My XM Radio (in my GPS) died a number of weeks ago. I kept thinking of getting it fixed but all the GPS units I am looking at use FM/Cellular for traffic reports and paying for radio only just didn’t make a lot of sense for someone who drives 7-10K miles a year, I do have an MP3 player after all. Traffic updates on a GPS on the other hand are a nice luxury I enjoy in my traffic riddled area.

I went to xmradio.com to press the big-red CANCEL button, but no such button could be found. The FAQ online indicates how to cancel but the directions did not reveal a magic link to me. ... Click to read more

I added JungleDisk (my current favorite) to the brief synopsis of backup software. I highly recommend JungleDisk, especially for Linux users. Another excellent Linux backup solution is Rsync.net. They support numerous Linux (as well as other) solutions and have some of the best customer support I have encountered. Unfortunately for by 400 GB backup sets the price becomes a little high.

For those in a Windows environment take a look at DataDepositBox. There software is a breeze to use and managing multiple accounts painless. ... Click to read more

Research into online backup tools

Update 2008-11-06: I have been using JungleDisk for multiple client systems including Linux, Linux servers and Windows. It works very well, is much cheaper for large data sets than DataDepositBox. The downside is its relatively week sub-account management compared to DataDepositBox. But for the 400 GB of storage I now have the savings using S3 make the transition worth it. ... Click to read more

*In Progress*

This entry is not a formal review. It is just some quick notes I wanted to track as I researched project management software. Hopefully others with similar situation will find the information a useful starting point.

Project management can get complex very quickly and software to help manage projects is very useful. Even small projects can become tricky to monitor, especially when they are on a fast track or involve a lot of research dependencies. ... Click to read more

I have chosen Chief Architect as my design tool for my Father’s remodeling business. It beat out the other major competor VectorWorks. Chief Architect can do residential and interior design far faster and easier than VectorWorks can and residential design is what this evaluation was based on.

I personally prefer VectorWorks because it is a more of a platform. Eventually I, or others, could fill in all the holes I mention in my VectorWork review and it would be far supior to anything I have found on the market today. ... Click to read more

Chief Architect version 10 Findings

I have purchased a copy of Chief Architect 10.0 Enterprise. This version costs about $2,300 and comes with the CAD, renderor and a huge number of video training guides. My goal is to learn enough about home design to assist my father who is a general contractor specializing in small remodels.

Currently the remodel plans are done by hand and he would like to make the process easier and provide more capabilities such as 3D views for design purposes. Unfortunatly I am not a draftsman or architect. ... Click to read more

In general the state of PC based PVRs is a bit immature. These are general oberservation of the core software that PVR’s are built upon, commercial or private. The lack of a CD Player option is very weird. When I or my Lady wishes to play a CD we bought the last thing I am going to do is try and explain to her how to rip it! A drop it in and it plays seems to be the “right way”. The same applies to external media cards from cameras. Should the pictures be extracted and saved to a predetermine dlocation, possible by date? Almost anything is better than doing nothing! ... Click to read more

I love the idea of the Google Toolbar, especially the spell checker. But I had to wonder how it worked. Its not rocket science but it is a nice implantation of client/server code. The idea is that text is sent to Google via XML and returned to the toolbar via XML. For a moderately fast connection this is all very nice and can be extended to multiple operating systems easily.

The problem is that the text is sent clear-text to an organization that is not under the author’s control. ... Click to read more

Initial results of my search for an image scanner today. ... Click to read more

Kathy and I want to make some changes to our new house. I decided to try the various home design CAD systems to see how well they could handle my split level. I choose to look at 2 major packages.

• FloorPlan by IMSI. I had some experience with version 8.2 and now its at version 10.

• Punch by Punch Software. I had also tried this some time ago ut at that time it was too slow and cumbersome.

I purchased FloorPlan ($50) 10.0 and tried it out. While better than 8.2 it still requires strange workarounds for what I think are simple things. ... Click to read more