If you bought a Seagate hard drive at retail between 3/22/01 and 9/26/07 you can go to this site to see the class action settlement against Seagate. The gist is that they advertised hard drive space in gigabytes measured as one billion bytes instead of using the binary definition of 2 to the 30th power (like operating systems use) which resulted in their drives being sold as having 7% more usable space than they really did.

The upshot is that Seagate is paying out 5% of your purchase price as cash for drives bought in that time frame. Check out the site for all the gory details.

That’s more like it, DOCSIS 2.0 is good:

The test says “Warning: ISP upload compression was detected. Your upload speeds may be inaccurate.” but I don’t know how the test is effective.

Well that was really odd: after replacing my cable modem (who knew that a DOCSIS 1.0 modem would be deprecated and suffer degraded performance?) I ran a few speed tests at DSL Reports and the third one (to Ontario) came back with this:

I knew something was up when the needle on the meter started going below zero but I thought it was just a problem with the display in the Flash applet. Of course the tech told me that I should see higher speeds with the new DOCSIS 2.0 modem but so far it’s actually a bit slower (but I only have a small sample size so far).

It’s a good thing I didn’t pick up a new handset from Verizon yet since I just read that they should have an Android handset out in October. I don’t know what it will be (haven’t had time to research it yet) but it looks like the Motorola Calgary should be out in the December/January time frame (although that’s old news; image below. The only downside is that VZN will probably lock the crap out of their Android stuff like they do all the other handsets.

Gizmodo article on Android at Verizon

PC Magazine article from today quoted below:

Verizon Wireless will launch a range of Android-powered “feature phones, PDAs, netbooks … speciality devices” and smartphones for the United States’ largest wireless carrier beginning “in a few weeks,” Verizon Wireless chief executive Lowell McAdam said Tuesday.

“This is a family of devices – it’s not just a smartphone or PDA,” he said.

McAdam was speaking as part of a joint announcement with Google of a comprehensive partnership between Google and Verizon, where the two companies will “co-develop a family of Android based devices … with innovative applications from both our companies,” McAdam said. Two phones will arrive this year, with many more devices coming in 2010, he said. The two companies have been talking about a partnership for at least the past 18 months, McAdam said.

I found this article interesting reading and haven’t even touched the comments yet. It’s about how NAT really isn’t a security measure and explains why. Extra bonus: a Star Trek TOS story to open the article:

How many Star Trek classic fans are in the house? Man, I just love that show. I honestly believe that is was Star Trek that generated my interest in engineering and of course kept me from getting dates until college, but that’s a story for my therapist. There is an episode called “The Corbomite Maneuver,” where the intergalactic King of Cool Captain Kirk bluffs a goober alien into thinking he has a heavy duty bomb onboard and the alien backs off. Then he, Spock and Scotty drink a case of Newcastle and ash out a Cohiba. OK, I am kidding about that part; Spock wasn’t there.

Port 666 at Network World

So my router couldn’t get an IP via DHCP from my cable modem tonight for some reason. I first go through my usual ritual of power cycling the modem, then the router (which works 50% of the time). No dice, still getting 192.168.100.2 on the router. I then call up Cox tech support, using their automated system will get me back up & running about 90% of the time. Unfortunately tonight the IVR piped me into the queue for a live ticket taker.

Even more unfortunate was her attitude. I explained that even after power cycling both pieces of equipment my router was not getting an IP via the cable modem. Her instant response was “Cox does not troubleshoot wireless routers” so I explained that the router is wired directly to the modem. She then said “Cox does not troubleshoot routers” and we went around and around. Finally she decided to try to help me by walking me the long way through Start > Run > Cmd and doing an ipconfig. I played along to that point but told her that this info wouldn’t help since my computer was getting its IP from the router and the router wasn’t getting a valid IP from Cox.

I then insisted on speaking to a Tier 2 tech so she put me on hold for about three minutes. Of course just before she picked back up the router finally got an IP (since I kept clicking the Renew button in the interface). The sad part is that I asked about the intelligent IVR that usually takes care of the problem by remotely resetting my cable modem and such and she said they still have it so I’m frustrated that I had to speak to a ticket taker when the IVR does a better job.

My friend sent me this link to a Wired article about Unix epoch time about 20 minutes too late. The date/time stamp in the Unix epoch format was just 1234567890 about 20 minutes ago. There’s also a link to a geeky clock that can tell time in Roman, hex, Unix Epoch, binary or octal formats. Click the image to go to the product page at Think Geek.

Geek Clock

I never thought I’d see the day but Newegg had a Western Digital Caviar Green 1TB internal drive (with 32MB cache no less) for only $99 last week; it’s back up to a whopping $110 now. Even after all these years the pace at which technology gets bigger , faster and cheaper still amazes me. This was the first I’d heard of these drives but the Newegg reviews on that page had 83% of reviewers give it a 5 out of 5 (47 respondents). Of course one of those people gave it a 5 even though they hadn’t even installed it in a computer yet.

I guess that last test wasn’t a fluke, I got about the same again today. I’ll have to read about that Boost stat though since it was over 13Mbit/sec this time.

I don’t know when it happened but it looks like Cox uncorked my upload speed at some point. I used to get maybe 400k/sec or something but I just ran a test to a server about 425 miles away and got this:

The funny part is that I used to get closer to 6-7Mb/sec download so it was a tradeoff.

I thought the upgrade would finish unattended but it did ask twice about keeping or overwriting config file so the next morning I had to tell it to keep my Samba config file. That night when I got home I had one more prompt to answer and then it completed & rebooted shortly thereafter. The only hiccup that I’ve seen so far is that Samba would crash on startup or when I tried to open its control panel. I opened the smb.conf file and it looked like there was a syntax change so I commented out some old lines for folder shares and it seems to be working now.

Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron LTS install notes thread on the forums

I kicked off the Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron upgrade on my home file/print server tonight. I should wake up to an upgraded OS, cross your fingers.

Review: Why Ubuntu ‘Hardy Heron’ Wins Laurels

I just came across this article describing how to replace the hard drive storage in a Zen Micro MP3 player with a solid-state CF flash memory card. I just might have to look into that, sounds like a fun weekend hacking project. I ran across the story at instructables while searching for an answer to why my Zen won’t boot after I let the battery run completely dry.

Damn, I can’t believe how fast hard drive storage prices are falling. I got an e-mail from Newegg saying I could buy the Seagate Barracuda 7200 rpm SATA drive with a whopping 1 terabyte of storage for $249 (with a $20 promo code) and with free shipping. I wish I had my tax refund back already.

On top of that they are selling 2GB of Corsair DDR2 800 for $69 (after $15 instant savings) and then on top of that a $40 mail-in rebate for net cost of just $29. Unbelievable, I remember paying about $100 for my first stick of 8MB of RAM for my first Mac.

Like my friend Darana said this is Nerds R Us. Somebody compiled hard drive costs from Newegg and plotted a graph of GB/dollar across various drive sizes and came up with a basic point graph here. Looks like right now the sweet spot is 500GB drives where you can get just over 5GB for each of your hard-earned dollars (~$100). He did the same thing for flash memory cards but there isn’t an obvious sweet spot on the graph. The HDD plot is actually a slightly-skewed bell curve though.

His picture on the main page is a bit creepy but if he’s programming in Python, C and PHP and he is “currently 14.6906376277 years old” then he’s got a great future ahead of him. He’s even working on the PCB for a quad-rotor UAV.