My World

Mobile Phone Update

brandon — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 10:55:42 +0000

Well, I made the decision to go with the iPhone 4S on Verizon. It was delivered on Friday and so far I am impressed with the device and the network. No network is perfect, but in the little testing I have done this weekend in spots that were dead or almost dead on my Nexus One on T-Mobile had usable signal on Verizon. There are locations where the signal is weaker, but that is also to be expected. Only time will tell.

What mobile phone to get on which carrier?

brandon — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 14:08:22 +0000

Well, I think that I have made up my mind that it is time for a new phone and probably time to leave T-Mobile since they ended their roaming agreements with AT&T in some of the areas that I tend to spend sometime in. Yes, they have service in most of these areas, but it is poor at best in most locations. I can see that there is service form AT&T, but I am only able to use it for emergency calls, which is nice to know that it is available, but still not ideal. With that being said I am leaning toward making the jump to Verizon, yes it will be more every month for the same features, yes their are data caps. If my data usage stays the same I am not too concerned as I use no where near the cap. So am I missing something in deciding to switch carriers?

The next decision is what phone to get, as you can probably guess based on the timing of this I am thinking about the iPhone 4S, as I seem to be more and more Apple centric in what I use and do with technology in the past couple years. I have an iPad, Mac and iPod Touch. Currently my personal phone is a Nexus One on T-Mobile and that is the phone that I would be replacing, I also have a work phone that is an EVO 4G on Sprint, so I will still have an Android phone. I am also open to getting an Android phone on Verizon also, but the real question is which mobile OS to go with? What features that I have come to love on my Nexus One am I going to miss if I make the move to iOS. What are the pluses to moving to iOS. I am a Google Voice and Google Latitude user so how well do these apps function or not on iOS compared to Android? I enjoy photography and the camera on the iPhone's in the past seem to be far superior to anything on any of the Android phones.

The bottom line is should I switch carriers and/or mobile phone OS? If I do what are good and bad of each?

Secure browsing on open Wifi

brandon — Tue, 05 Apr 2011 11:00:08 +0000

Shortly after getting my iPad2 I was sitting in a hotel connected to their wireless network with my computer and fired up Wireshark to see what I would see floating through the air. I saw about what I expected, everything that everyone connected to the same access point was doing. I have known this was the case for a long time and have normally used a PPTP VPN to my house to get around this, but that didn't always work as well as I would like. My roommate tunnels his traffic through a PC at the house over SSH, which I could also do, but it was the iPad that really got me thinking, what could I do that I could easily do on the iPad as well as any computer and not have connectivity issues. PPTP has issues getting through some routers and firewalls and the easiest way around this is to move to SSL so that was what I did. I opted to pick up a Cisco ASA and setup AnyConnect over SSL on it. There is an AnyConnect client for the iPad, it does require that you have the AnyConnect Mobile licenses on the ASA, but after I looked into the price was not too bad for the piece of mind that it would give me. Yes, it was somewhat of a pain to setup, but after a weekend of testing and working on it on and off I did get it to do everything I wanted it to and it has been working well for the last week. I will post some of what I learned along the way in the future.

A couple of weeks with an iPad

brandon — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 11:00:55 +0000

I was one of the nut cases that decided that I wanted an iPad2 bad enough that I was willing to stand, okay sit, in line for several hours, turns out it was a good thing that I arrived when I did, I was about the fortieth person in line, I would have to guess that by the time I was done buying my iPad2 there had to have been at least three hundred people in line at Southdale.

Well, it has been a few weeks since it was released and I must say that I am enjoying the device. I find that that I am checking out Twitter, Facebook and catching up on the news with it. Flipboard is defiantly one of my favorite applications, I really like that way that it pulls in my Google Reader as well as Twitter and Facebook accounts in a great magazine style format. I also, played with GarageBand which is cool and for me not being a musician by any means, it was fun to play with and heck, someday I might even get something good out of it. There have been a number of other applications that I have played with and I will write about those in the future.

