Webcams are coming bundled with all sorts of great features and very competitively priced.

The Foscam F18910W was recently brought to my attention as a really good deal.

This webcam has wireless B/G support. This means you only need to run power to where it is and no other wires required (e.g. cat5 ethernet cabling).

It also has Pan Tilt, you can control where it is aiming remotely.

You can have a 2-way conversation with the visitor/intruder.

It supports alerting where it can send you an email with photos if the camera detects motion. Also if you can use the Boxcar App on an iPhone which can give a push notification if it detects motion. You can setup FTP for image uploads.

It has support for a variety of Apps to remote control it on mobile devices. (iPhone, Android, Blackberry)

Colour images during the day and infrared support for night vision (up to 8m).

The best part, it is only $100!

Here is a good video demo on how it works:

You need a bit of technical assistance/knowledge to setup the webcam if you want all the bells and whistles working remotely. e.g. setting up port forwarding on your wirless router to be able to remotely see it. Maybe setting up a dynamic dns hostname if your public IP changes.

The disaster recovery plan is probably the most important as it helps address short term crisis’ that are acute and potentially catastrophic to an organization. Things like response time, disaster detection, and resource allocation are just a few of the hot topics that need to be addressed as part of the disaster recovery plan, frequently referred to as the DRP. Unfortunately most organizations do not have such a plan. The DRP helps identify unknown weaknesses in the IT system and also strongly helps documenting what’s currently in place.

For example I had a client with over 12,000 people on their payroll. These workers were all out in the field. This was at a time when it was difficult to hire people. It was of critical importance to never miss a pay run. If they missed one, people were sure to walk. Those were the type of workers they had in their employment. We ensured that part of their disaster recovery plan was hosted at an alternate geographic site, somewhere away from their main location. Their entire accounting system, such that they could do a full pay run, was replicated offsite including physically having a printer with some cheques. In the event that something happened, it can be difficult to gain access to your own financial resources. Having all that in place is something that you need to think about right down to who do you call, which manufacturers can you call, what equipment do you have, what models were they, and what are their serial numbers, are they on warranty, where do you call for that, are there 24/7 phone numbers…

This really brings forth a lot of questions that you might not have asked or that you might have taken for granted. They are brought to surface and decide whether or not you even want to deal with it. We call that risk analysis or risk management; you’re deciding whether or not a particular concern or product or software or service or some data within the organization, what is the amount of risk within that topic, what is the amount of risk associated with losing it, and how much time can you be without it, and what you are willing to spend to address the issue. A few years ago, a person could be without their email for days or a week, it was no big deal. Now I have many clients where they cannot live without it! If they’re without email for a day it’s almost a disaster in itself. All the communication is done that way and there are actual costs attributed to it. Some organizations can attribute actual dollars lost due to missing a piece of equipment or someone’s time. Loss of productivity with your own staff where you actually have to shift what they’re doing away from billable work into non billable work because something internal has to take priority (such as reconstructing valuable data) can be costly.

Having a DRP document in place, even to raise questions that have never been considered, can be very valuable.

Knowing where to begin can be very overwhelming but you can keep it simple by bringing in a consultant in what I call a discovery meeting. This should be a short two hour meeting with no agenda where some basic areas covered. It is a question and answer period where the consultant asks questions to paint the picture of what the organizations IT systems look like. Not everything will have an immediate answer. Certain areas may be focused more heavily based on the answer. The meetings are very organic. They usually help bring to surface unexpected areas of concern. The entire meeting might be sidetracked into a certain topic, but that’s okay, it’s just the first meeting.

As a result of that meeting, you’re going to get some homework. I find that frequently in those discovery meetings it’s very helpful to actually sketch out how the IT systems are related, what components are in play, and what your understandings are. It helps bring forth a lot of issues to surface as many organizations don’t have proper documentation. Organizations are literally flying by the seat of their pants and they’re in firefighting mode. The documentation they have is several years old.

