My DigitalZone

Fingerprint Reader …. Neat but …..
My Toshiba Satellite U205 has a fingerprint reader. It’s kinda neat when it functions properly but can be a pain when it doesn’t recognize your fingerprint. I found out that it can be a REAL pain when the fingerprint reader malfunctions and you have some important files in “My Safe.” When you register your fingerprints, the software asks you to create a backup password in case of fingerprint reader malfunction, so the computer not recognizing your fingerprint is not a disaster. As long as you remember the backup password, there is a way out.

Reinstalling the software: Protector Suite QL
If the problem persists, you can remove and reinstall the fingerprint reading software, Protector Suite QL. The reinstallation of the software should not affect the files inside.

Crash and Safe Mode Operation
The real disaster occurred when my laptop crashed and could only be booted to a safe mode. I learned a hard way that the fingerprint reader didn’t work in a safe mode. Of course, I couldn’t find my backup password. I got locked out of My Safe. I have PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) installed on my laptop, so all my very important files were encrypted with PGP and NOT stored in “My Safe.” But I had a few personal files there. I wanted to retrieve them but couldn’t find a way to do so. If you search on the internet for “My Safe fingerprint problem,” you’ll see there are other people who lost the contents of My Safe.

As I restored the factory default setting on my laptop, I lost contents of My Safe. I didn’t lose any other personal data as I was able to move all my personal files, including pgp-encrypted files, to an external hard drive.

So, the moral of the story is “DO NOT USE MY SAFE.”

Don’t get me wrong. Other than the mishap I described here, I’m very happy with my Toshiba.

Benefits of external hard drives are numerous. Sure, you can use an USB flash drive to store a lot of stuff but probably it’s not enough for all of your music and video files. With an ever-increasing capacity of hard drives of a desktop PC or a laptop, you DO NEED to have an external drive for archiving or backup purposes. It’s also useful when you want to move your data files, whether they are documents, music, photos, or videos, between two computers.

As you can see in this post, my Toshiba laptop had a serious problem recently possibly because of some viruses, and I needed to restore the factory default, which meant I was gonna lose everything I’d put on my laptop. As my laptop refused to operate in a normal mode, I booted it into a safe mode and moved all my data files to an external HD (Western Digital My Book, 500GB). So, external drives come in handy in an emergency situation. I have two external drives, both from Western Digital. One is My Book, 500GB, and the other is Passport (250GB, shown in the above).

Let’s summarize benefits of external hard drives.
Benefits of External Hard Drives

1. Archiving
   If you computer is old and you are running out of a disk space, you can archive some files on an external drive. Archiving the data on an external HD will have an added benefit of making your computer running more smoothly if your computer is sluggish because of not enough disk space on a HD.
2. Backup
   Your family photos on your desktop/laptop computer can vanish, if your computer crashes. You need to back up all of your important files either by burning the data on CDs/DVDs or storing them on an external HD.
3. Security
   Data stored on an external HD are safe from hackers if you disconnect the external HD from your computer after backing up/archiving the data. I do my taxes on my computer but my tax files are stored on an external HD because all my computers are up and running and on the internet 24/7.
4. Portability
   You can move a large amount of data from one computer to another. These days, the transfer speed is so fast, so it’s much more easy to transfer data via an external HD.
5. Affordability
   External hard drives are becoming cheap by the day, so it is easy to take advantage of added storage capacity.

Nothing is perfect, so there are some disadvantages for external hard drives, too.
Drawbacks of external hard drives

1. Theft
   As they are portable, it is easy to get stolen. If you store important data on it, the loss is very painful. You also need to protect your personally important data (i.e., your financial record) by encrypting the data.
2. Damage to the device
   External drives can break mechanically. You may drop the drive or spill soda on it.

Let’s take a look at the prices of drives from online stores.

	Western Digital 1TB My Book Mac Edition USB 2.0 External Hard Drive $123.01 from BUY.COM
	Western Digital My Book Essential 1TB External USB 20 Hard Drive $119.99 at Best Buy.com

Now you can see I like Western Digital. All my hard drives I purchased in the past 15 years or so are from Western Digital and none failed. I highly recommended them.

Let’s go over to eBay and see what they got over there.

US $12.50 (3 Bids) End Date: Monday May-21-2012 20:30:09 PDT Bid now | Add to watch list

US $20.50 (3 Bids) End Date: Monday May-21-2012 19:45:22 PDT Bid now | Add to watch list

US $34.00 (3 Bids) End Date: Monday May-21-2012 19:00:53 PDT Bid now | Add to watch list

US $26.00 (16 Bids) End Date: Monday May-21-2012 19:00:37 PDT Bid now | Add to watch list

US $51.00 (5 Bids) End Date: Monday May-21-2012 18:15:35 PDT Bid now | Add to watch list

How can I send and receive a fax on the internet? That was the question I needed to answer when I ditched my landline phone. I don’t use faxes too often but I have a small personal fax machine, which has become a big paper weight.