The Clintons Want to Go Big & Play Mini Golf w/ Taylor Swift

brandon — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 02:05:59 +0000

Over the last year or so I found the Clintons Band they are an independent band that produces music that I really enjoy. I have all of their CDs, heck some I even own multiple copies of. They are in the process of recording a new Album and are in need of some funding for it. More information can be found on the Kickstarter project page.

Why do stores have different prices in store and online?

brandon — Mon, 04 Apr 2011 01:14:51 +0000

Why do some stores feel it necessary to have different prices in their stores and online when I can order online and pickup my purchase in the store. Today I decided I was going to stop by Best Buy and check out the Beats By Dr. Dre Solo HDs as the reviews of the new model were looking promising online. When I got to the store I discovered that they were marked $219.99 as opposed to the $199.99 that there were on the web site for. So, I decided to play with them and see what I thought anyway. I thought about it for a bit and decided that I was going to get them, but I opted to head home and order online to get the better rate, not to mention that I would get more of a cash back bonus if I bought them my Discover card shopping site. I know that if I had pushed the issue in the store I would have gotten the priced matched without it being too big of a deal as they have done that for me before. I guess the lesson to be learned from this is to shop around including the website of the of the brick and mortar store that you are shopping at, it can pay off.

General Update

brandon — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 01:12:52 +0000

Well, it has been a very long time since I have even looked at my site, let alone written anything on it. I can't believe that we are already the the second half of October already, where did the summer go? Work had keep my busy over the last several months and that is good and bad. One thing for sure is that it really makes time fly.

Several technology related items have changed around here over the course of the summer and the fall. The main one is that I bought a Mac again after not having had one in more than ten years, I must say I do like it. I am also using Aperture on it for my photo management. It has been nice to get all of my photos in to one single location. I still have a lot to learn about how to put the power of Aperture to use for me. Also, I have added some new lenses to my camera kit, some F2.8 lenses are now in my kit. I have not had many opportunities to shoot recently, but I hope to be able to put them to good use in the near future. Also, the MythTV system is no longer operational and has been replaced by a couple of DirecTV DVRs. Comcast is going all digital in our area and that made the MythTV option much less desirable, so after some research we made the switch. Overall, much less to maintain that MythTV, but also less flexible. I do miss some of the features of MythTV, but it sure is nice to be watch and record so many more cable channels in HD.

I think that covers what I have been up to for the last several months while I have been neglecting my web site more than normal. Don't forget to check out some of my photos in my gallery.

Vacation Photos Posted

brandon — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 01:24:43 +0000

Photos from my most recent vacation have been posted to my photo gallery. The photos can be found at http://www.perrinetech.com/gallery2/v/2010/CaliVacation/. This was a trip around the San Francisco bay area.

More Server Upgrades

brandon — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 11:33:22 +0000

Yesterday I decided to take the plunge and upgrade the remaining servers that I have at home from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04 despite the issues that I had with my last upgrade experience. These servers are all part of the MythTV setup in the house, they also do some other items, but mostly for MythTV. Well, the upgrade went without an issue. Some parts were slower that I would have liked, but in the end it all worked fine. MythTV upgraded just fine. The only item I had to do was to move some configuration files back to get my remote control to work again. Overall, the upgrade went well and it was a relief, when I say the system boot back up.

Server Upgrade

brandon — Sun, 09 May 2010 02:09:42 +0000

Well, it has been a long time since I have written anything on the blog, I have been around and doing things. Today I decided to upgrade the operating system on my server from Ubuntu 8.04 to 10.04, I prefer to stick to long term releases for my servers so that I don't have to upgrade them every six months. Well, it was bad upgrade. I did the upgrade and rebooted the server and it did not want to boot. I probably should have stopped at that point and found out what I needed to do to recover and get GRUB to boot, but I was lost and decided to just start over and install from scratch. Well, almost scratch I did not delete the partitions, but I did format them. Well, when the server rebooted after the fresh install it would only boot to the GRUB rescue prompt and no matter what I did I could not get past that point. I ever tried another almost fresh install to no avail. After the third install attempt where I did delete all of the partitions and start over the server rebooted and started up just fine. After a while I was able to restore most everything from the backups. At this point all is looking good, but if you are going to upgrade be prepared for the worst case and make sure that you have good current backups.