The discovery meeting will bring to surface a number of hot topics. Some might be immediate short term issues and others which are longer term. The discovery meeting also helps establish a new relationship between the organization and the consultant to see if there is a fit. When it comes to IT systems, you really need to trust the consultant as you are divulging a lot of critical information about the way your organization is run. Many times it involves more access, user names, passwords and knowledge than the owner or president of the company. You really want to have a solid relationship in place with the consultant. These meetings helps determine if either want to move forward and in what capacity.

The other benefit from starting with an initial discovery meeting is due to most organizations not wanting to make a big investment. They don’t have budget for this. They’re worried this is going to cost a lot of money. You don’t want someone coming to change everything. Having a two hour meeting is a very minor consultation fee that many organizations use discretionary funds in order to initially pay. Then you can get a sense of feeling whether or not you want to move forward.

I have personally been contacted by many concerned people who have lost all of their irreplaceable pictures. Recently someone took many pictures at their daughter’s wedding and left all of the pictures on the camera’s memory card. They took that memory card into Walmart to get some prints made directly off the memory card. A few months later they went to access the card again from their computer and the card could not be read. They had not made any copies of all the electronic photo files… all was gone. We sent the card to a data recovery business and unfortunately nothing was recoverable. They were devastated!

Even if you did make a copy of all your data (home videos, movies, music, photos), where do you store them? What happens if there is a fire in your home? How much backup and archiving should you do? I feel if something is irreplaceable such as personal videos and photos which are worthwhile memories, you should have an offsite copy. This could be as simple as having an additional copy made onto optical discs or portable external hard drives.

I feel it can be very valuable to have an outside opinion from someone knowledgeable in IT. Similar best practices found in the business world can apply on a smaller scale to our homes. Discuss with them your current electronic needs (music, photos, videos), what you do, and suggestions for how to safeguard this data. For example, there are a number of online Internet-based backup providers. Several even provide free backup services up to certain amounts (e.g. www.mozy.com, www.idrive.com and explore.live.com/skydrive).

I ended up going with a solution by Sonos (www.sonos.com). I was amazed at the simplicity and great features this provided.

You have the ability to implement different “Zones”. These zones can be based on room (e.g. living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom). Each zoneplayer when purchased could be either an amplifier (i.e. it can power its own speakers) or non amplified such that you connect it to an existing stereo.

From the great remote control provided or even using an app for iPods, you can control what is playing in each zone (they can all be different), group zones together, and adjust the volumes for each.

There is a massive amount of free Internet radio stadios on just about any genre you could want available along with pointing to your own music collection. You could even source a stereo in one of your zones to be the audio feed for your home audio system.

The system is so easy to work with that you can just pack it up, bring it somewhere else, and within minutes you are back up and running.

I was reading a magazine recently and discovered another potential solution. The AudioBulb (www.giinii.com). This solution is a lot more affordable than Sonos and probably even easier to install. All you have to do is screw in these light bulbs which have built in speakers, place your iPod in the supplied dock, and away you go. You can have up to 8 of these audio bulbs in your system. I haven’t had the chance to try out this solution but it would definitely be a strong contender if I had to implement another solution.

The purposes of implementing these audio solutions was to have light background music in many different rooms. It is not a replacement for your main stereo. Something great to consider especially if you like to entertain.

We have a bird feeder in our yard that is very popular particularily with chickadees.

I noticed that they tend to take the same flight path towards the feeder and leaving. The gears were turning in my head wondering how to capture one of them in flight.

I setup my Canon EOS 60D on a tripod with a lens allowing me a focal length of 500 mm so I could zoom right in near where they were landing on the feeder. I set my DSLR to Tv mode so I could lock the shutter speed to be extremely fast. Disabled auto focus on the lens then I manually focused on the very edge of the feeder to get the right spot. I then shifted the camera slightly to the left so there was nothing in the frame. I set my camera to continuous mode and waited. As soon as I saw a chickadee flying towards the feeder, I held the button… snap snap snap snap. I did this a number of times for each bird.

Out of over 400 pictures taken in a short amount of time, about 10 of them caught some part of one of the birds. I copied the photos onto my computer to have a larger view and was rewarded with 2 amazing pictures.. for an amateur!

