Relative Known Sizes of Objects in the Universe

http://htwins.net/scale2/

The Universe is big and yet also very small. Remember, the Universe is not all about what is out there in outer space. The Universe is everything in existence.

Use Your Computer From Anywhere: A Guide to Remote Controlling Your PC

Instead of re-inventing the wheel, I have decided to post a link to this very helpful article.

http://lifehacker.com/5902654/use-your-home-computer-from-anywhere-a-comprehensive-guide-to-remote-controlling-your-pc

http://lifehacker.com/five-best-remote-desktop-tools-1508597379

You should keep a few things in mind when accessing your computer from the Internet. Firstly, every click you click and every text you type will have a slight and noticeable delay. Basically, with remote access, you send the keyboard typing and mouse movement to the remote computer and that computer sends back the up-to-date video of its screen measured in resolution and frame per second. The more resolution, the larger and sharper is the screen. The higher the frame rate, the smoother is the motion of any changes made on the screen. All remote access solutions use some sort of data compression to make the videos being stream back towards you smaller in file size per frame. Therefore, the smoothness in motion and the sharpness of the graphics of the remote computer's screen depend on the processing speed of both the remote computer and the local machine that compress and decompress this video stream. On top of that, there is also the encryption and decryption of the video stream as well. After all, this data that goes back and forth traverses the Internet so in theory anyone whose computers the data goes through can intercept the data. So you may not want these unauthorized people to see the screen of the remote computer and any keystrokes from you that may contain confidential information.

While all remote access technology uses some sort of compression to make the experience smoother, not all of them use encryption. Therefore, if you have confidential data being sent back and forth between your local machine and the remote machine, please make sure that there is encryption involved.

Moreover, just because there is encryption, it does not mean that the encryption is strong enough. Any unauthorized person who is skilled enough will eventually crack the encryption. If your remote access method uses encryption methods like DES, then it is not strong enough for ultra-confidential data. At a minimum, it should be AES 256bit.

If you do not know what sort of encryption your remote access technology uses, then you can use your own encryption method and have the remote access technology run inside your encryption. Therefore, you may actually have a case of double encryption. To do this, you can set up a VPN tunnel between your local computer and the remote computer. You can use the VPN solutions that are built into the operating system or use a third part solution.

A simple VPN using PPTP should be sufficient. Although not as secure as the others, PPTP is fast and is found in all major operating systems from Windows XP to Windows 8. Mac OSX also supports PPTP out-of-the-box. Setting up VPN using PPTP is also easy.

However, if you have confidential data going between the two machines, you should get at least L2TP or IPSec. These are also built into most major operating systems but you may want to have a dedicated box that does the encryption outside the computers. These boxes can also be your network routers. They are not expensive. Having a $200 router that is placed in the network of the remote computer should work fine. You don't need to have another of this router in the network of the local network.      

Enable the F8 key for booting into Safe Mode in Windows 8

First open Command Prompt as Administrator. Then key in.

bcdedit /set {default} bootmenupolicy legacy

This will bring back the Windows 7 screen when you tap F8 during boot including the option to go into Safe Mode. Safe Mode in invaluable when doing any malware removal.

To put it back to the default Windows 8 boot screen (not sure why you want to do that given the usefulness of the older menu option), key in this command in the command line .

bcdedit /set {default} bootmenupolicy standard

Useful Tech Resources

Virtualization

http://www.vladan.fr

Google Apps for Business

In my opinion, Google is the best email host at the moment. If your email address is at GMAIL.COM, then you have Google hosting the email for this account. Moreover, if you want to get an email account with a custom domain like yourcompany.com and want Google to host the email for this domain, then you need to pay Google some money for its Google Apps for Business. Remember, Google only hosts the email service for the domain, not the domain name itself and its DNS service. These two services can be hosted by Google as well if you want, but not necessary a requirement for Google to host the email aspect of the domain.

Google Apps for Business has 2 plans: One with Vault and one without Vault.

The one without Vault is $5 per email address per month with prorate or $50/year. With Vault, add an extra $5 to each account per month. If you choose Apps without Vault, there is no retention of emails that are deleted and the Trash is emptied. By contrast, with Vault, the deleted emails are retained forever as long as you continue to pay Google the extra $5 per account per month to use it. The emails in Vault does not count against the quota in the inbox. Google will also help you with any ediscovery process if required by the courts, certifying that these deleted emails' timestamps and chronology have not been modified. In short, Vault is industry PCI compliant. 

