Category: Tech

Netflux

Netflix is taking a lot of heat for the big increases in plan pricing. My account page says:

The price of your Unlimited Streaming + 2 DVDs out at-a-time (Unlimited) plan will change to $22.98 (including $3.00 for Blu-ray) (plus any applicable tax) a month starting with your next billing period on or after Sep 01, 2011.

To stay at the same $18/month I now pay for streaming video and two discs at home, with the Blu-ray option, I have to drop to one disc with Blu-ray. So that’s what I’m probably going to do. Right now there are only two Blu-ray titles in my disc queue, so I’m even considering dumping the option, because that would be $7/month less than the $23/month the 2-disc plan will cost in September, and that’s $7×12 months=$84, which would cover the $79/year that Amazon Prime costs. It’s a classic Economics problem in determining marginal utility.

Bad battery! Bad! No, wait. Good!

Praise and thanks to the local Batteries Plus store. The “replace battery” light and buzzer came on for the battery backup that keeps the phone working with Verizon FiOS for a few hours during a power failure. This was the second battery. I replaced the original battery just a year ago, after four years.

I took both of the allegedly failed batteries to the Batteries Plus store, and the guy there, working by himself on a Sunday, said “Verizon FiOS? I bet they both test fine.” And, indeed, they did. His explanation was that the FiOS UPS seems to have a habit of overcharging batteries then declaring them worn out, prematurely.

He suggested discharging the battery with a light or letting it sit for a week or two. Well, the original battery has been sitting idle for over a year, so I figured I’d put that back in and, if the tech at the store was right, it would work. And it did. So now the question is, how long will it last? Maybe I should let it run down for an hour or two once in a while. The only catch with that idea is, unplugging the power supply will leave the phone working off the battery, but Internet and TV service will be down.

Follow-up: Six days later the original battery is still OK.

The grandfather of Internet worms

One weekday in 1988 I was waiting in line to order at a lunch counter in Kendall Square, Cambridge, Massachusetts (or it might have been Au Bon Pain by then). In front of me were two MIT guys who were talking quickly and nervously about something that was going very wrong on the Internet. The problem was the first software worm, written by Robert Morris, who is now at MIT himself. His father, one of the creators of the Unix operating system, has died.

What large servers you have!

Today at work I was watching a not very useful video about VMware virtual networking. When I looked to see what else YouTube had pulled up as related material, what I saw between NIC teaming and the Cisco Nexus was a surprise.

That little blue ghost in the upper right corner of the screen shot is Ghostery. I recommend giving it a try. So far, it seems to work best with Firefox 4.

Perfect!_@#$%^&*()-=Passw0rds

One of my New Year’s resolutions was to keep up with Steve Gibson’s Security Now! podcasts. I’ve been doing that, and last week Gibson had a particularly valuable discussion on strong passwords. I’ll embed the part of the podcast of interest, called Password Haystacks.

[audio:http://media.grc.com/Padded-Passwords.mp3|titles=Security Now! with Steve Gibson]

Gibson offers an excellent method for coming up with your own, relatively short, passwords that are suitable for portable devices. He also has copy-and-paste passwords that offer the ultimate in security.