Landing

Leaving, in flight

Recently one of my friends let me know about 500px.com and I have slowly posting some of my favorite photographs online. Here is my profile:

http://500px.com/DavidPapp

I have a long ways to go compared to the professionals and their amazing pictures. It is a fun hobby and I love learning more about it each time I experiment with my camera.

VMWARE

• 1 new VM every 6 second
  (Faster than rate of babies born in US)
• More thank 20 million VMs around the world
  (If they were physicaly machines, would stretch 2x length of the Great Wall of China)
• There are 5.5 vMotions per second
  (More than number of planes taking off globally)
• More than 800,000 vSphere admins
• More than 68,000 VCPs in 160+ countries
• 48 vCloud service providers

VSPHERE5

• More than 1 million engineering hours
• More than 2 million QA hours
• 200 new features
• More than 2,000 partner certifications

VMWORLD 2011

19,000 attendees (Hurricane Irene caused many flight cancellations, would have been higher)

Hands-On Lab Stats

• 248 servers
• 2,496 cores
• 18,048 GB total memory
• 6,392 GHz total processingv
• Powered by vSphere5 and vCloud Director 1.5
• 480 seats, all dual monitor
• 24,000 lab seat hours
• 18,000 labs deployed
• 225,000 VMs deployed

• bank and credit card pins
• luggage tags
• garage door opener
• home keyless locks
• safes
• briefcases
• padlocks

Almost everyone uses some form of their birthdate, combination of their birthdate (month, year), or other family members.

Interesting I read recently that the top ten 4 digit codes are:

1. 1234
2. 0000
3. 2500
4. 1111
5. 5555
6. 5683
7. 0852
8. 2222
9. 1998

It is estimated that the above 10 codes represent 15% of all user codes being used. Even worse is that once you know someone’s user code, they tend to use it everywhere, even for email accounts and computer passwords.

Certainly 4-digit codes have limited variations, but if you must use only 4-digits, please try and make the deterent a bit more difficult to overcome. Shake things up and use different codes in different places. And most of all, don’t be part of the 15%!

With the convenience of carrying around tablets such as Androids and iPads, yet the inconvenience of not being able to run everything you need on these lightweight portable systems, accessing your PC remotely is still something many people have a requirement for.

LogMeIn Ignition (Android and iPad)
$30 app, fast, simple

Citrix GoToMyPC (Android and iPad)
$99/yr per PC, expensive, secure and reliable

Wyse Pocket Cloud Pro (Android and iPad)
$15, easy, supports multiple connections

PhoneMyPC (Android)
$15 app, performs well, has a limited free version, has encryption

My favorite is LogMeIn Ignition which I highly recommend you try out. They have Windows and iPhone versions as well. This mature product has become a required part of my toolkit.

If the situation is serious, you may need to use a data recovery service. They are expensive, however if recovering the data is uber important, you may have no choice. It is best to not attempt any form of data recovery yourself and you increase the chance of causing more damage or losing more data. You increase the likelihood of being able to recover your data if you don’t do anything.

If the loss of the data isn’t super critical, you could try some of the software solutions below on your own.

One free piece of software you should have in your toolkit for just such a situation is Parted Magic. This particular piece of software you need to burn the image you download (an ISO file) to a CD and then you would boot your computer from that. This is very helpful to have in those situations where your computer can’t boot into Windows. Also it is always good to shutdown your computer if you are really concerned about recovering a file as it minimizes the chance that anything overwrites it. So using something like Parted Magic to boot into an alternate operating system to recover your files is more ideal.

Burning ISO files to an optical disc (CD/DVD) is quite easy. One nice free program you can use is CDBurnerXP. It is very simple to use for burning files or entire images (ISO files) to a disc.

Parted Magic has it’s own file manager view and you can copy files from the corrupted hard drive to another drive. Never copy files to the same drive that is having problems as you might overwrite what you are trying to recover.

Another idea is to take the bad drive and connect it to another computer. If the drive does spin up and shows up in the drive manager, but you cannot see any of the files, then you could look at some commercial programs. One program is R-Studio which has 3 flavours all under $100 and is generally successful at recovering files. It supports a large number of file systems (including Windows, Linux, and BSD variants).