I have had the new iPhone 4S for almost a week now.  No, I have not been playing Angry Birds or First Person Shooters; I have been talking to my phone.  Sound Strange?  Siri is the new built in “assistant” that takes voice commands on the iPhone and it is amazing,  I want coffee,  all I have to do is ask my phone “I need Coffee!” and Siri will reply, “there are 5 great coffee shops close to you.”

“What is the traffic like..”  Siri tells me.

Siri, Where did you come from?

Siri will reply, “This is not about me, but about you.”

What is your Background, Siri?

SIRI is the results of 40 years of research funded by DARPA-Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency via SRI International.  The DARPA PAL program (the Personalized Assistant that Learns) focused on improving the way that computers support humans through the use of cognitive systems and artificial intelligence.  SIRI is the result of the research and development by contributions from Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Massachusetts, the University of Rochester, the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition, Oregon State University, the University of Southern California, and Stanford University, as well as from SRI.

Anyone who has studied the beginnings of the internet may recognize DARPA.  What amazes me?  “40 years of research funded by DARPA….”  

While Siri is indeed very neat, one must wonder what kind of damage this thing is doing to your bandwidth.  Complaints have surfaced that Siri is doubling data usage.  I have a tendency to be around a lot of W-Fi hotspots throughout my day, so I am really not that concerned.  If you do not have a bunch of hotspots available to you throughout your day, then it would be best to monitor your data usage very close.

Overall, I am very excited about my new iPhone and SIRI.  The bottom line, SIRI keeps my appointments, reminds me of things and just helps me out!

Your computer system will crash.

Your external hard drive will crash.

You could loose data to a natural disaster.

Let’s face it, our personal and business data backup strategy only requires a little planning and a very little bit of action to be a lot effective.

Below, I am going to outline the Do’s and Dont’s of preserving your data assets.

DONT’S

DONT store critical data on a USB Thumb Drive.  USB Thumb Drives are used as only a temporary storage or transport device!!

DONT rely on a single-disk external drive to store your one and only copy of your data!

DONT store all your very valuable data in a single location.

DONT store data long term on PATA/SATA Hard Drives.

DONT forget to back up your email .PST files and your program settings.

DO’S

Do make multiple copies of your data backup’s.  If you are backing up photograph’s, make two sets of backup’s and store one set in a different geographical location.

Do understand and audit your backup strategy on a monthly or quarterly basis.

Do use RAID Technology such as a DROBO to safely protect against hard disk crashes and lost productivity.

Do use encrypted Cloud Based Backup systems such as MOZY, it is very cost effective at around $6/month.

Do practice recovering data and understanding the restoration process.

By taking these simple, yet effective steps, you can enjoy piece of mind knowing that your data is safe and secure.  Take the time to develop a Disaster Recovery plan for your home and business data!

I get asked the question all the time:  “What steps can I take to protect myself on public wi-fi networks?”  In this post, I will show you some basic firewall settings for your Mac.  Note:  These settings are based on MAC OSX 10.6.8 Snow Leopard.

Choose "System Preferences"

1. First, choose your “System Preferences from the Apple menu.

First select "Sharing."

2.  Next, let’s take a look at the “SHARING” settings.

Make sure you do not have any sharing options enabled.

3. You will note that none of my sharing options are enabled.

You may need to authenticate with your username and password

4. As you can see in the above photo, my firewall is active.  I will need to click on the bottom lock icon so that I can change the firewall settings.

5. I selected “Block All incoming connections.”  As you can see, we can still “join” the network and recieve basic network connectivity…..that is exactly what we want.  You will also notice that I have selected “Enable Stealth mode.”  Stealth mode blocks ping requests from the network.  It sorta makes you appear invisable.

6. Everything looks good from here with the firewall.

Please note that these settings are not 100% safe, but at least it makes it so that a more skilled hacker will need to be present to hack your Mac.

I was parusing through the Clearance section on the apple.com web site when I came accross a Duel-Core Mac Mini for under $500.00.  I have always been a bit skeptical of the Mac Mini due to price.  The iMac includes Apple’s most incredible monitor, camera, keyboard, mouse, etc.  But, I thought what the heck, I have a keyboard from my old iMac G3 and a Microsoft Mouse….let’s go for it.  My real excuse was to replace my aging Dell Mini Tower under my desk that was running Windows XP.

I order the Mini, and it arrives in two days. (They did forget to include the power cable, but sent one to me overnight).  I proceeded to hook the mini up to my old $100 LCD Acer 20″ Monitor.  Surprisingly, the resolution was at 1600×900 and looked very clear.  I did calibrate the monitor with Apple’s built in settings, which indeed did help a lot.  I also want to note that I installed Windows 7 Professional 64 BIT OEM onto a Bootcamp partition.

Windows 7 Professional on the Mac Mini

One of the biggest surprises was how incredibly well Windows 7 Professional actually runs on the Mac Mini Duel Core.  My overall Windows rating was a 5.6 out of 7.9.  Surprisingly, the rating system only complained about the NVDIA 256mb Video chip.  I installed Microsoft Office 2010 Professional, Visio Pro, and Project Pro.  All run superbly fast.  I will be moving my Quickbooks application from the old Dell to the Mini, but I am thinking that I did not allocate enough space to the Windows partition, and it it ALWAYS a pain to move Quickbooks because you have to call them, wait and…well you get the picture.  I allocated 60 Gig to Windows 7 Windows 7 took up a whopping 20 gig..ouch.  The Windows 7 drivers are all located on the Mac OSX disks that came with the Mac Mini.  Installed without issue.  Overall, I have been very impressed with the Mini and Windows 7.  I basically replaced a big ugly black tower that consumes power, has a bunch of unattractive wires hanging out of it, with a small Duel Core box that containes both Mac OSX and Windows 7 Professional for under $700.

OSX 10.6.8 on the Mac Mini

The Mac Mini came with 10.6.8.  My original intention was to replace my aging Dell Diminsion and all the unattractive cables.   Which was a success.  But, this computer quickly drew the attention of my kids, both under 10 yrs of age!  My, son, was very helpful in setting up the Mac Mini.  I created their own accounts for both of them.  My wife has her own account.  We set up Parental Controls on the Mini, established time limits and established blacklist and whitelist sites.

I did order a 8GB Memory kit from Otherworld computing for a measly $65.00.  It has not arrived per this writing, but It will add performance to the Windows 7 partition and to Mac OSX.  My 2TB Western Digital Drive acts as my iTunes library as well as (on-site) data store.  I may eventually upgrade the OS to Lion – $30.00, and then even possibly Lion Server for the $50.00.  Apple really has set the standard for PC’s.  This little Mac Mini has become a hub already for iPods, Apple TV streaming, etc.

UPDATE:

The RAM arrived in great order and it was so easy to install. All 8GB of Ram took approximately 10 minutes to completely install.  Windows 7 operates like a charm!  The one annoying thing that I had diffuculties with was the “print screen” feature.  If you recall, on a Windows keyboard, you can just press the “print screen” key, paste into PAINT and have your screen shot.  With a Mac keyboard, I had to use the Snippet Tool Located in the “Accessories” folder under “All Programs.”  No big deal.  Below is the printout of the Windows performance rating.