by Jason Prahl | Jan 7, 2012 | Blog, Computer Hardware, Computer Tips
I recently setup the home version of Astaro for my firewall because I use it at work and like how it works and how you configure it. After setting it up my wife’s laptop starting having problems sending email. It was receiving email ok, but couldn’t send. After some poking around the standard Astaro setup allows for SMTP SSL traffic through port 465 but Google uses port 587. To fix it I added a Google SMTP SSL service definition to the Email Messaging service group. The Email Messaging service group was setup during the initial installation as allowed traffic through the firewall. To add the Google SSL port: from the service definitions section locate the Email Messaging group and click the plus to add a new service definition. Name it what you want make the port 587 and you are good to go.
by Jason Prahl | Jan 6, 2012 | Blog, Miscellaneous, Product Reviews
Im always intrigued with the various ways technology can be used in our lives. Especially when it reaches beyond my normal tech zones of computers and reading and video games. I purchased the Jawbone Jambox, a small Bluetooth speaker and was highly impressed by the quality. That prompted me to check out Jawbone’s website to see what else they were doing. I knew they did the Bluetooth headsets and didn’t need one of those. But then I saw the Jawbone Up and became curious.
After reading some initial reviews I wasn’t encouraged because it got a lot of negative feedback. Still the concept and images made me decide to ignore the bad and get one anyways.
I don’t workout at the gym but I do swim, so the idea of using it to track that exercise as well as the standard pedometer also lead me to take the plunge. On top of that I’ve been attempting to understand sleep and sleep patterns and how to get the best nights sleep.
So, how well does it do any of this? The sleep tracking works well and has been very interesting to see. It measures your movements while you sleep to determine how much deep and shallow sleep you get. It has a built in alarm to wake you at the optimal point in sleep, gently vibrating on the wrist instead of a blaring alarm clock. I still wake up groggy most of the time, but have noticed a few nights where it woke me at just the right time and I was ready to go.
The pedometer works well and has you set a goal so you can see how you do each day. It’s hard to get as much movement as you really should but that’s not anything to do with the device.There is a food tracking function but I haven’t used that much. It looks like it just allows you to take a picture of your meals. Not sure if it does more than that.
I haven’t experienced the issues of syncing, battery life and charging that others have reported. These issues have caused Jawbone to quit selling the Up temporarily until they can address them. They even went a step further by offering no questions asked refunds allowing the users to keep the device on top of the refund. Not many companies willing to stand behind their products like that.
As far as the workout mode goes I haven’t used it much to track workouts. The reason is my only workouts are swimming laps and I haven’t been brave enough to wear it while swimming. The band is listed as water-resistant to 3 meters. That should be enough to cover normal lap swimming but I didn’t want to take the chance. 
There are some who have said they use it while swimming and don’t have problems and just as many who have said they used it and then started having problems.
The band is comfortable to wear and I barely notice it’s there most of the time. The battery life seems to be around 6 days or so. It could probably go longer but I haven’t tried wearing it until it ran out.
I wish it had a PC or Android client. Currently its only on iOS for the syncing of data. I have an iPad so I use it on there even though the app is not made for iPad, it’s made for iPhone/iPod so it doesn’t look too good on the iPad. I also haven’t used it in conjunction to the iPhone to utilize the GPS tracking function.
Overall I’m happy with the device and may get up the guts to swim with it. Hopefully it’ll help me keep more active. Just the act of monitoring activity tends to make you want to be more active.
by Jason Prahl | Jan 5, 2012 | Blog, Quotes
Ask not what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive… then go do it.
Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
~ Howard Thurman
by Jason Prahl | Jan 4, 2012 | Blog, Software
I’m not sure how I missed this one. I remember trying Teracopy a couple of years ago but for the life of me I don’t remember why I didn’t keep using it.
Now that I’ve installed it again I wonder how I’ve got along without it all this time! I have my usual utilities I install (Notepad++, Filezilla, Firefox, VNC, etc.) and now I’ll add Teracopy to that list.
Windows file copying is better than it used to be for sure but Teracopy just puts the polish on this highly used task.
I’m always copying files here and there and moving them and Teracopy just does a better job of it. It’s faster, it has error recovery (one of the biggest frustrations with the built in Windows copying), pause and resume and more. Head over to their website and check it out. It’s free though there is a paid version that adds a bit more functionality that I haven’t tried but am very tempted to.
by Jason Prahl | Jan 3, 2012 | Blog, Books/Reading
One of my New Years resolutions is to read more this year. The book I’m currently reading is Einstein, His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson. I haven’t actually finished the book yet. I’m close to finished and do recommend reading this book. I enjoyed Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Job so much I decided to see what else this author had written and found this as well as a biography of Benjamin Franklin.
