https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl? http://www.eblah.com en https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1391012598/ https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1391012598/#num1
A byte can be thought of (typically) as a single character.  This is the "base" unit for comparison.

1000 bytes is a kilobyte.  That's roughly the length of a joke or very short story.

1000 kilobytes is a megabyte.  You can think of that as a small novel, or if you're old enough to remember, about the capacity of a 3.5" floppy disk.

1000 megabytes is a gigabyte.  That's the size of a movie from Netflix.

1000 gigabytes is a terabyte.  That's a thousand movies!  Ten terabytes could hold the entire U.S. Library of Congress.

1000 terabytes is a petabyte.  That could hold over 13 years of HD video.  50 of these would hold the entire written works of mankind from the beginning of recorded history, in all languages!

1000 petabytes is an exabyte.  It's hard to imagine that much information, but it's believed that 5 of these could hold all the words ever spoken by human beings.

1000 exabytes is one Zettabyte.  According to the story I watched last night, this is how much surveillance data the NSA supposedly collected last year.

Seriously?  I knew they gathered a lot of information, but that is stunning!  Also, the congressional committee for intelligence said this was not an invasion of privacy, since nobody knew they were being surveilled, and thus did not complain.

I notice some sources say the NSA data centers can hold one Yottabyte.  That's 1000 zettabytes, and about the size of the entire internet.  Over a high speed connection, it would take about 11 trillion years to download that much information.  
]]> Wed, 29 Jan 2014 16:23:18 Diddly https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1375206339/ https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1375206339/#num1 disloyal, but the only way to earn my dollars is by producing something I like or want or need.

In this post I want to discuss a particularly polarizing topic.  iOS vs Android.  These are the two gorillas in the smartphone and tablet market space.  As soon as someone identifies what type of device they have, they are immediately dismissed as having a bias towards their device.  Well, I have both Android tablets and Apple tablets.  Yes, plural, for both.

A common pitfall in any discussion is to play the "spec" war.  Every month there's a new better device with better specifications announced.  Somehow the mere announcement invalidates any argument against that particular line, so I'm throwing specs out the window.  They're a red herring.  More storage / resolution / ram / Ghz / mWh doesn't make one device better than another, unless you specifically need that attribute to be happy.  In which case, this post isn't for you.

I'm going to talk about what a mobile device needs to make me happy, beyond just being useful.  It's only 2 things, and only one vendor (to my limited experience) gets them both right.  I welcome counter-arguments on these points.

1) Battery Life
I like my mobile devices to be able to hold a charge for a long time.  Ideally, I'd like to measure that in weeks, but will settle for days.  Definitely not hours.  If I can't put your device to sleep and a week later pick it up and use it, you lose.  Note that I specify "sleep", not "power off".  Mobile devices need to be instantly ready to use, not two minutes after it boots.

2) Software shouldn't dictate model
This is essentially an argument against "fragmentation".  If I buy a modern device, I want to know I can run anything from the software store on that device.  The device is useless without software, and it just sucks to discover incompatibilities with something you really wanted to use.

2b) Jailbreaking / Rooting does not excuse 2)
Not all devices. from either line, can be Jailbroken or Rooted.  Even if it can be hacked in such a manner, it means sacrificing the continued support from the manufacturer.  And even then, it still doesn't guarantee you'll be able to run the desired software.

Fragmentation was actually the motivation for this post.  I found this excellent analysis of Android fragmentation and discovered it was even worse than I thought.  http://opensignal.com/reports/fragmentation-2013/

In the following images, taken from that article, you can see just how many different makes and models of android devices there are in use today.  In fact, there are more than 11,000.  Every piece of software in the Google store runs on some subset of those devices.  The odds of a device you purchased being able to run a given app decreases with every segmentation between your device, and the device is was written for.  As you can see, there's a lot of divisions.

Even if you take the hardware out of the equation and just look at the operating system version, there is still a lot more incompatibility with Android.  The pie chart shows the predominance of different versions in the wild.

Because of these two factors, I currently choose iOS as my mobile platform of choice.  This could change if something comes along and does a better job with either of my two points while still being useful.]]> Tue, 30 Jul 2013 17:45:39 Diddly https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1375130651/ https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1375130651/#num1
The Server
On your linux host, install the excellent X11RDP-o-Matic script.  http://scarygliders.net/2013/07/25/x11rdp-o-matic-version-3-now-released/  Note, this only works on Debian based linux, like Ubuntu.

I literally used these three steps:
1. sudo apt-get install git;
2. cd ~ && git clone https://github.com/scarygliders/X11RDP-o-Matic.git && cd X11RDP-o-Matic;
3. sudo ./X11rdp-o-matic.sh –justdoit && ./RDPsesconfig.sh;

Now I can log into my linux work PC using Microsoft's Remote Desktop Protocol.

I'm going to assume you already have an SSH server on your LAN that you can access from the internet for the purposes of tunnelling.  If not, a Google search can help you: https://www.google.ca/search?q=setting+up+an+ssh+tunnel

The Client
On your Chromebook, install the Ericom AccessToGo software.  It's free in the web store.

Hit Ctrl+Alt+T to get the Chrosh shell.  Then enter ssh to get the secure shell client.  Once there, enter the appropriate parameters:
ssh> forward 8000:x.x.x.x:3389
ssh> host y.y.y.y
ssh> user your-ssh-username
ssh> connect

where x.x.x.x is the ip-address or name of your host PC on your LAN, and y.y.y.y is the ip-address or name of your ssh server on the internet.

Finally, launch the AccessToGo app.  Enter localhost:8000 as your host, and the username and password to log into your linux desktop.  That's it!]]> Mon, 29 Jul 2013 20:44:11 Diddly https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1356122548/ https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1356122548/#num1 Fri, 21 Dec 2012 20:42:28 Hawkeye https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1355932880/ https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1355932880/#num1 Wed, 19 Dec 2012 16:01:20 Hawkeye https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1353073891/ https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1353073891/#num1 Fri, 16 Nov 2012 13:51:31 Hawkeye https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1349986636/ https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1349986636/#num1 Thu, 11 Oct 2012 20:17:16 Hawkeye https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1348070647/ https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1348070647/#num1 Wed, 19 Sep 2012 16:04:07 Hawkeye https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1344539755/ https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1344539755/#num1 Thu, 9 Aug 2012 19:15:55 Hawkeye https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1336756940/ https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1336756940/#num1 Fri, 11 May 2012 17:22:20 Hawkeye https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1336153504/ https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1336153504/#num1 Fri, 4 May 2012 17:45:04 Hawkeye https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1335185711/ https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1335185711/#num1 Mon, 23 Apr 2012 12:55:11 Hawkeye https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1334581714/ https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1334581714/#num1 Mon, 16 Apr 2012 13:08:34 Hawkeye https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1332533306/ https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1332533306/#num1 Fri, 23 Mar 2012 20:08:26 Hawkeye https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1331570922/ https://darkshade.homeip.net/cgi-bin/forum/Blah.pl?m-1331570922/#num1 Mon, 12 Mar 2012 16:48:42 Hawkeye