there is a trend among free apps to start spying on us. they typically begin as a nice little wallpaper app and then sometime after 500,000 download they change into a spy machine. please pay attention to the permissions of the apps you already “trust” as they still can be malicious. a wallpaper app should NEVER need access to phone, sms, email, etc…

airpush.com wants to spam you where it hurts

I’ve installed a few free android wallpaper and mp3 apps. Last night I discovered one of them is spamming my notification bar. I didn’t know how to determine which one so I just started un-installing them and reading the comments. I discovered it was an mp3 download app. But sadly most of the other free apps had comments about the permissions changing. This is a bad trend. More about that on my next post.

by removing the Hibernate bug feature. type “powercfg.exe -h off” as admin in terminal

right-click the command prompt shortcut to “run as admin”
type “powercfg.exe -h off”
your hiberfil.sys will magically disappear giving you 6GB of more free space

but sadly failed. $99 to get XBMC goodness. With a simple hack the AppleTV 2 can run XBMC  . 720p, 1080p, .mkv, flac. Its all there. The icing on the cake? AppleTV still runs its own goodness: netflix, itunes streaming.

every time I install Windows 7 on a 32GB SSD I am reminded once again of Microsofts failure. When the install completes the first thing you will notice is that you have very little space left for files. Now i’m sure you think I am about to complain about the size of the install (I could), but its really what you can’t see that kills you: “hiberfil.sys” & “pagefile.sys”. They are hidden system files.

hiberfile.sys:  8GB  (are you loco?!!!)
pagefile.sys:  4GB  (unnecessary)
                  12GB of wasted space 

The 8GB is for a feature known has hibernate. With this feature you can turn off your computer without closing your running programs. But then you might ask, “what is sleep”? Great question. Sleep and hibernate as twins. With one minor difference, sleep needs to sip some power while hibernate can work without power. Hibernate is a feature that gets no use but takes up precious resources.

Now day its typical to have 4GB of RAM. In my case its 8GB of ram. Why does a machine need 4GB of page file (swap) space? It doesn’t and with a simple tweak you can make it 512MB (with an option to expand larger if needed)

Acer Easystore $349 WITH 2TB drive…as i’ve said over and over again, drobo is a rip. $649 drobo will get you ZERO drives. So lets subtract the price of the 2TB drive, $99 from $349 == $250. Now drobo comes with proprietary software to keep your data safe so lets add the price of our open source software $0. That was easy. ZFSguru is my choice for data redundancy. I’ll offer up a more robust ZFS guide really soon. I’m still learning myself.

PS. datapall is my fictional product name

I got a free chickfila sausage sandwich this morning, 600cals 40g fat =(