I enjoy Walter’s writing style and this book has made me think way more than I planned on. When he writes about Einstein’s theories he gets very technical and in depth. Sometimes it’s almost a physics or math text book in the explanations but done so in a much more enjoyable way than I remember physics and math being in school! This is a great biography that gives great detail into the life of Albert Einstein.
by Jason Prahl | Jan 2, 2012 | Blog, Miscellaneous
I’ve been having heating issues at home with the arrival of cold weather. Our thermostat is set on 68 most of the time. I’d notice the temperature would be 66 or 65 and the heater would not be on. Turning off the heat at the thermostat and back on seemed to get it going. After a few weeks of this I decided to replace the thermostat.
This seemed to fix the issue and I praised myself for not having to pay for an expert to come out and do something simple for me. Until it started to not heat again a couple of weeks later.
Still determined not to pay someone big bucks I went to the greatest source of human knowledge and inspiration since God gave us the Bible, the Internet.
The main fan comes on right away, the heating element by the blowers lights up red hot then all three jets come on for about 4 seconds and promptly shut off.
It does this about 4 times and quits.
I noticed some led lights and they indicated low flame.
Googling this gave me some instructions on cleaning the flame sensor, a metal rod that sits in the midst of the flame and looks like this image:
The instructions were to remove this and clean it with sandpaper. Apparently it gets dirty and fails to register the flame is working properly. So far this appears to have fixed the problem.
We’ll see if I once again avoided having to have an expert come out charge me big bucks!
Beware: I am not a heating and air expert just a DIYer with Google. You have been warned.
Here’s a sample link of the advice I used to get mine working:
by Jason Prahl | Jan 1, 2012 | Blog, Computer Hardware
After recently replacing my main router on my home network with a Cisco e4200 and updating it with DD-WRT, my xBox refused to get an IP address from the DHCP server. I could see the IP lease on the router and even after deleting the lease it would generate another lease. But the xBox itself would not use the IP address.
I noticed the default lease lifetime was set to 0 and thought I’d try changing it to something else for the heck of it. I set it to 1440 (which is 24 hours) and voila it worked. All other devices were functioning ok at 0, not sure why the Xbox didn’t like it. Oh well.
by Jason Prahl | Dec 29, 2011 | Blog, Quotes
I know I myself have no special talent; curiosity, obsession, endurance, combined w/self-criticism, have brought me to my ideas.
~ Einstein
by Jason Prahl | Dec 28, 2011 | Blog, Computer Hardware
I recently got AT&T’s U-verse service at home and have been enjoying it so far. The internet has been working much better than my Mediacom service had been doing. My only issue was that I wanted more control over the router and I wanted to setup VPN access into my home network. So, I installed DD-WRT on my Cisco E4200 wireless access point/router then got the AT&T setup in DMZ mode to pass traffic to the E4200.
This setup was working great for almost all aspects except when I would VPN into work or even do a SSL remote desktop session outside my network. After about 5 minutes the remote desktop session would become unresponsive and I’d have to reconnect. This was driving me crazy because I couldn’t work for more than 5 minutes at a time. I did a bit of Googling and found the answer on the following site:
http://www.comprepairgurus.com/att-u-verse2wire-gateway-and-dd-wrt-router-in-dmz-mode/
Basically, the DMZ mode on the AT&T router was causing the DD-WRT to renew it’s lease every 5 to 10 minutes. The DHCP responses were being blocked by the DD-WRT firewall.
Adding the following command to the DD-WRT firewall fixed the problem and I haven’t had a remote desktop timeout since:
iptables -I INPUT -p udp –sport 67 –dport 68 -j ACCEPT
(Click the Administration tab, then Command tab. Enter the above command in the text box and click Save Firewall then reboot.)
Be sure to check out the above website where I got the fix from. They have a lot of tips and fixes for other issues as well.
by Jason Prahl | Sep 27, 2011 | Blog, Microsoft Exchange
Had a user having problems sending an email to an email address. By all appearances the rejection notice seemed to point to an issue of our mail server having problems getting to their mail server.
I told the user to try it again later (this and telling them to reboot fixes most issues). Still more rejections after a couple of days.
So I Googled the error and found the fix on the second link that showed up.
The problem was actually a malformed contact in the user’s Microsoft Outlook contacts.
By copying and pasting the email address into notepad and then back into the contact it was fixed.
The issue stems from the email address that was stored in the contacts had mailto: and some other weird characters even though what was displayed looked just fine.
The other thing I did was to clear the auto address that pops up in the to field when composing a new message to make sure it was getting the address from the newly fixed contact.
