Codewrangler

Backup, Backup, Backup! :-)

November 21, 2012

Now that it’s the holidays, you will be taking more pictures and videos of friends and family and all the festivities.

Don’t lose it, because you don’t have a backup of your valuable, irreplaceable memories.

Below is a link to an article about the “Backup Rule of Three”. Take heart and follow it’s advice. The basics of the philosophy can be summed up by saying, and I paraphrase since I don’t remember the exact wording or who said it, but here it is, “If you don’t have your data in (3) places and (1) of them is off-site, it doesn’t exist“.

The Compute Rule of Three – http://www.hanselman.com/blog/TheComputerBackupRuleOfThree.aspx

Here are some links to some online backup resources as well:

Carbonite – http://www.carbonite.com

Barracuda Networks – https://www.barracudanetworks.com/

Mozy – http://mozy.com

DollyDrive (Time Machine to Cloud) – http://www.dollydrive.com

Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! 🙂

Microsoft / Windows 8

Windows 8 And Boot Camp

October 27, 2012

If you have just purchased a Windows 8 Pro upgrade AND you are upgrading your Boot Camp partition, you may noticed a few issues. In this short piece, I will address the issues that I have seen or heard reported and offer a few solutions.

Trackpad and Keyboard

After downloading the Windows Pro 8 $39.99 upgrade, I ran the “Install Now” option. It chugged and chugged and rebooted and voila! I had my Windows 8 installation. However, the track pad did not work and neither did the keyboard, for typing in my password. I attached a USB and tried to start the on screen keyboard, but it wouldn’t load. Does any of this sound familiar to you? If you have just installed the upgrade to your Boot Camp, you have experienced the same thing. I’ve seen it all over the net.

The Solution

The good news is that there IS a solution. The bad news, is the solution is to install a fresh install. That means all your apps and documents get put in a “Windows.Old” folder. Not ideal, to say the least. However, after doing a fresh install and installing the latest Boot Camp drivers, everything works, except for some “Coprocessor” that it found. I am assuming this is related to the graphics card, but I am not sure.

Scrolling

Once I got everything up and running, I tried scrolling the start screen. Being a Mountain Lion user, it felt completely backwards. For those of you that are not familiar with it, OSX has a scrolling feature called “Natural Scrolling”. Essentially, this means that when you scroll on the Trackpad or the Mouse wheel, it scrolls in the direction that your scrolling, instead of the opposite way that earlier OSX did and Windows still does.

Thankfully, there is a solution for this as well. It’s called Trackpad++ and you can download and install it for free (thank you Vladimir Plenskiy), at the following URL. 64 Bit Windows 8 requires you install PowerPlan as well:

http://trackpad.powerplan7.com/

Install, reboot, install and boom! You are up and running with “Natural Scrolling” and some other features as well.

Conclusion

Hopefully this has been helpful to some of you who may be suffering from the upgrade. It seems, that the best way to experience Windows 8 is to buy new hardware designed specifically for Windows 8. But, sometimes you use what you got. 🙂

Microsoft

Coincidence? I think not…:-)

October 2, 2012

I just saw this article on MacRumors.com :

Apple to Announce 4Q 2012 Earnings on October 25

Then I started to ask myself, “Isn’t there something else BIG that’s happening on that day?”. For Microsoft, there definitely is. They are scheduled to officially release their follow on to Windows 7; Windows 8.

Windows 8 Release Date: Launch Event Scheduled, Invitations sent

Makes me wonder if Apple scheduled that day on purpose. Always a good strategy to announce your billions in revenue and ‘best quarter ever’ on the same day your competitor ‘bets the company’ on Windows 8.

Just saying…:-)

News / Radio

Mark Davis is back!

May 29, 2012

For those of you Mark Davis fans, in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area…he’s back! After an absence from the air since April, after not having his contract renewed with the new owner of WBAP, Cumulus Broadcasting, he has signed to do his same show in the 7am to 10am CST time slot on KSKY 660 AM(they can also be heard on FM). His Producer Susan, from WBAP, will be joining him.