Mike Jandreau

Writer.Musician. MovieSnob. Web Guy.

I finally gave in, and purchased a new computer yesterday. Namely, the one I’ve had my eye on for the last few weeks. I splurged, and bought it yesterday, from CompUSA. Smartly, over the border, to save on tax. Specs: Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 quad-core processor, dual 320 GB hard drives, 3 GB RAM (PC5300), 16x LightScribe DVD drive, Vista Ultimate (with Media Center), built in wireless networking, wireless keyboard and mouse. I also upgraded the video card, to support dual DVI. I, easily, let the sales rep talk me into the top of the line video card. (GeForce 8880) As we know, I can’t live without dual monitors these days.

My old PC will now live in the living room (P4 single core, 3GB PC3200, 1.6TB storage) as a music share. Though I learned a valuable lesson, when you read online that “displaying a PC on a TV (even an HDTV)” that it’ll look horrible, they’re not kidding. At 800×600, the screen’s barely readable, via DVI. Luckily once iTunes is started, the TV will be shut off, and iTunes will do its thing.

In migrating from my old XP box, to the new Vista box, there’s a few things that are obviously different. I had the intention of installing XP over Vista when I got the machine home. However, I think if I never give Vista a chance, I’ll never get used to it. Sure, it’s got some quirks that you have to adjust to, but so did XP when it came out. Here’s how I migrated, which may help you:

My migration had two major necessities, 1) to get all the extra junk off my old machine (programs/files), 2) get that extra junk onto the new machine (programs/files)

What I did was the following: as I uninstalled a program from the old PC, I installed it on the new PC, one by one. The good part of this was that the new machine was much faster than the old, so the processes finished about the same time. Perfect. Some important things to remember, before uninstalling an application, that may slip your mind:

• If your application requires user settings, see if there’s an option to back up those settings. (ie e-mail applications, FTP clients, browser favorites)

• If your application needs to be downloaded from the internet, install it before you uninstall the old one, in case you need a serial number

The biggest, and most helpful thing I found in my migration, was an application called MozBackup. What MozBackup does is simple, it takes all your settings from both Firefox and Thunderbird, and dumps them to a file. You then e-mail that file (or copy it over) to the new computer, and install it. It captures everything! Though it warns you that some extensions might not work, I didn’t have any issues. Firefox captured: bookmarks, links, extensions, cookies, cache, and display settings. Thunderbird captured: all my e-mail settings (43 e-mail accounts settings), all my saved/archived messages, and e-mail signatures. Amazing. If you have to move from one PC to another, and use Firefox/Thunderbird, definitely download MozBackup. It’s free, and worth every penny.

I’ve still got more work tonight to do, installing video processing applications, mostly. One note to make: TivoToGo does not work with Vista. There’s supposedly some hacks you can do, to make it work. Luckily there’s a VIIV option available, that works with Media Center, that I downloaded, and it worked. However, if you don’t have Media Center on your Vista PC, you can easily still get to your Tivo:

Open up trusty Firefox (or IE, if you’re dumb), and type in: https://<your tivos ip address>/nowplaying/index.html (if you don’t know your Tivo’s IP address, you can get it from the settings on your Tivo itself)
Username: tivo
Password: your media access key (gotten/set at Tivo.com in your account)

This will allow you to download files directly to your PC from your Tivo(s). I’ve found, honestly, that the download speeds going direct from Tivo-PC are faster than if you use Tivo’s software. I haven’t found a way to get files to the Tivo just yet. (Sidenote: if you have video files on your PC that you want to watch on your Tivo, you can easily convert them using Videora Tivo Converter to something Tivo can understand. Though you’ll need to upgrade your TivoToGo software to the Plus version. I think I paid $30 or so, and is was worth it. Hopefully Tivo fixes the Vista issues, so things work as expected.

The most important thing to remember when you’re moving from one PC to another- be sure to copy all the data you want to save, before deleting it. If that means copying it to more than one location, to ensure you’ve got it, do it. I’d rather have two copies, than zero copies.

Next project after software installations are finished: ripping every CD we own to the “old” computer, and hooking it up the audio system. That’s a project in itself.

I’m working from home today, for the first time. When I used to work from home at my last job, I could just use my computer here, connect to the VPN, and have access to everything I needed.

