GeekwithEnvy

Blog

Orionid Meteor Shower

by Leave a Comment

Dust from Halley’s Comet will begin to collide with our atmosphere tonight as Earth’s orbit places us in the path of the debris.Meteors in the Night Sky NASA says that the best time to view the Orionid meteor shower is between  11PM to 3AM EST tonight, October 20 through the early morning of the 21st. The meteor shower will be visible from everywhere in the world.

To best view the shower, make sure to get as far away as you can from local light pollution and then find a good spot to sit and relax. Make sure you get into a position where you don’t put strain on your neck while looking up at the night sky.

If your fortunate enough to have clear weather conditions you should be able to see 15-20 meteors every hour. As the debris hits the atmosphere at over 100,000 miles per hour it will begin to burn up, creating a wonderful cosmic display.

You can watch a LIVE feed of the shower form NASA below.

Free desktop streaming application by Ustream

The Mighty Web Browser

by Leave a Comment

BrowserWe are constantly using our web browser, it’s one of the most frequently used applications on any computer, so we need it to be stable and quick. Sometimes though, things start to fail and we get frustrated. When things get ugly we just move on to the next one, perhaps even back to the one we used to use, to see if it has gotten any better. Fortunately, there are plenty of browsers out there to choose from.

I test out a lot of browsers but tend to find myself using either Firefox or Safari the most when I am not reviewing one. I actually had a good run with Internet Explorer for a while, up until I started to experience issues with certain web applications failing. These web application failures only happened when using IE and it was an app that I used on a regular basis.

While looking at web browser statistics, I was quite surprised to see StatCounter showing IE in the lead. I thought for sure that Firefox or Chrome would top the charts but IE is still quite dominant. It’s easy to see how a pre-installed web browser on the world’s most popular OS could easily grab such a large percentage of users and while many may have installed a second browser, they continue to use IE as their default browser. I’m not saying that IE is unusable but it needs a lot of improvement. In fact I prefer Internet Explorer’s UI over most, but the stability issues that plague my applications are just too much.

I basically consider four major factors when choosing a browser, stability, speed, simplicity and security. I like my browser to more or less, stay out of the way. I want the content to be the main focus and I like a clean interface that has only what I need and nothing else. An ideal browser should be fast and reliable, unexpected crashes and failure to load specific, media rich content are major decision factors for me. Security needs to be strong, especially if you use online banking and or shopping.

Here is a recent snapshot of the top 5 browsers from 2011 to 2012.

StatCounter-browser-ww-yearly-2011-2012-bar

Hacker Comex No Longer With Apple

by Leave a Comment

Nicholas Allegra (Comex), has sent out a tweet stating that he is no longer associated with Apple.

If you have ever jailbroken your iPhone or iPad then chances are you have used JailbreakMe,which was created by Allegra. Jailbreaking removes all of the security features that Apple puts in place for devices like the iPhone and iPad. Obviously, Apple was less that thrilled about this jailbreaking process and they continued to release updates to close these security holes.

Comex
Nicholas Allegra (Comex)

Allegra continued to find holes in the source code of Apple products and he did so with ease, this attracted the attention of Apple and they decided to bring him onboard in August of 2011 as an intern. Having a guy like this on your side is extremely valuable and who knows how much better Apple’s security is because of his efforts, but his time with Apple now appears to be over.

Allegra claims that he was let go partly because he didn’t respond to an e-mail from Apple asking him if he would like to extend his employment with them. Allegra later goes on to say that there were other reasons for not continuing to work with Apple.

Hopefully something can be worked out between Comex and Apple, I can’t imagine leaving behind so much talent.

 

How to Tell If You Are Taking Advantage of USB 3.0

by Leave a Comment

USB (Universal Serial bus), how did we live with out it?

gravisGamePad
Gravis GamePad

It’s probably a safe bet to say that most of the people who use USB technology have no idea what the world was like before it existed. Remember PS/2 and RS-232 connectors?It used to be a very different world when it came to how we connected devices to our computers.

Imagine having a different type of connector for each device you connect to your computer, that was reality in the early years of computers. I remember plugging in my Gravis Game Pad into the sound card, yes that’s not a typo, which had a midi/joystick port next to the 3.5mm jacks for microphone and audio out.

Fortunately for all of us, USB which was officially introduced in 1996, standardized the way we connect devices to our computers. We no longer had to worry about which device needed what port and which device would work on what type of hardware, everything became “universal”. The USB standard has undergone a few changes over it’s lifetime with each version slightly more stable and faster than the last.

USB1
USB 1.0

Transfer speeds for USB 1.0 are 1.5 Mbit/s and 12 Mbit/s

USB2
USB 2.0

Transfer speeds for USB 2.0 are 480 Mbit/s

USB 3.0

Transfer speeds for USB 3.0 can be up to 5 Gbit/s

Of course there are many other changes that go along with each USB release besides just transfer speeds. Changes to USB have also included power management and simultaneous two way transfer. The USB connector is really amazing, everything from keyboards to cell phones utilize this amazing interface and USB 3.0 is even better.

Now that we know how much faster USB 3.0 is compared to 2.0 (about 10 times faster) we need to know if were even using it. It may be difficult at first to tell which technology you’re using because USB 3.0 ports are backwards compatible with USB 2.0 and therefore look identical to their 2.0 counterpart . If you haven’t bought a new computer in last year or so you probably don’t have USB 3.0.

In some cases an indication that you may have USB 3.0 will be a blue colored USB port on the computer itself, but the best way to tell is to check your hardware configuration via your preferred OS.

Microsoft Windows

You can check your computers hardware on Windows machines by right clicking “My Computer”, then “Manage” and then “Device Manager”.

Locate USB and you should see “USB 3.0” somewhere in the hardware description.

Mac OSX

Similarly, in OSX you can click the Apple logo in the top left of the finder bar, click “About this Mac”, then “More Info” and then “System Report”.

So is it worth all of the fuss? Absolutely! I have a USB 3.0 external hard drive and data transfer speeds are incredibly fast compared to 2.0 models. Any device using 3.0 should perform significantly better.

Apple to Hold a Special Event

by 1 Comment

Apple has set the date, on October 23rd they will hold a special event for making some major announcements.

Apple Logo

Many of us are expecting to see a mini version of the iPad (iPad mini) which should better align Apple to compete with Amazon and Google. It would make sense to see Apple offer a broad array of tablet solutions to bombard the market with different price points,sizes and features to try and grab prospective tablet owners who may be currently on-the-fence about which tablet to buy.

At this point no one really knows for sure exactly what else Apple has up it’s sleeve. Although it will be nice to confirm, we are hoping to see more than just an iPad mini.

I personally would like to see some updates for Mac desktop solutions like the Mac Mini which could use a bit more love. For now we can only speculate and we will just have to wait and see what comes out of the event, which will be held in San Jose, Calif. on October 23rd.