Collins’ Onovia

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working at setting up a video verification system in the central station for the alarm company I work for. The technology driving this system is amazing. This is the best (if not only) 100% wireless video alarm verification system on the market. The Videofied concept is that it will cut back (if not eliminate) false alarm dispatches from an alarm company, and provide video alarm response where never possible before.

The best part about this solution is that it’s a “Stick and Go” system. It can be preprogrammed and shipped from the monitoring company, installed in the site, and monitoring can begin. The Videofied system can support up to 24 devices, and works as a “hub and spoke” type configuration. The main control panel being the hub, and the devices being the spokes.

Videofied right now is focusing on copper theft. This is a crime that is exploding. Don Horne of Electricity Today, stated that copper theft increased 1,150 percent from 2005 to 2006. Those are some scary numbers.

Conventional CCTV systems are a horrible solution for copper theft because by the time someone sees the video, the copper is gone and the damage has been done. Electrical substations, cellphone towers, and rooftop air conditioners are among the hardest hit targets. These are also the hardest sites to alarm due to the fact that there may not be a conventional phone line or power source. With Videofied, there is no “hardest” part to the equation.

If you’re company is concerned about copper theft, but can’t afford to install a $30,000 CCTV video system that no one will watch anyways, Videofied is for you! Just send me an email

with your contact information and I or someone my company will return your call and answer any questions you might have!

Ever since January 17th, 2007 I have been dealing with random computer shut offs. I’ve replaced several components in my pc trying to diagnose the problem. To this day, it still shuts off 1-2 times a day. Quite annoying for a gamer and a coder. So, I just ordered the following parts to build my new computer. It’s only a small upgrade, but it will do for now o.O

The case
I looked high and low for a “cool” looking case. I also wanted it to live up to it’s look. I decided to go with the Antec Nine Hundred gamer case. Important features for this case are the top control panel, large bay room, and excellent cooling reviews.

The Power Supply
I’ve long been told that this is the single most important piece of hardware in a PC. You don’t want the PSU malfunctioning or dying out on you, so I went with the CORSAIR CMPSU-750TX 750W power supply. A little pricey, but worth it.

The Motherboard
The ASUS P5N-D Motherboard caught my eye early on. It’s a great motherboard with good reviews. Loads of features, and supports all of the latest hardware.

The Video Card
This is the part that I’ve skimped out on with my last two computer builds. Each time, I kicked myself in the ass because of it. This time I went with the EVGA 512-P3-N862-AR GeForce 9600GT. While this GPU is not top of the line, it’s certainly not the bottom.

The Processor
The Intel Core 2 Quad Q9300 Yorkfield 2.5GHz Quad-Core Processor caught my eye right away. This thing must pack quite the punch. And at just under $300 for the retail box, how could you go wrong?!

The Memory
Because I’m going to make the leap of faith to Vista64, I knew right from the start that memory was going to play a huge factor in how my computer performed. So, I went with the OCZ SLI-Ready Edition 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel kit. 4 Gig of quality memory should do the trick!

The Hard Drive(s)
Ah… now to the slowest piece of computer hardware known to mankind. The hard drive is the bottleneck in any PC. Initially I’m going with a single drive setup. The Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD3200AAKS 320GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s will be my initial drive, while the Western Digital Raptor WD360ADFD 36GB 10,000 RPM SATA will be installed soon as only my boot drive.

The Other Stuff
APC SurgeArrest
ASUS 20X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe
ASUS Xonar DX 7.1 Channels PCI Express Interface Sound Card (Note: I realize that the motherboard has an onboard sound chip, but the fact that I’ve always had two sound cards and the amazing reviews for the Xonar really made me get this)
Microsoft Windows Vista 64-Bit Home Premium
ZALMAN CNPS9700 LED 110mm 2 Ball CPU Cooler
OCZ OCZTFRZTC Freeze Extreme Thermal Conductivity Compound

I’m excited for all these parts to get here so I can fire this thing up! I’ll take pictures once everything is in place.

I read an article on the PC World website about how Mozilla’s CEO has his panties all up in a bunch about the fact that Apple pushed their Safari web browser via Apple Software Updater. I have Apple’s annoying automatic updates disabled. However, after I was done reading the PC World article, I enabled the automatic updates to see if this was a “Stealth” install, as the article claims.

After a few minutes, the updater showed up with an iTunes + Quicktime update, and a Safari update. Hrmm. Not to stealth if you ask me. Now, I’m not really sure what Mozilla is afraid of here. I highly doubt that Safari will impact the Mozilla browser market share. Some claim that because the update was pre-selected, it’s “ethically wrong“. My response would be if people weren’t so fucking click happy all the time, then this wouldn’t be a problem. Click Click Click, oh by the way, you just gave me your car. I mean, come on people. READ shit before you click.

After reading all this fuss, I had to check out Safari. (BTW, if there was no crying foul, I wouldn’t have even know about Safari for Windows, thanks!) I’ve used Safari on my friends Mac, but not extensively. I’m actually writing this post in Safari. I’ve played around on all the websites I normally visit, and I have yet to run into one problem. I liked the easy to understand interface, and that the options show me only what I need to see. I also don’t like the fact that its sucking up 202MB of memory with just 4 tabs opened. Even Firefox isn’t that bad. I’ll stick with Firefox myself.

End result: No damage done to Firefox, Safari gets a test run by a bunch of people that never had the opportunity, and everyone remains a click happy, pantie bunching, complainer!

When I’m helping people with computer issues and they ask about their missing documents, I always (even if I know they don’t back things up) ask them where their backups are. The response seems to be the same every time. “I don’t know” or “Where are they normally?”. Backups this day in age are important. Everything we do on computers today is prone to viruses, trojans, user error, and hardware failures.

Backups are typically hard to configure and manage. Swapping tapes, cd’s, dvd’s, etc is annoying, and often never done. Mozy takes all the hassle out of backups. Simply install the software, configure the directories to be backed up, and forget about it! And best of all, a 2GB personal account is FREE!!

Mozy works by backing up your data to their servers. The best part about the Mozy backups is the fact that it’s encrypted. When installing, you can configure Mozy to use their encryption key, or specify your own.

I’m a coder. I can’t tell you how many times I lost files due to my own ignorance. Edit a file, save it, close the program and then forget that you deleted an entire section of the code! No problem with Mozy. Restoring files takes just minutes through their website or the virtual drive that’s added to your system.

If you don’t currently have a backup system in place, you should think about doing so. It may just save your life one day!! Check out Mozy Today!

Just today my Verizon FiOS service was activated. It came with an Actiontec MI424-WR Revision C modem/router combo. Slick look, ok reviews on the net, so I’ll go with it!

The first thing I wanted to get done, was open up some ports for uTorrent, HTTP, and a few others. There’s many resources out there that give you directions on forwarding ports on the MI424-WR Rev. C, including PortForward.com. Finding the directions was a breeze, however figuring out that the directions were wrong wasn’t.

When you are adding a server service port on the router, your source port needs to be set to any, and your destination port needs to be set to single, with the port number typed in next to it. Here’s an example:

I had Verizon install their FiOS service that has been available here in my neighborhood for little over a year now. I talked to a few neighbors that currently have the service, and they had no gripes about it. I’m interested in seeing the difference in speed. So, here’s the results:

Comcast Speed Test:

Verizon FiOS Speed Test:

Looking at those results, I’d say that Verizon is definitely the way to go.

I’d also like to mention that the Tech that came to install the system was professional, and prompt. He did his thing, asked if we had any questions, and that was it. in all, it took about 1 1/2 hours to install the system. Mind you we already had all the in-house wiring required.