Consulting | Donald Perreault

Very Disappointed With Roxio Crunch...

Tue, 08 May 2007 19:21:01 -0400

I purchased Roxio's $39.99 application for converting video into the AppleTV video format today. Roxio claims:

Roxio Crunch™ is the essential video converter for your Apple TV, iPod, and iPhone. Take your video in to the living room or the palm of your hands fast and simple. Roxio Crunch is a one-stop shop for all of your video conversion needs. Batch export will make your life even simpler: converted video will be automatically added to iTunes for syncing. Don’t just convert it, Crunch it!

Convert DV, AVI, MOV, MPEG-4, MPEG-2, DivX, DVD-Video, Video_TS folders, and more
Automatically add converted video to your iTunes library for easy syncing with your Apple TV, iPod, or iPhone
Powerful award-winning video conversion technology from the makers of Toast®.

I can't believe how disappointing Crunch is.

Handbrake 8.5B1 is faster, much more flexible and is free.

Brief Introduction to Mac OS X Computer Security.....

Sat, 05 May 2007 12:54:38 -0400

Lately, I have been concerned with the security of the data on my computer and how I could improve upon that security. My concern is someone illegally breaking into my computer and gaining access to my data, passwords, social security number, credit card account numbers and my bank account numbers. Any computer with a broadband connection to the Internet is susceptible to an attack. Preventing unauthorized access to the important data on my computer is my sole responsibility. Data security involves recognizing and responding to any potential security threats in advance.

I am not a computer security export. I am basing my security advice on the 18 years of computer experience I have, most of which is on Apple Computers. Therefore, my advice is primarily targeting Mac OS X users. Securing computers running Mac OS X involves taking a few steps. Computers connected via a full-time broadband connection are much more vulnerable to an attack than computers that are connected to the internet via a dial up connection.

You can perform many relative simple procedures to protect your computer from illegal access. First disable any Sharing Services that you are not using. If you are not sharing files over your LAN then there is no need for you to have Personal File Sharing enabled and this goes for Windows Sharing, Personal Web Sharing, Remote Login, FTP Access and Printer Sharing. If you do need any of the above services enabled then be sure to also enable the built in Firewall for that service.

For additional protection against intruders I chose to use a Linksys Firewall cable/DSL router. The Linksys Router comes with built-in advanced Firewall and VPN capability allowing you to connect multiple PC's to a high-speed broadband Internet connection or to an Ethernet backbone. This router also acts as the only externally recognized Internet gateway/IP on your local area network (LAN) making it extremely difficult for an intruder to obtain a local IP address supplied by the built in DHCP server of the Linksys router.

It is critical for a safe computing environment to supplement your physical security with a few simple virtual ones. One of the simplest and most important is careful management of your account passwords. Most email accounts and many web sites require you to use an account name and password to login. If you use the internet a lot you are going to accumulate quite a few passwords. Managing these passwords to keep them secure is one of the most important area's of online safety.

Most people underestimate the importance of choosing good secure passwords and keeping those passwords secret. A good password has two properties: It should be hard to guess, easy for you to remember and as lengthy as possible.

When trying to create a secure password thats hard to guess, keep several things in mind. Never use information about yourself that someone could guess or figure out by doing a little research about you. It is also important not to use the same account name and password for multiple sites. If a criminal gets the information for one site he will have access to all your accounts using that information.

I use a program called Wallet developed by Waterfall Software to store ALL my password and login information. Wallet uses military-strength 448-bit Blowfish encryption to secure your most important data. Wallet also comes with a Password Generator to aid the user in creating very secure passwords. I feel very comfortable storing all my important data in Wallet. Another application that lets you manage your passwords and securely store notes, account numbers, and other confidential information is Apple's Keychain Access. By default when you login to Mac OS X you are automatically unlocking the user's login keychain. I do not like to store important information in the login keychain because the login keychain remains unlocked while you are logged into Mac OS X by default. If you leave your computer and forget to logout or lock the login keychain anyone could sit down at your computer and access your passwords and login names. I recommend creating another keychain to store your important information in and open that keychain only when access to that information is needed and then promptly locking it after access.