Customers of legacy Postini email retention service will be transitioned starting 2014 to Vault without paying the extra $5. As to how long this generous offer will be, it is unknown. This includes the limited time Postini services such as those only retain the email for 3 months for example. With Vault, the limited retention period is expanded indefinitely. Again, Google may not offer this generous entitlement for grandfathered accounts for long.

Each account gets 30GB of storage that is shared between the various services such as mail, Picassa, Docs, and so forth. If you need more storage, you can buy it. Vault storage is indefinite and is not part of the initial 30GB quota.

If you have multiple accounts (multiple email addresses) for the domain with Vault, each account can have its own Vault license. This means for certain accounts that are more critical, you can assign a Vault license to it to enjoy the retention benefit. For the non-critical account within the same domain, you can use it without Vault. Vault licenses are transferable. Once transferred, the retained email associated with that Vault license is deleted forever. 

If you miss a payment for the month, there is a 30-day grace period where all functions still work. For the next 30 days, the whole domain or any specific unpaid accounts are put on suspension without deletion. After 30 days of suspension, this account or domain will be deleted forever. The point is make sure you pay Google on a timely basis. It goes without saying. It's a business, not a charity.   

Sometimes Having Mercy Pays Off

On my desk, I left a morsel of uneaten food the other day over night. In the morning, there was a line of ants going at it. I could not trace the path back to their nest.

I removed the food bit and smote the ants. Three days later, the ants, although not in so many a number, still were going at the non-existing food. It dawned on me that ants are blind. They cannot see the food or lack there of, but can only follow their chemical trail to the food. So after killing a bunch of them, I spared a few. After a day, there were no more ants. Evidently, the un-killed ants came back to their nest and told the rest that there is no food at the end this particular trail as opposed to no news to colony so the colony keeps on sending their troops to retrieve the food .

USB Thumb Drives

If you are a computer user, even moderately, chances are either you own at least one or have heard about “flash drives”. They are also knows an thumb drives or USB sticks. The latter attests to the method in which these marvelous devices are connected to the computers. In fact, thumb drives are also used to provide external and portable storage to devices that are not traditionally considered computers: things like modern digital TVs, game consoles, and network-connected storage devices called NAS.

Just what are these thumb drives and why are they called thumb drives? Well, the answer is pretty obvious when you see one or hold it in your hand. They are the current superstars of simple and convenient portable storage that you can carry with you in your pockets or purses. They even can be worn like pendants or small enough to hang on your keychains. These are great tech gifts because of their low cost, usefulness, universal compatibility, and can be molded into all kinds of interesting novelty shapes like a human thumb. Some are so small that they virtually disappear into the USB slot. As such, these tiny drives are great for the tablets that have a full-size USB port. 

To use it, you would simply plug one of these drives into the USB port of your computer. After the computer has recognized the drive and as in a Windows PC machine, assigns it a drive letter, it is ready for use.The process only takes a few seconds. No need to install any special hardware because all computers these days have at least one USB port. All widely used computer types like the Macs and PCs recognize these drives automatically. Also, the USB connector on the computer provides the power to the these drives as well. Sometimes you would see a light that comes on when these drives are properly connected to the computer. On a Mac, the thumbdrive would appear as a white-colored icon on the desktop. More recent versions of the Mac system does not display the icons of these drives on the desktop by default. However, you can easily configure your Mac to do so quite easily.

So what are these thumb drives used for? They are used for two primary purposes. First as external portable storage that you can use to keep second copies of important data files as backups in case the primary files are lost. As said, once the computer has recognized the drive and presented it with an icon or drive letter, it's a simple matter of copy and paste the files you want to backup.

The second use of these thumb drives is to transport files from one computer to another, even between Macs and PCs. People often use the local network or the Internet to send files to themselves or others, but sometimes either the network is not available or the files are simply too large to be transmitted this way. Therefore, people would just dump these files onto their thumb drives and re-connect them to the other machine and drag the files out of the drives. It was the old “sneaker net” with those floppy disks except this time, the amount of data that can be transferred is much bigger and the read and write speed from the drives is much faster.

