 was also much better than 2010. The second half of the year was one of the busiest I can remember for some time and this in conjunction with my decision to make sure I spend enough free time “not working” meant some things had to be dropped down the priority list – this blog included – but I’m happy that I’ve learnt my lesson from the summer.

One of the things that also dropped off quite badly in the second half of the year was the amount of reading I did for the same reasons outlined above. It didn’t stop altogether but the pace with which I was getting through books at the start of the year was totally different to the end of the year. My reading tracking experiment showed between the start of 2011 and May 3rd, I’d read 18 books – the final total for the year was 26. A much slower pace! I’m happy with my experiment though. It’s been good to look back and see what I’ve actually read this year which also makes recommendations to others easier too. Richard Tubb wrote a great piece recently about why reading is important which is worth a look.

Christmas always reenergises me when it comes to reading though. My family always know that books are a good choice when it comes to gifts and I’ve got some excellent ones again this year!

So 2011 was pretty decent – I’ve met some great people and done some really interesting things – thank you to everyone that contributed to my year whether that was virtually or in person.

Bring on 2012!

Choosing The “Right” Smart Phone

Earlier in the year I wrote about my thoughts on choosing a new mobile phone.

I went with Windows Phone and tried to be (reasonably) impartial about why I’d discounted the others.

I promised a follow up post explaining how I was getting on. That post never turned up as my writing mojo vanished (which I explained in a blog post – the irony)

By the time I’d gotten back into the mood for writing again the Mango update was imminent so I thought I’d wait for that. There were so many features I was interested in that I couldn’t have written a post without using a variant of this phrase a million times.

“This will be fixed/better/improved/available when Mango arrives”

Waiting seemed to make sense.

However, there was a massive delay in getting Mango out to Samsung Omnia 7 devices on T-Mobile in the UK which wound me up in a big way and I lost my enthusiasm for writing about it. On top of that Richard Tubb wrote a great series of posts about his experiences trying out all the major platforms.(read them…now!) which I was glued too so any thoughts I had for writing about it at the time disappeared. 

This morning I spotted that Richard was about to order an Android device which reminded me to make a start on this post.

So now that I’ve rambled on for 200 odd words I’d better get to my point

I’m of the opinion there isn’t much to gain in arguing the difference between any of the major phone platforms anymore. They all do some really good, unique features and equally they all have faults or things that could be improved on.

I honestly think that each platform has a “style” (for want of a better word) that will fit certain types of people depending on their own personality, habits and way of getting stuff done.

For some people that will mean an iPhone, for others that’ll be Blackberry or Android or Windows Phone.

In case you’ve been living under a rock you’ve probably spotted that people get very defensive and passionate about their choice of mobile phone and it’s become the kind of techno-religious debate we see all the time

Windows vs Linux vs Mac / Xbox vs PlayStation / Internet Explorer vs FireFox vs Chrome / etc, etc, etc

In these types of debate ultimately no-one is “right” and all it really boils down to is personal preference based on what works best for the individual.

Now when someone asks me what phone they should go for I’ll happy explain what I personally like about the phone I have chosen but will also suggest that where possible they should take a look at lots of different devices, speak to people who have similar interests or work in the same kind of way before diving in. Those mobile contracts are long and expensive to get out of!

They all make calls, do email, send text messages, get on the Internet, update social media and run apps which is what we’d now call “core functionality”. They all do it slightly differently and have their own little niggles. But they all do it.

Find which one irritates you the least and go with that one.

For the record I’m really enjoying my Windows Phone. I’m not going to say anything other than that in this post though!

As always your own thoughts, opinions and comments are more than welcome

How The Internet Changed My Life

The phrase “life changing” is used an awful lot when talking about technology and the Internet in particular seems to get this more than any single item of modern technology.

I for one totally believe technology can change lives.

When using the the phrase “life changing” in this context though it’s usually meant in the collective/global scale.

It’s not something you can dispute. Children growing up now will have no concept of what an encyclopaedia is. If there is something they want to know everyone’s first instinct now is to look it up online.

Media and entertainment as we know it is totally different to where it was ten years ago in that it’s not limited to radio, television or the cinema. We now consume media on a multitude of devices and screen sizes whenever and wherever we want. 

So how did the Internet change my life specifically?

While it may sound a bit extreme everything that’s good in my life at the moment I have the Internet to thank for.

This.

My family.

So how do I have the Internet to thank for this?

I’m writing this post to mark a bit of an anniversary. It’s 10 years since I met my significant other, Bryony.

A big milestone generally, but when we met there was about 200 miles between us.

That’s because we met online.

What’s really interesting about that is that anyone reading this will probably think,  “so what?” as it’s not really that big a deal anymore.

It happens all the time and people get married and have children after meeting on the Internet so often now it’s just one of those things. But remember i said this was 10 years ago. There was no Facebook or Twitter and actually just chatting to someone on the Internet was still quite a big deal for the average computer user back then. There was a real taboo about it and for some time afterwards we didn’t tell the entire truth about where we met when we were asked.

But we finally met in person and found out neither of us was a crazy lunatic (well she wasn’t anyway )  and the rest is history! We got married, bought a house and had a couple of children just like any other couple who may have met through more conventional means.

I’m very thankful to the Internet for that!

I’ve also met lots of other great people virtually and in person via the Internet. Considering there is a stereotype of people who spend a lot of time behind a computer not being all that sociable I’ve met a lot of people entirely because of the Internet.

My involvement with AMITPRO and the SBSC community came through this blog. This still has a massive influence on my professional life and I’ve met some amazing people who I’m lucky enough to call friends as well as business acquaintances.

It’s hard to believe that this picture – the very first time I met anyone from the SBSC community – was taken in August 2007!

I’ve also had some really great times all in the cause one of my favourite pastimes – gaming!

I was in Cambridge for the first ever UGVM meet. I was pleased to get an invite even though I’m more of a UGVM lurker!

I was in Blackpool again recently for Replay Expo.

and at the Retro Computer Museum

All this as well as trips to Bletchley Park which in turn led to my recent involvement in Pecha Kucha.

Every single one of these things came about because of contacts and communities I’ve been involved with online and it’s difficult to picture what my life would look like if it wasn’t for Tim Berners Lee!

So I have the Internet to thank for having a huge impact on my family, friends and career.

Life changing enough?

I wouldn’t change a thing!