Not all applications allow you to securely protect the application data it creates. In these cases I will store that data on an encrypted disk image that I create using Apple's Disk Utility.

Happy to be here...

Sun, 29 Apr 2007 12:23:05 -0400

I awoke this morning with the thought of today being my 47th birthday. Had you asked me 20 years ago if I would still be alive on my 47th birthday I probably would have laughed and told you that it would be highly unlikely. Truthfully speaking, I did believe that I would live to be 47 and long beyond that. Statistically speaking people with CF generally die young, most in their 20's and 30's.

Over the last three years my health has declined considerably, my lung capacity is at 30%, I was diagnosed with diabetes and I have been put on a lung transplant list. The only time I feel good is after I finish a 2 week course of IV antibiotics and that good feeling starts fading after a few short weeks. As difficult as it may be I do my best to stay positive but I am not immune from periods of unhappiness.

HD & Apple TV

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 14:05:45 -0400

A couple months ago I purchased a Sony Bravia 46 inch LCD HDTV. The quality and color of HD content on this TV is absolutely phenomenal. The purchase of my new TV prompted me to upgrade my Digital Cable to High Def (HD) Digital Cable. Unfortunately my Series 1 TIVO did not record HD content so I ended up subscribing to the DVR service from Comcast my cable provider. I did consider purchasing a new TIVO Series 3 box but TIVO does not allow transferring of the lifetime subscription from my Series 1 box to a new Series 3 box. I just could not justify the purchasing of a new Series 3 TIVO box and lifetime subscription.

Now that I have a HD TV I want to watch all my TV in HD content. I also wanted to upgrade my DVD player to the new Blu-ray HD DVD. The Blu-ray Disc format provides picture quality beyond anything available, with full capability 1080p/24 resolution which my new TV also supports. Currently Blu-ray discs are around $10 more than DVD's and Blu-ray disc players vary from $500 to $1200, a bit high compared to the standard DVD players. History has shown that new technologies consistently drop in price as time passes. Not wanting to spend a small fortune I settled on the Sony Playstation 3 because in addition to being a great gaming computer it also supports the Blu-ray disc format at a price less than most Blu-ray Disc players.

I have an extremely large DVD collection, many of these DVD's I have converted to a format that would play on my TV via my iPod. However, the bit rate and resolution of these iPod movies did not display very well on my new TV. It was also very inconvenient to swap out my movies on the iPod for playing on my new TV. This problem was eliminated when I purchased the just released Apple TV. The Apple TV supports a much higher resolution and bit rate than that of the iPod giving you a much better picture providing your movies are encoded properly. There are numerous online reviews of the Apple TV so I will refrain from a detailed review only to say that I am thrilled with the ease of setup, features and picture quality of the Apple TV. My only complaint with the Apple TV is Apple's decision to use a meager 40GB Hard Drive for storage. With my large large video and music collection I found myself still needing to re-sync the Apple TV frequently. I was thrilled when Weaknees released a do-it-yourself hard drive upgrade kit for the Apple TV. I purchased the 160GB HD upgrade kit, it came with everything necessary to complete the upgrade promptly and painlessly. The upgrade took less than 20 minutes from the shutdown to restart. If you find your Apple TV lacking storage then I highly recommend the Weaknees Apple TV upgrade. I can now store over 200 hours of video on my Apple TV and I always have something available to watch.

Needless to say I am watching way to much TV :)

Endangered Orangutans...

Sun, 19 Feb 2006 12:37:29 -0500

Asia once played home to one of the largest rainforests on earth; now however, more than 80% of that forest has been lost forever. Scientists once anticipated that habitat destruction might cause orangutans to go extinct in 35 to 50 years. However, due to massive clear cutting, illegal logging, poaching, and the kidnapping of infant orangutans for the illegal pet trade, it is now estimated that if such practices go unchecked, the current population of orangutans will go extinct in less than ten years. Please help by donating at http://www.orangutan.orgor http://www.orangutan.com