Just how much data can one of these drives contain? The cost of these drives is proportional to their capacity and to a lesser extend their data transfer speed. When these drives first came out 15 years ago, their capacities were 256MB (megabytes) and 512MB. This was a marvel in technology in those days considered floppies were still popular at that time because a typical floppy can store a meager 1.44MB of data! Also, a floppy disk needs a floppy drive to work. These days, you can buy a 8GB (gigabyte) thumb drive for around $10. Capacity wise, they come in other flavors of 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB and 128GB. There are even higher capacities, but their cost is prohibitive. Incidentally, 1GB is 1000MB. So a 16GB thumb drive has the storage capacity of around 11,000 floppies!

The data transfer speed in and out of these thumb drives depends on the maximum theoretical speed of the USB port and the quality of the storage chip inside the thumb drive. Some of these chips can move data faster than other lower quality chips, but none of them can transfer faster than the theoretical maximum speed of the USB connector on the computer. There are 3 versions of USB. Version 1 runs at 10mbps (megabit per second). Version 2 (the current standard in most computers) runs at 480 mbps. The latest USB3 runs at a whopping 4.8 gbps, ten times faster than USB2. USB3 ports on the computer are backward compatible so you don’t have to throw away all those USB2 thumb drives. If you get a USB3 thumb drive anyway, you should get one that has the faster chip to take advantage of the USB3 port speed. You can get a so-called SSD-on-a-stick USB3 thumb drive and experience the amazing speed boost when used on a USB3 ports . Incidentally, USB3 thumb drives will work with USB2 ports on the computer. The U in USB stands for "universal" for a reason.

So when presented with a myriad array of thumb drives at the store, how to pick the right thumb drive? Fortunately, the technology of thumb drives have matured enough that even the cheaper models mostly work just as well as the more expensive ones. I have always picked the cheapest thumb drives and so far no problem with any of them. However, there are other little things you should keep in mind. There are thumb drives that for some reason have their casing wide enough that when plugged into a USB port on the computer, its girth prevents the insertion of another USB plug next to it. You should avoid buying these thumb drives. On the left are drives with a slender casing and one that does not. Other than the slender frame of the thumb drive, I also recommend that you buy a drive that has an indicator light on it. The flickering of this light tells you that there is data going through the drive. Therefore, do not yank it off the computer when it is doing the data transfer.

One thing that drives me crazy with some drives. Some of them contain pre-existing “helper” programs. Once plugged into to the computer, these programs launch themselves and offer a variety of features like pre-made folders for music and pictures. Some even offer encryption for the data stored on the drives. The problem with these programs is if you do not have user administrative rights to the computer that you plug the drives into, you cannot use these programs, and therefore, you have no access to the data that were successfully copied over from the previous computer where you did have admin rights. Unless you need these specific features, do not buy drives that include them. Basically you just want to use a dumb drive that all it does is offer external portable storage. For some of these drives with pre-loaded programs, you can completely remove them. However, I have encountered drives where these programs cannot be removed. So it’s best simply to avoid all of them just in case.

If you want restricted access for the data stored on these thumb drives, there are better and more standardized ways to do so. One would be creating password-protected folders with free programs like 7zip. To unzip such a folder does not require administrator privileges. Some thumb drives literally have a thumb scanner on its encasing. A little search on the Web may yield such a drive that has all of its finger scanning and authentication executed from within the drive, making running of a program on the target computer to offer access to the drive unnecessary.

Lastly, not all thumb drives come with the USB connector. A few drives come with firewire or eSATA connectors. Firewire and eSATA thumb drives obviously require a firewire and eSATA ports on the computer to work, respectively. While these non-USB thumb drives offer faster speeds, the extra speeds do not warrant your buying them because not all computers have firewire or eSATA ports. Given the whole point of having a thumb drive is portability, it defeats the purpose. Buying USB3 thumb drives make more sense because they can be used with any of the ubiquitous USB ports on the computers.  

I leave you with one of my favorite novelty USB drives. Actually, this is technically not a drive because they do not have any storage capacity but given that the USB port also provides power to the "drive", use your imagination as to what the dog will do when plugged into a powered USB port.