The new company, however, does things a little differently, and I’ve got a “work laptop”, which is fine. After starting work a few short minutes ago, I realized that I hated having two separate keyboards and mice. So I searched for an article I read on Lifehacker a few days ago, for details on Synergy.

Synergy allows you to share a keyboard and mouse across multiple computers on the same network. That means my nice keyboard and mouse for my “home” computer can zip right across mid-air, onto the laptop, and works just like it was connected to it directly.

I was a bit worried at first, seeing that the work laptop’s on the VPN, I didn’t know if Synergy would recognize it as being “on the same network”. But it did, and I had it up and running within a matter of minutes. If you’ve got the need to share a keyboard and mouse across multiple computers, Synergy is definitely the way to go. And the best part, it’s free.

Synergy’s been added to my “list of applications I can’t live without”, which I’ll post sometime later on.

Ever since I started using a dual monitor set up at home (two 19″ Samsung LCD monitors), I can’t live without two monitors. When I started my new job here, they gave me a fairly beat up old laptop. Which is fine, I can cope with 15″ to look at. The bad news was the max resolution is 1024×768, which I stopped using a number of years ago.

So I brought in my own 17″ LCD to use in conjunction with Windows XP’s fancy “extend my desktop” feature. Combined with Realtime Software’s Ultramon, makes for an excellent workspace (even at different resolutions.)

However, I found something that comes in handy as well. If you’re off to a meeting, and can only bring your laptop (and not the second monitor), don’t use the “disable secondary monitor” option in Ultramon. What I’ve started doing, is leaving it enabled while I’m off with the laptop. Why? Easily, to cause less clutter.

Windows XP still thinks you’ve got a second monitor attached, as does Ultramon. With some handy keyboard shortcuts (I’ve got mine set up as Control + > and Control + < to move windows to the other monitor), you can still dump programs you’re not using to the other “monitor”, even though it’s not connected. This allows you to easily move things you don’t need in front of you, to clear up your one (less than optimal resolution) monitor. Handy little trick, if you’re stuck with just a laptop.

I’ve been hard at work the last few nights working on various projects:

•  Did some more design changes to the Lace Reader website last night. Added new menu items, a “send a quote card” section, a reviews section, and a section for press & media to get downloadable materials.
• Did more work on the pagination script for the “all about Salem” website that Christine and I are working on.
• Trying to creatively come up with some ideas to improve the usability of MovieSnobs to increase return users, and loyalty.   Right now, I don’t think just having the movie reviews is cutting it.
• Renewed the domain name topfivealbums.com last night.   Am going to try to rethink the purpose of it, and redesign it accordingly.   While it’s fun to have what it is now, no one seems to be interested in it, and haven’t submitted anything in a while.   I’m surprised it doesn’t get more traffic, if you Google the phrase “top five albums”, we’re the first result.   You’d think people might look for that sort of stuff.

That’s about all I’ve got going on, for right now.   That’s my update.

Over the weekend/holiday, I did quite a bit of design work, and learned a few new things, as well.

I started off on Friday night, by finishing the install of the CMS software, for one of my design clients. I’m not sure exactly what his intent is for the site, but the CMS software I installed is a social networking application (similar to MySpace, Facebook, etc). Once he gets back in town we’ll discuss what he’s looking to do with the site, and how much resources he’s looking to throw at it, to make it what he wants.

My office was closed yesterday, due to July 4th, so I spent the majority of the day, working with Christine working on one of our new projects. We’re building a site about Salem Massachusetts (where we live). Sort of an informational site for tourists. Where to go, where to eat, what tours to take, how much money to anticipate spending, etc. We figured with all the tourism that happens around our house from May through November, it would be helpful to have a site where people can get information about the area. It hasn’t launched yet, but we spent a lot of time yesterday working on it. I spent my day re-writing the code for the listings page, and managed to work in some clauses into my queries that will allow sortable tables (something I previously didn’t know how to do), so I’m psyched about that. I’ll post a link to the site, once it’s complete, and will add it to my Design Portfolio (up top there).

That’s all I’ve got for now. That, and be sure you watch Burn Notice tonight at 10PM. The pilot was just okay, but I think the show’s going to get a lot better in time.