Nowadays most things can be done email or sending a scanned document by email. Still, there are some people/companies that prefer faxed documents. So, I went searching for some info.

Can I Send a Fax via My Cell Phone?
It looks like it’s difficult. Even though I remember my old old Sprint cell phone, my very first cell phone, had some documentation about connecting the cell phone to a fax machine, at this time and at least in the U.S., it’s not an option unless you are using a wireless carrier that supports GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) and have a GSM cell phone. AT&T and T-Mobile use the GSM system while Sprint and Verizon use CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access). I am a satisfied Verizon Wireless customer because of their network quality, so I’m not going to drop Verizon just to be able to send a few faxes a year.

howstuffworks.com has an interesting article about using a cell phone camera to take a pic of a document but it just sounds too tedious.

Internet Fax via Email
There are many internet fax services on the internet now. Basically, what you do is to send an email with an attachment to the fax service provider and they will convert the attachment so that they can send the document to a regular fax machine. You can also receive a fax through the internet fax site. Here are some major internet fax services.

• eFax
  eFax Plus costs $16.95 (USD) per month, with a one-time $10.00 (USD) fee to activate your number. You get 130 pages of incoming faxes free each month. Outgoing faxes cost $0.10 (USD) a page to numbers in the U.S. Incoming faxes cost $0.15 (USD) a page.
• myfax.com
  $10/month or 30 day trial.
• faxzero.com
  Offers free fax. Max 3 pages per document and max 2 faxes per day for free. Their premium service costs $1.99 per fax, max 15 pages.
• MetroFax
  Monthly Fee — $12.95 per line
  Activation — $9.95
  Toll Free — $2 extra per month per line
  Included Pages — 1000 inbound/outbound (combined)
  Per-Page –3¢ after 1000 pages
• FaxAway
  * There are no set-up fees for a Faxaway account.
  * You may allow as many as 250 email users access to your Faxaway account at no additional charge.
  * There is a small account maintenance charge of $1 monthly.
  * Those enrolling with a credit card are charged a fixed deposit of US $10.00 upon activation.
  * Sign-up using a check or money order for a minimum of $100.00.

Today was a big day at Amazon.com. As I posted a couple of days ago, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, held a press event today, announcing the new version of Kindle, Kindle DX. It has a 9.7” 1200×824 pixel screen, which is about twice as large as the standard Kindle. There are some improvements over the standard one but few are technical. It now has a built-in PDF reader so the user can carry some personal and professional documents. It can store 3,500 books compared with 1,500 in the standard version.

The two notable aspects of today’s press release are Kindle’s partnerships with educational institutions and the traditional print media. Students of five universities will have an option to have textbooks in Kindle. It’s a novel idea but I’m not sure how practical it can be for students and teachers.

Its another partnership is with the print media. During its trial period, users can get electric delivery of three major newspapers: The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. That’s interesting.

See, I like to try new things, so I subscribed to an audiobook/magazine service for a while at Audible.com. So, naturally I’m starting to like what Kindle offers. Even though the price of Kindle DX is rather steep ($489), Kindle book prices are much lower than paper book prices. For example, a new Kindle book price is $9.99 while the price of hard copy versions ranges between $24 and $26. What’s more, the delivery of a book is instantaneous. They already have a good selection of newspapers and weekly magazines for Kindle at very affordable prices.

If you travel a lot and like to read, Kindle DX is very convenient. If you read about 3 books in a month, you can recoup the cost of your initial investment within a year because of cheaper Kindle book prices.

One of my coworkers just recently bought Kindle 2 and she was not happy today. She thinks Amazon.com should offer her a discount toward a purchase of Kindle DX. But she can sell her (almost new) Kindle 2 at eBay. So, I took a look at what eBay has at the moment.

Here’s eBay’s offerings.

US $202.50 (7 Bids) End Date: Tuesday May-22-2012 12:08:17 PDT Bid now | Add to watch list

US $222.50 (10 Bids) End Date: Sunday May-27-2012 18:39:22 PDT Bid now | Add to watch list

US $222.00 (12 Bids) End Date: Wednesday May-23-2012 11:35:12 PDT Bid now | Add to watch list

US $212.50 (2 Bids) End Date: Tuesday May-22-2012 21:43:52 PDT Bid now | Add to watch list

From time to time, I see web sites that do not have directory listing disabled. This happens on an Apache server that is not configured properly. If the webmaster create a directory and does not place an index.html (or index.php) file, the contents of the directory are there for everyone to see.

Not allowing the visitors see the directory listing does not make a website secure per se. But visitors can go up and down the directory trees if the listing is not disabled. In order to disable a directory listing of a particular directory and all of its subdirectories, you can just place a file called .htaccess with the following line on it.

Options -Indexes

As long as a subdirectory does not have its own .htaccess file that allow directory listing, it works.